Time passes like this, distorted and dreamlike. Time disconnected from anything outside the tiny church. Later Ettore watches Chiara dress again. She does it in a leisurely way, with no sense of impropriety or indecent haste. Like a woman in her own boudoir; languidly at ease.
‘Come here,’ he says, when she’s finished buttoning the back of her skirt, and the front of her blouse, and her bedraggled stockings into her garter belt. She puts on her shoes before she obeys him, coming to sit beside him on the pew. She sits close; he puts an arm behind her shoulders and lets his fingers rest in the hair at the back of her neck. The width of her neck fits his hand exactly, and it’s satisfying. ‘My sister says you’re in love with me.’ At this she stiffens for a fraction of a second, but then surrenders.
‘Of course. Didn’t you know?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, but of course he did. He denied it to himself because of the bewildering way it pleased him in one second and angered him the next. There’s a hung moment in which she doesn’t ask him if he loves her back.
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t love me back. It doesn’t change anything,’ she says simply.
‘I don’t know if I can still love anybody. Or anything. Not properly. Not as I would wish to,’ he says, and this is truthful enough. He can feel his own pulse in his fingertips, resting against the skin of her neck.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says.
‘How… how are you here? How did you get here?’
‘Carlo gave me your message the day before yesterday, but I couldn’t come any sooner. Then I said I wanted to come and see Boyd. My husband, here in Gioia. Anna brought me in the little cart, and I told her I was going for a walk before I went in to see the men… I don’t think she believed me.’ A defiant jerk of her chin. ‘But why shouldn’t I go for a walk, to stretch my legs after the ride?’
Troubled by this, Ettore thinks for a moment.
‘Anna is close with Federico. You must be careful; she might tell him and he would know why you have really come.’
‘He doesn’t know you’re here, in this church, though. Does he?’
‘No. No, that’s right. But you must go to Via Garibaldi before you go back to the masseria. You must see your husband.’ Saying this is like needlessly pressing a bruise.
‘Yes. And Pip… Pip knows,’ she says, in a mournful voice, rich with guilt. She shuts her eyes. ‘There was the most awful scene. When I got back from here last time… It was awful. He’s so hurt. I… I don’t know what to say to him.’ She looks down and a tear lands on her skirt; a small dark mark on the fabric. Ettore almost says it will be over, soon, but then he realises it would sound cruel, not kind as he means it.
‘Will he tell his father?’
‘I don’t know.’ The words are spoken on a sigh, soused in misery. Something else occurs to Ettore, something possibly more dangerous.
‘Will he tell Marcie?’
‘What? Why should he?’ she says, puzzled. ‘And what would it matter?’
‘Never mind. Listen to me, Chiara. I have to ask you to do something for me.’
‘Whatever it is, I’ll do it.’
‘Don’t say that until you’ve heard me. It… could be dangerous for you.’
There’s a pause, and in it Ettore has the choice. He can tell her the raid is coming, tell her to get out of the masseria, her and the boy and Marcie, and be far away when it happens. Or he can ask her what he must ask her. He keeps his jaw tight shut for a moment more, a moment in which she is not in great danger, and he is not the cause of it. It’s a soft, elastic moment, like the time they spent making love – the luminous space between seconds, impossible to preserve. ‘There will be a raid,’ he says at last, and the darkness creeps in. ‘On Sunday night there will be a raid on my uncle’s farm. He is in Gioia, not on the farm, so he will be in no danger, and it will go easier. I… I will be one of the raiders. My sister with me, and many others. I need you to ask the guard to open the main door for you, at exactly one in the morning. And then you must go into the main building and lock yourselves in a room – the three of you together, Marcie, the boy, and you. Can you do that?’
He can hear her breathing, high up beneath her ribs again, like when she first arrived. He can sense his words sinking into her, being absorbed, and he waits to see how she will react – if she will panic, if she even understands what he’s said. When she looks up her eyes are fearful, but there’s no panic, no refusal.
‘One in the morning is too late. They would never open the door for me then. It must be earlier. I’ve never been out after midnight before, and they were very reluctant to open the door even then.’
‘Then, you’ll do it?’
‘If I begged you to be safe… if I begged you not to do this, would it make any difference?’
‘No.’
‘Then I will do it.’ She tips her head, lets it rest on his shoulder for a moment, but she’s too agitated and lifts it again, fiddling with the frayed cuff of his shirt, running the threads through her fingertips. ‘But it must be earlier. And I must hope and pray that Carlo is on the door.’
‘What time?’
‘Eleven? Sometimes I’ve walked before bed, to help me sleep.’
‘It’s risky.’ Ettore shakes his head. ‘Gioia won’t be fully asleep… the squads will be about…’
‘Later would be impossible, even if Carlo is on the door. You won’t… you won’t hurt him, will you? If it’s Carlo? He’s so young; he’s harmless…’ she says, and Ettore agrees with her. But he’ll make no empty promises.
‘Don’t stay to see. Do you hear? You run to your room, and you lock it. That’s all you do.’ Her face clouds at this obvious skirting of her question. Ettore looks away.
‘I did not want it to be this way,’ he says. ‘But they leave us no other way. You must say nothing of this. To anyone.’
‘If you’re hurt…’ Chiara shakes her head; tries again. ‘If you’re hurt-’ Ettore lifts her chin with a crooked finger and stares into her eyes to press home his command, and make her obey.
‘Don’t stay to see.’
He keeps her there as long as he dares, after the sun has gone past noon and she’s long overdue at the house on Via Garibaldi. He has the feeling that she wouldn’t leave at all if he didn’t make her; that same inseparable mix of bravery and stupidity he’s seen in her before, that same blind urge to follow her heart against all better sense. She would stay with him in that little church, and pretend that they could live that way. At the door she turns.
‘You could come to England,’ she says; a sudden flare of reckless hope. ‘With me. You could come back to England with me. I’ll divorce Boyd… we could marry. Pip would come around… he’s almost a man. You could come away from all of this.’ He can hardly bear the look on her face, the fragility of her. In the time it takes him to reply, in the time it takes him to frame the only answer he can give, he sees her collapse into herself, and the hope burn out as quickly as it flared. In the end she slips away before he’s said anything else, dipping her chin, pulling her hand away from his.