Secrecy by Rupert Thomson Page B

left cheek, as if she had been out gathering wild berries and had reached up absentmindedly to wipe her face. She had never married, though she had been engaged to the son of a local judge, who had left her for a richer woman only a few weeks before the wedding. She learned the bitter coin-taste of abandonment, and no man was allowed into the house again, except for Sabatino Vespi, who courted her for a decade and didn’t get over the threshold more than a handful of times.
    Vespi was much older than Ginevra, Faustina said, and though he lived on a ridge outside Torremagna, he spent most afternoons on a plot of land at the foot of the village walls, directly below Ginevra’s house. It was there, on a west-facing slope, that he grew the fruit and vegetables that he sold in the nearby market town. Faustina would often go with him. They would leave so early that stars would still be scattered across the sky, and she would sit on the tailboard, facing backwards, her bare feet dangling above the white dust road. Wrapped in a rug that smelled of earth, she would watch as the dark shapes of scrub oaks, pines and cypresses jolted by.
    One Tuesday morning, when she was nine or ten, he broke a long silence with a question that caught her off guard, though she knew, with the uncanny, unearned certainty of a child, that this was a subject he had been turning over in his mind for years. ‘Do you think your mother would ever marry me?’
    ‘Do you
want
to marry her?’
    ‘Oh, yes.’
    Intrigued by the force he had put into the words, she scrambled over the heaps of onions and garlic, and climbed up on to the bench-seat.
    ‘So you love her?’
    Vespi looked towards the moon, which had faded as the darkness faded, and was now no more than a chalk scratch on the slowly heating pale blue of the sky.
    ‘I loved her long before she got engaged,’ he said. ‘I loved her before she knew what love was. I loved her
first
.’
    She had never heard him talk about his feelings before – it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have any – and she stared at his battered, unshaven features with a kind of awe.
    ‘Does she know that?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You never told her?’
    ‘I should have. I was too shy, though.’ He looked at her. ‘You think it’s too late?’
    If she tried to imagine Ginevra’s heart, she saw wood-shavings, and bacon-rind, and thin, curling off-cuts of boot-leather. It was like peering into the corner of a shed, or into a room that was hardly ever used. She hoped her heart never looked like that.
    Vespi saw that she had no reply for him. ‘You do, don’t you? You think it’s too late for poor old Vespi.’
    Once, when Vespi appeared at the house with a basket of his own fruit and vegetables, she had watched through a crack in the door.
Why do you keep bothering me?
she heard Ginevra say.
Why can’t you leave me alone?
Vespi stood in silence, his chin lowered almost to his breastbone.
It’s because I’m all you can get, isn’t it?
Ginevra said.
Is that what I am? All you can get?
Still Vespi didn’t speak. Ginevra stepped close to him and angled her face in such a way that her birthmark must have filled his field of vision.
You’re sorry for me, aren’t you? Why not admit it?
Then, shockingly, she turned sideways and vomited on the floor. Vespi’s hand hovered near the small of her back as she bent over. He didn’t dare to touch her, though. He muttered something – Faustina thought she heard the word
beautiful
– but Ginevra was on her hands and knees by then, clearing up the mess, and didn’t notice.
    Vespi’s grip on the reins had slackened. ‘It’s too late.’
    ‘I don’t know.’ She shifted beside him on the bench-seat. ‘You’ll have to do something unexpected.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘That’s for you to think of.’
    They had come to a standstill on the crest of a hill. The dirt road dropped steeply away in front of them, the valley below filled with dense white fog.
    ‘Don’t you have