Anna had opened her mouth but found that she could not think of the right response; then he had spoken, for the first time. His voice was deep and hesitant.
‘Yes,’ he had said, ‘good.’ And just as she looked up, he had smiled.
Anna stopped, and looked around her in a kind of daze. Neither of them had been paying very much attention to the way they were walking, and they had come to a clearing with the mossy trunks of some huge fallen trees across it. It was light and warm, the carpet of beech leaves soft and dry in the sun. But the sky overhead was not as bright as it had been; a veil of fine, high cloud, not immediately distinguishable from the fading sky, had drifted silently across from the north-west.
‘Where are we?’ said, Anna, frowning. ‘I don’t recognize this place.’
Paolo stood for a moment, looking around him. The clearing was on a south-facing slope, sheltered, at the blind end of a little valley, blocked by a spur of land, clogged with climbing vegetation run wild and not apparently leading anywhere. Below them stood a crag of bare rock, raw after a recent landslip; a path led above it around the edge of the slope, deeper into the unpopulated dead centre of the reserve, southwards and away from their destination. Logically, Anna knew that somewhere further below them must be the principal track through the forest, but it looked like they had reached a densely overgrown dead end.
‘It’s all right. I know where we are,’ Paolo said.
There was something different about him, Anna thought; perhaps it was because she was suddenly feeling her age, her resilience undermined by the walk and the effort of revelation, but her son no longer seemed, as she had always thought of him, to be dependent on her, but rather the other way around. Perhaps that’s how it should be, she thought.
‘Sit down, Mamma,’ said Paolo gently, spreading his jacket on one of the fallen trees, and she did what he said. He sat beside her, elbows on his knees, face between his hands in concentration.
‘So,’ he said, ‘you went to eat with them.’
Looking off into the distance, Anna nodded slowly. She turned to look at him, he met her gaze and as he watched her remember Paolo could suddenly see what perhaps his father had seen in her; there was something alive and determined about her face. Her eyes were bright, and if you rubbed away the web of lines, the softened jawline, all the small signs of age, her face under the headscarf in that grey Roman street could have been beautiful. What makes a man fall in love, after all? A look, an impression, the feeling that someone else can see what he is thinking, someone understands. Beauty is only a part of it.
‘You have to understand,’ Anna went on, and Paolo wondered that she could be unaware of how intently he was trying to understand. ‘I was thirty-eight. Before – I had never missed something I hadn’t had. I saw girls with their boyfriends – but I couldn’t behave like that. There was no one to protect me, so I had to protect myself. I kept myself to myself.’
Anna stopped abruptly, and Paolo nodded, aware as he had not been before of his mother’s lonely determination for those many years in her little flat, working, sleeping and waking up to work again.
‘It was my last chance,’ she said.
His mother had been exactly the age he was now, thought Paolo, and he knew what she meant. ‘Yes,’ he said, and he sighed, a sound infinitely weary.
Anna, who heard in the sigh her son’s despair at the thought of her compromised life, was defiant. ‘I know she – I know I should have thought of her. His wife. She was – she didn’t deserve it. But – she had always had everything, and I had nothing. It didn’t seem particularly wrong, that some of it should be mine. It seemed right.’
‘It’s OK, Mamma,’ said Paolo. ‘I can hardly blame you, can I? Where would I be if –’
Ruefully Anna shook her head, looking down at her hands, calloused and blue-veined, lying idle now in her lap.
Paolo went on, speaking as gently as he was able. ‘But what did you think – what did you think would happen? How long did you think it would go on, without her knowing?’
The distant rumble of a vehicle approaching, some way off through the trees below them, registered only subliminally, a marker for civilization and the proximity of a path out of the forest, a faintly ominous sound, growing louder.
Anna passed a hand across her forehead, and for a moment her face was hidden. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, wearily. ‘We didn’t get a chance.’
20
At the tiny click as the line went dead in Justine’s hand Louisa had turned away, hugging herself as if she was cold, although in the sheltered pocket of the hillside where they had come to a halt the still air was humid and warm.
Justine looked down at the mobile; in one corner of its stamp-sized screen an icon representing an envelope blinked at her. She frowned, then sighed with exasperation.
‘I can never work out how to collect messages on this thing,’ she said, crossly, jabbing the call button to see if it might at least tell her where the message had come from. It said, number unknown. She held it out to Louisa, who shook her head distractedly, and turned as if to go. Then Louisa turned back in a panic.
‘It might be from Tom,’ she said, suddenly breathless.
‘It knows Tom’s number,’ said Justine. ‘The phone knows his number.’ And Louisa turned away again.
Justine held the phone to her ear again, then she heard it, the breathless intimacy of Penny Truman’s voice. Just calling to say sorry, darling. Hope I didn’t make an exhibition… She sounded husky, hungover. ‘You know, say anything I shouldn’t have. But really,…’ Her voice became indistinct for a moment, and Justine could hear a man’s voice, impatient in the background. Then the voice was loud again suddenly, clearer than before. But what are you playing at? You must be mad, coming out here, with them of all people. Talk about playing with fire. There was a pause, as though she was wondering whether she should say any more, a click, and Penny Truman was gone.
Justine could feel Louisa’s eyes on her, and with an effort she thrust Penny Truman and her insinuations out of her mind. ‘Let’s just get back, then,’ she said, quickly. ‘Shall we? Lucien can sort out the message when we get down there.’
Louisa said nothing, nor did she move, but just stood there, frowning at the line of electricity pylons that strode across the dark forest canopy into the distance. Justine realized that going back down into the valley would effectively cut them off from Tom. She hesitated, unwilling to express to Louisa her feeling that they had, anyway, reached the point of no return. There was nothing more they could say that would influence him, and Justine was quite certain that his mobile had by now been either switched off or abandoned altogether. They would just have to wait, and hope. She opened her mouth, but before she could say anything Louisa turned towards her sharply.
‘It was always going to come to this,’ Louisa said, taking her by surprise, so precisely did she express what Justine had been thinking. ‘He’s got to make up his own mind.’
Justine took a deep breath, and nodded gratefully. ‘We’d better get back,’ was all she said. ‘The boys – we’ve been away a good two hours now.’
On the gentle downward incline the path followed to begin with, right at the fork where the lorry had gone left, it was fast going, and their spirits lifted, despite everything. They rounded a sharp corner and met a breeze coming up the valley, light but persistent, that cooled them. The heat seemed to have gone out of the sun, too, although it was midday. At this rate, Justine thought, it’d take them no time at all to get back home.
They came to the pretty olive grove, the long grass beneath the olive trees, the seedheads; the ruined house. Reluctant to pass on, they looked curiously around the deserted farmstead but there was no more sign of life than there had been earlier. Louisa sat down beside the path, and with a sigh lay back in the long grass, arms above her head. Justine lay down beside her, and together they gazed up through the branches of a small olive tree, hiding among its silver-grey leaves the shiny green fr
uit.
‘I feel better, now,’ said Louisa. ‘It’s funny, but I do. At least I know – well, I know more than I did.’
Justine nodded, the dry grass tickling her cheek. There was a silence, then Louisa spoke again.
‘I’m sorry I was a bit of a bitch. That first day – God, it seems months ago, doesn’t it? Poking my nose in about you and Lucien, babies and all that. I think I was just feeling–sometimes, being a mother, you want to let people know it’s not that easy. Having babies, looking after them. You lash out.’
‘You weren’t a bitch,’ said Justine, touched. Then on impulse, rolling over to look at Louisa she said, ‘Lucien’s agreed we can have a baby, now. He – he was reluctant before.’ As she said the words, something about them didn’t sound right, and she frowned.
‘He’s agreed?’ Louisa raised herself on her elbows, frowning.
Uncertainly, Justine nodded. ‘Well,’ she said, turning the words around in her head, ‘I mean, we decided. Both of us.’ But they hadn’t, of course; for his own reasons, Lucien had given her permission, which wasn’t quite the same.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Louisa, ‘That’s wonderful! That’s just – of course, it is hard work, you know. But it’s worth it.’ She put an arm around Justine and gave her a squeeze.
‘And maybe,’ she went on, ‘it’ll be good for Lucien, too. He seems a bit, I don’t know. Out of sorts. Needs something to focus on, maybe?’ She smiled at Justine uncertainly.
‘Mmm,’ said Justine, vaguely, thinking.
‘You are happy, though?’ said Louisa.
‘Yes,’ said Justine. ‘Yes. It’s just – after all this time, it’s not quite what I expected.’ She lay back down, not quite sure that she would be able to explain herself to Louisa. You are happy? She didn’t know.
The next stretch was the steep, rocky slope that led almost straight downhill to the valley floor, where they’d found the porcupine quills.
After less than five minutes Justine’s calves ached with the effort of braking her descent on the steep slope; beside her, Louisa was breathless with concentration. They paused for a moment, and in the silence Justine thought she could hear something above them; a murmur of voices speaking softly, insistently among the trees. The women looked at each other, then set off again.
Justine had taken the left-hand side, where the rocks were stepped conveniently, and soon she was ahead of Louisa, who had first had to pick her way across a scree of loose stone before slotting in behind, in Justine’s slipstream. Dogged, silent with concentration, Justine felt the rhythm of her descent take over, and although she was aware of Louisa falling behind she could focus only on where she would next place her foot. Here, then there, then here again, the sound of her own breath loud and monotonous in her ears. It wasn’t until she reached a kink in the path, almost at the bottom, that she stopped and turned back to share a smile of triumph. Only Louisa wasn’t there.
They’d had lunch in Da Giovanni’s, the three of them, a small, bustling, whitewashed place off the Piazza dell’ Fico, full of workmen eating ham and pizza bianca. Amalia had tried to draw her out, but Anna had felt inhibited and had said little. She had only felt on safe ground when asked about home – her childhood home, that is, and she’d found herself talking about the hills and the forest and their little rows of vines before she’d felt their eyes on her and fallen silent, blushing stupidly.
While they said goodbye in the Via della Pace, Luca kissing his wife, Anna had stood obediently silent, pretending interest in something on the other side of the road. She gazed blankly at the headlines pasted on the side of a newspaper kiosk; murder at Ostia. She stole a look, though, just as the barman standing in his doorway and the hardy handful of customers sitting at the tables outside the bar looked, as Amalia lifted a hand to wave and walked away, tall and straight, long red hair twisting down her back. She was magnetic, a golden talisman they all wanted to touch. Anna wondered what could be happening, and she didn’t look at Luca when he spoke.
‘This way,’ he said, nodding to a side-street. ‘The car’s down here.’ He turned away abruptly, and she followed, feeling as though many eyes must be on her.
Alone with him in the small, dusty Fiat bumping through the narrow streets behind the Piazza Navona, Anna had been overtaken by doubt. One look, after all, could be mistaken for something it was not, even if Anna had never made that kind of mistake before, and Luca Magno – well, whatever reputation he had, it was not for womanizing.
Sitting upright in the passenger seat, jolted by the car’s erratic progress on thin tyres and holding tight to her bag on her lap, Anna had stared straight ahead, aware of him beside her, all the way out to Cinecitta. He only spoke once, taking his eyes from the road briefly.
‘How long have you lived alone, like that?’ he said. And suspecting pity, Anna had held her head high and answered as lightly as she could, ‘Oh, ten years. A bit less, maybe.’
Still she hadn’t looked at him, but out of the corner of her eye she saw him nod gravely. ‘You’re brave,’ he said, not laughing, but softly, and she thought he meant it. Generally people thought there was nothing brave in it; they thought she was a bit odd; soft in the head. They both fell silent, after that; the journey had never seemed so long.
But when they stopped, as he leaned down to take her hand and help her out of the low-slung car, Luca held both her hands and looked at her until she had to raise her eyes from the dusty kerb and look back. She had trembled, after the strain of keeping silent and not looking, and tried to pretend it was the cold. Luca had nodded, put his arms around her and pressed her against him, apparently oblivious to the fact that at any time someone might walk around the corner. She still remembered the exact feeling, although she couldn’t express it, the feel of the prickly wool of his jacket against her cheek, his heart beating against her throat, the sweet smell of tobacco and his sweat, before he released her and they stood apart again. Perhaps it might have been nothing to a different woman, but that embrace was the single most significant instant of Anna’s life, and she had known it even then.
‘And that was that,’ said Anna, looking up. ‘We met again, the next day; I drank coffee with him at the railway station, on my way to work; we hardly said anything. I don’t think we could believe what was happening.’ She closed her eyes and thought of the station bar, a hundred bodies jostling for their breakfast, shouting their orders, pushing them towards each other, she and Luca. The barmen calling to each other, the hiss of the coffee machine and the heavy clank of the trains beyond the glass.
When she opened them again Paolo was looking at her, but he expressed neither understanding nor disapproval; he was waiting for what would come next.
Anna sighed. ‘Neither of us was the kind of person to take things lightly. Deception. Whenever we saw each other – not often; he came to the flat once a week, perhaps, for six, or seven months – it was a struggle. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t; I knew I should put an end to it, for him, but I couldn’t.’
Paolo cleared his throat. ‘Did he know? Did my father ever know about me?’ At the hoarse sound of his voice, Anna looked up at Paolo, and it was as though she had never seen him before. She could not separate him from his father now, in her mind.
It’s easy, she thought, when they’re children, to pretend that they need to be older to understand properly, to put it off, but, really, love is easiest to explain to a child. She knew that now. She could have simply said, we loved each other. She remembered Paolo as a little boy, the warm weight of him in her lap, how she used to whisper to him how much she loved him, before he could speak.
The mossy log was damp and hard even through Paolo’s waxed jacket, and Anna’s back ached; she stood up.
‘He died before you were born,’ she said. ‘You always knew that.’
‘But did he know?’
‘He knew,’ she said slowly. ‘I should never have told him, though.’
‘Why?’ said Paolo. ‘Didn’t he have a
right to know?’
She looked at him oddly, the anger in his voice chiming with his words in her head; suddenly something slotted into place. ‘There’s something you haven’t told me,’ she said, slowly. ‘Did Livia ever get pregnant, Paolo?’
‘Mamma,’ he said, looking down, ‘I’m sorry. That’s – finished. Livia – there were things we didn’t agree on. It wasn’t for me to change her mind. But this isn’t to do with Livia. Please. Tell me, just tell me.’
Anna put out a hand to touch his arm, wanting him to turn back to her. ‘I didn’t want to tell him, because I didn’t want to blackmail him into anything. I wanted it to be because of me. That he left her.’
Anna was surprised to find that she didn’t feel ashamed, telling her son these things; shame had been the reason for her silence, she could admit that now. But when she opened her mouth to speak at last she found it had evaporated, along with the guilt and the blame and the ancient passion, all burnt out. She looked back at her younger self and thought; what else could you have done?
They had had a row, she and Luca; their only row, standing facing each other in the flat, the little windows open to the street below and every word they said no doubt avidly received in the neighbouring flats, old Giulia downstairs cocking an ear over the washing-up. She had told him first that he would have to leave Amalia; she made her voice as hard as she could, to make him afraid of what she might do. And then, hearing herself, she found that she could not disguise all the anger she had accumulated, at being condemned to be the other woman, the lesser one. At the injustice of her finding him when it was too late. She wanted him to leave Amalia because he loved her, not because she was pregnant, and that was when she almost broke down, when she saw the look of desperation in his eyes and knew that it would not happen.
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