Learning by Heart (32 page)

But I have those four days
.

I see you standing by the window in the first light of morning. I get up from the bed where we have hardly slept all night. I put my arms round you, and you stand with your back to me, but your head leaning on my shoulder. And I pass my hands down your body, and you turn your head and kiss me. Such intensity in that kiss; such absolute giving
.

And I turn you round and drop my hands down your back, feeling every inch of skin, running my fingers over your shoulders, your waist, to the curve of the spine in the small of your back, and I pass my hands between your legs, beginning to kneel as I do so. And I feel you shudder as I touch you. And you give yourself to me, and never before, never since, have I known the ecstasy I felt with you that morning, that night
.

And we ate on the terrace, and looked at the sea. It was a run-down house, really, not much more than a peasant’s cottage. It is better now: I have reconstructed it. I have employed a very good carpenter and a gardener, and made it nice for you, darling. It’s not bigger. The rooms are the same. The bedroom, and the bathroom with the blue floor. You remember. We filled the bath to overflowing by mistake. You remember. We wiped the floor and laughed while we did it, because I had never done a domestic thing before in my life, and was so hopeless. I changed all that, too, Cora. I would surprise you now
.

I have two houses. One in Rome and this one in Enna, and I have the cottage on the coast. I live mostly in Rome, and it is a beautiful house. But I didn’t want to end my life there, among strangers. I wanted to come here
.

I wish that we had lived in any house, anywhere, together. I wish that we had married, and raised a family. I wish we had had children together. Sometimes I allow myself to think of our family because I have never had children. I think of them, and I can feel them sometimes in the room, or standing silently by the door
.

I wonder if they are really there
.

I wonder if part of me lives in you, darling
.

I send you all my love with this journal
.

All my love, all of my life
.

Eighteen

As Cora stood at the top of the hill with Joshua late that afternoon, she saw them coming.

They were walking across the field together, Zeph a little way ahead of Nick. But the smallest movement had caught Cora’s eye: just after they had come through the gate to the house, she had seen Zeph turn and glance at her husband, dipping her head a little. And Nick had put his hand on her daughter’s shoulder and run his fingers, just briefly, down her arm. Then he called Joshua.

Cora looked back at her grandson. All afternoon, he had been helping her as she worked her way up the long slope of the orchard, deliriously happy to be sitting alongside her on the field mower, oblivious to its rattling age and the cloud of petrol smoke it dragged in its wake. She had rigged up an amateur seatbelt, but there was really no need: he had been as good as gold. It had been only in the last half-hour that he had squirmed round in his seat to watch the rake pull in the cuttings.

Now he saw his father. For a moment he did nothing at all. Then he jammed his fist into his mouth and chewed his knuckles. Cora turned off the engine and got down.

Nick began to walk away from the house, parallel to them, between the lines of apple trees. Cora saw him grin; he cocked his thumb over his shoulder. Cora knew what the gesture meant. ‘Want to swing?’ she asked.

There was a rope swing in the woods on one of the big chestnuts.

Joshua began to scramble down, bypassing Cora’s outheld arms. From a hundred yards apart, mother and grandmother watched as the little boy ran between the Dabinetts planted in their military sequence, two abreast. Cora shaded her eyes against the weak five o’clock sun and saw Nick pick Joshua up and swing him over his shoulders in a fireman’s lift. He waved at her. She waved back, then looked at Zeph.

All at once, watching Zeph come towards her, she was struck by Richard’s expression on her daughter’s face: of determination. She leaned against the mower, taking off her gloves.

Zeph stopped six feet from her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

‘I’m tired,’ Cora admitted. ‘What’s happened? What have you said? What have you agreed?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘But is it all right?’

‘Yes,’ Zeph told her. ‘It’s all right.’

For a moment Cora couldn’t speak. The relief was so great that she could only nod. Then, ‘He’s done a very stupid and hurtful thing,’ she said, ‘but, darling, there are worse men in the world.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Men who use women,’ Cora replied, ‘and don’t care whom they hurt. Bullies and liars. Nick isn’t like that.’

Zeph looked down the length of the trees. ‘He’s been offered a job in the USA,’ she said.

Immediate fear replaced the relief. Cora was aware that she had gasped. ‘Will he take it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you go with him?’

‘I don’t know.’

Cora plunged her hands into her pockets. A little prickle of pain threaded its way through her chest and shoulder. Well, if they had to go, they had to go, she told herself. It was a good thing. They had to be together. That was what was important. She watched Zeph’s profile. She wanted to hold her, but her daughter’s face was unreadable. Then, a crooked smile came to Zeph’s face. ‘I liked this best of all,’ she said, ‘the first mowing. I liked it better than the blossom, to be out here with Dad for the first time in the year.’ She looked at her mother. ‘It’s what I remember most,’ she said. ‘It was him and me, all the time. Like a private world, out here. Nobody else up on the hill. Just everything green. And us.’

‘Yes, all the time.’

‘Never you,’ Zeph said.

Cora was silent.

‘I used to think you didn’t care much about being with us,’ Zeph glanced back at her mother, ‘but that isn’t right, is it? It was because of me that you were never together.’

‘No,’ Cora told her. ‘He wanted you. You have to understand that. There was never any question of it.’

‘Even though I wasn’t his daughter?’

Their eyes met. ‘You were his daughter,’ Cora said, ‘in every way that mattered.’

‘He adjusted to me.’

‘No,’ Cora said. ‘He didn’t just accept you, he wanted you from the very first. He never blamed me, Zeph, from the first moment he knew about you.’

‘He forgave you? He knew?’

‘It was more than that,’ Cora said. ‘Much more.’

She had realized she was pregnant four months after they returned from Sicily. It was early September and they had been busy during the summer. It had been rainy and hot so the crops were heavier than usual, and the stock grew like wildfire. In May, Cora had made up pots and baskets of pelargonium, all scarlet, and taken them to the Saturday market along the main street in town.

She had had a little stall by the abbey gatehouse, and from her vantage-point had been able to look back along the path to the church and down Long Street. Traffic had gone back and forth ceaselessly, and every Saturday, standing first with the pelargonium and, latterly, with the fruit, she had wanted to step to the edge of the pavement and ask any driver to take her away.

Momentary madness like that had populated the weeks after they returned. She had felt a deep irritation with everything around her, the house, the weather. Especially the weather. One afternoon in June, when it had poured and she had been sitting in the kitchen watching the rain stream down the windows, she had put her head on her arms on the table and cried for a long time. She kept thinking of how the heat would be settling in Sicily, burning down into the ground, warming the seas.

She kept thinking of him, of Enna, of Easter. How she had got up very early on that Easter Saturday in Enna and gone out of the small hotel, leaving Richard asleep. She had taken her bag and passport and walked quickly across the square, then down the alley that ran beside the hotel. And gone straight into his arms. Pietro was waiting exactly where they had arranged.

He had borrowed a car. They drove across the mountains, down to Caltagirone, through Ragusa and Modica to the coast, then turned east. She remembered the grey backs of the hills, the great boulders broken in some and dragged to the edge to scour a little pasture on the high ground. She remembered narrow roads that raised dust as they passed. She had sat next to him on the bench seat in the front of the car, and they had hardly spoken, his hand on her thigh.

They reached the cottage in late afternoon.

As she got out of the car, she looked at him. The cottage was down a long stony track; it faced out to sea. The garden was merely a pasture of thorny grass. There was no one to be seen, and they had passed no one on the road for the last three or four miles. There were no other buildings in any direction. Pietro walked round the side of the car. The sun beat down. He took her in his arms and pressed her against the door.

She wanted him. There was no subtlety in it. She could not summon the coyness, the holding-back she had been taught all her life that a nice woman should employ. Even with Richard she sometimes felt, still, on the rare occasions that their lovemaking was anything other than perfunctory, that she should not hold him as she did, or ask him to do certain things. She felt as if he merely obeyed her, bemused by her need, without feeling any of his own. She sometimes wondered if he felt for her in any sexual way, if he thought or fantasized about her. She didn’t know. He would smile at her the next day with an odd, preoccupied glance, as if he couldn’t quite fathom her.

But this was different. This was a fever. Pietro responded with delight to her every touch; the sound of his voice as she put her hands on him was a revelation. And she was ready to indulge her greed, her overwhelming longing. She couldn’t do otherwise. She didn’t want to do otherwise. She wanted to close her eyes and be consumed by him. In the back of her mind for the last twenty-four hours, she had heard Bisley’s voice, ‘the fire of life’. And he had been right. She hadn’t known until now exactly how right.

Pietro drew back from her. ‘Is this real?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, because she had no idea what she had done, how she would live from now on, or what she could tell Richard. She had a sense of dreaming, yet of being more alive than at any other moment of her life. So she couldn’t answer Pietro.

She saw disappointment in his face: he had expected her to reassure him of the promise she had made, her promise to come away with him and stay with him.

‘I will make it real,’ he said.

They walked to the house, and he opened the door. The inside was cool, the floor tiled. It smelt a little damp, because it had not been opened since the winter rains, and she walked round it, opening the shutters and the windows, letting the light stream in. He took her hand and they went upstairs. As she stood by the bedroom door, watching him, he took off his clothes and stood motionless in front of her. He was very beautiful, more beautiful than a man deserved to be, and she thought of the gods making him in their image.

Four days.

Perhaps they strayed over the Styx in those days; perhaps she sold her soul to the devil to be with him. Perhaps what they had done was truly a sin, dark and desperate, and they were exiling themselves to hell, to purgatory, to be damned. All these ideas went through her mind as she loved him. In the early hours of the morning she would watch him sleep, and she would pray, a thin little prayer to a God she was not sure would listen to her, even if He existed, that they might be protected, that they would not be punished.

On the fifth day, early in the afternoon, as they lay on the bed, they heard a car coming down the drive. They had listened for a while, not believing it could be anyone they knew.

‘There will be some mistake,’ Pietro had whispered. They were lying curled into one another, both on their left side, his arms round her, she clasping his hands over her breasts. As the engine drew nearer, he tightened his hold. Then he lifted himself on to one elbow, kissed her shoulder almost absentmindedly, listening intently.

The car drew up below the window.

They heard a door open and close, then footsteps on the path.

She sat up. ‘Who is it, do you think?’ she asked.

Pietro went to the shuttered window. He opened it, stood stock still for a second, then turned and picked up his clothes. ‘It is Richard,’ he said, without looking at her.

She hurried to dress. She heard Pietro go downstairs, the outer door opening, and the blurred cadence of two voices.

When she came downstairs, she saw Richard’s glance stray first to her bare feet. He was dressed in a shirt and tie, trousers and jacket despite the heat; next to him, Pietro stood in his jeans and unbuttoned shirt. Richard walked forward. He didn’t look at the house, only into her face.

‘It’s time to come home,’ he said.

‘How did you find us?’ she asked.

‘Alex told me of this address,’ he replied. ‘He used to come here with his lover.’

There was a slight emphasis on the word
his
, but nothing more. She waited.

‘This is Cora’s home now,’ Pietro said, at their back.

She looked at him, and back at her husband.

‘Cora,’ Richard said, ‘you will have nothing to live on – no money. And no home, either. When Pietro’s father finds out about this, he won’t allow you to be here.’

‘I am not afraid of my father,’ Pietro said. He moved alongside them, and touched Cora’s arm.

‘I can’t come back,’ she said. ‘Not now.’

‘I don’t mean for ever,’ Richard said. ‘Only for six months.’

The two of them stared at him.

‘Six months?’ Pietro repeated. ‘She will not come back even for a day.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Cora said.

‘Don’t listen to him,’ Pietro urged.

Richard ignored him. ‘Cora, please think about what you are doing.’

‘I shall look after her,’ Pietro said. ‘The decision is made.’

Cora could not speak; gently, she disengaged Pietro’s hand.