‘None of us emerge from this spotless, Chiarina. Pip will recover, and he’ll have learnt something important about this world, and the people in it. In time he’ll hardly think about it any more – the young are like that. It will take you and me far longer to mend, I think.’
‘I feel like… I feel like I shouldn’t go on living,’ says Clare. Fresh tears are choking her, aching in her throat, but she’s sick of them and forces them back. ‘This summer has been… it has been the best and worst time of my whole life. The best and the utter worst.’
‘But you will go on living, and you have my great-nephew to think about. Or great-niece. Marcie told me,’ says Leandro. He puts one hand on her shoulder for a moment, squeezing it. ‘Perhaps in time, when all of this is less raw, you’ll let me visit you, and the child? Or you’ll come here to visit us? I have precious little family left to me.’
‘I’ll never come back here.’
‘Never? And if Pip wants to visit his father in jail – because Boyd will be jailed, I’ll make sure of it – you’ll make him come on his own?’
‘No.’ Clare hangs her head. ‘No, I won’t make him come on his own.’
‘Life is a catalogue of things we must do for the people we love, whether we want to or not. The only way to avoid it is to never love, and what would be the point of anything then?’
They are silent again, letting more time pass. The wind rolls around them and the hot sun is in their eyes, and it seems as though they might ossify, slowly, if they stayed there long enough; they might become a part of Puglia’s bones. Clare can see the land’s hard beauty, then; the harsh glory of it. It makes her think of Paola; it makes her see that you’d need that stony strength of heart to live there. ‘This war is almost over,’ says Leandro. ‘You asked me how it could ever end and here’s the answer – with the rich crushing the poor in an iron fist. The braccianti have already lost; in a few more weeks they’ll have to admit it, even to themselves. The proprietors have won. We proprietors, I should say. Every time the workers resist, they will be beaten down.’ As he speaks, Ludo Manzo rides past the gates on his new brown horse, kicking up dust from its hooves. He rides easily, sitting back in the saddle, holding the reins loosely. ‘They may happen to call themselves fascists right now, but there have always been men like that to beat the peasants down, and there always will be,’ says Leandro, nodding towards his overseer. ‘The Manzos. At least we’re down to one of them.’
‘Ettore said that Ludo has a knack for staying alive.’
‘That he does, more’s the pity. His son was the one that killed Ettore’s fiancée. Did you know that?’
‘Federico? No… I didn’t know.’ Even in her detached state, Clare feels the shock of it.
‘Despicable. I’m sure my nephew had a hand in Federico ending up in that fire. He and the girl’s brothers; and I don’t blame them one bit – he had it coming. The man that was killed that night was Ettore’s good friend. The one who looked like a movie star – I think his name was Pino. So I’m sure Ettore was there.’
‘Oh, not Pino too.’ Clare thinks of Pino’s kind face; his young wife peering out past him at their door, and the way he kissed her before he left. She thinks of him saving her from Federico, and searching for the right word to say to her afterwards. Coraggio. Somehow his death seems the worst injustice of all. ‘This place is horrible! It’s brutal!’ she says bitterly. ‘How can you love it?’
‘Love it? No, I don’t love it. But it owns me.’ Leandro turns to her and smiles sadly. ‘Whenever you’re ready, I’ll take you and the boy to the station.’
Clare packs her things. She leaves Boyd’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe, his shaving brush and soap on the washstand, the rubber sheath in its flat box, tucked into the bedside drawer. She doesn’t know or care what will happen to these things. She goes up to Marcie and Leandro’s room and finds the door shut, the corridor outside in shadow. She stands at the door for a long time, with the hair on her arms prickling; gripped by such knotted emotions she can’t pick one from the other. You nearly made a murderer of Pip, she wants to say. Kind, sweet Pip. You broke his heart out of spite. Or was it simply boredom? And then she wants to say, I know you’re miserable. I know you hate it here, but you can’t leave. I know you didn’t want Ettore to die.
‘Marcie?’ she says. The word bounces back at her from the wood. Perhaps she imagines it, but the silence inside seems to take on a sentient quality. She’s sure Marcie can hear her. She raps her knuckles against the door. ‘Marcie? Can I come in?’ There’s a tiny sound of quick, panicked movement; a rustle of cloth against skin. But that’s all. Clare waits for a long time but the door doesn’t open and she doesn’t knock again. ‘We’re leaving soon. We’ll be gone, so you won’t have to see either one of us,’ she says. And even though she’d planned to say much more she doesn’t, because she can’t say sorry, and she can’t lay blame; she can’t demand an explanation, and her anger is already burning itself out. So she turns her back and walks away, and leaves Marcie hidden there in silence. And then she realises that there could be no greater mark of regret from Marcie, no clearer expression of grief, than silence.
Clare goes to Pip’s room and her heart jolts at finding his bed empty, the door ajar and the windows open, blowing out the fustiness of sleep. She takes a deep breath and grips the bedpost until she feels steady. Then she gathers up all his things and packs them into his trunk, and drags it over to the doorway. It only takes five minutes. We’ll leave and everything here will carry on without us. And we will carry on. It’ll be like we were never here. As if in answer to this, as if to deny it, a wave of nausea forces her to sit down on the lid of the trunk, drenching her forehead with cold sweat and her mouth with saliva. She wipes her face and then puts both hands on her midriff. ‘I hadn’t forgotten you,’ she tells the baby quietly, and almost smiles. She knows then that the child will give her back the notion of joy, in time, and that even if the world must think the child is Boyd’s, she will tell it about its real father – about his wild blue eyes, and his strength and his gentle heart; how it had felt like she’d always known him, and that she’d loved him instinctively, right from the start.
Time passes and she stays there, on the lid of Pip’s trunk, trying to picture what it will be like to be back in Hampstead, back in the house that was Boyd’s before it was ever hers. She pictures the slow turn of the hands on the clock in the empty hallway, and the silence that will settle once Pip is back at school, and she knows in that moment that she won’t stay there. Not for any longer than she absolutely has to. She will have to find work, and a flat to rent, and she doesn’t know what or where she will do or go, but an image of the sea on a summer’s day comes into her mind – the deep, deep blue of it, with the mirroring sky above. She longs to have this shade of blue in her life, this saturation of colour.
The thought of starting over, of a town full of strangers, holds no fear for her. Instead she wonders how she can have been so afraid of such trivial things before. Before Puglia, before the Masseria dell’Arco, before Ettore. She realises she’ll always be better for coming here; she will always be more alive; she feels like some of Ettore’s strength has bedded into her alongside his unborn child. And when enough time has passed she’ll be able to divorce Boyd, and cut herself free of him. She doesn’t care that she will be gossiped about; she doesn’t care what anyone will say. The Kent coast, or Sussex; a small town by the sea where Ettore’s child can be born, and Pip can come in the holidays, and the puppy can run about. Boyd’s house in Hampstead can sit and wait for him, if he should ever return to it. Clare will not be waiting; she will go her own way.