‘Yes, you can love more than one person. And your father is my husband,’ she says, and they both know that this is no answer at all. But she can’t lie to Pip, ever again, if she wants to keep him.
Pip looks down at his feet, where Peggy is cavorting on her back: a pot belly and waving legs, eyes rolling, ears inside out. Clare waits for some sign from him that this talk has improved things between them. She feels the weight of her promise not to go to Gioia again, dragging at her. It’s all so much, so heavy. She longs to lie down and steadies herself against the wall with one hand, noticing the rough cobbles, the film of dust on every upward surface. It’s an ancient wall, hundreds of years old, six feet thick, built in another age to keep out raiders and thieves. And now raiders and thieves are coming again, and Clare will be one of them.
‘How did that happen?’ she murmurs, shaking her head to Pip’s questioning glance.
‘Is he coming to the party tomorrow?’ says Pip darkly.
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Not of course – you know Leandro loves him, kind of. And Marcie’s never had a family before – cousins or siblings or nephews or anything.’
‘You’ve become good friends, haven’t you? You and Marcie. I’m… glad.’
‘Well I haven’t had much choice, have I? With Father in town, and you…’ Pip pauses, looking away again. ‘With you busy. Out walking. What was I supposed to do, all that time?’
With this twist of the knife he sets off up the stairs, and Peg scrambles after him. Clare stays a while in the shadows – not in the kitchen, not out of it; halfway between worlds, between lives. She puts the flat of her hand to her middle. There’s nothing to feel, of course, it’s far too early. If anything, she has lost some weight since they came to Italy – her stomach is almost concave between her hip bones; the skin is taut, smooth, no different to the touch. And yet she knows. She is completely certain. And in that halfway place where she can imagine, for a while, that no grief will come of it, she smiles.
Clare tries to be wherever Boyd is not. He has his work but he’s restive and rises from it often, to pace the sitting room and the terrace, to emerge into the courtyard only to stall there, stock-still, as though he can’t remember why he went. Clare tunes her ears to the sound of his steps, and keeps out of sight. She and Pip have spent much longer at the masseria than Boyd; they know it far better – its hidden corners and stairs, the way to the roof, the cracked love seat in the vegetable garden. She goes along the corridor to what was Ettore’s room, and stands in the white emptiness of it. She lies down a while on the bare mattress. No scent of him, no trace. The father of my child. Clare turns the words around in her mind, over and over. Somehow she’s sure Ettore will be happy. In a place with so much death, mustn’t new life be a welcome thing? She thinks of Iacopo, and the way he is treasured – he is illegitimate, the child of Paola’s lover who was killed at the Girardi massacre, and it doesn’t seem to matter at all. She’s desperate to tell Ettore, and to look into his eyes as she does. But soon the room gets too empty, too quiet, and Clare’s thoughts are too loud in comparison, so she roams on.
From outside the bat room she hears Marcie’s laugh, and Pip’s muffled voice. There’s music playing so she can’t hear what they’re saying, even though she remembers Marcie saying that they ought to save the gramophone needles for the party. It had been when Clare had been about to dance with Pip. She puts her hands to the wooden door and presses her ear to it, shuts her eyes and feels a hundred miles from them, from Pip. She lets the knife turn in her heart – that she has left him so much alone to be with Ettore; that she turned her back on him from the very first moment Leandro’s nephew collapsed in front of her on the terrace. When she can stand it no longer she knocks and goes in with a tentative smile, hoping to be absorbed into their fun, hoping to see Pip laugh. She expects to see them dancing again, like before, or up on the dais, but they are sitting side by side on the old couch. Marcie has her feet tucked up like a girl, her arms linked under her knees, her body turned towards Pip. She’s listening to what Pip’s saying with rapt attention, and for a moment they don’t notice Clare there, they haven’t heard her come in.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting,’ she says. Pip breaks off mid-sentence and blushes.
‘Clare!’ says Marcie, unfolding her legs. Her feet are bare, smooth and pale; her toenails are shell pink. She looks as though she’ll stand up, but then changes her mind. Pip doesn’t get up either, and Clare is left standing over them, awkwardly, trying to talk from a different eye level. ‘We were just… discussing the play,’ says Marcie. ‘Weren’t we, Pip?’ Her teeth and tongue are stained, and Clare notices two sticky glasses on the floor, and a jug of red wine, dark inside. She can smell it in the air; she can smell it on Marcie’s breath. She glances at Pip, searching for the same traces on him, but he keeps his mouth shut and nods to answer the question, so she can’t tell.
‘Oh. I see,’ says Clare. She looks at Pip again, and because he won’t look at her she knows he has been drinking too, and doesn’t want her to see. ‘All right there, Pip? How’s it going?’ she says.
‘All right, I suppose,’ he says. The words pitched halfway between gruff and petulant.
‘I was thinking about going for a walk – do you fancy coming with me? Protect me from these bandits and rebels I keep hearing about?’ She smiles. She wants to grab his arm and drag him from the room, and knows she can’t. Not any more.
‘Perhaps later on. After lunch,’ he says. His eyes flick up to hers briefly, guilty and defiant.
‘Yes. It is rather early, isn’t it?’ says Clare. She looks at Marcie, whose cheeks and eyes are pink, and whose smile has gone as hard and flat as glass.
‘Oh, there are few such rules here. This isn’t England,’ she says, too loudly, and her tone dares Clare to argue. There’s a glitter in her eyes, a simmering anger, and Clare thinks of the row she overheard, deep in the night – the frayed edges of Marcie’s voice, the hint of mania there.
‘No more it is,’ Clare murmurs. She can’t hold Marcie’s gaze so she looks at Pip again, but he’s peering at his hand and running his thumb over the bite marks – dry and flaking, almost gone. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,’ she says, with a desperate feeling, like she might cry.
‘Enjoy your walk,’ Marcie calls after her, and though Clare wants to look back and see if this is mocking, or serious, or angry, somehow she can’t bring herself to.
From a narrow window, sunshine pouring through, she sees Leandro Cardetta on the roof of the opposite side of the quad. He’s standing near the edge with his arms loose at his sides, his chin high; lord and master of all he surveys. The weather is restless and threatening. There’s a hot, dry breeze, the kind that spreads fires, and blackish clouds on the southern horizon. The air catches at Leandro’s hair and shirt; they are the only things moving in that still scene – the parched ground and stone walls behind him look like a painted backdrop. He stares fixedly into this menacing distance and Clare realises that, despite all the time she has spent as his guest that summer, she can’t even guess at his thoughts. In Gioia he had been about to tell her the real reason he brought her and Pip out to Italy, she was sure of it. He’d said she was in danger. But then Boyd had appeared, and he’d cut himself off. What did that mean? That he didn’t want Boyd to know the reason, or didn’t want him to know that he intended to tell Clare?
She stares at Leandro; is every bit as still as him. In spite of all that has happened to her, all that has terrified her, she hasn’t quite got the courage to interrupt him. He is a closed book; stern face, implacable eyes. Leandro Cardetta is a very dangerous man. For the first time Clare looks at what Boyd said from a different angle – beyond the obvious fact that Cardetta is a man who’ll use his own means to achieve his own aims. Dangerous beyond that – dangerous to Boyd in some specific way? She watches his windblown figure with growing unease until the black car pulls into the courtyard and Federico Manzo climbs out of it. Then she shrinks back to her own room, keeping close to the walls; jittery with revulsion and wishing there was still a key she could turn in the lock.