The Italian Wife

  Isabella walked over to the window and inspected the sodden courtyard in the gloom, runnels of water zigzagging across it like silver snail-tracks. ‘Papa, have you heard anything more about the girl, Rosa Bianchi?’

  She felt his mood change. He tucked the records back in their box and flipped the catches shut with a crisp snap.

  ‘No, I’ve heard nothing. Now do as I say and forget about her.’

  ‘How can I? For the past week I’ve been going over to the convent every day but they refuse to let me in to see her or Sister Consolata. And I can’t get in to see Chairman Grassi either. It’s driving me mad. They’re hiding something, I’m —’

  ‘Isabella!’

  She turned from the rivulets on the window to find he was standing close behind her.

  ‘Do you,’ he asked sternly, ‘want to lose the job you worked so hard to get?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then forget this girl. She is a troublemaker in this town, just like her mother was.’

  ‘She is all alone, Papa. Her mother died in front of my eyes by leaping off my tower. Yet we know nothing about her. I feel a responsibility for the child. I have to talk to Rosa and find out if I can help her.’

  His silence was a solid wall between them.

  ‘Listen to me, Papa.’ She needed to be honest with her father. ‘I know you think it’s risky but her mother told me something before she ran off to my tower, something that means I have to speak to Rosa. She mentioned Luigi.’

  Her father’s heavy brow creased in the way that used to frighten her when she was a child. ‘Oh, Isabella! That just makes it worse. I’m telling you to forget about that girl. She will bring you nothing but trouble.’

  ‘What I don’t understand, Papa, is why they don’t just remove her from Bellina to an orphanage in Rome or Turin, if they don’t want me speaking to her.’

  ‘Perhaps they already have.’

  His words hit her flat in the chest. She hadn’t considered that possibility.

  ‘I have to leave now.’ He scooped up his medical case, and in the tiled hallway he snatched his hat and scarf from the hat stand.

  ‘Why so early, Papa?’

  ‘Three more workers were caught in an accident yesterday.’ His fingers reached for the doorknob. ‘That makes six this week.’ She saw the muscles of his jaw tighten. ‘Two died. These houses that you and Mussolini are building are killing people.’ He buttoned up his jacket. ‘And I’ve heard that Sister Consolata is being transferred to another convent.’

  ‘Why? Where is she going?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  He walked out into the dismal morning and his daughter closed the door against whatever it was that was happening out there in this town she loved so fiercely.

  Isabella stood naked in front of the mirror.

  Don’t do this.

  The air hung chill in the bathroom and her skin felt tight, as if it had suddenly grown two sizes too small for her. The staccato beat of her heart betrayed her nerves.

  Don’t do this.

  But she refused to let herself listen to that soft-tongued voice inside her head. For years it had been lulling her into a false state of calm, whispering in her ear, deceiving her. It told her that if she acted normally, spoke normal words and thought normal thoughts, then she would be normal. It had been lying to her.

  She stared at the person in the mirror and asked herself when that other person had become her. There were similarities, she would admit that. But nothing more. The same shaped face, but this one had unfamiliar shadows wrapped around her eyes and hollows in places where there shouldn’t be hollows. The bones of her cheeks were hard, shiny and brittle.

  When had she become so thin? Her hair was unbrushed. Lips open as though ready to cry Stop this. She didn’t let herself look at her pale, tight-skinned body because she knew what she would see – one hip higher than the other, one leg thinner than the other because it was lazy and didn’t do its share of the work.

  Her mouth was dry. Sadness was seeping up her throat until she could barely swallow. She didn’t want to set eyes on herself and her hand reached out for her dressing gown but she turned away before her fingers could grasp its protective folds.

  It was three years since she’d stood bare-skinned like this in front of a mirror and dared to turn around to inspect her back. She had become expert at hiding from herself but now she snapped her head round before she could change her mind and made herself look long and hard at her rear view in the mirror.

  Dear God, it was ugly. Still there. Purple and glistening, like a big hollowed-out aubergine. The jagged hole – made by the bullet that smashed its way through her muscles and bone, severing nerves, destroying connections – seemed to grin sideways at her, the skin around it puckered and ridged. Each of the seven operations had left scars that snaked in silvery ribbons down her spine and across to the bony line of her hips. As if she were a parcel tied up with strings of scar tissue. She stared at the reflection and refused to look away.

  The strange sound she heard in the room was her own breathing.

  No man would want her. She was damaged goods. In this boisterously fecund country where a woman was prized by how abundantly she could produce soft-cheeked bouncing children – as easy as shelling peas – Isabella was barren. Marked by the fingerprint of death.

  As she stood in the cold bathroom, anger came at her with teeth and claws. It came from the walls, from the bath and the washbasin, from the curved white lights. From the mirror itself. It ripped through her, making her skin burn and her fingers yearn to tear that image off the surface of the mirror.

  It had all started with Allegra Bianchi. Why had she spoken of Luigi? What reason could she have? And what secrets was Rosa keeping stored in that wild young head of hers that might lead Isabella to the killer of her husband? No matter how much she cared for the sorrow of the child or worried about the ill-treatment she was receiving now, Isabella needed to pluck those secrets from her head.

  Abruptly she closed her eyes, snapping the connection between herself and that other creature in the mirror. She reached again for her dressing gown and as she did so, the question flashed through her mind one more time: why did Allegra Bianchi choose her? Of all the people in the piazza. Why her?

  10

  Isabella waited an hour outside the house with the green door. It was where the photographer lived, the one who could handle horses. It was small, one of a row of plain terraced cottages that opened straight on to the street. She wondered why he had chosen to live on the upper floor of such a modest house in the manual workers’ district of Bellina, when as a government employee he must have had the option of one of the luxury apartments in the centre of town.

  Bellina was divided into zones, well organised and strictly segregated by what job a person held. At the heart of the town stood the government administrative buildings in all their splendour, including the magnificent black and white Banca d’Italia, flanking the central piazza. Spreading out from these were the elegant apartment blocks – in one of which Isabella and her father lived in comfort – but behind them the more mundane housing was grouped in zones for the traders, office workers and artisans.

  But it was on the outskirts that things changed. The labourers’ cottages crowded on top of each other, elbowing the grim carabinieri barracks right to the very edge of the barren plain itself. Isabella had heard rumours from Francesca of unrest in the zone, stories of the Blackshirts sweeping through it with their truncheons. Here the dust was thick, at its worst when the wind raced down off the mountains, and this was where any overflow from the canals risked running into the houses if the pumps failed.

  Why on earth would he choose to live out here?

  Isabella didn’t knock on the door. To do so at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning seemed presumptuous. She didn’t mind; she spent the time nosing around the street, inspecting the cornices and checking the headers and heels. The sight of the downspout straps alrea
dy working loose sent a flicker of annoyance through her that set her prowling in search of other signs of premature decay.

  But the green door remained stubbornly shut. Upstairs the shutters lay open but no sounds trickled down to street level in the cool breath of morning, though the voices of an elderly couple downstairs could be heard bickering. The rain had decided enough was enough and had drifted up into the mountains, allowing the morning sun to slide gracefully over the terracotta-tiled roofs, bright as a flame on the glass of the windows. Isabella was thinking of her father’s Dr Pavese, the one who vanished without trace, and she almost missed the moment when the green door sprang open.

  Immediately Isabella sensed a change in the air. It was subtle but it was there, she could feel it. A quick ripple of energy. Even a tan dog that had been lazily scratching its mangy backside against a drainpipe felt it and shook its long ears noisily. Five houses down, a young woman in a red dress stepped out of her doorway and began sweeping her patch of pavement with rapid strokes of her broom, as if she had been watching for the photographer to emerge.

  Isabella had forgotten how tall he was. She’d forgotten the way he moved as if every moment was something of value to him, as if each stride of his long legs or swing of his arm had a purpose. His shoulders were broad under his pale jacket, he wore no tie and his camera equipment case swung easily at his side. As he left the house he nodded at the woman with the broom and paused to check the sky, like a hound sniffing out a change in the weather. He wore no hat and the sun glinted on the unruly chestnut waves of his hair as he squinted up at it, but as soon as he caught sight of Isabella on the opposite site of the street he bounded forward.

  ‘Buongiorno, Milanese.’ A smile spread slowly over his face, his grey eyes wide with surprise. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’

  She considered telling him that it was a coincidence, that she was just in the area to inspect the houses and see how people were settling in. But she looked down at the package in her hands and told him the truth.

  ‘I’m looking for you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve found me.’

  ‘Yes.’ The thick paper of the package crackled as she fingered it.

  ‘How did you know where I live?’ His gaze was fixed on her face, not on the package.

  ‘It wasn’t hard,’ she said. ‘I asked around. There aren’t too many photographers holed up in Bellina.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I brought you a present.’ She held out the package.

  For a moment Isabella thought he looked suddenly wary. A flash of something darker darted across the pale grey of his eyes but then it was gone and she wondered if she had imagined it because it was swallowed by the broad grin he gave her.

  ‘What’s this for? A bribe?’

  She didn’t blink, though the word hung hot in the cool morning air. The sky was pale, washed clean by the rain, with only the mountains in the distance looking bruised and misshapen.

  ‘It’s a thank you,’ she told him. ‘For stopping the horse.’ She thrust the package at him.

  ‘Grazie. But it’s not necessary, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  He carefully unwrapped the paper and a smile of real pleasure softened the angles of his face when he saw what lay inside.

  ‘Two red snappers! Excellent. Fragolino is one of my favourites.’ He lifted the two fat pink fish to his nose and sniffed. ‘Caught fresh this morning.’

  Any lingering doubt that Isabella had about her choice of gift vanished.

  ‘You certainly know the way to a fisherman’s heart,’ he laughed.

  ‘But you’re not a fisherman. You’re a photographer.’

  ‘So I am.’

  For an awkward moment Isabella didn’t know where to go next with the conversation, unwilling yet to blurt out exactly why she was here, but she was aware that at any second he could wish her good day and walk off to wherever he was going. He was a person, she realised, who was capable of standing in silence indefinitely, waiting to see how someone else chose to fill it.

  ‘You’d better put the fish somewhere cold for later,’ she suggested.

  ‘Or we could cook it and eat it together, you and I.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t bring you two fish for that reason.’ She felt colour rise in her cheeks. ‘I didn’t mean that. They’re both for you to eat.’

  ‘Thank you, Signora Berotti, you are generous.’

  Isabella saw him glance at her wedding ring then he slipped the strap of his equipment case off his shoulder and placed the leather box at her feet.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said and vanished back behind the green door with his fish.

  The young woman in red rested her hands and her chin on the end of her broom handle and regarded Isabella with a scowl that switched to a smile the moment the photographer re-emerged into the street.

  ‘Now,’ he said, all bustle and business as he swept up the camera case, ‘my car is over there.’ He waved a car key in the direction of a brand new Fiat Balilla parked in the street. ‘I am heading out to one of the farmsteads, so why don’t you come along?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  He rubbed a palm over the rough Sunday stubble on his jaw and laughed, the kind of laugh that warmed her skin.

  ‘So you can tell me,’ he said, ‘what you’ve really come to see me about.’

  He looped her arm through his and she tried hard not to limp.

  ‘My name is Roberto.’

  Isabella already knew his name. Just like she knew his age – thirty-two. She knew he’d lived and worked down south in Sorrento and Naples, and that he’d opted to spend the summer when he was nineteen on his hands and knees photographing and cataloguing pottery among the ancient ruins of Pompeii. She knew he liked sour cherry crostata for breakfast and that as a child he’d had a dog called Vico that had been trampled to death by a bull. And now he was living on the top floor of a modest house with an elderly couple called Russomano living underneath. All these things she’d learned from Francesca, who should have been a spy instead of a baker.

  ‘I am Isabella.’

  He gave her a brisk nod of his head as he drove past the barracks and out of town. ‘Buongiorno, Isabella Berotti.’

  So he knew her name. That was a start.

  ‘You have your camera case with you.’ She gestured at the brown leather case on the back seat, recalling the weight of it when she’d lifted it at the station. ‘Does that mean you’re working today?’

  ‘That case goes most places with me,’ he smiled, the way Luigi used to when talking about his favourite dog. That same affection in the smile.

  ‘It’s Sunday,’ she pointed out.

  ‘So it is.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t be working today.’

  ‘Did you?’ He glanced across at her and let his eyes linger a moment too long on her face, so that he had to correct the steering wheel with a twitch of his hands. Ahead of them the road ran straight and empty, its dirt surface raised on layers of crushed stone to lift it above the level of the fields, and alongside it ran a murky drainage channel. All the roads across the plain were being constructed on a rigid grid system but at the moment they had nowhere to go because the other towns were not yet built. But every five hundred metres, regular as clockwork, one of the farmsteads popped up on the roadside, like square blue mushrooms sprouting from the sea of black treeless soil that had been tirelessly tilled.

  ‘You don’t like it out here, do you?’ Roberto commented. ‘Among the fields, away from your carefully created buildings.’

  No. No, I don’t.

  ‘Of course I do. It’s the start of what will be a great grain bonanza. We’ll become the bread basket of Rome within a year.’

  ‘Ah,’ he murmured, running his hand along the clean curve of the steering wheel, ‘so I hear.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it?’

  ‘No.’

  A small gasp escaped her. No one spoke like that. Not against Mussolini’s Battle for Grain. Isabella stare
d at the quiet expression on his face to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. She swivelled round in her seat to face him squarely.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the farmers here. If others bothered to do so, they’d hear the same.’