The Italian Wife (6 page)

‘I know.’

She drank her coffee and stared mutely into the bottom of the empty cup as if it might hold the answers she needed. She wasn’t in the mood for a lecture, not today, not when the image of a sunken forehead had lodged itself behind her eyelids.

‘Do you, Isabella?’

‘Do I what?’

‘Do you know? Do you understand? Do you realise what happened yesterday?’

She glanced up and found him waving his biscuit at her and chewing fiercely on his moustache as if he would bite his way to the truth if it killed him. Dr Cantini was a great upholder of truth at all times. Sometimes, just sometimes, he was so blinded by the glare of truth that he didn’t notice who or what his large feet were stumbling over in the dark shadowy world of compromise and half-truths where most people lived. He possessed full heavy features and a high forehead that was clearly needed to accommodate all the knowledge whirring around inside his head, and Isabella loved him. Despite the interminable lectures. Despite the fact that he could see no one else’s point of view but his own and had a temper like a firecracker.

She loved him because he had looked after her ever since her mother’s death from poliomyelitis when Isabella was six years old. She used to follow him around like a pet dog, leaning against his strong legs and clinging to his laughter as she grew up. But everything changed after the shooting.

It was hard to explain. Even to herself. After the shooting they were both angry at the world or at God or at anyone who even looked at either of them the wrong way, so they took it out on each other for a while. Though he never put it into words, he blamed her for having married what he called ‘a filthy Blackshirt’ and for a while she could not bring herself to speak to him because he had refused to let her die alongside Luigi. It was only after her third operation that she came to her senses. So she gave him a smile now, reached behind her for the bottle of grappa that sat ready on the sideboard and poured a slug into his coffee.

‘Tell me, Papa, tell me what happened yesterday?’

‘Isabella, we live in a Fascist state.’

She rolled her eyes at him. As if she didn’t know that.

‘In a Fascist state,’ he continued, ‘the state controls every aspect of our lives. It believes it knows better than we do what is good for us.’

Isabella sighed. She had heard this before.

‘Isabella,’ her father said more sharply, ‘I would remind you that those who oppose Fascism in Italy are punished. Mussolini has bestowed the title “Il Duce” on himself and has his secret police and his Blackshirts to do his bidding. He needs only to whisper his thoughts and someone will make them happen. That’s the kind of power he has.’

‘Papa, don’t —’

‘Listen to me, Isabella. What happened here yesterday was a slap in the face to Fascism and an insult to Mussolini’s proud new showcase town. I warn you, they won’t let it pass without retaliation.’

‘Against the child? No, Papa, you’ve got it wrong. They won’t hurt her.’

He frowned. ‘You believe that?’

‘Yes, I do. Be reasonable, Papa. It’s 1932, a new modern world. Look at this beautiful town. Look how far Italy has come. Only seventy years ago we were just a jumble of warring nation states, trampled over by foreign powers. We didn’t even become a united country under one king until 1861.’

Papa smiled. ‘I know all that, Isabella.’ He pulled his pipe from his pocket, cradling it in his hand. ‘Just remember that Benito Mussolini is not a man to overlook a deliberate insult to one of his precious new towns.’ He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘So you really believe young Rosa is safe?’

Isabella’s chest suddenly became tight. ‘Don’t you?’

‘What I think, Isabella, doesn’t matter.’

She felt a thud of unease. Her father always believed that what he thought certainly did matter. He was not a man who underestimated the power of his own mind.

‘What matters at the moment,’ he said, ‘is that you steer clear of her.’

‘But, Papa, I need to speak to her. To make sure she’s all right.’

‘No, Isabella.’ His cheeks were growing flushed, always the first sign of anger in him. ‘Stay away from that girl. If you want to keep your job.’

‘What?’

He shook his head impatiently. ‘You can’t afford to stir up any trouble, so don’t go near the child. I insist on it.’

Isabella sat wordless, stunned into silence. She stared at her father but he jabbed his unlit pipe back into the pocket of his crumpled jacket and rose from the table, his heavy frame moving quickly for a big man.

‘What do you mean, Papa? I am a respected architect here.’

‘This business has not ended and I don’t want you involved.’

He snatched up his medical bag from its place beneath the coat hooks and stalked out of the front door. Isabella heard the mosquito screen bang shut behind him.

6

Isabella was standing at her drawing board in the office. She was retracing the section of a building in Via Corelli, busy working alongside the other architects and engineers employed on the Bellina project. But her father’s words kept getting in the way of the detailed drawing in front of her.

If you want to keep your job
.

Her father wasn’t a man to say things he wasn’t confident were true. If he said her job was at risk, then that’s what he meant. It was Dottore Martino, the chief architect under Frezzotti, who had appointed her to this job; a small energetic man who possessed rigorous standards and a string of medals pinned to his chest by Il Duce. He was the kind of man who made Isabella feel cleverer just by being in the same room with him. But now she was confused and wondering why he had picked her for his team.

Why her?

She was surrounded by some of Italy’s most innovative architects. They were all crammed with their drawing boards into the large airy rooms of the architectural offices, where huge windows allowed light to stream in from the piazza. Each of the employees was under constant pressure to get everything right. No, not just right. Perfect. Bellina was the first of the six new towns to be built on the drained marshes and each one had been allocated only two hundred and sixty days from start to finish.

So deadlines were tight. Everyone worked long hours. That suited Isabella. She was happiest when working. There were twenty-two architects and over forty draughtsmen in this group of offices, each with a wary eye on his neighbour’s drawing board as they measured and drew, and remeasured and redrew according to Dottore Architetto Martino’s pronouncements. Isabella was the only female architect working on the project, surrounded daily by the odour of hair oil and by the casual touch of male hands on her bottom whenever she was foolish enough to allow them too close.

‘Signora Berotti!’

Isabella jumped. Everyone in the office jumped when Dottore Martino entered a room in his Milan-crafted suit and black-rimmed spectacles.

‘Signora Berotti, there is a job I need you to do.’

He stopped in front of her board, eyeing Isabella’s section drawing. She was working on a three-storey building containing six apartments that was already under construction, a fairly straightforward design for the artisan quarter of town. No great challenge. But even so, the pen in her hand itched to improve the lines on the top sheet of tracing paper before his critical eye spotted anything it didn’t like. Throughout the large room pens and set squares paused, heads turned. She could sense the half-smiles, the male desire to see soft female flesh torn to shreds.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Get yourself down to the stone-yard. A new delivery of stone has come in for the apartments and I want you to check the colour and quality. There have been some questions about it. Be quick. And make sure you’re at the rail station by two o’clock for the reception of the new farmers from up north.’

When Dottore Martino said go, you went. She put down her drawing pen and snatched her bag from under her stool, and as she did so, he added casually, ‘You’re good with stone.’

This was a man who did not often offer praise. It might not have sounded like much, but it meant a great deal to Isabella.

‘Get going, then,’ he said curtly. ‘And get this drawing right.’

‘Yes, sir.’

She saw the faces of her colleagues as she strode from the room.

You’re good with stone
.

That would annoy them.

Dottore Martino was right. Isabella
was
good with stone. She reacted to it the way normal people react to pets. She loved to stroke it, to caress it, to feel each ancient layer of history within it. It spoke to her in ways that humans didn’t, so it was with a hitch of pleasure in her step that she walked into the stone-yard. It was set way back behind the station and rattled with the sounds of chisels chipping away at slabs and the occasional shriek of an electric saw biting through granite.

The air shimmered with stone dust as Isabella walked past the slabs of pale limestone and richly coloured blocks of marble and headed for the wooden office. She banged on its door and called out, ‘Tommaso!’

There was the clatter of a chair inside and the door burst open with a roar.

‘Isabella!’

She was grasped in a bear hug and kissed on both cheeks. When her ribs were on the point of cracking, she beat off Tommaso Lombardi and grinned up at him. He looked as though he had been hewn out of one of his own slabs of rock and his grey beard stank of garlic.

‘
Buongiorno
, Isabella, come in, come in. Your lovely face makes my old heart sing.’

He drew her into the office by the scruff of her neck. It was always like this. She loved the warmth of his greeting and of the home-made hooch that he kept under the chaos he called a desk.

‘How’s life treating you, Tommaso? Still breaking women’s hearts?’

He laughed, shaking his big belly and the flimsy walls of his office, the laugh of a man who relishes every minute of his life. His skills as a stonemason were much in demand and she reckoned he must have more than fifty men working for him in the yard, but even that number never seemed to be enough. Dottore Martino drove him hard.

‘Ah, Isabella, my pretty one, I never break a woman’s heart. I make her happy.’ He was already pouring a dark liquid into two grimy glasses and handed one to her. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning but she wasn’t planning on arguing.

‘
Salute
, Tommaso!’

‘
Tanta salute
.’

They took a moment to let the alcohol hit their stomachs with the impact of a train, then set to work. He led her around the yard and together they examined the great slabs of stone. He grumbled deep in his beard over the fact that there had been some complaints about the quality of some of the stone being used in construction and he encouraged her to run her hands over the mottled granite that she needed for the apartment block. As she did so, she asked casually, ‘Have you heard anything about the death in the Piazza del Popolo yesterday?’

‘A terrible way to die!’ His stone-hardened hand marked out a cross on his chest.

‘What are people saying?’

‘That she was crazy for love. That her husband had run off with another woman.’ He tossed his great grey head. ‘That’s no reason to…’ His chest heaved. ‘She’d been cutting herself with a knife, they say.’

‘What? Where did you hear that?’

‘It’s the gossip in the wine shops all over town.’

‘I hope it’s wrong.’

‘Why would it be wrong?’

Isabella shrugged. ‘Maybe Chairman Grassi wants people to believe that only an insane woman would kill herself in his beautiful town. Does anyone know anything about her or why she chose Bellina?’

Tommaso grimaced and raked his fingers through his beard. ‘No, not that I’ve heard. Bad luck for you that she chose your tower.’

She chose my table for her child.
My tower for her death
.

‘Yes,’ she muttered. ‘Bad luck for me.’

‘Ah, Isabella, don’t look like that. It was not your fault.’

She fixed her mind on what she was here for. The stone calmed her. She moved over to a stack of travertine that had just been delivered from up near Rome. Travertine is a calcium carbonate that results from hot spring water penetrating up through underground limestone. She loved the way that when the water evaporated, it left behind magical layers of dissolved limestone. This gave it a rough banded appearance, a beautiful honey-beige with stripes of tan weaving through it like the pelt of a ginger cat. It was so enticing that she stood there stroking it, its pinhole indentations rippling under her skin, and she would have stood there happily all day if she had the time.

‘Signora Berotti, I didn’t know you would be here.’

Isabella swung around. Before her stood a slightly built man in his late thirties with light brown hair and pale caramel eyes that missed nothing. They were inspecting her with interest. She realised that she must have been standing there longer than she thought because Tommaso was gone and so was the lazy blue sky. In its place hung a thin layer of bruised mist and she could see in the distance an army of storm clouds massing above the Lepini mountains, their dark shadows crawling down on to the plain.

‘Signor Francolini,’ she said. ‘I was sent over by Dottore Martino to check on the granite for the apartments in Via Corelli. There have been complaints.’

Davide Francolini was Dottore Martino’s right-hand man. He was the person who made things happen, working with engineers and builders, ensuring that the drawings on Isabella’s tracing paper leapt into life as buildings of solid stone and brick. She didn’t envy him his job when so many hundreds of buildings had to be constructed at such breakneck speed, often with untried workmen, but he functioned with a calm efficiency and was well respected within the office. He’d never spoken more than two words to her before.

‘Complaints?’ he asked.

‘I only know what I was told by Tommaso,’ Isabella explained. ‘You should speak to him.’

‘But I’m not. I’m speaking to you.’

He said it with a soft smile. He wasn’t looking to make trouble for her.