Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

He came through the door, his head tilted to one side, long and lean and handsome in his off-duty clothes. She’d never seen him in his uniform, but he’d told her about it. He’d told her with pride that he even had a sword. ‘Of course, it’s meaningless,’ he’d said in a throwaway manner: she’d believed him, then. She’d thought when he began talking to her in that way of his — all that lulling, deep-voiced insistence brought to bear on her, Chiara thinking herself so sought out in the university cloister — that here was a man at the heart of the old order who had only contempt for it. ‘Just pen-pushing,’ he’d told her with his lazy, amoral smile. ‘I don’t fancy a war zone.’ Together what might they not overthrow? But at the same time, buried somewhere deep, she’d liked the idea of that sword too, of that uniform. She’d wanted it all.

The way he held his head, the half-smile on his face, the pause in the doorway. He knew.

‘Darling,’ he said, smoothly amused, and she saw his gaze flick up to the camera she’d found, behind the painting, a tiny eye. She gazed steadily at him, not following his glance: she felt a great surge of misery. Had she still been hoping that this was her own paranoid imagination? That they were still twined souls in rebellion? That he loved her? But it wasn’t her imagination. This was a horrible dirty story, an old, disgusting story about a stupid girl and a wolf, a virgin and a Bluebeard, a house full of locked doors. She was a fool.

He stepped towards the bed and his hand was on her thigh under the silk: his face came close to hers and she smelled the onion on his breath.

His mobile rang.

The smile fixing on his face, he pulled back and reached into a pocket for the phone. His face over hers stilled as he looked away from her and down, at the cellphone’s screen.

‘No,’ he said, his expression darkening.

‘No,’ she said, lifting herself from the pillow, with her eyes fixed over his shoulder on the little eye of the camera and with her hand groping for the only weapon she had, hidden under the pillow, her last resort, no time to call for Dad. Downstairs someone was shouting her name.

*

They had to leave the car at the end of a long private parking lot, and vault the locked gate: with difficulty, in Sandra’s case.

They’d driven in near-silence until they got to the Viadotto dell’Indiano, the viaduct that would lead them in a wide overhead curve around the congested centre and to the Isolotto. The sedate rows of apartment blocks flanking the river rose to greet them through their canopy of trees: so calm, so secluded, so private.

‘The Oltrarno’s gridlocked,’ Pietro had said. ‘The Frazione Verde are demonstrating. As if that’ll make any difference.’ His mouth was set in a line.

‘The Isolotto’s a big place,’ Sandro had said, despairing, and Pietro had looked at him.

‘D’you think I don’t know where to find my own daughter?’ And when Sandro had just stared, Pietro had turned his face away and said stonily, ‘I ran a trace on her mobile phone through the computers the morning after she left.’

‘You knew where she was,’ Sandro had said. ‘All along, you knew? And you didn’t come after her?’

Pietro had stared at the road ahead as he’d answered: a lorry was blocking their exit, moving horribly slowly. ‘I didn’t make the connection,’ he said. ‘I was watching the Frazione, my daughter had grown up and left me. They were different things. Do you seriously think that if I’d had the slightest inkling she’d got involved with this guy — this guy — I’d have let it lie?’ Ahead the lorry began to move.

Sandro looked at his friend’s tormented face. ‘No,’ he said, his chest tight.

‘I had to let her go,’ Pietro said, still not looking at him. ‘What, sit in a car outside in the street, watching her? Fascist dad. Big Brother. What if she saw me? Or he did?’

‘You didn’t even come and get a look at him?’

‘I didn’t know!’ Pietro had said in anguish, and his hands had gripped the steering wheel. ‘I thought I had to let her go. But I had to know where to come for her, when the time came.’

And the time had come.

Now, though, ten years younger than him, Pietro was pulling away from Sandro as they ran through the parking lot.

Chiara!

An old woman in black looked over her balcony at the sound, at Pietro bellowing like a maddened bull in the orderly, shrub-lined grounds below her. Looking up, Sandro saw something in her beady, dark eyes, a kind of satisfaction: recognition. She turned her head to look along the block and up, and pointed.

They ran under the elevated building to a liftwell, and pressed all the bells in turn at the locked door. A click came, and they were through. ‘Third floor,’ said Pietro, and he was on the stairs before Sandro could even think about the lift. Sandro’s lungs were burning before they got to the first floor, he was dizzy with the effort and with wondering, which door?

And, could either of us even batter a door down, at our age?

But the door was open and Chiara behind it dressed only in a pink slip, struggling with a tall man. Absolutely recognizable even in his jeans, the lazy-smiling soldier with his big jaw, taller than her and pinning her, like a child, by holding her arms over her head. He turned an expression of amazement on them as they entered.

Arturo. The tall colonel with deepset eyes, climbing out of his cramped army vehicle in the Piazza del Carmine. Stretching his long legs in his office opposite the Botanic Gardens, looking at his watch as Sandro tried not to like him, a bust of Aristotle on the shelf. Flavia Matteo had ended her life in that marble tomb of a bath, in that bathroom where the distant reflection of pale seaside light played on the walls, for this man. Who was worthless, and she had known it.

He looked at Sandro and Sandro saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes, the beginnings even of amusement. We can be men together about this.

‘She hit me,’ he said, and Sandro saw on his temple a trickle of blood and a reddening abrasion. In one of the hands he held by the wrists, Chiara clutched her mobile phone: her knuckles were grazed and bleeding. ‘There’s no need for it.’ He sounded affronted. ‘As if I can’t control myself. There’s no need for violence.’

Drawing back his fist, Pietro punched him.

*

Someone had found an amp and a microphone and had plugged it in, God knows where. Across the wide piazza the crowd swayed, silent. They waited.

In the corner of the square where they’d arrived and been unable to move further stood Enzo and Giuli, pressed against each other shoulder to shoulder, Luisa and Gloria with their arms tight around each other. No one in all the great hushed mass of people was looking anywhere but at Niccolo Rosselli, who stood on the steps of the great church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

He wasn’t alone: from against his father’s chest Rosselli’s son stared with beady black eyes out over the crowd.

Rosselli spoke.

‘Go home,’ he said, and there was a murmur, a groundswell of menace.

‘I need to mourn my wife,’ he said, and the murmur fell away. Giuli felt Enzo’s hand close warm around hers.

‘I need you all to go back to your homes.’ His voice was weary but firm. Giuli held her breath: they were all holding their breath, and then he spoke again.

‘Go home. And wait.’

He stepped away, one hand holding the back of his son’s head as he turned, and Giuli saw the child look up at him in the absolute silence.

And then, like a wave breaking in the great piazza over all the heads, over the man and his child, then came the roar of approbation.