The Italian Wife

  He stuck out a hand to take over the halter but the photographer smoothly eased the horse forward and out of reach. ‘I’ll walk him to the wagon for you.’

  Outside the station building – with its frontage curved like the great prow of a liner – stretched a whole row of horse-drawn wagons. They were to transport the peasant farmers with their families and chattels to their allocated new farmsteads, and any extra horses were being tied on behind.

  ‘Come along then,’ the man urged. ‘You can ride in the wagon with us to keep him quiet if you’ve nothing better to do.’ He hurried off towards one of the wagons that was already piled high with children and packages.

  Isabella didn’t want to see the photographer go. She wanted him to tell her about Sorrento and what it was like to sail in stormy seas. She wanted him to understand that not for one moment did she underestimate the danger he was in when he stopped that charging horse and above all she wanted to say thank you. Thank you. For risking your life. And a voice deep within her was whispering, Where were you ten years ago when I needed you to stop a charging bullet?

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ she said politely.

  He had started leading the horse towards the row of wagons but he stopped in his tracks, suddenly realising she wasn’t coming too. She was aware of a sense of disappointment but wasn’t sure if it was his or hers, until she saw an expression of quiet amusement flit across his face.

  ‘Milanese, would you be so kind as to retrieve my equipment case for me? I abandoned the poor thing on the platform when I ran for the horse.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll fetch it.’

  Isabella pushed her way through the crowd and located the camera which lay miraculously undisturbed on the station platform where he had left it. It was a long rectangular leather case with a shoulder strap, and was heavier than she expected when she picked it up. She ran her palm over its smooth surface and wondered just how much it had cost him to desert it the way he did. The poor thing, he’d called it. As if it had feelings. By the time she returned the equipment case to him, he had hitched the horse to the back of the wagon and was climbing up over the backboard. His eyes lit up at the sight of the case and he drew it to his side protectively.

  ‘Thank you, Milanese.’

  Isabella smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  The rain was falling harder now, big fat drops of it that speckled the ground. The horse edged sideways and stamped one foot, impatient to be gone.

  ‘Why don’t you jump in the wagon for a ride too?’ the photographer suddenly asked with a grin. ‘By the way, what’s your name?’

  ‘Ah, Signora Berotti,’ a man’s voice intruded as if in answer to the photographer’s request, ‘I’ve been looking for you.’

  It was Davide Francolini from her office. Not now. Please don’t talk business to me now.

  Isabella half turned towards him. His hair was flattened by the rain.

  Go away. Go away.

  He placed a hand on her elbow. ‘I have a message from Colonnello Sepe for you. He has telephoned the convent and arranged for you to see the girl right away.’ He waved a hand towards a black car parked on the opposite side of the road and tried to draw her away but she hesitated.

  ‘Come now,’ he said.

  Isabella felt a churning of something cold inside her but this time she let him wheel her away from the wagon. Nevertheless she turned her head.

  The cart carrying the man in the flat cap along with his wife and excited children was already rattling off down the street, the horse still skittish behind it in the rain. The photographer was standing up at the back among the bundles of belongings. He moved easily with the sway of it, the way Isabella could imagine him doing on a boat-deck, and all the time he was watching her and her companion. She raised a hand and waved goodbye.

  He didn’t wave back.

  8

  Convent living was not hard. Not for Rosa. Yes, it was cold at night; yes, the meals were only scraps to feed a starling; and yes, some of the girls were spiteful. But she had moved around from place to place so many times that she had learned how to make new friends quickly. And how to leave them just as quickly too.

  What was hard was the nuns. With their angry eyes and their crepey cheeks and the ruler ever ready in their hands to smack down on soft young knuckles or to clip across the back of calves, stinging like a snake bite. The one good thing Rosa had to say for her own mother was that she never hit her, so these sudden casual physical attacks left her speechless with rage and misery.

  Rosa liked mathematics, liked the symmetry of it, and she was in the middle of an arithmetic lesson with Sister Agatha when Sister Consolata stuck her cheery head around the door. Her cheeks were bunched into a smile that was at odds with her sour black habit and stiff white headdress. Sister Consolata was the exception among the nuns, a beam of sunlight in a dark and thwarted world. All the girls wanted to be in her sewing class because there were no rulers there and she would sing to them in her pure soprano voice while they worked.

  ‘May I borrow Rosa Bianchi for a while? Reverend Mother wishes to speak to her.’

  Sister Agatha, a stout woman who preferred cold baths to children, frowned to demonstrate her disapproval but could not gainsay the orders of the Reverend Mother.

  ‘Very well, Rosa. You may be excused.’

  ‘Thank you, Sister Agatha.’

  Rosa had learned that much, to thank them for every tiny sliver of mercy if she wanted to keep the skin on her knuckles. She glanced with lowered eyes at her friend, Carmela, sitting next to her, a pale-faced Venetian with unholy Titian curls, legs like stilts, and carrying the stigma of being born out of wedlock. Carmela tried to give her a tiny smile of encouragement but her eyes were huge with concern. Why? What did the Reverend Mother do? Whip you? Make you pay for your sins? Rosa shuddered because she knew she carried around a whole heap of sins.

  ‘Hurry up, girl,’ Sister Agatha snapped.

  ‘We don’t want to keep Reverend Mother waiting,’ Sister Consolata added gently.

  Rosa hurried to the door and down the stark corridor, scurrying behind the long black robe that moved surprisingly fast. She yearned to grasp one of its musky folds, to smell it, to let its incense drift into her head, to hold on to it. To hold on to something.

  ‘Rosa, dear child, let’s tidy you up.’

  Sister Consolata had come to a halt in front of a large oak door carved with the image of Christ on the cross. Rosa lowered her eyes and was taken by surprise when the nun started attacking her hair with a hairbrush that appeared like magic from the folds of the black habit.

  ‘You have such lovely curls,’ the nun laughed, ‘and we don’t want Reverend Mother cutting them off, do we?’

  ‘No, Sister,’ Rosa whispered, appalled.

  She submitted mutely to the tidying process, to being patted and pressed and brushed down, but her fingers managed to creep into one of the black folds where they nestled quietly for a few seconds. When finally satisfied, Sister Consolata rested a blue-veined hand heavily on Rosa’s head and closed her eyes in silent prayer. Rosa watched the way the soft layers of her face settled into stillness like ripples in a pond and the way the scarlet flares on her cheeks faded. She stared up at the nun for a long moment and wondered what she’d look like if she were dead.

  ‘Now, little one,’ Sister Consolata popped open her eyes, ‘the good Lord has brought you a visitor today.’

  The nun’s words made the world outside – on which Rosa had slammed the doors tight to keep it out of her head – come sweeping back to her, but now it had changed: it was bent and twisted at the edges. Suddenly she felt as if she were drowning, something dark and heavy flooded her chest and she had to squeeze her eyes shut to keep tears away. Once again the stiff and savaged body of her mother on the cold slab flared up inside her head. She started shaking.

  ‘Courage, Rosa. Our dear Lord in Heaven is with you and knows all that is in your heart. Call on Him for strength.’

  She patted Ro
sa’s chest right on the spot where her heart was hammering so hard she feared it would crack open her ribs and spill a crimson flood on to the clean scrubbed floor under her feet.

  ‘You’re breathing too fast, Rosa. Slow breaths. That’s better. Stand up straight now.’

  Rosa took slow breaths. She stood up straight. She stared blindly at the door.

  Sister Consolata tapped timidly on its oak surface and put her ear to it, her face tense within the tight circle of her wimple. A murmur came from the other side. With a bright smile pinned on her lips, the nun opened the door.

  Dislike. It hung in the room, as grey as mist; the air was drenched with it. That’s what hit Rosa first when she stepped over the threshold of the large high-ceilinged room. The woman in this room disliked her intensely. And Rosa knew why. Sister Agatha had spelled it out to her. Reverend Mother was pure of heart. She talked to God every day. She read His Word every day. Whereas Rosa was nothing but the tainted offspring of a wicked woman who had condemned her own soul to eternal Damnation in the Fires of Hell. That’s what Sister Agatha said. Tainted blood careened through her veins. Did she bear a mark on her forehead too, like the evil Cain in the Bible? One that others could see but Rosa couldn’t? That thought tormented her.

  ‘Here’s Rosa Bianchi, Reverend Mother.’

  When Rosa didn’t move, Sister Consolata placed a firm hand against her back and launched her across the expanse of Persian rug under the critical gaze of the vast oil paintings on the walls, all of them old men decked out in violent red or gaudy purple robes.

  ‘Come here, girl.’

  Rosa warily approached the figure in black who was seated near the log fire. The room was far warmer than the corridor or the classrooms. Mother Domenica sat stiff as a poker in a carved chair that looked very old and extremely grand. She wasn’t tall but reminded Rosa of a giraffe because of her long skinny neck and pointed face. Her tongue kept flashing across her lips, grey and thin, but otherwise she remained totally still, hands folded like pieces of bleached paper on her lap. But a movement in the chair opposite on the other side of the fire caught Rosa’s attention and for a second her feet froze. Paralysed with hope.

  ‘Hello, Rosa. How are you?’

  It was the architect.

  ‘I’m well.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

  Rosa could not take her eyes off her visitor. She was sitting in a smaller carved chair and seemed to glow in the amber light of the fire. Her dark hair hung wet and shiny to her shoulders and her skirt, the soft colour of mushrooms, was speckled like a bird’s egg by raindrops.

  ‘Signora Berotti has generously come to visit you, Rosa, to enquire after your welfare.’

  Rosa didn’t know what to say. She nodded.

  ‘Don’t be sullen, girl. Come and sit here.’

  Mother Domenica jutted her pointy chin towards a small pine stool placed beside her own chair. Rosa wanted to pick it up and carry it over to place it beside the architect’s chair but she didn’t want her knuckles skinned in front of her visitor, so she did as she was told and sat on the stool. Sister Consolata backed out of the room and shut the door quietly, leaving Rosa alone with the grey mist of dislike.

  Rosa had thought a lot about the architect since she’d been brought to the chill corridors of the convent. Signora Berotti was different. And she had that way of looking at you. Isabella, she’d said her name was. An architect with a dead husband and a bullet hole in her back. Rosa wondered what it looked like. What she did know was that Signora Berotti wasn’t like other people. No one else had ever talked to her about ‘pilasters’ or ‘symmetry’. No one else would ever think she would care.

  ‘Tell me about your day, Rosa,’ the architect prompted gently. ‘Mother Domenica tells me that you had French and mathematics lessons this morning and a good lunch of lasagne.’

  Then Mother Domenica is a liar.

  Rosa nodded. She could smell the lies in the black material that hung its holy disguise on the woman in the big carved chair. The lies smelled like rotten grapes. Sour in her nostrils. When Rosa lifted her gaze to the pointed face, the Reverend Mother was smiling at her, but Rosa didn’t smile back. She stared straight at the nun’s sharp black eyes.

  ‘Do you enjoy learning French?’ the architect asked when the staring had gone on long enough.

  ‘Oui,’ Rosa muttered.

  What else could she say? She thought about saying: No, Signora Berotti. We stand in a row in the French class and Sister Maria fires a word at each of us that we have to shout back in French. If a girl gets it wrong, she has to kneel on the floor and the flat side of Sister Maria’s ruler slaps down on her head. She stays there until she gets a word right. I have never learned French. My head is sore. My knees hurt. Is that what you want to know?

  Rosa lowered her eyes to the round table that stood at knee height between the two chairs. On it sat two cups of coffee. The Reverend Mother picked one up and raised it to her thin lips, the aroma of it drifting thick and heavy to the back of Rosa’s throat, making saliva spurt into her mouth. Beside the other cup stood a small silver jug of milk and a stubby glass of water. She could guess who the water was for. The hard bones of her shoulder blades slumped forward and she sat in silence, listening to the logs crackle in the flames and feeling the coffee torment her empty stomach.

  ‘Rosa.’

  The architect drew her attention.

  ‘Rosa, I’ve brought you something.’

  Rosa’s gaze jumped to her face. The architect’s eyes were blue, not blue like a flower is blue, but blue like the sea, full of greys and purples and greens that threaded their way in and out of the blue. They were smiling at her.

  In the large carved chair the black robes rustled and the coffee cup was replaced on the table. ‘And what might that be, signora?’ Mother Domenica asked.

  ‘I’ve brought Rosa some torcetti.’

  ‘Our girls are not allowed to eat between meals.’

  ‘I’m sure you can make an exception in this case.’

  Rosa became aware of the architect changing shape. When she’d first entered the room, Signora Berotti had seemed soft in the chair, her body curved, her head tilted on one side, her mouth rising at the edges in a smile. Now, Rosa could see that the signora’s limbs had grown spiky, her fingers straight, her shoulders back. Her eyes were no longer round when she looked at Mother Domenica but had a hard edge to them that had not been there before. From a canvas bag at her side she withdrew a small package wrapped in greaseproof paper and held it out to Rosa, offering it on the palm of her hand, the way you would tempt a nervous foal.

  ‘Enjoy them,’ she said.

  Rosa’s hand was fast. Faster than the Reverend Mother’s. She snatched it on to her lap and started to rip open the paper, hunger driving her stomach to lurch and bile to shoot into her throat.

  ‘Just one.’

  The Reverend Mother’s stern voice barely reached her ears. All she could hear was the tearing of the paper. All she could smell was sugar. On her lap lay a nest of torcetti. Baked worms. That’s what they looked like, worms with heads crossed over tails, sugar-crusted and crunchy. Rosa lifted one, sank her teeth in, bit it in half and felt the sweetness and crispness explode on her tongue, making her dizzy. Immediately she pushed the rest of the biscuit into her mouth.

  Dimly she was aware of the architect talking, moving her hands through the air, laughing and shaking her head, telling a story it seemed. Something about a train. A brass band. A horse and a rabbit. But Rosa only caught snatches of it. She was too busy with the torcetti, her golden twisted worms, the crust of sugar gleaming like diamonds catching the firelight. Swiftly she started to cram them whole into her mouth, to fill up the lonely spaces, to stifle the voices inside her, to squeeze more and more down her throat until all the emptiness would be gone and all she would feel was full. Stuffed full. No more pain or —

  ‘Rosa Bianchi, stop that at once!’

  The Reverend Mother’s hand was
reaching for what was left of the package. Vaguely Rosa was conscious of the architect rising to her feet, still narrating her story of people arriving on a train, still trying to distract the Reverend Mother’s attention from the appalling and repulsive sight of Rosa cramming food into her mouth.

  ‘Enough!’ Mother Domenica shouted.

  The nun’s veinless hand seized a corner of the greaseproof paper.

  ‘You are disgusting, girl.’

  The hand started to remove the package but Rosa clamped both her own hands tight around it. The Reverend Mother’s face distorted with disbelief and a shudder ran through her.

  ‘Give it to me, Rosa Bianchi. At once.’

  ‘No.’