‘Indeed,’ says Clare, and there’s a loaded silence while they both wait to hear what will be said next.
They haven’t quite settled this between them yet – the tone they will take when discussing Leandro Cardetta, his past, his designs for them, the kind of man he is, and that Boyd has brought them here at his behest. It bothers Clare that she still doesn’t know how her husband came to meet Cardetta in the first place; that he has still never answered that question. Boyd picks up a pencil and starts to sharpen it with the small paring knife he keeps on his desk. Clare moves away from him, ostensibly to study a painting of St Sebastian on the wall, head thrown back in agony, bristling with arrows. Tradimento. Here they are talking as though nothing has changed, as though they are a team, when there is so much they don’t know about one another.
‘When will you show him the drawings?’ she says, at last.
‘Soon. I don’t know… soon,’ says Boyd. He frowns at his work again. ‘I want to make sure they’re perfect.’
‘Nothing is ever perfect. You’ve said before that you tend to overwork things sometimes.’ Clare hears her own words, incredulous. She should tell him to delay, to wait, to spoil the drawings. She should do whatever she can to prolong their stay. But then she thinks of Pip, and his sullen unhappiness, and she is torn, bewildered.
‘You’re right, my darling,’ says Boyd.
Just then, a strange sound comes from some far-off part of the house, and Clare listens for a moment before she can make it out. Then, unmistakeably, she picks out the three-time rhythm and shrill strings of a waltz.
‘Is that Strauss?’ she says, and Boyd smiles.
‘I forgot, I was meant to tell you – Marcie’s looking for you. She said something about a party.’
‘I’ll go and see.’ Boyd opens his mouth as though he will say something, ask something, but he hasn’t time to before Clare leaves the room. She goes up to the bat room, the rehearsal room, the spare room – it has these various names – the music getting louder with each step she takes, echoing along the stone corridors, and it’s been so long since she heard any that Clare is drawn towards it. It’s so profoundly out of place here at the masseria, here in Puglia. It’s music from another time, another place; it’s music from another world, and sounds alien in this sparse land, with these hard people. But it’s Marcie, of course; she doesn’t belong in Puglia any more than Clare does.
Clare opens the door to twirling figures; they are waltzing across the floor – Marcie and Pip. Pip is awkward and slightly out of time but Marcie doesn’t seem to mind and follows his lead, however halting. She keeps a beautiful frame, her neck arched back, eyebrows high and haughty, smile serene. She’s slightly taller than Pip in her heels; he has his chin up to compensate, and is concentrating hard.
‘Clare!’ Marcie calls when she sees her standing there. ‘You’ll never guess what, but Federico has only managed to fix this old gramophone! I thought it was dead and gone – it’s been in the junk room for months.’ The waltz is getting slower and slower as the gramophone winds down, so Clare goes over to wind the handle and tighten the mainspring.
‘Lord, now it’s too fast for me!’ says Pip, struggling to organise his feet, and Marcie laughs, and they dance faster, turning around and around until Clare is dizzy watching them. She’s suddenly awash with all her love for Pip, and all her pride in him, and the fact that he’s dancing when everything around him is so strange and so dark. Her eyes swell with tears and her heart with guilt, because it’s him she’s betraying too, of course, not just Boyd. Where can her love for Ettore lead her, apart from away from Pip? She has a sudden clear premonition of agony ahead.
‘No more! I’m dying!’ cries Marcie, breaking off her hold. ‘My mama told me a lady should never perspire, but in this heat who could help it?’
Clare lifts the needle out of the groove and quiet fills the room.
‘We could have carried on,’ says Pip. ‘Clare, don’t you want a go?’
‘Well, we need to save what needles we have for the party, Filippo,’ says Marcie.
‘You and I will dance then,’ says Clare. She wipes her eyes with her fingertips. ‘You looked very elegant, Pip. Any young lady would be proud to dance with you.’
‘Are you crying?’ Pip smiles.
‘Oh, Clare, whatever’s the matter?’ says Marcie.
‘Oh no, don’t worry – you should have seen her at my last school play. She cried all over the place,’ says Pip, lightly, but there’s something else underneath his words, almost like a tinge of contempt. It jars Clare, so that she clears her throat, reorders her face, and tries not to show her pain.
‘I’ve sent Federico out with the invitations. Ilaria will cook up a feast, and we’ll drink too much wine and dance until dawn! Oh, I can’t wait,’ says Marcie, coming over to Clare and gripping her arms. Her face is flushed beneath the powder, her eyes slightly frantic. ‘I wonder if Ettore would come? There must be precious few parties in his life right now. It’d do him the world of good.’
‘I’m not sure his leg is ready for dancing,’ says Clare.
‘Oh, have you seen him lately, then? I hardly even lay eyes on the kid when Leandro’s here.’
‘I saw him… on guard duty, I think. And he’s hardly a kid, is he?’ Clare fiddles with the gramophone handle, her fingertips feeling both raw and numb, like the rest of her – unbearably self-conscious.
‘Oh, they all get that weathered look down here in Puglia. Ettore’s only twenty-four though – you wouldn’t think it, would you?’
‘No.’ Clare can’t breathe for a second. She thought he was older than her; he seems it in so many ways. Suddenly she understands how young he must have been when hardship began its march over his body and face. ‘Will you be performing your play at the party as well?’ she says tightly.
‘Oh, heavens, I don’t think we’re ready, are we, Pip? Are we? No, I think that’ll have to be a bit later on.’
‘Well, I can’t wait to see it. Can’t you even say what it’s about?’ says Clare.
‘Oh, we don’t want to ruin the surprise, do we, Pip?’ Marcie aims a flash of her bright smile at Pip, and he smiles, closed-lipped, and shifts his feet.
‘That’s right. It’s supposed to be a surprise,’ he says. Clare gazes at him for a moment, because the expression on his face is one she hasn’t seen before.
The next day is one of heavy cloud and brooding humidity; stillness so complete that not a single leaf nods on the fig tree, not a single blade of the dry grass twists or bends. Clare goes for a walk after lunch and fancies she can feel the air parting to let her through, and closing gummily in her wake. She meets Ettore in the broken-down ruins of a trullo, its roof open to the blank sky. They make love first, and talk afterwards, like always. There’s little room to think of anything until their initial physical need is sated, and after a day, two days, sometimes three days, that need builds and snaps like a static charge. Clare is left with a graze on her spine from the rough stone wall, which stings, and an overwhelming sense of safety, surety.
‘You’re only twenty-four, Marcie told me,’ she says. Ettore nods. They sit side by side on the stone ledge outside the door of the trullo, and Clare thinks of all the people who have sat there before them, down the centuries: men smoking, thinking, watching; women resting, talking, hulling beans. Other lovers, perhaps, who’ve needed a hiding place and a hard stone bed on which to lie.