Christobel Kent - A Darkness Descending

Giuli Keptthe school notebook with its elastic retainer. She didn’t know what else to do with it, was her excuse: she didn’t want to destroy it, nor to hand it over to the police to have men poring over it.

‘I’ll let Pietro have it,’ she said to Enzo as they laid the table for Luisa and Sandra’s arrival for the dinner long postponed. ‘When he asks. It’s evidence, I know that.’

She might have destroyed it. That might have done the trick, the trick of putting it all behind them and moving on. But, as Barbara had said, we don’t like obliteration.

She’d told Enzo what was in the book — some of it. ‘He was really into it, you can tell,’ she said. ‘She wouldn’t have fallen for it otherwise. He liked the game of it, and Flavia was an intelligent woman, a good match for him. In that way.’

Enzo understood: he was the one who’d said it, after all. The right bait for the right fish.

‘It might even be why — he didn’t sleep with her. Didn’t force her. He had his evidence, he only did the minimum. Perhaps he saw no need to harm her more than was necessary.’

‘Maybe,’ said Enzo dubiously. ‘He harmed her enough.’

Even now, folding napkins, laying them on the neat place settings, slicing the tomatoes as Enzo had shown her, Giuli felt a knot of rage and grief form in her at the thought of it. Arturo had taken Flavia to the seaside and shown her his idea of love: he’d talked to her about Aristotle and stroked her pale freckled arms in a hotel bedroom. He had said he’d wait: she had come out of the hotel in the early morning so radiant with it that even a street sweeper had stopped to watch her face.

She’d waited: she’d struggled and fought against it, she’d turned to her husband and had her child, and it hadn’t worked. Arturo had lured her back two weeks after the baby was born, even as he was working on Chiara, to a flat in the Isolotto — his dead mother’s flat, it turned out, as he was shacked up, most of the time with Nicoletta Farmiga — and had filmed her removing her clothes. Because this in the end was what it was about: documentary evidence.

Had Arturo enjoyed it? Had it started out as a kick for him, an ego trip? Maybe. Probably. Or a power trip too. Perhaps. Had he and Farmiga cooked it up between them, because everything about Flavia got to Farmiga: her political idealism, her shame, her purity? Farmiga wasn’t talking, but Sandro thought it was possible. A bit of nasty fun, maybe, a challenge, see if you can pick her up. And then: that’d show them. What would it look like for Rosselli if his wife were caught in bed with another man? The saintly Flavia.

Then if there was documentary evidence too, pictures that could go out on the internet, it could be turned into a weapon for the cause — their cause that was the negative image of Rosselli’s commitment to openness, to justice, to clean hands.

And when, having got what he wanted, the soldier had stopped returning her messages, when he’d already started turning his attention elsewhere, Flavia had tried to hold on to her sanity for a month. Flavia Matteo, who’d trained herself for a lifetime not to feel except on behalf of others, not to need except for others’ needs, had been unable to keep going. She’d gone back to the glittering waves and white seaside light, and had put herself out of her misery.

The little book told it all. It was Flavia Matteo’s creation, it was her love story. One day, Giuli told herself, she would destroy it.

When Flavia had turned up dead and it had looked like there was a chance of a sympathy vote for Rosselli, they’d had to stage the break-in and tip off the police to go looking for dirty pictures.

‘Right,’ said Giuli, stepping back and looking at her perfect table, smelling the food on the stove. She went over to Enzo and put her arms around him and felt him relax.

‘I love you,’ she said.

*

‘Tie?’ asked Sandro, frowning into the wardrobe. Luisa looked at him in surprise.

‘For Giuli?’

He shrugged. ‘It feels like a special occasion,’ he said, and Luisa nodded.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s turned cool out there. Might even wear a jacket too.’

Luisa was in her slip: he saw her put a hand up to her left side.

‘It was so easy for him, in the end,’ she said with sorrow. ‘An intelligent woman, but he destroyed her.’

‘I don’t know if it was so easy,’ Sandro said. ‘But perhaps that was part of the kick. To them it’s all part of the same game: politics, sex. Get one better. Triumph.’

Luisa’s hand stayed where it was, at her flattened breast. ‘And Chiara?’

He shrugged, uncomfortable. ‘The agenda might have been a little different, the techniques too. He might — he might have been pleasing himself more. The same game, though. Still the same game.’

‘What’s going to happen to him?’ Luisa asked.

‘He’s been suspended on full pay while the investigation continues,’ said Sandro. He still couldn’t think of Arturo without a churn of nausea: the man’s charm had taken him in as easily as a girl. The philosophy and the intelligence glittered on the surface, and underneath a darkness moved, alive with greed, venality, self-interest. It was the world.

Sandro took out a tweed jacket: too heavy. He put it back in the wardrobe and took out a light wool one, frowned at it. He could hardly remember where half these things came from. Luisa must have bought them for him: she was still in her slip in front of him.

‘Is it even a crime?’ she asked. ‘Seducing a woman.’

He turned to her, put his hands on her arms, trying to manage the love he felt for her closed, intent expression.

‘The concealed filming is a crime,’ he said. ‘A good thing there’s evidence to back that up … the photographs Enzo managed to retrieve. If they can prove conspiracy, blackmail — all those things.’ He thought of Pietro: he’d been removed from the investigation, for obvious reasons. Was there a winner here? Chiara was safe: that was all Pietro cared about. And the vigilantes had been dealt a blow, and they knew it.

‘They’ll get on to the internet, won’t they, though?’ Luisa was still frowning furiously. ‘It’ll get out.’

‘Maybe,’ said Sandro. ‘Maybe. But then again, maybe people are not as terrible as we think. Maybe no one wants to see pictures of a naked woman on the verge of tears, a woman who went on to kill herself out of shame.’

‘I don’t think it was shame,’ said Luisa. ‘I think it was grief.’

Sandro raised his head. ‘She left behind a child,’ he said. ‘Perhaps people will have pity.’

‘He’s strong enough, isn’t he? Niccolo. He seems strong enough, after all.’ She spoke hesitantly.

‘To keep going with the Frazione?’ Sandro rubbed her arms briskly. ‘You’re getting cold.’

‘To bring up the child,’ said Luisa, and as he took his hands away she brought her arms up across her chest.

‘Yes,’ he said, and gently he prised one arm away. ‘He’ll bring up the child very well. His mother’s not going to live for ever, is she? And she’ll come into line.’

Luisa looked down at him, waiting to know what he was going to do next.

‘I was getting quite fond of this,’ he said, touching her scar under the silk. She pulled her head back in surprise.

‘Now he tells me,’ she said, and he saw pink rise up her throat. He put his mouth to her neck and breathed in.

‘Which is not to say,’ his voice sounding muffled against her skin, ‘I won’t be fond of the new one, too.’ Sandro pulled his head back and smiled. ‘Now get dressed, girl of mine,’ he said. ‘You’ll catch your death.’

*