Anna saw Paolo look from the tiny-waisted dress, a dress for a princess in a fairy story, to his mother, small and compact and sensible in her dressing gown, and she saw him try to imagine her in this story. She sighed, and pushed him out of her room.
‘Let me get dressed now, there’s a good boy,’ she said. ‘We’re going down to get those mushrooms, don’t think you’re going to get out of it now.’ And she smiled to reassure him.
There would be some modern psychological explanation for the wedding dress; displacement activity, no doubt. It soothed her, the tiny stitches, the expanse of blank white silk, soft and cool. After all she could not attend her lover’s funeral as a wife, she could never have dressed in black, pulled her hair and wailed in the street, so she had to do her mourning somehow.
She had been there, at the back, along with hundreds of others, people who had never known him at all but were standing shoulder to shoulder with a comrade, shouting slogans as they marched behind his coffin through the pungent summer streets of Rome. From that day Anna’s hatred of politics bloomed, a loathing of political demonstrations, speech-making, rabble-rousing; she might have embraced the struggle, for the sake of Luca’s memory, but she couldn’t; every cell in her body refused. She had felt sick to hear their chanting that day, an aggressive nausea that invaded every cell of her body as she stood there, pressed against the wall by the relentless mass of passing mourners, sweating in the heat. The weight of the unborn Paolo was no greater than a peach but the unnatural solidity of his coiled shape inside her stubbornly growing, pressing outwards, became a part of the impossible physical burden of her grief and her guilt, and turning away from the procession to escape she had fainted dead away in the door of a baker’s shop.
That was the first time Anna had admitted to anyone else that she was pregnant. Of course the baker had known straight away, and given her a queer look; fortunately she was some way from home, and he was not her baker, so he must only have guessed – from the lack of a wedding ring on her finger or her dead-white pallor? – at her situation. Perhaps it had been because she was no longer young that he’d looked at her like that; as if she might have known better, at her age. His wife had looked at her in a more kindly way, when called down from the window upstairs, where she’d been watching the cortège pass. She told Anna to get to the hospital, just to be on the safe side, and that was where the work had begun, the struggle to keep him. That was when she had known, under the disapproving scrutiny of the duty sister, that she would not be able to give up, throw herself into the Tiber and have done with it.
‘I’m going about this from the wrong end,’ she said to Paolo, apologetically, as she locked the kitchen door carefully behind them and took a grateful breath of the cool air outside. Tiny buds of olives were swelling on the gnarled silver trees, and the grass had grown long and pale in the little meadow over the road, among it angelica and wild garlic gone to seed. She could smell rain, despite the bright sky, was the thought at the back of her mind, not even a thought, a countrywoman’s base, ineradicable instinct. ‘I don’t seem to be able to start from the beginning.’
The road was silent and empty in the sunlight; the little morning traffic it saw had already been and gone. The forest ranger in a fancy jeep heading down to monitor the pollution levels in the water, the loggers, Montale with his trailer had all disappeared down the hill before Paolo had even come out on to the terrace with his coffee. The two of them, mother and son, crossed over and set off on through the long grass of the clearing opposite the house, making for the path to Il Vignacce.
In the kitchen Paolo had remonstrated with Anna that there was really no need, if she didn’t feel up to it, to go on such a long walk; they could just go a kilometre or so to the little lake, or into town. But Anna had shaken her head; she wanted to go down there. She couldn’t tell how it was all going to turn out, after all; what Paolo might say, or think; what she was going to say herself. It would be as well to be out and doing something.
Anna had forgotten how delightful it was to walk through the trees on a day like this, the smell of autumn properly in the air, cooling but not cold yet, and bright overhead through the leaves. Even the promise of rain later and the knowledge that Paolo was still waiting for her to explain his existence could not dispel the extravagant private pleasure she felt once they were in the forest, her childhood home. She had not been down this way for some time, not for years, but the path was familiar to her. It began with a little cobbled pavement which in the spring was the course of a stream, now just a mossy groove in the hillside. Then they passed by a cave formed by an ancient rockfall, one slab balancing on another and carpeted inside with rusty brown beech leaves, where Anna had hidden as a child and Paolo after her. As they picked their way carefully through the dry, slippery leaf covering, ahead of them the compact black shape of a young boar, fat on the summer’s rich pickings of nuts and fruit, broke cover and hurtled across their path on comically short legs. The rustle and clatter of its hooves on the forest floor was loud in the silence.
Anna took a deep breath. ‘I know you always thought he was a film star,’ she said, apologetically. ‘Or maybe you hoped?’ She half-turned towards her son walking beside her.
‘Perhaps when I was young,’ Paolo said, shaking his head slightly. ‘Not now. I think I’d rather he wasn’t now.’
She sighed. ‘Just as well then. He was a worker, just like me, at least, that’s how he started. He was a set-builder, though he’d moved on by the time I met him.’
Paolo said nothing, just took a deep breath of the clean air of the woods, and they walked on in silence. A light wind blew through the trees and the dainty yellow leaves of the birches shivered.
‘If you want me to begin at the beginning,’ she went on, slowly, ‘I met your father’s wife first. I met her before I met him.’
To begin at the beginning; Anna had met her lover’s wife before she met him. She felt a kind of anguished awkwardness as she said the words to Paolo, as though this was too blunt a way of breaking the adulterous impropriety of their relationship to him, when all she had meant was to be faithful to the truth, the historical truth. It was never easy to talk to one’s children about love, perhaps, but this was an agony. In order to explain to her son how he came about she couldn’t restrict herself to the bare facts; they would explain almost nothing, she realized, except a sad, familiar old story of weakness and betrayal.
If Anna really wanted him to understand, she would have to remember it all herself, that was the trouble. Then she’d have to shape it into a story for him, a story that had some meaning and didn’t leave him thinking of his father as weak, his mother as hard as stone.
It wasn’t as though they were a nondescript couple, Luca and his wife, Amalia; they were a beacon of goodness and hope. He was a leader and an idealist, a fierce champion of the people, she the beautiful red-headed daughter of a wealthy philanthropist, kind and clever and good. She had come for a fitting; the irony was, Anna was at the film studios permanently then, she had only been recalled as a special favour. Everyone had wanted to do them a favour, emblems of a better world, the post-war, post-fascist world; people would shake Luca’s hand in the street.
‘She had a lovely figure,’ said Anna, absently, looking at something far away. Down below them on the steep slope the sparse foliage low down on the trees seemed to hover in the green half-light, but nothing moved except the dust of ancient crumbling leaves in the air. It was very quiet.
‘Her skin was quite white, like milk, and she was tall. Long white arms, and a twenty-two-inch waist, even after the child.’
You could tell that she was the daughter of wealthy parents from that alone, Anna mused, almost talking to herself, her long straight limbs, her perfect skin, her gleaming red hair. A war spent nourished on good meat and vegetables, no doubt a larder hanging with hams, stacked with flour and eggs and sugar, in her parents’ great villa above the heat and dirt of the city. It was very near Paolo’s hospital,
that old villa, although that was something she didn’t say to him. It wasn’t just her clear skin that showed her happy upbringing; everyone said Amalia had a temper as sweet as that of a lamb reared by hand, sunny and kind and clever and generous. The daughter – their daughter – had been more serious.
‘A child?’ The ground had flattened out here and Paolo stopped suddenly, putting his hand out, gently but firmly, to stop his mother too. ‘A daughter?’
Anna nodded, looking away from him. ‘Four or five years old, she was then. I only saw her once.’
The little girl had been like her father in temperament, resembling her mother in appearance, a slight, freckled child standing beside the rolls of cloth and watching closely while Anna had measured Amalia, tall, upright and bare-shouldered in her petticoat, for a dress. Not a ballgown, nothing so frivolous, just a day dress made of dark wool crêpe, but Amalia hadn’t been able to give up her taste for beautiful things entirely when she married a poor man, that had been obvious to all of them as they watched her turn slowly in front of the mirror.
It was easy to see why Luca had fallen in love with Amalia; she was Sleeping Beauty waiting to be kissed, the mythical prize for a suitor pure in heart. Not so easy, Anna found as she searched her memory, to explain why he had fallen so far in love with a small, shy, dark-haired seamstress approaching middle age as to pull his life down around his ears.
19
The flatbed truck passed them with agonizing slowness, and unwillingly Justine and Louisa stood and walked behind it as it went, lurching alarmingly on the uneven road and braking hard at every bend. It was loaded with what looked at a distance like short, stubby logs but was in fact something lighter: cork. The bark of a hundred trees was stacked in piles like curved terracotta roof tiles, pale coral-red inside, like something still living, dark and calloused on the outside. Three men sat with their legs dangling from the back of the lorry, dusty boots almost touching the ground. Their clothes, their skin, their hair were all blackened to the same uniform seamy griminess and gave them a look of timeless, sinister antiquity, like chimney sweeps or savages from an old colonial engraving. They smoked in silence and stared, expressionless, at the two women through the cloud of reddish dust that rose in their wake.
As they walked Justine compacted the empty plastic water bottle and put it into the little rucksack of Lucien’s that she had snatched up from the kitchen table when they left. She noticed that her forearms were beginning to burn in the midday sun, and reached into the bag for some sunscreen; sunburn encouraged the lack of pigmentation to spread, and usually she was more circumspect. Groping in the bag’s nylon depths she drew out not sunscreen, but Lucien’s mobile. Thoughtfully she weighed it in her hand; once he’d been bullied into having one, needless to say he had chosen a model from the top of the range. It was so small it could pass for a cigarette lighter – not that anyone had cigarette lighters any more now that they’d all grown up and given up – and rounded like a silver pebble. Lucien was not capable, she thought with a mixture of pride and irritation, of buying anything cheap and ugly.
‘Why don’t you call Tom?’ she said, turning to Louisa, flipping it open. ‘You’ve got to talk to him, haven’t you? You have to, Louisa. Even if it means finding out something you don’t want to know, you can’t go on like this.’
Louisa looked unhappily at her. ‘Now?’ she said, looking around them at the empty woods, the distance between them and civilization.
There’s nowhere to hide up here, thought Justine, slowing her pace to allow the lorry to gain distance ahead. But it wasn’t like Louisa to run away from an unpleasant duty, and she felt sorry for her.
‘At least up here you’re likely to get a signal,’ she said, trying to sound matter of fact. ‘Martin couldn’t get one at all down in the valley the other day.’ She nodded across the hill to the radio and phone masts just still visible clustered on the far peak. Resignedly Louisa sighed and reached for the phone.
Justine watched Louisa’s face as she listened, the mobile pressed to her ear. She looked resigned, but alert; there was a readiness in her expression that was encouraging, something like the old Louisa. From the receiver Justine could hear the tinny bleep, sounding on and on, and she wondered where he could be; whether he was ignoring the sound in a bar somewhere, or couldn’t hear it. Just as they were both about to give up and Louisa was turning towards Justine with a despairing look, there was a click, and a voice answered. Louisa’s face lit up, and for a fraction of a second, before she reminded herself of the desperate situation their marriage was in, Justine felt envious. But almost immediately Louisa’s face clouded over, and she was trying to explain something.
‘No, no, he’s not – Justine had his phone. How did you know?’ She was frowning into the phone, exasperated at being deflected from her course. ‘Stop it, Tom,’ she said. ‘I’m up at the top, with Justine, there’s a signal up here. Lucien’s still down at the house. I’m just using his phone.’
She spoke through gritted teeth, and Justine sighed despite herself, and turned away. What had Tom got against Lucien? His self-control? His freedom?
‘Tom, where are you?’ Louisa was trying to get the conversation back on course. Justine could hear no response.
‘Please, Tom.’ She spoke softly, but with determination. ‘Please. The children – look, we need you. I know there are other – I know you’re very unhappy. Whatever’s been going on, we can sort it out. I – I love you. Come back.’ Louisa’s voice was still quiet, but Justine could see the strain in her face, any trace of freshness and youth rubbed out suddenly. Her hand around the phone was white-knuckled. ‘Tom?’Justine held out her hand for the phone and reluctantly Louisa passed it to her.
There was background noise wherever he was, voices, tinny music, the clatter of a bar being set up. ‘Tom, it’s me,’ she said. ‘Justine.’ She heard him sigh, closer.
‘The job’s nothing, Tom,’ she said. ‘None of that matters. The boys – we all just want you to come back. Louisa – they’ll be so unhappy without you.’
At first she could hear only the noises from the room behind him, but then Tom spoke.
‘It’s not just the job. There’s something I’ve got to do,’ he said. ‘Maybe – maybe it’s the only way to sort out all this. Look after Louisa.’
‘Louisa needs you, Tom,’ Justine said, ‘not me. You’ve got to come back and tell us what’s going on. You can’t deal with this on your own.’ She heard him sigh again.
‘You don’t know, though,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to know. Everything that’s happened – you wouldn’t say that if you knew.’
Somewhere at the back of Justine’s mind a tiny warning sounded at the words: if I knew what? ‘It’s OK,’ she said, trying to subdue the urgency she felt. ‘None of it matters.’ But perhaps her alarm had made itself heard, or she had reached the limits of her ability to reassure, because there was a click and Tom, the bar, the music and the voices were all gone. Ahead of them at a fork in the road the lorry lurched abruptly down to the left and disappeared from view, leaving Justine and Louisa alone.
‘I was leaving,’ said Anna, continuing hesitantly, knowing that if she stopped now she might never go on with the story. ‘Just letting myself out at the street, after the fitting. They were standing there on the pavement, right in my way. I almost knocked them over.’
She looked at Paolo, standing beside her, his head bowed as he listened intently, hands behind his back. ‘Go on,’ he said.
Anna sighed, but she went on.
It had been a dull day at the beginning of winter; cold, overcast and spitting with rain. Anna had been pulling her headscarf tight under her chin as she left the building, padded out by her second best winter coat, which was a miserable faded black. Amalia, his wife, stood there with her face turned up to her husband, bright in the grey street. Her back was to Anna, and she was wearing a light mackintosh belted tight and smart at the waist; everything about her was carelessly perfect. Anna just
looked up over Amalia’s shoulder and there he was; she looked into his face and she saw something there, something that was just for her. She looked back down, dazzled.
Then Amalia gave a little jump and turned, suddenly aware of Anna at her shoulder. It may even have been that she saw her husband – Luca – looking past her at something, but she could not, Anna thought, have seen the look itself.
‘Anna!’ she exclaimed as she saw who it was, and Anna could still feel the arm that fell lightly on to her shoulder, his wife’s arm embracing her, her stirring of unease. She had looked down at her boots.
‘Luca,’ Amalia said, smiling at her husband, perhaps knowing that it would please him that she treated her seamstress as a friend, but her warmth no less genuine for all that. ‘Anna’s the cleverest woman in Rome. With a needle, at any rate. Where are you off to now, Anna?’ she asked.
Bristling a little at Amalia’s patronage, suddenly, uncharacteristically emboldened, Anna had looked up again, and pushed her scarf back a little from her face. It was the first – and only – time in her life that she had consciously offered herself to a man for approval; it was such a small gesture, but at the time she had the feeling that she was taking a great risk.
‘I just live up there,’ she said, pointing up to her front window at the top of the neighbouring building. ‘I’m going home for my lunch. Then I go back to Cinecitta. That’s where I work, normally.’
‘Oh, but Luca’s going to Cinecitta this afternoon, too,’ said Amalia. ‘You must have seen him there? He works with the unions; a union coordinator, do you know?’
‘I spend most of my time in wardrobe,’ said Anna. ‘We’re confined there, you bow. We don’t get out much. But of course, yes, I’ve heard of – of him.’ Then she smiled and made as if to turn away from them.
‘Luca – look, Anna,’ Amalia said, turning back to look at her husband and taking Anna gently by the elbow to hold her there. ‘Come and have lunch with us, then Luca will take you out there, in the car. We have a little car.’
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