The Italian Romance by Joanne Carroll Page B

to know. He touched the bush again, pulled slightly at it so he could just see the house through the crisscross of branch and twig. She was still there. She hadn’t gone to call for someone. She leant down and rubbed her leg, slowly. And when she straightened, pulled back the flyaway curtain and closed one of the French doors, he felt a loss, a rather strange one. She did not show herself again.
    He heard the boy, the quick, light footsteps. He’d lost concentration. He should have been watching the back door. He was shocked out of the dream he had fallen into. He froze, his heart thumping. The youngster didn’t see him. Jack waited. He strained to hear other steps.
    It was quiet. The boy had done well. There was nobody coming after him. Jack moved carefully behind the shield of the green hedge.
    Later, Gianni let himself back into the kitchen. Alphonso was sitting at the table, his braces down, his bad leg resting on another chair. He licked his thumb and turned a page of the newspaper, glaring at the boy over the top of his glasses. ‘What mischief have you been into?’ he said.
    â€˜Nothing,’ Gianni answered, and shrugged his bony shoulders. They were beginning to broaden out, though Gianni didn’t really know it. He walked quickly by the older man, who made to whack at his legs with the newspaper. The paper disturbed the air and the quiet of the kitchen. Gianni jumped, as Alphonso wanted him to do, and laughed. He ran up the stairs to his bedroom.
    He wondered if anyone would notice that a round of cheese had disappeared from the pantry, and a whole loaf of bread, four big, juicy red tomatoes and a bottle of red wine. He’d even delayed to fill up an empty bottle with water. And before he’d left with his booty in the cloth bag where Berta kept her rags, he went back to the pantry and lifted down a can of anchovies. He hadn’t thought about how the Americans would open it. It was the anchovies that worried him. Grandfather had sent them in a box with a few other things to his mother a few weeks ago. Something in him thought it right to give them to the Americans. It was Gianni’s gesture, his attempt to tip the balance into rightness.
    The dark man had said the name of a town. Gianni stood in the middle of the road and pointed south. He had watched the two Americans, the one he knew to be Capitano and the smaller, fair one, disappear into the trees. He felt proud.

I lived with him for four decades. Why didn’t he tell me?
    Shame? My poor love. How it must have scalded you, hounded you, if you felt you had to keep it from even me. Unless it was particularly from me. That’s a possibility. Did you think it would hurt me? Disillusion me? Or did you think it was none of my business? I could wring your neck. Why the hell did you leave me out of this?
    When was the last time you read these letters? Did you read them over and over? Or couldn’t you stomach it? Yet you kept them. Did you suddenly remember you loved her? Oh, yes, I knew there was something I’d forgotten. I did love my wife, that was it.
    And I want to ask you the question she asked. Why didn’t you write back? I want to ask you in all seriousness. Why didn’t you help them? Or try? At least try. My God, Nio, why didn’t you write?
    Was that your life for forty years: How could I have done that? How could I have done it?
    Nio. Nio. You made yourself a stranger. I didn’t know you. If I didn’t know the hell at your heart’s core, who did I know? Don’t you see, you bloody fool, you did it to me, too?
    She writes like a child. Neat, carefully blotted, the first oneanyway. And the second almost as controlled. Not the third. The ink is smudged here and there. And she’s written quickly. Didn’t that wrench your heart?
    It does mine. It does mine. Beloved husband, she says. Yes. I am touching her for the first time, as I touch her notepaper.
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