There was a sound from the doorway, a feather-light sound, but they both heard it, and turned towards the door. In the hot, flat light that fell through the door a tiny lizard, curved into an S-shape, stood briefly immobile on the warm brick before flickering back outside, making minuscule displacements in the dust.
Martin turned back to Justine. ‘He’s not good at hiding what he’s feeling. I’m surprised you didn’t see it, but you’re a romantic, aren’t you?’
I suppose I am, thought Justine, if that means wanting everything to turn out right.
‘Maybe it seems strange to you,’ Martin said slowly. ‘I can see it does. But Tom was never going to – it wasn’t an affair.’ He pronounced the word with a kind of contempt.
Martin went on, talking almost to himself now. ‘It was an idealized relationship they had. Platonic. It wouldn’t have worked any other way, the practical stuff would have killed it. Tom’s not practical, is he? You said it yourself, Louisa deals with all that.’
About time someone else did it for her, Justine found herself thinking, as she thought of Louisa outside in the chair, worn down by her responsibilities.
He went on, quietly, as if he too was thinking of Louisa just outside the door. ‘And now Evie’s – now she’s dead –’ Martin looked away from her, as though he didn’t want her to see what was in his face. ‘Tom and I – in a way we’ve got her in common, now. He reminds me of her.’ Martin closed his eyes for a moment, and Justine tentatively put out a hand.
‘She loved you, you know,’ he said, turning at her touch on his arm, and his tone was odd, stifled. ‘She wouldn’t have wanted you hurt.’
Justine stared at him, torn between longing and confusion, wanting to know, suddenly, what Evie had been thinking. ‘What do you mean?’
She thought of the last conversation she’d had with Evie, when she’d sounded almost as Martin did now, trying to communicate something obscure, asking whether she and Lucien were happy. She thought of Lucien’s photograph of Evie smiling, with Dido at her shoulder. Had that smile been trying to tell them something?
‘Evie never meant to hurt anyone,’ he said again. ‘But she had a blind spot. Like we all do, I suppose; sometimes she couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, that what she was doing would have consequences.’
‘Do you mean Evie killed herself?’ said Justine. ‘That’s how she hurt us?’
Martin shook his head. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. He gazed out through the door, unseeing.
Justine stared at him, turning over what Louisa had said. ‘Was she ill? Louisa –’ Then she stopped, not wanting to give Tom and Louisa away, wondering whether Martin had a right to know. She took a deep breath.
‘Louisa said Evie came to see them, that morning. Told them she was going away, she was ill and she needed to get away.’ Justine waited to see what he would say; somehow she expected him to grab hold of her, interrogate her. But Martin wasn’t like that, she realized; he just nodded.
‘She had a mild but progressive illness,’ he said with an odd formality, as though he was a doctor. He named a disease of the nervous system Justine had heard of; common enough, it came in different forms, some severe, some less so. She thought of Evie getting that news and suddenly she could see her haunted face all those years ago, in a cold kitchen with a baby in her arms. ‘What if I couldn’t move? Couldn’t go to her?’ Justine closed her eyes, cold with the shame. She never said.
‘It wouldn’t have killed her,’ Martin said, sounding sincerely puzzled. ‘Her mother had it too; the more severe form. It did kill her.’
In the silence that followed, they both heard a distant whine, the sound of a vehicle far away, but getting louder, but neither of them could focus on what it might mean.
‘What?’ said Justine slowly, opening her eyes, trying to process what she had just heard. She shook her head. ‘No. Her parents died in a car crash. In Spain. It was one of the first things she ever told me.’
Martin sighed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she made that up.’ He put his head in his hands, moving it from side to side as if to ease some pressure. ‘That’s what I mean,’ he said, but Justine didn’t understand.
‘But you don’t think she killed herself – because she was ill? It makes it more likely, doesn’t it?’
When Martin spoke his voice was muffled by his hands. ‘We’d talked about it, I made sure we talked about it. Her illness.’ Justine thought of Lucien’s sneering comment on Martin’s – what had he called it? – his brooding intensity.
Martin went on, paying her no attention, talking to himself. ‘She wasn’t on her own – she would never –’ He raised his head. ‘There are things – what happened to her parents for example – things she didn’t tell everyone. And other people – know things about her I don’t know. Didn’t know.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘But I think I know what happened now. Just wait – wait until Tom gets back. Until we’re all here.’
Justine nodded, unwillingly; there was something in Martin’s voice that made her uneasy. He sounded nervous, as though he was asking her to sit down before delivering bad news. ‘Just one thing,’ she said, ‘before – while it’s just us. You and Lucien – is this to do with Lucien? You were arguing. You don’t like him, do you?’
‘Justine,’ said Martin, shaking his head, ‘you’ve never seen Lucien as he really is. He only thinks about himself.’
Justine sighed. ‘I know him better than you do,’ she said, but even as she spoke she wondered. ‘He looks after me.’
‘Looks after you!’ Martin was angrily contemptuous. ‘He uses you. Without you he’d be – pathetic. He’d go on living in a house someone else paid for, pleasing himself, freeloading. Letting other people buy his drinks. You’ve got to see that.’ He stood up.
Justine felt queasy. She was tired of it, all of a sudden, worn out with puzzling over it, with dealing with their bickering. She looked away, towards the front door and the outside. The sun was fading; the sharp edges of the light cast into the room were blurred and indistinct now. As she looked, Lucien appeared in the doorway.
‘Someone’s coming,’ he said, shortly, and turned back outside. They got to their feet.
Justine and Martin stood in the doorway and looked; beside them Louisa was stirring in her deckchair. High up on the hill Justine could hear the sound of a car, still invisible beneath the forest’s dark canopy; the roar of an engine, intermittent as it bounced and dipped with the road, but getting closer.
‘What – what’s happening?’ asked Louisa, dazedly, sitting up in her chair. No one said anything; they were all looking the same way.
They were looking past the cowshed, following the zigzag path of the road which was just visible through the screen of the trees. They looked up across the face of the hill to where a cloud of dust marked the arrival of the car she had heard earlier. From where they stood they could only see that it was a long, low vehicle, its colour obscured by dust, and it was moving painfully slowly, crunching around the bends, its passage marked by the flapping of birds in the leaf canopy. Only at the final bend, when the screen of trees had thinned to the last remaining few birches, did it reveal itself as Tom’s Volvo, and it wasn’t until the car emerged from the trees and had got almost as far as the cowshed that Justine could see that Tom had a passenger.
Anna and Paolo let the boys run on ahead of them down the steep, uneven path to the waterfall. Anna felt strangely relaxed now, after all the commotion, the encounters with foreigners, the effort of trying to work out what was going on between them at lunch.
Quite unable to translate what the English visitors had been saying, it had all the same seemed to Anna that there was very little in the way of human warmth to bind their group together. And where among Italians the very act of eating at the same table would have softened some of their differences and brought them just a little closer, in this case it seemed to have had the opposite effect. Do the English simply not like each other, she wondered, or do these people have a particular re
ason for fighting over everything? She gave a mental shrug, and looked sidelong at Paolo, grateful for his good nature and his transparency, to her at least. They walked on, side by side, after the boys.
‘I haven’t been down here since I was a child,’ said Anna slowly, breaking the silence. ‘I dreamed about it often enough.’
Paolo looked at her with surprise. ‘Why didn’t you come?’
‘I left it too long. I began to be afraid.’ She looked away, as though searching for something among the massed ranks of silent trees.
‘Afraid of what?’ Paolo’s voice was puzzled.
She sighed, feeling foolish. I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Ghosts. My father –’
‘They brought him down here?’
‘It might have been,’ she said. ‘Somewhere near, anyway. I always had it in my mind that they brought him to II Vignacce, it was abandoned then, soon after the Germans arrived. We – we children thought there were ghosts here, just as you did, even before – before he was taken from us.’
Soberly Paolo nodded. ‘I can see,’ was all he said.
But it did seem other worldly, even to him: the uncertain green light in which dust motes and shreds of gossamer hung suspended, turning slowly; and the tiny noises, the creeping, rustling, ticking sounds that might be one thing or might be another. Paolo and Anna were at a bend, the house now just out of sight and below them hung the damp, cool, misty air that drifted up from the river. Anna stopped for a moment, her face thoughtful.
‘If you leave things,’ she said, ‘if you don’t go back and look again at the things you are afraid of, they change, your mind works on them and works on them, when you aren’t looking.’ She looked at her son for a moment, wondering whether he understood, before she went on, ‘At first I used to dream of rescuing my father, and I could see him as clearly as ever, his face that I loved. But then I began to be afraid, I thought of him dead, coming back from the dead. Do you see? The more you bury your head under the pillow, the bigger the monster grows.’
‘Yes,’ said Paolo. He thought of his own father, changing shape in a child’s starved imagination.
Below them the boys had stopped, crouching over something on the path; as Paolo and Anna approached they turned their small brown faces up towards them, bright with excitement.
‘Dinosaurs,’ Sam breathed in awe. Anna frowned, and bent to look; it was a small bone, clean and white. She smiled at them, and shook her head. ‘Too small,’ she said in Italian, gesturing with her hands as though measuring a fish.
‘We can bury it,’ said Paolo in English, and enthusiastically the boys agreed, already shovelling with their hands in the leaves and ivy. Solemnly they placed the bone in the hollow they had made and covered over the spot with elaborate care. Anna and Paolo stood over the boys and their tiny ritual, and looked at each other.
‘Are we nearly there?’ asked Sam, when he’d finished smoothing over the earth. Paolo nodded. ‘Nearly. Can you smell the river?’ He held up a finger and sniffed the air, and, looking at him curiously, the boys did the same, down to holding their own fingers in the air.
‘I can smell something,’ said Angus, uncertainly, wrinkling his nose. ‘Something cold.’
‘That’s it,’ said Paolo. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’ And the two boys set off again, galloping and skidding on the stones. ‘Careful!’ called Paolo after them, shaking his head and laughing despite himself.
‘You see,’ said Anna, ‘children, they’re good for you. They keep you young.’ It was as close as she could come to a reproof, to coming back to the subject of Livia, and children.
‘So you’re glad you had me then,’ said Paolo, smiling, knowing where she was going and deflecting her.
‘Don’t even joke about it,’ said Anna. ‘How easily I could not have had you, it makes my blood run cold.’
Both of them fell silent then, their thoughts returning to the moment at which she might have been able to choose, the terrifying randomness of life brought into being, or denied.
The path had become flattened and narrow, densely overgrown on both sides, the rampant growth held back only by rusty barbed wire. They had reached the valley floor itself. Paolo took his mother’s arm.
‘How did he die, Mamma?’
She sighed, and turned to look at him. His death – Luca Magno’s death – had been a public event. Not a famous man, not a household name, but a man who had significance in many others’ lives. There had been speculation when he died that it had been an assassination, and she knew that Paolo would be aware of that, now that he knew his father’s name; a Mafia killing, someone high up in the film business sick of Luca’s troublemaking, jealous of his power. It was a part of history, all that speculation, but she knew that was not what had happened. She hadn’t been there, but she knew.
‘There were witnesses, of course,’ she said slowly.
Anna had pored over every written word about Luca’s death, stored the papers until they grew yellow, then thrown them away one day, suddenly afraid of the questions Paolo might ask. There had been a street trader who swore he’d seen someone give Luca a push, just at the last moment, just as the tram loomed behind him. Luca had reached the Largo dell’ Torre Argentina, where the great steel and glass monsters shot past each other thick and fast, their wheels shrieking against the tracks, gliding unstoppably towards their destinations. It was less than ten minutes after he had left her.
Then, the witness said, no doubt clutching his tray of sweets in case someone stole it while he was talking to a reporter, the mysterious assailant had vanished, quite vanished. Just like an assassin, they’re taught to disappear into thin air once the deed is done, he’d announced with an air of certainty. Another witness, a pale, nervous young woman out on an errand for her mother, had fainted dead away at the sight. When she was revived, sitting in a nearby bar with a glass of warm water and brandy, she said she’d seen him, positively seen Luca Magno walk in front of the tram. He’d turned, looked up at it and then stepped out in front of it quite deliberately. This was the report that haunted Anna, but she knew it was not true, because she’d seen the look in Luca’s eye when he had left her no more than ten minutes earlier. Could her memory so deceive her? It was true that in her misery, in the agony of self-examination and reproach that followed his death, she had doubted everything, but she knew now, remembering how it had been, that he would not have killed himself with what she had told him fresh in his mind. It was too new, too astounding; he would have needed more time to turn it into despair.
Ahead of them came a whoop of pure excitement. The boys had come to the waterfall, and Anna and Paolo quickened their pace. They passed through a stile that kept the cattle from the waterfall and its precipitous drop, and there were the boys, hopping from leg to leg as they stripped off their shorts, giggling as they fell over each other in their haste. The path ended in a narrow beach of mossy stones, the dark water of the river narrowing towards two giant, squared-off rocks, flat on the top. On this side of the waterfall the river was deep and dark and narrow, forced between the rocks; beyond, on the other side, Paolo could hear but not see, as the water gushed out white and thundered into a pool below.
Paolo went on ahead to make sure that there was enough water for them to jump into, clambering on to the great flat rocks, which were still warm with the day’s heat. Below him the pool was ice-green, foaming with the falling water and deep; he’d never been able to understand why here the water was so pale, a fairy colour, while upriver it was so dark.
‘All right,’ he said, smiling at the boys, ‘you can jump.’ And as they shot past him, gasping with excitement on the brink, Sam, the older one, glanced back at him for reassurance, and then they were gone. He turned back to Anna.
Looking at her son, Anna hesitated. What could she tell him?
There was only one out of all the stories that had rung true. An account lacking in drama, perhaps but that did not necessarily make it false. A middle-aged woman on her way home from the mar
ket, clutching a string bag containing some onions, a stick of celery and a piece of beef skirt, her coat buttoned up to the chin and her face sagging with the memory of what she had seen.
‘Tell me, please,’ Anna had said, begging her, once she’d tracked the woman down to her little one-room apartment above the roaring traffic on the Viale Aventino. ‘Tell me.’
He’d had the oddest look on his face, the woman said, as if he was dreaming. She’d been struck by it, a half-smile as if remembering something sweet. He’d been walking along the pavement towards her, he’d had a hat on, pushed back from his forehead and she remembered thinking him handsome. She hadn’t noticed the tram, either, she’d been looking at this young man – well, youngish – and something about him had made her think of her own husband, when they’d just met and he’d arrived to collect her from her father’s house so that they could walk out together. A dreaming look, looking forward to some sweet thing.
‘He’s dead now, my husband,’ the woman had said, apologizing for Anna didn’t know what, for being a widow, for being a sad case, for not being able to tell the story straight. The room smelled stale, of laundry not aired, leftover food, and loneliness.
‘It was an accident,’ Anna said to Paolo, and hearing the words she knew that she believed it, finally. No one had been to blame, not Anna, not the unborn Paolo, not Amalia and her daughter, not the tram driver.
It happened as if she’d been in a dream herself, the woman had said, looking down into her lap, her hands working nervously. Or as though the whole scene had been slowed down, the women in their coats pushing past, the man selling lottery tickets, the grumbling queues waiting for the trams on the periphery of her vision; she’d watched it happen. The man – Luca Magno – he kept coming towards her, one foot in front of another, his hat jaunty on his head, not looking at anything but something playing behind his eyes. Then just as the tram came past, looming up behind him, he seemed to lurch as though he’d missed a step, and he tilted sideways. She saw a look of disbelief on his face, puzzlement. He fell the wrong way. And after that all she could remember was the noise, the terrible raucous shriek of brakes, and someone screaming.
Late Season Page 28