The Italian Wife

  A fine drizzle felt soft and warm on their faces and he walked with his arm around Isabella’s waist, his pace trimmed to match hers. She spoke little. She told him about the meeting arranged for tomorrow morning and that her visit to the quarry had been interesting. But that was it. Something had closed down inside her. He cursed whatever it was that had driven her back in on herself where the nightmares stalked.

  He wrapped a scarf around her arm and fastened it like a sling. She didn’t object but she didn’t welcome it either. He could smell the rain in her hair. Once over the bridge into the district of Trastevere, he breathed easier. Here was a maze of narrow streets that twisted and turned on themselves, a place where artists and thieves knew they could find a meal and a bed or a damp cellar to hide in.

  ‘Here we’ll be safe,’ he assured her.

  She nodded. Her shoulder against his felt weightless.

  ‘Isabella.’

  She turned her head to him. The blue lamp outside a smoky bar spilled its melancholy light over her as though there were bruises under her skin that had been hidden till now. Her face looked flat and drawn.

  ‘Tomorrow you’ll learn more from this fellow Blackshirt about your husband and why you were shot. Things will become clearer. You will feel better.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes. Tomorrow will change things.’

  She looked away. At a rat slinking along the gutter. ‘Today has already done that.’

  ‘Anything more?’

  ‘No. Grazie.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yes. It smells good.’

  The waitress, with long dark-blonde hair and wide-set cornflower-blue eyes, grinned at Roberto. ‘It tastes good too.’ She gestured at the two dishes of pork in a steaming spicy sauce of tomatoes and capers that she had placed on the table.

  Roberto smiled at her. ‘Are you English?’

  ‘Of course I am. You’re a sharp one, aren’t you? I came to Rome on holiday and…’ She slid an affectionate glance across the tables of the tiny restaurant to where a young slim-hipped waiter was taking an order for an aperitivo. ‘Well, I stayed.’ She cast a look at Isabella’s tense face and her bandaged hand, and asked quietly, ‘Do you need anything, signora? An aspirin perhaps?’

  Isabella looked up, surprised. ‘No, I’m all right. But thank you, that’s kind of you.’ She smiled at the girl. ‘You must like it here in Rome.’

  ‘Si! Italian men are much more romantic than Englishmen.’

  ‘Hah!’ Roberto uttered a snort of laughter.

  The girl tossed her hair with a grin. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Just remember, don’t believe a word they say,’ Isabella commented lightly but her smile grew stiff and tight around the edges.

  Roberto felt an uneasy chill. What did she mean by that? He studied her face by the flickering light of the candle overflowing in the neck of a wine bottle on the table, but she had pulled the shutters down too securely and he could fathom nothing. It was a mistake. He shouldn’t have brought her here. The place was full of people having a good time, drinking, talking and laughing.

  ‘Enjoy your meal,’ the waitress urged. ‘If you need any more wine, signore, just give me a shout. My name is Issie.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The moment she had moved away, Roberto reached across the table and cut up the pork on Isabella’s plate into bite-size pieces. ‘There, try that. It should be easier to eat one-handed.’

  During the meal he talked to her. He chattered about the photographs he’d taken in the city today at the Campo dei Fiori market, but she uttered no comment and he had no idea what twists and turns were spiralling inside her head. So he filled in the silences by making a show of enjoying his meal. She chased her food around her plate with a fork, but none of it reached her mouth. Every now and again she gave a small shake of her head that tumbled long tendrils of her dark hair over her cheeks, and he wondered what it was she was denying with each shake of her head.

  The minutes ticked past slowly and a man in a gondolier costume sang ‘O sole mio’, accompanied by an enthusiastic accordion. The waitress cleared their plates, replacing them with tiny cups of fierce black coffee and a crisp almond biscotti.

  ‘You didn’t enjoy your meal, signora?’

  ‘I wasn’t hungry after all, I’m afraid.’

  The girl shrugged and drifted away to lean her shoulder like a young whippet against the slim-hipped waiter who was watching his padrone play briscola with one of the customers. Roberto sat back in his chair. He drank the last of his wine and allowed a silence to build to the point where Isabella was forced to look straight at him. Her eyes were slate-grey instead of blue, as if someone had thrown a handful of grit in them while she was at that damned quarry of hers.

  ‘Isabella, why do you find it easy to talk to the waitress but not to me?’ Even he could hear the restrained anger in his voice and he clipped it out before it did damage. ‘Don’t shut yourself away, Isabella. I’m here to —’

  ‘To what? To help? Or to spy on me?’

  She saw his reaction. Saw the dark regret that shadowed his face. Without a word she rose from her chair and walked out into the night.

  34

  There was a roaring in Isabella’s ears. A raging. A screaming that she knew was coming from the part of her that refused to accept that Roberto had betrayed her.

  Yet she stood silent in the room. It was a room that didn’t deserve to watch the destruction of love, a room that was small and humble. Roberto had found it earlier in a Trastevere pensione and booked it for them to spend the night together, but now the double bed with its spotless linen seemed to taunt her. She couldn’t look at it.

  Instead she looked at Roberto. He was still wearing his wet hat and raincoat as if he didn’t expect to stay. She longed to go to him and press the warmth of her body against his, begging him to tell her that she was wrong.

  ‘I love you,’ she stated simply.

  He stepped towards her but she shook her head. He seemed too big for this flimsy room, its ceiling scarcely higher than his head.

  ‘But today,’ she continued, ‘I was informed that you have been working for Grassi all this time.’

  ‘You know I work for Grassi.’

  ‘I don’t mean as Bellina’s official photographer. I mean as his spy. The reason you kept close to me was to find out more about Rosa’s father.’

  ‘Isabella.’ The way he said her name, as though it tasted sweet on his lips, made her forget the fire that burned in her leg from walking too many of Rome’s streets. ‘I keep close to you, as you put it, for one reason only. Because I love you.’

  She closed her eyes against hot sudden tears.

  ‘Who told you otherwise?’ he demanded.

  ‘It was the man who tried to sit at my table this morning, the one with ginger hair and the high opinion of himself. He found me again. He tracked me to the quarry.’

  She heard his breath come hard. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Luca Peppe. He is one of Rosa’s father’s men, the ones who launched the attack to assassinate Mussolini with the biplane.’

  She looked at him with a straight gaze and saw him sway, actually sway backwards the way he would if she’d punched him in the chest. She could feel their connection tearing at the edges.

  ‘What did he say?’ Roberto asked sharply.

  ‘He told me that you are a spy for Chairman Grassi, building up dossiers on the people in the town, so that every rule they break or indiscretion they commit is preserved on your photographic paper. Grassi uses this information to force his will on the people of Bellina and to manipulate the employees who work for him. Luca Peppe insisted that’s how you got me out of prison, by throwing Grassi’s deputy to the dogs. It’s the reason you avoided arrest after the rally.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have so little trust in me?’

  The taste of bile in Isabella’
s mouth was so strong she needed to spit it out. ‘Roberto, why would Grassi arrest me for fleeing from the rally but not you? I couldn’t understand it at the time. It only made sense when Peppe revealed that you were in Grassi’s pocket.’

  She wanted Roberto to deny it, to shout his innocence at her, but he didn’t. ‘Why would Grassi know about cracks in my building on Via Corelli when you were the only one I’d told? At first I thought it must be Davide Francolini who had accused me – he knew about the cracks and he was on the rally field – but it wasn’t, was it? It was you. Why would Grassi release me from prison when you asked him to? And why did the Blackshirts turn up at Caldarone’s farm not long after you and I went out there? It all came from you, didn’t it? Tell me, Roberto, that it’s not true what Luca Peppe said? Tell me it is all a lie.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Isabella. Because it’s all true.’ His face was rigid, the words brittle.

  His voice died abruptly and part of Isabella died with it. It left cold air between them. She shivered but gave no other outward sign of what his words did to her. His eyes didn’t blink. He was watching her intently. Outside, everything grew still and quiet, the street noises ceased, the buzz of the traffic in the narrow road, the woman berating her husband from a balcony. It fell silent and she felt as though her heart had stopped beating. Why should it want to beat when its reason for doing so had been stolen from her?

  Yet still she had a thirst for him, a need, a raging hunger that she’d felt for no other man and she knew she could not walk out of this room, any more than she could walk out of her skin. So she stepped closer to him, removed the wet brown fedora from his head and eased his raincoat from his wide shoulders with one hand.

  He had betrayed her.

  How can you betray someone you love?

  You can’t. If you betray a person, you cannot love them.

  It was as simple as that.

  There was an ache in her chest, as though a piece of glass had lodged itself between her ribs. ‘Sit down, Roberto.’

  ‘You’re the one who needs to sit, Isabella.’

  ‘Please sit.’ She gestured at the bed. There were no chairs in the room.

  For a few seconds she thought he would refuse, as he stood there tall and silent, filling the room with sadness. But then he did as she asked and sat on the edge of the bed, its flowered counterpane in sharp contrast to his dark city suit.

  ‘Roberto, explain it to me. I know you do not possess a treacherous heart. You are not a person who would ruthlessly pocket Grassi’s gold in exchange for information. You are not that kind of man, I am certain. So what is going on? What have you done?’

  She stood in front of the shuttered window, her left arm wrapped around the sling. The scarf he’d used still smelled of him and she hugged it close.

  ‘I need to know,’ she said. ‘The truth.’

  ‘The truth?’ He gave a faint shake of his head. ‘We all have our own version of the truth.’

  ‘If you love me, why are you spying on me for Chairman Grassi?’

  Slowly he extended his long legs in front of him, as though stretching out this thing she was calling truth.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, his gaze on her face, ‘what happened six years ago. I was a photographer in Sorrento and Naples. I loved what I was doing and was putting together a series of photographic studies for an exhibition. I had found a sponsor who was excited about my work and the exhibition was going to be an exposition of the sea in all its moods. I’d go out in my father’s fishing boat in all weathers to capture the pictures I wanted. It was hard and dangerous at times but…’

  Isabella listened. Fascinated. There was something in his voice, a tail-end of the excitement he had felt in those days.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘To earn a crust while I was scouring the sea with my camera, I took photographs of tourists. You know the sort. A quick snap while they’re at dinner and I return an hour later to sell the romantic moment to them preserved for ever as a photograph. Not exactly creative genius, but I made a living out of it.’

  He fell silent.

  She didn’t hurry him.

  ‘Then one evening I took the photograph that destroyed my life.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I was doing the usual trawl of the restaurants in the town square in Sorrento and there was a small grey man at a table eating mussels, sauce glistening on his chin. He looked like a nobody, but with him was the most beautiful blonde, a pampered and petted young woman wearing too much make-up. She couldn’t keep her hands off him. I thought it strange but took my photograph anyway.’ He shrugged, a hard angular movement of his shoulders. ‘That was it. I was arrested on the spot. My camera destroyed. My studio and darkroom burned to the ground with all my photographs for the exhibition. That was the end.’

  In two strides she was beside him, seated on the gaily coloured cover. She didn’t touch him.

  ‘Why, Roberto? Who was the man?’

  ‘He was —’ He stopped himself. ‘No, I’ll not name him, it’s safer for you not to know. But it turned out that he was one of Mussolini’s chief sidekicks.’

  ‘And the young woman?’

  ‘She was Mussolini’s current mistress at that time. She was spreading her favours too wide, it turned out.’

  ‘Oh, Roberto. But surely the man had destroyed the photograph? He didn’t have to destroy you.’

  He turned and smiled at her, a crooked tilt of his mouth that made Isabella’s heart falter. ‘No, he didn’t trust me not to go to Mussolini even without the photograph, so he trumped up the charge of blackmail. Claimed I was trying to extort money.’ Again he gave that sharp sinewy shrug. ‘Don’t look like that, Isabella.’ He touched her chin, a tender little tweak. ‘I survived. As you can see.’

  ‘Five years? Was that the prison sentence?’

  ‘No, ten years.’

  Her eyes widened. Outside, the wind had risen and the whole world seemed to be raining.

  ‘Ten years?’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you only served five.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why only five years?’

  ‘Only? Only?’ He clenched his lips into a hard ironic line. ‘Five years inside one of Mussolini’s labour prisons for something you didn’t do is never “only”, Isabella.’

  ‘I know, Roberto,’ she whispered.

  He gently stroked her bandaged hand. ‘But five is better than ten.’

  ‘How did you get out?’

  ‘How do you think?’

  ‘Grassi.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She leaned the weight of her shoulder against him.

  ‘That bastard came to me,’ Roberto continued, ‘and offered me a deal. To work for him. Or rot in that hell for another five years. A simple choice.’

  Isabella felt a shudder pass through him.

  ‘So I took it,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else doing the job. At least I could ensure that…’ He frowned, drawing his brows together, and released a small groan of disgust.

  ‘Ensure that what?’

  His foot drummed on the floor. ‘I tell myself that I ensure that some get away. Like the Caldarone family. Because I know who is in danger, I can prepare them ahead of time. Like I was teaching Gabriele and Alessandro to handle a plough. I warn them to give them a breathing space to escape. But not all succeed. I am not blind, Isabella, I know I have bought my freedom at the cost of others. And it disgusts me.’

  It was said. The truth. It lay broken on the floor and Isabella had to bend down and pick it up. How could she know what decision she would have made in his place?

  ‘Listen to me, Roberto – you are right when you say that if you didn’t help Grassi, he would have found someone else to do the job, and that person might not be so considerate. But —’

  But betrayal…

  A long silence took hold of the room. Neither wanted to unearth more word
s, afraid of what they might find, of what they might feel.

  ‘This is an evil system, Isabella, that has Italy by the throat,’ Roberto said quietly. ‘That forces its people into such choices. Mussolini has banned all political opposition and crushed all freedom of the press, so it is no wonder that men like Rosa’s father turn to violence. They see no peaceful option. Mussolini and his Blackshirts are driving us to be people we never wanted to be.’