‘Up, Ettore! Don’t you dare go back to sleep.’ Paola’s voice is hard as well – it’s not just her face and the way she moves. Everything about her has gone hard, from the flesh on her bones to her words and the contents of her heart. Only when she holds Iacopo is there softness in her eyes, like the last remembered light after sunset.
‘You’re the stone in my shoe that I can’t ignore,’ he tells her, standing up, stretching the stiff cords of muscle that run down his back.
‘Lucky for you,’ Paola retorts. ‘If it wasn’t for me we’d all starve while you lay dreaming.’
‘I don’t dream,’ says Ettore.
Paola doesn’t spare him a glance. She crosses to the far side of the room, to the recessed ledge in the stone wall where Valerio sleeps. She does not touch him as she wakes him; she only speaks, loudly, near his ear.
‘It’s past four, Father.’ They know Valerio is awake when he starts to cough. He rolls onto his side, curls up like a child, and coughs, and coughs. Then he swears, spits, and swings his legs to the floor. Paola glares.
‘Vallarta again today, boy, if we’re lucky,’ Valerio says to Ettore. His voice rattles in his chest. Paola and Ettore share a quick, meaningful glance.
‘Best hurry then,’ says Paola. She pours them both a cup of water from a chipped amphora, and the ease with which she does it shows that the jar is already less than half full. Paola must wait for their appointed day before she can go to the fountain for more – it’s either that or buying it from a dealer, which they cannot do. Not at such prices.
Masseria Vallarta is the biggest farm near Gioia, some twelve hundred hectares. It’s one of the few, even now at harvest time, that has been hiring men every day. Before the war this was the one time of year when work was guaranteed – weeks of it. The men would sleep out in the fields rather than bothering to walk back and forth every morning and night; waking with soil in the creases of their clothes and dew on their faces, and the bite of stones underneath them. The debts of the winter could finally be earned back, and paid off – the rent on their measly apartments, bills for food and drink and gambling. Now, even the harvest is no guarantee of work. The proprietors say they can’t afford to hire the men. They say that after last year’s drought, and the vacuum of the war, they are going out of business. If they are hired to Masseria Vallarta today, Ettore and Valerio will walk ten kilometres to reach the farm, and start work at sun-up. There’s no food from the night before; they ate it all. There might be something at the farm for them, if they are hired, though it will come out of their wages if there is. The men stamp their feet into their boots, button their battered waistcoats. And as he goes out into the cool of the morning, into the ageless shadows of the little courtyard and the narrow streets that lead to Piazza Plebiscito, where they will queue for work, Ettore makes his promise. He makes the same promise every morning, and means it with every fibre of himself: I will find out who did it, Livia. And that man will burn.
Chapter Three – Clare
It’s always a shock to see how much Pip has grown during term time, while he’s away for weeks on end, but this time it seems like something more fundamental has changed. Something more than his height, the length of his face or the width of his shoulders. Clare studies him, and tries to put her finger on it. He has fallen asleep with his head against the dusty window of the train and his dog-eared copy of Bleak House resting against his chest. Fine strands of his hair have fallen forward onto his forehead, and shake with the movement of the carriage. With his eyes shut and his mouth drooping slightly open, she can still see the child he was. The little, lonely person she first met. His face is more angular now – the jaw stronger, the brows heavier, the nose slightly longer and more pointed. But his light brown hair is as flyaway as ever, and he doesn’t need to shave yet. Clare looks closely, checking. There’s no shadow of whiskers on his chin or top lip. Her relief at this is profound, and makes her uneasy.
She turns to look out of the window. The landscape is unchanging. Mile after mile of farmland; wheat fields, for the most part, interspersed now and then with orchards of faded olive trees, and gnarled almond trees with their trunks twisted and black. When Pip is a man, an adult, when he finishes all his schooling, when he leaves home for good… Clare swallows, fearfully. But she can’t prevent it, of course. She can’t cling on to him. She won’t let herself. Perhaps this is what has changed, this time: he’s become enough like a grown man that she can no longer deny it’s happening, and that one day soon he will separate himself from her, and start his own life. She’s not his mother, so perhaps she should feel the wrench of this a bit less. But a mother has an unbreakable bond, the bond of blood and heritance, of knowing that her child was once a part of her, and in some ways always will be. Clare doesn’t have that. Her bond with Pip feels more breakable, more delicate; perhaps every bit as precious, but also with the potential to melt away without trace. She fears that most of all. He is only fifteen, she reassures herself. Still a child. The train gives a lurch to one side, and Pip’s head bangs against the glass. He starts awake, snapping his mouth closed, squinting.
‘All right there, Pip?’ Clare says, smiling. He nods affably.
‘We must be nearly there.’ He yawns like a cat, unashamedly. His teeth are just starting to crowd at the front, jostling for space.
‘Pip,’ she protests. ‘It’s like staring into the abyss.’
‘Sorry, Clare,’ he mumbles.
‘We are nearly there.’ Clare gazes out at the bleached grass of a field, blurring past. ‘We must be nearly there.’
Her mouth feels as stale as her crumpled clothes and her sticky skin. The train is stuffy, airless – it’s no wonder Pip keeps nodding off. She might have done so herself, but Boyd cautioned her about the Italians and their light fingers, so she’s too worried about their purses and possessions, and what Boyd would say if they were robbed after he’d warned her. She wants to stretch her legs and wash her hair, but at the same time, as a few scattered buildings come into view, she suddenly doesn’t want to arrive at Gioia del Colle. There’s something wonderful about travelling – about being moved across the long miles of the earth with no sense of responsibility, their aim achieved purely by waiting patiently. And, because she and Pip are alone in the compartment, there’s only the ease and pleasure of his company. No manners to be minded, no struggle to find small talk. Their long silences are thoughtful, companionable, never uncomfortable. And she’s also nervous about what waits at the end of the journey.
Boyd has committed them to spending the entire summer with people she has never met, and knows precious little about. No amount of protest would sway him from the plan; and she couldn’t even write down her reluctance in a letter to him, as she preferred to – to make sure she kept her argument straight and her tone of voice even. Not when he was already out in Italy, and the instruction for her and Pip to join him came faintly down a rustling phone line. In desperation she’d suggested a fortnight, rather than the whole season, but Boyd hadn’t seemed to hear her. And just like that, the restful summer at home she’d been looking forward to – alone with Pip, watching the sweet peas climb their bamboo canes and playing whist in the shade of the high garden wall – had vanished. The Italians who will be their hosts are clients of Boyd’s; Cardetta, an old acquaintance from New York, and his wife, who is charming. Beyond that, she knows only that they are rich.
The train has passed cone-shaped huts built of rock, like strange hats discarded by stone giants. It has passed fields full of working men, swinging scythes; dark, thin men who did not look up as the train clattered by. It has passed small carriages pulled by donkeys, and farm wagons pulled by oxen, and not a single motor car. Nothing, beyond the train itself, to betray that the year is 1921, not 1821. Clare is struggling to picture what rich might look like, this far south; it worries her that there might not be electricity, or indoor plumbing; that the water might make them sick. In the north they say that the country south of Rome is best avoided, and that the country south of Naples is a barren no-man’s-land, peopled by sub-humans – a godless, under-evolved race too base to drag itself out of poverty and dissolution. Pip’s school had been happy to release him early for the summer break when she wrote to say that they would be taking him to Italy. What better way for Philip to finish the academic year than by visiting the very treasures of art and civilised thought he has spent the recent months studying? wrote the master. Clare let him picture Rome, Florence and Venice, since that was the conclusion he’d leapt to, and left it at that. She herself has never heard of any of the major towns here in the south: Bari, Lecce, Taranto. And the town where they are headed, Gioia del Colle, was difficult to find on the map.