The Night Falling

This blind urge to destruction, this bloody and suicidal will to annihilation, has lurked for centuries beneath the patient endurance of daily toil. Every revolt on the part of the peasants springs out of an elementary desire for justice deep at the dark bottom of their hearts.

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Carlo Levi

Chapter One – Clare, afterwards

They must all change trains at Bari and the platform fills with shambling people, creased and surly like sleepers newly woken. Mostly Italians; mostly men. Clare takes a breath and tastes the sea, and suddenly she needs to see it. She goes alone, leaving everything she owns and not caring; walking unhurriedly when once she might have been anxious – fearful of theft, of impropriety, of the next train leaving without her. This new fearlessness is one of the things she has gained. Everything she’s seen and felt over the summer, every wild thing that has happened has purged the fear from her; but she doesn’t yet know if gains like this one will balance out the loss.

Bari’s city streets seem alien after so many weeks in Gioia and at the masseria; they are too big, too wide, too long. But there are the same knots of restless men, and the same feeling of waiting violence. Clare draws some curious looks as she goes, with her worn-out foreign clothes, her fair hair, her air of detachment. This could well be the last day she ever spends in Puglia – if the choice is hers, it will be. After today, after she rejoins the train, she will leave it and every second, and every passing mile, will carry her closer to home. This thought slows her steps. Home is not home any more. That, like everything else, has changed; home is another of the losses, stacked up against the gains. But as she continues to walk she wonders about it, and decides it could also be a good thing. A part of her release.

The pavement is lustrous, worn by use, polished by salt spray; gradually the light in the sky changes, and seems to lift and widen. Her gaze is drawn upwards for a moment, but then the street opens onto the quayside and the sea is there in front of her, with the early morning sun still soft on its surface, and the colour of it is a revelation. Clare walks to the very edge of the land, until all she can see is the blue. A blue that seems alive, that seems to breathe. This is what she was looking for, what she’d hoped to see. She lets the colour soak her, like it soaks the sky, and even though it’s painful it’s somehow still a comfort. A reminder to go forwards, and not look back. She stays there for a long time because she knows that when she turns away this colour – this exact blue – will be just another memory, the best and bitterest of all.

Chapter Two – Ettore

He has heard another man say, on the long, dark walk before dawn, that hunger is like a stone in your shoe. At first you think you’ll just ignore it – it’s an irritation, but it doesn’t really hinder you. But then it makes you limp, and makes it hard to walk. The pain grows. It cuts deeper and deeper into your flesh, crippling you, slowing your work, catching the corporal’s cruel eye. When it reaches the bone it grinds in and becomes a part of you, and you can think of nothing else. It rusts your skeleton; it turns your muscles to rotten wood. The man warmed to his theme as they trudged, and felt their bones rusting. He kept thinking of ways to embellish it, hours afterwards – the comments coming apropos of nothing and puzzling the men who hadn’t walked within earshot of him that morning – as their arms swung the scythes to cut the wheat, as the sun rose and burnt them, as blisters swelled beneath their calluses. Over the squeak and clatter of wooden finger-guards on wooden handles, his embellishments kept coming. Then it turns your blood to dust. Then it fells you. It creeps up your spine and lodges in your brain. And all the while Ettore thought it was a stupid comparison, though he said nothing. Because, after all, you could always pull off your shoe and kick the stone away.

He can’t kick his hunger away, any more than he could wake up if Paola didn’t shake him. She’s rough as she does it, and punches him if he doesn’t wake at once; her knuckles are sharp against the bones of his shoulder. She moves as briskly and abruptly in the pre-dawn darkness as she does at day’s end, and he doesn’t know how she manages it. How she has the energy, or how she sees so well in the dark. Other men, conditioned from childhood, wake of their own volition at three, at four, at five at the latest, but by then the chances of work are slipping away – it’s first come, first served, and the queues are long. Other men don’t need their sisters to rouse them as Ettore does, but without Paola he would slumber on. He would sleep the day away soundly, profoundly. Disastrously. For a few seconds he lies still, and asks nothing of his body. Just a few seconds of rest, in darkness so complete he can’t be sure whether he’s opened his eyes or not. There’s a smell of tired air, of earth and the rank stink of the prisor, which needs emptying. Even as Ettore notices it, the collector arrives outside – the slow plod of mule hooves in the small courtyard, the creaking of wheels.

‘Scia’ scinn!’ the collector calls, all weary and hoarse. ‘Scia’ scinn!’ Hurry up! Come down! Sighing sharply, Paola checks that the wooden lid is tight to the ceramic prisor pot, then hefts it up and carries it out. The stink gets stronger. In the dark, Paola says, at least your neighbours can’t see as you tip it into the collector’s huge barrel. But as the little cart moves away, jolting on the uneven stones, there’s always a trail of human waste on the ground behind it, slippery and foul.

Paola shuts the door gently behind her, and keeps her footsteps soft. It’s not her brother or Valerio that she doesn’t want to disturb, but her son, Iacopo. She likes the men out of the room before he wakes, so that she can nurse him in peace, but this rarely happens. With the scratch and flare of a match, and the growing glow of a single candle, the baby is awake. He makes a small sound of surprise and then mewls quietly in protest, but he is sensible and doesn’t cry. Crying is hard work. Part of the ammonia stink in the cramped room is coming from the child. Without water to wash him, or his blankets, it’s hard to get rid of the smell; there’s the sourness of vomit, too. Ettore knows that once she is alone Paola will wet a rag to clean him, but she’s careful not to let Valerio see her do so. He is fiercely jealous of their stock of water.

Livia. Ettore shuts his eyes on the candle flame; sees its red imprint on the inside of his skull. This is the order in which his thoughts run each day, every day: hunger, then the reluctance to rise, then Livia. Impulses really, rather than thoughts; Livia is as visceral, as connected to his body and his instincts rather than to his mind as the other two things. Livia. It’s less a word and more of a feeling, irresistibly linked to memories of smell and touch and taste and loss. Good losses as well as bad – the loss of care, for a moment; the loss of all responsibility, of all fear and anger, washed away by the simple joy of her. The loss of doubt, the loss of misery. The way her fingers would taste after a day spent cleaning almonds – like something green and ripe you could eat. The way she seemed to feed him, so that when they were together he forgot to be hungry. Just for that while. He can picture the exact grain of the skin on her calves, soft as apricots at the backs of her knees. And then there’s the loss of her, like a slash with ragged edges. Like the onslaught of ice a summer hailstorm brings: bruising, freezing, killing. The loss of her. The muscles around his ribs pull tight, and shake.

‘Up, Ettore! Don’t you dare go back to sleep.’ Paola’s voice is hard as well – it’s not just her face and the way she moves. Everything about her has gone hard, from the flesh on her bones to her words and the contents of her heart. Only when she holds Iacopo is there softness in her eyes, like the last remembered light after sunset.

‘You’re the stone in my shoe that I can’t ignore,’ he tells her, standing up, stretching the stiff cords of muscle that run down his back.

‘Lucky for you,’ Paola retorts. ‘If it wasn’t for me we’d all starve while you lay dreaming.’

‘I don’t dream,’ says Ettore.

Paola doesn’t spare him a glance. She crosses to the far side of the room, to the recessed ledge in the stone wall where Valerio sleeps. She does not touch him as she wakes him; she only speaks, loudly, near his ear.

‘It’s past four, Father.’ They know Valerio is awake when he starts to cough. He rolls onto his side, curls up like a child, and coughs, and coughs. Then he swears, spits, and swings his legs to the floor. Paola glares.

‘Vallarta again today, boy, if we’re lucky,’ Valerio says to Ettore. His voice rattles in his chest. Paola and Ettore share a quick, meaningful glance.

‘Best hurry then,’ says Paola. She pours them both a cup of water from a chipped amphora, and the ease with which she does it shows that the jar is already less than half full. Paola must wait for their appointed day before she can go to the fountain for more – it’s either that or buying it from a dealer, which they cannot do. Not at such prices.

Masseria Vallarta is the biggest farm near Gioia, some twelve hundred hectares. It’s one of the few, even now at harvest time, that has been hiring men every day. Before the war this was the one time of year when work was guaranteed – weeks of it. The men would sleep out in the fields rather than bothering to walk back and forth every morning and night; waking with soil in the creases of their clothes and dew on their faces, and the bite of stones underneath them. The debts of the winter could finally be earned back, and paid off – the rent on their measly apartments, bills for food and drink and gambling. Now, even the harvest is no guarantee of work. The proprietors say they can’t afford to hire the men. They say that after last year’s drought, and the vacuum of the war, they are going out of business. If they are hired to Masseria Vallarta today, Ettore and Valerio will walk ten kilometres to reach the farm, and start work at sun-up. There’s no food from the night before; they ate it all. There might be something at the farm for them, if they are hired, though it will come out of their wages if there is. The men stamp their feet into their boots, button their battered waistcoats. And as he goes out into the cool of the morning, into the ageless shadows of the little courtyard and the narrow streets that lead to Piazza Plebiscito, where they will queue for work, Ettore makes his promise. He makes the same promise every morning, and means it with every fibre of himself: I will find out who did it, Livia. And that man will burn.

Chapter Three – Clare

It’s always a shock to see how much Pip has grown during term time, while he’s away for weeks on end, but this time it seems like something more fundamental has changed. Something more than his height, the length of his face or the width of his shoulders. Clare studies him, and tries to put her finger on it. He has fallen asleep with his head against the dusty window of the train and his dog-eared copy of Bleak House resting against his chest. Fine strands of his hair have fallen forward onto his forehead, and shake with the movement of the carriage. With his eyes shut and his mouth drooping slightly open, she can still see the child he was. The little, lonely person she first met. His face is more angular now – the jaw stronger, the brows heavier, the nose slightly longer and more pointed. But his light brown hair is as flyaway as ever, and he doesn’t need to shave yet. Clare looks closely, checking. There’s no shadow of whiskers on his chin or top lip. Her relief at this is profound, and makes her uneasy.

She turns to look out of the window. The landscape is unchanging. Mile after mile of farmland; wheat fields, for the most part, interspersed now and then with orchards of faded olive trees, and gnarled almond trees with their trunks twisted and black. When Pip is a man, an adult, when he finishes all his schooling, when he leaves home for good… Clare swallows, fearfully. But she can’t prevent it, of course. She can’t cling on to him. She won’t let herself. Perhaps this is what has changed, this time: he’s become enough like a grown man that she can no longer deny it’s happening, and that one day soon he will separate himself from her, and start his own life. She’s not his mother, so perhaps she should feel the wrench of this a bit less. But a mother has an unbreakable bond, the bond of blood and heritance, of knowing that her child was once a part of her, and in some ways always will be. Clare doesn’t have that. Her bond with Pip feels more breakable, more delicate; perhaps every bit as precious, but also with the potential to melt away without trace. She fears that most of all. He is only fifteen, she reassures herself. Still a child. The train gives a lurch to one side, and Pip’s head bangs against the glass. He starts awake, snapping his mouth closed, squinting.

‘All right there, Pip?’ Clare says, smiling. He nods affably.

‘We must be nearly there.’ He yawns like a cat, unashamedly. His teeth are just starting to crowd at the front, jostling for space.

‘Pip,’ she protests. ‘It’s like staring into the abyss.’

‘Sorry, Clare,’ he mumbles.

‘We are nearly there.’ Clare gazes out at the bleached grass of a field, blurring past. ‘We must be nearly there.’

Her mouth feels as stale as her crumpled clothes and her sticky skin. The train is stuffy, airless – it’s no wonder Pip keeps nodding off. She might have done so herself, but Boyd cautioned her about the Italians and their light fingers, so she’s too worried about their purses and possessions, and what Boyd would say if they were robbed after he’d warned her. She wants to stretch her legs and wash her hair, but at the same time, as a few scattered buildings come into view, she suddenly doesn’t want to arrive at Gioia del Colle. There’s something wonderful about travelling – about being moved across the long miles of the earth with no sense of responsibility, their aim achieved purely by waiting patiently. And, because she and Pip are alone in the compartment, there’s only the ease and pleasure of his company. No manners to be minded, no struggle to find small talk. Their long silences are thoughtful, companionable, never uncomfortable. And she’s also nervous about what waits at the end of the journey.

Boyd has committed them to spending the entire summer with people she has never met, and knows precious little about. No amount of protest would sway him from the plan; and she couldn’t even write down her reluctance in a letter to him, as she preferred to – to make sure she kept her argument straight and her tone of voice even. Not when he was already out in Italy, and the instruction for her and Pip to join him came faintly down a rustling phone line. In desperation she’d suggested a fortnight, rather than the whole season, but Boyd hadn’t seemed to hear her. And just like that, the restful summer at home she’d been looking forward to – alone with Pip, watching the sweet peas climb their bamboo canes and playing whist in the shade of the high garden wall – had vanished. The Italians who will be their hosts are clients of Boyd’s; Cardetta, an old acquaintance from New York, and his wife, who is charming. Beyond that, she knows only that they are rich.

The train has passed cone-shaped huts built of rock, like strange hats discarded by stone giants. It has passed fields full of working men, swinging scythes; dark, thin men who did not look up as the train clattered by. It has passed small carriages pulled by donkeys, and farm wagons pulled by oxen, and not a single motor car. Nothing, beyond the train itself, to betray that the year is 1921, not 1821. Clare is struggling to picture what rich might look like, this far south; it worries her that there might not be electricity, or indoor plumbing; that the water might make them sick. In the north they say that the country south of Rome is best avoided, and that the country south of Naples is a barren no-man’s-land, peopled by sub-humans – a godless, under-evolved race too base to drag itself out of poverty and dissolution. Pip’s school had been happy to release him early for the summer break when she wrote to say that they would be taking him to Italy. What better way for Philip to finish the academic year than by visiting the very treasures of art and civilised thought he has spent the recent months studying? wrote the master. Clare let him picture Rome, Florence and Venice, since that was the conclusion he’d leapt to, and left it at that. She herself has never heard of any of the major towns here in the south: Bari, Lecce, Taranto. And the town where they are headed, Gioia del Colle, was difficult to find on the map.

Just half an hour later the train creeps into the station, between two near-deserted platforms. Clare smiles at Pip as they stand and stretch and gather themselves, but it’s she who wants reassurance, not Pip. Hot, heavy air is the first thing to greet them, and it has the smell of blood on it. The unmistakable metal reek of gore. The deep, fortifying breath Clare had been taking sticks in her throat, and she looks around, repulsed. The sky is an immaculate blue, the sun low and yellow in the west. They move away from the hissing train, and the buzz of insects fills their ears.

‘What’s that smell?’ says Pip, holding the creased sleeve of his blazer to his nose. But then they hear a shout, and see a figure waving from the window of a car.

‘Ahoy, dearly beloveds!’ Boyd’s voice is tight with excitement. He waves his hat and laughs, and when he emerges from the vehicle it’s with an unfolding of long limbs, the unfurling of a long spine. He is tall and narrow and, ever fearful of appearing clumsy, he moves with exaggerated grace.

‘Ahoy!’ Clare calls, relieved. She has brought them this far, and has the soothing feeling of handing control back to her husband. She and Pip cross quickly to the car, and Clare turns to wave the porter over with their luggage.

‘Make sure you’ve all your bags. I wouldn’t put it past them to miss one and carry it all the way to Taranto,’ says Boyd.

‘No, this is all of them.’ Boyd hugs Clare, hard, then turns to Pip and hesitates. This is new, too – this slight awkwardness between them. It tells Clare that Boyd can see his son’s encroaching adulthood just as clearly as she can. They shake hands, then smile, then bashfully embrace.

‘Philip. You’re so tall! Look – far taller than Clare now,’ Boyd says.

‘I’ve been taller than Clare since the Christmas before last, Father,’ Pip points out, slighted.

‘Have you?’ Boyd looks troubled; his smile turns strange, as though he ought to have known or remembered this. Clare is quick to deflect him.

‘Well, you do spend most of your time sitting in a chair, or on a bicycle, or in a boat. It’s hard to tell your height,’ she says. Just then the breeze blows and brings the tang of blood and violence anew. Boyd pales; what’s left of his smile vanishes.

‘Come on, climb in. The slaughterhouse isn’t half a mile south of here, and I can’t bear the smell of it.’

The car looks brand new, although there’s a fine veil of dust dulling its crimson paintwork. Pip examines it at appreciative length before they climb in. The driver, dark and inscrutable, barely nods at Clare as he and the porter secure their bags, but his eyes return to her, again and again. She tries not to notice. He would be handsome but for a harelip; a neat divide in his upper lip, and in the gum behind it, where his teeth are twisted and uneven.

‘You might get a few looks, dear girl,’ Boyd tells her in low tones, as the car pulls away. ‘It’s the blond hair. Rather a novelty down here.’

‘I see,’ she says. ‘And do you get looks, too?’ She smiles, and Boyd takes her hand. His hair is also fair, though now it’s filling with grey it looks more silvery, and seems to have an absence of colour. It’s thin across the top of his scalp; his hairline has crept back and back from his forehead and temples, like an ebb tide slipping from a shore. This is what Clare notices about him when they have been apart for a while, though this time it has only been a month: that he is growing old. He asks how their journey was and what they saw, what they ate and if they slept. He asks how their garden in Hampstead looked, before they left it, and when Pip’s school report is due. He asks all this with a strange desperation, a kind of manic neediness that immediately puts Clare on edge, at some bone-deep level where memory and experience reside. Not again, she begs silently. Not again. She sifts hurriedly through her mind for something she’s missed – some sign, something he might have said on the phone, or before he even left; some hint of what the problem might be. She has done as he asked, and brought herself and Pip all this way to him, and yet there’s something wrong. There’s clearly something wrong. They leave the station behind in a cloud of pale dust, and though fresher air comes pummelling in through the windows, Clare is certain she can still smell blood.

Chapter Four – Ettore

Piazza Plebiscito is full of men dressed in the typical black. These are the giornatari, the day labourers; men with nothing to their name, and no means to feed themselves but the strength of their backs. In the shadowy dawn they are a dark scattering against the pale stones of the pavement. The murmur of voices is low; the men shuffle their feet, cough, exchange a few low words. Here and there an argument starts, shouts ring out and there’s a scuffle. Once he and Valerio are in their midst Ettore can smell the grease in their hair, the sweat of all the days before on their clothes, the hot, stale fug of their breath. It’s a smell that has been with him, all around him, since the first days he can remember. It’s the smell of hard work and scarcity. It’s the smell of men as animals, muscle and bone made hard by graft. The overseers are there, on their horses or standing holding them by the reins, or sitting in little open-topped carts. They hire five men here, thirty there; one shepherd wants a pair of men to help trim his flock’s feet. It’s easy work but he can pay next to nothing, and the men eye him in disgust, knowing that one or other of them will have to take his low wages.

This is how it was always arranged, until the Great War. Those that want work come to the piazza, those that want workers meet them there. A wage will be offered, and men selected. There is no negotiation. Then, after the war, things changed. For two years, things were different – the worker’s unions and the socialists won some concessions, because during the war men like Ettore and Valerio, who had so little cause to fight, were promised things to keep them in the trenches. They were promised land, better wages, an end to the unending hardship of life, and afterwards they fought to make the landowners and proprietors keep those promises. For a few febrile months, it seemed like they might have won. They established a closed shop of labour, in which only union men could be hired, and no one from outside the county. Wages and hours were fixed. The labour exchange kept a roster to make sure each man got his fair share of work, and there was to be a union representative on each farm, to make sure conditions were met. This was only the year before, towards the end of 1920. But somehow it’s all coming unravelled again. The tide in this simmering feud, which is generations – centuries – old, has turned again.

It’s a strange conflict – one around which everyday life keeps moving like a river around rocks. It has to, because the men must eat, and to eat they must work. So life must go on, even when the rocks in question are things like the massacre at Masseria Girardi Natale, the summer before, when workers armed with only their tools and their anger were shot down by the proprietor and his mounted guards. Now the contracts all the proprietors signed are being ignored, and men who protest aren’t hired. There are rumours of a new type of brute squad: teams of thugs led by veteran officers – captains and lieutenants tainted by the madness of the trenches, who remember the peasants’ reluctance to fight, and despise them for it. The peasants are used to hired gangs – mazzieri, named after the mazza, the cudgels they carry – but these new ones are something else. They are being armed and abetted by the police, unofficially of course. And they have a new name – they are the fasci di combattimento. They are members of the new fascist party. And they have a single-mindedness that’s scaring the men.

Some nights Ettore goes to a bar and reads the newspapers out loud to the unlettered. He reads from the Corriere delle Puglie, and from La Conquista, and from Avanti!. He reads of attacks on syndicalist leaders, on chambers of labour, and on socialist town halls in other towns. In Gioia del Colle, the old way of recruiting has slowly crept back into the piazza, and the two sides stare at one another across this bitter divide – workers and employers. Each waiting to see who will blink first. In February there was a general strike in protest at the massing and arming of the new squads, and their brutality, and the breaking of the contracts. The strike held for three days but it was like a finger pressed to a widening crack in a dam; a dam behind which the tide is rising inexorably.

Ettore and Valerio push their way towards the overseer from Masseria Vallarta; a man well into his sixties with drooping white moustaches and an immobile expression, as solid and unreadable as the trunk of a tree. Pino is already there; he catches Ettore’s eye and jerks his chin to greet him. Giuseppe Bianco; Giuseppino; Pino for short. Pino and Ettore have lived shoulder to shoulder since they were in the cradle. They are the same age, have seen the same things, suffered the same hopes and hardships; they’ve had the same patchy, soon-curtailed education, and had wild times at Saint’s Day festivals more pagan than holy. They’ve been to war together. Pino has the face of a classical hero, with enormous soft eyes, warm and brown rather than the usual black. He has curved lips, the upper protruding slightly over the lower; curling hair and an open expression far out of place in the piazza. His heart is open too; he’s too good for this life. There’s only one thing the two men do not share, and it’s driven a wedge between them this year: Pino is married to his sweetheart, but Ettore has lost his. All the girls used to quarrel to catch Pino’s eye. They knew a soft touch when they saw one, and fancied waking up next to that face for the rest of their lives. Now that he’s wed some of them try just as hard, but Pino is faithful to Luna, his wife. Little Luna, with her buoyant breasts and her hair hanging right down to the broad spread of her buttocks. Pino is the only man Ettore knows who can find a real smile before dawn in the piazza.

He smiles now, and thumps Ettore’s upper arm companionably.

‘What’s new?’ he says.

‘Nothing at all.’ Ettore shrugs.

‘Luna has something for the baby. For Iacopo,’ says Pino, and looks proud. ‘She’s been sewing again – a shirt. She’s even stitched his initials into it for him.’ Luna works in fits and starts for a seamstress, and carefully collects whatever scraps of thread and fabric she can spirit away. There’s never enough to make clothes for adults, but Iacopo now has a vest, a hat and a pair of tiny slippers.

‘She should be setting such things by for when you have your own baby,’ says Ettore, and Pino grins. He longs for babies – a herd of them, a flock. How or whether they’ll all be fed is not something he lets worry him. He seems to think they’ll be self-sustaining, like hearth spirits or will-o’-the-wisps, like putti.

‘Iacopo will have outgrown them by then. I’m sure Paola will lend them back.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘You mean she’ll want to keep them, to remember how little he was?’ says Pino. Ettore grunts. What he’d meant was that he’s not so certain Iacopo will outgrow the little things so soon. His nephew is reedy and too quiet. So many babies die. Ettore frets about him, frowns over him. Whenever Paola sees this she shoves him away, and curses. She thinks his anxiety will coalesce and bring some grim prophecy down on her son.

The man from Masseria Vallarta takes a sheaf of paper from his pocket, unfolds it. The waiting men focus their attention on him, watching with steady expectation. It’s a strange ritual – the farm has a harvest to bring in and the men all know it, but even so, they do not trust the man. They do not trust that they will have work until they are standing in the field, working. They do not trust that they will be paid until the bailiff puts the coins into their hands the Saturday after. The overseer catches Ettore’s eye and gives him a hard stare. Ettore stares right back at him. He is a union man, and the overseer knows it; knows his name, and his face. Some have led the strikes and the demonstrations while the others followed, and Ettore is one of the first kind. Or he was – in the six months since he lost Livia he’s done nothing, said nothing; he’s worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, ignoring his hunger and his exhaustion. In all that time, he has spared not a single thought for the revolution, for his brothers, for the starving workers or the ever-present injustices, but the overseers don’t seem to have noticed his change of heart. The absence of his heart.

So there’s a black mark by his name that nothing will shift, but he also works without pause, and attacks the ground with the heaviest mattock; he presents them with a conundrum: a troublemaker who works like a Trojan. The corporal with the white moustaches hires him with the merest nod of his head, marking down his name. Then he flicks his gnarled finger at the others he’s chosen, including Pino, and those men file away to begin the long walk to the farm. Valerio is not chosen. Years of wielding the mattock have shaped his spine, bending him like an overblown tree, and though he’s tried not to cough since they got to the piazza, you can see the effort of containing the spasms in the way his body clenches and shakes from time to time. He cut about half as much wheat as some of the other men yesterday, and the immovable overseer has an infallible memory for such things. Ettore grips his father’s shoulder in parting.

‘Go now to the shepherd, over there. Go now, before others take his lire,’ he says. Valerio nods.

‘Work hard, boy,’ he says, then gives in to his cough. Ettore doesn’t bother to reply. There is no other kind of work, after all.

The sun is rising in a gentle riot of colour by the time they reach the farm. Pino turns his face to it for a minute, shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath, as though, like a plant, the sun will give him the energy to work that day. When the sky is alight like this Ettore thinks of Livia, shielding her black eyes with one hand. When it rains, he thinks of Livia squinting up at the clouds, and smiling as the water hits her skin. When it gets dark he thinks of the times they met beneath the arches of Gioia’s oldest streets, when they would know each other by touch and smell alone, and she would take his questing hand and kiss his fingertips, and send thumps of desire straight to his groin. He knows that his thoughts of her show on his face, and he can tell from Pino’s expression that he sees it – that subtle sinking, a creeping mix of sorrow and frustration; he can see that his oldest friend doesn’t know what to say to him, as long as the moment lasts. They are each given a drink of water and a chunk of bread before work starts. The bread is fresh, which it normally isn’t, and the men tear into it like dogs. The water has the stone grit taste of the cistern. They start work straight afterwards, wriggling their fingers into the wooden hand-guards that are meant to protect them, but which the farmers really like because they extend a man’s grasp, and mean he can gather a bigger sheaf of wheat each time. One man wields the scythe – the taller, stronger ones, with the longest reach – and behind him comes another man, tying the cut stalks into sheaves.

For hours there’s nothing but the swing of blades, the crunch of the cut stalks as they fall and are gathered up. High above their heads black kites ride the hot air, circling; curious about the smell and movement of the working men. From a distance it looks as though the harvest will be good: field after field of golden grain, rolling in the scorching altina wind from the south. But up close the men see that the stalks are sparser than they should be, shorter, with too few grains on each ear and too much space between them. The yield will be less than hoped for, and their wages to match. At midday the sun is debilitating; it crushes the men, it weighs them down like chains. The corporal’s horses wilt, hanging their heads and letting their eyelids droop, too fagged to even shake the flies away. The overseer calls a halt and the men rest and have another drink of water, just enough to wet their parched throats. As soon as their shadows have crept two hand spans to one side the overseer checks his watch, rouses them, and work continues.

Pino and Ettore pass each other, working within earshot for a short while as their lines coincide.

‘Luna is trying to buy beans today,’ says Pino, conversationally.

‘I wish her luck. I hope the grocer doesn’t rob her.’

‘She’s smart, my Luna. I think she will get some, and then we’ll have a fine dinner.’ Pino does this a lot – talks about food. Fantasises about food. It seems to help him beat his hunger, but it does the opposite to Ettore, whose stomach writhes and mutters at the thought of fava beans boiled with bay leaves, and maybe some garlic and pepper, and mashed up with strong olive oil. He swallows.

‘Don’t talk about food, Pino,’ he pleads.

‘Sorry, Ettore. I can’t help it. That’s all I dream about: food, and Luna.’

‘Then dream quietly, for fuck’s sake,’ says the man working behind Ettore.

‘I don’t mind if he talks about his wife as long as he doesn’t spare us the details.’ This is from a lad no more than fourteen, who grins lopsidedly at Pino.

‘If I catch you dreaming about my wife, I’ll cut your prick off,’ Pino tells him, angling his scythe towards the boy, lifting its wicked tip; but he isn’t serious, and the boy grins wider, showing them his broken front teeth.

The altina picks up, smelling of some distant desert, humming over the grey stone walls of the field and through the leathery leaves of a fig tree in one corner. The ground is dust-dry, the wheat parched, the sky mercilessly clear. The men lick their lips but can’t keep them from cracking. Flies buzz brazenly around their heads and necks, biting, knowing that the men won’t spare the effort to swat them away. Ettore works and tries not to think. He comes across a patch of wild rocket leaves, bitter and mean. He picks all he can find and eats them when nobody is looking, feeling his throat clog with saliva and the hot taste of them. The guards are extra vigilant at this end of the day – eyes sharp for signs of the men slowing down, of surreptitious rests being taken, of the scythe being leant upon, not swung. The man gathering the wheat Ettore cuts has dropped far behind – he keeps straightening up, pressing his fingers into his spine and wincing. The overseer has a long leather whip, coiled at his hip. His hand strays to it, time and again, as though he’d love to use it. Ettore’s stomach clenches even tighter after the snack of rocket leaves; his head starts to feel light, strange, as it often does towards day’s end. His body keeps working, regardless; shoulders swinging the weight of the scythe, back muscles tensing to stop its momentum, twisting him from the waist, hands gripped tight. He can feel every tendon as it rubs over bone, but his thoughts drift away from him, away from the heat and the toil and the suffocating wind.

He has heard about a hole in the ground at a town called Castellana, twenty-five kilometres from Gioia, towards the sea. This hole in the ground is wide and nothing that goes into it ever comes out, except bats – streaming millions of bats, like smoke. Sometimes it belches up shreds of a chilly white mist, which are said to be the ghosts of people who have gone too near and fallen in. It is the mouth of hell, the locals say; it plummets right down into the core of the earth, into a blackness so heavy it would crush you. Ettore thinks about this hole as his body keeps going, and his back burns like there’s a knife stuck in it, and his guts cramp from the leaves he ate. He thinks about jumping into it and falling through white mist and then cool, clammy darkness; he thinks about curling up in the ancient black depths, in the world’s stony heart where no man belongs, and waiting there. Not waiting for anything, just waiting; where it is cold and still and silent.

He’s suddenly aware that his name has been spoken. Ettore blinks and sees Pino off to one side, his face wide with concern. He realises that his scythe is still, that he has straightened up and let it come to rest on his boot. He can’t seem to make his hands tighten on the shaft. Behind Pino, he sees two guards exchange a word and a nod, sees them kick their sluggish horses to life and set out towards him. He can’t seem to make his thoughts come back from that hole in the ground and his sudden yearning for it. With all the will he can find, he grips the scythe and lifts it, turning his body to the right, angling the tip of the blade to catch the right number of wheat stalks. But he is too far from the edge of the crop, and the weight of it throws him off balance. His body uncoils, the way it must. It has moved this way thousands of times, on thousands of days; he can no more stop it than he can stop his heart beating. But he will fall if he doesn’t correct his stance, and though falling would be better than the alternative, he has no choice in this either. His body drives itself, is its own master; it keeps its own counsel, as he has trained it to do. Ettore teeters, and lurches forwards. His left leg lands in the path of the scythe as it swings, and he can do nothing to stop what will happen, though he sees it clearly enough. The metal bites easily, cleanly. He feels it hit the bone and lodge there. Pino shouts, and so does the man behind him. A bright spray of blood splatters the wheat stalks, looking too glossy and red to be real, and then Ettore falls.

Chapter Five – Clare

Gioia del Colle is quiet. Low sunlight pools in the street corners, reflecting from smooth stone slabs and streaked walls. Though they pass along avenues of elegant villas, four storeys high, with painted render and symmetrical shuttered windows, the road is crusted with manure – the fresh and fly-struck scattered over the old and dry. There are women out walking with huge urns or baskets on their heads and shoulders, but they do not speak. The only car is the one they’re riding in; it creeps along slowly behind a dray cart loaded with barrels. Clare sees almost no men, and when she points this out to Boyd, he shrugs.

‘They’re all out working on the harvest, darling,’ he says.

‘So early in the year?’ she says, but then remembers all the teams she saw from the train, their scythes moving with the steady rhythm of metronomes. She opens her mouth to say something about the lack of tractors, or harvesting machines, but shuts it again. The south is poor, she has been told. Everywhere is poor after the war, but the south was poor to begin with. They have gone from destitute to something less than that.

In the rear-view mirror she catches the driver’s eye, flicking over her as though checking something. She shifts her weight and turns to smile at Pip. The car turns onto Via Garibaldi and drives down between the tall, ornate fronts of the best houses Clare has seen yet. Some might even be described as palaces, she thinks. Palazzi. Slowing, the driver sounds the horn, and a set of carriage doors in the wall of one building swing open for them to drive through. They pass beneath a wide, dark archway and into an open courtyard. ‘Oh, look!’ says Clare, surprised. Boyd seems pleased by her reaction.

‘A lot of the grander houses are designed like this – a quadrangle around an inner courtyard. But from the outside you wouldn’t expect it, would you?’ he says. The sky is a perfect bright square above them.

‘I had no idea that there would be places like this here. I mean…’ Clare pauses uncomfortably. ‘It’s obviously a very poor region.’ In the mirror, the driver stares at her.

‘The peasants are poor, the gentry are rich, same as anywhere,’ says Boyd. He gives her hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t worry, darling. I wouldn’t bring you to darkest Africa.’

A few watchful staff appear around the cloistered edges of the courtyard, ready to take the luggage, and as the three of them exit the car Clare feels her heart bumping with nerves. Their hosts appear through double doors in the far side of the building – a couple, the man holding his arms out wide, as though to greet old friends; the woman with a smile to rival the sun.

‘Mrs Kingsley! We are so delighted to finally have you here!’ says the man. His hands come to rest on her shoulders, heavy and warm, and he kisses her on both cheeks.

‘You must be Signor Cardetta. How do you do? Piacere,’ says Clare, using the Italian word self-consciously, uncertain of her accent.

‘Leandro Cardetta, at your service. But – you speak Italian, Mrs Kingsley? This is wonderful!’

‘Oh, hardly at all!’

‘Nonsense – she’s being modest, Cardetta. She speaks it very well,’ says Boyd.

‘Well, I hardly understood a word the driver said to the porter at the station. It was very disheartening.’

‘Ah, but they probably spoke in the local dialect, my dear Mrs Kingsley. Quite a different thing. To the peasants down here, Italian is as foreign a language as it is to you.’ Cardetta turns her gently towards the radiant woman. ‘May I present my wife, Marcie?’

‘How do you do, Mrs Cardetta?’

‘Oh, I’m Marcie – only ever Marcie! When people go around calling me Mrs Cardetta I don’t even know myself,’ she says. Marcie is striking, elegant, with the narrow hips and shoulders of a boy, and disproportionately full breasts sitting high on her chest. Her eyes are blue and her hair the colour of ripe barley, set in a wave that grazes her jawline. Her American accent is unmistakable and Clare tries not to show her surprise. ‘What – neither one of these fellas warned you I was a Yankee?’ says Marcie, but she doesn’t seem displeased.

‘Warned isn’t the word, but no – I had assumed you were Italian, Mrs Cardetta – Marcie. Do forgive me.’

‘What’s to forgive? And who is this highly distinguished young man?’ She holds out her hand and Pip shakes it, and though he is polite and confident as he does it, a touch of colour brushes over his cheeks. Clare thinks of the way she herself used to blush when shown the least attention by a man – or any new person – and feels a rush of tenderness towards him. He waits, as he should, for Signor Cardetta to proffer his hand and his name, then he does the same – deferentially, but not too much so. She’s proud of him, and glances at Boyd, hoping that he will have noticed. But Boyd is watching Leandro Cardetta, the way a person might watch an animal suspected of only feigning sleep.

‘Thank you for sending your wonderful car for us, Mr Cardetta – it’s an Alfa Romeo, isn’t it? It’s beautiful, but I don’t recognise the model,’ says Pip enthusiastically. Leandro grins wolfishly at him.

‘Bene, bene. You’re a young man of excellent taste, I see,’ he says. ‘But you wouldn’t recognise it – it’s brand new, and only a few have been made. Rarity, you see – that is the key to true value.’ The pair of them saunter over to the crimson car, to peer at it from all angles. Marcie Cardetta smiles and takes Clare’s arm; she is all ease and familiarity, and Clare can’t imagine how that must feel. Marcie is dressed in white, like a bride: a long skirt and tunic in some fluid fabric that ripples and follows her every move, belted low around her hips. As they walk into the house Clare catches the scent of her – musk and lilacs, and somehow the suggestion of moisture. It’s an oddly intimate aroma, at once compelling and intrusive. There’s scarlet lipstick on her mouth, and powder on her cheeks; up close Clare can see the fine lines at the corners of her eyes. She is maybe forty, or a little older, but has such glamour that she seems far younger – younger than Clare, even, who suddenly feels just how very thirsty and unwashed and tired she is. Only as they step into the shadows inside does Clare realise that Boyd has been left alone, hesitating, in the centre of the courtyard. She looks back at him to smile but he has his hands in his pockets and is staring down at his feet, frowning, as if displeased by the dust on his shoes.

Marcie walks her onwards, and talks.

‘My dear Clare, I cannot tell you how thrilled I am to have you here – you and Philip, of course, but mainly you – poor Philip! No, it’s all right, he didn’t hear me. Just to have somebody to talk to, you understand – other than a man, and what woman can really talk to a man? I mean with words, you understand, not that other language we all speak.’ She dips her head towards Clare, gives her a conspiratorial little nudge with her shoulder. ‘I mean just to talk about everything. The Italian women – well, I should say the Puglian women, because you could hardly compare the specimens down here to those in Milan or Rome – well, they look at me like I fell from outer space! Not a word of English, any one of them. And I’ve tried to learn Italian – believe me I’ve tried, and I’ve managed it a bit, but when they don’t want to understand you, by golly, they’ll make sure they don’t. Staring at you with those black eyes of theirs – have you seen their eyes? Did you notice their eyes? Like jet buttons on a sackcloth waistcoat, with their faces all so brown. We must make sure you don’t get too much sun, dear – your skin is just delightful… And how funny is it that you can go six months without seeing a blonde down here, and now we have two under one roof!’

On and on Marcie talks, as she leads Clare up to the room she’ll be sharing with Boyd. The house is warm and shadowy, and full of echoes. The light is barricaded out – on the sunny west side of the quad the shutters are all closed, so that only thin, bright shafts get through here and there. Clare’s smile begins to ache in her cheeks but she feels some of the tension that has clenched her guts since the train left Bari begin to dissipate. Inwardly, she’s still as uncomfortable in new company as she has ever been, and she’d been dreading the conversation drying up, dwindling into silence while she floundered for a way to replenish it. At least it seems that there will be few such awkward silences to contend with. Few silences at all.

Once they reach the room Marcie clasps Clare’s hands for a moment, gives a happy little shrug and leaves her to change. A steady quiet settles in her wake. Clare turns around, sees the book Boyd is reading and his glasses, placed neatly by the bed. The room is large and square, and faces south, and Clare opens the shutters to a rush of hot air and the slanting yellow light of evening. The walls are a rich ochre colour, the ceiling a high spread of dark wooden beams, the floor terracotta. There’s a painting of the Madonna above the fireplace, and one of Paris above the bed, which has an ornate brass bedstead and a mattress sagging visibly in the middle. When a servant brings in the luggage, the door howls in protest. It’s made of the same aged wood as the ceiling, and has massive hinges to cope with its own weight. Like a door in a castle, Clare thinks. Or a jail. She leans over the window sill and looks out at the clustered red rooftops and the narrow streets. Immediately behind the Cardettas’ house is a small, neat garden with more paved walkways than flower beds. There are fig and olive trees for shade, and a vine-covered veranda where a long table waits, covered with a linen cloth. There are herbs but few flowers, and no grass. One of the fig trees is alive with small birds – Clare can see them all, rattling the leaves, hopping about like fleas. They chatter rather than sing, but it’s still a nice sound.

The door moans again as Boyd comes in. He has a way of moving, a way of standing slightly curled in on himself, that looks faintly apologetic. Clare smiles and crosses to him, to be folded into him, against the smooth fabric of his shirt and the slight give of flesh underneath. He is that much taller than her that her hair gets caught up with the sharp points and buttons of his collar. He has a faintly sour scent about him that she doesn’t remember smelling before. Or perhaps once before. It makes her uneasy.

‘I’m so happy to see you,’ he murmurs into the top of her head. Then he holds her out at arm’s length, studies her intently. ‘You didn’t mind coming?’ Clare shrugs. She can’t quite bring herself to deny it, not completely, because she did mind. She likes the unhurried habit of their home life in Hampstead, and taking Pip to their favourite places in London during the holidays. She doesn’t like to admit to herself that she’d been glad when Boyd announced he would be going to Italy, but it’s true nevertheless. It was better for him to be working, to be occupied; it was better for her and Pip that they had the house to themselves, and could keep their own hours and counsel. That they could make as much noise, and be as silly as they wanted. Say what they wanted. For a brief while the summer had stretched out ahead of her, wonderfully long and serene, until his phone call from Italy curtailed it.

‘I was surprised. You wouldn’t normally ask me to travel – not all this way. But I had Pip with me for the journey, so of course it was fine.’ This much is true, at least.

‘I know it might seem a bit peculiar. But Cardetta wants me to stay for as long as it takes to finish the designs, and I can’t… it’s too good a commission to turn it down. I mean – I’m happy to work on it. It’s an interesting project.’ He kisses her forehead, one hand on her cheek. ‘And I couldn’t bear the thought of so many weeks without you,’ he says. Clare frowns.

‘But when you first telephoned you said that it was Cardetta who wanted us to come out – Pip and me? Why would he? To keep Marcie company?’

‘Yes. Probably. Anyway, he only suggested it, and it gave me the idea. He had to offer the invitation first, of course. I couldn’t just ask and oblige him to accept.’

‘I see.’

Clare disengages herself from his arms and goes over to open her bags. It hadn’t seemed like that when they first spoke about it, soon after Boyd’s arrival in Italy. Even thin and buzzing along the telephone wire his voice had sounded tense and beleaguered, and almost fearful. She’d heard it in the clipped way he spoke, and straight away she’d felt the familiar dread sinking into the pit of her stomach, solid as wet sand. They’ve been married for ten years, and she is minutely attuned to the least sign of distress in him. She knows well enough what can come of it. It’s there now, of course – she saw it the first moment she set eyes on him, as he waved from the car. But sometimes it comes to nothing. She doesn’t want to acknowledge it too soon and risk it coalescing when it might not necessarily.

Born shy, the only child of parents who never raised their voices, never argued or ever spoke of their feelings, Clare longs for peaceful accord more than anything else; nothing jarring or unexpected, no awkwardness. Over the years, Boyd’s episodes have honed her fear of confrontation to a point of excruciating finesse. For days, weeks, sometimes even months, he is transformed; silent and precarious, unreadable. He drinks brandy at any hour, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t go out, he barely eats. His silence thickens like a black cloud around him, which Clare is too scared to penetrate. She walks on eggshells around him, dogged by her own inadequacy, her inability to bring him out of it. Sometimes, during such spells, the sight of her makes him collapse into violent sobbing. Sometimes days pass and he doesn’t seem to see her at all, and she remembers what happened when she persuaded him to go to New York, years before, and what might have happened, had she not prevented it. Then she can’t sleep or eat herself. She’s a prisoner to his mood, too frightened to make a sound. The relief when it’s over, when Boyd finally rises from his chair and sinks himself into a hot bath, and asks for a cup of tea, is so immense she has to sit until her breathing slows.

Boyd watches her as she hangs her skirts and dresses in the giant wardrobe that looms along the far wall of the room. He sits on the edge of the bed with one long leg crossed over the other, his hands laced over the uppermost knee.

‘I’m sure we could find a servant to do that for you – Cardetta seems to have hundreds of them,’ he says. Clare smiles over her shoulder at him.

‘I can manage well enough without a ladies’ maid,’ she says. ‘He must be very rich, then?’

‘I should say so. This is one of the oldest and biggest houses in Gioia – well, of those that he could get his hands on, anyway.’

‘Oh?’

‘Cardetta wasn’t always rich – and he was away in America for twenty years. I get the impression that the signori here – the upper crust – treat him as a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.’

‘Well, I suppose that’s understandable,’ she says. ‘Especially if he was away for so long. How did he make his money?’

‘In New York.’

‘Yes, but-’

‘Do stop that and come here,’ he says, with mock severity. Clare looks at the crumpled silk shirt in her hands, and the way the pale yellow of it perfectly mirrors the light-filled sky outside. She wishes she wouldn’t hesitate but she can’t seem to help it. But then she smiles and does as he says, sitting gingerly in his lap. He wraps his arms around her waist and buries his face in her chest, and somehow it’s not sexual, but as though he wants to hide. ‘Clare,’ he breathes out her name, and she feels the heat of his breath on her skin.

‘Is everything all right, darling?’ she says, trying to sound bright, trying for offhand.

‘It is now that you’re here.’ He tightens his grip until Clare can feel his watch digging into her ribs. ‘I love you so much, my dearest Clare.’

‘And I love you,’ she says, and just then notices how very dry her lips feel. Dry and miserly. She shuts her eyes for a moment and wishes that he would stop there, say nothing more. She wishes that his grip would loosen. But he doesn’t stop there, and he doesn’t loosen his grip.

‘I would die without you, you know. I swear it.’ Clare wants to deny it – she has tried to before. She has tried, in the hope that he will realise how onerous his words are. ‘My angel,’ he whispers. She can feel his arms shake from the strain of keeping hold. Or perhaps it’s she that shakes. ‘My angel. I would die without you.’ She wants to say, no, you would not, but when he says such things something gets hold of her throat and squeezes it, and no words will come out. She can’t tell if it’s guilt, or fear, or anger. She reminds herself that most women would be grateful for such devotion in a husband; she reminds herself to be grateful.

‘I should go and check on Pip,’ she manages to say, sometime later.

When the sun has set they join their hosts for a drink in the garden, at the long table beneath the vine-covered veranda. A silent girl with her black hair parted in the middle, wearing an old-fashioned, high-necked blouse with a frill, brings a tray of glasses and a jug of some dark drink, and begins to pour. Small round fruit plop out into the glasses with the liquid, like soft pebbles.

‘Oh, good – amarena,’ says Marcie, clapping her hands. ‘This is just the thing you folk need after your long trip. Wild cherry juice – we can’t always get them, but when we do, one of the kitchen girls mixes up a batch of this stuff. She keeps the recipe all to herself, mind you – she absolutely refuses to show me! There’s some herb she adds that I just can’t put my finger on. She says it was her grandmother’s secret. Isn’t that just hilarious? To guard something as silly as a recipe?’

‘It’s not silly at all,’ Leandro tells his wife serenely. ‘She has precious little to call her own.’

‘Well, fine then.’ Marcie doesn’t miss a beat. ‘Try it – go on. There’s sugar there if you want it, but I think it’s delicious as it is.’ She beams at Pip, and he does as he’s told. He’s changed into a clean shirt and tie and his stone-coloured linen blazer with its matching waistcoat, but somehow his clothes still look wrong in their surroundings. He looks like a hastily spruced schoolboy, when at home he’d worn the new outfit into town with the hint of a proud swagger in his step. As if he realises, Pip stays at the edge of his chair and looks embarrassed. Clare sips her drink.

‘It is delicious,’ she says automatically, and then realises that it’s true. She steals a long glance at Leandro Cardetta.

He looks to be approaching fifty; he has copious iron-grey hair, swept back from his temples and from a high forehead, deeply lined. He is certainly not beautiful, but perhaps he’s almost handsome; his face has a certain gravitas, a kind of heft to the sculptural features – jaw and nose and brows. His skin is bronze and has the thick, smooth look of good leather. There are deep creases at either side of his mouth, and pouches under his eyes, and those eyes are so dark it’s hard to see the pupil against the iris – it looks instead as though his pupils are enormous, dilated far beyond the norm. Perhaps it’s this that makes his resting expression one of warmth and approachability. He is not overly tall, not nearly as tall as Boyd; his shoulders are strong and square, ribs like a barrel; a slight paunch, a mark of good living, fills out the space behind his shirt. He leans back in his chair, the small glass of amarena held in the fingers of his left hand with surprising delicacy. He is watchful without being disconcerting; elegant not but effeminate.

Catching Clare’s surreptitious gaze, he smiles.

‘Whatever will make your stay with us more comfortable, you must only ask, Mrs Kingsley,’ he says smoothly.

‘Unless it’s music or shopping or cinema, or a blaze through a casino – in which case you’re bang out of luck!’ Marcie declares.

‘Marcie, cara, you must not make it sound as though Gioia is completely devoid of fun. We have a very fine theatre – do you care for the theatre, Mrs Kingsley?’

‘Oh, very much so. And Pip too – he is proving to be a fine actor, in fact,’ says Clare.

‘Philip – is it true?’ Marcie leans across and grasps his forearm, staring avidly.

‘Well, I…’ Pip’s voice breaks and he clears his throat, flushing. ‘I was in a play last term, and people said I did well. I was Ariel in The Tempest.’

‘And you were quite brilliant, actually,’ says Clare.

‘But – I’m an actress, didn’t you know? Well, I was, back in New York. Not much call for it here. But, oh, I love the theatre! I love acting… It’s something in the blood, don’t you think – it’s a calling you can’t ignore. Do you feel that, Pip? Does acting make your heart soar?’

‘Well, I… I do think I should like to be in another play, certainly,’ he says. ‘But it’s not something one can really make a career out of, is it?’ These are Boyd’s words, coming out of his mouth, and they give Clare a sinking feeling. Pip’s heart did soar during that play. She saw it happen.

‘Well, why ever not? I did.’

‘Pip’s a good scholar. He’ll go up to Oxford, and then to chambers,’ says Boyd. He sips the crimson drink then rolls his lips back slightly.

‘Add some sugar, if it’s too sour,’ says Leandro, passing him the sugar bowl. Boyd smiles thinly without looking at him, and spoons some into his glass.

‘Chambers? You mean law? Ugh, why not say mausoleum? Poor boy!’

‘Not at all. My father always intended me for the law, but I hadn’t the mind for it. Pip has. It would be outrageous to waste such natural good fortune.’

‘And what about what Pip wants?’ Marcie asks this lightly but Clare can see Boyd taken aback to be challenged; she wishes Marcie would drop it.

‘He’s only a boy. He can’t be expected to know what he wants,’ he says. Marcie pats Pip’s arm, then gives him a jaunty wink.

‘I’ll work on them, don’t you fret. What’s the law compared to applause?’ she says. Clare is relieved when Boyd chooses not to reply to this question.

Dinner is an array of dishes, some of which arrive together, some on their own after a suitable pause. Fresh white cheeses, breads, vegetables dressed in lemon and oil; pasta with broccoli; rolled strips of veal; soft focaccia bread oozing olive oil and the smell of rosemary. Pip eats as though he hasn’t for days, but even he is defeated in the end. He shifts uncomfortably in his chair and Leandro laughs – a deep, sudden bark.

‘Philip – I should have warned you. Forgive me. In this house they will keep bringing food as long as you keep clearing your plate.’ Pip has had a glass of wine, and looks far more relaxed.

‘I think I shall be very happy here,’ he says, and Leandro laughs again.

‘Perhaps a short walk, to look at the town and to let the meal settle before bed?’ says Clare. She too has overeaten; the smell of the fresh food woke a hunger gone dormant from being so long ignored. Marcie and Leandro share a quick glance between themselves. ‘Isn’t that the thing to do, here in Italy? La passeggiata?’ says Clare.

‘Yes, Mrs Kingsley, that’s so. However, here in the south we take our passeggiata earlier in the evening – around six, as the sun is setting. The gentlefolk, I mean. Now, this late, the streets are… more for the working men, lately back from the fields. There’s no law, of course, but perhaps tomorrow, at an earlier hour, might be better for you to walk,’ says Leandro.

‘Oh. I see,’ says Clare. Leandro inclines his head smoothly at her acceptance, and she wonders about the black-and-whiteness of this, the idea that people are either peasants or gentry, with none of the middle strata to which Clare and Boyd belong at home.

Marcie suggests a tour of the house to Clare instead, when the food is cleared away. Boyd and Leandro stay at the table, drinking a bitter fennel liqueur that Clare can’t stomach, and that makes Pip grimace. Leandro fills and lights a long pipe, made of some pale wood and banded with ivory. Its blue smoke hovers in the air like a phantasm. Pip dithers for a moment, half out of his chair. He’s not child enough to follow the women, not man enough to want to stay with the men. His eyes are pink and sunken with fatigue.

‘You look done in, Pip,’ says Clare. ‘Why not turn in? I shan’t be far behind you.’ She guesses he will like the time alone, to read and explore his room, and she sees she’s right in his relieved expression.

‘Perhaps you’re right, Clare,’ he says. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr Cardetta? Father?’

‘By all means, Philip.’ Leandro nods, gives a benevolent smile. ‘Rest well. Tomorrow, we will talk motor cars, you and I – I have something to show you that I think you’ll like.’

Marcie leads Clare away, passing from room to room, flicking the light switches on as she goes, leaving them for the servants to switch off behind them. The leather soles of her sandals make almost no sound as she walks; her narrow figure is sinuous beneath her clothes. They pass through a library and some stern, masculine rooms that have huge desks and severe-looking chairs, through a cavernous sitting room more lavishly done, and then another, and then a dining room with a table in the middle that could comfortably seat twenty-four diners, and a ceiling festooned with painted plasterwork. The floors are of polished stone or colourful, intricate tiles; the windows all have heavy shutters, and their voluminous curtains are held back by twisted silk ropes. It is all grand, with a kind of solid splendour, but Clare finds it oppressive, stagnant, as though it froze in time fifty years earlier. She begins to imagine the air creaking as they push through it. The place smells of stone and parched wood, and the prickle of dusty damasks.

Marcie turns to face Clare as they reach the foot of a marble stair.

‘Well, what do you think?’ she says. Her accent runs the words together: whaddyathink?

‘I think it’s very lovely,’ says Clare, after a fractional pause. Marcie smiles delightedly.

‘Oh, you Brits are always so damned polite! How could anyone not love you? It’s a museum, I know it is; a gentleman’s club from eighty years ago. Deny it – I dare you!’

‘Well… some of the decorations are perhaps a little dated.’

‘Ain’t that the truth. I’m working on him, honey, I’m working on him. My Leandro isn’t all the way used to the idea of a woman’s touch yet, but I’ll get him there, you’ll see.’

‘Now is the perfect time, surely? If Boyd’s here to redesign the façade, why not update the interior at the same time?’

‘That’s my exact argument, Clare. My exact argument. Can I say something rather personal?’ The question comes so suddenly that Clare blinks. In the half shadow of the staircase it’s hard to read Marcie’s expression. She’s smiling, but then, she’s always smiling.

‘Of course,’ says Clare. She hopes the question is not about Boyd. What has he said?

‘Well, it just seems to me that you can’t even be thirty yet. I can’t figure that you’re that charming boy’s real mother?’ Clare’s heart thuds in relief. She exhales slowly.

‘I’ll be thirty at my next birthday, and you’re right. Pip’s mother was Boyd’s first wife, Emma. She was an American – a New Yorker, like you. She died when he was four years old.’

‘Oh that poor child. And poor Emma, knowing she had to leave her tiny boy behind! But lucky him to have such a thoroughly lovely and unwicked stepmother.’

‘We’re very close. I was only nineteen when I married Boyd…’ Clare trails off, unsure what she intended to say. Marcie’s eyes are alight, her curiosity plain, and Clare wonders how long she has been alone in this house, and how lonely she has been. ‘Well. I suppose I’ve been more like a big sister to him than a mother. He remembers Emma, of course.’

‘How did she die?’

Clare hesitates before answering. Soon after she met Boyd she asked her parents the same question, since they had mutual friends and a closer acquaintance with him then. She was told Emma had died in childbirth, while they were living in New York; that Boyd’s grief had been all-consuming, and she should avoid all mention of it. She’d accepted this unquestioningly, until a few months after her wedding when she’d come to know Pip a little better, and discovered that he had memories of his mother. Then her curiosity had been uncontrollable. It would have been too cruel to ask Pip, still a small boy, the true cause of her death so in the end, on an evening when Boyd was calm and happy, Clare gathered her courage and asked him. And he’d looked at her with such profound shock it was as though she hadn’t even been supposed to know Emma’s name, or that she had existed, let alone shown any interest in her. His pained expression had chilled her; it made her regret her words at once. She tried to take his hands and apologise but he disengaged her, stood and went to the door as if he would leave without answering. But then he paused, not looking at her.

‘It was a… a sudden fever. An infection. Sudden and catastrophic.’ He swallowed; his cheeks were pale and drawn. ‘I do not wish to speak of it. Please don’t mention it again.’ And that night in bed he hadn’t touched her, not even with the sleeping length of his limbs, and Clare had cursed her own insensitivity, and vowed to do as he bid.

Shaking off the memory of that night of lonely self-recrimination, Clare uses Boyd’s exact words to answer Marcie.

‘It… was a sudden fever. Boyd has never been able to talk about it to me; not properly. It’s too painful for him.’

‘Poor man, I’ll bet it is. Men are so less well equipped to deal with things like that, don’t you think? They have to be strong, and they’re not allowed to cry, or seek comfort in friends, so they just bottle it all up and let it fester. My Leandro has things he won’t talk about – scars he won’t show me. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m an actress, but I just think let it out, you know? Let it out. Look at it in the light of day, and maybe it won’t seem so bad. But he won’t, of course. That man is a damned fortress when he wants to be.’ She runs out of breath, takes a gasp as if to go on, but doesn’t. She smiles instead. ‘Well, I suppose it’s up to us to just be there if they ever do want to talk about it.’

‘Yes. But I don’t think Boyd ever will. Not about Emma. He… he loved her very, very much, I think. Sometimes I think he’s afraid to tell me about her, because he doesn’t want me to be jealous.’

‘And are you? I would be – I am most definitely the jealous type. I had it easy, since Leandro’s first and second wives created such a stink when he divorced them that he can’t stand either one of them now. They both hate me, of course; and they have three sons between them who are none too keen either. Nothing much I can do about that. But the ghost of a beloved first wife – ugh! Who could compete?’

They turn and start up the stairs together, shoulder to shoulder, one slow step at a time, and Clare doesn’t answer straight away. She thinks of the time she found Boyd in his dressing room, holding a pair of ladies’ silk gloves that were not hers and running his thumbs over the fabric with a slow, hard intensity. He didn’t notice her standing there, and in that moment Clare saw an expression of such acute anguish on his face that she hardly recognised him. The gloves trembled in his hands, and when he spotted her he dropped them as if they’d burnt him and his face filled up with blood in such a rush that a vein bulged out at each temple. As if she’d caught him in bed with another woman; but in fact that came later. She said It’s all right; but he didn’t manage to reply.

‘I’ve made a point of never to try to compete. Love isn’t a finite resource, after all. He can love me as well as still loving her,’ she says now, in a low voice.

‘What a wise and wonderful thing to say! You’re far more of a grown-up than I am, Clare,’ says Marcie. Clare says nothing, not sure that Marcie means this as a compliment. ‘And you married him at nineteen? Goodness, you were just a girl!’

‘Yes, I suppose I was.’

‘Me, I wanted to live a little before I settled down. I wanted to, you know, try a few of them on for size before I chose. But perhaps I was a little wild back then.’

‘I grew up in quite a rural part of England, so there really weren’t that many eligible men to choose from. My parents actually met Boyd first, through some friends of theirs, and thought he’d be a good match for me.’ At this Marcie’s eyes go wide.

‘You let your parents choose your husband for you?’

‘Well, no, it wasn’t quite like that-’

‘No, sure, sorry – I didn’t mean to pounce. I left home at thirteen, that’s the thing. I can’t imagine what having that kind of guidance was like.’

‘It was very…’ For a moment, Clare can’t think of a word. She was a child, and then she married Boyd and became a wife; these are the only two incarnations of herself she has ever known, and at the moment of transformation she’d been happy – relieved that things were settled and certain.

She was the only child of parents who’d almost given up hope; her mother had been forty when she was born, her father well past fifty. By the time Clare was eighteen her mother was frail beyond her years, worn thin and increasingly vague, and her father had pains in his chest for which he took tablets – five or six a day, ground vigorously between his molars at regular intervals – though they did little to alleviate his symptoms. In much the same way as she can now see Pip growing, her terms away at school allowed her to see, clearly, how age and infirmity were stealing a march on her only family. More than any of her classmates, she was faced with the thought of not having them any more, of being alone in the world, and the empty spread of an unknown future frightened her. But that makes her settling on Boyd sound like an act of dry calculation, or of knee-jerk desperation, which it hadn’t been. ‘I was glad that they approved of him. And they were glad that I did, too, of course.’ Marcie says nothing for a while, and Clare realises how bloodless this sounds. ‘And I loved him, of course. I grew to love him.’

‘Well, of course you did. He’s a sweetie. So gentle! I can’t even imagine him having a temper, and he obviously adores you. You must get away with murder. Me, I have to be careful. When Leandro goes off it’s like a volcano!’

‘No, well… I’ve never seen Boyd go off, I don’t think,’ says Clare. Instead he implodes, into a distant, silent place where she can’t reach him, and then the world seems flimsy and unsafe, and she and Pip cling to each other, cast adrift, waiting to see how and when and if he will come out of it again. It’s been five months since the last time it happened, and now she’s sure she can sense the gathering pressure of the next time. She hopes she’s wrong. ‘How did you meet Leandro?’ she says, changing the subject because Marcie’s expression is quizzical and almost pitying.

‘Oh, he saw me on stage one night. He says he fell in love with me before I’d even sung a note.’ Marcie smiles again and loops her arm through Clare’s as they climb.

Alone, Clare knocks softly on Pip’s door and opens it. The door has the same sepulchral groan as the one to her room. Pip is sitting on the wide window ledge, looking out at the night. The sky is a deep indigo, freckled with stars.

‘All right there, Pip?’

‘All right, Clare. I was trying to work out which different constellations you can see this far south, but I didn’t bring a chart and I’m completely lost.’ He turns to face her. He’s in his pyjamas with a green tartan dressing gown tied tight around his middle. Both pyjamas and gown are too short for him already, and Clare smiles. She goes to stand beside him and looks out. He smells of toothpaste and the lavender sachets she packed in with their clothes.

‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there, Pip. You know I’m a complete dunce with astrology.’

‘Astronomy. Astrology is horoscopes and things.’

‘Well, that rather proves my point, doesn’t it?’ she says, and Pip grins.

‘And you’re not a complete dunce at anything. You just pretend to be to make me feel better,’ he adds perspicaciously.

‘Oh, I don’t know. A star’s a star as far as I’m concerned, as long as they sparkle and look pretty. What else ought I to know, then?’ Pip begins to tell her about how long the light has taken to reach their eyes, and how many different types of stars there are, and how some of them are planets, and how there might be people on them, looking at the pinprick glimmer of Earth from light years away. He rambles on for a while, as he does when he’s exhausted. Outside there are few lamps lit in the streets, or behind the closed shutters of other houses. There’s no more noise of people, or passeggiata. Gioia dell Colle is early to bed.

Pip’s room is much the same as Clare’s, but smaller, and facing west. She looks to see if he’s unpacked, and finds his trunk more or less intact, hidden away in the wardrobe, which is all she’s come to expect, really. She glances at the bedside table, already knowing what she’ll see there – the one thing he always unpacks, no matter where they go: a photograph of his mother in a silver frame. The picture is a studio shot; Emma is standing alone next to a tall jardinière full of some extravagantly trailing plant, with her thin, pale hands clasped in front of her. The picture was taken in 1905, the year before Pip was born, and she’s wearing the fashionable high-necked dress of the time; Pip claims to remember the very one, and says it was a gorgeous colour, the crimson of a Virginia creeper in autumn, but in the picture it merely looks dark and severe. Her face is serious but not sombre, a thin oval with light eyes and a mass of curly hair, piled high and spilling down over her right shoulder. Though her expression is fixed for the photographer, Clare has always fancied that she can see a trace of mirth in her lips and the arch of her brows. She picks up the photo and studies it, made curious anew by Marcie’s questions. This is the only picture of Emma she has ever seen. It might be the only one that exists. Emma is every bit as frozen in time as the house in which they’re staying. She can clearly see the ways in which Pip has taken after her, and it’s only this that makes her seem like a real person to Clare: a woman who laughed and sneezed and got angry and made love; not just a face in a photograph, a ghost who haunts her husband.

Pip looks around at her, and sees what she’s doing. He’s never acknowledged any awkwardness between Clare and the memory of his mother, and Clare is grateful for it. He has never compared her to Emma; he has never said, in anger: You’re not my real mother. Some things don’t need saying. He has never blamed her for his mother being dead, as other children in their grief and confusion might have done.

‘I think she would have liked the dinner, don’t you?’ he says.

‘Oh, absolutely. Particularly the fried zucchini flowers – I remember you telling me how she liked to try new things. They were so light. Delicious. Would she have liked Mr and Mrs Cardetta, do you think?’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Pip thinks for a moment. ‘I think she was inclined to like most people. And they’re very welcoming, aren’t they?’

‘Very.’ They do this sometimes, particularly in times of stress – guess at Emma’s opinion of things; her likes and dislikes, how she might have behaved in a particular situation. It’s a way to keep her alive, a way for Pip to feel that he knows her, when in fact his memories are the fleeting sensory impressions of early childhood: the colour of her dress; the length of her hair; her voice and the warmth of her hands; that she loved oranges and her fingers often smelled of the peel. Sometimes this is also how Pip lets Clare know his own opinion of things – difficult things that he would stumble to speak openly about. Sometimes he declares that Clare and Emma would have got on, and been good friends, and this is another generous fiction – that the two women could ever have been in his life at the same time.

There’s a measured pause as they both look at the picture, then Clare puts it back in its place. She is always careful never to leave her fingerprints on the glass.

‘Is… is Father all right?’ Pip asks, with painful nonchalance.

‘Yes. I think so, yes,’ says Clare, with equal bluff. Pip nods, and won’t quite meet her eye. ‘He’ll be better now we’re here, anyway. Don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so.’ Pip keeps his eyes on the picture of Emma. He suddenly looks defeated; unhappy, and far from home. Clare searches for the right thing to say.

‘I know this is a bit strange, our coming out here like this. And I know it… it could be a bit of a lonely summer for you, not seeing any of your friends,’ she says. Pip shrugs again. ‘But we’ll have fun, I promise. And I bet you’ll make some new friends, too… Have a good sleep, and tomorrow we can go exploring. And Mr Cardetta might take you out again in that car you liked so much – the Alfred Romeo.’

‘It’s Alfa Romeo, Clare,’ says Pip, with a smile.

‘See. I told you I was a dunce.’ She hugs him for a moment, quickly kisses his temple. ‘Sleep. I’m about to.’

Boyd is still outside with Leandro. From the bedroom window, two storeys up, Clare can see pipe smoke rising in the light of the oil lamps on the table; she can hear the soft roll of their voices, but not their words. She listens for a while all the same, then closes the shutters as noiselessly as she can, not sure why she feels she must be quiet. The bed sinks as she climbs into it; the sheets smell a long time unused – clean, but stale. The room is warm and still, and as soon as she shuts her eyes she hears the whine of a mosquito near her ear. Then she hears two more. She hasn’t been entirely honest with Marcie, because there is one way in which she is jealous of Emma: Pip. Not because she wants to be his mother – he wouldn’t be who he is without Emma – but because she wants a child of her own; she wants to carry it and know the strangeness of a separate life inside her; she wants the shock of labour, and the perfect satisfaction of nursing. She wants to be a mother, as well as a stepmother and surrogate older sister. Love is not a finite resource – she could love her own child and love Pip just as much. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Pip is nearly grown, and will soon leave her by herself.

But Boyd doesn’t want another child. Boyd is afraid to have another child. Boyd can’t quite put his fear into words but it exists, and it’s bone deep. Whenever she and Boyd have made love it has been with the rubber sheath between them, and the lights out. Sometimes, Clare feels that they have never actually made love at all, since they could not see each other, and did not touch. She’d wanted to talk again about a baby during this trip, but Boyd is already tense so now she’s not sure. There’s already that undercurrent that she dreads to see in him, and she knows it has something to do with Cardetta, so she guesses that it’s also to do with New York. The mosquitoes whine in Clare’s ears, and beneath the sheets she starts to overheat. Her skin prickles. The first and only time she and Boyd were in New York together was one of the worst times of her life; her memories of it are like a strange and sickening dream. She’s wide awake even though she’s exhausted, and she knows it’s because she’s waiting. She’s waiting to find out what it means, and what will come of it.

Chapter Six – Ettore

Ettore is eleven years old. It’s March and the sky is flat grey, an unbroken swathe of cloud which makes it look as though rain will fall, but it won’t – the sky has hovered like this for days, and come to nothing. The work gang is weeding, pulling up any wild plant amidst the young shoots of wheat now sprouting from the grain sown last October. Right now, the fields around Gioia are more mutedly, softly green than they will be for the rest of the year. Since this is one job that doesn’t require great strength, boys as well as men are employed. In years when there are more weeds – after a damp spring, for example – boys as young as eight and nine will be out in the fields, paid so little money it barely warrants the term wages. But little is not nothing – only those men who have built up such debts that they must work for free to recoup the losses get less. It is dull work, endlessly repetitive. When Ettore’s back gets tired from bending over, he bends his knees instead, as his father has taught him. To give the one set of muscles a break. After a while, he switches back again. His hands are stained and the skin is stinging and split from pulling at the tough stems, pitting his weight against deep roots knotted in the stony soil. Each boy has a canvas sling around his shoulders, and the number of times it’s been filled and emptied will dictate what he is paid come Saturday.

Along the edge of the field his father Valerio and some other men are breaking rocks. The smack of their picks, arrhythmic, echoing like gunshot, is all anyone has heard all day. They will all hear it in their sleep that night. Ettore gravitates towards the men, hovers as near as he dares. It’s tufo stone they’re breaking, the same stone that covers the county, coughed up from the ground as though the earth has an endless supply. Gioia dell Colle is built of the stuff. When newly cut or dug up it’s a soft buff colour; with time it weathers to grey, and the rain carves holes through it like worms through cheese. But what fascinate Ettore are the shells. The tufo stone is full of seashells. Sometimes just fragments, sharp little edges, but sometimes whole ones, their ridges making perfect, undamaged fan shapes, millions of years old. Pino laughed when the schoolmaster told them that – that the shells were millions of years old. He couldn’t fathom it, nor how they’d got into the stone, so he laughed. Ettore tried to explain it to him afterwards, because to him it held all the allure of proven magic, but Pino’s attention was like a gnat, weaving here and there and never quite deciding where to land.

Ettore keeps edging closer to the stone-breakers. He casts a furtive look back at the overseer, to make sure he’s not watching. They are at Masseria Tateo, and the overseer is Ludo Manzo, the corporal most feared and hated of all around Gioia for his cruelty, his arbitrary dispensation of punishment and his loathing of the giornatari, which has all the vehemence of one who has walked in their shoes, and never wants to do so again. The punishment that the men fear most is that they will not be hired again. They must work, or starve, and Ludo Manzo dismisses men for the least slackening of their pace, the least expression of displeasure, with his famous catchphrase ringing in their ears: There’s no work here for ungrateful cafoni. Cafoni means ignorant redneck, it means bumpkin, it means peasant scum. They are also beaten or lashed, sometimes; but it’s the boys who fear him most. The boys seem to attract the worst of his attention – and it is attention, not temper. In fact, when he notices a transgression Ludo actually seems pleased rather than not – pleased to have cause to punish. Perhaps it relieves his boredom. The men mutter to each other that he has sold his heart to the devil for a life of ease. But the day is long and the hours even longer, and the minutes stretch out into aeons to a boy of eleven, and so Ettore edges over to the newly broken stone, making some charade of picking weeds as he goes, and tries to see any perfect shells, newly come to light. If there are any, bedded into rocks of a size he can conceal, he will try to spirit them home for his collection. Once or twice Valerio has tried to cut a shell free for him, but they always shatter.

There’s a minute flutter of raindrops then. Across the field, weed-pullers and stone-breakers pause and turn their eyes briefly to the sky. But that’s all there is; those few drops.

‘You’re not paid to watch the weather, you fools,’ Ludo Manzo shouts at them. As one, the men go back to work. All but Ettore. There, facing the sky a few metres away, is the perfect specimen. A scallop shell as wide as the palm of his hand, turned upwards like a bowl and now with one spot of rain marking it darkly, as though it was meant to be. It’s embedded in a chunk of tufo that he might just be able to carry home, wrapped in his cap. He crouches over it and wriggles his fingers underneath it, hefting it to check the weight. It’s at the top end of what he can hope to conceal, and he lingers in indecision, wondering if it’s worth asking Valerio to try to cut it smaller, though he’s unlikely to under Ludo’s watchful eye; wondering if he could come back for the shell later, if he hides it now; wondering if he should just grab it and hope for the best at the end of the day.

‘Ettore, what are you doing? Are you crazy?’ says Pino near his ear, in the loudest of whispers. Ettore leaps up in alarm, knocking Pino’s chin with the top of his head so that both of them wince.

‘Mother of God, Pino! Don’t sneak up like that!’

‘I just didn’t want Manzo to see you! What are you doing? Oh… not another shell. It’s a nice one,’ he concedes, crouching. ‘But how many more do you need?’

‘I like them,’ Ettore mutters. He shrugs, and his friend looks at him with his head on one side, squeezing the soft flesh under his chin into a little roll. Against all logic, Pino, at eleven, is almost chubby. The neighbours all pinch his cheeks in delight, and say that he has a lucky angel watching him, feeding him honey in his sleep. They ruffle his hair, when it’s not shaved off for lice, hoping that some of his luck will pass to them, and to their own weedy, infested children.

Pino stands up, grabs Ettore’s sleeve and pulls him away. They walk a few paces, then he bends and scrabbles at a thistle in a desperate show of industry. Ettore gazes back at the rock, trying to fix its location in his mind for later.

‘Come on! Please, Ettore!’ Pino begs. They all fear Ludo Manzo, but Pino fears him more than all the rest, because Ludo seems to hate him for some reason. Maybe it’s his ready smile, or the way he laughs at things that others can barely find a smile for; maybe it’s the way he looks well fed, though he is not. Maybe it’s because, however harshly Ludo treats him, Pino is never crushed. Before long, he will be smiling again.

‘All right, all right, let go! You’re the one who’ll catch his eye!’ Ettore casts a glance in the direction of the corporals, and sees that they are all watching them. Three of them, including Ludo, mounted on wiry brown horses. They are on the far side of the field so he can’t see their faces, but he feels their eyes on him and it turns his knees to water. He crouches down, wants to disappear; he grabs at weeds and begins to pull them up with feverish vigour, stuffing them into his canvas sack. Fear churns in his guts. ‘Pino, don’t look up,’ he whispers, and Pino turns pale. His eyes are wide enough to fall out of his head; his mouth hangs slightly open as he too begins to work as though his life depends on it. They keep their heads down, hoping that nothing will come of it. Ettore aches to look again, to see if their attention has moved on, but he daren’t. Then they hear a horse approaching, and Pino gives a small, wordless mutter of fear.

Only when the horse is so close that they must move or be stepped on do the boys stand up and scurry back. They look up into the black eyes of Ludo Manzo. He has a long, skeletal face, with the exact round shape of his eye sockets plain to see, and scarred, gaunt cheeks. His beard is a scribble of black wire, and he stinks of stale wine.

‘Do you boys think I’m blind or stupid?’ he says conversationally. ‘Well? Which is it? Speak up or I’ll beat it out of you.’

‘Neither one of those, Mr Manzo,’ says Pino. Ettore glances at him incredulously. Pino always seems to think that people will do right, if he does. When Ludo speaks, Ettore stays silent. Without fail.

‘You’ve always got an answer, haven’t you, fatso? Well then, you tell me – if you don’t think I’m blind or stupid, why do you think I can’t see you from over there, dossing instead of working? Or do you think I won’t mind paying you for wasted time?’ This time there’s silence from both boys. The stone-breakers work on, making their fearful din. Ettore snatches a quick glance across, but Valerio’s head is down. He wishes his father would notice his trouble, even if there’s nothing he could do to help. Ludo crosses his arms over his horse’s withers, tips his hat back slightly on his head, peers down at them and thinks for a while. ‘Did you just forget what you were supposed to be doing? Is that it – are you too stupid to remember to work?’ he says at last. Shut up shut up shut up, Ettore thinks, even as he hears Pino take a shaky breath, and open his mouth.

‘Yes, sir,’ he says. Ettore gouges an elbow into Pino’s ribs but it’s too late. Ludo sits up with a gleeful twist of his lips.

‘Well then, let’s see if we can’t do something to help you remember.’ The other guards have come to watch; one grins and chuckles to himself, knowing there’s some spectacle to come; the other frowns at Ludo and pauses, as though he might say something. But in the end he only turns his horse away and walks it slowly to the far end of the field. Ettore wishes he would come back.

A short while later there’s another sound amidst the breaking of stone: the sound of Pino crying, and yelping in pain. Ettore tries not to look; he doesn’t want to witness his friend’s humiliation, but his eyes flicker back, treacherously, just once. He catches a glimpse of Pino’s bare behind; his trousers are round his ankles and he’s shuffling between the watching guards. Ettore can’t tell exactly what he is being made to do. Pino stumbles and falls down a lot, his cheeks blaze with pain and embarrassment, and Ludo laughs so hard he has to blow his nose; a kind of hard and silent laughter with no joy in it.

Ettore looks away. He is left alone to listen as this goes on – that’s his punishment. Ludo is an uncanny judge of character, and seems to know that this is worse for him, that his guilt will eat him because it was his interest in the shell that started it. Across the field, the other workers try not to see. Only the boys glance over occasionally; some of them look sick, others fearful, others blank. Ettore is put back to work with the other corporal close by him, cussing at him if he looks over his shoulder towards Pino. But it’s not Pino he’s watching, in truth; it’s Ludo Manzo. He wants to memorise Ludo’s face – every line of it, every whisker, and the way the muscles seem to writhe in his cheeks as he laughs. He wants to be able to picture it in his mind’s eye as clearly as he is seeing it now, because it will most likely be dark when he kills him.

Anger wakes him from this dream-memory with his teeth grinding hard together, his jaw aching and his breath flaring his nostrils. It’s the kind of anger that can’t be suppressed, or ignored. It causes an impulse to destroy that will turn on him if he doesn’t satisfy it. Ettore opens his eyes and lurches to his feet, ready to tear into Ludo Manzo with fists and nails and teeth, but he is at home, and he is alone, and bewilderment stops him. Then the room lurches and chugs into a sluggish maelstrom all around him, and he sits back down, shaking. Only then does he remember cutting his leg with the scythe, or rather, his leg reminds him. The pain seems to fizz peculiarly, like the prickles of a thousand hot needles, then it clamps its teeth in a tight, unbearable grip like a steel trap. Ettore stares down at it in horror but there’s nothing much to see. The leg of his trousers has been rolled up over his knee and the exposed skin is caked in dried blood. There’s a cloth tied across the wound itself, and he recognises it as one of Iacopo’s wraps. Wincing, he pulls it off. The wound is a dark gaping slice, clean but deep; he can see the grey-white of bone in there, and lumpish black clots of gore. Immediately that the cloth is off, fresh blood begins to well and drizzle onto the floor. Ettore watches it stupidly. His throat is so dry he can’t swallow.

The door swings open and Paola comes in with Iacopo in a sling on her back. She hesitates when she sees him sitting up, and for a moment relief floods her face. Then she sees his leg and rushes forwards.

‘For God’s sake, Ettore – I just got it to stop bleeding and the first thing you do is start it up again?’ Ettore tries to say sorry but he can’t make his voice work. Paola drags a small stool across to him and plonks his leg up on it. She ties the cloth back over the wound, and then squeezes it. Ettore chokes a little, coughs in shock at the pain, and Paola looks up at him. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry for your pain.’ His blood squeezes up between her fingers and he sees her pale, and her lips press tight. Over her shoulder Iacopo gazes at Ettore with an inscrutable expression, and Ettore reaches out his finger. The baby grasps it at once, with his whole hand, and opens his mouth to suck it. The strength of his grip makes Ettore’s stomach clench in pleasure. Some days Iacopo’s grip is weak, some days strong; some days he doesn’t even reach for the finger. Today the baby has a calm, businesslike demeanour, and his grip is steadfast.

‘I’ll be all right. It’ll be all right,’ Ettore manages to say.

‘Will it?’ says Paola. She pushes him back onto the straw mattress, then lifts up his damaged leg and lays it out. She wipes her hands angrily on a rag and won’t meet his eye. She wears a scarf over her hair, like always, tight to her head and tied at the nape of her neck. Her hair is rolled into a knot there so that no stray strands escape. It makes her look severe, older than her twenty-two years; it accentuates that hardness she’s had since Iacopo’s father died. She shakes her head. ‘If you can’t work, we’re finished.’ Ettore can’t remember when he last heard his sister sound frightened, but she does now.

Lying down makes the room spin again, and Ettore shuts his eyes to still it.

‘Of course I’ll be able to work. How did I get back here?’

‘On Pino’s back, of course. All the way from Vallarta.’

‘Pino always was a big ox. I could go back now and finish the day. I’m fine.’

‘Go back now?’ Paola is trying to clean the blood out from under her fingernails.

‘It’s still light. There’s still time. I worked nine hours or more before it happened, I think…’

‘Yesterday. That was yesterday, you idiot; you’ve been asleep since then, nothing would rouse you. Who knows if they’ll pay you for an unfinished day… You were bleeding so much when you got here… You needed to rest.’ Paola can’t help but sound a tiny bit resentful. They all need to rest, after all.

‘I’ve lost a whole day’s work today, then?’ says Ettore, his eyes snapping open. Paola gives a curt little nod. Never once, since he was ten, has he missed a day’s work when work was available. He feels like a man left stranded; he feels traitorous and betrayed all at once. He sits up again but Paola stops him with a curse.

‘It’s too late now! You might as well rest. Luna is trying to borrow a needle and thread, to close the wound.’ Paola undoes the sling and deftly gathers Iacopo into her arms. She smiles wearily at him, and his little face broadens in delight. ‘How did it happen?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know. I… I lost my balance. I was thinking about… something. I just lost my balance, I think.’

‘Didn’t you get a meal?’

‘A little bread, but no wine.’

‘Those miserly bastards!’ Paola suddenly barks, and Iacopo’s eyes go wide. She quickly puts him over her shoulder and sways him, rolling her eyes anxiously to the ceiling.

‘Paola, please don’t worry. I can work. It will be fine.’ But Paola shakes her head.

‘You must go to our uncle. Ask him for an easy job while you heal.’

‘I will not.’ They glare at one another, and Paola looks away first.

Ettore stays still for a few hours, taking in the strangeness of seeing their one room in daylight. He watches the beam of light from the single window as it glides slowly across the floor. Paola comes and goes. She brings him a cup of water and then a cup of acquasale, thin soup made by boiling up stale bread with salt in water, with a little olive oil or cheese added in times of plenty. There is mozzarella in the soup she gives him; Ettore glances up but doesn’t ask how she got it, because he knows she won’t answer. A man called Poete has a crush on her; he works at the small mozzarella factory at the far end of Via Roma. He has hands like paddles, a chinless face, and always smells of milk. The workers at that factory are allowed to eat as much mozzarella as they like inside the factory, but they aren’t allowed to take any home for their families. That way, the workers gorge themselves once or twice, but are then too sick of the stuff to want it any more. A few months ago a man tried to smuggle home a whole mozzarella – a knot the size of his fist. When it looked as though he would be caught he stuffed it into his mouth and tried to swallow it, and choked to death. Poete got his job, and there’s not much he wouldn’t attempt, it seems, for the things Paola will then do to repay him. She chose him carefully. Poete has subverted one of the lads who brings the milk from the farms every morning, in heavy pails swinging from the handlebars of his bicycle; so Paola regularly gets pilfered milk for Iacopo, since her own is never quite enough for him. Clearly, Poete has also found a way to smuggle out cheese sometimes. It tastes impossibly good, impossibly rich. Ettore shames himself by wolfing it down, and not sharing it with his sister.

It’s hard for Paola to get paid work because of the baby, and because of her reputation. If there is an outbreak of violence in Gioia, a protest – like the stoning of a shop where the baker has been mixing dust into the loaves and selling at high prices – Paola is at the front. She makes her voice one of the loudest, and she does not defer to authority, or to the Church. When she was fifteen there was the scandal of the priest who had been discovered interfering with the little orphan girls in his care. Paola claims to have thrown the torch that finally set his house on fire. The peasants have little enough use for the Church, anyhow – the priests say the droughts and hardships are the result of their godlessness, and they continue to charge for funerals, weddings and christenings, when none can pay. Last year, when the government ordered rationing to help with the post-war shortages and women were frequently made to grant sexual favours to officials in return for their flour, oil and bean coupons, Paola took steps to protect herself. On the day one such randy official made his intentions plain, she let him lead her to a quiet place then she put a knife to his scrotum, got all the coupons she was due and some extra ones as well. She laughed about it, and said the man would be too embarrassed to tell anybody, but Ettore worried for her, then and now. The officials know her face, and he fears that they will mark her out, and make a point of finding her. Sooner or later. She goes about with Iacopo strapped to her back like a talisman, but that won’t deter them when it comes to it.

By afternoon Ettore is on his feet. He can’t put any weight on the cut leg so he hops, using the walls for balance. From their door a short flight of stone steps leads down to a tiny courtyard, an offshoot where the narrow street, Vico Iovia, makes a ninety-degree turn. Beneath their room is a stable, where their neighbour sleeps with his mule and an elderly nanny goat. Ettore picks up the wooden pole with which the double door is barred at night, and uses it as a crutch. There’s no water for Paola to wash their clothes, but she hangs what spare things they own out on a line anyway, to try to air them. Flies settle on the stiff fabric, like they settle on everything else. Paola comes along the alley with a basket of straw on her hip – fodder she collects for their neighbour’s goat, in return for a cup of her milk now and then. She opens her mouth to scold him but Ettore forestalls her.

‘Did Valerio find work today?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘And yesterday – he was with the shepherd, yes? How much did he earn?’

‘He stank of sheep, so I suppose that’s where he was. He wasn’t back until after dark, then he slept, and said nothing to me. He…’ She pauses, repositions the basket on her hip. ‘His cough is worse. Always worse.’

‘I know.’ Ettore sets off in the direction of the castle.

‘Where are you going?’

‘To check he’s earning, since I’m not, and not busy pledging yesterday’s wages on wine.’

The castle looms over him as he emerges from Vico Iovia. Crows line its rooftops, bickering and looking down at the mess of life at street level. It looks out of place, almost ridiculous. There it sits, empty, a monument to one man’s wealth and power; and to the peasants of Gioia, who live sometimes ten, twelve, fifteen to a room, it’s hard to think such things were built and belong in their own world, and not in some fairy land. Ettore’s leg throbs harder and harder. It sounds so loud in his own ears that he starts to wonder if other people can hear it too. It begins to bleed again, and leaves a trail of drips so that a stray dog comes to follow him with its nose twitching. When it gets too close Ettore flails at it with the wooden pole. The dog has a hungry, speculative look in its eye. On the Via del Mercato is a bar, a simple place with stools in front of a pitted countertop, and big barrels of wine behind it. It’s the first one Ettore tries, and he curses when he sees Valerio at the far end of the room, sitting there stooped and unshaven, playing zecchinetta with a man who looks considerably happier than him.

Ettore limps over and slams his hand down flat on the bar in front of them. Neither man is startled, so he knows at once that they’re drunk. The playing cards are yellow and dog-eared; there are sticky rings of spilt red wine all around them, and the scent of it sour and pervasive in the air. Valerio looks up at his son, and Ettore sees that he has drunk so much he can’t keep his face straight. It veers from shock to guilt to anger to resentment, all in a few seconds. Valerio swallows, and finally settles for a sort of sickly, listless expression.

‘Something you want to say, boy?’ he says.

‘Yesterday’s money? Is there any of it left?’ says Ettore. He sounds cold and hard to his own ears, when what he feels is a kind of debilitating urge to surrender waiting to swallow him – a deep black well of it, like the hole at Castellana, into which he might fall and never emerge.

‘My money, you mean? My money, boy.’

‘Mine now, in truth,’ says his companion, who Ettore has never seen before. The man grins a mouthful of gappy brown teeth at him, and Ettore would like to knock them out of his mouth. He sees at once that this man is nowhere near as drunk as his father.

‘He has lost it all to you?’ he says.

‘What he hasn’t tipped down his throat,’ says the barman, who has run the place for as long as Ettore can remember. ‘And he still owes me twenty-eight lire from the winter.’ Twenty-eight lire, in summer, is a good month’s wages.

‘Why aren’t you working?’ Valerio says then, glaring at his son.

‘I cut my leg. I’ll work tomorrow though… why aren’t you working? What will Paola eat tonight, since you’ve pissed it all away?’

‘Don’t accuse me, boy! Mind your own damned business!’ Valerio thumps his fist on the bar and nearly slides off his stool. Raising his voice makes him cough.

‘Ah, leave your old man alone, why don’t you? Pleasures in life are few enough for you to deny him a drink and a game with an old friend,’ says the brown-toothed man. Your old man. Ettore stares bleakly at his father, stooped and sunken and coughing; his hair is salt and pepper, grizzled; there’s dirt in the bags beneath his eyes. He is an old man indeed. He is forty-seven years old. Ettore takes the man’s wine glass and drinks it empty.

‘You’re no friend of his. And if I see you with him again, you’ll wish I hadn’t,’ he says.

That night, as Valerio snores on his ledge, Ettore is woken by the movement of Paola getting up from the mattress beside him. She’s as silken as a cat when she wants to be, but he is sleeping fitfully, with the way his leg itches and thuds. He hears her finding shoes, shawl, knife and matches. He almost asks her where she’s going, but since he wouldn’t like the answer, he stays silent. When she’s gone he reaches out, softly, softly, until he finds his nephew’s sleeping body beside him. He rests his fingers lightly on Iacopo’s ribs, and feels the reassuring flutter of air in and out, in and out. It seems faster than it should be, but he’s still so tiny that Ettore isn’t sure. His cheeks are a little rough – some rash or irritation. That Paola has not taken the baby with her tells him where she might be going.

While he waits, because he can’t sleep until she’s back, he lets himself conjure Livia. Her father brought the family to Gioia six years ago, from a village in the marina – near the sea – where they had once worked on a vineyard that was then eaten whole by phylloxera bugs. Livia came with her parents and two brothers, to face the hatred and the resentment of the Gioiese workforce, who had no time or goodwill for people coming from beyond their own borders to take work. For over a year they lived in the street, camping out beneath the ancient arcs of Gioia, or the portico of a church, or the canopied doorways of the rich and absent, until Livia’s father finally made some friends in the peasants’ union and got enough work to rent a room. Ettore first saw Livia when she was eighteen and he was twenty-two. Just two years ago, but he can’t seem to remember what his life was like before she walked into it; just like now he can’t quite work out how he’s supposed to carry it on without her.

Livia had waves of deep brown hair – a dark chestnut colour, not true black – that matched her skin tone and her eyes almost exactly, creating a harmonious whole, a sort of soft blurredness that was irresistible. She had a dimple in her chin that was his undoing. She would sit in the market place with her mother and the other women with a bucket between her knees and knife in her hand, scraping the husks from nuts, or shelling peas or fava beans, or grinding coffee – whatever was needed. In times when farm work was slack, in November, and January through February, Ettore would steal moments to watch her, and the way she smiled that gave a glimpse of her lower teeth, and the upper ones that were in a strange formation – the canines and premolars longer than the incisors – that gave her a slight lisp when she spoke. It wasn’t that she was the most beautiful, or had the best figure or a provocative way of walking. Ettore couldn’t say why, exactly, but to him she looked like how heaven might be, and he didn’t dare approach her in case he was wrong, and got woken from his dream. Her heart-shaped face had an intelligent expression, her eyes were bright and she had a way of cocking her head to listen that reminded him of a bird; some small, rounded, self-contained bird – a woodcock, or a golden plover.

Pino made him go and talk to her, finally, and the last thing Ettore wanted was to have his friend at his side when he introduced himself – tall, beautiful, devastating Pino. But he never would have done it without Pino’s elbow in his ribs, and as it turned out Livia only looked at Ettore. Only at him, right from the very beginning. She didn’t blush, or simper, or sneer. She put one hand up to her lips and stared, and said his eyes were the colour of the sea, and reminded her of home; so straight away she baffled him, because Ettore had never seen the sea. Nor a mirror. He found out quickly that she only ever said what she actually thought, and had no guile, no patience for games or dissembling. In the time he’d spent watching her he’d never seen her talking to a man, so he’d assumed she would be shy of him, and afraid of what he wanted. But in the end it was she who kissed him first, with all the simplicity and directness he soon came to expect. And she never did spoil the idea that she was like heaven. She had the power of life and death over him from that first exchange.

When perhaps two hours have passed, Paola returns. There’s a slight grunt from her, and a thump as something heavy hits the ground. She pushes it under the bed and Ettore smells blood, and not from his own leg. She lies back down beside him in silence, and he listens as her breathing steadily slows. The smell of smoke clings to her, bitter and strong. She has joined a poaching raid on a masseria, he knows then. They have stolen, they have killed livestock, they have torched, and she has her loot under the bed – meat, some of which they will eat, most of which they will sell to buy other foodstuffs. He feels nothing about this other than guilt, because it’s his fault she’s taken this risk, his fault that she’s this worried about their survival. For a second he’s furious with her, because she could easily be killed, or arrested, and what would become of Iacopo then? The guards open fire freely at thieves and raiders, and then there are the dogs, too. People frequently die, trying to take what they cannot buy. But his anger only makes the guilt worse, because Paola knows the risks, of course, and nobody worries more for her child than she does. But still she went. Ettore lies in the dark and his frustration grows until it’s harder to bear than the wound in his leg. When his sister shakes his arm to wake him he still has not slept, and he snatches the limb away in fury, ignoring her offended expression. They do not speak of her absence, of the meat under the bed, the smell of smoke, or the frank exhaustion on both of their faces.

In the piazza Ettore avoids the Masseria Vallarta overseer, who knows of his injury, and tries to find work elsewhere. He drops his improvised crutch and balances with both feet on the ground but the weight only on the whole leg, and is hired with a group of men to a smaller farm. But he can’t even begin the walk without the pole to lean on, and is promptly dismissed. When all the overseers and workers have gone he finds Valerio, also unemployed, sitting on the steps of the covered market with an unreadable face. Ettore has no idea what to do with his day. A kind of itching desperation means he can’t go home, he can’t rest. He sits next to his father for a while, as the sun rises and floods the piazza and the temperature soars. He thinks that once threshing starts he might have more luck – a job where he can stand rather than walk, feeding the machine or swinging a flail, using the strength of his arms rather than his legs. His body feels tremulous and broken. The sun roars down at them both but Ettore starts to shiver as his father starts to sweat. He keeps thinking he can hear the hum of a scythe swinging, but that can’t be right. He shakes his head doggedly, to be rid of the sound.

‘If Maria was alive she would fix that leg,’ Valerio says suddenly. ‘She would fix this cough too.’ He sets great store by the memory of his wife’s healing skills, though one time Maria Tarano made a poultice for a neighbour’s wound and that wound turned black, the skin around it shiny and fat, and the unfortunate man soon died of it. After that Ettore lost faith in her magic, in her infallibility. He saw from the way she shrank back when others came to her for help that she had lost faith too. But her efforts earned them payment in kind, so she kept them up. And she could not heal herself, of course, when cholera came for her eleven years ago. ‘I still miss her, Ettore. Sorely, I miss her,’ says Valerio, and Ettore suddenly sees that grief is a thing they have in common, he and his father. It saddens him that he hasn’t thought of this until now.

Paola sells cuts of her stolen meat – a sinewy shoulder of mutton – to various neighbours and strangers, by hushed word of mouth. The peasants keep such things to themselves, but the police and proprietors sometimes send out spies to watch and listen, to find out who suddenly has something they ought not to have. For three days they have bread and beans and olive oil to eat, and even a little wine to go with their meals. Paola cooks the beans in a pignata by the fire, makes a thick stew with the mutton bone and adds handfuls of black pasta and pecorino cheese. They eat together from one large dish, much cracked and stapled, that has served their dinners for as long as Ettore can remember; sitting on stools around a tiny, wobbly table that is the envy of many less well-furnished neighbours.

‘Did you hear about Capozzi?’ says Paola, as they eat. Ettore nods. She is normally his eyes and ears in Gioia, when he is in the fields all day; now he is about town in the daytime he sees and hears as well.

‘What of him?’ says Valerio.

‘Arrested again. Beaten as well, I heard. Badly. He was trying to prevent the removal of men from retaken common land, and the burning of what they’d planted there. He was only speaking, but they charged him with disturbing the peace. Disturbing the peace!’ The three of them share a steady glance, and Ettore knows that Paola is waiting for them to express their anger, their outrage, their fear.

Nicola Capozzi is a Gioia man who founded the local branch of the socialist party there in 1907. The workers have no real understanding of the politics behind their strikes and their riots – they need no such understanding, but they know that Capozzi speaks for them. That he is their man. Since the new branch of the fascist party was formed in Gioia recently, with the full support of the signori and proprietors, there’s no doubt as to which side the police are on. There never has been. The men now wait to hear of Capozzi’s murder. Assassination, it will be called, and nothing will be done about it as and when it happens. Not via official channels, in any case.

‘There’ll be a rally. There’ll be a strike until he’s released. I’ll find out today when it will start,’ says Paola, holding her brother’s eyes. But all the outrage, all the fear and anger at the dinner table comes from her alone. Valerio carries on eating as though he hears nothing; and without Livia Ettore can’t find that feeling any more. He can’t find his will to fight.

For three days, all is well. Being well fed keeps Ettore’s shivers to a minimum, and he feels better even though he doesn’t feel right. Then, after three days, the food runs out and Valerio is coughing so hard he can be heard right across the piazza, and Ettore stands square before the overseer of Masseria Vallarta at dawn, with his weight on both feet, and declares himself fit for work. His cut leg beats like a drum; the bone screams silently at him. He can feel the overseer’s eyes on him as he joins the group for the walk to the farm; he grinds his teeth together, so hard that his jaw cramps, but he does not limp. Halfway along the dusty track out of Gioia he feels the warm trickle of fresh blood as the wound reopens. It goes down into his boot, and makes his foot slide around. Pino is not with him; he was hired elsewhere, and Ettore looks around at the other faces to see if there is a friendly one, one he knows, who might carry him back to town if he can’t walk. He sees Gianni, one of Livia’s older brothers, and makes his way over to him.

Gianni looks down at Ettore’s leg but says nothing. He’s older than Ettore by two years, but seems much older still. His face is hard, his expression grim. If Livia was a golden plover, then this brother is a black kite, silent and watchful. He doesn’t moderate his pace to make it easier for Ettore to keep up.

‘Gianni. How is your family?’ says Ettore. Gianni shrugs one shoulder.

‘Surviving. My mother still pines for Livia.’

‘As do we all,’ says Ettore carefully. In truth, pining isn’t something he can imagine Gianni doing. Pining needs softness; pining needs a heart in which to feel the wound. ‘Have you heard anything?’ He can’t help but ask, though he knows Gianni would have sought him out if he had. Gianni shakes his head.

‘It’s impossible to overhear the guards when we harvest.’

‘I know.’ This is something else that might be easier once threshing starts. With the cutting, and the men scattered all over the fields, there is less talk, less gossip. Less opportunity to eavesdrop on the guards and the other annaroli – those with permanent jobs on the masserie. There will be no other way to find out who did the things to Livia that Ettore is careful not to think about, because it’s unbearable in a way that could drive him mad. There’s no other form of justice for the peasants than the personal settling of scores; that has always been the way. Ettore has heard guards boasting of their various exploits and misdeeds, at other times, and he always made a note of the man’s face, if he didn’t know his name, and passed on what he’d heard to those that wanted to know. He trusts that, sooner or later, someone will do the same for him. But it has been six months, and not even a whisper about it. About her. About who would attack a young girl out alone, walking back to town with a bundle of foraged firewood in her apron. Ettore is confused, worried. It’s a source of steady shame, but violence towards wives, daughters and sisters is everywhere in Puglia. The downtrodden men, harried by failure and desperation, often lash out at the only targets they have, even if those targets are innocent, even if they’re loved; even if he loathes himself all the more as a result. But such violence stays in the home, and is nobody’s business. A deliberate attack, outside the family and of such savagery, is everyone’s business.

‘I always ask. I always try to find out,’ says Gianni, as though Ettore had accused him otherwise.

‘I know,’ he says again.

‘We will find out, one day.’ Gianni stares along the road ahead, his eyes narrow though the sun is not yet full up. His certainty reassures Ettore. One thing not in doubt is that, when they find him, they will make the man pay with his hide. They walk on in silence, and soon Gianni has drawn ahead, and Ettore is left behind. Gianni is not a man who needs or wants friends. Ettore feels despised for his weakness.

The day is a long and agonising grind. Too late, Ettore uses one of his bootlaces to tie his trouser leg closed below the wound, but the dust and dirt have already found their way in, and the cloth that’s tied around it is the same one he’s had since the beginning, and it has started to smell. At least, he hopes it’s the cloth that smells, and not the wound itself. He is tying sheaves instead of wielding the scythe; it’s easier in some ways – no tool to carry, no twisting, less shifting of weight from leg to leg. But more bending over, more stooping; and every time he leans down Ettore’s head swoops giddily, queasily, and he fights for balance. When lunchtime comes he stares at his chunk of bread and wonders why, though he knows his stomach is empty, he doesn’t want to eat. He puts the bread in his pocket to take back, and swallows his water in three gulps. The flies won’t leave him alone. By afternoon he’s shivering again, though the day has been one of flat, white heat, and he can tell from the way he’s stared at that he doesn’t look well. A man he doesn’t know claps him on the shoulder and tells him he’s earned his rest that day, but his touch makes Ettore recoil. His skin feels like needles and pins; his guts are juddering.

On the walk home he finds himself alone, because he’s slow and stops to rest often. The sun is setting and the sky has turned the palest turquoise, a colour so pretty that Ettore sits down on the stone wall beside the road and stares at it for a while, not quite knowing where he is or how he got there. He rolls up his trouser leg and peels off the sodden cloth over the wound. The gash has gone black, the skin of his shin shiny and fat. Ettore grins at it, a baring of his teeth that has nothing to do with mirth. Painfully, he stands and walks on, and it seems only moments until full dark descends. He can see lights up ahead and he thinks it must be Gioia, but he can’t seem to get any closer. He legs won’t do as he tells them any more; it’s a weird feeling – the sudden loss of something taken entirely for granted, like forgetting how to breathe.

He takes another rest, this time sitting with his back to the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. He wants them as far away from him as he can put them, but the smell of the wound is too strong to escape, and it reminds him of the trenches. Against the far grey sky bats twist and flutter in silence, and tiny stars are winking alight. Ettore stares up at them and can no longer remember where he was going, or why. Then there’s a growing sound, a rumble, a crunching. A motor car speeds into view, coming away from Gioia with its headlights dazzling. It’s deep red; it kicks up a plume of pale dust behind it, ten metres into the sky. It flashes past Ettore without pausing, and in the instant that it does he’s sure he can hear laughter beneath the sound of its engine – a high peal of female laughter. He stares after it in amazement. The proprietors can’t get petrol for their tractors or farm machinery, they say, but at least one rich man has a laughing car and enough fuel to make it fly.

He rests his head back on the wall. The night is cool but still the air seems hard to breathe, like it’s too thick, and sticks to the sides of his mouth and throat like dust. For a while he focuses on drawing this unhelpful stuff into his lungs, and pushing it out again, and he has no idea if this while is seconds or hours. When a figure emerges from the dark and crouches down beside him, Ettore has no idea what it might mean.

‘Porca puttana! Ettore – what is that stink? Is that you?’ it says, and puts a hand on his shoulder to rouse him. Ettore frowns, rounding up his thoughts and eyes and tongue, which stray away from him like wilful cats. He can see a black outline, a mass of curly hair that seems to move like snakes.

‘Pino?’ His friend seems enormous, a gigantic version of his normal self. ‘Why are you so big?’

‘What? Paola sent me to look for you when you didn’t come back. Is that your leg that smells so bad? Can you get up? Come on.’ Pino’s arm is around his ribs; he wraps one of Ettore’s arms around his neck and heaves him up. The movement is too much, and Ettore retches in protest, bringing up nothing. He suddenly thinks that if he dies without avenging Livia, his own rage will burn him for eternity – he will have his own personal hell, and he will never see her again. Some other lucky ghost will find her in heaven, and claim her. Ettore hasn’t cried since she died, not once, but he starts to cry now.

He doesn’t understand much of anything else for a while. He feels as though he’s floating, and at times it’s quite nice. At other times it starts to feel like drowning. He thinks he hears Valerio and Paola arguing about a doctor, about a druggist, about what to do; he thinks he senses Pino, still huge, waiting to find out what they decide. He wonders how they can carry on talking when the air is hotter than flames. He is inside a building, then he is outside, and then inside again, somewhere different. The sun comes up, and the light hurts his eyes. He is carried, and it is giant, snake-headed Pino who carries him; sweating, the breath puffing in and out of him. From time to time Paola’s face hovers in front of him, and her features swim about as though they’re melting – her eyes are drips of molten wax, running down the candle of her skull; she’s terrifying, and when she speaks she makes no sense.

Ettore is carried for a long time. Then there are walls around him, a place he can’t understand. He feels himself righted, feels the ground under his feet although he can take none of his own weight, and can’t even clench his hand to hang on to Pino. Only Pino’s grip on his wrist, keeping his arm looped around Pino’s neck, keeps him upright. There are voices, and the babble of them swells to a deafening crescendo in his ears, louder than summer thunder. He thinks his eyes are open but what he sees can’t be real, so he isn’t sure. He sees sparkles of light, white skin and golden hair: he thinks he sees an angel. He frowns, struggling with this, because it reminds him of some other thought he had, somewhen. Could it be Livia? Could this mass of impossible, painful brightness be Livia? He stares harder, tries harder. The sparkles of light are eyes, and they are fixed on him; they seem to blaze. He wants to stretch out a hand and know by touch what he can’t make his eyes decipher, but his arm won’t move and he feels himself sinking, and all the light is gone.

Chapter Seven – Clare

In the morning Leandro says that he and Boyd must talk business. Boyd has some preliminary drawings for the villa’s new façade to show him, completed in the days before Clare and Pip arrived, and he vanishes into Cardetta’s cavernous study with them under his arm, visibly tense at the coming judgement. A pair of sharp parallel lines appears between his brows at such times, and Clare wishes he could conceal his anxiety better – like she conceals her own. He gives too much away. Leandro catches her eye as he shuts the door, and there’s a knowing look in it that she can’t decipher. But she doesn’t trust it; she doesn’t know if this man knows how Boyd can be. How breakable.

‘Oh, don’t you worry,’ says Marcie, as Clare turns away from the study door. ‘Leandro’s a pussycat really – and I know he loves Boyd’s style. You should hear him go on about that building of his in New York.’

‘Really?’ That building of Boyd’s in New York, the one he designed half out of his mind. Clare can’t see a picture of it without a creeping feeling of dread.

‘Of course! He’s got nothing but praise for your husband’s talents. He could have had any architect in the world come and design this new front, you know. But he chose Boyd – didn’t even consider anyone else, as far as I’m aware. But that’s my Leandro, you know? He knows what he wants. Now, what say you and me and Pip go out for a bit of a walk?’

It’s mid-morning by the time Marcie has chosen an outfit, and the shoes to go with it.

‘Really,’ she says, as they leave the house for Via Garibaldi, ‘whoever would have known that New York clothes would be so unsuitable in Italy? And that there’d be nowhere – I mean, nowhere – to buy any others once I got here?’ She’s wearing an outfit not dissimilar to the one in which she breakfasted – the lime green of spring leaves – but with high boots laced up her shins. ‘Ready, Master Pip? You shall be our champion against the wild Italians,’ she says, flashing a smile.

‘Had you always lived in New York before you came here, Mrs Cardetta?’ says Pip.

‘It’s Marcie, please! Yes, born and bred. And I love it, but I jumped at the chance to move to Italy. Of course, I thought Leandro meant Rome, or Milan, or Venice. That’s how he proposed to me, you know – did Boyd tell you? He said he wanted to go home, to Italy, but he wouldn’t go unless I married him and went with him. He said I was the missing piece – isn’t that just the sweetest thing you ever heard?’

‘It sounds very romantic,’ says Clare.

‘Oh, devastatingly so. Who could say anything but yes? But then, I always did find proposals hard to resist. Got myself into a few fixes that way,’ she says. The hare-lipped man who drove them from the station opens the street door for them, to a drench of white light. He watches Clare again, just as he did before, even as he nods to Marcie in apparent deference. ‘Thank you, Federico. Whew – it’s going to be a hot one today.’

‘You were engaged before, then?’ says Clare.

‘Oh, two or three times.’ Marcie waves a hand and then pauses on the pavement, looking right and left as if she can’t decide which way to go. ‘Like I said, I was a little wild. But I always managed to escape in the nick of time!’

‘Mr Cardetta said there was a castle,’ says Pip hopefully.

‘You’d like to see it? It’s an ugly old thing. Well, then, follow me, if you’re sure. But I should warn you, it’s right in the middle of the old part of town. That’s where the peasants live and I must say, it’s not always pretty.’

The narrow brim of Clare’s hat doesn’t cast enough shade over her face, and the sun is relentless on the eyes. She can feel it smarting on the back of her neck, and she’s soon sweating. There’s the same hush on the streets as she noticed before, the same strange absence of the bustle she’d expected; there are more people around at this hour, but they keep their voices down, and they don’t seem to hurry. There are men too, leaning against walls and in doorways, or glimpsed through the door of a bar, drinking in spite of the early hour. The party of three goes at a measured pace, because of the heat and the need to keep an eye on the dirty pavements. The sky is so bright that glimpses up at the architecture must be taken quickly, judiciously, before the eyes are seared.

‘The castle’s off that way, but we’re taking the long route because I wanted to show you Piazza Plebiscito first,’ says Marcie, as they come into a large open space surrounded by the shuttered windows and symmetrical façades of houses Clare guesses to be eighteenth and nineteenth century. There are ranks of balconies looking out over the square, each with neat iron railings; a low covered market building that reeks of spoilt vegetables; a raised octagonal bandstand; a beautifully gnarled medieval church, crouched beneath a tall bell tower; and globular street lamps suspended from elegant scrolled poles. Marcie talks them through everything they see. ‘That’s the old Benedictine monastery. Isn’t it just darling? This is where the men all meet every morning to sort out who’s working where. This is really the hub of things – processions, political meetings, that kind of thing. We must go to the Chiesa Madre as well, of course.’

There are men who aren’t working in Piazza Plebiscito as well, standing with their shoulders stooped and their gazes steady; smoking, talking now and then. They have the patient, intransient look of people with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Many of them turn to watch the two blonde women walk by, with their awkward young escort and their clothes so different to the dark, enveloping attire of the Gioia women. The men all wear black or brown or charcoal, and their eyes are uniformly dark, uniformly ambiguous. They squint at the world through veils of cigarette smoke, and their scrutiny somehow makes Clare feel precarious, less real in the world. She’s not a guest there; she’s a temporary anomaly. Like water on waxed cloth, she feels that she could stay on the surface indefinitely, and never sink in. And, equally, she could be removed without consequence. It’s nothing like the other places she has been to in Italy, where foreigners are a common sight. She feels like checking over her shoulder – she does so several times. The streets of Gioia feel poised, as tense as a pent breath; like the whole town is waiting to exhale, and that exhale might be a roar. Clare thinks of the quick look that Marcie and Leandro exchanged when she first suggested going out for a walk. She checks Pip, but he’s swinging his arms and looking around, oblivious.

Only on Via Roma, which they walk down to look at the vast palazzo of a prestigious family called Casano, do they see any better-dressed, apparently upper-class people, invariably walking and not loitering. Marcie smiles and greets them but receives only the merest acknowledgements in return. Her smile loses its glow but she won’t let it drop. Clare walks closer to her, in solidarity.

‘It must be hard to make friends in a new place when you don’t have the language,’ she says. Marcie takes her arm gratefully.

‘They call me his American whore, you know,’ she says, in low tones so that Pip won’t hear. But he does hear – Clare can tell from the way he stiffens and looks away across the street as if the sight of the water spout, and the queue of women waiting at it, are fascinating to him.

‘Small towns breed small minds.’

‘Amen to that. Do you know, almost none of the men who actually own the land around here can be bothered to live here? And none of the nobles – well, there’s one count who has a big palace outside of town. The rest just have tenant farmers to manage their estates, while they swan around in Naples and Rome and Paris. Anyone with enough money to live elsewhere does exactly that. Except my Leandro, of course. So what’s left is a snooty bunch of not-quites, who make themselves feel better by indulging in delusions of grandeur.’ Marcie is still smiling but even she can’t say all this without sounding angry, and sad.

‘I’d never heard of Gioia del Colle before Boyd called me to say that’s where we were going,’ says Clare.

‘Nobody’s heard of Gioia del Colle, sugar. Give it a few days and you’ll understand why.’

To get to the castle they turn onto a narrower street that runs right through the middle of the old town. There are large houses on this street too, but they look more run-down and less fashionable than those on the peripheral streets, and off to either side are tiny alleyways, crowded in with dilapidated stone houses. Windows are clouded with filth; steps run up and down to wooden doors gone jagged and toothy with rot. The gutters are choked with rubbish and muck; there’s a stink of sewage, and they are more careful than ever where they put their feet. Clare has the growing impression of smart newer streets surrounding and curtaining off a seedier, far poorer centre.

‘Smells like the drains are a bit blocked,’ says Pip.

‘Drains? Oh, Pip, they don’t have drains,’ says Marcie.

‘Oh.’ Pip frowns, and clearly wishes he hadn’t mentioned it. ‘Don’t people get ill?’

‘Of course they do. They even get cholera now and then. You’re fine at home with us, of course – all our food comes from the masseria, and the water’s bought in so I know it’s clean. Here on your left we have the house that Napoleon built for his little brother when he was in charge here. And if you look up, you’ll see the castle.’

Clare and Pip do as they’re told, and see three high, square towers with broken tops; the fourth having presumably collapsed. The walls are vast, vertical, indomitable; perforated here and there by small windows and arrow slots.

‘Can’t we go in?’ says Pip. The huge doors don’t look as though they’ve opened in a decade. ‘Who owns it?’

‘Oh, some noble old marchese or other,’ says Marcie, with that wave of her hand that’s almost a tic. ‘I’ve never seen it open. There’s a ghost, though. Do you believe in ghosts?’

‘I don’t know, really. Probably not,’ says Pip, but Clare can hear he’s interested. ‘Who’s it supposed to be?’

‘A girl called Bianca Lancia. She was one of the wives of the king who built this place hundreds of years ago – the most beautiful of his wives – and he locked her up in a dungeon here when he heard a rumour she’d been unfaithful to him. So you know what she did to prove her love for him?’

‘Threw herself off the battlements?’

‘Close. She cut off her… well. An important part of a girl’s anatomy. Both of them.’

‘And did the king love her again?’

‘What, when she’d chopped off the things he probably liked best in the first place? Well, he rushed down here to be reconciled with her, but she died. So what was the point of that, I always wonder?’

‘Well, she regained her good name,’ says Pip pompously.

‘A good name’s no good to a corpse,’ says Marcie, with sudden feeling. ‘Stupid girl, that’s what I always think when I hear that story. She should have found another way. Or another man.’

‘Maybe she had been unfaithful, and she wanted to punish herself?’

‘Even stupider, then.’

Clare wants to divert them, since the subject’s not appropriate for Pip, but beneath the wall of the castle she suddenly can’t think quite clearly; she’s distracted, and feels vulnerable. She looks up at the looming fortress in case that’s where the danger lies – those crushing stone walls, threatening to fall; she looks over her shoulder again, and then turns on her heel, but there’s nobody close by. Just then a man in a hurry emerges from an alleyway opposite the castle, and Clare’s gaze lands on him, and catches there. He’s hampered by a lame leg and has a wooden pole as a crutch, but it’s just a wooden pole, with no easy means of gripping it, so he must use both hands and twist awkwardly to do so. He sets off to the south, as quickly as he may, not looking left or right but only straight ahead. He is thin, black-haired; he has knots at the corners of his jaw where his teeth are clenched. A stray dog trots across the street then lowers its head, sniffs, and turns to follow the man, and there’s something in its posture that Clare doesn’t like; she almost wants to warn him about it. He moves away along the street and disappears behind a wagon piled high with scrap metal and spools of rusty wire.

‘What is it, Clare? Who did you see?’ says Pip.

‘Nothing. Nothing at all,’ she says. The sun is moving towards noon, and there’s no shade in the street or at the foot of the castle walls. She suddenly longs for London; for the quiet little street they live on, the green smell of the air and the predictability of everything there.

‘Well, shall we go back? I don’t know about you but I need a cold drink and a sit-down,’ says Marcie. They all have a wilted look; the kind of deflation that comes from setting out on an adventure but finding only mundane things – hot feet, thirst, and the discomfiting feeling of being unwelcome.

When they get back to the house Federico opens the door for them, and Clare, instinctively now, doesn’t meet his eye. It bothers her that he might think it’s his deformity that makes her look away, when in fact it’s his scrutiny, which is like a constant question mark; whatever it is he wants to know, Clare doesn’t want to answer. He has that look – of one trying to puzzle something out, and something about that makes her not trust him. As they come into the courtyard Leandro calls down to them from one of the upper storey verandas.

‘Come up, come up! We’re having a pre-lunch drink.’

‘Oh good! We’re gasping,’ says Marcie. Boyd and Leandro are in cane chairs around a low table. There’s a square of vivid cerulean sky above the courtyard, but the terrace is in shade. Boyd reaches out for Clare’s hand as she sits by him, and squeezes it. His smile looks genuine, and she’s reassured.

‘Well, what do you think of our Gioia?’ says Leandro. He’s wearing a stone-coloured suit with a deep purple silk tie, part colonial gentleman, part dandy; he leans back in his chair and smiles, all ease.

‘There are some truly beautiful buildings here,’ says Clare. She opens her mouth to say something else, but can’t think what. There’s a pause, and Marcie shoots her a startled glance. ‘It’s charming,’ she says but her voice is rather thin and unconvincing. She has never liked to lie, and prefers silence. Leandro smiles again, and his eyes slide away from her, and she knows she’s insulted him. She daren’t look at Boyd. ‘Tell me, why do the people wear so much black? I’d have thought it would be terribly hot for them,’ she says.

‘The peasants, you mean?’ says Marcie. ‘I guess they like it because it doesn’t show the dirt. They don’t seem too keen on washing all that often.’

‘Marcie,’ Leandro rebukes her, gently enough, but his eyes are hard. ‘It’s not an easy life. These people are poor, they haven’t enough to eat; they can’t afford doctors. Their children don’t thrive. And now, so soon after the war… they wear black because they are in mourning, Mrs Kingsley. Most of them have lost somebody.’

‘I see,’ says Clare, and senses Marcie’s discomfiture beside her. She makes a point of not looking at her.

After lunch Leandro takes Pip down to the courtyard, and the big coaching doors swing open, and another car pulls in with its engine coughing and growling. Leandro stands with one hand in his pocket, his shoulders in a comfortable slouch. He watches Pip, and Clare sees his delight in Pip’s reaction – the way Pip asks to see the engine, and runs his hand over a leather seat, and stands back, head cocked, to admire the overall proportions of the machine. She herself can see no real difference between this car and the other, apart from that this one is black, and the other red.

‘Would you like to drive it, Philip?’ says Leandro. Pip’s face breaks into incredulous joy, and Leandro laughs. ‘I can take that grin for a yes, I think?’

‘Isn’t that rather dangerous? He’s really not old enough,’ says Boyd.

‘Not dangerous at all. I’ll drive us out of town, where there are fewer things to run into, and then he can have a go. Well, lad – are you keen?’

‘Absolutely!’

‘Then let’s go. But – gently, to begin with. If you crash into any trees or walls, I’ll patch up the damage with your hide.’

‘I won’t crash,’ says Pip eagerly. He waves to them as he climbs in, and Clare wonders at the ease with which Boyd’s note of caution was swept aside, his permission not sought. As the car pulls away Boyd’s cheeks turn an angry red.

In the silence after the engine noise there’s the creak and thump of the doors as Federico closes and locks them again. Clare turns her back to him before he finishes the task, and goes back up to the veranda with Boyd. There’s a small sofa and Boyd sits down beside her so that their shoulders and hips and thighs press together, in spite of the heat.

‘Mr Cardetta likes your designs?’ asks Clare, and Boyd smiles, and the tension of the moment before disappears. He rests his elbow on the back of the couch, trails his fingertips through the hair at her temple.

‘Yes. I think so. He wants something more, though… I’m not quite sure what. He told me a lengthy tale about an abandoned castle near here…’

‘The one in the centre of town?’

‘No, another one, called Castel del Monte. But it was built by the same man. It has eight towers, each with eight sides, around an eight-sided courtyard. It has no kitchens, no stables, no discernible function… and yet it has obviously been designed with tremendous care and attention, using rare and expensive stone. It’s high on a hill so it can be seen from miles and miles away in clear weather. But there’s no sign of anyone ever having lived there.’

‘It’s a folly.’

‘It’s an enigma. And that’s what he wants.’

‘He wants octagonal towers high enough to be seen for miles around?’ says Clare playfully, but Boyd barely smiles. He is thinking now, his mind has gone back to the problem.

‘He wants symbolism. He wants people to look upon his works, and wonder.’

‘But whatever for? Isn’t it enough to be fashionable, and… display his largesse?’

‘He wants something that will make all those people in town who think they know everything about him think again.’ Boyd shakes his head.

‘To show that he’s different to them, and not afraid to be so?’

‘I suppose so, yes.’

‘And can you do that? Can you design him an enigma?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ says Boyd, and he presses a kiss to the side of her head. ‘Or we’ll be here an awfully long time.’ He smiles, and Clare laughs a little, but they know without saying that he’s only half joking. There seems to be no question of refusing Leandro Cardetta anything he asks for.

They sit for a while, and the only sound is the occasional rattle of a passing cart, the clop of hooves and fall of booted feet. Boyd sighs, and curves his body towards her. He puts his hand on her knee then runs it higher, to the top of her leg, the outside edge of his little finger touching the crease between her thighs. With his other hand he tips her head back and kisses her neck. In that position it’s hard to speak, but when Clare tries to lift her head he holds it there, with one hand on her forehead, her throat as bare as any sacrifice. Just for a moment. She has a sinking feeling, and shuts her eyes to ignore it.

‘Darling,’ she manages to say. ‘Not here. Someone will see.’

‘No one will see. The servants have all gone to rest, like Marcie.’ His voice is deep, and his hand on her thigh grips tighter. Such ardour in the daytime is unlike him and she wonders if it has its origins in someone or something beyond herself. In the corner of her eye she catches a movement, down by the courtyard doors. She’s up in an instant.

‘That servant is watching; the driver,’ she snaps, and changes her tone when she sees Boyd’s face fall. ‘Really, there’s no privacy here.’

‘Of course there is. But we’ll go inside, if you like,’ he says, standing up. ‘Who do you mean – the fellow with the harelip?’ He takes her hand, glancing over his shoulder at the empty courtyard. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m not sure that I like him. He…’ But she can’t say why, exactly. Only that the thought of him watching them together curdles her stomach. Boyd loops his arm around her waist and pulls her closer. ‘Anyway, darling, I’m not sure I’m in the mood,’ she says, in a rush.

‘But it’s been such a long time, Clare.’ The difference in their heights makes it difficult to walk so close together; their steps mistime. ‘Haven’t you missed me?’

‘Yes, of course I have.’

‘Well then. What’s the problem?’ Clare smiles and shakes her head, and some small part of her loathes the readiness of her capitulation.

Through glass doors off the veranda is a library, with a large desk at its centre that Boyd has been using for work. His pencils and pens are all there, lined up neatly in their boxes. Clare goes to look, to run her fingers across them, and the hard leather of the desk top. She does this sometimes – touches things before sex, to waken her senses. From behind, Boyd holds her, kisses her, pushes hard against her. She tries to mirror his passion but she can only think how strange it is that it’s daylight, and they are not shut away where they should be. But when he puts his fingers into her, and his tongue deep into her mouth, and he undoes her blouse and pulls her bra down over her nipples, she clings to his shoulders and arches herself towards him, because this is a different kind of love-making to their norm, and that’s at once alarming and welcome. And perhaps it is this kind of love-making – spontaneous and urgent – that makes a child, and they will look back in years to come, when that child does something silly, and smile fondly and joke in private that the baby was bound to be wild, since it had such wild beginnings. But Boyd stops with the head of his erection not quite touching her. Almost, but not quite. He shudders between her thighs; his eyes are rapt and he’s breathing hard, but he stops.

‘Wait here,’ he says, as he hurries to do up his trousers. Then he leaves the room.

Clare is left with cold touches of his saliva and her own arousal smudged here and there on her skin. She crosses her arms over her chest and listens to her pulse slowing down. He has gone for the rubber sheath, and when he comes back he finishes the act with the barrier between them, and with all traces of her own passion lost Clare suddenly notices the thinning of his hair as he hunches over her, and the way the desk cuts into the backs of her thighs, and that he keeps his eyes tightly shut the whole time. He climaxes without a sound; she only knows it’s happened because he stops breathing for the space of three heartbeats, or four – her slower heartbeats, not his rapid ones.

Afterwards, Boyd insists that they go and rest in their bedroom, though Clare wants to dress and sit outside in the shade. He uses water from the ewer to rinse the sheath in the wash bowl. Clare used to hate the sight of the thing. Once she thought about sabotage – she held it between her fingers, pinching it, assessing its strength and noting how easy it would be to put a few holes in it with the pin of a brooch. Now she feels that that would be cheating. If she’s to defeat the thing, and be rid of it, she must do so fair and square, by convincing her husband. But she has less and less heart for the fight – the fire has gone out of her hatred of it; it’s more a kind of detached dislike now, a resigned antipathy. The implications of that aren’t lost on her, and they worry her. She doesn’t want to be ready to give up yet. She pictures life at home with Boyd, in years to come, when he has retired and won’t go out to the office every day; when Pip has left home, and will call when he remembers to. She pictures the slow march of time like this, and the terrible weight of her impending solitude. Letting these thoughts coalesce steels her to speak up again.

When the sheath is hanging next to the linen towel, drying, Boyd comes to lie beside her, like spoons.

‘How do you find Gioia, really?’ he says.

‘It scares me,’ says Clare. ‘It felt like we shouldn’t be here. Like it’s no place for tourists.’

‘We’re not tourists.’

‘What are we, then?’ she says, but he doesn’t reply. ‘Marcie hates it here,’ she adds.

‘You think so?’

‘I’m certain of it. Boyd,’ she says carefully, ‘will we never have a child? I so very much want to have one.’

‘We have Pip, don’t we?’

‘Yes, but… it’s not quite the same. Not for me. I’m not Pip’s mother.’

‘You’re as good as a mother to him. You’ve raised him.’ He kisses her hair. ‘And made a splendid job of it.’

‘You know what I’m asking, Boyd.’ She takes a steady breath to keep hold of her nerve. ‘Why don’t you want us to have a baby?’

‘Haven’t we been over this, darling?’

‘No, not really. You’ve told me you’re afraid – but what’s to be afraid of? I’ve waited and waited… I thought in time you’d be ready. But it’s been ten years, Boyd. I’m almost thirty… There’s not that much time left for it. You can’t still be afraid, surely?’

‘Clare, darling…’ He trails off; she waits.

‘Did… was Emma damaged by childbirth? Is that it? Did she… not quite recover from it?’

‘No.’ His voice is rough with strain. ‘No, she was never the same afterwards. It was never the same afterwards. I… I started to lose her the day Philip was born, and I… I couldn’t bear to lose you in the same way.’

‘I’d be fine, I know I would. And I-’

‘No, Clare,’ he says, and now his voice has a hard edge. ‘No. I just can’t allow it.’

‘You can’t allow it?’ she echoes desperately. But Boyd says nothing else.

Through the closed shutters Clare stares at incandescent bars of sky, and it seems wrong to banish the day. With a sudden itch of claustrophobia, she longs to be outside, even in the heat and the sunshine, because the air in the room feels stale and used up. She’s hot beneath Boyd’s arm; sweat blots her blouse in the small of her back, and his breath on her neck is stifling. She worms away slightly, shuffling her head across the pillow, but Boyd’s arm tightens.

‘I think I’ll go out for a walk. Just a short one,’ she says.

‘A walk? Now? Don’t be silly – it’s the hottest part of the day. You can’t.’

‘But I don’t feel like lying down.’

‘Nonsense. You need to rest.’ He kisses her hair, tugging a single strand that sticks to his lips. ‘Why did you marry me, Clare?’ he asks. This is another of the things, heard a hundred times before, that she wishes he wouldn’t say. There’s self-loathing underneath it, which turns the question into an accusation. She knows the answer she must give and says it quickly, to have it done, because silence won’t do.

‘Because I loved you. I loved you straight away.’

Perhaps it’s only half a lie, really. She did fall in love with him – a tall, handsome, older man with an air of sadness, and a hunted expression. At once she wanted to ease his pain. She wanted to be a reason for smiles, and optimism. Her parents introduced them at an afternoon tea in the back garden of their modest Kent home, on a fecund late June day when the borders were alive with bees and white butterflies; she’d already been told about Emma, and warned of his grief. As though that was the only thing about him worth mentioning. It seemed to Clare that he was a man who had lived one whole lifetime already; a man with a wealth and depth of experience that made him steady, and safe. His age reassured her. He struck her as kind but sad, and she wanted to make him happy; and in making him happy, she would make herself happy. His grief was proof of sensitivity, and she wanted to mend his broken heart. He was not overtly demonstrative but she came from a family of undemonstrative people, and she admired the quiet restraint of his grief, and the tender way he looked at her. Her father told her that Boyd wanted a young woman as his second wife; he wanted somebody untouched by grief, unscarred by life. Someone clean of heart and mind with whom to start afresh.

She hadn’t found out about Pip’s existence until after Boyd had proposed and she’d accepted. When she was told that Emma had died in childbirth, she’d assumed that the child had also been lost. You needn’t have anything to do with him, if you really don’t want to, said Boyd. I’d understand; and he has his nanny, after all. Clare had been so terrified at the idea of instantly becoming a mother that she hadn’t time to be upset with Boyd for not telling her about him sooner. She thought about pulling out of the wedding, though it had already been announced in the newspaper; she suddenly, and for the first time, had the feeling of being rushed into something, of careering headlong with her eyes shut. But when she met Pip, sitting down to tea in a hotel in Marylebone, all her fears vanished. Aged just five, Pip said nothing, kept his eyes on his cake and ate it a crumb at a time. Clare had been certain he would hate her on principle, but there was none of that. He looked so frightened and lost that on instinct she reached under the table and took his hand; his expression mirrored exactly what she herself was feeling. She simply couldn’t bear the thought that the small boy should be afraid of her, or of what her intrusion might mean for him. Pip didn’t snatch his hand away, he looked at her in silent confusion – and immediately she wanted to stay with him; with them. She felt an instant affinity with him, and also sensed the gulf between him and his father, and she decided that she would bridge that gap. It all clicked into place, and she relaxed.

Later on, after dinner, Clare finds Pip in the very library where she and Boyd made love that afternoon. She’s glad he’s chosen a chair and isn’t sitting at the desk, which she can’t quite bring herself to look at. There was no shame in what they did, only impropriety, but somehow shame is what she does feel – shame not at the memory of them together, but of the minute she spent there alone, bare-breasted, while Boyd went out of the room for the sheath. She’s ashamed of the controlled way he was able to stop himself in the midst of the moment, and of her own dispassion. Pip has an illustrated atlas of birds open across his knees, and is flicking through it without paying much attention.

‘All right there, Pip? Are you bored to tears?’ she says. He has already caught the sun, and in the lamplight he has a subtle glow. Beneath his shirt his shoulders and elbows are sharp angles.

‘A bit. But this afternoon was the best. Leandro says he’ll teach me to drive while we’re here. Properly, I mean.’

‘That’s Mr Cardetta to you.’

‘But he says to call him Leandro.’

‘Even so…’ She’s about to say more when a sound from outside stops her. Shouting, and the sudden clatter of footsteps. She and Pip share a quick look and then go together to the window that looks over the street.

Clare tilts the shutter slats flat and they peer out through them. There is more shouting, one voice louder than the rest, in words she can’t understand.

‘Open them properly, Clare, or we won’t see a thing,’ says Pip. Clare does as he suggests, and they lean out to look along the length of Via Garibaldi, and down to the stone-flagged road. A loose column of men is marching along it, wearing the customary black, but no jackets. The sleeves of their shirts are rolled up; some of them have guns on belts around their hips, others carry short, sturdy wooden clubs. There are flashes of light where a badge or an emblem reflects the light, but they are too far away to make out. A man at the front has a peaked cap, like a policeman, and this is what Clare thinks at first – that they are police. She can think of no good reason why a police procession would be going on at night, and why the men aren’t in uniforms, just dressed to identify with one another, to be seen as a group. The sight of them makes her uneasy. Their faces are mostly young, clean-shaven; their eyes have the feverish look of boys doing exciting things. ‘Who are they, Clare?’ asks Pip, loudly enough.

‘Hush!’ she says, though the chances of them being heard are small. She’s suddenly absolutely certain that she doesn’t want any one of the young men to look up and see them watching. ‘I don’t know,’ she says quietly. There’s more shouting, angry words, and figures flit here and there in the shadows on the dark side of the street, in the mouths of alleyways. The column keeps marching, and only changes direction when a rock is thrown – Clare thinks it’s a rock – and lands with a loud smack and a scattering of dust at the leader’s feet. The man in the peaked cap raises his arm to halt them, then points; the men swerve suddenly, as one, and vanish into a side street. They make Clare think of a flock of birds, or a swarm of insects, homing in on something to eat.

Pip is uneasy now, too. They wait in silence, though there’s nothing more to see except a woman in a long skirt, hair covered by a scarf, who hurries over to stand on the corner and peer cautiously after the armed marchers. A while later there’s a loud, repeated banging, the sound of glass breaking, and a woman’s scream. There’s more shouting – one voice again, a man’s, loud and aggrieved. Then he stops, and there’s nothing else. Clare realises she’s been holding her breath, and craning too far out of the window.

‘Come in, Pip,’ she says, grasping his sleeve. She closes the shutters again, latches them, checks that she’s done it properly. Pip’s eyes are wide and his face is blank with disquiet.

‘What was all that about? Were they the police?’ he says. ‘Shall we go and ask Leandro? He’s still up, I saw him go across the courtyard a little while ago.’

‘It’s Mr Cardetta, Pip, and no, let’s not bother him now. It’s probably nothing. Most likely nothing at all.’

‘It didn’t look like nothing. And it didn’t sound like nothing,’ says Pip huffily. Clare raises an eyebrow at him and he scowls but goes with her towards the bedrooms. But she can’t blame him because he’s right. It didn’t look or sound like nothing. Clare suddenly thinks of the way she felt earlier, by the walls of the castle – the same way she felt just now, when she thought she might be seen by the marching men. We shouldn’t be here, she thinks.

For two days, Clare thinks about the column of men all in black, but says nothing. For two days she thinks of the insistent way Boyd made love to her, and his refusal to give her a child, but says nothing. She’s suddenly more aware than ever before of all the things she doesn’t say, and she has that same prickling feeling as when Boyd’s breath on the back of her neck was too hot, and his arm around her wouldn’t loosen, and he wouldn’t let her get up from the bed. It’s a feeling like something building up, something gathering. Nobody else seems to notice, as the days settle into a pattern of sorts, and suddenly the thought of spending the whole summer that way makes Clare worry that the feeling could grow into something worse; into something like hysteria, or panic.

Boyd spends hours at the desk in the library, drawing and erasing and drawing again, frowning at his work but completely immersed. Pip has more driving lessons with Leandro, and in between he finds an old bicycle in one of the shady downstairs rooms that the servants inhabit, and rides it around the courtyard, in and out of the colonnades, like a little boy. When it gets a puncture Federico finds the hole using a basin of water, patches it and pumps the tyre back up. Clare sees them exchange a few words and smile. The servant’s cleft lip is less noticeable when he smiles – it evens itself out, and he keeps his mouth shut, as if ashamed of his teeth. When the bike is fixed the two young men shake hands before Pip remounts, and Clare wonders if she’s being unfair in disliking Federico the way she does.

She spends a good deal of time reading. The library is stocked with works in Italian that have faded spines and dusty tops; they clearly came with the house and haven’t been read in a generation. There are only a few books in English, which came with the Cardettas from New York, and Clare wishes she’d brought more with her. When she runs out of things to read, the hours will be even longer, her sense of suffocation harder to ignore. Marcie sews her clothes into new shapes, and writes long letters to friends in New York, and chatters and laughs; her smile flits from room to room like a nervous cat, and Clare wants to soothe her, somehow. But she doesn’t know how to soothe a person who is outwardly joyful, and laughs at the merest thing.

‘Tell me about London, go on,’ says Marcie one afternoon. ‘I’ve never been. Is it wonderful? It must be.’

‘Well, I like it very much. The place where we live – Hampstead – is very quiet and green, nothing like the centre of London. There’s a huge hill you can walk up, to get a view of the city to the south. There are lots of little teashops and places to eat lunch; the children go on donkey rides and splash about in the swimming ponds. It’s lovely…’

‘But don’t you go into the city? Don’t you go dancing?’

‘Well… yes, we do. Not very often – Boyd spends all day there, you see, at work. He likes to come home to the peace and quiet. And he never was much interested in dancing. We go to the theatre quite often.’

‘And shopping? There must be wonderful shops.’

‘Yes,’ says Clare. ‘Yes, there are.’ She doesn’t elaborate, though she can see Marcie’s frustration at her reticence. She doesn’t want to say that the wife of a modest architect shops rarely, and then in small ladies’ outfitters, not at Liberty or Harrods.

‘But what do you do all day, Clare?’

‘Well, I…’ Clare pauses. Her first impulse is to defend their quiet life, but then there are the murmurings of panic she feels at the thought of Pip leaving home – of not having him to look forward to; of being alone with the serene slide of the afternoons, waiting for Boyd to come home, and the amorphous disappointment of the evenings once he has. At the thought of being alone during one of his bad spells, when his silence and self-destruction might drive her mad. ‘I suppose it can be a little dull,’ she says. ‘But for the most part I’d rather have dull than frantic.’

‘Would you? Golly, I’d far rather have frantic!’ says Marcie. ‘But then, when you love your husband there’s always fun to be had – the best kind. Am I right?’ She smiles wickedly, and winks at Clare, and Clare can only nod, embarrassed, because fun isn’t a word she has ever associated with Boyd.

The days are uniformly hot and bright. Clouds sometimes gather in the afternoon, but they slink sheepishly into the night as it falls, and are gone by morning. As to how exactly Leandro Cardetta fills his days, Clare can only wonder. He comes and goes, and is rarely in one room for long. On the third afternoon, as the sun begins to mellow, Leandro suggests they join in the passeggiata with Gioia’s signori. Marcie declines with a headache, lying across a long couch in the shade like a fallen leaf; Boyd looks up from his desk when Clare goes to fetch him, and shakes his head.

‘I’m on to something here, darling. You carry on without me,’ he says.

‘Please come, Boyd. I really don’t want to go on my own.’

‘Don’t be silly. Of course you must go, if Cardetta’s asked you to.’

‘But I just… don’t know him all that well yet. I’d far rather you came too. Won’t you?’ The thought of being alone with their host unsettles her; though he’s only ever solicitous and polite, still there’s something arch and knowing about him.

‘Not now, Clare. Take Pip with you, if you need company.’ Clare goes back down to where Leandro is waiting, and he smiles as though he can sense her reserve.

With Pip, they stroll along Via Garibaldi first one way and then the other. People are not quite as ready to snub Leandro as they were Marcie. When he greets them it’s with a subtle positioning of his body that makes them stop walking; he stands just enough in their way that brushing past him would be obvious and rude. Clare can almost follow their conversation in Italian, but the southern accent is strange to her; some words elude her, and as she chases after them she misses what comes next. Pip’s face mirrors incomprehension, but when Leandro introduces him to someone, he shakes the men’s hands with a confident buona sera.

‘This is one of our distinguished doctors here in Gioia, Dr Angelini,’ says Leandro, as Clare shakes the hand of a short, fat man whose face and grey hair shine with grease. ‘Well, I say distinguished doctor, what I really mean is revolting quack. This man fleeces the poor of Gioia, selling fake medicines supplied to him by his brother, the druggist; and he examines the women far too enthusiastically – I’m sure you don’t need me to elaborate. I don’t believe he ever even graduated, and he’s the first to flee his post for Rome when cholera breaks out. Don’t worry, he can’t speak a word of English,’ he says, all in the same convivial tone, as Dr Angelini smiles and tilts his head obsequiously. Clare struggles not to show her surprise, and Pip gives a quiet guffaw before he can help himself. The doctor’s eyes narrow suspiciously, and Cardetta says something to him, evenly and with no trace of inappropriate humour. The man inclines his head again, but glares at Pip as they part.

Clare steals a sideways glance at Leandro Cardetta as they walk on, and his smile is roguish in response.

‘That was so funny!’ says Pip, and Clare almost hushes him censoriously, then realises that to do so could be a slight to Leandro.

‘You didn’t approve of my introduction, Mrs Kingsley?’ he says.

‘I was just a little… caught unawares,’ she says. They’re walking west into the glaring sun, and her eyes are fighting the light.

‘I’d hoped you’d find it refreshing. Unpleasant people deserve to be mocked, after all.’ He shrugs. His way of speaking is unusual; the New York accent is quite soft for one who learnt English there, and the imprint of Italian intonation is on every word.

‘Why trouble yourself to know them, if you dislike them so?’

‘Ah, alas, Mrs Kingsley, in order to be somebody, you must know everybody.’

‘What kind of somebody do you want to be?’ says Pip. He has become far too familiar with their host since the driving lessons began. And yet Leandro Cardetta doesn’t seem to mind at all, and Clare wonders then if all her misgivings – about Gioia del Colle, about Federico and Leandro – are only in her mind, brought on by the tension she senses in Boyd. Jumping at shadows.

‘I want to be listened to, Philip,’ says Leandro Cardetta. ‘I am no idealist. I know that for a terrone like me, their respect will always have to be bought. But however I must get it, I will get it.’ Clare says nothing, and he glances at her again. ‘You don’t approve, Mrs Kingsley?’

‘Oh, I’m sure I know little enough about it.’ His smile turns a little stiff.

‘Ah, I sense that old British maxim, hovering on your tongue – that respect must be earned to be of value,’ he says. ‘Your husband has said the same thing to me before, but it isn’t always true. If the people I have to deal with only understand money and power, then that’s the path I must take with them. I learnt in New York there’s a way to get to everybody, you only have to know how to find it. And I didn’t work my way up from nothing over there to be dismissed by people who’ve done nothing in life but sit and squander it, growing fatter and lazier and stupider all the while.’

‘But why come back, then, if you’ll be forced to be friends with people you don’t like?’ says Pip.

‘Friends? Oh, I have no friends here. But this is my home, in spite of all of it. I remember these streets from when I was a tiny child. This stink…’ He takes a deep breath. ‘The taste of it. Can you know what that means, Pip? Perhaps you’re too young yet. I lived in America for a long time, but every day – every day – I thought of coming home. Now I’m here, and I’m not wanted. Well, too bad. I’m home. And home I will stay.’ There’s no room for manoeuvre in this whatsoever. Clare wonders how often Marcie has come up against the same brick wall, and feels sorry for her.

‘What business were you in in New York, Mr Cardetta?’ says Clare. ‘Will you pursue the same business here?’

‘Waste disposal.’ He smiles at her, pleased by her surprise. ‘Not what you were expecting? There’s a hell of a lot of people in New York, creating a hell of a lot of garbage. And no, those days are over. There’s almost no rubbish in Gioia – haven’t you noticed? What the poor don’t eat, the dogs do.’

They walk on a little further, and pass a group of three men as immaculately dressed as Leandro, standing at a corner with their waistcoats buttoned up and gold watch chains catching the light, and no dust on their shoes. Leandro stiffens; it makes him look taller, stronger.

‘Buona sera, signori,’ he greets them, inclining his head but not stopping. Clare starts to smile but stops in the face of their blatant hostility. One of the men spits, off to one side rather than at them, but the insult is clear.

‘You’ve no right to speak to us, cafone,’ that man says, darkly, in English. ‘You’ve no right to wear those clothes, or live in that house.’

‘You look well, Cozzolino. The season agrees with you,’ Leandro says mildly. Once they’ve passed Clare feels the men’s eyes glare after them, and she daren’t look back.

‘That man was so rude… what’s a caffoney?’ says Pip.

‘Cafone means peasant riff-raff. Don’t look so horrified, Mrs Kingsley. Cozzolino doesn’t deserve to be respected, let alone feared. He’s the worst kind of Gioia signori. He thinks his rank is God-given, and excuses all and any excess. But it’ll catch up to him, sooner or later.’

‘I don’t know how you can stand to be spoken to that way. It was horrible,’ says Clare.

‘Sooner or later, they’ll have to get used to me. I mean to give them no choice.’ He glances at her again as they walk back towards Piazza Plebiscito. ‘I never thought a Briton would be so shocked to see class prejudice in action, I must say.’

‘There’s no excuse for bad manners. And I suppose I… I’ve never…’

‘Been at the sharp end of it?’

‘Yes. I couldn’t stand to have to associate with such people.’

‘You would stay away, and let them win? I have a thick skin, Mrs Kingsley – it’s impossible to get anywhere either here or in New York without one. But I don’t forget these slights.’ He taps one finger on the side of his head. ‘One day Cozzolino might regret talking down to me the way he does. Or perhaps you think he’s right? You think high society is no place for an arriviste like me?’

‘No,’ says Clare, nervous of the edge in his voice. ‘No, I don’t think that at all.’

‘In a small place like Gioia, this is how politics works, Mrs Kingsley. It’s all about who you know, and who you pay. Imagine if I ended up in city hall one day! Then I could really make a difference here. But it’ll only happen if I make myself one of them, at least outwardly. It’ll be a long process, and perhaps a distasteful one, but every game has a set of rules.’

‘Ought democracy be a game?’ says Clare.

‘I didn’t make the world.’ Leandro shrugs. ‘Politics was ever a dirty business.’

‘Then I think I’d rather not be involved at all.’

‘But, Mrs Kingsley, that’s no solution! Women may vote in your country, now – isn’t that so? Don’t tell me you don’t exercise that right?’

‘Once I turn thirty, I may vote. But I won’t have the first idea who I should vote for. I suppose I’ll take Boyd’s lead on it. Politics has never really interested me, truthfully. Better that I leave it to those who understand it,’ she says. Leandro grunts. He walks with his hands linked behind him, studying his fancy shoes for a while.

‘For you, politics is something that happens in the newspapers. Decisions made at a distance to you, which have no obvious effect on your life. Is that not so? Easy to ignore it, then. Here in Puglia, politics is something that happens on your doorstep; it’s something that happens to you, whether you’re interested or not. Politics can take food out of your mouth, and impoverish your family. It can make you unemployable, and land you in prison. It’s not possible to ignore it, to be uninterested.’ Feeling his rebuke, Clare says nothing; the silence is awkward.

‘I hope you do get to be mayor,’ says Pip, and Clare is grateful. ‘Then that man won’t dare to be rude to you.’ Leandro chuckles.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny, watching him try to be civil?’ He flashes Pip his lupine grin.

Just then there’s a commotion in Piazza Plebiscito, immediately up ahead. They are at the edge of the square and a loose ring of people have stopped to watch; they shift on their feet, nervous, uncertain. Wearing the peasant black, these could be the same aimless men Clare noticed before; one or two of them call out words in the dialect, but the men they’re watching don’t pay them any attention. These others are three men in black shirts, with batons in their hands, standing every bit as poised but with none of the uncertainty of the onlookers. A fourth is putting his shoulder to the door of a house that opens onto the square; his teeth are gritted, snarling, and he grunts each time he drives himself into it. With the other people whose evening strolls have brought them unexpectedly on this spectacle, Clare, Pip and Leandro stop still, paused in the act of turning away.

‘Are they the police? Are they going to arrest somebody?’ says Pip.

‘We should go,’ says Clare, and finds that her throat has gone dry, but Leandro neither moves nor speaks. He watches the scene with an unreadable intensity. So Clare and Pip watch too, and she’s sure that whoever the men are, they’re not the police. With a crash of splintering wood the door gives way and the men are inside. Somewhere above, a woman shouts incomprehensible words; there’s the scuff and thud of footsteps on wooden stairs. The ring of onlookers take an involuntary step forwards, as one, but again, something stops them. They are afraid, Clare realises. They are horribly afraid. We should go.

Thirty seconds later the men in black emerge, bringing another man out between two of them. The man is middle-aged, his neat beard shot with grey. He has round, wire spectacles; he’s slightly built, and they have messed up his hair so that it flops onto his forehead. He walks with a certain reluctance but offers no real resistance. He is dignified, and Clare exhales a little, thinking the worst is over.

‘Do you know who that…’ she begins to ask, but then words abandon her. Once they are clear of the house the man’s arms are released. He reaches up and straightens his spectacles with the index finger of his right hand, then one of the men in black raises his baton and strikes him viciously around the side of his head. It makes a horrible sound, meaty and oddly hollow. The man’s spectacles fly off as his head cracks around; Clare hears them rattle as they hit the ground. The man falls down, boneless; there’s a spray and spatter of blood. His left eye socket looks odd and collapsed but he must still be awake because he curls himself up and tucks his elbows in, as if that will protect him as more blows fall, the four batons rising and falling, again and again, clenched in white-knuckled hands. They kick him too, driving their booted feet into the soft parts of his body for a long time after he has stopped moving; they are breathing hard when they finish. Clare doesn’t see them go – she doesn’t see if they saunter, or run away like guilty men. She can only see the crumpled, broken man on the paving stones, and his ruined little spectacles next to him. And then she sits down, without blinking, as if she owes him her undivided attention, and Pip throws up beside her.

Boyd wakes her hours later, with darkness outside the shutters. He turns on the bedside light and it sends a stabbing pain into her skull.

‘How are you now?’ He takes her hand in one of his and brushes the fingers of the other over her cheek.

‘I want us to go.’ Clare sits up carefully. She’s finding it hard to think because the world is a different place than it was before – it’s dangerous and unknowable; there are killers in the shadows. She suddenly knows, in way she didn’t before, how breakable she is. How easily she might die. She’s still wearing the clothes she had on for the passeggiata, and when she looks down she expects there to be blood on them. A shudder courses through her. ‘All of us, you, me and Pip. I want us to go home.’

‘Clare-’ Boyd shakes his head.

‘Please, Boyd. There’s something terrible going on here, and I don’t want to be here while it happens… I don’t want Pip to be here! For pity’s sake, Boyd – your fifteen-year-old son just saw a man beaten to death!’

‘He’s not dead, apparently. He was still alive when he was carried-’

‘Is that somehow supposed to make it better?’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Well. If he lives, then… then I’m glad. But it changes nothing, Boyd. We don’t belong here.’ She wishes she could stop shaking but the tremors seem to come from the very core of her, rattling up from her bones implacably.

‘We can’t leave, darling.’ Boyd shakes his head, calmly regretful. The lamp lights him from below, and puts deep shadows under his eyes. He sits down on the edge of the bed, his spine a long curve, his shoulders collapsing around him. Clare wants to shake him, the way she has been shaken.

‘Why not? You’ve had time to get to know this building… You could work well enough from Bari, or Rome. Or from London – from home, Boyd.’

‘That’s just not possible.’ He stands up and drops her hand; walks to the end of the bed and then back again.

‘But why?’

‘Because I’ve given my word, Clare! Leandro asked me to come out here and work with him on this, and I agreed. I can’t go back on that.’

‘Why can’t you? I’m sure he’d understand – any reasonable person would understand!’

‘It’s not possible, Clare!’ he cries, standing in front of her, looking down, clenching his hands into fists. Clare stares for a long moment. She doesn’t understand him; just then she feels she hardly knows him. When she speaks it’s almost a whisper.

‘Why are you so afraid of him, Boyd? Whatever happened between you, in the past? Something did – something happened in New York, didn’t it?’ Boyd stares down at her, and tears spring up, shining in his eyes.

‘Nothing,’ he says roughly, and they both know it’s a lie. ‘That’s enough. You’re my wife and I… need your support. I have made my decision.’

‘But Pip and I don’t need to stay – I never gave my word to stay, and Cardetta can’t possibly expect us to. Come with us, Boyd,’ she begs.

‘Clare, no. You may not leave. I can’t bear to be here without you.’ Clare can feel the erosion of her resolve – the precise way in which it crumbles, from the edges to the core – but behind it is the thought of staying in Gioia for the rest of the summer, which causes a sickening lump to form, low down in her throat. She fights against her fear of standing her ground, of meeting him head on, unbalancing him.

‘I’m… going to go and see Pip.’ She stands gingerly, half expecting the floor to break beneath her feet, and leaves him there by the bed, buckled in on himself. She goes barefoot to Pip’s room.

Pip is sitting in the window again, wrapped up with his dressing gown pulled tight around him, as if he’s cold. There’s an untouched supper on a tray by the bed, and a cup of milky coffee that has dried into a saggy skin across the top. Pip’s face is ashy white, and Clare goes and hugs him, holding his head to her shoulder, until after a moment he puts his arms around her and she feels a single sob rock through him.

‘He wasn’t even trying to get away,’ he says, muffled and bewildered.

‘I know, darling.’

‘Why did they attack him like that, then? Why didn’t the police come?’

‘I don’t know, Pip. I don’t understand it either. We’ll be home soon, I promise. We won’t stay, you and I. All right? We’ll go home.’ There’s a thrill as she says this; she’s never disobeyed Boyd before.

‘All right. Good.’ Pip nods, and pulls away from her, and Clare runs her hands through his hair to straighten it, and tries to smile. His eyes are enormous.

‘I felt like I was part of it. I felt like I was as bad as them, because I just watched and didn’t do anything to help. That poor man. He wasn’t even trying to get away. Do you think those were the same men we saw the other night? Do you think they were on their way to do that to someone else when we saw them?’

‘Shh… Try not to think about it too much, Pip. There was nothing we could have done. It was… awful. It was just awful, I know. We’ll go soon, I promise.’

‘You promise?’ he echoes, too upset to be embarrassed about the tears streaking down his cheeks. Clare nods, kisses her fingers and presses them to his forehead. ‘You’re shaking,’ he says, and Clare smiles.

‘I can’t seem to stop. I’m like a bowlful of jelly,’ she says.

‘I threw up on Mr Cardetta’s shoes,’ he says tonelessly. ‘You know, the black and white ones, with the fancy stitching?’

‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ Clare murmurs, and is rewarded with a tiny glimpse of his smile. But her throat feels itchy and hot, and she’s aware of her heart beating, harder than normal, tight against her ribs.

In the morning Clare has coffee in her room, near the window so she can see the sky. She doesn’t want to go downstairs or eat, she doesn’t want to see Leandro Cardetta, and when Marcie comes to flutter around her, fussing and cooing in her fragile way, she is all but unresponsive. She can’t seem to find the energy for more because she keeps hearing the rattle of wire spectacles hitting the ground, and Boyd has sunk into the silence that she dreads, and she knows that she’s the direct cause of it. But she can’t bring herself to say she’ll stay; she’s as afraid of upsetting Boyd as she is of staying in Gioia. She’s torn, and hoping for him to tell her she can go home. She reads without absorbing a word, and jumps every time there’s a noise from the street. She was witness to a crime, so the perpetrators have reason to come after her – her and Pip. But then, there were plenty of witnesses. If witnesses were a worry to them, they would not have gone in broad daylight to batter the slim man with the wire spectacles. They had wanted people to see them at their work. Clare lowers her book as she realises this, and nearly drops it when there’s a knock at the door. She doesn’t answer, but a second or two later it opens anyway, and Leandro walks slowly over to where she’s sitting.

He stands and watches her for a moment or two, and Clare wishes she could read him better. She struggles to hold his gaze, when her own wants to slide away from him and hide. Eventually he sighs a little, and shakes his head.

‘Mrs Kingsley, I am so sorry.’ He waits, as if she ought to fill the pause, but she has nothing to say to this. ‘I’m well aware how distressing it must have been for you, and the boy, to witness such a thing.’

‘Thing? Mr Cardetta, that was not a thing. That was a murder.’ Her voice wobbles on the final word.

‘The man lives-’

‘For now, and by pure chance.’

‘I understand that you’re upset, but please, don’t be so quick to leave – not when you’ve barely arrived.’

‘It seems entirely inappropriate that we’re here at all, Mr Cardetta. There’s clearly some kind of… crisis going on here. Perhaps nobody wants to acknowledge it, but there it is. Pip and I have no place here, whatever my husband says.’ She takes a breath to steady herself; Leandro watches her carefully. ‘Who was that man? The man they beat?’

‘His name is Francesco Molino. He was – he is – an advocate for the reforms; a key voice in the peasant league.’

‘And the men who attacked him?’ At this Leandro pauses, and Clare can see him choosing what to tell her, how much to reveal. She holds his gaze.

‘Mrs Kingsley, you are quite right. There is a crisis here – in truth, there’s a war. Nobody is calling it that, yet, but that’s what it is. There is a war going on between the farm labourers and the men who own and run the farms. And I believe the tide is turning. After the Great War ended things went in the workers’ favour. There was so much anger and hardship, and the time was ripe for change. But the proprietors have a new weapon now.’

‘Those men?’ says Clare, and Leandro nods.

‘Members of the new fascist party – squads paid by the wealthy to… turn the tide back their way. To break strikes, and undermine the socialist movement. You have nothing to fear from them, of course. You’re not a part of this.’

‘How can you say that after what happened yesterday? And how can they just… do what they want like that, with no fear of arrest or censure?’

‘This is not Britain, Mrs Kingsley; this is not even Italy. This is Puglia. The local branch of the fascist party, begun here only in June, was founded by members of the police force.’

‘You mean… they may act as they please? They have official sanction – the law is with them?’

‘No. They have unofficial sanction, and the money is with them. That’s far more important down here.’

From the garden below the window Clare hears Boyd’s and Pip’s voices, echoing slightly, making a calm sound. Leandro pulls up a chair to face Clare and sits down.

‘I have a proposition for you,’ he says, lacing his fingers and watching her over the top of them. ‘Stay here in Puglia, but not here in Gioia. Not in town.’

‘No, Mr Cardetta. I want to go home, and so does Pip. Boyd may even come too, if I can convince him. You have been an excellent host, but I don’t understand why my husband can’t work on his plans for your new façade from somewhere else. He won’t tell me… he…’ She shakes her head. The trembling has stopped, outwardly, but she can still feel it in her gut, like aftershocks. ‘He insists that he must remain here with you, even if he won’t explain why. So – please – let him go. Let him come away with me and Pip.’

‘Stay, for his sake. Even I can see that he’s happier, and works better, when you’re with him. We can all see the good you do him.’

‘But you just said yourself, there’s a war on here! How can you ask us to stay?’

‘Stay for his sake, and… stay for Marcie’s sake. Please. I have a masseria outside of Gioia – a farm deep in the countryside, in a tranquil place where none of these troubles will come near you. You and Marcie and the boy can go there, Boyd and I can travel back and forth as we need to. Mrs Kingsley, I know my wife isn’t happy here. I’m not blind. If only you could see how much good it’s done her to have your company! These past three days she’s been more like she was when I first knew her – more like she was in New York – than at any time since we moved here. Please. Go to the masseria. My wife needs you, and your husband needs you, and I need your husband.’

Leandro keeps his steady black eyes on her until she feels skewered, and knows that however much she twists there’ll be no breaking free. She has that same choking feeling that she knows so well, that feeling of something around her throat. It helps her not to agree; the silence grows until it seems to ring. ‘This is very important,’ says Leandro eventually, softly, still not breaking his gaze. ‘I may not speak freely about everything that concerns me, and I can only ask your forgiveness for that. But I can’t allow you to leave yet. I’m afraid I will not allow it.’ Clare stares at him, stunned mute. She can’t quite believe what she’s heard, but there’s no mistaking that Leandro is entirely in earnest. He is steely with it, too sharp to touch. ‘Do you understand, Mrs Kingsley?’ In his face, in his tone, she sees the truth. She is entirely subject to his will, entirely at his command; they all are. When Leandro goes off it’s like a volcano, Marcie said. Clare’s pulse flickers in her neck; she has to swallow before she can speak.

‘Very well,’ she says, and Leandro’s answering smile is warm and relieved, and all trace of the threat disappears.

Word is sent ahead to Cardetta’s masseria – the Masseria dell’Arco – to be ready for their arrival, and they stay the rest of the day in Gioia while Clare and Pip repack their things, and Marcie fills a steamer trunk with clothes and shoes and make-up. She seems as giddy about the change in plans as if they’ve decided to go on a picnic or to a gala of some kind.

‘You’re going to love the masseria, Pip,’ she declares, as they sit down to dinner and Clare has the manic sensation that they’re all fiddling as Rome burns. She glances from face to face to see if anyone else senses anything amiss, but they are all acting as though nothing has happened, and she can’t work out if it’s her who’s unreal, or if it’s them. Only Pip can’t keep his disquiet from showing. He’s bounced back from his shock with the resilience of youth, and by sleeping fourteen hours overnight, but he’s still quiet and his eyes, when nobody’s talking to him, have a far-off look. ‘It’s like a kind of castle, really. Built to keep out marauding bandits, aeons ago. Lots to explore, and lots of animals too. Do you like animals?’

‘Yes. I like dogs – I should like to have a dog.’

‘Well, we have plenty of dogs there!’ Marcie beams at him. ‘Plenty of cows and horses and mules too, but they’re far less fun, I know.’

‘They’re farm dogs, mind you,’ Leandro cautions. ‘They’re not pets, so don’t try to play with them until they know you.’

‘Oh, darling, of course he won’t! Pip’s not silly,’ says Marcie. ‘And the stars! You won’t believe the number of stars.’ When the food arrives everybody eats, including Pip, but Clare finds that it all tastes of nothing; her tongue seems numb, and even though her stomach feels caved in with hunger, when she tries to swallow it almost makes her gag. Boyd takes her hand under the table and squeezes it with a quiet intensity. She doesn’t look at him, and drinks her wine too quickly.

Federico drives the two women and Pip out to the farm in the red Alfa Romeo. The men will follow in a couple of days, and as they leave Clare turns to look up at Boyd from the back seat, so that her last view is of his face thrown into shadow as the car pulls away. He stands with his shoulders slumped, and when he kissed her goodbye minutes before there was something feverish about it, something frantic in the press of his lips that almost made her recoil. The car’s headlights lance ahead through the darkness; a plume of dust and fumes trails behind it. Clare thinks of her promise to Pip – that they would go home soon – and wonders if he remembers it. If he will challenge her about it. Right now he seems distracted enough by Marcie and her constant talk. She sits in the front seat next to Federico, and turns back to face them.

‘Do you know, there’s a raised area in one of the old bedrooms at the masseria – it used to be where the bed would have stood, but we don’t use that room at the moment because there’s a hole in the corner of the roof and bats get in and swing from the rafters – bats! Can you believe it?’ She shudders theatrically. ‘I’d smoke ’em out, if it was up to me, but Leandro says to let them be. Let them be! We don’t need that room! Well, he has some strange notions, sometimes. But – anyway – the platform would make a very fine stage. What say you and I have a few acting lessons together, Pip, and maybe put on a bit of a play? What do you say?’

‘All right. That’d be good. What play should we do?’

‘Whatever you’d like. We’ve no texts, of course, but we can do our own version of whatever story you like. We could even write a script ourselves.’

‘How about Dracula? Then we could use the bats as extra members of the cast,’ says Pip with a grin, and Marcie chuckles.

‘How about Macbeth – we can use real wool of bat for the witches’ potion!’

‘How about Antony and Cleobatra?’

‘The Merry Bats of Windsor?’

‘The Taming of the Bat?’

Marcie tips back her head and laughs, and Clare is grateful to her because Pip is laughing too, pleased to have amused her, and he seems to have forgotten what they saw yesterday. Clare can’t even find a smile. She feels as though somebody is pressing a knife to her throat; she hardly dares move. She leans her forehead against the cool glass and stares out at the walls and scrubby trees blurring past as the car rumbles along the dirt road, its headlights giving the world a sickly caste. And then they pass a man, sitting slumped against the wall beside the road with his face turned up to the sky. They are past him in a heartbeat, and Clare turns to look back but he has vanished into the darkness. It’s late in the evening and they are far from town, and something in his posture makes her think he’s not just resting, not just star-gazing – he’s in trouble. In her mind’s eye batons rise and fall, and she fears for him, takes a breath, and for a moment the words hover on her lips: Stop the car. Go back. But she stays silent and he is behind them, and this is one more thing that she doesn’t say, and has no power to change. She feels exhausted and afraid. She feels like surrendering but doesn’t know to whom, or what her battle is. They arrive at the masseria soon afterwards and go straight to their beds. Clare has the impression of massive stone walls and the smell of cow manure. She’s so tired she can barely climb the stairs, but then she sleeps only fitfully, skimming through dreams that she knows would frighten her if she could see them clearly.

Every wall of the masseria is painted white, and in the morning sunshine it’s painful to look at. The place is arranged in a square around a large courtyard, its solid, flat rooflines like shoulders hunched against the world, and the only way in or out is via the huge archway that gives the place its name, tunnelling under the full width of the rooms above it, fifteen feet or more, and closed off by wooden doors twelve feet high. One and a half sides of the quadrangle are barns and storage sheds for grain and animals and equipment, with servants’ rooms above; these have reinforced gates that open only outwards, not into the courtyard. The dairy forms another side, and then the living quarters rise up three storeys, and only open inwards, not outwards. If the place came under attack, this inner keep would be well protected.

It’s early and Pip is still asleep; Clare sits with Marcie, who is quieter before noon, at a table on a partly covered terrace over the dairy, accessed via an exterior stone stairway. The cows have been and gone from milking; Clare heard the soft clatter of their feet, and occasional lows of discontent, sometime soon after dawn. She looks out at the view over the barns, at the parched brown fields and their grey stone walls, and hears the breeze making a low thrum as it rolls along the shallow crease in the land where the masseria is situated, and through a forbidding thicket of prickly pear. A dog barks, not far away, and the leathery leaves of a fig tree rattle against the outside wall of the dairy; other than that, the stillness is striking.

‘Are you all right, Clare? Did you sleep?’ says Marcie. Clare manages to shake her head, but can’t speak. For a while she feels Marcie watching her, from one side, then: ‘Poor little mouse.’ And it might be sympathetic, or an accusation of cowardice.

Clare still can’t bring herself to eat, though she knows she should. After two nights of failed sleep the hunger makes her unsure if she’s quite awake, or if her eyes are even open, and though she knows Marcie spoke a few minutes ago, she can’t quite remember what she said. Something about the weather, perhaps, or about the day to come. When she sips her coffee, she’s surprised to find it gone cold. When she looks up to ask Marcie if a fresh pot could be brought, she finds that she’s alone at the table, and for some reason this makes her want to weep. She stares out along the gentle curve of the land, squinting into the distance, and tries to think what she ought to do next. She must not be so strange once Pip is up, but everything is different and unsafe and she can’t think of a way back to a logical scheme of things, a way back to normality, where she knows what’s expected of her, or what to expect of those around her. She has no idea what’s happening. There’s some commotion down in the courtyard, and the creak of the gate opening, but she pays it no heed. Only when figures appear, directly in her line of sight, does she blink and try to focus.

Two men and a woman stand in front of her, the smaller of the men supported by the larger, who has the face and physique of a movie star. There’s a revolting smell with them, a smell of rot and corruption.

‘Signora Cardetta, Signora Cardetta, scusi… Ettore…’ the movie star says, and then something else she can’t decipher, and Clare shakes her head. They’re looking for Marcie, this odd trio. The woman has a raw-boned face and a gaze like a whip crack. Her hair is hidden under a scarf and there are two damp patches on the front of her blouse, over her nipples. Where is her baby? Clare wonders. The knees of the smaller man are sagging, and his head lolls on the other man’s shoulder, but just then he gasps, his eyes open and they find Clare’s. And suddenly she is wide awake. His hair is black and his skin as swarthy as any she’s seen in Puglia, stretched tight over cheekbones like razors, but his eyes are electric blue – a ridiculous, unreal blue like a shallow ocean on a sunny day. The colour of them hits her like a slap in the face, and for a few seconds it’s all she can see; his expression is at once bewildered and full of wonder, and she longs to know why. And then his eyes roll back and he collapses, and there’s a sudden strange expansion inside her head, like something swelling up at speed, and bursting.