‘A bit. But this afternoon was the best. Leandro says he’ll teach me to drive while we’re here. Properly, I mean.’
‘That’s Mr Cardetta to you.’
‘But he says to call him Leandro.’
‘Even so…’ She’s about to say more when a sound from outside stops her. Shouting, and the sudden clatter of footsteps. She and Pip share a quick look and then go together to the window that looks over the street.
Clare tilts the shutter slats flat and they peer out through them. There is more shouting, one voice louder than the rest, in words she can’t understand.
‘Open them properly, Clare, or we won’t see a thing,’ says Pip. Clare does as he suggests, and they lean out to look along the length of Via Garibaldi, and down to the stone-flagged road. A loose column of men is marching along it, wearing the customary black, but no jackets. The sleeves of their shirts are rolled up; some of them have guns on belts around their hips, others carry short, sturdy wooden clubs. There are flashes of light where a badge or an emblem reflects the light, but they are too far away to make out. A man at the front has a peaked cap, like a policeman, and this is what Clare thinks at first – that they are police. She can think of no good reason why a police procession would be going on at night, and why the men aren’t in uniforms, just dressed to identify with one another, to be seen as a group. The sight of them makes her uneasy. Their faces are mostly young, clean-shaven; their eyes have the feverish look of boys doing exciting things. ‘Who are they, Clare?’ asks Pip, loudly enough.
‘Hush!’ she says, though the chances of them being heard are small. She’s suddenly absolutely certain that she doesn’t want any one of the young men to look up and see them watching. ‘I don’t know,’ she says quietly. There’s more shouting, angry words, and figures flit here and there in the shadows on the dark side of the street, in the mouths of alleyways. The column keeps marching, and only changes direction when a rock is thrown – Clare thinks it’s a rock – and lands with a loud smack and a scattering of dust at the leader’s feet. The man in the peaked cap raises his arm to halt them, then points; the men swerve suddenly, as one, and vanish into a side street. They make Clare think of a flock of birds, or a swarm of insects, homing in on something to eat.
Pip is uneasy now, too. They wait in silence, though there’s nothing more to see except a woman in a long skirt, hair covered by a scarf, who hurries over to stand on the corner and peer cautiously after the armed marchers. A while later there’s a loud, repeated banging, the sound of glass breaking, and a woman’s scream. There’s more shouting – one voice again, a man’s, loud and aggrieved. Then he stops, and there’s nothing else. Clare realises she’s been holding her breath, and craning too far out of the window.
‘Come in, Pip,’ she says, grasping his sleeve. She closes the shutters again, latches them, checks that she’s done it properly. Pip’s eyes are wide and his face is blank with disquiet.
‘What was all that about? Were they the police?’ he says. ‘Shall we go and ask Leandro? He’s still up, I saw him go across the courtyard a little while ago.’
‘It’s Mr Cardetta, Pip, and no, let’s not bother him now. It’s probably nothing. Most likely nothing at all.’
‘It didn’t look like nothing. And it didn’t sound like nothing,’ says Pip huffily. Clare raises an eyebrow at him and he scowls but goes with her towards the bedrooms. But she can’t blame him because he’s right. It didn’t look or sound like nothing. Clare suddenly thinks of the way she felt earlier, by the walls of the castle – the same way she felt just now, when she thought she might be seen by the marching men. We shouldn’t be here, she thinks.
For two days, Clare thinks about the column of men all in black, but says nothing. For two days she thinks of the insistent way Boyd made love to her, and his refusal to give her a child, but says nothing. She’s suddenly more aware than ever before of all the things she doesn’t say, and she has that same prickling feeling as when Boyd’s breath on the back of her neck was too hot, and his arm around her wouldn’t loosen, and he wouldn’t let her get up from the bed. It’s a feeling like something building up, something gathering. Nobody else seems to notice, as the days settle into a pattern of sorts, and suddenly the thought of spending the whole summer that way makes Clare worry that the feeling could grow into something worse; into something like hysteria, or panic.
Boyd spends hours at the desk in the library, drawing and erasing and drawing again, frowning at his work but completely immersed. Pip has more driving lessons with Leandro, and in between he finds an old bicycle in one of the shady downstairs rooms that the servants inhabit, and rides it around the courtyard, in and out of the colonnades, like a little boy. When it gets a puncture Federico finds the hole using a basin of water, patches it and pumps the tyre back up. Clare sees them exchange a few words and smile. The servant’s cleft lip is less noticeable when he smiles – it evens itself out, and he keeps his mouth shut, as if ashamed of his teeth. When the bike is fixed the two young men shake hands before Pip remounts, and Clare wonders if she’s being unfair in disliking Federico the way she does.
She spends a good deal of time reading. The library is stocked with works in Italian that have faded spines and dusty tops; they clearly came with the house and haven’t been read in a generation. There are only a few books in English, which came with the Cardettas from New York, and Clare wishes she’d brought more with her. When she runs out of things to read, the hours will be even longer, her sense of suffocation harder to ignore. Marcie sews her clothes into new shapes, and writes long letters to friends in New York, and chatters and laughs; her smile flits from room to room like a nervous cat, and Clare wants to soothe her, somehow. But she doesn’t know how to soothe a person who is outwardly joyful, and laughs at the merest thing.
‘Tell me about London, go on,’ says Marcie one afternoon. ‘I’ve never been. Is it wonderful? It must be.’
‘Well, I like it very much. The place where we live – Hampstead – is very quiet and green, nothing like the centre of London. There’s a huge hill you can walk up, to get a view of the city to the south. There are lots of little teashops and places to eat lunch; the children go on donkey rides and splash about in the swimming ponds. It’s lovely…’
‘But don’t you go into the city? Don’t you go dancing?’
‘Well… yes, we do. Not very often – Boyd spends all day there, you see, at work. He likes to come home to the peace and quiet. And he never was much interested in dancing. We go to the theatre quite often.’
‘And shopping? There must be wonderful shops.’
‘Yes,’ says Clare. ‘Yes, there are.’ She doesn’t elaborate, though she can see Marcie’s frustration at her reticence. She doesn’t want to say that the wife of a modest architect shops rarely, and then in small ladies’ outfitters, not at Liberty or Harrods.
‘But what do you do all day, Clare?’
‘Well, I…’ Clare pauses. Her first impulse is to defend their quiet life, but then there are the murmurings of panic she feels at the thought of Pip leaving home – of not having him to look forward to; of being alone with the serene slide of the afternoons, waiting for Boyd to come home, and the amorphous disappointment of the evenings once he has. At the thought of being alone during one of his bad spells, when his silence and self-destruction might drive her mad. ‘I suppose it can be a little dull,’ she says. ‘But for the most part I’d rather have dull than frantic.’