Christobel Kent: Dead Season

Sandro had just looked at her. ‘Let’s see how we go,’ was all he’d said. Savings: how much could you save living in as a chambermaid at the Loggiata? They probably even deducted her board.

‘So, first stop, the bank?’ said Pietro. ‘Or this apartment he’s supposed to be doing up for them, his little family?’

‘Yes,’ said Sandro, ‘I think, the bank.’

And something stirred at last in his sluggish, heat-stupefied veins. The need for action, the chance that maybe tomorrow morning there’d be a breath of air, in the early hours. The Banca di Toscana Provinciale, then, first thing. He stood up.

‘I hope you do get away,’ he said, anxious suddenly, prey to some foreboding he didn’t want to acknowledge.

And at the door he turned back. ‘Give Chiara my love,’ he said. ‘Tell her I remember that day you brought her into the station. Tell her I remember that rabbit she brought with her, trailing around, holding it by the ear.’

And Pietro’s expression — the same combination of affection, respect and bewilderment he’d known for twenty years — followed him out on to the street and stayed with him all the way home to Luisa.

Who had a surprise waiting for him.

One advantage of August, Roxana had to admit, as she urged her little motorino up the Via Senese, between the handsome facades 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.