CHAPTER FOUR

ONE ADVANTAGE OF AUGUST, Roxana had to admit, as she urged her little motorino up the Via Senese, between the handsome façades of art-nouveau villas blackened by seventy years of exhaust fumes, was that the traffic was barely non-existent. No rushhour to speak of – even if you still got hassled by the buses; one driver in particular seemed to follow her home every night, serenading her by releasing his brakes with a sharp puff on every bend. Over the houses a ridge of grey-green came into view in the dusk: olive trees, and the beginning of the end of the city.

It had been a strange day, even for August. As the hours had passed, the absence of one particular customer had faded in significance. There could have been any number of reasons; maybe the heat got too much even for Albanians, sometimes.

Someone had phoned for the boss, which might not have been out of the ordinary in the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze on a sweltering August Tuesday, but here? The phones hardly rang at the best of times.

‘No,’ she’d heard Val say, loitering behind the boss’s desk; had he even had his feet up on it? Pretending to be in charge. A good telephone voice, thoughtful, concerned. ‘No, he’s not here.’ Sauntering out through the door with a smile to Roxana that perhaps he thought was inscrutable, that certainly was ridiculously superior, as if merely answering the boss’s phone was promotion.

She hadn’t bothered to go out for lunch, and Val, as usual, had taken advantage. Got back at four. The scream of fire sirens again that had seemed to go on all afternoon, people grilling food outside, even in the heat, and getting careless with matches and accelerants.

And then towards the end of the day there’d been a guy on the pavement outside, idling. White trainers, greased back hair, skinny, hopping from one foot to the other. The police so dozy in the heat the drug dealers could come right out on the streets, was that it?

If anything, it was hotter than yesterday; as the sky turned luminous over the ridge with the setting sun, Roxana, in her thin jacket with a day’s sweat and grime under it, didn’t know how she was going to stand it. The weather rarely broke before the end of August. Sun, sun, sun, merciless sun. And the tropical thunderheads building over the city to hold the heat in, for another sweltering night.

The road opened briefly after it joined the Via del Gelsomino, a straight stretch with a row of farmhouses along a ridge to the left, the thickly planted cypresses of the cemetery to the right. The green didn’t last: beyond the cemetery was a long row of petrol stations, luring holidaymakers and commuters.

Not the prettiest part of Tuscany, that was for sure: the road was generally choked at the end of the day; once, as she hummed past on her motorino, Roxana had seen an overheated car burst into flames, a man running out of it holding a baby. Tonight it was quiet; the heat lay over everything like a blanket. The sun was dipping behind the hills now and the electric-blue sky was streaked with neon pink; funny, thought Roxana, allowing herself a brief moment of delight, how a sunset can be so cheesy in art, but never cheesy in real life.

The cluster of modest villas that was Galluzzo stood ahead of her. Roxana’s heart dipped and she told herself, not for the first time, that it was no good. She dreaded work and she dreaded getting home again: freedom was this brief moped ride between the two. She could hear Maria Grazia nagging her cheerfully down a telephone line, ‘Something’s got to change, Roxi.’

It would be fine, she told herself, wheeling the motorino in through the gates and under the house. It is what it is. Pushed open the door and called, ‘Ma?’ And when her mother came slowly through the door from the kitchen, that twisted, rueful smile on her face, the relief behind it probably visible only to Roxana – relief and the lingering trace of a fear that no one might come.

‘Hey, Violetta.’ She called her mother by her name as often as she remembered to these days, hoping to establish a grownup relationship, hoping belatedly to bestow on her mother the adulthood she so feared she might lose.

Kissing her mother on the cheek, Roxana smelled face powder, the faint tang of sweat underneath it. No air-conditioning, of course, in the little old-fashioned villa; Dad hadn’t wanted it. ‘We’re practically in the countryside here,’ he’d say, brooking no argument. ‘I don’t want one of those ugly great boxes whirring away on my lovely terrace.’ The terrace he hadn’t been on in years, which Ma used only to hang out washing, a broom long idle in one corner, old cat-box in the other. A bedraggled plumbago. ‘The fan’s good enough.’

Dinner was on the table, even though it was barely seven-thirty. Without Roxana’s father Violetta Delfino seemed to have lost track of her days, there was so little to fill them. Only Roxana’s return from the bank marked a fixed point, and the table was laid to hasten her home.

It was ribollita: delicious, under the right conditions – and Roxana knew Ma had made it because it was her favourite – but the most unsuitable dish you could imagine in the heat, thick cabbage and beans.

‘My favourite,’ she said. ‘Sit down, Ma.’ Her mother hovered uncertainly.

‘Someone called, today,’ she said, frowning, anxious. ‘For you.’

‘Sit down,’ said Roxana again, fork in hand. ‘I can’t eat until you sit down, cara.’

It could have been anyone; it was most probably a mobile service provider, wanting to sell her a contract. One conversation with Ma was usually enough to deter cold callers: she’d keep them on the line for hours. Asking advice, what broadband was, whether they thought it might be useful for calling her brother in Argentina. Who had been dead five years, but Ma regularly forgot that, or perhaps didn’t want to sound as alone in the world as she actually was. Once Roxana had caught her talking to a timeshare saleswoman about her daughter who had an important job in a big bank. Because to say an unimportant job in a small bank would have been shameful? Or because she had persuaded herself it wasn’t so?

‘Oh, I was so worried I’d forget,’ said Ma, lip trembling.

Roxana took her hand, stilled it. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t important, anyway. Did you drink enough water today?’

Ma had been admitted to hospital for dehydration last summer, just after Dad died. Surprised herself by how urgently she wished him back, Roxana just hadn’t been quite on the case; she had tried to make Ma eat, but she hadn’t thought it was liquids she needed.

‘Yes,’ said Ma vaguely.

Roxana poured her a glass, and spooned some of the ribollita on to her plate. Took a mouthful herself: it was practically cold, which was a blessing. Roxana thought she detected a rogue ingredient; Ma’s recipes had gone off kilter, too, every meal an adventure now. Mentioning it, though, would lead to Ma telling her she had OCD, again.

The room was dim, shutters closed against the day’s heat, and Dad had always used light bulbs of roughly half the wattage necessary. After forty years of marriage Ma couldn’t even begin to question his decisions, Roxana understood that. She got up and pushed the shutters open a little: probably a mistake, she thought, feeling the wall of heat that met her. You could almost see it, creeping inside like fog.

Leaving the shutters ajar, she returned to her seat, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades, and her mother looked up at her, helpless. This was worse, she thought, worse than being nagged about her OCD, or her childlessness, or her single status.

‘Are you all right, Ma?’ she asked, a prickle of anxiety setting up.

Alzheimer’s was what she dreaded: she’d tried to broach the subject with her mother’s doctor, but he’d brushed her off. ‘Grief,’ he’d said brusquely. ‘If she seems a bit vague, or forgetful, or lost, that’s the most likely culprit.’ And it could be a killer too, he’d made sure she knew that. She’d taken Ma in on her return from hospital, and had lingered to ask him one or two things she didn’t want her mother to hear; his hand on her shoulder as she left, though, had been kindly enough, she knew that. The same doctor who had given her her shots and looked in her ears when she was six years old: he probably still thought of her as a kid.

‘And how was your day, dear?’ said Ma, the spoon languishing in her bowl, ignoring the question.

‘Fine,’ said Roxana, staring at her. ‘August, you know.’ She sighed. ‘It’s like a ghost town. And Val’s driving me mad.’ Leaned forward. ‘Since when did you ask me about my day, Mamma? Now I know there’s something wrong.’

‘That Valentino,’ said Ma, contemptuous, and Roxana breathed again. Ma had met Val a couple of times and looked down at her nose at his sharp suits, his aftershave – almost everything about him.

‘Can’t you just imagine him as a child? That kind. Spoiled wouldn’t be the word.’

At this point Roxana might normally have mentioned her own younger brother, apple of her mother’s eye, but she was so relieved at the return of her mother’s sharp tongue that she did not. She concentrated on cleaning her plate scrupulously. It was sage, she decided. Ma had put sage in it. Which wasn’t right.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He asked me for a drink after work.’

And laughed. Her mother’s expression was a picture: the desire to thrust her daughter into a liaison – any liaison – with a man warring with her absolute disdain for Val.

‘It’s all right, Ma,’ she said. ‘He only wanted to manoeuvre me into shutting up early. He’s about the laziest man I ever met.’

‘But surely you can’t do that? I mean – it’s a bank!’

‘Oh, Mamma,’ said Roxana, and sighed. ‘We had three customers all day. We closed up five minutes early, that was it.’

‘So you did go for a drink with him?’ Violetta was looking at her slyly. Perhaps after all she thought Val would be better than nobody.

Roxana folded her arms. ‘A drink, yes, Ma.’

Val hadn’t meant anything by it. She knew he hadn’t. They’d had a nice enough half-hour, though, sitting in a bar just across the river in the Piazza Demidoff. In June and July the place would be so packed you had to walk around the customers in the road; as it was, there’d been a couple of expensive convertibles parked ostentatiously and illegally. Hardly a parking warden about, at this time of year. They’d sat on the terrace under the lime trees outside, though their scent was long gone.

‘You don’t mind?’ he’d said curiously, as the waiter set down their drinks, a cold beer for him, a ruby-red Crodino for her. ‘Stuck here in August?’ Someone had called over to Val, from another table, asking about the weekend, and leaning back in his chair, he called back an answer, shaking his head ruefully.

He’d turned back to Roxana, sipping his beer. ‘Everyone’s off to the seaside,’ he’d said sourly. ‘Elba. Vincenzo’s got a place there.’ Covertly, Roxana had eyed the man who’d called across: tanned, lazily handsome. She’d shifted in her chair.

‘You could go?’ She had wondered what he was still here in Florence for.

Val had shrugged. ‘I agreed to stick around, didn’t I?’ he’d said thoughtfully. ‘Marisa wouldn’t take no for an answer. Very insistent, that she had to get off on the yacht with Paolo.’ He leaned back. ‘Their perfect life.’

‘It’s all right for them,’ Roxana had said. Marisa’d just assumed, in her case. That she’d comply. ‘For the bosses. But just for the weekend?’

‘I’ve got no one to go with,’ Val had said, eyeing her. Then drank a little deeper from the beer. ‘It’s not like it was. You know, the lads, away together for the weekend, the girlfriends come and go. But these days, the girls stick around, wives some of them, by now. It’s the lads that disappear.’

It had been the deepest conversation she’d had with Val since she’d known him. Maybe it wasn’t all roses, being a man about town.

‘Sorry, Val,’ she’d said. ‘What happened to – what’s her name?’

‘Lily?’ Val had given her a sidelong, sardonic look. ‘The American?’

‘If you say so.’ Roxana had only glimpsed her from a distance, now and again, a rangy blonde with expensive clothes. ‘She go back to America?’

‘Greece,’ Val had said briefly, draining his beer. ‘Next stop. On the Grand Tour.’

‘Right,’ she’d said, giving him what she hoped was a sisterly, consoling smile. He’d laughed and got to his feet. ‘Want another?’

Roxana glanced across the table at her mother in the uneven light of the inadequate bulbs. It wasn’t as if she’d never had a boyfriend, for God’s sake; there’d been Matteo at college, only he’d fancied someone else more; that kind of thing happened when you were twenty-two. And then she’d been too busy working – trying to please the boss, staying late; for a while Violetta had even warned her off, thinking there was something going on, telling her he was a married man and she should be careful. And when next she lifted her head from her desk, all the men her age seemed to be taken.

Can’t be helped. Someone will come along. That was Roxana’s mantra.

Roxana didn’t bother telling Violetta any of this; she’d only get the wrong idea.

Instead she stood up and dutifully began to clear the plates. This kitchen, she thought absently, ugh. The wooden units were thirty-five years old, oppressively Tyrolean in style but still, unfortunately, in excellent condition.

At the sink – no dishwasher, of course – she spoke over her shoulder. ‘So what did you get up to today? How far did you get on your walk?’

Violetta was very good about her daily walk, as prescribed – the only thing prescribed, in fact, by the same family doctor. ‘Fresh air, exercise,’ he’d said briskly. ‘Better than antidepressants,’ and Roxana had agreed with him. Violetta would walk up around the side of the Certosa, the pale-walled monastery surmounting its hill beyond Galluzzo, and along the lanes into the countryside. She grumbled that she was turning into one of those old widows from her own childhood, bow-legged in black, searching the hedgerows for sorrel and chestnuts. It was doing her good, they both knew that, and she did come back with a bag of something most times, even if it was only nettle heads for risotto.

But now behind Roxana there was a silence, and turning she saw on her mother’s face only anxiety and confusion. This was new: she’d been vague, there’d been episodes – but this was another thing.

‘Violetta? Ma? I said, how far—’

But her mother’s lip was trembling. ‘I didn’t go out. I – there was the phone call. And then someone came to the door. I didn’t have time. It – it looked like rain.’ She was practically babbling.

‘Looked like rain? What are you talking about?’ Roxana could hear her own fear, sounding like anger, and she tried to soften it. ‘Sorry, Ma. One thing at a time. Someone phoned.’ She came back to the table and sat down; outside a siren wailed, far off in the city, and she reached for her mother’s hand. It seemed to hold no warmth, the fingers no more than skin and bone.

‘There was a message.’ Violetta Delfino stopped.

Roxana smiled steadily into her mother’s eyes. ‘You wrote it down.’

Her mother returned her look. ‘Yes,’ she said, hopefully, then with greater certainty, ‘Of course.’ And made as if to get up, in awkward haste, to fetch the pad they kept by the telephone in the hall. Roxana held fast to her mother’s hand.

‘But you don’t remember who it was?’

Violetta looked around herself, anywhere but at her daughter. ‘I’m sure it’ll come to me,’ she said, and with a sigh Roxana released her.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Ma stayed where she was, as if she’d forgotten any urgency. ‘A woman,’ she said. ‘It was a woman, I remember that much. I’m not gaga, you know.’

Roxana let out a quick nervous laugh. ‘I know,’ she said, and got to her feet.

But the pad by the telephone in the hall was blank; it sat there on the perfectly polished table, dead centre on its own lace doily. Behind her in the kitchen doorway her mother stood, nervously moving her hands.

‘Oh, Ma,’ said Roxana.

*

‘So what d’you think?’

Sandro gazed at his wife, who was eyeing him with a certain sceptical amusement, one hand on her hip, the other having just gestured across the dusty tiled floor.

‘I think it’s a wreck,’ he said, paying no attention to the protesting murmur that came from the third figure in the room, a small, bearded young man in a short-sleeved shirt and tie, clutching a briefcase. ‘And it’s three floors up.’

Luisa had met him on the doorstep, ready to go out. Dark-grey linen dress, a bit of lipstick, her best handbag on her arm. She’d sniffed his breath as she kissed his cheek, good-humoured.

‘How was Pietro?’ she’d asked cheerfully. ‘Amazing, to think of that little girl all grown up.’ He’d agreed.

What had been more amazing, although neither of them was going to say as much now, was how Sandro and Luisa themselves had survived, because when Chiara had been born, Luisa had shut herself in her room for a day and a half, emerging pale and monosyllabic. She had given birth to their only child twelve years before Chiara; close to perfect on the outside, the baby had suffered from a syndrome that brought with it major defects in the internal organs; at most a baby born with the syndrome might survive for a month. Luisa and Sandro’s daughter had lived a day and a half. There was still no known treatment; these days there were prenatal scans – and abortion. Sandro still sometimes wondered about it all. About what they would have done if they’d been offered that option: would it have changed anything? Their daughter’s birth and short life had left them too shell-shocked to approach the possibility of trying again, until it was too late. Would a termination have left them any different? Sandro could not grasp it: it was too big a question.

On their doorstep Luisa hadn’t let him go inside to change. ‘We’ve got half an hour,’ she’d said. Sandro had just looked at her with faint exasperation, and she’d said, before he could ask, ‘It’s a surprise.’

The first part of the surprise had been standing on the doorstep of a grubby-stuccoed three-storey villa in the south of the city, on the eastern edge of San Niccolo, twenty minutes on foot from Santa Croce. The young man with the beard, who smelled strongly of aftershave, had greeted them, introducing himself as Sergio Galeotti of Galeotti Immobiliare. An estate agent.

Galeotti’s car had been outside, an expensive, low-slung model with a personalized number plate: GALIMM. Even a mid-range Maserati didn’t come cheap: Sandro imagined that plenty of backhanders would have come Sergio Galeotti’s way. Prices fixed, deals done.

Whatever happened, Sandro’d wanted to say to Luisa, to the old way? Where you went to see a man you knew, who knew a man who knew an apartment that had come free, in a nice area, knock-down price for a quick sale? But glancing at his wife, he’d seen that she knew exactly what he was thinking, because she always did. And he’d known what she’d say, too: that was how we got our flat, the old way, and we’ve never been happy there.

‘Mr Galeotti is handling the sale for a client of mine,’ Luisa had said briskly. ‘Signora del Conte. You know her.’

It hadn’t been a question, but yes, Sandro knew her, one of many devoted clients of his wife’s, this one a fierce, beady-eyed, elderly woman. Oh, and startlingly wealthy, too. A hoarder, of shoes and silk blouses and properties, here, there and everywhere, little apartments, garage spaces, a cottage or two in the country. Luisa had spent her whole working life at the same place: Frollini, just off the Piazza Signoria, a shop that over the years had transformed itself from an excellent old-fashioned haberdasher’s and ladies’ outfitters – all wooden display cabinets, sensible knitwear and lace collars – to one of a chain of sleek palaces of luxury. Luisa, who had enjoyed moving with the times, was now the most senior saleswoman, and their treasure; she had many loyal ladies – not to mention those ladies’ daughters and granddaughters – and some of them were extremely well connected.

‘She’s a very good client,’ Luisa had gone on. ‘And as a favour to her Mr Galeotti has agreed to waive the buyer’s fee.’ Oh, yes, thought Sandro. The money’ll reappear somewhere else, you can bet on that; no such thing as a free lunch. And the old lady certainly had a fat portfolio of properties.

But it was a nice area, even Sandro had grudgingly had to admit that. If pushed, he would have said it was his favourite part of the city: not quite on the tourist track, tucked between the river and the green hills that rose up from it to the Piazzale Michelangelo.

Quiet but not too quiet: they’d walked through a small piazza on their way here, no more than a junction between roads just inside the soft stone of the mediaeval wall, and there’d been the sound of quiet conversation in a bar, the rattle of cutlery being laid in a restaurant, some kids on their mopeds chilling out. No blaring satellite TV, no thumping music, no smashing bottles. It was a nice area, which was why they couldn’t afford it.

‘We can’t afford it,’ he’d said flatly before they even went inside. The street had been quiet, a patch of green rose above a low wall opposite the hundred-and-fifty-year-old building; a rusting, wrought-iron balcony ran right along the top floor. The agent had dipped his head discreetly at Sandro’s words, leaving Luisa to deal with that particular obstacle.

‘You don’t know how much it is,’ she’d said.

Galeotti had raised his head again. ‘I think you’ll find my client—’ and he had broken off, nodding to Luisa, ‘our client, should I say, is open to offers. The apartment does need, ah – some attention.’

And Sandro had sighed, giving in. Then Galeotti had fished from his briefcase a great circular bunch of keys – eight or nine different sets, each tagged – extracted one and they had gone in.

Some attention: well, that had certainly been true. The roof had collapsed in places, and the speckled tile of the floor was heaped with rubble. The window frames were rotten and the shutter-slats half broken; the tiny bathroom blotched with rust and mildew, the kitchen no more than an ancient cooker and a stained sink in one corner of the main living space. But the room was wide and light and spacious and beautiful, with chestnut beams; one set of long French doors let in a rectangle of green hillside, and another a slice of the view, between rooftops, of the smoke-blue layers of the Casentino hills.

‘Perhaps you could leave us for ten minutes, to have a look around?’ Luisa had said politely to Galeotti, who had appeared unsettled by the request.

‘Well, I don’t know,’ he’d said, chinking the big hoop of keys against his thigh.

‘Please,’ Luisa had said, and there was something about her tone – Sandro knew it all too well – of precision and firmness and certainty, which demanded compliance.

‘I’ll be downstairs,’ the estate agent had said shortly. Ten minutes.’

‘I don’t like him,’ Sandro had said, listening to the man’s footsteps on the stairs.

‘I think he can tell,’ Luisa had said, smiling. The pale soft skin around her dark eyes had crinkled and Sandro had found himself wondering why anyone would want to erase such lines. ‘I could never work out how you managed to be such a good policeman,’ she’d said, hands on hips. ‘You’re so bad at pretending.’ He had laughed abruptly: wasn’t that just like Luisa? Hide a compliment in an insult. Or vice versa.

‘Yes,’ he’d agreed. ‘Do you like him, then?’

And she’d laughed out loud.

A little trace of a breeze had set up, drifting through the long window nearest to them that gave on to the hillside, and it brought with it the smell of hot, dry earth and pine needles. It hadn’t rained in five months.

‘You love it, don’t you?’ Luisa had said, and Sandro had nodded, just barely.

‘Why did you bring me here, Luisa?’ he’d said with a sigh, turning slowly on the spot, taking in the scratched floor tiles, the long streak of reddish-brown stain down one corner, the lovely windows one after another. ‘We can’t afford it.’

‘Come here,’ she’d said, and dutifully Sandro had followed his wife. Ahead of him her wide shoulders – finer than they’d been before the chemo, her collarbones pronounced now, but still strong – made him think of Anna Niescu’s tiny frame, struggling with its burden. Had her fiancé brought her to a place like this and said, Imagine, darling? This is where we’ll put the nursery.

‘We’re too old,’ he’d begun, but Luisa’s sharp backwards glance had silenced him. She had then taken him into the only other real room in the apartment, the one bedroom. It was big, too, twice the size of anything you’d find in a modernized place. A square, handsome room, with two windows looking down into the nested houses, ornamented with window boxes and washing hung out to dry, that clustered around the old wall.

By now the sun had disappeared behind the dark hump of hillside to the west, but the sky had remained livid blue, and clear. Luisa had been leaning on the windowsill, silhouetted as she gazed out. The hot wind had blown in past her, carrying her scent inside with its load of humidity. She’d turned.

‘Do you think I want this for me?’ she’d said softly. ‘Just for me? Do you think I don’t hear you, lying awake, grinding your teeth every time someone smashes a bottle in the street? Pacing the flat at night as if you’re in a cage?’

Sandro, suddenly overwhelmed by his own stupidity, had said nothing.

‘Too old? No,’ Luisa had said. ‘Life is too short. You need to make changes, now and again. Not too often, but Sandro, caro, once or twice in a lifetime? Is that too often?’

He’d nodded, mute with shame. ‘I thought you loved Santa Croce,’ he’d mumbled.

‘I made the best of things,’ she’d said, shrugging. ‘We both did. But we don’t necessarily have to do that forever.’ She’d sighed. ‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t think it was a bad place. But I like this one much more.’

There was a sound from below, of someone slipping on the crumbling steps, and a muffled curse. And then the agent was with them in the bedroom, examining the dust on his shoes with disgust. ‘Seen enough?’ he asked brightly, key in hand. ‘Ready to go? Sorry to rush you, but there’s another viewing in ten minutes.’

‘Another viewing?’ Luisa said with dismay, and the man shrugged.

‘It’s a good area,’ he said. ‘Places like this don’t hang around.’

One of the windows hung at a crazy angle, and Galeotti, trying to open it, had pulled a rusting hinge out of the wall. ‘Needs some attention,’ Sandro had said drily and the man had looked back at him with a trace of sullenness before putting the professional smile back on his face and leaving the rotten window to dangle against the wall.

Now settled in at Nello for a late dinner, they talked around in circles. Could they afford it, how much would they get for the place in Santa Croce, who might they get to do the work? Pietro knew a mason, and there was a good place in Santo Spirito for the windows. Every time Sandro felt excitement bubble up inside him he fought to suppress it – partly because it was his nature, partly because it was only sensible, wasn’t it? Because nothing was certain. So dangerous, to make plans: disappointment was the default position in life. But Sandro found himself agreeing to go into the bank, to talk about a loan. He pushed away his plate, the breaded cutlet on it not quite finished. This heat, it had taken away his appetite, too.

‘There was a girl came in today,’ he said slowly. Talking of plans.

And he was suddenly overcome by the desire for a cigarette, after twenty years without one. But now smoking was banned more or less anywhere but most particularly in the place where it would have been most perfectly enjoyable, in a convivial restaurant after a good meal. Since when, he asked himself, did we become so intolerant? Since when did we start refusing to take even the tiniest risk for another’s pleasure? Of course, smoking terraces had sprung up all over the city since the new law, most of them so fully enclosed that effectively people were still smoking inside. But that was the Italian way: keep your head down under authority’s demands and then carry on as before.

Fleetingly he wondered: perhaps taking up smoking again would be a change too far even for Luisa.

‘A girl?’ said Luisa, her curiosity caught by whatever it was he had allowed to slip into his voice. Reluctance, regret.

And for the second time that day Sandro laid out Anna Niescu’s story, but the version of it he found himself telling Luisa was different in several particulars, some of it new even to Sandro himself. He talked of the sweetness of the girl’s nature, of her conviction that the man needed only to be brought back to her for a happy ending to ensue, her faith. And he even found himself telling Luisa, wonderingly, what he would not have dared describe to her even five years ago: of the moment when he and Anna Niescu had both looked down at the child moving inside her, immanent; untainted perfection waiting to be born.

‘It seems like waiting for someone to die,’ he said, without even thinking if what he was saying made sense. ‘Waiting for a child to be born. You can’t – anticipate. You can’t know what it’s going to be like, until it’s there.’

Too late, he heard what he had said. They had waited for their child to die. But Luisa closed her hand over his. ‘You’ll have to find him, then,’ she said. ‘The father. If anyone can, you can.’

It had never failed her, not through all the chemo and the surgery, the bruising cannulae, the drips and the hospital wards and the vomiting in the dark. And not for the first time Sandro wondered where Luisa got it from, all that certainty.