A Darkness Descending

by Christobel Kent

  It had been a while ago that Clelia had seen Flavia in the – the other clinic. Before the baby.

  What other kinds of addiction were there? As many kinds as there were human beings, as many as there were fetishes. Gambling, exercise, online chat, clothes. Love; money; pornography. To each his own: was there anyone, Giuli wondered, with no weakness, no chink, no wound whereby the craving might enter the bloodstream? And what had been Flavia’s?

  Behind her on the bedside table Giuli’s mobile hummed, set to silent, in receipt of a text message. Swiftly and silently she turned over and reached for it. Sandro.

  Despite herself, Giuli smiled. Sandro would never be a master of the text. He went on too long, rambling: he wouldn’t use abbreviations, but he was even in this cramped form fully himself. Bad-tempered, despairing, kind, persistent. Worrying at this problem she’d got him into like a dog with a bone, seeking out the marrow, working into the crevices. Lying awake, like her.

  He’d forwarded her a list of names, friends, or at least ex-colleagues, from the Scuola Agnesi where Flavia had worked: she’d stopped work at Easter, and the baby had been born in July.

  She’d had friends … that was interesting. Of course, most people did: Giuli was the exception, too wary, too much of an outsider, and although she supposed that Luisa and Sandro counted, she thought of them more as family. Of course Flavia Matteo had had friends. Still, Giuli frowned at the word in the text, unable quite to picture the nervous woman she’d known among a group. Go to the school tomorrow, maybe, said Sandro. The text stopped short: he’d overrun his limit, or had sent it by mistake. As she held the little phone between her hands, intent, another text came in.

  He was, he said almost as an afterthought, still at the seaside with Niccolò Rosselli, staying overnight: suicide confirmed, identity confirmed. Giuli’s eyes widened at the thought. Then – Rosselli wants me to look into her death. She could hear the despondency in it as if Sandro had spoken the words aloud. Why me? it seemed to say. Giuli clicked the mobile phone shut and lay on her back with it clasped to her chest between her folded hands like a talisman.

  Because you’re clever, she thought as she fell asleep, at last. Because you’re the best. Because you’ve got a heart.

  *

  As her head shifted restlessly on the pillow, the memory of the look Chiara had given her across the emptying market weighed on Luisa’s chest like a stone. Should she have called Gloria and told her she’d seen her daughter? Gloria’s first question, of course, would be, How did she look? Did she look all right? And the honest answers respectively would have been, Beautiful, and, No. She didn’t look all right to me. Questions needed to be asked: tomorrow, in that market, Louisa would ask them. Someone must know that man Chiara was with.

  Luisa reached with both arms across the empty space to where Sandro should be and left them extended there. When he got back, they’d – they’d do what they always did when he got back, and everything would be fine. His broad fingers wouldn’t falter as they passed over the place where the breast had been, they’d be as warm and certain as they always were, his skin would smell the same. Sandro would come back to her, even if their friends’ daughter had disappeared, even if another man’s wife was dead. He was the one who’d come back.

  *

  A kilometre from Giuli, four kilometres from Luisa and six from the apartment in which she’d grown up, Chiara lay wide-eyed in the dark in the double bed, thought about the man who had lain beside her, and then thought, there are some things you can’t tell your parents.

  Tonight, he’d told her, he would have to go, he couldn’t stay. Where did he go? She knew her mother would ask the question, her friends – were they still her friends? – would ask it, but Chiara didn’t ask. She knew it was part of a game he was playing, a test he was setting her: a woman, he seemed to say as he got up from the bed, a real woman doesn’t have to ask. Men go about in the world and they don’t have to account for themselves. And she knew, he said, she knew he’d always be back. Because he said so.

  He’d shown her photographs, of things men and women did. He said, ‘You need to be ready, of course. We’ll wait.’ She had had to control a reflex of disgust. No, she’d thought, never, that’s not love – but after a half-hour of his long fingers on her calf, stroking, she’d just thought, perhaps it could be love. Yes, it is. And then he’d said, But you’re not ready yet. And he had got up, and gone, and left her with the hairs still on end, where he’d touched her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE NEEDLE-SHARP LIGHT SHONE early through the slats of the unfamiliar room’s shutters, but Sandro had no need to remind himself where he was. He felt as if he hadn’t slept more than an hour the whole night.

  Carlo Bastone had called at two a.m., when Niccolò Rosselli, under the influence of the sleeping tablets Sandro had given him, had been snoring the deep, harsh snore of the heavily medicated, an untidy sprawl on his bed. On the other bed, Sandro had been dozing, no more than that. He’d texted Giuli, he’d called Luisa, later than she’d have liked but she was glad to hear his voice, she said. He smiled now in the pale early sun at the memory of his wife’s impatient Yes.

  Dozing at most – but enough to befuddle him when he’d heard an unfamiliar ring tone and only realized too late that it was Rosselli’s mobile. Retrieving it – eventually – from the jacket pocket into which he’d slipped it, Sandro had seen it still had a good charge on it. These old phones had a lot to be said for them: what he called the ‘magic phone’ Giuli and Luisa had talked him into, with its touchscreen and 3G and whatnot, died after an hour on the road. You had to carry any number of chargers around with you.

  Missed call, Avv, it had said on the screen. He had frowned at that, then his own phone had begun to ring and when he’d answered it, and heard Carlo Bastone’s voice, he made the connection. Sitting up, he’d cleared his throat.

  Avv for Avvocato.

  Niccolò was still snoring now, his face grey as marble. Sandro’s phone told him it was six-twenty-two. On impulse he swung his legs over the bed and pulled on his trousers.

  Looking fresh and spruce at the front desk with the sun flooding into his foyer, Salvatore smiled at Sandro as he emerged from the lift, as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a guest to go out for a stroll, unshaven and looking like death, at half-past six in the morning.

  ‘All right, sir?’ he said, raising his eyes from another paper – the early edition of the local rag, by the look of it. Il Tirreno, the holiday newspaper, full of complaints about the beach disco and cuts in ferry services. There’d be nothing in there about it.

  ‘All right,’ said Sandro warily, his eyes scanning the front page.

  ‘You’re here about the girl, aren’t you?’ said Salvatore. ‘If you don’t mind my asking.’

  It was there on the front page. ‘WOMAN FOUND DEAD IN HOTEL BATH’. A large photograph of a hotel frontage; a smaller one beside it, a headshot.

  ‘Girl?’ In death Flavia Matteo receded from them, the middle-aged men who would grow older and more hangdog, the red-headed woman still beautiful, the young mother. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You mean Flavia Matteo. Yes. I’m here with her husband.’

  The grieving widower: Sandro thought of him lying like the dead on the bed, and covered his face briefly with his hand.

  Bastone had wanted to talk to him in the early hours.

  ‘I can’t wake him, no,’ Sandro had said. ‘After the day the man had yesterday? Please. Tell me what it is, Bastone.’

  ‘There’s been a break-in.’ The lawyer had sounded terrified. ‘At the Frazione’s offices. A lot of mess. I don’t think anything’s gone – but I don’t know. The police called me at midnight.’

  In a low voice Sandro had told him to calm down. Another mummy’s boy, this one, another only child. Sometimes it escaped Sandro’s memory that he was one himself: this younger generation seemed, though, to profit less by all that exclusive parental attention.

  ‘Nothing’
s gone? Well then. Someone’ll have been looking for valuables. This kind of thing happens when you hit the headlines. Or – well – someone trying to capitalize on the confusion maybe. It’s possible perhaps a businessman doesn’t like you, sends in a goon or two, some right-wing loner, drunks – could be anyone.’ He had sighed in the dark, warm bedroom, with the unfamiliar smells, another human being in close proximity. A weird time of night.

  ‘Two in the morning’s not the time to think straight,’ he’d said. ‘Has it been secured? The office?’

  ‘I got someone out to board it up,’ Bastone had said. Sandro had been surprised the man would even know where to start finding a handyman in the middle of the night. ‘Good,’ he’d said. ‘Look – get some sleep. I’d call Enzo in the morning, if I were you, he’s a sound lad. But not too early, eh?’

  It had been impossible for him to get off to sleep after that.

  ‘She was a good-looking woman,’ said the concierge, studying the newspaper with concentration. Sandro angled his head to get a look at the photograph they’d found of Flavia Matteo; it looked like a passport picture. They must have been quick off the mark. ‘Distinctive.’ The man looked up at him. ‘It’s not a nice business, suicide.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Sandro, and with the receptionist in his striped waistcoat in front of him, for the first time found himself thinking about whoever it was – bellboy, chambermaid – who’d found Flavia’s body. ‘It’s rough on everyone, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Never understood it myself,’ Salvatore said, clearing his throat uncomfortably. ‘Leave the world behind? Never.’ Together they stood in the sunlight, feeling its warmth. The street outside was empty, bathed in that clear pale brightness of the seaside, where the streets all end at the water.

  ‘Nor me,’ Sandro said. ‘Just lucky, I suppose.’ He straightened. ‘When do you go off duty, Salvatore? It is Salvatore, right?’

  He inclined his head, acknowledging Sandro’s courtesy. ‘I go off at eight,’ he said. ‘And breakfast is between eight and ten, sir.’

  ‘Is it a good breakfast?’ asked Sandro. He had never had a good hotel breakfast – it was one reason for staying in hotels as little as possible. Packet croissants and filter coffee. Salvatore gave him a conspiratorial look.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, without conviction. ‘Considering. But if I were you I’d head down to the Bar Cristina, on the front, two blocks that way.’ He nodded to the left. ‘They make their own pastries. The coffee’s good. Has the added advantage of Cristina herself.’ And he smiled to himself.

  The bar was spacious and bright, filled with the light off the sea. It would have been modern in perhaps 1932 but had been nicely maintained, fitted out in pale green glass. Cristina turned out to be a bustling little woman perhaps five years older than the concierge – Sandro suspected some not inconsiderable history there – with high-piled dark hair and small, shrewd brown eyes.

  As she set a caffe macchiato and two pastries in front of him, the woman rested her elbows on the counter and regarded him. ‘You’re here with the husband,’ she said. This was a smaller town than Sandro had suspected, for all its sprawl inland; Salvatore must have phoned ahead. ‘Of the suicide. Friend of the family?’

  Sandro downed his coffee and took a bite of the pastry. It was stodgy but delicious: he tasted butter and vanilla. ‘Sort of’ he said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Cristina, watching him. ‘A time like that you need friends. Poor kid.’

  There it was again, Flavia, who would never grow old. ‘Yes,’ he said, and deciding on impulse to trust her with more than platitudes, ‘we’re trying to work it out. What happened.’ He imagined Luisa in the corner of the room eyeing him and this attractive older woman with sceptical amusement.

  ‘She must have been desperate,’ said Cristina, and there was something in her voice that made Sandro look into her face, trying to fix her meaning. She started to look away but Sandro held her gaze.

  ‘She’d been here before,’ Cristina said quickly, and smoothed her apron with a hurried, anxious gesture. ‘I’ve seen her before, in the town. Girl like that? You don’t mistake her. I said to my husband: She’s been here, I don’t know when, don’t know where I saw her …’

  Husband? Sandro wondered fleetingly where Salvatore fitted in. ‘She was hardly a girl,’ he said, obscurely trying to retrieve the real, living Flavia Matteo, with that madonna’s pale face, weighed down with worry. He pictured her on that mythical ferryboat, over the dark river, dwindling into a child, when she’d left behind a child of her own. ‘She was forty-two and recently a mother.’

  ‘Dangerous age,’ said Cristina, frowning.

  ‘Do you have children, Cristina?’ asked Sandro. The woman raised herself, pulled her apron tight, her bosom – high and round for a woman of her age – seeming to become more prominent.

  ‘No,’ she said shortly. There was a story here, one that Sandro would never be told. ‘But for any woman – dangerous,’ she insisted, daring him to challenge her. ‘When you know you’re getting – not just older, but old.’

  A silence fell: Sandro picked up his second pastry and contemplated it. Luisa was always warning him about diabetes: his own father, wiry into his seventies, had developed it, and no one would call Sandro wiry. He adjusted his waistband downwards and took a bite. Life was too short. There was a contradiction there somewhere.

  ‘You think she’d been to the town before.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before.’

  ‘Not in Florence? By all accounts she didn’t get away from the city much.’

  Cristina made a face. ‘Florence? I wouldn’t go there if you paid me.’ Out here they were basically Pisans, and the centuries-old hostility between the kingdoms held good. She shook her head. ‘No, I’m here all year round. There’s nothing like it, the seaside. Nothing like it.’ She looked over his shoulder through the wide glass window, where the water glittered in the early light.

  ‘Might she have come in here? In the bar.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Cristina frowned, dubious. She reached under the counter and brought out a cloth. She passed it in a wide arc over the pale blue-green glass, buffing it to a shine. She must have to do that a thousand times a day, thought Sandro, marvelling at the industry required, all for a glass bartop. A woman of standards. The door swung open and a weary-looking woman came in with two small children, chattering insistently. They tugged their mother over to a glass cabinet full of coloured plastic balls and began to wheedle for a coin. Cristina didn’t pay them any attention.

  ‘It wasn’t in here,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m pretty sure of that, I’m – well. It’s different when you’re at work, you don’t quite have the leisure – and I remember the sunshine. On her hair. Isn’t that peculiar? To remember that,’ she marvelled.

  That hair. He’d seen it dull red against the laundered sheet of the morgue. ‘You work every day?’

  ‘Except Sundays. We’re closed Sundays.’ She brightened. ‘So it’d have been a Sunday, wouldn’t it?’ She looked at him with grudging respect. ‘That’s clever.’

  ‘Not really,’ said Sandro mildly. ‘Sunshine. How long ago, do you think? A warm day?’

  ‘We have a six-, seven-month season,’ said Cristina proudly. ‘There are a lot of warm sunny days.’ Behind Sandro the door opened again and he felt the cool early air, heard the shush of waves. Could he and Luisa retire to the sea? People did.

  A man in overalls came up to the bar beside Sandro and took off a cap: he brought the whiff of dustbins in with him but Sandro held his ground. Cristina bustled back to the coffee machine and filled a glass with warm milk. A dash of cold coffee from a jug. The man ladled teaspoons of sugar in: two, three, four. A small glass of brandy, and only then did Cristina look back at Sandro.

  ‘It was a while ago, that’s all I could say. Time does funny things, doesn’t it? As you get older. I think it wasn’t this season. I think—’ She put a hand thoughtfully to her hair, spun like candyflo
ss. ‘I think I was blonde. Which would make it the end of last season.’

  Sandro nodded, careful not to smile. ‘Brunette’s good on you,’ he said, surprising himself.

  ‘What was she at the Stella Maris for?’ Cristina asked, absently brushing off the compliment. The dustbin man looked up at the name, then back to his latte macchiato. ‘What a dump that place is. Digusting old Calzaghe, one chambermaid for twelve rooms and her not even an Italian. Not that many are these days.’

  You couldn’t stop people saying things like that. It was a small town and even in Florence, the big city swarming with all nationalities, people said such things.

  ‘And pricey with it. No wonder he can only scrape a handful of guests.’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Sandro thoughtfully. ‘When you’re planning – well. Perhaps it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘If it didn’t matter, why didn’t she just lie down on the tracks in Florence? Or walk into the river, if she wanted to spare the train driver. Or the chambermaid, even if she is a Croat. It’s an ugly business, however you do it.’

  My sentiments exactly, thought Sandro. And Croats are practically Italians, aren’t they? Spit from Venice and it lands in Croatia.

  ‘Where is the Stella Maris from here?’ he asked. Cristina drew herself up behind the bar, bosom lifted. She nodded along the seafront. The dustbin man set down his empty brandy glass and wiped his mouth, but didn’t make any move to leave, standing motionless in the full blessing of the sun.