‘Then why don’t you take her and go? Go until this has passed? Go somewhere safe!’
‘No man and no circumstance will take this from me, Mrs Kingsley. I may hate this place, I may hate its people – those who’ve done nothing to improve themselves for ten generations; those who scorn the poor from positions of ease that they’ve done nothing to earn – I may hate it all, but I belong to it. There’s nowhere else I belong. Nothing I’ve done would have any meaning elsewhere.’
‘And Marcie?’ says Clare, bewildered. ‘What of where she belongs?’
‘Marcie belongs at my side,’ says Leandro intransigently.
‘How can it end, a war like this? How can it ever end?’ she says. Leandro shrugs.
‘We may be about to find out, Mrs Kingsley.’
Boyd is back at his desk, stooped and miserable, but since all his drawings are still in the sitting room he’s stooped over nothing. Pencil shavings and his paring knife, and the slotted shadows falling from the window. This time he doesn’t look up when Clare comes in behind him. He runs his thumbnail along a crack in the wood, gouging out a twisted worm of the dust and dirt of ages.
‘He’s calmed down now,’ says Clare, staying where she is by the door. For some reason she can’t go any closer, she can’t touch him. He doesn’t seem like anyone she knows. Your husband and I have a complicated past. ‘He knows you weren’t trying to insult him.’
‘Good. That’s good.’ Boyd’s voice is strangely hollow, hopeless. Clare has the sudden urge to shake him. Shake something out of him. ‘But I’ll have to start again. It could take weeks. Weeks, Clare.’
‘He told me he might not bother.’
‘He what?’ Boyd turns to her; his cheeks are mottled, his thin hair limp in the heat.
‘With all the trouble in Gioia, he said he might postpone the project. He said we might be able to go soon,’ says Clare, and wonders what Boyd might make of her dispassion. But his face lights up, breaking into radiant hope.
‘Oh, I hope so! That’s wonderful, Clare…’ He blinks rapidly, casts his eyes around the room and smiles. ‘If only I’d known at the start that all I had to do was produce a design he didn’t like… We could have gone weeks ago.’
‘Perhaps we should wait to see what he decides before we start packing,’ she says coolly. ‘He’s the boss, after all. In more ways than one, it would seem.’ Boyd looks crestfallen.
‘Clare, what is it? What’s wrong? There’s a distance between us that was never there before-’
‘Is there? Wasn’t it?’
‘Clare, please – talk to me!’ he says, still wretched and hunched at his desk. ‘Please don’t withdraw from me. I… I need you so terribly much.’ The sight of him is somehow unbearable – she wants to pity him but even that urge makes her restive, irritable. He’s like the ant bites around her ankles that she wants to scratch. She can’t explain the feeling; she doesn’t know if it’s him causing it, or if it’s taking her over of its own accord.
‘I’ve nothing to say. Really,’ she says quietly. She leaves him there, shutting the door behind her and gripping the handle for a moment, as if she might keep him inside that way, away from her.
Some nights Clare leaves her husband sleeping to slip through the dark hallways to Ettore’s room, letting fear burn out the somnolence of all the sleep she’s missing. The risk is huge, but so is the reward, the feeling she has with Ettore that everything – the world, her life, herself, everything – is better, and will be well. They are quiet during these night-time meetings; there are few words. She doesn’t think about what she will say if Boyd is awake when she returns to their room. She doesn’t think about what she will say if she encounters anybody on the way there, or on the way back. She doesn’t think of them at all, and usually she sees nobody. So she’s wholly unprepared on the one occasion she nearly runs into Pip, coming up from the kitchen with a jug of water, his bare feet slapping gently on the stone stairs. Clare presses herself into a dark doorway and hopes he won’t hear her heart thudding. His face is in shadow, his hair, wild with sleep, gives him a strange silhouette. When his door clicks shut she has to wait for two minutes, three, four, before she trusts her legs to carry her; before she’s sure that he, the one other person she loves, isn’t going to re-emerge. And then the thought intrudes on her again, that these two people she loves are from different planets, and she can never have them both. It stings like the cut of a cold, sharp blade. But she carries on to Ettore’s room.
Another time, she pauses at the foot of the stairs that lead up to Marcie and Leandro’s room on the third floor. Their voices drift down to her and stop her in her tracks, first with the fear of discovery, then with the irresistible thrill of trespass, of watching unseen. Muffled words, stifled volume, but it’s unmistakably a bitter argument; one with its own energy and momentum, that rises and falls in waves as it gets the better of them and then is forcibly hushed. The hairs stand up along Clare’s arms. She doesn’t want to listen but she does, just for a few seconds. She hears Leandro say:
‘Marcie! I’ve told you, it’s impossible.’
‘No! What’s impossible is that you can expect me to stay here in this godforsaken desert for weeks on end without going completely insane!’ Marcie replies. Her voice is frayed, like Clare has never heard it before; so ragged with feeling that the words are distorted.
‘What would you have me do? Well?’ Leandro barks. Then there’s something like a wail from Marcie, a thin sound, drenched in misery, almost childlike. With a shiver, Clare moves away, and doesn’t hear anything else.
Many days pass like this – days of held breath and waiting, at once transient and ponderous. Sometimes Clare and Ettore meet far out in a distant field where the wheat has been cut and the stubble burnt, and nothing more will be done until ploughing in the early weeks of autumn. One day they hunker behind a wall with a view of the blackened ground, beneath a sky like scalding milk; there’s the tired cheep of crickets and the far-off whistle of a kite, and the prickle of smoke in the air. Ettore sits with his back to the wall and his square, bony knees drawn up; Clare curls at his side, leaning into him, and he holds her there with one hand at the back of her neck and the other reaching across to clasp her upper arm in a grip that almost hurts. He doesn’t seem to be aware that he’s doing it; he is distant, more preoccupied than ever. His thoughts, in their silences, slide away to things she can’t know. He no longer needs the crutch to walk; he has a limp, lessening all the time.
‘Tell me about Livia. What was she like?’ she says. The name makes Ettore breathe in sharply. He blinks, turning his head to look away across the field.
‘What was she like? She was…’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s hard to describe her, when it should be easy. It’s like talking about a dream.’
‘Try. I’d like to know.’
‘She was young, younger than me. Full of smiles, even when life was bloody. She was like Pino in that way – such a good heart, nothing could crush it. You know? Do you know anybody like that?’
‘No,’ says Clare truthfully.
‘She had dark hair, dark eyes; not like yours. She had this musical way of talking… I always loved to hear her talk, the sound of her voice. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t afraid to be hungry, to go without. She wasn’t afraid of what anybody said. She was only afraid…’ He pauses, swallows laboriously. ‘She was only afraid at the end. After… after she was attacked. I think she was afraid to die. I think she knew she was going to die, and was afraid. I wish I hadn’t seen her fear.’