The Gulf Between

by Maxine Alterio

  Under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, love, lies and disenchantment lead to a menacing showdown in this suspense-filled novel.

  A foreigner is seriously injured not far from Julia’s safe Queenstown hideaway.

  Why does he have her name in his wallet?

  His unexpected arrival takes Julia back forty-five years to London, where as an impulsive young woman she first met Benito Moretti — a meeting that was to change her life, taking her to the glittering Gulf of Naples. There Julia found herself pitted against her belligerent mother-in-law and Benito’s sinister brother in a lethal battle for her husband and children.

  Julia remembered her father saying,

  We’re all as sick as our secrets. Words that still haunt her.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  Follow Penguin Random House

  For my family

  It is incompleteness that haunts us

  — Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

  1

  New Zealand, 1994

  Sirens are wailing in the distance, a rarity in Queenstown, at any hour, day or night. I’m inside my home on the rise, surrounded by mountains and the commanding vista of Lake Wakatipu, about to wash the breakfast dishes, feeling sleep-deprived and out of sorts. A deep-rooted nightmare ensnared me in the early hours. I’d woken drenched to the skin, the top sheet wound around my neck, tight as a noose. Outdoors, the uproar is coming closer. I turn off the kitchen tap and listen. There’s an ambulance and two or three police cars heading in this direction. I cover my ears and close my eyes. But I cannot block out the clamour or the memories it evokes. I once stood in another house, on another hillside, in another time. There I looked out to the Mediterranean Sea and across to Mount Vesuvius.

  In an instant the past roars into view.

  I am on the Vomero, overlooking the Bay of Naples. An English-woman with an Italian husband and two children living amid the constant racket erupting from every direction, every dwelling, vehicle, person. The entire population, it seemed to me, behaving as if they swallowed uppers with their espressos. In less time than it took to light a cigarette, ordinary people could turn a humdrum conversation into a full-blown slanging match or an affectionate gesture into an ominous hand signal.

  At first these switches unsettled me. Likewise, the compulsion these same people had to dial everything up to full volume. On the whole, Londoners with similar backgrounds to mine disagreed and made up in private, whereas in Naples the locals treated their streets as theatres. Dramas took centre stage. Emotions ran high. Disputes unfolded for anyone within earshot to hear and see.

  Openness, however, was not a trait I observed in my in-laws, the Morettis. And not every street show was entertaining.

  A week after we arrived I set off for a short walk, leaving Ben to mind our youngsters, Matteo and Francesca, who were engrossed in Carosello, a TV comedy with a cast of puppets. I hadn’t gone far when a police van screeched to a halt at a property opposite my mother-in-law’s villa. Armed police emerged from the vehicle, stormed the house, dragged out three men and threw them one by one into the rear of the van with less care than a butcher would when handling sides of beef. After locking up the trio, an officer pulled a hip flask from his trouser pocket, took a swig and offered the rest to his workmates with such swagger you would have thought he was at a football game celebrating a goal. I remained rooted to the spot, one hand on the front gate, the other over my mouth. Unconcerned, as far as I could tell, that I had witnessed their strongman tactics they fired off a volley of catcalls. I bolted up the driveway, their laughter ringing in my ears.

  Altercations between law enforcers and thugs were as common as women peddling religious figurines and protective amulets. A city founded on calamity and superstition doesn’t discriminate. Men, women and children have to work at surviving. I was no different.

  Today, safe on the other side of the world, I tug my thoughts away from events that occurred more than thirty years ago and return to the present. Impatient to resume my routine — the act of restoring things to their rightful place calms me — I put the marmalade and bread in the pantry. But as I pop the butter in the fridge, memories of another kitchen pull me back.

  In a pan on a wood-burning stove, tomatoes and garlic simmered in olive oil. From a stone jar on the bench I took a wooden spoon worn thin from use and stirred the sauce. Satisfied with the consistency I tipped chicken and Parmesan ravioli into a pot of boiling water. The table was set for six: three generations. I wanted to get through the meal without anyone falling out but nothing was straightforward in this hilltop villa. The boots of Fascists had marched across its flagstones.

  Here in Queenstown my heart contracts at the memory of once inhabiting the same space as these thugs, although not at the same time, eliciting a sensation similar to a forearm pressing against a windpipe. I grip the edge of the bench, stare into the sink where I had been about to wash a single plate and knife. The image of the family I have in my mind slowly disperses and I am alone again in this house in the Southern Hemisphere, gazing at a familiar blue lake.

  Outside, the wailing intensifies. I move to a larger window. Watch two late-model Toyotas come to a stop as a blur of blue and white zooms by, and another, white with a red cross, sirens blaring, flashing lights spinning, swirls of dust settling on the golden-leaved poplars lining the road, turning them beige.

  At the intersection, the sirens shift to a higher pitch.

  I return to the bench, pick up a coffeepot and set it over a flickering gas flame.

  It soon gives off a rich aroma, conjuring up images of sweet-scented lavender, bread dough at rest, sun-ripened lemons, a serpentine coastline, outdoor markets, gelatos, laughter and tears. I thought the love we had known in London would continue in Naples. I thought families stayed together. I thought we were stronger than we turned out to be.

  While I’m on the patio drinking coffee, the telephone rings, jolting me back to the present. It’s Hester, the wife of a doctor who treats me for insomnia. As his secretary, she has access to my medical file. Not that it matters. I haven’t told her husband Patrick what keeps me awake. She and I are members of the same amateur repertory society. I can’t call her a friend, although she has done her best to turn me into one. Entirely my fault it
hasn’t happened. I turn down invitations to make up the numbers at dinner parties: socialising with couples who have a divorced or widowed desperado in their circle searching for a replacement pudding-maker has me running for the hills.

  ‘Julia,’ Hester says, ‘I don’t know where to start. This is rather difficult.’ She’s speaking in a fast, urgent tone.

  ‘What’s wrong? Is Patrick OK?’ I hope so. He’s a good doctor.

  ‘Yes, yes, he’s fine.’ She clears her throat. ‘There’s been an accident this side of the Shotover Bridge. According to a witness, a rental car barrelled into a parked ute. It’s thought the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Patrick was called out. He rang me from the crash site.’

  ‘What has this got to do with me?’

  There is a sharp intake of breath. Then she says, ‘An attending police officer found a wallet among the wreckage.’

  Visions of another crash, fire consuming the occupants, flick into my mind. Before the memory of those flames engulfs me, I smother them with a swathe of well-honed strategies and say, ‘Has someone from repertory been hurt?’

  ‘No, the driver’s a foreigner. I’m calling on a hunch.’ She gives a strange dry little cough. ‘He has serious head injuries. Neither helicopter was available. So the paramedics are taking him through to Dunedin in an ambulance. Julia, I wonder if—’

  ‘Has Patrick asked for me?’

  Occasionally I translated for patients with little or no English: this year holidaymakers from Turin with a sick child, last winter a skier from Lombardy who fractured his tibia on the slopes of Coronet Peak.

  Hester has gone quiet. I’m about to repeat what I said when she resumes talking, though now in a low, tense tone. ‘The same officer showed Patrick a black-and-white photograph clipped to a passport.’ She pauses a second time. I’m too apprehensive to ask the question swirling through my mind. ‘It’s a photo of a boy and a woman,’ she says at last, ‘with two names written in pencil on the back.’

  My heart clatters against my ribcage. ‘Did Patrick say what they were?’

  ‘Should I close the surgery and come to your house, Julia?’

  ‘Just tell me. Please.’

  ‘Matteo and Julia. Matteo and Julia Moretti, which is why I felt I had to call …’ Her voice tails off.

  I’m perspiring. Unsteady on my feet. I tighten my grip on the receiver. ‘Did Patrick mention the birth date on the passport?’ My little boy, my Matteo, will be forty-four, almost middle-aged.

  ‘Yes.’ There is a rustle of paper. ‘Twenty-first September, 1950.’

  I drop the phone, dash inside and snatch my car keys and purse off the bench. Without stopping to consider whether I’m in a fit state to drive, I sprint to the garage, wrench open the door of my car. The ambulance has a half-hour head start. Maybe more.

  2

  I clench the steering wheel, tight, hard. Had Matteo been on his way to see me? Perhaps he never stopped thinking about me either. The thought fills me with hope. Unless he’s here as a tourist, unaware that I live nearby. No, that’s too much of a coincidence. Although long-haul travellers have been known to fall asleep behind the wheel of their rental car, Matteo wouldn’t, not if he intended to contact me. He’d be tense, alert and nervy, as I am at present. But why show up without warning? We haven’t seen each other for years. And now he’s injured.

  A chill stalks up and down my spine. I shake uncontrollably.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ I say out loud. Concentrate on something mundane. Or pleasant, if that’s what it takes to keep these wheels on the road.

  I fixate on my first trip to Queenstown in the Sixties, one of several holidays I had in the resort town before settling there. My daughter Francesca, and Oliver, Matteo’s godfather and a close family friend, accompanied me. We stepped off the plane into what we came to think of as a time warp. Sheep grazed in paddocks alongside the runway. Two cars on the same road constituted a traffic jam. No one padlocked their bicycles or secured their properties.

  Nowadays the place is a mecca for adventure-seekers. Paragliders soar in harnesses through pristine airspace, tweaking fabric wings, exploiting every source of lift. As an eight-year-old Matteo flew a kite on Streatham Common and learned to read the wind, too. We were living in London then, all of us together, happy.

  I stifle a sob and focus on the windy stretch of road unfurling in front of me.

  Below to my left, the swift turquoise water of the Clutha winds through the gorge. Further along on the flat the same river provides irrigation for peach, apricot and cherry orchards, stone fruits that need bone-chilling winters to flourish. Bare-branched and austere, their autumnal forms remind me of the religious statues scattered throughout Naples and the wider environs of Campania.

  White-knuckled and taut-eyed I shoot past these southern New Zealand sentinels, determined to concentrate on driving, but my mind has other plans. Between Clyde and Roxburgh, as I wind through schist-strewn land either side of the highway, it alights on the knot of words I have carried within me in case I ever came face-to-face with Matteo again. The prospect in reach, I doubt my ability to release them. They cannot excuse my actions, only explain them. I thought before we met in person we would talk on the phone, slowly ease back into each other’s lives.

  Don’t die, son. Please don’t die.

  Near Lawrence I spot the rear of an ambulance swinging around a tight bend. Foot flat on the accelerator I overtake a truck and a van and tuck in behind the vehicle with the St John sign.

  All I want is a chance to put things right between us.

  What if another Matteo Moretti is inside? Or it’s the right one, but I’m too late?

  Gloomy refrains play over and over in my mind until my head aches.

  Neither Ben nor his brother, Ernesto, will have spoken well of me after I left the Vomero, the neighbourhood we lived in and where, on top of caring for their mother, I was expected to attend to domestic matters, be subservient, never voice an opinion or contradict a male. Attitudes nowhere near as pronounced in Ben or in the life he and I had together beforehand with the children in Chelsea. Or at least that’s what I thought. It’s hard to know for sure. Memory is an unreliable guide.

  My thoughts flit to us walking hand-in-hand through Holland Park. Twilight. No human sounds, just birdsong and the rustle of leaves underfoot. ‘Tell me about Ernesto,’ I said. ‘Is he a handsome devil, too?’

  ‘We’re poles apart.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘He’s a risk-taker.’

  ‘You took a gamble coming to England. And you married me.’ I elbowed him playfully in the side, giggled a bit.

  Ben stopped walking and stared into the fringe of a dark woodland area. ‘I avoid trouble,’ he said. ‘Ernesto embraces it.’

  ‘So he’s a hoot, a real party animal?’

  Ben had given a long drawn-out sigh. ‘He thrives on danger.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘He has to win regardless of the cost. At school, he shot to the top of the dung heap because he invented the code “No dare too outrageous or too perilous”. Everyone revered him. It went to his head. He kept upping the stakes.’

  Ben withdrew his hand from mine and set off at a brisk pace.

  I had to run to catch up. ‘How far did he take it?’

  An incredulous expression spread across Ben’s face, as though he couldn’t quite believe we were still talking about his brother. ‘Did it end badly?’ I asked.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, forehead to crown. ‘His behaviour escalated during the war,’ he said, ‘and it went up another notch after he found the body of our father, Sergio, outside the Basilica, a cardboard sign hanging from his neck — “Collaborator” scrawled across it.’

  ‘You’re kidding. Bloody hell.’ As I absorbed the information I wondered what had led to his father’s violent demise and why Ben hadn’t told me about it earlier. I was about to accuse him of deception when he swung about and faced me head-on, hunc
hed shoulders almost touching his earlobes, eyes unfathomable oily-black slicks. Unnerved, I said, ‘So Ernesto’s nothing like you.’

  ‘I like to think this is correct.’

  ‘You don’t sound sure.’

  ‘We came from the same womb and grew up under the same roof.’

  Until Ben uttered these words, I thought he had come through a war-ravaged childhood largely unscathed.

  At last Dunedin comes into sight. Ignoring the traffic lights, I follow the ambulance along the one-way system and around a corner into the hospital carpark. The vehicle pulls up outside the Emergency Department. The ambulance ramp is lowered. I run from my car towards the entrance.

  The paramedics are bringing a man strapped to a stretcher towards me. Please let him be Matteo. We’re two steps away, three at the most. I peer at the bandaged head, the distinctive brow-line, honey-toned skin, a straight nose ending with a soft tip. Any doubt falls away. This man is my son.

  I’ve longed for this moment. Dreamed of it, imagined it coming about in a hundred different ways. Never like this, though.

  ‘Is he going to make it?’ I ask the paramedic nearest me.

  He says, ‘We need to get him to a theatre fast.’

  I run alongside the stretcher, hand outstretched, saying ‘Matteo, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry’, but before I can touch him someone in a white coat shunts me aside.

  A nurse takes me through the foyer into a waiting room. There she says, ‘Once everything is under control I’ll fetch you a cup of tea and bring the paperwork for you to fill in. You are related?’

  I think of those finely arched eyebrows, the same as my father’s. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘His mother?’ she asks.

  A sob catches in my throat. I bob my head. The nurse pats me on the arm. ‘Stay here,’ she says kindly. ‘The surgeon will come and talk to you after he’s operated. Try not to worry. Your son’s in good hands.’

  I sink into a chair, out of sight of anyone milling about the corridor. I want to gather my thoughts. Get everything straight in my mind. Recall the girl I was before falling into marriage and motherhood.