‘I can’t talk to you about this now,’ Irene said, with a desperate attempt to sound calm. ‘I don’t know this man and I have to go home to my children now.’ And she clicked the phone shut.
Still holding out the handbag, Roxana said nothing. Irene took it, dropped the mobile inside, slung it over her shoulder and walked in silence to the car but at the door, as she climbed in, she looked up at Roxana. ‘I don’t know what they meant,’ she said. ‘The policeman said another man was dead and there may be some connection.’
‘Another man?’
There was a sudden silence, except for the evening song of the birds in the trees, thousands of them, it seemed to Roxana, in all this luxurious expanse of garden and trees and shrubs, filling the air.
‘A man, a man,’ said Irene, her face upturned. ‘Found dead at Bellosguardo beside his car, they thought a mugging at first. He had the cutting in his pocket, from the paper. Where Claudio’s death was reported.’ She was very pale, the thought of another death, another family bereaved, making her face a blank of fear. ‘An estate agent.’
‘A coincidence,’ said Roxana, trying to think. Trying to make sense of it. ‘Surely it could be just — I don’t know.’
Did people cut out random pieces from the paper? But Irene’s expression suggested that there was no room for the possibility of coincidence — that this was bad news, and everything was horribly connected.
‘They asked if we were buying a property,’ she said as though talking to herself. ‘The police. They said Claudio had — they said he had — the Guardia di Finanza said-’ And she stopped. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I can’t think about it.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Roxana, taking hold of her arm. ‘Call me later. Call me tomorrow. Call me any time, Irene. This will be all right.’
‘He said that,’ said Irene Brunello, and Roxana knew she wouldn’t call. ‘He said that. But I don’t know if it can be all right.’ Roxana stepped back and Irene pulled the door closed, wound down the window. ‘Goodbye, Roxana,’ she said.
Who told her it would be all right? Watching the slow movement of the automated gates opening, the blink of the tail-lights as the car disappeared, Roxana could only think, ridiculously, of Sandro Cellini.
‘Don’t,’ she called back to Marisa, her hand poised over the button that would close the gates again. ‘Leave them. I’m going too.’ Going home to see Ma, to pay the handyman, to sit a while in the dark until she felt safe again. To call Sandro Cellini.
‘As you wish,’ said Marisa, arms folded across her body again in that pose of hers that said, Come no closer. ‘That could have been worse,’ she said with a stiff smile as Roxana leaned down to pick up her helmet.
‘You think?’ said Roxana, pulling on the helmet, horribly uncomfortable in the heat; for a second she longed for the motorino rides of her early teenage years, hair flying in the wind along the coast road, arms round some boy.
Could it really be true, what Irene had said about Marisa’s boyfriend? Was it some way of — lashing out? Or had Roxana just imagined it, had she misheard? One thing was for certain, she wasn’t going to ask Marisa.
Would she even say thank you? Thank you for coming, for talking to the bereaved woman, for diluting the grief? Of course she wouldn’t.
‘Thank you,’ said Marisa. Roxana gawped.
‘She hates me,’ said Marisa.
It was the whisky talking. Marisa drained the glass.
‘You could do worse than Val, you know,’ she said then, looking down her nose. Her languid voice was only slightly slurred. ‘It’s all about family, you see, about connections. He’s got his own apartment, all he needs is a wife, and he likes you, I can tell. He told me today he’d sold the motorbike, can you imagine that? Growing up: this has made him grow up.’ She paused, her huge eyes gleaming as she gazed up to the darkening sky. ‘You’ve got nothing,’ she said, ‘no security, if your family’s not connected, that’s how things are. Particularly now.’
Roxana stared at her: there was too much to argue with in this little speech for her even to get started on it. Particularly now — what? Particularly now we’re all out of a job? He likes me? She hadn’t even thought about that. And looking at Marisa she thought, you’re probably not even my boss any more, I don’t need to be polite to you. But she found she didn’t want to be rude either.
‘I don’t need Val,’ she said, swinging a leg over her Vespa. ‘I’ve got a family.’
‘I’ll let you know when we re-open,’ called Marisa, ‘keep in touch,’ as the gates began to close behind Roxana. She raised a hand in acknowledgement and turned her head just slightly. Marisa stood there on the porch of the villa that wasn’t hers and seemed in that moment to Roxana to be absolutely alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
It was ironic, thought Luisa, lying in the dark, that when her baby had died she had thought briefly in the dreadful, mad, dark months that followed — the only time in her life when she’d lain in bed, day after day, this very bed — that it had been the lack of a maternal instinct in her that had caused her baby to die. Even though the doctors had explained their daughter’s syndrome to her, more than once, even though they’d told her it was nothing to do with her, it was a fluke, still she’d thought it was because even though she’d waited and waited she’d never at any stage of her pregnancy really felt like a mother.
Ironic, because now she was lying awake fretting over two younger women, neither blood relations, as though she were indeed their mother. Anna Niescu and Giulietta Sarto: the one waiting, passive and hopeful, for her baby, and the other, who had spent her life turning away from normal family life, deciding now at the very last moment that a family might be what she wanted after all. Was ironic the word, or should it be tragic?
Next to her Sandro shifted. She could tell from his breathing that he was a long way from falling asleep.
‘You know I’m working tomorrow?’ she said. He grunted. Fine, was what the grunt meant.
They were past that, both of them; Sandro was past being jealous of every moment she spent in the shop, and Luisa was past throwing herself into work so that she didn’t have to think about the cancer. It now seemed like a crazy phase. She’d even been to New York. Her boss Frollini had taken her for the collections, no doubt just a misguided attempt on his part to cheer her up, to tell her he needed her, she wasn’t on the scrapheap yet. It had caused trouble for a bit, but they were past that now too.
Over thirty-five years Luisa had learned to interpret her husband, who was a man of few words. Fine, was what the grunt meant: fine, let’s not talk. He would be thinking, behind the closed eyelids; the occasional impatient exhalation, the movement of the arm, on top of the sheet, then back by his side, told her that much. And they both had plenty to think about.
Of course, they had no idea what was going through Giuli’s head, not for sure: Giuli was as tight-lipped as she had ever been about her private life. Work, she could do, scrubbing floors, sorting out the computer, answering phones, taking histories from her clients, either for Sandro or at the Women’s Centre. She thought she was playing it close to her chest, but Luisa could see. Something was happening in there: she was pale, she was fidgety, she was distracted. Then there was the tenderness she showed around Anna, the softness in her voice when she talked about Enzo, the engagement, making things formal for the first time in her chaotic life. For God’s sake, she must have thought, could it happen? Am I too old?
Luisa shifted on to her side. Sandro exhaled.
Or was this just Luisa superimposing her own fears, her own regrets on the poor kid? That would be the look she’d see in Sandro’s eyes if she did nudge him awake, turn on the light in the humid room, and say, actually, not fine at all, actually, let’s talk. Giuli’s a tough cookie, he’d say, wearily rubbing his eyes and blinking at the clock on his side of the bed. Giuli knows what she’s doing.