The Night Falling (16 page)

On the fifth day Ettore waits until dusk, until he sees lamplight from inside the overseer’s
trullo
, then he steels himself, limps over to the door and knocks before he can think twice. When Ludo Manzo opens it Ettore can’t prevent the disgust that jars through him. The overseer’s face is deeply scored by years of work outdoors, his top lip is seamed, his teeth are longer and browner than before, but his eyes are as hard and bright as they ever were. He studies Ettore for a second and then laughs out loud.

‘I see from your face that you’ve worked for me before,’ he says. His voice is deep and hoarse, like there’s grit in his throat. For a hideous moment Ettore is too cowed, too tied up with hate and fear to speak. He nods. ‘The boss told me you’d come and ask for work. I guess that’s why you’re here – not from some yearning for my company?’

‘Yes. No,’ says Ettore.

‘Well, I don’t remember you, Ettore Tarano, but I asked in town so I know you’re trouble. I guess since you’re the boss’s nephew, you’re my trouble now.’

‘I only want to work for a wage. Until my leg is whole and I can go back into the fields.’

‘Boy, you’re a damned fool. If I had a rich uncle, I’d make myself his right-hand man and get fat and drunk, and laid.’

‘I want to work for a wage.’

‘I heard you. And I said you’re a damned fool.’ Ludo stares hard at him, with his mouth twisted to one side as he thinks. Ettore fights the urge to fidget, to turn away, or to hit him. To do anything other than stand there in front of him, waiting, at his mercy again. If he did what Ludo suggested, if he used his uncle, he wouldn’t have to do this. He wouldn’t have to suffer the likes of this man. ‘All right. You can’t walk, you can’t carry. You can’t cut wheat. There’s pretty much fuck all you can do, but you can sit on your arse and you can watch, am I right? Take over from Carlo in the
trullo
by the gates at midnight. Keep watch. The rifle stays there – you take it from him, you hand it to the man who relieves you in the morning. Is that understood?’

‘Yes.’ The effort of staying calm, of staying still, is exhausting. When Ludo nods and shuts the door the breath rushes out of Ettore, and he droops. A guard, with a rifle. Inside pissing out, as his uncle once said to him. And if raiders come from Gioia what then? Will he shoot at them – at people he might know, people he has worked with, people he lives alongside? Ettore limps away.

Until midnight he waits in the vegetable garden, where it’s cool and there’s a good smell of green things. Out of habit he pulls a few weeds and makes a heap of them; he picks a few little tomatoes and eats them. Bats twist and turn silently along the tunnel made by the fruit trees. When it gets too dark Ettore sits down on the broken love seat and looks up at the sky, and thinks about Livia. She managed to walk some of the way home, after she was attacked. She made it to the edge of town, where she was found, and brought the rest of the way. Bruises the size and shape of a man’s fingers on her neck and breasts and thighs; little cuts from the point of a sharp knife, circling her throat like a necklace; bite marks all over her. She was mute with shock; could tell them nothing. It took her two days to die of her wounds, and it was an infection, not the severity of them, that took her. The festering of wounds inside her that her mother couldn’t see or clean. She ran a violent fever; her skin was hot, dry and burnished red. She didn’t smell right, and when her eyes were open they focused on nothing.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
, she said, over and over again.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
. Ettore squeezed her hand tight in his, and kissed her knuckles, and told her that he loved her and that she was his sweetheart, which made her frown slightly, as if dissatisfied. Towards the end she gave no sign of even hearing him, and only repeated her request over and over again.
Tell me I’m your sweetheart
. So he told her, over and over again, that she was his sweetheart, even though that was not a term they had ever used before, and it puzzled him; he told her that he loved her, that he belonged to her, and he pressed his hands to her burning skin as if he might wick the heat away from it. And then she died.

The sound of quiet footsteps jars him back to himself, and he notices that his eyes are wet and itching. He scrubs his face with one hand and then goes still, and hopes to go unnoticed by whatever corporal or servant is passing. But the footsteps turn into the garden, and silhouetted against the light from the
masseria
he sees Chiara Kingsley. She seems to stare right at him but doesn’t see him there, deep in shadow beneath the trees. She stops walking, drops her chin to her chest and wraps her arms around her middle, curling in on herself as if she’s in pain. He expects to hear her sob, but she makes no sound at all. He can’t even hear her breathing. She seems like a person who’s trying not to be there; or is trying not to
be
at all. Pale skin and pale hair, with her lightness and her quietness, and her feet bare. To Ettore she looks like thistledown, like something as ephemeral and impermanent as that. Something that the wind will blow right through, even as it carries her along with it. Something that might vanish without trace. If Paola has iron inside her then this English woman has air, or some other intangible stuff. She’s not quite real. She’s not like anyone he has seen before.

She stays in that odd huddled posture for some time then drops her arms to her sides and looks up at the sky. She seems in no hurry to leave, and Ettore can’t stay still any longer. He reaches for his crutch and stands slowly, and hears her quick, indrawn breath.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Ettore,’ he says. He makes his way over to stand in front of her, so they are both half-lit and half-shadowed. He opens his mouth to say something else, but nothing comes. Chiara watches him, and her expectation makes him want to walk away.

‘You did not dine today,’ she says eventually, in Italian.

‘I did. Just not at my uncle’s table.’

‘You prefer to be alone?’ she says, and he doesn’t answer because though this is not quite right, it’s an easy explanation. ‘Are you well?’ He shrugs, and then nods. He gestures towards the crutch. ‘You don’t like to be here,’ she adds, and it’s not a question. Ettore shakes his head, on his guard. His aunt is easy to offend, his uncle even more so.

‘I do not like to be kept.’

‘Neither do I,’ she says softly. He frowns, and doesn’t understand her because what is she, what is the wife of a wealthy man, if not kept? ‘You are an uncle yourself,’ she says. ‘I met your sister when she came here with you. I saw that she had a baby.’

‘His name is Iacopo.’

‘Do you have children?’ she asks. He shakes his head. ‘Neither have I.’

‘Filippo?’

‘He is my …’ She can’t find the word in Italian. ‘My husband’s son. The son of his first wife.’ She starts to smile but it doesn’t quite take shape. In the dark her eyes are huge and dazed, like she can’t quite see. ‘I hate this place,’ she says then. ‘Is that the right word?’ Then she says something in English that he can’t quite catch, something bitter and angry.

‘You are free,’ says Ettore, puzzled. ‘You can go.’

‘No. I’m not. I can’t.’ She takes a long breath in. ‘Mr Cardetta says the peasants do not speak Italian, only the language of this place. How is it you can understand me?’

‘Italian was spoken at school. I have an ear for languages.’

‘You went to school?’ She sounds surprised, and then looks apologetic.

‘A few years, only.’

‘And you were able to learn some English from Marcie, over the winter.’

‘I must go. I am a guard now.’ He can’t keep his lip from curling as he says this, disgusted at himself. ‘You should not be outside the walls after dark. It isn’t safe.’ Her eyes go huge again, her arms wrap back around her, shielding her.

‘I wanted to run … to fly away,’ she says.

‘Escape.’ Ettore gives her the right word, and she nods. That naked look is back – that clarity, that lack of guard. It bothers him, somehow; it snags at him.
Thistledown
, he thinks. ‘Go back inside. You should not be out here.’ He leaves her there, not waiting to see if she does as he says.

Carlo, the fresh-faced guard he saw on the roof before, grins when Ettore comes to relieve him at the
trullo
by the iron gates. He stands up with a yawn, hands the rifle over and stretches his arms above his head.

‘Vallarta had a raid again, three nights ago,’ he says, as he passes Ettore on the threshold. ‘Three steers taken, and one of the barns torched. Don’t fall asleep. The bell is there.’ He indicates a large brass handbell in a niche in the wall. ‘Make a racket if you see or hear anything, and we’ll all come running.’ He walks off towards his bed with a jaunty step. Ettore runs his hands along the rifle; the smooth patina on the wood of the butt; the cold, dead, metal barrel. He has wanted to get his hands on a gun for a long time; holding it gives him a sudden wild pang, a feeling of power and reckless violence. In the trenches he felt better with his rifle in his hands; safer and stronger, even though he knew it meant almost nothing, and would likely make no difference. It was a feeling that came from the heart, not the head. He stares out into the darkness beyond the gates, then turns to look at the farm, glowing here and there with lamplight. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants to do.

There’s no light in the
trullo
, though a lantern sits primed and ready with a book of matches beside it. To light the guard would make him a target, and spoil his night vision; the darkness is where a nightwatchman belongs. Ettore sits down on the stone ledge by the doorway and rests the rifle across his thighs. It presses cold through the fabric of his trousers, though everything else is warm – the stone, the ground, the air. His heart feels cold along with it because he has crossed the divide. To anyone looking on, he has turned his coat. He doesn’t know what he will do if raiders come, and he prays that they won’t. There are flickers of lightning far off along the eastern horizon. He sits, and he listens to the quiet rustle of geckos hunting, and thoughts of Chiara Kingsley come to him unbidden – the pale weightlessness of her.

He catches himself wondering what her white skin would feel like under his hands, and whether if he held her she would just dissolve, and drift away. She might taste of nothing; might be as flavourless as water. She might be as insubstantial as a breath of air, but then he thinks of the first touch of cooler air that comes in the autumn, drifting down from the north, and how it always wakes him, tingling over his skin like soft sparks of electricity. She’s transparent, like water, and he thinks of the first swallow of water after long hours of work, when there’s dust in his throat and his eyes and his nose. He would devour her too, just like her stooping husband, if he knew she would make him feel that way. Air and water; thistledown.
I want to fly away
, she said, wrapping her arms around herself. And she ought to. Puglia is a land of earth and fire, he thinks. A thing of air and water will not long survive.

Chapter Nine

Clare

The first and only time Clare went to New York was late in the spring of 1914, as the creeping threat of war spread across Europe like an illness. In America the rich were still building, still dancing, still inventing cocktails and laughing the way Marcie laughs now, with excitement and abandon. Clare had been married to Boyd for three years, and she was happy; serene with her own brand of quiet joy. Then Boyd came home from work one day frowning and unsettled; there was a potential new project in New York and the senior partner wanted him to submit designs for it. Clare immediately encouraged him to go, and to take her too, before she remembered that Emma was from New York – that he’d met her there, married her there, lost her there. When Boyd’s pained expression reminded her, she stumbled into shocked silence. But after pausing for thought, she hid her embarrassment by pushing on, albeit nervously. She told him it might be a good thing for him to make peace with the city; to lay its ghosts to rest; to see old friends of his and Emma’s. At this his head snapped up.

‘But I don’t want to see any of them! It would … it would be too difficult. Too awful.’

‘Well … well then, darling, it’s a big enough city. Nobody need know you’re there at all, if you don’t want,’ she said.

‘That’s true,’ said Boyd. He sounded careful, hopeful, as if he hadn’t considered this, so Clare pushed on once more.

‘We don’t have to go any of the places that you … went before. I’ve never travelled, Boyd; not properly. We can make it our second honeymoon. It would be such an adventure, and, well, it can only be good for you, surely? I mean, workwise.’ The month before, Boyd had been passed over for a senior partnership for a second time. He ran his hands through his hair, stood up and paced the sitting room carpet for a while. ‘Please let’s go, Boyd. I think it would be wonderful.’

‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘All right, we’ll go.’

It would be a better honeymoon this time around, Clare decided, since the first had been rife with the awkwardness of two shy people making love for the first time. They’d gone to the Isle of Wight for a week, but her memories were of all the painful little misunderstandings, odd misfires and subtle disappointments. Boyd made the journey to New York first, and had been there some weeks before Clare travelled out to join him, leaving Pip at home with a nanny. He’d started work on his design for the new bank building – not quite a grand hotel, but still something monumental. That was the word the bank used – monumental. Something that people would have to stop to look at, and tip back their heads to take in. He had a design but it wasn’t quite there – she heard those words a lot in the six weeks she stayed in the small rented apartment near Central Park.
It’s not quite there
. They never mentioned Emma; Clare watched her husband carefully for signs of grief or painful memory, and was relieved to see none.

She’d been a little anxious that the trip might make him worse, not better, but she began to relax. Boyd had spent the first year of their marriage jumping at shadows, and now and then they’d overwhelmed him. Like the time she’d found him holding Emma’s silk gloves, cast away in thought. He was the first to check the post every morning; he stiffened whenever the doorbell rang. Clare sometimes found him staring out of a window, or into the fire, hands in his pockets, eyes glassy. Once she saw him staring at Pip as he played with his trains on the nursery carpet, and she went in to them with a smile but paused, because Boyd was looking at his son as if he hadn’t the slightest idea who he was. But things had improved since then; the shadows had receded, and he was less distant. Clare spoke about Emma with Pip, but never with Boyd. She wanted her husband to concentrate on the future, not the past, and it seemed to her, in those first few weeks they were together in New York, that he was doing exactly that.

Boyd seemed focused, but happy. He spent long hours studying the Flatiron, and the brand new Woolworth Building, and the St Regis Hotel. He knew the bank had three firms working on preliminary drawings, and that he was the only European. He knew they expected to see something stately and Victorian in style from him, or something
beaux-arts
; something with all the dyed-in-the-wool grandeur of the Empire. Boyd wanted to give them something they hadn’t even considered – something they’d never seen before, but that wouldn’t shock them overly. A clock tower to break the roofline, with decorations either side after the ancient Egyptian style, and thin obelisks at each corner, like delicate, geometric rock pinnacles. He was secretive, and wouldn’t show Clare the drawings he spent so many hours hunched over. Late in the day he’d let her coax him away from them to walk beneath the brand new leaves in Central Park, where the constant city roar was a murmur, and the air smelled of living things as well as food and sweat and burning. The owner of the bank was hosting a party to mark the submission and unveiling of the three designs. The mayor, John Purroy Mitchel, would be attending, and with that news Clare realised, finally, the significance of what her husband was working on. And the day after that announcement came something happened, and Boyd was never the same again.

Clare returned to the apartment from lunch with the wives of two of Boyd’s colleagues, and found him at the window in a posture of such unnatural stiffness that she thought at once he’d had terrible news of some kind. Her stomach dropped; she thought immediately of Pip.

‘Boyd, darling, what is it? What’s happened?’ she said, but he didn’t move. She went to stand beside him and saw the glass in his hand, and the brandy bottle on the ottoman, and noticed the stink of it all around. ‘Boyd?’ she whispered, but she might as well have been mute, invisible. He looked dead. His face was grey and had a shine to it; unpleasant-looking, like something was trying to ooze out from inside him. If he was breathing it didn’t move his chest and it made no sound. His eyes looked dull and empty. If she’d found him lying down in that state she would have screamed. She tried to take his hand but it was clenched tightly around something, and then she noticed a few white spots against the green carpet. She frowned at them until she realised what they were. Frantically, she prised open Boyd’s hand and found his little jar of barbiturate pills, which he took to soothe his nerves and help him sleep. The jar was empty.

At her touch Boyd turned his head slowly towards her and, just as slowly, his face collapsed; his mouth melting open, misshapen, trembling. Clare caught her breath. ‘Boyd,
tell me
! Tell me! Is it Pip? Has something happened to Pip?’

‘They were here. They came
here
,’ he said. ‘They knew … knew where I was.’ The words were so slurred and distorted she could hardly make them out.

‘Who knew?
Who
came here? Boyd, I don’t understand.’ Boyd swayed, took a staggering step, fell to his knees. Clare went down with him and put her arms around him, tried to soothe him. He was heavy, and threatened to topple all the way; she struggled to hold him, and then, with a spasm that felt strange against her body, he vomited. She felt the heat of it spatter her calves, and the stink of the brandy got stronger, and as she tugged and cajoled him towards the bathroom she saw more white pills in what he’d brought up. Many more. He was sick again, and a third time before she managed to get him any distance at all. Everything about him was unfamiliar; his long body was a dead weight, his loose face and rolling eyes had no trace of his personality, or the melancholy dignity of the man she’d married. She left him lying on his side while she called the doctor, so panicked that at first she couldn’t remember how to use the telephone, even to reach the concierge.

The doctor was with him for a long time. He gave Boyd an emetic that brought up everything else inside him, until his convulsions resulted in nothing but strands of spittle and horrible choking sounds. Clare went back and forth to the bathroom, emptying the doctor’s bowl, trying to clean the worst of the sick from the carpet. The smell of it was inescapable. Outside the window, the sun moved below the rooftops and the sky turned dove grey. Clare watched pigeons bolt across it and noticed how the twilight took the colour out of everything. She felt that these were things that were happening to another person, someone quite other than her. She was detached from them; she didn’t understand, and didn’t want to think too much about it. She only knew her own fear for what it was when the doctor emerged, and sent her heart jolting madly.

‘How many pills did he take?’ the doctor asked her, brusquely.

‘I … I don’t know. There were around fifty in the bottle, I believe, and … and a handful were on the carpet. And then, when he was sick …’ She swallowed nervously.

‘It’s very lucky he began to purge when he did. Very lucky indeed. Mrs Kingsley, has your husband attempted to harm himself in this way before?’

‘To harm himself? Oh, I don’t think … I mean, I’m sure he didn’t intend …’ Clare fell silent. The doctor watched her steadily. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t that. He takes the pills for his nerves. Sometimes he … he can’t sleep.’ Her voice was jittery.

‘It does no good to ignore these things, Mrs Kingsley. I believe he’s out of any danger. Let him rest, give him plenty of fluids, and I’ll be back in a few hours to check up on him.’

It was a long time after the doctor left that Clare found the courage to go in to her husband. She dreaded to find that grey-faced, boneless stranger; and if he was Boyd again, she dreaded that too. She had no idea what to say to him, no idea what to do. She crept in as quietly as she could; the glass of water she carried shook so badly it threatened to spill. She hoped to find him sleeping but he was awake, sitting up against several pillows with no hint of colour in his face.

‘How are you now?’ she said, as though he’d had a slight cold. Boyd’s eyes glimmered with tears at the sight of her; he squeezed them tight shut, like he couldn’t bear it. Clare put the water down beside him and took his hand, gathering her nerve. ‘Will you tell me what this is about, darling? Will you please tell me?’ she said, as gently as she could. Boyd looked up at her, and took a breath. But after a moment of thought he shook his head.

‘I can’t, Clare. You of all people … I can’t. Forgive me. Forgive me.’ His throat sounded raw.
You of all people
. She dwelt on the meaning of that for a moment.

‘You said before that “they” had come here. Who did you mean, darling? Was it … was it some old acquaintances of yours? Friends of Emma’s?’ This was all she could think of that might have upset him so – something to revive his grief, and bring it the surface. She’d often felt, since they wed, that he kept too quiet about it. That he kept it from her, so as to never crowd his second wife with the shadow of his first. Perhaps such a storing up of feeling was unhealthy – perhaps this sudden eruption was its only possible outcome. She should have known that sooner or later it would flare up, like a sickness, and knock him down. And she had persuaded him to come to the one place on Earth where that was most likely to happen. Guilt seized her. ‘Forgive me,’ she said, and kissed his hand. ‘I should have let you speak of her more. I should have encouraged it, in fact. You must, if you think it would help; you needn’t fear that I’ll resent her. I won’t, I promise.’ Boyd said nothing.

Carefully, uncertainly, life carried on. Clare drew the curtains against the evening, switched on lamps and brewed tea. She tried to ignore the feeling that the ground was fragile beneath her feet. Over the following few days she tried to catch her husband’s eye, tried a small smile now and then, but he barely seemed to see her and she felt a little chill in her heart, knowing then that he could never love her as much as he’d loved Emma. But she resolved to love him enough, him and his son, for that not to matter. And he did love her, she was sure of that; even if it was only with the love he had left over after loving Emma. It would be enough. It was three days later, at bedtime, when Boyd finally volunteered to speak, and in the darkness his voice sounded different, and strange.

‘I … I would die without you, Clare. You’re an angel. I would die without you.’ Clare smiled automatically, though he couldn’t see it. He’d never been as frank before, never expressed such devotion. She smiled and waited to feel happy, and couldn’t work out why happiness didn’t come. Perhaps because he sounded so sure, so adamant, and she didn’t want it to be true – not literally, because anything might happen to her, just like it had to Emma. Sudden sickness, sudden death. She was awake for a long time, too troubled to sleep. She thought and thought, and though her guilt made her replay the events, over and over – what if she hadn’t persuaded him to come to New York, what if she hadn’t gone out to lunch that day, what if she had coaxed him to express his grief before then – she nevertheless suspected that this crisis had been waiting inside Boyd all along. She suspected that it was waiting there still.

For the rest of their time in New York Boyd was jumpy and distant, worse even than when Clare first knew him. She found herself watching him, and being careful not to let him notice that she was. She watched, and she saw the tiny blisters of sweat along his hairline, and on his upper lip. She saw the way his fingers fumbled at things, like they were numb. She saw his eyes slide away when people spoke to him, and the way their words drifted past him, unregistered. She saw him sit for hours in front of his drawings and not change a single line. As the day of the deadline and the night of the reception approached, she caught him just standing again, staring. She could think of no way to break the spell, no way to distract him. She felt as though she were on a cliff top, leaning out; her heart careered along whenever she spoke to him. She was no longer sure of anything. She was no longer sure of him.

‘We could just go home. Couldn’t we?’ she said, softly, over breakfast. ‘If the drawings are done, couldn’t we just go? We needn’t stay a moment longer. We needn’t go to the party …’ As she spoke she was assaulted by a homesickness so powerful it actually ached. She wanted their terraced house in Hampstead with its little square of garden, and Pip home from school, smelling of socks and pencil shavings, asking to be held. She wanted things she understood. Whatever their trip to New York had been, it had been no honeymoon.