A Darkness Descending Read online

  Now Sandro sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and allowed September to soothe him. August was over, that was something to celebrate in itself. They’d had a holiday this year: after last year’s terrible, suffocating month in the city, they’d made an unspoken agreement, never again. So this year they’d borrowed someone’s mother’s place in Castiglioncello, an old lady’s house smelling of mothballs and damp, and gone there for three weeks. Not an unalloyed success – neither Sandro nor Luisa was good at idle holiday pursuits, she would rather cook than be served at table, whiling away the hours playing cards seemed nothing but a waste of time – but five or six days into their confinement something had come over them, something almost like the holiday spirit had taken them by surprise.

  They had found themselves going out for an aperitivo together at six, first one night, then the next, then every night as if it were the most natural thing in the world, rather than something they’d last managed more than a year before. They had gone to the little outdoor cinema tucked away in the old town between whitewashed walls, with weeds growing up through the cracked paving, and watched an ancient Fellini film with half a dozen other couples. They had walked along the beach in the cool early morning, watching the sun come up, not hand in hand because it wasn’t their way, Luisa a little in front and holding her hem out of the water.

  Three old women in flowered housecoats had walked ahead of them in the pale dawn doing the same, slow, apparently aimless, talking around in circles about grandchildren and church and the baker’s wife’s affair. Apparently aimless but actually restoring order to the world … this was the revelation that had come to Sandro as he found himself slowing his pace, realizing that as he wasn’t actually heading anywhere, there was no point in going there fast. Holidays: perhaps there was something to them, after all.

  They hadn’t worried about Giuli either, minding the office for them in the city after taking her own two weeks at the end of July, because she had someone of her own, now.

  A neglected child, an abused adolescent, Giuli had ended up in prison for taking a violent revenge on her abuser. It had brought her into Sandro’s life – he’d been her arresting officer – and had indirectly led to his premature departure from the police force. Not disgraced, no one thought that any more, not for passing information on the abuser to a bereaved father, but rules were rules, always had been. Giuli had been released from prison more or less into Sandro and Luisa’s care. All parties being adults, no one had had to ask anyone’s permission or sign any papers, but it had been an unorthodox arrangement for the couple, childless and now too old to have children, to decide to love and protect Giuli, in so far as they were capable of doing so. And now after forty years and more of having to fight her own corner, Giuli had Enzo, too.

  Reading her husband’s mind, Luisa called over her shoulder from the fridge where she was putting the meat: involtini stuffed with sage and ham, four sausages, only the two of them to feed.

  ‘You know we’re supposed to be eating with them Saturday night?’

  Today was Tuesday. She hadn’t even needed to say who they were. Brushing herself down in an unconscious and familiar gesture that made Sandro smile and want to take hold of her, she ran her hands under the tap and sat down at the table with him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said mildly. God only knew what Giuli would cook: it wasn’t her forte. Her mother would never have made housewife of the year even if she’d lived to see Giuli hit fourteen. The girl had been fed on packet cakes and fizzy drinks then her mother had died and she’d stopped eating anything at all.

  ‘I said I’d bring something,’ Luisa said. Mind-reading again.

  And he looked down once more at the letter from the insurance company. Fraudulent: it was a nasty word for something everyone did. ‘Who isn’t fraudulent?’ he said out loud.

  ‘Me,’ Luisa said. ‘I’m not fraudulent. Never took a piece of stock home, nor even a paperclip, never cheated my taxes.’

  ‘No,’ Sandro said. ‘Why is that?’ And she’d turned her back on him with the ghost of a smile.

  ‘He’s claiming post-traumatic stress stopped him working,’ Sandro added. Luisa made a sound of deep cynicism and he raised his head to monitor his wife, his infallible moral compass. Sometimes it was tricky, living with a moral compass that accurate.

  ‘Weren’t you ever even tempted?’ he asked. ‘To steal just one paperclip? Or something more appealing maybe. A pair of shoes … a pair of stockings … way back when.’

  Way back when the store Luisa worked for, now a gleaming white and steel palace of fashion, had been principally an old-fashioned haberdasher’s with wooden drawers filled with stockings and cashmere and lawn nightdresses, hand-embroidered.

  But he knew the answer. She didn’t even have to smile and shake her head: it was one of many differences between them. Sandro, like all his colleagues, would borrow stationery from the office, nip out on errands on police time, turn a blind eye. There were plenty worse than him, plenty. ‘So, why?’

  She put her head on one side, thinking. ‘Because you don’t know where it would end,’ she said. ‘You have to have rules for yourself.’ And straightened, haughtily. ‘Where was post-traumatic stress after the war? In ‘sixty-six after the floods?’ And snorted.

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I know. But it was an accident, not his fault, woman shunted him on the motorway. Someone in the car behind her died.’

  Sobered slightly, Luisa had pursed her lips. ‘Still,’ she said.

  ‘He’s got psychiatric reports, and everything,’ Sandro said.

  ‘That in itself …’ Luisa said. ‘That’s not someone whose life has been knocked for six. Commissioning psychiatric reports? Looking for compensation.’

  ‘Catch-22,’ Sandro said, groping mentally for a faded image. He’d read the book, thirty years before. ‘Isn’t that the situation? If you’re really crazy, you wouldn’t be asking for the psychiatrist. Something like that.’

  Luisa ignored the reference: she hadn’t read Catch-22. It would, Sandro realized, have annoyed her too much. ‘Still,’ she said, ‘I suppose that’s not your job. To make a judgement.’

  ‘Fortunately not,’ Sandro said. It hadn’t been his job to make judgements as a police officer either, not really: then, too, his job had been to gather the evidence and hand it on. Not that it had stopped him: taking judgement into his own hands had been what got him kicked out of the force.

  He shuffled the papers into some kind of order, slid them into his briefcase. Checking this insurance claim was looking like the worst kind of job. Fiddly, small-scale, and already it seemed to be requiring him to examine his own conscience into the bargain.

  ‘It’s all money, though,’ Luisa commented, although he’d said nothing. ‘It’s all work.’ Sandro got to his feet, tempted to laugh at himself, or at her, for the precision with which she could read his expression. Extraordinary that she could still be bothered, after all these years, to make sense of him.

  He smiled. ‘Giuli’s place on Saturday,’ he said, hefting the briefcase. Was he looking forward to it?

  ‘Their place, now,’ Luisa said.

  ‘He’s good for her, isn’t he?’ asked Sandro, feeling the need for confirmation. ‘Enzo, I mean?’ That was why they were going for dinner, to keep tabs. Giuli didn’t look vulnerable – in fact, she looked as far from it as was possible, with her fierce little face and her spiky dark hair and her cheerful recklessness on her battered army-grey motorino – but she was. Enzo had been around for more than a year now, but Luisa wasn’t going to let up.

  That grudging nod was what he had expected, but Luisa’s expression was more complicated. ‘Yes,’ she said eventually.

  Sandro was at the door before he responded to the note of doubt: wanting it not to be there. Wanting to get off to work leaving everything fine behind him.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he asked, with reluctance, standing in the doorway.

  ‘Well …,’ said Luisa, standing motionless at
the kitchen table, the September light falling on half her face. Frowning. ‘I’m not so sure about this political business. She – they – seem very caught up in it. I don’t understand this Frazione Verde. It seems – extreme to me.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said with relief. ‘Extreme? Aren’t they a bunch of hippy, green, Rainbow Coalition types? Very soft-centred, I’m sure. And it’ll just be a phase. Young people, you know.’ He clasped the briefcase to him in an unconscious gesture of protection, but of what or whom, he wasn’t sure.

  ‘She’s not young, Sandro,’ Luisa said. ‘None of us is young any more.’

  The telephone rang.

  *

  Chiara Cavallaro, curly-headed, small for her age and slender – too slender, her mother had begun to fret, just lately – emerged from the great doorway to the Università degli Studi into the broad sunshine of the Piazza San Marco, weighed down with books. Worse than school, she’d grumbled to her mother on her return with the reading list, but she hadn’t meant it: the knapsack you carried to school represented something quite different. The pink backpack embellished with friends’ signatures, the childish exercise books, the quaderni with their doodles and their covers decorated with cartoon characters, filled with the diligently neat handwriting of a girl child, easy to please.

  What expression would come over her father’s face if she reminded him of that? Her father the stern policeman, soft as a pussycat at home, the man who wanted an easy life, to be indulgent to his daughter and be loved in return.

  ‘You were never easy to please, angel,’ he’d say, with that wary smile, wanting her still to be his little girl.

  ‘No,’ her mother would agree, watching her more closely. Round-hipped, good cook, red hair. No fool. Chiara loved her mother.

  She loved both of them, of course she did. Blinking into the sunshine, Chiara raised a hand to shield her eyes. It wasn’t just being an only child – most of her friends were only children. It was to do with – with the old order. The old ways of doing things. Cutting corners, sitting it out till retirement in the comfort of the corrupt state sector. She wanted to lean down into her father’s armchair in the evenings, take him by his elbows and shake him. ‘Wake up, Babbo,’ she wanted to say. ‘You’re only fifty-six. Do something to change the world, before it’s too late.’ Start the fight from within.

  Political science. That had got him started.

  ‘At least she’s staying home,’ her mother had said, on Chiara’s side in this one. ‘You know, there are kids who go to the other end of the country, these days, for their laurea.’ Neither of her parents had a degree. Her mother should have had one: she was more intelligent than her husband, which was why she had done so well in the bank.

  The truth was, Chiara would have gone to the other end of the country to do her degree, if she’d had a choice. But the course in Florence was an excellent one – among the best. And she’d have had to go to her parents for the money to live away from home. Until now she would, anyway.

  ‘But political science,’ her dad had groaned, head in hands. ‘Where’s that going to take you?’ It was going to take her away from him, her conservative old dad, and he knew it. She could see it in the face he raised to her, weary, dubious, that he only wanted her to be like him, or her mother, to get a safe job, to have a child, to live in comfort.

  ‘Comfort’s not what it’s all about, Babbo,’ she’d said.

  Was there a word for the expression he’d worn after that? A kind of blankness had fallen over his face, as if he genuinely didn’t understand what she meant. As if he gave up. At the memory, Chiara frowned.

  And thank God he hadn’t been there when she got up this morning, because it would have been on the local news, perhaps even in La Nazione, the terrible right-wing rubbish Dad read. It’s got local news, though, he’d plead, as if regional loyalty was enough. As if. She loved her city, of course she did, she was Fiorentina through and through. Which was precisely why – damn, damn, thought Chiara. She felt sick at the memory, last night coming back to her.

  Dad would probably say Rosselli was on drugs, or something. His answer to every evil, drugs. Chiara had never touched a drug in her life, but she wasn’t even sure if he knew that. The fact that Giulietta Sarto had been there last night would only have confirmed his conviction that where left-wingers were gathered, there would be ex-convicts, junkies and prostitutes, and Giulietta Sarto qualified on all counts.

  ‘I know she’s clean now,’ her dad had said a few times. ‘I know Sandro loves her. But once a junkie, always a junkie.’

  For a brief second of doubt Chiara did wonder if he might be right, though, as she remembered it … remembered Niccolò Rosselli’s face as blank as her father’s in that moment before he’d toppled headlong like a felled tree, on the stage in front of them all. It had been so – catastrophic.

  They’d carted him off in an ambulance, dead or alive, no one knew. Rumours flew before the stretcher even left the hall, then the place had gone crazy in the aftermath, complete chaos, the hardliners setting up a chant, people talking wildly about conspiracy, some drunk singing ‘Bandiera Rossa’. A fight had even broken out on the pavement outside as the ambulance moved away. Inside the meeting room Chiara had been frightened. Properly frightened, wanting her dad kind of frightened, just for a moment there, just when it looked like there might be a stampede.

  In the sunshine she was hot, suddenly. Maybe she should just do it. Maybe she did need to get away from her parents, like he said. Her man.

  She’d been first out of the introductory lecture and most of the others – she knew some of them from school, again had felt that pang, of wanting to start again in a new city – had hung around, to talk to the speaker, a well-known figure in the city, a left-wing historian and journalist, and something of a hero. He’d spoken openly against the current government, had told the new intake they were the only hope for their country. Chiara had found herself wary of him, of the hero-worship thing at least, and when she saw the crowd gather around the speaker she’d turned and gone, suddenly uncertain, her father’s cynical voice in her head. The man probably said that to every year’s new students: You are your country’s only hope, knowledge is the key. And of all people Sandro Cellini, her father’s best friend and ex-partner in the police force, had come into her head again then: she could almost see his expression, his frown, at the gaggle of eager students, and their hero.

  They were streaming past Chiara as she stood there in the doorway, then one detached himself from the crowd, stopped. Smiled.

  ‘I suppose you were there last night?’ he asked, head tilted, between her and the sun. He lifted the books from her arms. ‘Let me take those.’

  She looked into his eyes. She’d tell Dad tonight.

  *

  Eighty miles out east, on the seafront at Viareggio, the sun that shone on Chiara Cavallaro in the Piazza San Marco sat high over the flat-calm silver sea, still strong enough to warm the few morning bathers on the groomed sands. Less groomed than they would have been a month ago, the striped umbrellas and wooden loungers depleted, the bathing stations closing down one by one as September cooled and drew to a close, but the town was still busy. Plenty of the hotels, indeed, were still booked out, the cheaper, more discreet ones, lovers stealing a last few illicit days at the end of the summer without the need for a sea view.

  The Stella Maris had vacancies, but then it was expensive for what it was. A faded place one street in from the front, its blue-washed stucco no longer the deep cobalt it had been in better days, an overblown garden of unpruned magnolia and laurels, and twelve old-fashioned, under-decorated rooms, fewer than half of them occupied this sunny Tuesday morning.

  ‘It’s “Do not disturb”,’ said Vesna, coming out to shake her dusters among the laurels and addressing herself to her employer, Signore Calzaghe. His seedy, overweight bulk parked in a grubby swing seat on the Stella Maris’s verandah, his chin rough with at least a day’s white stubble, Calzaghe was the hotel
’s owner, manager and holder of any other self-appointed position that did not require him actually to lift a finger in its service. He frowned back at her.

  ‘Number five?’ Unfortunately for Vesna, her employer might be lazy but he had an excellent head for detail, for numbers and names and quantities (of guest soaps, for example, which he required her to dry out in the airing cupboard if barely used, or linen washed, or rolls ordered for the breakfasts). He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘So? Less work for you, I’d have thought. Fewer towels to the laundry, too.’

  Vesna saw that crafty glint in his eye and could see he was wondering how he could somehow recoup that unused labour for himself, that twenty minutes she would have spent in number five setting the guest’s toiletries straight, closing her wardrobe door, making her bed.

  She tucked the dusters into the belt of her maid’s uniform, a pink as faded as the hotel façade’s blue, made for a larger woman. Better that than too tight: Vesna had had her fill of too-tight maid’s uniforms, and the male guests’ response to them. The female guest in number five had bothered her from the day she walked in, pale and breathless as if she’d run there all the way from the station. Vesna opened her mouth to say so, and closed it again: her instinct was that the last thing the woman in number five needed was Calzaghe on her case.

  ‘Did she say how long she was planning to stay?’ He was chewing his fat cheek now, his piggy eyes contemplating the possibility that he was going somehow to lose out on this deal.

  ‘She wasn’t sure, she said,’ said Vesna. ‘But she’d be gone by the weekend.’

  He sighed, a sound he made self-important, impatient, accusatory all at once.

  ‘Give it another day,’ he said. ‘She’s only herself to blame. If the linen’s not changed.’ And he settled back into the swing seat and closed his eyes.