The Night Falling (5 page)

‘It was a … a sudden fever. An infection. Sudden and catastrophic.’ He swallowed; his cheeks were pale and drawn. ‘I do not wish to speak of it. Please don’t mention it again.’ And that night in bed he hadn’t touched her, not even with the sleeping length of his limbs, and Clare had cursed her own insensitivity, and vowed to do as he bid.

Shaking off the memory of that night of lonely self-recrimination, Clare uses Boyd’s exact words to answer Marcie.

‘It … was a sudden fever. Boyd has never been able to talk about it to me; not properly. It’s too painful for him.’

‘Poor man, I’ll bet it is. Men are so less well equipped to deal with things like that, don’t you think? They have to be strong, and they’re not allowed to cry, or seek comfort in friends, so they just bottle it all up and let it fester. My Leandro has things he won’t talk about – scars he won’t show me. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m an actress, but I just think let it
out
, you know? Let it out. Look at it in the light of day, and maybe it won’t seem so bad. But he won’t, of course. That man is a damned fortress when he wants to be.’ She runs out of breath, takes a gasp as if to go on, but doesn’t. She smiles instead. ‘Well, I suppose it’s up to us to just be there if they ever do want to talk about it.’

‘Yes. But I don’t think Boyd ever will. Not about Emma. He … he loved her very, very much, I think. Sometimes I think he’s afraid to tell me about her, because he doesn’t want me to be jealous.’

‘And are you? I would be – I am most
definitely
the jealous type. I had it easy, since Leandro’s first and second wives created such a stink when he divorced them that he can’t stand either one of them now. They both hate me, of course; and they have three sons between them who are none too keen either. Nothing much I can do about that. But the ghost of a beloved first wife – ugh! Who could compete?’

They turn and start up the stairs together, shoulder to shoulder, one slow step at a time, and Clare doesn’t answer straight away. She thinks of the time she found Boyd in his dressing room, holding a pair of ladies’ silk gloves that were not hers and running his thumbs over the fabric with a slow, hard intensity. He didn’t notice her standing there, and in that moment Clare saw an expression of such acute anguish on his face that she hardly recognised him. The gloves trembled in his hands, and when he spotted her he dropped them as if they’d burnt him and his face filled up with blood in such a rush that a vein bulged out at each temple. As if she’d caught him in bed with another woman; but in fact that came later. She said
It’s all right
; but he didn’t manage to reply.

‘I’ve made a point of never to try to compete. Love isn’t a finite resource, after all. He can love me as well as still loving her,’ she says now, in a low voice.

‘What a wise and wonderful thing to say! You’re far more of a grown-up than I am, Clare,’ says Marcie. Clare says nothing, not sure that Marcie means this as a compliment. ‘And you married him at nineteen? Goodness, you were just a girl!’

‘Yes, I suppose I was.’

‘Me, I wanted to live a little before I settled down. I wanted to, you know, try a few of them on for size before I chose. But perhaps I was a little wild back then.’

‘I grew up in quite a rural part of England, so there really weren’t that many eligible men to choose from. My parents actually met Boyd first, through some friends of theirs, and thought he’d be a good match for me.’ At this Marcie’s eyes go wide.

‘You let your
parents
choose your husband for you?’

‘Well, no, it wasn’t quite like that—’

‘No, sure, sorry – I didn’t mean to pounce. I left home at thirteen, that’s the thing. I can’t imagine what having that kind of guidance was like.’

‘It was very …’ For a moment, Clare can’t think of a word. She was a child, and then she married Boyd and became a wife; these are the only two incarnations of herself she has ever known, and at the moment of transformation she’d been happy – relieved that things were settled and certain.

She was the only child of parents who’d almost given up hope; her mother had been forty when she was born, her father well past fifty. By the time Clare was eighteen her mother was frail beyond her years, worn thin and increasingly vague, and her father had pains in his chest for which he took tablets – five or six a day, ground vigorously between his molars at regular intervals – though they did little to alleviate his symptoms. In much the same way as she can now see Pip growing, her terms away at school allowed her to see, clearly, how age and infirmity were stealing a march on her only family. More than any of her classmates, she was faced with the thought of not having them any more, of being alone in the world, and the empty spread of an unknown future frightened her. But that makes her settling on Boyd sound like an act of dry calculation, or of knee-jerk desperation, which it hadn’t been. ‘I was glad that they approved of him. And they were glad that I did, too, of course.’ Marcie says nothing for a while, and Clare realises how bloodless this sounds. ‘And I loved him, of course. I grew to love him.’

‘Well, of course you did. He’s a sweetie. So gentle! I can’t even imagine him having a temper, and he obviously adores you. You must get away with murder. Me, I have to be careful. When Leandro goes off it’s like a volcano!’

‘No, well … I’ve never seen Boyd go off, I don’t think,’ says Clare. Instead he implodes, into a distant, silent place where she can’t reach him, and then the world seems flimsy and unsafe, and she and Pip cling to each other, cast adrift, waiting to see how and when and if he will come out of it again. It’s been five months since the last time it happened, and now she’s sure she can sense the gathering pressure of the next time. She hopes she’s wrong. ‘How did you meet Leandro?’ she says, changing the subject because Marcie’s expression is quizzical and almost pitying.

‘Oh, he saw me on stage one night. He says he fell in love with me before I’d even sung a note.’ Marcie smiles again and loops her arm through Clare’s as they climb.

Alone, Clare knocks softly on Pip’s door and opens it. The door has the same sepulchral groan as the one to her room. Pip is sitting on the wide window ledge, looking out at the night. The sky is a deep indigo, freckled with stars.

‘All right there, Pip?’

‘All right, Clare. I was trying to work out which different constellations you can see this far south, but I didn’t bring a chart and I’m completely lost.’ He turns to face her. He’s in his pyjamas with a green tartan dressing gown tied tight around his middle. Both pyjamas and gown are too short for him already, and Clare smiles. She goes to stand beside him and looks out. He smells of toothpaste and the lavender sachets she packed in with their clothes.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Pip. You know I’m a complete dunce with astrology.’

‘Astronomy. Astrology is horoscopes and things.’

‘Well, that rather proves my point, doesn’t it?’ she says, and Pip grins.

‘And you’re not a complete dunce at anything. You just pretend to be to make me feel better,’ he adds perspicaciously.

‘Oh, I don’t know. A star’s a star as far as I’m concerned, as long as they sparkle and look pretty. What else ought I to know, then?’ Pip begins to tell her about how long the light has taken to reach their eyes, and how many different types of stars there are, and how some of them are planets, and how there might be people on them, looking at the pinprick glimmer of Earth from light years away. He rambles on for a while, as he does when he’s exhausted. Outside there are few lamps lit in the streets, or behind the closed shutters of other houses. There’s no more noise of people, or
passeggiata
. Gioia dell Colle is early to bed.

Pip’s room is much the same as Clare’s, but smaller, and facing west. She looks to see if he’s unpacked, and finds his trunk more or less intact, hidden away in the wardrobe, which is all she’s come to expect, really. She glances at the bedside table, already knowing what she’ll see there – the one thing he always unpacks, no matter where they go: a photograph of his mother in a silver frame. The picture is a studio shot; Emma is standing alone next to a tall jardinière full of some extravagantly trailing plant, with her thin, pale hands clasped in front of her. The picture was taken in 1905, the year before Pip was born, and she’s wearing the fashionable high-necked dress of the time; Pip claims to remember the very one, and says it was a gorgeous colour, the crimson of a Virginia creeper in autumn, but in the picture it merely looks dark and severe. Her face is serious but not sombre, a thin oval with light eyes and a mass of curly hair, piled high and spilling down over her right shoulder. Though her expression is fixed for the photographer, Clare has always fancied that she can see a trace of mirth in her lips and the arch of her brows. She picks up the photo and studies it, made curious anew by Marcie’s questions. This is the only picture of Emma she has ever seen. It might be the only one that exists. Emma is every bit as frozen in time as the house in which they’re staying. She can clearly see the ways in which Pip has taken after her, and it’s only this that makes her seem like a real person to Clare: a woman who laughed and sneezed and got angry and made love; not just a face in a photograph, a ghost who haunts her husband.

Pip looks around at her, and sees what she’s doing. He’s never acknowledged any awkwardness between Clare and the memory of his mother, and Clare is grateful for it. He has never compared her to Emma; he has never said, in anger:
You’re not my real mother
. Some things don’t need saying. He has never blamed her for his mother being dead, as other children in their grief and confusion might have done.

‘I think she would have liked the dinner, don’t you?’ he says.

‘Oh, absolutely. Particularly the fried zucchini flowers – I remember you telling me how she liked to try new things. They were so light. Delicious. Would she have liked Mr and Mrs Cardetta, do you think?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Pip thinks for a moment. ‘I think she was inclined to like most people. And they’re very welcoming, aren’t they?’

‘Very.’ They do this sometimes, particularly in times of stress – guess at Emma’s opinion of things; her likes and dislikes, how she might have behaved in a particular situation. It’s a way to keep her alive, a way for Pip to feel that he knows her, when in fact his memories are the fleeting sensory impressions of early childhood: the colour of her dress; the length of her hair; her voice and the warmth of her hands; that she loved oranges and her fingers often smelled of the peel. Sometimes this is also how Pip lets Clare know his own opinion of things – difficult things that he would stumble to speak openly about. Sometimes he declares that Clare and Emma would have got on, and been good friends, and this is another generous fiction – that the two women could ever have been in his life at the same time.

There’s a measured pause as they both look at the picture, then Clare puts it back in its place. She is always careful never to leave her fingerprints on the glass.

‘Is … is Father all right?’ Pip asks, with painful nonchalance.

‘Yes. I think so, yes,’ says Clare, with equal bluff. Pip nods, and won’t quite meet her eye. ‘He’ll be better now we’re here, anyway. Don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so.’ Pip keeps his eyes on the picture of Emma. He suddenly looks defeated; unhappy, and far from home. Clare searches for the right thing to say.

‘I know this is a bit strange, our coming out here like this. And I know it … it could be a bit of a lonely summer for you, not seeing any of your friends,’ she says. Pip shrugs again. ‘But we’ll have fun, I promise. And I bet you’ll make some new friends, too … Have a good sleep, and tomorrow we can go exploring. And Mr Cardetta might take you out again in that car you liked so much – the Alfred Romeo.’

‘It’s Al
fa
Romeo, Clare,’ says Pip, with a smile.

‘See. I told you I was a dunce.’ She hugs him for a moment, quickly kisses his temple. ‘Sleep. I’m about to.’

Boyd is still outside with Leandro. From the bedroom window, two storeys up, Clare can see pipe smoke rising in the light of the oil lamps on the table; she can hear the soft roll of their voices, but not their words. She listens for a while all the same, then closes the shutters as noiselessly as she can, not sure why she feels she must be quiet. The bed sinks as she climbs into it; the sheets smell a long time unused – clean, but stale. The room is warm and still, and as soon as she shuts her eyes she hears the whine of a mosquito near her ear. Then she hears two more. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Marcie, because there is one way in which she is jealous of Emma: Pip. Not because she wants to be his mother – he wouldn’t be who he is without Emma – but because she wants a child of her own; she wants to carry it and know the strangeness of a separate life inside her; she wants the shock of labour, and the perfect satisfaction of nursing. She wants to be a mother, as well as a stepmother and surrogate older sister. Love is not a finite resource – she could love her own child and love Pip just as much. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Pip is nearly grown, and will soon leave her by herself.

But Boyd doesn’t want another child. Boyd is afraid to have another child. Boyd can’t quite put his fear into words but it exists, and it’s bone deep. Whenever she and Boyd have made love it has been with the rubber sheath between them, and the lights out. Sometimes, Clare feels that they have never actually made love at all, since they could not see each other, and did not touch. She’d wanted to talk again about a baby during this trip, but Boyd is already tense so now she’s not sure. There’s already that undercurrent that she dreads to see in him, and she knows it has something to do with Cardetta, so she guesses that it’s also to do with New York. The mosquitoes whine in Clare’s ears, and beneath the sheets she starts to overheat. Her skin prickles. The first and only time she and Boyd were in New York together was one of the worst times of her life; her memories of it are like a strange and sickening dream. She’s wide awake even though she’s exhausted, and she knows it’s because she’s waiting. She’s waiting to find out what it means, and what will come of it.