The Italian Wife

  Roberto stood close, looking over her shoulder, and she felt his breath warm on her cheek as he exhaled heavily. ‘They’ve scalped the child,’ he said.

  It was true. Rosa’s hair had been chopped to nothing more than a dark stubble all over her head, and her thin shoulders were hunched, her chin on her chest as she tried to hide from the lens.

  ‘The bastards! No wonder you didn’t recognise her from my description. I barely recognise her myself.’

  ‘Look at the girl next to her too.’ Roberto pointed to a tall girl beside Rosa whose hair had also been savaged and whose eyes were firmly closed, blocking out all trace of the world. ‘When I saw them in the courtyard I thought the pair of them had been ill, but this is…’

  ‘Barbaric!’

  The word hissed out of Isabella. She shook the photograph harshly as if it were Mother Domenica herself she was shaking. ‘Roberto, I have to go to her.’

  This had nothing to do with Luigi. This was about a child who needed help. She swung round to the door.

  ‘Wait, Isabella. Think first.’

  ‘No, Roberto, I must —’

  He placed both hand on her shoulders. ‘Listen to me, Isabella. No, don’t struggle. Listen first to what I have to say.’

  ‘It had better be good.’

  ‘I gave a girl in her class a note to give to Rosa.’

  That took her by surprise. His strong fingers withdrew, but she could feel the imprint of them on her flesh still and her skin pulsed as it refused to discard the memory.

  ‘What did you say in the note?’

  ‘That you wanted to see her.’

  ‘If I go there now, Roberto, and say to the nun on the door that it is absolutely essential that I see Rosa right now, a matter of life and death…’

  ‘No, Isabella. You’ve met Mother Domenica. Nothing you do or say will make that woman relent from her chosen path. For some reason she is working hand in glove with Grassi on this.’

  ‘I could collapse on the convent’s front doorstep. They would have to take me in.’

  His lips curved into a smile. But his eyes looked uneasy as if he didn’t put it past her.

  ‘Let me show you these, Isabella.’

  He led her over to the photographs pegged out to dry like washing and she saw it was a series of pictures of parts of a building. It was obvious which building. The convent of Suore di Santa Teresa, but this was the convent as she’d never seen it. In intimate detail. As well as the chapel, the bare soulless refectory, the meagre kitchens and the classrooms, she was looking at close-ups of doors and door locks. Of windows and window catches. Of drainpipes and high garden walls and sheds and beehives. One photograph taken through a grimy shed window showed a ladder.

  ‘Roberto,’ Isabella’s voice dropped to a whisper as though someone else might overhear, ‘this is a blueprint for a burglary.’ She switched her gaze to his face. ‘Or an intruder.’

  Slowly he started to smile at her. ‘Or an escapee.’

  17

  They talked. Far into the night.

  Over a bottle of red wine and a dish of olives from the groves of Gaeta just north of the marshes. Roberto talked Isabella through his day at the convent. She studied the photograph he’d taken of young Gisella and admired the moment of happiness that he’d captured in the girl.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For going to the convent. I’d fallen for Grassi’s lie that Rosa had been moved elsewhere.’

  ‘You should never trust that bastard.’

  They were sitting in the armchairs, a green-shaded lamp throwing shadows between them, and Isabella sat forward, near enough to lay a finger on his knee. She thought about it. The desire to touch parts of this man was always there in her, like a thirst that wouldn’t go away. She jammed her hands under her thighs.

  ‘Tell me, Roberto, why you hate Grassi so much.’

  He turned his face away, deeper into the shadow, and for a long while she could hear his breathing. Finally he said in a flat tone, ‘Chairman Grassi forced me into this job. I didn’t want it.’

  ‘How did he force you?’

  He gave an odd laugh and ran a hand through his hair roughly, as though Grassi was hiding in its thick waves and had to be torn out. ‘I was in prison. Grassi offered to get me out.’ He flicked his head around to stare at her directly. ‘Simple as that.’

  ‘Oh, Roberto, nothing is ever simple.’

  But the word ‘prison’ seemed to stand in the middle of the room, as solid as bricks and mortar. Isabella reached out, placed a hand on his knee and let it rest there. He stared at it, his expression lost in the shadows. Was he putting her allegiance to the test?

  ‘What were you in prison for?’

  ‘For corruption. Attempted blackmail.’

  ‘Were you guilty?’

  ‘No, I was innocent of all charges.’

  She didn’t doubt his word. Not for a moment. ‘That must have been terrible for you. How long were you in there?’

  ‘Five years.’

  Her hand tightened on his knee. ‘Roberto.’ She said his name softly and felt a wave of emotion wash from his body into her own. It shook her. The fact that the boundaries between them had become blurred.

  ‘What made Rosa lie to you about her father, I wonder?’

  She didn’t blink at his sudden change of subject, just took a mouthful more of the rich wine and answered straight out. ‘Because she’s been told to keep him secret.’

  ‘Is that what you believe?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘By her mamma.’

  ‘Or by her father.’

  Isabella nodded, setting her dark curls into a dance of their own. She saw him watch them. His eyelids flicked like a camera shutter, as though committing the image to memory.

  ‘So,’ she said in a businesslike manner, ‘I have to talk to Rosa. How hard will it be to climb the wall and break in?’

  He edged forward, coming into the yellow shaft of light, and his eyes had the sheen of grey silk in the lamplight. His mouth was smiling as if it was wrapped around words he knew she was going to like.

  ‘I have a better idea,’ he told her.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Mussolini is coming to Bellina on Friday.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Gisella told me that all the schoolchildren in the town will be marched out with Fascist flags to line the streets and cheer a welcome to our great Il Duce in all his glory. Rosa will be out in the open.’

  Isabella felt her pulse quicken. She pounded the flat of her palm on his knee. ‘Grazie, Roberto, mille grazie!’

  He laughed and touched her cheek, a tender caress down to the corner of her mouth, as if his fingers had been waiting to do it all evening. He trailed a loose lock of her hair through his fingers.

  ‘Isabella.’ He didn’t take his eyes from hers. ‘Let me brush your hair.’

  Is that how a man speaks his feelings? She could hear Roberto’s voice though no word was spoken, feel the beat of his heart though no flesh touched hers. Each stroke of the hairbrush as he sat behind her sent a message spinning along the length of the chosen tress to somewhere deep inside her. Only the other day she had told a man she couldn’t have lunch with him. She couldn’t even bear to sit across a table with a man alone, for fear it would drag her back to that day in the Milan marketplace. Now look at her.

  Look at her.

  Sitting peacefully with a man handling her hair as if he owned it. She asked herself how it had happened. How had she reached this exquisite place? Where each touch sent warmth spilling through her body and a rush of happiness was softening the harsh edges of her day.

  How long had he been sitting behind her? She didn’t know. But the brush had fought its way through the snarls and was flowing smoothly through her curls now. He put it down on the table and came around to admire his handiwork from the front, grinning at her as he patted a few stray strands into place with his hands.

  ‘A wo
rk of art,’ he told her.

  ‘You certainly know how to wield a brush.’

  ‘I’ve groomed lots of horses in my time, you know.’

  She laughed, a burst of sound that carried away with it the last of the tension from her body, and Roberto joined in with a delicious laugh that filled the room.

  ‘Now,’ she said with a smile, ‘show me your camera.’

  ‘It’s a Speed Graphic,’ Roberto informed her. ‘Manufactured by Graflex. They’re an American company.’

  Isabella nodded. She stared at the mechanical beast in front of her in the dark room. A wood-bodied folding plate camera, he’d said. She pictured his strong fingers working its metal knobs and levers and she reached out to touch it, seeking the feel of his skin on it.

  ‘It’s an amazing piece of equipment,’ he enthused. ‘The best for a journalist. Fine quality and manoeuvrable on the hoof when you’re under pressure.’

  ‘It looks complicated,’ she grinned.

  He laughed easily, and it struck her that he was good at laughing. Better than she was, and it seemed to her as though the camera had access to a private spot within him where a cache of happiness lay.

  ‘You have to prove your skill every time you use it,’ he admitted. ‘If you don’t pay attention you can double expose or shoot blanks. I have to confess it is not beyond possibility that in the past I have managed to fog exposures or shoot out-of-focus images on occasion.’

  ‘So it is complicated.’

  He considered her comment with a crooked tilt of his mouth that she found beguiling. ‘Yes, a Speed Graphic can be difficult when it wants to be,’ he admitted reluctantly, as though betraying an old friend, ‘but once you get used to it, it’s easy to use. It becomes second nature.’ He smiled fondly at the camera and ran a hand over its wooden case, mellowed with age. ‘We get along together just fine.’

  ‘I bet you do.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I can see that you’re good with your hands. Whether it’s cameras or horses or wayward hair, you make them do your bidding.’

  He looked down at his hands in a distant sort of way as if they might belong to someone else. ‘Not always.’ He paused. They were side by side at the table on which a rectangular stop-bath containing a dilution of acetic acid stood directly under the ceiling light. The liquid dissected the reflected light into glittering fragments and threw them up at Roberto, so that his face looked oddly disjointed, made up of different splinters that didn’t quite connect. ‘Sometimes,’ he continued, ‘I want to wring Chairman Grassi’s thick stump of a neck, but my hands don’t oblige. And at other times,’ he lifted an eyebrow and smiled at her, ‘I want to stroke the sweet curve of your neck, but my hands refuse. So no, not everything does my bidding. Unfortunately.’

  A blush swept up Isabella’s cheeks and she couldn’t tell by the set of his features whether he was teasing her or not. He was too good at keeping a veil over the black centre of his eyes, and she felt an uncertainty that, even as she turned aside from him, was still bubbling away within her.

  He gave a low chuckle and stepped closer. ‘Isabella.’

  The way Roberto said her name, as though dipping it in honey, made her heart expand until it seemed to fill every scrap of space behind her ribs. She started to swing back to him, the fading images of Luigi running through her fingers like water, and she knew she was going to kiss him. That was the point when her gaze was snagged by one of his photographs tacked to a board behind him on the wall, partly overlapped by a picture of her tower. Slowly, inexorably, the black shape in the photograph dug its way into her mind and her hand froze in mid-air halfway on its journey towards Roberto’s broad chest in its dark blue shirt. She was aware of the shirt rising and falling, his breath laboured as his gaze followed hers.

  ‘It’s her, isn’t it? Allegra Bianchi,’ Isabella said softly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that you took pictures of her.’

  He stared at the black shape. With no comment he stepped towards it as if it drew him against his will, and Isabella followed. She was the one who pushed aside the image of her tower and put her face close to the broken body on the steps.

  ‘Oh, Allegra,’ she whispered, ‘why did you come to our town? What madness brought you here?’

  The fan of the woman’s black hair and the sweep of her black dress, as ragged as a crow’s wing on the marble steps, was a shocking sight. Isabella’s stomach lurched. She snatched up the magnifying glass that lay on the table and examined the black and white print through it, viewing each twisted limb and shattered bone, her own face chalk-white.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That mark.’

  One arm was draped at an unnatural angle over the edge of one of the steps like a broken matchstick and it had inverted as it snapped on impact, revealing the soft inside of the woman’s right wrist. A white smear on its flesh leapt out at Isabella amid the tones of grey.

  ‘It looks,’ she said, ‘like a brand.’

  Roberto gently but firmly removed the magnifying glass from her hand. ‘It is a brand. But one that she didn’t ask for.’

  Isabella could hear the rage that his quiet words left behind in the room.

  ‘Tell me more,’ she said.

  ‘It is a method used by interrogators. They lay the flat side of a red-hot knife blade on your skin. Over and over on the same spot on your wrist until you want to rip your hand off.’

  She moved to stand in front of him and lifted his right hand in hers, turned it over and pushed back his shirt cuff. The scar was there. White and smooth as ice. Isabella uttered a low groan that resounded through the room and bent her head to his wrist. She kissed the scar. Shiny as butter beneath her lips.

  His hand buried itself in her hair. She lifted her head, expecting him to kiss her, but all he did was smile gently and move away from her, as though he saw something in her that warned him off.

  ‘Take a look at the Speed Graphic,’ he said in a voice that gave no indication of the fact that he had felt the softness of her lips on his wrist.

  Roberto drove her home. As they motored through the dark streets Isabella could hear the sound of hammering as construction workers laboured through the nightshift. They drove in silence, a comfortable silence because enough had been said and there was no need for more.

  Roberto parked the car outside her apartment building and walked her through the courtyard to her front door. The moon had risen and its bloodless light turned his hair to polished metal and silhouetted his strong nose. Isabella wanted to lay her hand on his chest, to brush her cheek against his cheek, to feel his breath on her lips, but he had not touched her since abruptly disentangling his fingers from her hair in the dark room and withdrawing his hand from hers.

  She wanted to ask why. Why? What shutter has fallen in your head? But he had instead led her around the darkroom, pointing out the features of the camera – its two shutters, its peep sights at the top, its Schneider 90mm Angulon lens, its coupled rangefinder and double extension bellows. He explained how the film is soaked in water first to swell the gelatine layer before being placed in the developer and stop-baths. Only then is it dipped in the fixer, a compound of sodium thiosulphate to remove the undeveloped silver halide material from the paper. This is what makes the image permanent.

  But Isabella had stopped listening to his words. Instead she heard the passion in his voice. It was a good voice, warm and deep, rising from within that spacious chest of his. And she watched his face. The way each part of it became animated. His eyebrows lifted and crouched, his eyes narrowed when he concentrated, his nostrils flared and his jaw jutted forward to underline a point. Each feature had a life and a language of its own. His mouth she didn’t look at. She averted her eyes. If not, she would be tempted to knock aside the words that were tumbling from it and place her lips there instead.

  Neither of them looked again at the pictu
re of the broken crow’s wing lying on the steps. Neither commented on why she would be bearing that scar.

  Now that they were standing on the doorstep of Isabella’s apartment, she knew the moment was in danger of passing without her having grasped it.

  ‘I will be working, of course,’ Roberto told her, ‘when Mussolini comes to visit. Taking pictures of the event. Moving among the crowd.’ He smiled at her in the shadows and she saw the whiteness of his teeth. ‘I’ll find her, I promise.’