Daughter of Silence Page 17

  Reluctantly, Landon scribbled the note and the old man handed it to an official to deliver to Rienzi. Then he steered Landon out of the court-room, through the clamour of the dispersing spectators and into the pale, late sunlight of the city.

  Three minutes’ devious walking brought them to a small square with a time-scarred fountain in the centre of a surprising little cafe that offered iced tea and sweet pastries. The square was still hot and humid, but inside there were deep shadows and a grateful cool. They were served quickly, and Ascolini began, brusque and unsmiling, to set down his thoughts.

  ‘Carlo has done much, much better than I expected. He cannot win, of course. Tomorrow will be a dangerous day for him, but if he survives it he will have scored a professional triumph. There will be twenty briefs on his desk before the week is out. And this will be only a small presage of what is to come. His first battle will have been won, as indeed it is won already – to prove himself a good advocate and an independent spirit. But one battle is not a campaign and there are others, more bitter, still to be fought. For this one he has been armed with education and training. For the others I’m afraid he is quite unprepared.’

  ‘I advised him weeks ago,’ said Landon bluntly. ‘He can win them only by walking away. Valeria is no good to him. She’ll take everything and give nothing. He’ll spend the rest of his life trying to tame her – and end an old man living with a shrew.’ Then he added, regretfully: ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I have a great respect for you and she’s your daughter. But I can’t be polite any more.’

  ‘You don’t have to be polite,’ said Ascolini mildly. ‘I know she’s jealous of you and Ninette and that she wants to make trouble between you. But you did make some of it yourself when you slept with her.’

  Shamed and shocked, Landon gaped at him. ‘How did you know that?’

  Ascolini waved an inconsequential hand. ‘She told me the day after your little escapade.’ He chuckled with sour amusement. ‘Oh, I imagine she promised discretion and secrecy, but you should have known better than to be taken in by such protestations.’

  ‘I should,’ said Landon, ‘but I didn’t. What was the point in telling you?’

  ‘A threat,’ said Ascolini quietly. ‘An assertion of power by a jealous woman. If I interfered any more in her relations with Lazzaro she would tell Carlo and she would tell Ninette.’

  ‘She told Ninette at lunch.’

  Ascolini nodded sagely. ‘I expected she might. How did Ninette take it?’

  ‘Better than I deserved,’ said Landon. ‘I left them together. What happens now I wouldn’t know. When you knew, Doctor, why didn’t you come to me?’

  Ascolini gave one of his eloquent shrugs. ‘I saw a profit in not telling you. I thought, and thought rightly, that you would feel obliged to Carlo and would stay to help him. For the rest,’ he chuckled again in self-mockery, ‘I could understand it. I’ve done it myself with other men’s daughters and other men’s wives. And there was a satisfaction in watching a man like you squirm a little. I shock you, I know, Landon. But I told you a long time ago this is the kind of people we are. My only credit is that I am honest enough to admit it. I’m not a noble father putting a virgin daughter on the auction block. I’ve connived at too many follies not to wear this small one with equanimity.’

  Landon burst out, bitterly: ‘Then why the hell did you make such a fuss about Basilio Lazzaro?’

  Ascolini answered in the same equable tone: ‘Even in a society like ours, Landon, old, sophisticated and often corrupt, there are limits beyond which a woman cannot go and still preserve her place. We are amused by the diversions of convenient marriage. We object to vulgarities like Lazzaro. This affair had to stop or Valeria would have no retreat at all.’

  ‘Do you think she has now?’

  ‘Just one – Carlo.’

  ‘Ninette said the same thing. I’m not sure that I agree. The road may be closed already.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ For the first time, there was a flash of anger from the old advocate. ‘Why else do you think I give you so much confidence? I want to use you, Landon…. Look! I saw Carlo this morning. I spoke with him and with Galuzzi. I am too old not to understand how matters stand between him and his client. You’re a professional. You know what this means. Carlo has affection for this girl. I read the signs. I’ve had clients of my own to whom I have been drawn in circumstances much less favourable. I was cynical enough to enjoy the opportunity. But Carlo is no cynic, and he has been starved of love too long.’

  Landon shook his head and leaned back wearily from his untasted coffee. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I can prescribe for Carlo – and I’ve already done it – but I can’t make him drink the medicine. Besides I don’t think it can go too far. The girl is mentally infirm!’

  ‘And have you, my dear Landon, never met those who need an infirmity in the beloved?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ Landon’s impatience was rising. ‘But what the devil do you expect me to do? Read him a little lecture and send him back to the loving Valeria?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Landon,’ said Ascolini with grave dignity. ‘We have spun webs for you and now you are as enmeshed as we are. One day, perhaps, we may have grace enough to make amends, but you’ve asked me a question and this is my answer.’ He paused a moment and then laid it down with an almost touching simplicity. ‘Tell Carlo, from one who knows, that it is sometimes better to be content with a small, sour apple than to eat strange fruit in an alien country.’

  When Landon reached the apartment, he found Ninette alone, bustling about the preparation of Carlo Rienzi’s dinner. They embraced, but without passion, and then Ninette told him: ‘I had a long talk with Valeria. I understand her, Peter, and I’m sorry for her. All her supports have been knocked away with one stroke – and Ascolini is responsible. I’m fond of him, as you know, but he has been brutally selfish in this matter, as in so many others. All his life he has tried to centre Valeria’s affection on himself. Now, because he wants children, because Carlo suddenly begins to look like the son he wanted, he turns away from Valeria. She’s lost, Peter, lost and bitter and jealous. So she tried to strike at anyone within reach.’

  ‘She still has Carlo to strike at,’ said Landon unhappily. ‘I think I should tell him before she does.’

  ‘No, Peter!’ Ninette was firm. ‘So long as there’s a chance that he won’t know I think we have to take it. After my talk with Valeria I think there is that chance. She knows at least that I feel no malice towards her – and that you don’t either.’

  ‘I think I’d feel better if I talked it out with Carlo.’

  ‘Would he, Peter?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Then she faced him with the question he had been dreading all the afternoon: ‘And how do you feel now, Peter – about us?’

  ‘I’m ashamed of myself, if that’s any help.’

  ‘Why are you ashamed, Peter? Because you’re not the man you thought you were?’

  ‘Partly. We all have our pride, you know. And partly because you deserve better from me.’

  ‘Do you mean that, Peter? Even though you know about Lazzaro and me?’

  ‘Lazzaro was an old episode for you. Mine was something different. There was no excuse for it.’

  ‘There’s always an excuse, Peter. That’s what worries me. I’m not perfect, God knows. If we were married I’d probably give you twenty more excuses in a month, but if you took them I would hate you. I don’t want that kind of marriage, Peter. I don’t want a union that flowers inevitably into the kind of cruelty we’ve seen practised in the last few weeks. I’m not built to endure it. I’d wither under it very quickly. I love you, chéri, but I want to see you content. I love you enough to want you gone if you can’t be content with me.’

  ‘I love you too, Ninette, more desperately than I ever thought possible.’ He moved towards her, but she drew away. He went on, slowly, piecing out the thought with difficulty: ‘All my life, for a thousand reasons and one,
I’ve tried to be self-sufficient, self-dependent, beyond the touch of the pain that other people can inflict. That’s the way they know me in my profession – the driving man, the ambitious fellow they’d like to trip but can’t because he knows too much and feels too little. I can go back to that, but I can’t be content with it any more. I know what I need. I know that I need you. I want to tell you something, sweetheart. I’ve never said this to another person in my life. At this moment I’m almost like Carlo Rienzi. You can put any price on yourself. I think I’d pay it.’

  For a long moment she stood slack and irresolute, measuring him, measuring the risk to herself. Then she shook her head and said in a whisper: ‘There’s no price, Peter. Just love me. For God’s sake, just love me.’

  Then she came to him running and clung to him and they kissed and were glad and it seemed almost possible that youth and all its illusions might be reborn again.

  When Carlo came he found them happy as birds in an apple tree. They hustled him into the studio and settled down to lay the foundations of a convivial evening. Chianti and Barolo and Tuscan brandy are rough remedies for the megrims, but they worked for them that night. They drank deeply and laughed immoderately and made a lavish production of Ninette’s dinner and then lapsed by degrees into drowsy contentment, while Carlo sat at the piano and played Scarlatti and Brahms and old plaintive melodies from the folk music of the mountains.

  It was a good time, a gentle time: a recall of youth and the high untarnished hopes of innocence. Their doors were locked against intrusion. Their windows opened on silver roof-tops and a sky rich with stars. Harsh memories were muted to mezzotint. The music laid a balm to new wounds and was lenitive to old regrets. When it was done, they sat quiet in the half-dark, the talk floating between like straws in slack water. Carlo said softly: ‘I am grateful for tonight – more grateful than I can tell you. Tomorrow is a critical day for me, and you have made me ready to face it.’

  ‘How will it go, Carlo?’ asked Ninette.

  ‘Who knows? We are on the knees of the Blind Goddess. I dare not hope too much.’

  ‘Are you satisfied so far?’

  ‘For myself, yes. I think we have done better than anyone believed possible. I can look at myself in a mirror and know that I have proved what I set out to do. At the beginning, I thought this would be enough. Now, it is all too little.’ He broke off to light a cigarette and the flare of the match lit up his face, peaked and pale, but endowed with the new maturity of experience. ‘It is Anna who troubles me now. She trusts me so far. She has so little fear, so little understanding of what my failure may mean to her. This is a nightmare to me.’

  ‘Perhaps to her it is a mercy,’ suggested Ninette.

  ‘Oh no!’ His reaction was swift and passionate. ‘You don’t understand. In the beginning it was a mercy – but not now. How can I explain it? When I first met her, she was like a child – no – like a woman who had wakened out of one world into another, strange but much more beautiful, in which there was nothing to hate, nothing to fear, nothing to desire. Even the prison seemed to her a comfortable place. I thought at first that she did not understand her situation, but she understood it very well and could look forward to twenty years of confinement without a single terror. Her only interest in her defence seemed to be that she should not disgrace me. I spoke to you about it, Peter, and you explained it to me as the euphoria of shock, the well-being of those who have survived a massive onslaught on the tissue of mind and body and have lapsed into the anaesthesia which nature provides beyond the powers of the physician. Then, slowly, awareness began to grow in her. She began to talk to me of her husband, of the failure of their life together, of her hope to come now to the consummation of love and bear him children. I did a brutal thing when I put him in the witness box, but it was necessary. And it has had a strange effect. For the first time, she has begun to be aware not only of tragedy but of hope. If she is robbed of it now, God knows what may happen to her!’

  His voice trailed off and they sat smoking in silence while the shadows closed in on them and the cigarette smoke drifted up, grey and ghostly, into the darkness of the ceiling. After a while, Ninette asked: ‘How do you see her, Peter? What kind of a person is she?’

  Landon thought about it for a moment and then said, judicially: ‘The answer is, I think, that she’s not yet a person at all. She’s twenty-four years of age, familiar as any of us with the motions of a work-a-day world, but still a child, with a child’s innocence and a child’s wonder and a child’s dependence.’

  ‘That’s it, Peter!’ Carlo’s voice was eager. ‘Valeria and her father think I’m in love with Anna. Perhaps I am, but not as they imagine. Valeria has never given me a child, but I think I have the same feeling for Anna as I should have for a daughter: a care, a tenderness, and a pity for so much simplicity.’

  ‘Will she ever grow up?’ It was Ninette who asked the question and Landon who answered it.

  ‘It’s possible, but it will be a slow process. Carlo has already seen some of the signs. The act of murder was, in effect, an attempt by violent means to shake off the burden of her past. The next step is the one we see now: she is groping, as children grope, for an affirmation of identity.’

  ‘Like this afternoon.’ Carlo took up the thread of the argument. ‘For the first time, she was angry with me because I told her she must be afraid for herself, instead of leaving me to carry the burden of her fears.’

  There was a moment’s pause, and then Landon spoke, quiet and shrewd, out of the shadows. ‘What did she say to that, Carlo?’

  ‘That I was impatient with her, that I asked too much too soon, that she wanted to be a woman, but could not grow alone.’

  ‘Poor child!’ said Ninette softly. ‘Poor lost child!’

  ‘But don’t you see!’ Rienzi’s voice took on a new, vibrant urgency. ‘She is looking for herself now, she is looking for a new road. If we lose our case and she is sent to prison for twenty years, she will sink back into the absolute calm of despair. She will end like those poor creatures who sit all their lives in one corner, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing, without even the thought of death to comfort them. But if we can win, if we can give her hope of release within a reasonable time, then she may continue the search, and, given a little love, she may well succeed. Even the care which she senses in me has done much for her. A little more – and who knows?’

  In spite of himself, Landon gave voice to the final question: ‘Can you spare so much, Carlo, and have you the right?’

  His answer came back, sharp and strong: ‘I think I have. I have spent so much for no return – why should I not spend a little on this lost one?’

  ‘The time may come,’ said Landon deliberately, ‘when your child is a woman and will ask more than you have to give.’

  ‘I cannot think of that,’ said Carlo Rienzi. ‘I cannot think past tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Landon and Ninette arrived at the court forty minutes before the session was due to open; but the ante-room and the pavement were already choked with people clamouring for entrance. It took twenty minutes of argument with a harassed official before they were admitted into the court-room, where other privileged visitors were already seated.

  Ascolini was there with Valeria. She was dressed more soberly than usual. Her face was pale, her eyes heavy and her manner was oddly absent and distracted. Landon and Ascolini sat side by side between the two women. The old advocate, too, was tense and preoccupied. He answered Landon’s questions vaguely and summed up the morning’s prospects in short, irritable phrases: ‘So far, it has been a matter of tactics. Carlo has gained ground. The main lines of his plea have clarified themselves. The dispositions of the court seem slightly in his favour. From this point, everything depends on the testimony he has to offer and on the use he makes of it in his final summation. I’d have liked to discuss it with him, but he, too, has a hard head. I feel old this morning. It is time I thou
ght of retirement….’

  The doors each side of the court opened and the personages began filtering on to the stage for the final act of the legal drama. The Chancellor and his clerks settled themselves at their table. The Prosecutor talked in low tones to his assistants. Carlo Rienzi came in with his two seedy colleagues trailing behind him. He sat down at his table and began leafing through his briefs and making notes on a scratch-pad beside him. There was a burst of excited talk as Anna Albertini was brought in by her gaolers. Then, as if to forestall any more discussion, the President and his assisting judges filed in briskly and took their places on the rostrum. There was whispering and scuffling as the spectators settled themselves and then the dry clatter of the gavel reduced the crowded room to deathly silence.

  Carlo Rienzi stood up. His voice was cool, clear and impersonal. ‘Mr President, gentlemen of the court, we have two more witnesses to offer and then our testimony is complete. With the permission of the court, I should like to examine Ignazio Carrese.’

  ‘Permission granted.’

  The man who approached the witness stand was a short, stocky peasant nearing fifty, with gnarled hands and a shuffling gait and a dark, sun-tanned face, seamed and scored like the weathered rocks of his own countryside. When the oath was read, he mumbled an assent and stood, arms limp, shoulders humped, eyes downcast to the floor in front of him.

  Rienzi let him sweat a moment and then stood a pace away from him until the peasant lifted his head and faced him with frightened eyes.

  ‘Tell the court your name, please.’

  ‘Ignazio Carrese.’

  ‘What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a farmer in San Stefano.’

  ‘Do you own your own land?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you always owned it?’

  ‘No. I bought it after the war.’