‘I know exactly what you mean, Pip. I really do,’ says Clare. She reaches out her hand to him, and when he doesn’t take it she stands, and bends down to wrap her arms around his head and shoulders. ‘We’ll go soon.’ The words bruise her as she says them; she swallows tears again. ‘We’ll go soon.’ But Pip pulls away, gently but insistently. He stands up and closes his book.
‘You should probably rest,’ he says, as impersonal as a stranger. ‘They sent for the doctor to see you but he hasn’t turned up yet.’ Clare sits back down obediently, powerless to prevent the ways in which he’s changing.
Hours later Boyd enters the room quietly and comes to kneel by the bed like a penitent. Up close he is all eyes, pale and wide and anxious. His skin has a waxy look and the sour smell is back, faint but unmistakable. Clare shuts her eyes.
‘Please don’t fuss me, Boyd. I’m fine. The doctor looked most put out to have been called for,’ she says, but Boyd doesn’t try to fuss her.
‘Cardetta wants me to redraw my designs. He’s not going ahead now, but he wants the plans ready for when he does. We’re going back to Gioia tomorrow, he and I,’ he says, in a deadened tone. Clare opens her eyes, hoping he won’t be able to read what’s in them. ‘I’m so sorry, Clare. I asked him to let you and Pip set off ahead of me, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He says you oughtn’t to travel alone. I suppose he’s right. And Marcie has her wretched party next week.’ Boyd takes her hand and presses his lips to it. ‘We’ll go soon,’ he says, unknowingly echoing the words she said to Pip earlier, and Clare feels Pip’s exact urge to retreat, to pull herself away. ‘I promise we’ll go soon.’ He lays his cheek to her hand and she tries to feel for him what she would once have felt – tenderness, if not love – but it’s gone. Only ashes of it remain, burnt out by the fire of Ettore.
‘It’ll be fine,’ she says, because his news has made her happy enough to believe it. ‘I’ll be fine.’
‘You’re so brave, my darling. You’re an angel.’
Once Boyd and Leandro have returned to the house in Gioia, Clare waits as long as she can. It’s three days, but seems far longer; the hours drag their feet and feel like weeks. She watches from the terrace, from windows, from the roof, even though she knows she won’t see what she longs to – Ettore, coming back; the square shoulders from which the rest of his spare frame seems to hang; the economic way he moves, and the limp; his rough black hair and hard face; his astonishing eyes, full of ghosts. She knows she won’t see it at Masseria dell’Arco again, but still she watches because there isn’t much else she can do. At the end of the third day, when Marcie and Pip emerge from the bat room, she tells them that she’s feeling faint again and is going to bed early, and won’t have dinner. As firmly as she can without being rude, she refuses Marcie’s offer to check on her later, to send up a supper tray, to send for the doctor.
‘I think I just need to sleep,’ she says, smiling as she lies. There’s a specific time she must use, a specific window. It must be while they are both in their rooms, which look out through the back wall of the farm, getting ready for dinner. If she’s seen she will say that she changed her mind, and wanted a walk instead.
The key in the ancient lock to her and Boyd’s room hasn’t been turned in an age. It resists when she takes it out, and when she shuts the door and tries to lock it from the outside she has to use both hands, and strain at it until it bruises her hands. Eventually it turns with a grinding clunk. She puts the key in her pocket, where it swings and weighs her jacket down. She drapes Marcie’s loaned scarf over her hair and knots it at the back of her neck. Now when they check on her, as she knows they will, they’ll have to think she’s locked the door and gone to sleep. She doesn’t try to decide what she’ll say when they ask why she locked the door, or if the servants let on that they saw her go out, or if she’s seen in Gioia. Deliberately, she thinks only about her destination.
Carlo is on the front door and Clare’s relieved. He’s amiable and obliging; he unlocks the door with a smile and a buona sera, and Clare walks across the aia with her back rigid and the skin between her shoulder blades tight and tingling, waiting to be seen, waiting for a shout to call her back. The buildings themselves seem to watch her but the dogs don’t bark – the one she thinks is Bobby even gives an experimental wag of its tail. Her heart batters her ribs, though her excuses are ready. Somehow, she thinks they’ll know at once what she’s doing, and that she’s lying. She doesn’t know the man on the gates; he has a chiselled face, all eye sockets and angles, but since they’re used to her walking he lets her out without a word. She can feel his bullet eyes following her as she walks away along the road, but she is out. She is free.
When the road from the farm abuts another, joining it at a right angle, Clare turns in the direction with the most wheel marks in the dust, trusting them to mark the direction of town. She doesn’t know how far away Gioia is, but since Ettore’s friend carried him all the way to the masseria, she hopes it can’t be very far. She walks with the sinking sun on her left shoulder, the key to her bedroom bumping against her hip. She walks, and walks. The road is straight and featureless, flanked by low stone walls; there are no men in the empty fields. She walks for well over an hour, until the sun kisses the horizon, flooding the furrowed land with an orange light that glows on every rock, every thistle and weed, every feathered head of grass. Clare stops, hands on hips, thirsty and feeling the first nudge of unease. Night is coming quickly. If she has walked in the wrong direction, she will have to go back to the masseria and repeat the ruse again another day. Tears of frustration blur in her eyes. She’s sweating under her clothes, and has dust up to her knees. She walks on a bit further then stops again, standing in the middle of the road for some minutes, frozen in indecision. She decides she must have come the wrong way – she doesn’t think Ettore’s friend could have carried him such a distance, even though he was tall and well built. Clare hangs her head in defeat, turns around and sees a small cart approaching in a cloud of sunlit dust.
It might be one of the dell’Arco servants, sent out to find her. If it is, she will go back quietly and pretend she lost track of time; she will have little choice. Clare steps to the side of the road and when the fat woman driving the cart sees her there she yanks her mule to a halt. The woman’s breasts rest on the bulge of her stomach, but there are such hollows in her cheeks that Clare can only think she’s lost all her teeth. The scarf over her hair is black, like her eyes. She is no one Clare has seen before, and when she speaks Clare can’t understand a word of it. The woman talks at some length, and then laughs, and Clare smiles nervously.
‘Gioia dell Colle?’ she says, and the woman laughs again, patting the seat beside her.
‘Sì, sì,’ says the fat woman, and then something else Clare can’t follow. She climbs up beside the woman, who whistles the mule back into its shuffling trot. The back of the cart carries a sparse cargo of tomatoes, aubergines and peppers; the woman smells of earth and smoke, and Clare sits mute with relief as, only a short while later, the outskirts of Gioia appear up ahead.
She doesn’t know where Ettore will be – at home, or working, or wherever. She doesn’t know where he lives, but he once said he lived near the castle, in the tangled streets of the old centre, so she will go there and walk and ask, and avoid Via Garibaldi. The thought of not finding him is debilitating, but as if to make up for her long, anxious journey, a curvaceous young girl walking near the castle walls – only the third person Clare stops to ask – points into the mouth of a narrow alleyway opposite. The girl sketches a right angle in the air with one hand and points to the corner, all the while studying Clare with naked curiosity. There’s the same smell of sewage and rubbish as before, the same hush from the people all dressed in black, with their furtive eyes and famished faces, and the women’s hair covered with shawls in spite of the warmth of the evening. Dusty and tired as she is, Clare feels too fat, too clean, too pale. Too much of a stranger.