Learning by Heart (33 page)

Finally Richard looked at Pietro. ‘Would you allow us to talk alone?’ he asked.

Pietro was watching Cora’s face. Eventually he nodded. He walked out of the house, and Cora saw him go down the garden and sit on the low wall at the edge of the terrace.

She went to the chairs by the kitchen table; pulled one out and sat down. Richard seated himself opposite her. She studied his face. She couldn’t believe that he wasn’t angry. She had expected a scene. He would be perfectly justified in losing his temper, to have come here like an avenging angel. But there was no trace of it, only concern.

‘Would you like anything to drink?’ she asked him. ‘It’s very hot.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

His politeness filled her with grief.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, looking down at her hands on the table top.

‘I will never say anything about this,’ he told her. ‘I will never refer to it.’

‘I can’t leave him now. You must see that.’

‘I can see that he’s a boy,’ Richard said, ‘with a life ahead of him, and a family name to protect. You know that what you have done will disgrace him?’

‘He doesn’t care about that.’

‘He will,’ Richard said. His voice was perfectly calm. ‘Perhaps not at this moment, but at some point in the near future he will care very much that he has disgraced himself and his family. The concept is very strong here, Cora. It’s shameful enough in England, but this is not England.’

‘It’s not shameful,’ she said, equally quietly. ‘I’m not ashamed of what I’ve done.’

There was silence. She was appalled to see that tears had formed in his eyes. She glanced away, unable to bear the expression on his face.

‘You’re in love with him,’ he said.

‘Do you think that I would do this if I weren’t?’

‘No.’

‘You must go,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘We’ll go to another country,’ she said. ‘We’ll go somewhere else.’

‘And cut him off from his family for ever?’

She said nothing. Outside, she caught movement: Pietro was pacing up and down. ‘We’ll work something out,’ she said.

‘He has studies to finish.’

‘He’s going to leave the university.’

‘And do what?’

‘Get a job.’

‘But Pietro is gifted, very talented. Or so Alex tells me.’

‘He’s not interested in the course he’s doing.’

‘Then he should do some other academic study,’ Richard said. ‘It would be a waste to do otherwise. Have you any idea what kind of pressure this will put on you both?’

She had no answer for him. They remained where they were, confronting each other across the table while the silence stretched out.

‘I can’t understand why you’ve gone to all this trouble,’ she said.

He frowned immediately. ‘What trouble?’

‘Following me.’

‘But of course I had to follow you,’ he said. He looked utterly perplexed. ‘How could you think that I would just abandon you?’

‘Because I’m with another man,’ she said. ‘And because you’ve been so remote from me.’

‘Remote?’ he echoed.

‘Since we came here.’

‘Oh, Cora,’ he said. And, all at once, he put his head into his hands.

‘You’ve excluded me,’ she said.

‘And that’s the reason?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not only that.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘You’re right,’ she told him. ‘You’ve made no effort to allow me to understand. I’ve felt at arm’s length from you for a long time.’

‘Cora,’ he said softly, ‘this past week …’

‘I know what these people feel about you,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know why. Pietro had to tell me. You didn’t confide in me before we got here at all. You didn’t explain.’

‘Pietro told you?’

‘He told me about you rescuing his father.’

To her amazement, Richard tipped back his head and gasped.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know how to bear this any longer,’ he said, almost to himself. She heard real despair in his voice. ‘All this week … the celebrations, the kindnesses, these people …’

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you appreciate it?’

‘I can’t endure it,’ he said.

‘But … why did you come here?’

‘Because Alex is ill, and I thought I must face what I had done.’

She tried to take in this last information. He got up from his seat, leaned on the table with both hands. ‘I’ve been dishonest with you,’ he said.

‘Dishonest?’ The idea was absurd.

‘I’ve allowed you to believe a lie about me.’

‘What lie?’

‘That I did anything honourable in the war.’

‘But you fought in Africa … you were decorated for bravery …’

‘It was fraudulent,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? Fraudulent.’

She stood up opposite him. His face had turned a greyish colour.

‘I didn’t pick up Pietro’s father to save him,’ he said. ‘I picked him up to quieten him. To stop him worsening the situation.’

‘But they had just shot his father …’

‘We had passed up and down that road twice that morning,’ Richard said. ‘They were just two boys in that dug-out. They weren’t going to shoot anyone. They were just reporting movements. They panicked and began to shoot.’

‘But you went into their position,’ Cora said. ‘You stopped them.’

‘Yes,’ he acknowledged. ‘I killed them. I shot a boy not very much older than Pietro who couldn’t even reload his rifle properly.’

‘You couldn’t help it,’ Cora said. ‘What choice did you have?’

‘I shot a frightened boy,’ Richard repeated.

‘But the knife …’

Richard walked to the window, put his hands on the sill. His body was angular and rigid.

‘He had a little bit of olive wood,’ he replied quietly. ‘He had been carving it. Just a little figure, a dog. It was lying on the edge of the slit trench with the knife. I don’t think he had any idea of what was happening. I think he’d been surprised by the other boy’s shot. I think he was trying to stop him. He was trying to surrender. He put up his hands …’

She walked over, and stood beside him.

His voice had dropped very low, so low that it was a struggle to catch what he was saying. ‘They were just two confused children,’ he whispered. ‘No more than eighteen. Maybe not even that. And I didn’t try to take them prisoner. I stumbled on them. They were right at my feet as I ran up from the road. I was injured. I got into the trench. The second boy didn’t even have a gun close to him. When he saw that I had drawn mine, he dropped his hands and reached for the knife. As we fell, we both tried to get hold of it. He cut my neck by mistake, I think. I got free from him, and tried to get out of the trench, then saw that he was lying on his knife.’

There was silence. She saw that his hands were shaking. Instinctively, she placed hers on top of his.

‘So, you see,’ he said, ‘I’m not such a great hero. I was only saving my own skin.’

‘That’s not true,’ she replied. ‘You saved two lives.’

‘It wasn’t my intention to save anyone’s life,’ he said. ‘It was my intention to save my own. And even though I was older than those boys, I behaved in the same way. I panicked.’

‘You did not,’ she objected.

‘I know what I did.’

‘This is the nightmare,’ she said. ‘This is what you see when you come up from the beach. It wasn’t the beach at all. It wasn’t the waves. It was inland a little way.’

‘I see the water,’ he said, ‘and then the boy. And then it’s always the same … I hide.’ He bowed his head.

She turned him towards her. ‘And this is what you’ve been afraid of all these years?’ she said, wonderingly. ‘This is what you’ve dreaded my knowing?’

‘Can’t you see? I could never tell anyone. I got home and no one would let it rest. I went travelling, and then Alex started to write to me. He told me what this family thought of me. It’s pursued me, and it’s all a fabrication. I’m not the man they or you think I am.’ And he let out a subdued sound of exhaustion.

She held his hand tightly. ‘You’re everything that I
know
you are,’ she replied softly. ‘And so much more. And nothing less.’

She came home with him. She felt she ought not to leave him – at least, not yet. She felt that she should come back, and end their marriage quietly, in a sensible way. That was what he had asked: that she come home and consider for six months. She did not want it to end in rumour and scandal, to have him face the ignominy. And she had to return to tell her father.

Pietro fought her decision every inch of the way for the rest of the week. They drove back to Taormina together. She met him every morning in the Villa Communale gardens. She went down to him before breakfast, at first light, between the sub-tropical trees. Between them, the light was bright turquoise, and it was hard to tell if it was the colour of the sea or the sky. She would walk forward, between the hibiscus, the tradescantia and the bird-of-paradise flowers, and see him waiting for her.

He would take her hand, and she would see the same fear and longing in his face as she felt. She would put her arms round him as they stood together, watching the sun progress across the hills, the town, the sea.

Eventually, he accepted that she would go home. But only for six months. He made her promise. Six months, in which he would try to arrange his own life.

But something happened on her return to England.

She felt the wrongness of it. She received Pietro’s letters, read them over and over again, heard the boy in them. She thought about the disgrace he might suffer. She thought about the future, when she was forty and he was still just in his twenties. She thought about the difficulty and gradually, inch by inch, hour by hour, the need for him faded.

She still thought of the sea, and of walking into it, just as Jenny had told her she should, the freedom, the pleasure, the sense of infinite possibilities. Jenny, who had vanished and never returned, whose whole life now seemed to have vanished with her.

Yet Cora still dreamed of him. She dreamed of the joy of him.

For a long time she could hardly look Richard in the face. His tolerance and patience were almost too much to bear. She felt she would be betraying him by returning to Sicily, compounding an injury. Richard had done nothing to her. He had always protected her. And this was how she had repaid him. Yet she longed to go: she longed for it with a physical pain.

In a rush of guilt one day, she returned Pietro’s letters, dropping them into the postbox on the lane, standing next to it, tears running down her face. Six weeks later, she did it again. The first time, the dogs stood at her side, bedraggled after a summer downpour, wagging their tails in sympathy. She had a moment then, in the middle of the endless wet, grey day, of utter bleakness.

But most of all, in the agony of that summer, as she was caught between the two men she loved, a longer-lasting feeling surfaced. She realized that if she left Richard she would also leave her father, and the destruction that would cause could never be repaired.

Pietro was young. He would rebuild his life. In fact, he had a life ahead of him. Richard had not. Richard had only her.

And then September came.

She told him she was pregnant; she told him miserably, standing in front of him like a child expecting to be punished, waiting for him to pronounce the death sentence on their marriage.

‘Have you written to Pietro?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said.

‘You’ve replied to his letters?’

‘No.’

‘Is there a reason?’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said truthfully, unable to hide the misery in her voice.

They were standing in the garden. It was evening; the unmistakable scent of autumn hung in the air. The light was altering: it no longer shone directly on the paths but lay slanted in oblique rectangles between the trees.

‘You must tell me now,’ he said. ‘You must make a decision.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, and began to cry, hating herself for this final weakness.

‘You must.’

She wiped her face clumsily.

‘You must choose,’ he emphasized. ‘If you tell him about this child, you must go back to him.’

‘What?’ she asked, not yet understanding his ultimatum.

‘If you choose to tell him, you must go back to Sicily. But if you choose to stay with me, you must never tell him.’

She gazed at him.

‘You can go back,’ he said, drawing out each word to make sure that she grasped his meaning. ‘Marry him, or live with him, make a life there.’ He was watching her expression. ‘Or stay here, and raise the child as our own. But not two lives. Not a life stretched between two countries. Not a child with two fathers. I will never say a word to you, Cora. I will keep my promise. But you must keep yours. You must never speak to him again, or write to him. You must forget him.’

‘I can’t do that,’ she said.

Around them the first shadows lengthened. She closed her eyes and saw the sea at her feet, blue-green near the shore, darker further out. She would never lose the joy of him, she realized. You couldn’t lose a thing like that: you couldn’t barter it away.

Richard took her hand. He began to walk along the path, guiding her to walk alongside him. When she followed, he pulled her closer to him, so that they continued arm in arm. All the time, the tears rolled down her face.

‘I think I would like to buy somewhere else,’ he said. He fixed his gaze on the top of the slope, where the driveway divided the thick hedges. The beech leaves in them had the first hint of orange, and of the white-red fragments that would survive the winter.

‘I think I would like to buy a bigger place, and have an orchard.’

He stopped suddenly, and looked down, fleetingly, at her body. He hadn’t touched her, slept with her, come near her since the spring. Now he took her in his arms and kissed her; not with the fire of Pietro’s kisses, but his own gentle gesture.

‘I’ve seen a farmhouse,’ he said quietly, ‘with two long sloping hills, and a little wood. An orchard would do well there. So would we.’

He put his hand on her face and tilted it towards him so that she looked into his eyes. ‘Stay with me,’ he said.

Cora looked back now at her daughter. Zeph was regarding her closely and, just as Cora was thinking how like Richard Zeph had become, even to the tone of her voice occasionally and little physical resemblances – the way she was tilting her head now, in concentration – Zeph asked a question: ‘Am I like him?’ she said. ‘Am I like Pietro?’