do.’
‘I know. I can pity him a little because I saw what he’d done to himself as well as to us. But forgiveness is more than I can manage too. Besides…’
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.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘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
‘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.’
