There’s a measured pause as they both look at the picture, then Clare puts it back in its place. She is always careful never to leave her fingerprints on the glass.
‘Is… is Father all right?’ Pip asks, with painful nonchalance.
‘Yes. I think so, yes,’ says Clare, with equal bluff. Pip nods, and won’t quite meet her eye. ‘He’ll be better now we’re here, anyway. Don’t you think?’
‘I suppose so.’ Pip keeps his eyes on the picture of Emma. He suddenly looks defeated; unhappy, and far from home. Clare searches for the right thing to say.
‘I know this is a bit strange, our coming out here like this. And I know it… it could be a bit of a lonely summer for you, not seeing any of your friends,’ she says. Pip shrugs again. ‘But we’ll have fun, I promise. And I bet you’ll make some new friends, too… Have a good sleep, and tomorrow we can go exploring. And Mr Cardetta might take you out again in that car you liked so much – the Alfred Romeo.’
‘It’s Alfa Romeo, Clare,’ says Pip, with a smile.
‘See. I told you I was a dunce.’ She hugs him for a moment, quickly kisses his temple. ‘Sleep. I’m about to.’
Boyd is still outside with Leandro. From the bedroom window, two storeys up, Clare can see pipe smoke rising in the light of the oil lamps on the table; she can hear the soft roll of their voices, but not their words. She listens for a while all the same, then closes the shutters as noiselessly as she can, not sure why she feels she must be quiet. The bed sinks as she climbs into it; the sheets smell a long time unused – clean, but stale. The room is warm and still, and as soon as she shuts her eyes she hears the whine of a mosquito near her ear. Then she hears two more. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Marcie, because there is one way in which she is jealous of Emma: Pip. Not because she wants to be his mother – he wouldn’t be who he is without Emma – but because she wants a child of her own; she wants to carry it and know the strangeness of a separate life inside her; she wants the shock of labour, and the perfect satisfaction of nursing. She wants to be a mother, as well as a stepmother and surrogate older sister. Love is not a finite resource – she could love her own child and love Pip just as much. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Pip is nearly grown, and will soon leave her by herself.
But Boyd doesn’t want another child. Boyd is afraid to have another child. Boyd can’t quite put his fear into words but it exists, and it’s bone deep. Whenever she and Boyd have made love it has been with the rubber sheath between them, and the lights out. Sometimes, Clare feels that they have never actually made love at all, since they could not see each other, and did not touch. She’d wanted to talk again about a baby during this trip, but Boyd is already tense so now she’s not sure. There’s already that undercurrent that she dreads to see in him, and she knows it has something to do with Cardetta, so she guesses that it’s also to do with New York. The mosquitoes whine in Clare’s ears, and beneath the sheets she starts to overheat. Her skin prickles. The first and only time she and Boyd were in New York together was one of the worst times of her life; her memories of it are like a strange and sickening dream. She’s wide awake even though she’s exhausted, and she knows it’s because she’s waiting. She’s waiting to find out what it means, and what will come of it.
Chapter Six – Ettore
Ettore is eleven years old. It’s March and the sky is flat grey, an unbroken swathe of cloud which makes it look as though rain will fall, but it won’t – the sky has hovered like this for days, and come to nothing. The work gang is weeding, pulling up any wild plant amidst the young shoots of wheat now sprouting from the grain sown last October. Right now, the fields around Gioia are more mutedly, softly green than they will be for the rest of the year. Since this is one job that doesn’t require great strength, boys as well as men are employed. In years when there are more weeds – after a damp spring, for example – boys as young as eight and nine will be out in the fields, paid so little money it barely warrants the term wages. But little is not nothing – only those men who have built up such debts that they must work for free to recoup the losses get less. It is dull work, endlessly repetitive. When Ettore’s back gets tired from bending over, he bends his knees instead, as his father has taught him. To give the one set of muscles a break. After a while, he switches back again. His hands are stained and the skin is stinging and split from pulling at the tough stems, pitting his weight against deep roots knotted in the stony soil. Each boy has a canvas sling around his shoulders, and the number of times it’s been filled and emptied will dictate what he is paid come Saturday.
Along the edge of the field his father Valerio and some other men are breaking rocks. The smack of their picks, arrhythmic, echoing like gunshot, is all anyone has heard all day. They will all hear it in their sleep that night. Ettore gravitates towards the men, hovers as near as he dares. It’s tufo stone they’re breaking, the same stone that covers the county, coughed up from the ground as though the earth has an endless supply. Gioia dell Colle is built of the stuff. When newly cut or dug up it’s a soft buff colour; with time it weathers to grey, and the rain carves holes through it like worms through cheese. But what fascinate Ettore are the shells. The tufo stone is full of seashells. Sometimes just fragments, sharp little edges, but sometimes whole ones, their ridges making perfect, undamaged fan shapes, millions of years old. Pino laughed when the schoolmaster told them that – that the shells were millions of years old. He couldn’t fathom it, nor how they’d got into the stone, so he laughed. Ettore tried to explain it to him afterwards, because to him it held all the allure of proven magic, but Pino’s attention was like a gnat, weaving here and there and never quite deciding where to land.
Ettore keeps edging closer to the stone-breakers. He casts a furtive look back at the overseer, to make sure he’s not watching. They are at Masseria Tateo, and the overseer is Ludo Manzo, the corporal most feared and hated of all around Gioia for his cruelty, his arbitrary dispensation of punishment and his loathing of the giornatari, which has all the vehemence of one who has walked in their shoes, and never wants to do so again. The punishment that the men fear most is that they will not be hired again. They must work, or starve, and Ludo Manzo dismisses men for the least slackening of their pace, the least expression of displeasure, with his famous catchphrase ringing in their ears: There’s no work here for ungrateful cafoni. Cafoni means ignorant redneck, it means bumpkin, it means peasant scum. They are also beaten or lashed, sometimes; but it’s the boys who fear him most. The boys seem to attract the worst of his attention – and it is attention, not temper. In fact, when he notices a transgression Ludo actually seems pleased rather than not – pleased to have cause to punish. Perhaps it relieves his boredom. The men mutter to each other that he has sold his heart to the devil for a life of ease. But the day is long and the hours even longer, and the minutes stretch out into aeons to a boy of eleven, and so Ettore edges over to the newly broken stone, making some charade of picking weeds as he goes, and tries to see any perfect shells, newly come to light. If there are any, bedded into rocks of a size he can conceal, he will try to spirit them home for his collection. Once or twice Valerio has tried to cut a shell free for him, but they always shatter.
There’s a minute flutter of raindrops then. Across the field, weed-pullers and stone-breakers pause and turn their eyes briefly to the sky. But that’s all there is; those few drops.