The Italian Wife

  His laugh caught Isabella by surprise and her heartbeat slowed a fraction. Her mind cleared, but she did what she had promised herself she would not do. She laid her fingers on Roberto’s arm. She stared at them, pale wilful creatures on the dark material of his jacket. When had she moved so close to him?

  Isabella dipped her head so that her thick hair fell between them. ‘Sometimes I can go a whole day without thinking about him once. Sometimes. And those are the good days. But I can never go a whole night without that man stalking my dreams. I wake screaming every time the shots are fired again. There’s a hole in me, Roberto. Not just in my back. In me.’

  ‘Isabella,’ Roberto murmured in a voice she hadn’t heard before.

  This was the voice that had whispered in the horse’s ear when it was spooked, and she felt it trickle now, sweet and comforting, into her own ear. Her fingers relaxed their grip on his sleeve. She felt the warmth of his hand as he cupped her head and drew it to his chest where she buried her face against him. She inhaled the scent of him safe inside her and knew that the tremors wouldn’t strike today, not with his scent so strong.

  ‘Isabella, that’s why we’ll find him again and next time you’ll speak to him face to face.’ Tenderly he brushed her hair back and kissed her forehead. ‘He will be coming back to the convent. For Rosa.’

  ‘You think he’ll risk it?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ He slid one hand to his jacket pocket and extracted something. ‘Look at these.’

  He placed in her hand two photographs. One was of a high wall and Isabella recognised it at once as the convent wall. On top of it lay the figure of a man as he scrambled over it. Too far away to be clear. Blurred features. Fair hair. A sense of determination caught in the frozen action of his limbs. Isabella didn’t breathe, didn’t blink in case he vanished. The second photograph was taken in a corridor and it was a picture that turned her heart over.

  ‘See?’ Roberto prompted.

  Isabella saw. At the end of the corridor stood a tall slight figure in a shabby suit that had a long tear in the jacket, so that one of its lapels hung loose. At the moment that the photograph was taken he was bending over to turn a key in a door. His hair had fallen forward but still his face was clearly visible. It wasn’t the face Isabella had expected.

  It was fine-featured and intelligent-looking, the kind of intellectual face that belonged in a university. Except for the hard cliff-edge cheekbones. And the knife that was visible where his torn jacket fell forward. The small hairs on the back of Isabella’s neck rose like the hackles on a dog.

  Isabella woke. How could she have fallen asleep?

  She had slept without dreams of any kind. Her body felt rested and warm, her mind loose and elastic. Slowly she let her eyes drift open.

  ‘Roberto!’

  She was stretched out on the sofa, her head propped on a cushion on Roberto’s lap and his arm was wrapped around her shoulders. In shock, she sat herself upright instantly.

  ‘Roberto, I’m sorry.’

  She was a mess. Her skirt, with the strips torn out of it for bandages on the rally field, had ridden up over her legs, revealing her thigh. She pulled it down and ran both hands through the tangled nest of her hair.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘Damn it, I don’t know how that happened.’

  ‘You were exhausted. You’d seen too many horrors. You needed rest, Isabella.’

  His voice lodged in her mind. It was different. The rhythms of it had altered. As though something had changed inside him while he watched her sleep. There was a new caged energy about him. The earlier tension that had compressed his mouth into a hard line when he was showing her the photographs was gone and there was a shine to his eyes that made it impossible for her to look away.

  ‘What is it, Roberto?’

  He was regarding her intently. ‘Tell me about Luigi,’ he said. ‘What kind of man was he?’

  ‘My husband?’

  ‘Yes. You never talk about him.’

  She didn’t mean to shrug, but she did it anyway. She wasn’t comfortable talking about Luigi. ‘Oh, you know, very Italian. Full of big gestures and sure of his place in the world.’

  ‘And what place was that?’

  ‘One where he was in control.’

  There was a moment, a flicker of time, when she knew he was about to ask the unaskable and she felt something she thought was dead stir and grunt inside her. The air in the room seemed to slacken, so that the gap between them barely existed.

  ‘Did he ever hurt you?’

  The question he should not ask.

  ‘Why do you think that?’ she said, annoyed.

  ‘In your sleep. You were fighting someone off.’

  She swallowed carefully. ‘Everyone hurts others at some time, people we love. We all do it.’

  He put his hands on either side of her face and kissed her lips. Not fierce or possessive. It was a firm decisive kiss and Isabella knew she needed to tell him more.

  ‘He was a big man,’ she elaborated. ‘Sometimes he didn’t know his own strength.’

  ‘Every man knows his own strength.’

  Isabella lifted Roberto’s hand and placed a kiss in the centre of its broad callused palm, a hand with a touch as soft as a breeze on a horse’s hide.

  ‘I was young when I married Luigi, young and dazzled by the splendour of him in his dramatic uniform. I was swept up in the passion of his great plans for the future of Italy, powered by the grandiose rhetoric of Mussolini.’ She shook her head, remembering those heady days in Milan. ‘Luigi was a man of action, Roberto. I had been brought up in a house of ideas and ideals, where principles mattered more than practicalities. Suddenly with Luigi I saw how Italy could really reform and become strong again if we took action. I was stupid enough to believe Mussolini’s promises.’

  Isabella stretched her arms wide as though to wrap them around the whole world. ‘I was captivated. Can you understand that?’

  ‘Foolish,’ Roberto muttered, but his hands closed around one of hers.

  ‘Weren’t you ever foolish when you were young?’ she demanded.

  Roberto laughed and drew her close. She could feel the ripple of his laughter still vibrating in his chest.

  ‘I once tried to swim from Sorrento right across the Bay of Naples,’ he confessed with a dog-eared smile. He brushed his lips along the smooth line of her cheek. ‘I was so arrogant I believed nothing could defeat me.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Oh yes. I almost drowned long before I reached Napoli. Treacherous currents.’ He chuckled, a rich throaty sound. ‘I learned my lesson.’

  ‘I learned mine too, Roberto.’

  A silence slid into the room and settled on the sofa. Isabella could hear her own heartbeat.

  ‘What did you learn, Isabella?’

  ‘When I came out of hospital I learned to take control of my own life. I swore never to give it up to someone else ever again.’

  His gaze on her face was solemn and thoughtful. ‘I admire what you’ve done, Isabella. There can’t be more than three or four female architects in the whole of Italy. That must have taken sheer guts, to stand up to a daily battle against our male prejudices against women in jobs of this kind. You must be tougher than you look.’

  She scowled at him. ‘I am tough.’ She ignored his sudden smile in case it tempted her to lay her head back down on the cushion. ‘Tough enough,’ she continued, ‘to go to Rome.’

  ‘No, Isabella, don’t —’

  ‘To drag information out of the man whose name Mussolini gave me. He was Luigi’s commander in the Blackshirts. It’s the only way I can find out what was going on ten years ago.’

  Roberto’s eyes flicked sharply across her face.

  ‘I came to a decision while you slept,’ he announced.

  ‘Yes?’

  This was it. Isabella knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be what she wanted to hear. Roberto had stepped into danger too often for her already and the weight of
that knowledge pressed hard on a soft spot inside her that wanted to wrestle him to the ground and keep him safe.

  ‘It’s about Rosa.’

  She rested a finger on his mouth, tracing the sharply defined curves of his lips, and whispered, ‘No.’

  ‘Isabella, I —’

  She silenced him with a kiss. Soft at first, no more than a light brush of her lips along his, to keep the words from tumbling out, but as she entwined her arms around his neck, the kiss became fierce and hungry. Her body pressed itself against his, and she was losing all sense of self in his scent and warmth. She felt things clicking into place inside her. Where had it come from, this overwhelming need for this man, this precious ability to love again that she thought she’d lost?

  From him. From Roberto himself. A gift that he had given her. A deep sigh of happiness escaped her. It was beyond her comprehension.

  His hands caressed her throat, her breast, sending heat spiralling through her veins and a pulse kicked into life in her groin that she had thought was dead and buried. She rubbed her smooth sleepy cheek against the bristle on his jaw and heard his breath rumble deep in his throat when her hand slid inside his shirt and found the hard lean muscles of his chest.

  Her hair fell thick and wild over him and he swept it up in his hand, a tangled hank of it, and tipped her head back, so that his lips could claim her long throat.

  ‘Isabella,’ Roberto murmured, exhaling the words in soft puffs of warm air over her pale skin. ‘I want us to remove Rosa from the convent tomorrow. You can keep her here with you, so that when her father comes for her, he will be forced to speak with you.’

  Her hand tightened on his chest like the bite of a horse. ‘Roberto —’

  ‘And I will go to Rome to question the man who was Luigi’s commander.’

  There it was. His decision. The heavy furniture seemed to press closer, waiting for a response. Isabella opened her mouth to say she could not risk him again, he was too much a part of her now, woven into the heart of her.

  The crash on the front door ricocheted through the apartment. No knock. No ringing of the bell. Just the splintering crash resonating in the silent room and then boots in the hall. Roberto leapt to his feet as five men in carabinieri uniform burst through the door into Dr Cantini’s living room. The air seemed to vibrate around them. Fear burrowed into Isabella’s chest, driving the breath from her lungs.

  ‘Signora Berotti,’ declared the leading police officer, the one with his heavy chin thrown forward and the bicorn hat worn like a weapon on his head, ‘you are under arrest.’

  ‘No,’ Roberto said firmly. ‘There is some mistake, officer. Signora Berotti is not —’

  ‘Shut your mouth before I shut it for you. Who are you?’

  ‘I am Roberto Falco, photographer for the town of Bellina. I work for Chairman Grassi and I shall be reporting you to him for incompetence and wilful misconduct if you do not leave this house at once.’

  The aggression in the officer’s eyes faltered. Isabella could see him calculating inwardly, but only until his sharp gaze fixed once more on her and then he marched forward. She had staggered to her feet. Struck dumb. But she stood straight and made no sound when he seized her wrist with a grip that nearly wrenched her arm from its socket.

  Instantly Roberto smashed his fist into the man’s face with the full weight of his body behind it.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, as a barrage of blows fell on him, driving him to the floor.

  ‘Come, bitch,’ the officer snarled through a bloodied lip.

  She was handcuffed and dragged to the door.

  ‘On what charge?’ Roberto bellowed. A gun was pointed at his head.

  ‘Treachery.’

  ‘Roberto,’ Isabella cried out.

  ‘Isabella, it’s a mistake. Don’t worry. I’ll go to Grassi.’

  She nodded stiffly.

  ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  But when she was shut alone in total darkness in the back of the police van outside, silent terror descended on her mind.

  27

  The cell was clean. It was new. It was cold.

  Isabella sat for three hours on the edge of the hard bed without moving. Eyes straight ahead. Spine rigid. If she moved, she feared she would fall off a cliff into a chasm. Her thoughts were spiky. Jagged. She kept remembering the colleague of her father, Dr Pavese, the one who vanished one day and was replaced without a word. She pictured a new architect walking up to her drawing board, using her drawing pens, sharpening her pencils. The others in the office would notice. They’d look. But would they ask, ‘Where’s Isabella?’ Would they demand an answer from Dottore Martino?

  Of course not.

  No questions. Not if you didn’t want Blackshirts’ boots in your bedroom at two o’clock in the morning.

  Treachery.

  The word burned, each letter branded into her brain. Treachery got you shot in front of a firing squad. Or hanged. Or beaten to death in your cell. Her eyes, the only part of her that still moved, scoured the cold tiles on the floor for bloodstains but found none. She breathed, but only just.

  Treachery.

  What had she done to deserve that word?

  Did rejecting Il Duce’s greedy lips count as treachery? Or speaking to a rebel’s child? Or pointing out a crack in a house? Or binding up the wound of a farmer who wasn’t a farmer?

  Dear God, where was the line between treachery and reality?

  Roberto had once warned her that she must guard not only her words but also her thoughts from scrutiny.

  Who had listened to her thoughts?

  Anger came. It drove the chills from her veins and forced her to stride back and forth across the small space, her heart hammering to break loose. She wanted them to come for her, to start the questions. She wanted to see their faces and look directly into their lying eyes. These people. They had wrenched control of her life from her hands and she had to take it back.

  Hours ticked past. The cell grew smaller and the air became too thick to breathe. The silence hurt her ears and loneliness twisted itself into a tight knot in her stomach. There was nothing here except a narrow bed and a galvanised bucket and the stink of her own fear on her skin. Life stripped of its outer layers, the way she’d seen a rabbit carcass flayed of its skin, hanging red and raw from a hook.

  But Roberto was here. With her. She invited him in and he came willingly. The sublime sound of his laughter demolished the fear inside her head and she heard again the promise in his voice when he said, It’s a mistake. Don’t worry.

  She stared at the blank wall and refused to blink.

  ‘I want a lawyer.’

  ‘All in good time, Signora Berotti.’

  ‘Colonnello Sepe, I want a lawyer now.’

  The policeman’s thin lips pulled into a sour line of displeasure. ‘We are not here to deal with what you want, signora.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘To answer the charge of treachery to the State of Italy and to Il Duce as the representative of this country.’

  Isabella’s heart lurched and she kept her hands linked together in the handcuffs on her lap, so that they would not shake.

  ‘I am baffled, Colonnello. I have never done anything against my country. On the contrary, I —’

  ‘Do not lie!’ His hand slammed down on the desk, but his voice grew as soft as oil. ‘It will get you nowhere.’

  Isabella wanted to run. To batter the door down. To leave this room. She could see in his dead eyes that she had already been tried and condemned in his mind. This was a formality, that was all. He was seated behind a metal desk in a chilly room, a poster on the wall of Il Duce on the famous balcony of the Venezia Palace as he addressed the crowds of Rome. It was the kind of grey-painted room where a person could lose their soul. Another officer sat silent in the corner, and the manilla file in front of Colonnello Sepe looked alarmingly thick.

  She sat upright on the hard chair and refused to drop her gaze. ‘What proof do yo
u have, Colonnello, that I ever —’

  ‘You are not here to ask questions,’ he snapped. ‘You are here to answer them.’

  Isabella said nothing. She waited in silence for more from the hawkish face before her, and saw a faint flash of pleasure flare the nostrils of his long pointed nose.

  ‘You are charged,’ he said, ‘with treason. You were running from the rally field long before anyone knew the aeroplane’s intention was to attack.’ He placed one hand on top of the other on his desk, a small bony tower. ‘Why was that, Signora Berotti?’