The Italian Wife

  Roberto had seen panic before. Knew what it did to people. It made them forget that they were human in their fight to survive. He risked a glance over his shoulder and was sickened to his core by what he saw. In the wave of panic the weak were being trampled in the crush. He yanked a terrified child from in front of the onrush of feet and pressed it sobbing into the arms of its father, but nothing could hold back the tide.

  Suddenly the shrill screams were obliterated, as the impact of the plane made the ground shudder under Roberto’s feet. Tremors raced through the ancient marshland far below. He tightened his hold on Isabella and together they swung around to see the fuel tanks burst into flames. Fire leapt hungrily over the crumpled fuselage and the little Caproncino exploded with a deafening roar.

  Roberto couldn’t hear right. He was crouched at the side of a man on the ground whose leg was shattered. The bones had come adrift, sticking out at the wrong angles, and the skin on one side of his face was burned to a glassy blistered shine. His lips were moving. But Roberto heard only a dull whirr of sound. Was it the man? Or was it him?

  He was holding the unknown man’s hand, sorrow making them cling to each other as they stared out at the carnage around them. The lips kept moving and it dawned on Roberto that the word that they were mouthing over and over was sigaretta. He rummaged in his camera case, found half a pack, lit one and set it between the wounded man’s blue lips.

  ‘You’ll be all right, my friend,’ he reassured him. ‘The doctors are here. They’ll get you to hospital where you’ll be fixed up.’

  The man nodded and forced a smile. His teeth were broken. A nurse descended and summoned stretcher-bearers who whisked him away to wait in the queue for ambulances. Roberto rose to his feet, breathing fiercely. It was hard not to hate. When he saw all the suffering strewn around him, it was hard not to harbour the bitter hatred that was lodged in his chest tight up against his breastbone. The stage and the flimsy biplane that had both been constructed of wood and canvas had been totally incinerated and he could see the Gipsy engine, mangled and twisted, sprawled off to one side of the blackened mess, having barrelled through the crowd in a storm of shrieking whirling metal.

  Cries of pain. Howls of grief. They littered the field. Bandages fluttered and blood seeped into the earth. People rushed to help and to offer comfort. To hold a hand. And behind each act of kindness Roberto knew there lay the silent guilty thought: Thanks be to God that it was you and not me.

  How could one man do this?

  The question clawed at Roberto’s mind, and he moved over to where Isabella was working, tying a tourniquet on a man’s arm. Just the sight of her calm, dry-eyed face and the swift efficient manner in which she twisted and knotted the rubber tubing around his bicep made him recall his own profession.

  Quickly he put the Graflex to work. He had to record this day of infamy and it was easier, always easier, to look at it through the glazed indifference of his camera lens than through his own eyes. But when his stomach had had all it could take, he returned to check on Isabella. A great swath of the skirt of her green dress was torn away, a bandage for somebody, and she was kneeling on the ground talking with a tall man who wore spectacles and carried a stethoscope around his neck. He was dealing with a woman’s stomach wound and his hands, like Isabella’s, were swift and efficient, not afraid of handling shredded flesh.

  Roberto had no intention of disturbing her at work, but it was as if Isabella could sense him, as if she could smell his skin or hear his heartbeat, because she immediately lifted her head and looked for him. It was one of those moments that would weave itself into the fabric of who he was. That fraction of a second before she remembered that there were others around, that a doctor was close to her elbow. That infinitesimal moment.

  As she rose to her feet her blue eyes widened, warm and beautiful, and she looked at him as though there was no one else on the face of the earth she wanted to be looking at right now. He wanted to tell her that when he thought she was about to die on the rally field, he knew a part of him would die too, the part of him that mattered. But now was not the moment.

  ‘I’m all right, Roberto,’ she said at once.

  Her hair was scraped back from her face and tied out of the way with a bootlace. She reached up and touched it, and he knew that what she really wanted to do was touch him.

  ‘Roberto?’ The doctor’s head shot up from where he was tending the woman on the ground. ‘Is this the Roberto, Isabella?’

  ‘Yes, Papa. This is Roberto.’

  Her father? Yes, he could see it now. The eyes. Their directness.

  ‘I’ve heard things,’ Roberto told them, ‘as I’ve been going around the field with my camera.’ His eyes travelled to the carabinieri patrolling past them and the brigade of Blackshirts spread out in force across the field.

  ‘What is it, Roberto?’

  ‘Mussolini escaped. Alive.’

  He described for them the conflicting reports of the assassination attempt – that Il Duce was unhurt, that he’d lost a leg, that he was alive but wounded by a piece of flying metal that had sliced open his cheek to the bone. Isabella listened, her face intent, her eyes on his.

  ‘Mussolini is alive?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded grimly.

  ‘Mussolini is alive? The plane didn’t kill him?’

  ‘It’s true. The suicide plan failed to kill him.’

  She stood mute, her eyes huge and unblinking. For a split second her face started to crumple and then grew livid with rage.

  ‘You mean,’ she shouted, as she swung an arm in a wide arc to indicate what looked like a battlefield around them, ‘that this was for nothing? All this. For nothing?’

  ‘Not for nothing, Isabella,’ Roberto replied quietly. ‘We will all pay for this.’

  26

  ‘Water?’ A rasping cry rattled down the hospital ward. ‘Acqua, per favore.’

  Isabella limped up to the far end with a jug of water, poured some into a glass and sat down with the patient to help him drink it. He was a young man running a fever. Sweat clogged his hair and stung his eyes. One of his lungs had been punctured.

  ‘Try to rest,’ she murmured and held his trembling hand as he lay back on his sweat-stained pillow with a sigh that seemed to drag the life out of him. He let his eyes fall shut.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he muttered through parched lips.

  So she talked. About the only thing she knew. Her architecture. She told him the story of the disputes it took to settle whether the police station should be allowed a small tower of its own, and she told it in such a way that he smiled and flashed his fine white teeth at her. When he finally drifted into sleep she stayed with him, as though somehow her presence was a weapon against his fever.

  It was dark now. Yet the muted edges of night failed to bring silence to the ward where the moans and sobs and murmurs of comfort continued as each hour shuffled past. Isabella was so weary that her bones felt ready to crack but she didn’t close her eyes. The images from the rally today were too vivid, stuck like burrs on the inside of her head, and when she heard footsteps approaching the bed, she swung around, a smile leaping to her face in the hope that it might be Roberto. It was her father.

  ‘Isabella, what the devil are you doing still here? I thought you’d gone long ago.’ He spoke in a loud whisper. ‘Take yourself off home and get some sleep.’

  ‘I don’t need sleep, Papa.’

  ‘I’m the doctor, Isabella, and I’m ordering you to get some sleep.’ He rummaged in the capacious pocket of his jacket, pulled out a bottle of tablets and tipped two in her palm. ‘Go home, take these, and I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘No. I’ll be spending the night here.’

  ‘Oh, Papa.’

  ‘Go.’

  Isabella’s hand closed over the tablets. There was a time not so long ago when she hadn’t been past begging for these, anything to block out the crippling images whirring insi
de her head. A white powdery pill that had the power to block out the sound of her back splitting and to rid her of the vision of her husband’s dead doll’s eyes. She had welcomed the physical pain because when it was all-consuming it meant she could think of nothing else.

  But not now. She slipped the tablets back into her father’s hand. ‘I’ll go,’ she said, ‘but I won’t use these. Give them to someone who needs them.’

  ‘I thought that someone was you.’

  ‘Not any more.’ She smiled up at him in the dim light thrown by the lamp on the central table in the ward and kissed his cheek. ‘Maybe you should take them yourself.’

  ‘Pah! I never take tablets.’

  She laughed softly at the irony of it. But her gaze settled on the rows of beds packed together so tightly and the smile drained out of her. ‘What will happen?’ she asked under her breath.

  ‘None of us knows.’

  ‘The pilot is dead. So no one can prove why he did it.’

  ‘Colonnello Sepe is not going to need proof,’ her father pointed out with a cold twitch of his mouth that people who didn’t know better would have taken for a smile. ‘Go home, cara mia, and don’t leave the house tomorrow. Keep off the streets. Take a taxi home. Speak to no one.’

  There were no taxis outside the hospital at this hour. It was late at night and the town was holding its breath after the horrors of the day. Isabella knew it wasn’t over, not yet. The moon picked out patches of mist slinking like stray dogs in the gutters, and behind the shutters of the houses and apartments lives were being stitched back together.

  She would walk home. She needed to feel the wind in her face and to let the night air dispel some of the things she’d seen in the hospital tonight. But she knew where her feet would lead her, even if she pointed them towards home, so she decided not to fight it. The house with the green door was some distance from the hospital but it didn’t matter. That’s where she would be heading and it wasn’t just a courteous need to thank Roberto.

  It was a craving.

  Isabella strode quickly through the hospital gates, her leg dragging more than usual because of tiredness. She looked across the road. She didn’t know why. Something pulled inside her, something drew her eyes to the dark spot opposite where two buildings almost met. There was a polite gap between them, a narrow alleyway going nowhere, and that was where Isabella’s eyes looked tonight.

  He was there. In the black mouth of the gap, staring out at the hospital frontage, stood Roberto. And then he was running across the empty street towards her, great leaping strides that brought him to her side in a rush of energy that swept aside her exhaustion and brought a wave of cool night air to clear the turmoil in her head.

  She felt a sharp single thud of her heart and then his hand wound around the back of her neck and drew her to him. He kissed her and she could taste on his lips the heat of the words he wasn’t saying and smell the darkroom chemicals on his skin. Her exhaustion fell away and in its place surged a desire to walk to Rome and back with this man.

  ‘Isabella,’ he murmured against her lips, ‘it’s time for me to drive you home.’

  She sat Roberto at one end of the sofa and herself at the other. A chasm of space between them. It had to be like that. If she sat any closer she would not be able to stop herself reaching out and touching him, and if she touched him, all the questions she needed to ask would vanish from her head.

  She sat in silence for a full minute while he inspected the room. He took his time. The heavy furniture, the photograph of her mother, the gramophone and the ranks of records. The shelves groaning under stacks of medical books. A sketch of herself when she was about five years old drawn by her mother, her hair a mass of unruly dark curls even then. He looked at it intently and passed no comment, but the muscles of his face seemed to relax as if he felt at home here. She had poured him a drink but it sat untouched on the table.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked bluntly.

  His gaze abandoned the sketch of her childhood face and fixed on her adult one. ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘What was going to happen at the rally.’

  ‘I didn’t. All I learned was that it was not a wise place to be today. Safer to steer clear of it.’

  ‘Yet you came there. For me.’

  He didn’t smile. ‘Of course I did. Did you think I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Thank you, Roberto.’ A pulse was beating in her throat. She licked her dry lips. ‘If you had not come for me I would have been killed or maimed. That’s certain, so thank you. This is the second time you’ve…’

  He frowned, his heavy brows drawing together and she could see he was uncomfortable with her thanks, just as he’d been when he’d saved her from the horse.

  ‘What about your friend from your office, the one who was standing with you? What happened to him?’

  ‘Davide Francolini, you mean? I saw him at the hospital. He’s a lucky man and should be thanking you too. When he saw you rush me away from there, he realised something was wrong and started to leave, but he got caught by the stampede and has a dislocated shoulder.’

  ‘Better than dead.’

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  ‘He has a nose for survival, that man.’

  But Isabella knew what Roberto was doing and she would not let him distract her. ‘How did you know that trouble was coming?’

  She saw his features tighten, his body grew tense. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to tell her. She could sense his mind whirring, working out how much he needed to tell her of whatever it was he was hiding from her.

  ‘Roberto.’ She said his name sharply, and it sounded harsh to her ears. She didn’t mean it to be harsh. ‘Roberto, who told you that the rally field would be dangerous? And why don’t you want to tell me?’

  He smiled, but it was stretched too tight. ‘Because you will be angry and I fear what you will do when you’re angry.’

  She waited in silence for a name.

  ‘Rosa’s father told me there would be trouble.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Rosa’s father. I saw him today and spoke with him.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Roberto’s words were so incredible that they would not go into Isabella’s head, but it penetrated slowly that he wasn’t lying to her or teasing her. He meant what he said.

  ‘Where did you see him?’ In her eagerness she shuffled further along the padded seat, her body creeping closer to him, whether she liked it or not. ‘When?’

  ‘Today. At the convent.’

  ‘How did you know he’d be there?’

  ‘I didn’t. I guessed. It made sense. He’d take the chance to see his daughter while everyone else was in thrall to Mussolini. He couldn’t be sure everyone would turn out to welcome Il Duce to Bellina when he arrived in the cavalcade, but the whole town was expected to be there for his speech at the rally.’

  She shuddered, uncertain whether it was anger at him or herself. ‘What was he like, this man who deserts his child?’

  ‘A dangerous man. All he can see is the goal. To rid Italy of Mussolini. Everything else is sacrificed to that end. Even his daughter.’

  ‘Including me.’

  ‘Including you.’

  He told her the details of his meeting with the rebel, and how he had neither confirmed nor denied that he was responsible for Luigi Berotti’s death and the crippling of Isabella herself. So this killer of her husband had been so close she could have spat in his face, if she’d known where to look. The thought sent a tremor of hatred through her, so strong it made her teeth chatter.

  ‘I’ve informed the police,’ he said, but when he saw the surprise on her face, he asked, ‘Isn’t that what you want? For him to be arrested and thrown into gaol?’

  ‘What I want is to tear his heart out.’

  ‘Isabella,’ Roberto shook his head, ‘we don’t know this man’s name. Or even if he was the one who killed your husband. All we can be sure of is that he was involved
in the plot to assassinate Mussolini today. He knew it was coming and warned me away.’

  ‘But he knows, doesn’t he, about the shooting in Milan?’

  ‘Oh yes, he knows all right. I made it clear that you need to speak to him. He thought you were dead.’ Roberto gave an odd little snort of laughter. ‘He’s probably hoping the police will get to him first.’