‘Yes, I suppose I was.’
‘Me, I wanted to live a little before I settled down. I wanted to, you know, try a few of them on for size before I chose. But perhaps I was a little wild back then.’
‘I grew up in quite a rural part of England, so there really weren’t that many eligible men to choose from. My parents actually met Boyd first, through some friends of theirs, and thought he’d be a good match for me.’ At this Marcie’s eyes go wide.
‘You let your parents choose your husband for you?’
‘Well, no, it wasn’t quite like that-’
‘No, sure, sorry – I didn’t mean to pounce. I left home at thirteen, that’s the thing. I can’t imagine what having that kind of guidance was like.’
‘It was very…’ For a moment, Clare can’t think of a word. She was a child, and then she married Boyd and became a wife; these are the only two incarnations of herself she has ever known, and at the moment of transformation she’d been happy – relieved that things were settled and certain.
She was the only child of parents who’d almost given up hope; her mother had been forty when she was born, her father well past fifty. By the time Clare was eighteen her mother was frail beyond her years, worn thin and increasingly vague, and her father had pains in his chest for which he took tablets – five or six a day, ground vigorously between his molars at regular intervals – though they did little to alleviate his symptoms. In much the same way as she can now see Pip growing, her terms away at school allowed her to see, clearly, how age and infirmity were stealing a march on her only family. More than any of her classmates, she was faced with the thought of not having them any more, of being alone in the world, and the empty spread of an unknown future frightened her. But that makes her settling on Boyd sound like an act of dry calculation, or of knee-jerk desperation, which it hadn’t been. ‘I was glad that they approved of him. And they were glad that I did, too, of course.’ Marcie says nothing for a while, and Clare realises how bloodless this sounds. ‘And I loved him, of course. I grew to love him.’
‘Well, of course you did. He’s a sweetie. So gentle! I can’t even imagine him having a temper, and he obviously adores you. You must get away with murder. Me, I have to be careful. When Leandro goes off it’s like a volcano!’
‘No, well… I’ve never seen Boyd go off, I don’t think,’ says Clare. Instead he implodes, into a distant, silent place where she can’t reach him, and then the world seems flimsy and unsafe, and she and Pip cling to each other, cast adrift, waiting to see how and when and if he will come out of it again. It’s been five months since the last time it happened, and now she’s sure she can sense the gathering pressure of the next time. She hopes she’s wrong. ‘How did you meet Leandro?’ she says, changing the subject because Marcie’s expression is quizzical and almost pitying.
‘Oh, he saw me on stage one night. He says he fell in love with me before I’d even sung a note.’ Marcie smiles again and loops her arm through Clare’s as they climb.
Alone, Clare knocks softly on Pip’s door and opens it. The door has the same sepulchral groan as the one to her room. Pip is sitting on the wide window ledge, looking out at the night. The sky is a deep indigo, freckled with stars.
‘All right there, Pip?’
‘All right, Clare. I was trying to work out which different constellations you can see this far south, but I didn’t bring a chart and I’m completely lost.’ He turns to face her. He’s in his pyjamas with a green tartan dressing gown tied tight around his middle. Both pyjamas and gown are too short for him already, and Clare smiles. She goes to stand beside him and looks out. He smells of toothpaste and the lavender sachets she packed in with their clothes.
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Pip. You know I’m a complete dunce with astrology.’
‘Astronomy. Astrology is horoscopes and things.’
‘Well, that rather proves my point, doesn’t it?’ she says, and Pip grins.
‘And you’re not a complete dunce at anything. You just pretend to be to make me feel better,’ he adds perspicaciously.
‘Oh, I don’t know. A star’s a star as far as I’m concerned, as long as they sparkle and look pretty. What else ought I to know, then?’ Pip begins to tell her about how long the light has taken to reach their eyes, and how many different types of stars there are, and how some of them are planets, and how there might be people on them, looking at the pinprick glimmer of Earth from light years away. He rambles on for a while, as he does when he’s exhausted. Outside there are few lamps lit in the streets, or behind the closed shutters of other houses. There’s no more noise of people, or passeggiata. Gioia dell Colle is early to bed.
Pip’s room is much the same as Clare’s, but smaller, and facing west. She looks to see if he’s unpacked, and finds his trunk more or less intact, hidden away in the wardrobe, which is all she’s come to expect, really. She glances at the bedside table, already knowing what she’ll see there – the one thing he always unpacks, no matter where they go: a photograph of his mother in a silver frame. The picture is a studio shot; Emma is standing alone next to a tall jardinière full of some extravagantly trailing plant, with her thin, pale hands clasped in front of her. The picture was taken in 1905, the year before Pip was born, and she’s wearing the fashionable high-necked dress of the time; Pip claims to remember the very one, and says it was a gorgeous colour, the crimson of a Virginia creeper in autumn, but in the picture it merely looks dark and severe. Her face is serious but not sombre, a thin oval with light eyes and a mass of curly hair, piled high and spilling down over her right shoulder. Though her expression is fixed for the photographer, Clare has always fancied that she can see a trace of mirth in her lips and the arch of her brows. She picks up the photo and studies it, made curious anew by Marcie’s questions. This is the only picture of Emma she has ever seen. It might be the only one that exists. Emma is every bit as frozen in time as the house in which they’re staying. She can clearly see the ways in which Pip has taken after her, and it’s only this that makes her seem like a real person to Clare: a woman who laughed and sneezed and got angry and made love; not just a face in a photograph, a ghost who haunts her husband.
Pip looks around at her, and sees what she’s doing. He’s never acknowledged any awkwardness between Clare and the memory of his mother, and Clare is grateful for it. He has never compared her to Emma; he has never said, in anger: You’re not my real mother. Some things don’t need saying. He has never blamed her for his mother being dead, as other children in their grief and confusion might have done.
‘I think she would have liked the dinner, don’t you?’ he says.
‘Oh, absolutely. Particularly the fried zucchini flowers – I remember you telling me how she liked to try new things. They were so light. Delicious. Would she have liked Mr and Mrs Cardetta, do you think?’
‘Yes, I think so.’ Pip thinks for a moment. ‘I think she was inclined to like most people. And they’re very welcoming, aren’t they?’
‘Very.’ They do this sometimes, particularly in times of stress – guess at Emma’s opinion of things; her likes and dislikes, how she might have behaved in a particular situation. It’s a way to keep her alive, a way for Pip to feel that he knows her, when in fact his memories are the fleeting sensory impressions of early childhood: the colour of her dress; the length of her hair; her voice and the warmth of her hands; that she loved oranges and her fingers often smelled of the peel. Sometimes this is also how Pip lets Clare know his own opinion of things – difficult things that he would stumble to speak openly about. Sometimes he declares that Clare and Emma would have got on, and been good friends, and this is another generous fiction – that the two women could ever have been in his life at the same time.