Lucy Gordon - The Italian’s Baby

She was silent for a long moment, getting up and pacing the room as though tormented by indecision.

‘What is it?’ he asked, looking up at her quickly. ‘Is there more?’

‘Yes, there’s something I’ve been waiting to tell you, but it had to be when the moment was right. Now, I think…’

She stopped, torn by indecision, even though she knew there was no turning back. Luca took her hands between his.

‘Tell me, Becky,’ he said. ‘Whatever it is, it’s time I knew.’

‘YES,’ she said. ‘You ought to know. Luca, have you ever been back to Carenna?’

‘No,’ he said after a moment.

‘Me neither, until recently. I went a few weeks ago, and I found out something else my father lied about.’

She stopped again. Suddenly the next part seemed momentous, and she wondered if she had been wise to start.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I’d always thought she died without being baptised, without a name. Dad never told me otherwise.’

‘You mean-?’

‘She’s there, in the churchyard. She was baptised by the hospital chaplain.’

‘But how could you not have known?’

‘They took her away to the incubator as soon as she was born, while I stayed behind for the nurses to finish tending to me. The chaplain was already in the baby unit, seeing another child. They thought our little girl might only have a few minutes, so he baptised her there and then, in case he wasn’t in time.’

‘And they never told anybody?’

‘Yes, they told Dad. I suppose they assumed he’d tell me, but he never did. But she was buried in consecrated ground.

‘The priest died last year, but I spoke to the new one, and it’s all there in the records. Apparently the priest held a little funeral, and told Dad when it was going to be. He couldn’t tell me, because my father kept him away, and he didn’t know where you were. So when our daughter was buried-’ a tremor shook her ‘-none of her family were there.’

‘Not even your father?’

‘He wanted to pretend that she never existed, and he wanted me to forget about her. So he tried to blot her out, and blot you out. He even told the priest her name was Solway.’

‘You mean-?’

‘That’s the name on her grave,’ she said with rising anger. ‘Rebecca Solway. But she’s there, Luca. She didn’t vanish into the void. He didn’t manage to obliterate her, not completely.’

Luca rose violently and paced the room as though sitting still was suddenly intolerable. He began to shake his head like a beast in pain, and she thought she had never seen a man’s face look so ravaged.

At last he came to a halt, and without warning swung his fist into the wall. It landed with a thunderous shock, and immediately he did it again, and then again. It was as well that the old cottage was made of solid stone or it could never have withstood the impact of his rage and agony.

‘Oh, God!’ he kept saying. ‘Dear God! Dear God!’

Torn with pity for him, she put her arms around his body. He didn’t stop thumping the wall, but his free hand grasped her so tightly that he almost crushed her.

‘Luca-Luca, please…’

She wasn’t sure that he heard her. He seemed lost in a haze of misery, where only the rhythmic thumping made sense.

At last he was too tired to go on, and leaned his head against the stone, shaking with distress. Rebecca rested her own head against his back, weeping for him. She could endure her own pain, but his pain tore her apart.

He turned far enough to draw her against his chest in a convulsive grip.

‘Hold on to me,’ he said hoarsely, ‘or I shall go mad. Hold me, Becky, hold me.’

He almost fell against her. All his massive physical strength seemed to have drained out of him, and there was only hers left to save him.

She did as he asked and held him. The path he was travelling was one she herself had walked only a short time before, and she resolved that he would not walk it alone, as she had done.

Leaning on her, he got back to the chair and almost fell into it. His eyes were vacant, as though fixed on some inner landscape where there was only desolation.

His right hand was red and raw where the wall had torn it, and she gently took hold of it, sensing how even the lightest touch made him wince. She began to dab it with water, her eyes blurred with tears at what he had done to himself in his torment.

She dropped to one knee beside him so that she could clean the bleeding wound. He stared at it, as though wondering how it had happened.

‘What did it look like?’ he asked at last.

‘What, darling?’ The word slipped out naturally.

‘Her grave, what was it like?’

‘Just a little grave, very plain and small, with the name and the date she was born and died.’

‘And nobody of her own was there at her funeral,’ Luca murmured. This fact in particular seemed to trouble him. ‘Poor little thing. Laid away in darkness, all alone.’

He shook his head as though trying to get free of something.

‘I was glad when I found out,’ Rebecca said. ‘It’s better than her having no baptism and no proper burial. I thought you’d be glad too.’

‘I am glad about that,’ he said quickly. ‘But we should have been told. If I’d known, I would have gone back there to see her, often. She wouldn’t have been alone.’

It was as if a light had shone through her mind, illuminating him as never before. Luca was an Italian, with the Italian’s attitude to death. Like almost everything else in Italy, it was a family matter. A child’s grave was visited regularly, with flowers and tokens on birthdays, because even in death that child was a member of the family. To him it was an outrage that his daughter had lain unvisited for fifteen years.

‘She’s still there, waiting for us,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it’s time her parents visited her together.’

He couldn’t speak. Dumbly he nodded.

‘But you should see a doctor about your hand first.’

He made an impatient movement. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘I’ve only got water to clean it with, and I’m afraid it will get infected. Or you may have broken something.’

‘Nonsense, I’m never hurt.’

‘Oh, yes, you are,’ she said softly. ‘Now, come and lie down.’

After a moment he nodded and let her lead him to his bed. His hand was clearly painful and he had to accept her help to undress down to vest and shorts, but when she mentioned it he said gruffly, ‘It’ll be all right tomorrow.’

By the next day it was swollen and still hurting him, but he wouldn’t consider ‘wasting time’ with a doctor. His manner was feverish, as though nothing mattered but getting to Carenna as fast as possible.

‘We can’t go in that van,’ Rebecca observed. ‘Where’s your car?’

‘Garaged in the village, with the man who hired me the van.’

‘You’ll have to show me how to drive it.’

‘I’ll drive it.’

But he had to give up after the first mile, and she drove the clanking vehicle the rest of the way.

‘Turn left, down there,’ he said almost as soon as they were in the village. ‘Becky, I said down there.’

‘Later,’ she said, bringing the van to a noisy halt outside the doctor’s surgery. ‘First we go in here.’

‘I told you I’m all right,’ he groaned.

‘And I’m telling you that you’re not.’

‘Becky, I don’t want-’

She lost her temper.

‘Did I ask you what you want? Luca, it’s very simple. I’m the only person who can drive at the moment, and I’m going nowhere until you’ve been to the doctor.’

‘That’s blackmail.’

‘Yes, it is. So what?’

‘You’re just being stupid.’

‘Fine, then the doctor can tell me so.’

But the doctor said no such thing. He was an old man with modern ideas, who’d equipped his surgery with a lot of good equipment, including a small X-ray machine. It took only a short time to establish that Luca had cracked two bones and smashed a third.

‘It’s good that you came straight to me, signore,’ said the doctor as he set the hand in plaster. ‘Otherwise your hand would have been crippled. You were very wise.’ He regarded them knowingly. ‘Or maybe you are just fortunate in your wife?’

‘Yes,’ Luca said.

‘Here are some painkillers, and two of these other pills will give you a good night. I hope you weren’t planning anything strenuous for the rest of today.’

‘No,’ Rebecca said quickly. ‘We were thinking of a journey, but now we’ve put it off until tomorrow.’

Luca simply nodded. He was looking worn and ill, and she sensed that this was only partly due to his injured hand. It was as though all the fight had gone out of him. He even agreed to stay quietly in the doctor’s waiting room while she returned the van and collected the car.

It was dusk as she drew up at the cottage, and she immediately set about getting the place warm and making him comfortable. His appetite was poor but he managed to eat some pasta with his left hand.

‘Go to bed now,’ she said gently. ‘And I think you should take the proper bed, and I’ll have the mattress.’

But he shook his head firmly and she made no further protest. He accepted her help undressing, then let her usher him into the rough bed like a mother with an exhausted child. He touched her hand briefly.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘For everything.’

She squeezed his hand, kissed him briefly and hurried out.

They were on the road early next morning, eating up the miles to Carenna in the silkily gliding car.

For this journey they had abandoned the jeans and sweaters in which they had been living, becoming sober and conventional again. In a severe, well-cut suit, Luca might have been the man she’d met again months ago, but he was not that man. His face had changed. It was thinner and almost haggard, as though he’d aged overnight.