The Italian Wife (31 page)

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.’

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?