‘What did you say to the mayor?’ she says.
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘In New York, when we were there seven years ago. At the party when the three designs were exhibited, by the different architects.’ There are three steady beats of silence, a fourth, a fifth. She can hear him breathing. ‘You were very nervous. Desperately so. You didn’t speak to anybody all evening, not even me, until you went up to talk to the mayor and some other men. Then you seemed better; and then we left. What did you have to tell him?’
‘Good Lord, Clare, I really can’t remember,’ he says; an awkward parody of offhand. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Clare-’
‘I don’t believe you! I want you to tell me.’
‘Clare, don’t raise your voice. You’ll be heard.’
‘I don’t care!’ She struggles up from the bed, out of his grasp. The sudden movement makes her head swim. She stands facing him, barefoot, arms around herself like armour.
Boyd sits up slowly. The sheet drops to his waist; he’s bare-chested – a soft sag of skin around each nipple, a short run of ribs visible above his rounded stomach, a fuzz of pale hair around his navel. She shouldn’t be in bed with this man; it seems wholly inappropriate that he should be so undressed. ‘Tell me.’
‘It was…’ He shuts his eyes, passes one hand across them. ‘I had to put in a word for Cardetta. I had to put in a good word for him.’
‘Why? For what?’
‘He… they… the city waste management contract was up for review. Leandro wanted it, but there were… rumours about him. And the new mayor – the one who seemed too young to be out on his own – was making a point of clearing city hall of corruption. So he was unlikely to award the contract to a known mobster, or a suspected one.’
‘So you… you walked up to the mayor and told him who to hire?’
‘No, of course not. The… one of the other men talking to him was to raise the topic, and to mention Cardetta’s name. I was to provide a… character reference for him. Off the cuff – by chance, it was to appear.’
‘And what did you say about him?’
‘I said… I said I’d worked with him on a building project. He had interests in construction as well, for years. I said he’d built for me, and I’d found him to be honest and open in all his dealings, and had delivered an excellent standard of work. I said I believed the rumours about his… other business concerns to be malicious ones put about by rivals and xenophobes.’ Boyd sounds like he’s reading from a script and Clare realises that he has this by rote. Still, seven years after the event, it’s imprinted in his mind. She thinks back to their stay in New York, and the sudden erosion of all her hopes for her marriage.
‘It was Cardetta who came to the apartment, wasn’t it? Or his men,’ she says, and Boyd nods. ‘I thought it was people who’d known Emma. Old friends of hers and yours, and it had upset you to see them. Thrown you back into grief.’ He shakes his head and then hangs it; he looks pale and uneasy.
‘But why did you do it for him, Boyd? How did he even know you?’
‘He… I… It was a straight trade, you see. I did this for him, and he made sure that… he made sure that my building…’
‘He made sure that your design for the new bank was chosen?’ To this there’s that hangdog nod again, that reek of self-loathing. ‘But how did he find you, Boyd? How did he even know who you were?’
‘I don’t know. I…’ His brows knit in thought, still not looking at her. ‘After Emma died I… I had a rough time of it. He… we…’ He trails into silence, gulping in a breath with a spasmodic lurch of his chest.
Clare stares at him. At this point she would normally relent and soothe him. She would be too afraid to push him into a depression that might take him days, weeks, to come out of. But that was the old Clare from before, in her safe, careful, quiet life. It amazes her, now, how frightened she was then, when she had nothing whatsoever to fear. Not compared to now.
‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’ He glances up at her flat tone, her uncharacteristic mien. She sees a flicker of self-awareness in his eyes, a swift recalculating, and realises how easily he’s played on her fears in the past. She takes a deep breath but then he crumples. Anguish stampedes over his face, and it’s real.
‘I’ve lost you, haven’t I, Clare?’ he whispers.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. She feels far out, alone; she feels that there can be no going back from here, or any undoing of these things.
‘That was the one thing… That was the one thing I never wanted. Never, ever.’ He smears tears from his eyes with the thumb of one hand. ‘I love you so much, Clare. My darling. You’re my angel, truly. You’re… perfect. I couldn’t live without you… you must believe-’
‘Stop it!’ She has no control over her sudden shout. ‘I can’t bear it when you say those things! I can’t bear it!’
‘Why not?’ he says, shocked. Never once in their ten years together has she raised her voice to him.
‘Because they’re not true! And how can I possibly live up to them – how could anybody ever live up to them? They’re tyrannical! And they make me hate myself – you make me hate myself!’
The quiet after her outburst seems to roar in her ears; the night’s silence returns, steadily repairing the tear she made. They don’t speak for so long that it becomes impossible to. They can only wait, with this pounding quiet between them, until one of them makes a move. Clare reaches up and wipes away half-dry tears with the flats of her hands. She feels sick, exhausted, and her head is ringing. Wordlessly, she comes to the bed and lies down on top of the sheet. Boyd stays where he is, sitting up and hunched, and she’s too tired to guess at his thoughts, or what they should do next; how things can go between them from now on. She shuts her eyes and pictures herself inside a sunlit church, small and ancient; she pictures the delicate way Ettore touched her, and kissed her; the tenuous, disconnected look of happiness on his face. But however much she tries the image remains distant, already fading. She falls asleep telling herself, over and over, that it was real.
Pip comes trotting down the outdoor stairs when he hears the car, and Clare’s heart leaps up to greet him; but when he sees her he falters, and when he sees his father he halts altogether. He hasn’t seen Boyd since before the night Clare locked herself out of her room and he discovered her lie; she has no idea how he will react to his cuckolded father, or how he will act. She watches as he stops on the bottom step, squinting in the sunlight with strands of his fringe in his eyes. It’s been weeks since it was cut. He looks slightly harried and flushed; he has points of colour on his cheekbones as though he has a touch of fever. Clare daren’t put her hand to his forehead to check. She hardly dare approach him at all, when all she wants is to put her arms around him and hold him until he can feel how much she loves him, and how she can’t bear his hurt, his anger. She watches to see if he’ll blurt out her betrayal at once, and expose her publicly, or whether her punishment will be more slow-burning than that.
Peg is under Pip’s arm, squirming and mouthing at his fingers. Boyd stretches his back, standing his full height for once, and walks over to his son with a studied ease.
‘Philip,’ he says, with peculiar formality. They haven’t spent much time together on this trip – stilted mealtimes, passing moments at breakfast and dinner, and then only during the times Boyd has been at the masseria. They clasp hands, lean in for a brief press of their shoulders, Boyd’s left to Pip’s; half of an embrace. ‘How are things? What on earth is this?’
‘This is Peggy,’ says Pip. His voice sounds deeper, more adult, than even the six weeks ago that they travelled down on the train. Clare’s amazed by how things have changed since then; how many things, and how much. Pip raises his eyes to her, just for a second. A flick of a gaze, to remind her what he knows, and Clare’s stomach flutters. Her lip is still swollen, with a reddish bruise spreading onto her chin, but he doesn’t seem to notice it. ‘Clare found her in one of the ruined huts when she was out for a walk,’ he says. This is the story they agreed to tell, when, in the darkness outside her locked door, Pip said: He gave it to you, didn’t he? And Clare had nodded, dumbly. ‘We think her mother must have abandoned her,’ he adds. Boyd grunts.