I squeeze her hand. ‘Do you think . . . Are you sure it was him?’
‘I’m not mad, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Her voice is hard. ‘I’m not imagining things.’
‘I didn’t say you were.’ I feel a stab of guilt. ‘Come on, let’s go back to the bothy.’
‘Can we just . . . Can we wait here for a while? Until we know he’s gone. Until we’re sure?’
‘Of course.’ I sit next to her on the cold chapel floor, pulling open the bag of wood and tiles that Cesare and I had gathered from the ship. ‘We can start laying these tiles in a pattern on the floor. We’ve no cement, but we can see what they’ll look like.’
She takes the tiles gratefully from me. Gradually her hands stop shaking and her breathing steadies.
As she sets down a tile, she says, ‘Does Cesare . . . He doesn’t ever hurt you?’
‘No. Never.’
There is an awkward silence and I wait for her to ask something else.
We lay out the tiles in diagonal lines, creating an inverted arrow, which will draw people towards the altar and towards that picture of Mary holding Baby Jesus – the picture that looks so like Con’s face, so like my own.
As Con lays the last of the tiles, she says, ‘I won’t let Angus hurt me again.’ It’s the first time in an age that I’ve heard her say his name.
Nor I, I think, and I clench the tile in my hand so tightly that it leaves a thin red line of broken skin.
It must be three in the morning when we walk back at last to the bothy, the land filled with the strange blue glow of the midnight sun.
Con’s breathing is easier and she smiles at me in the pale light. Sometimes I have a painful glimpse of the person I’ve lost, of the sister who I feel I’ll never see again. I miss her so much – it’s like a knife twisting in my chest. And I have to remind myself that she’s recovering, still. I have to remind myself that most injuries heal, in the end.
Outside the door of the bothy, my foot brushes against something. I bend down and pick up what feels like a stone, except that it is warm.
I hold it up to the ghostly, cloud-strewn sky.
He must have gone straight to the forge, rather than walking back to the camp.
‘What is it?’ Con asks.
It is part of a bomb, or part of a foreign ship that was ripped away and washed up on this beach. It is the best gift I’ve ever received.
Cuore.
‘It’s a heart,’ I say.
August 1942Cesare
Late one afternoon, towards the end of August, Cesare puts the final touches to the painting of Maria over the altar. She is nearly perfect. In the end, he decides to have her eyes downcast – this makes it easier for him to shape Dot’s high cheekbones and the upward curve of her lips, without having to capture the hunger in her eyes when she looks at him.
As he paints, he remembers the feeling of her breath against his ear. The warmth of his name, exhaled into his mouth.
He imagines her working in the small hospital in Moena, if she wants to – hadn’t she always said she wanted to be a doctor? It would be possible, surely. He imagines her walking with him in the mountains, swimming alongside him in the lakes. He will show her the church, where he painted the beautiful ceiling. He imagines introducing her to his parents.
Dorotea. Mia moglie. My wife.
His mother will gasp and take her hands. He imagines Dorotea at the table he sat at when he was a boy; he imagines her eating strong cheeses and soft bread, which she will dip into olive oil. He imagines her laughing, and drinking his father’s red wine.
He refuses to let himself consider that Moena may be gone. The hospital, the church with its ceiling. The table he knows so well. His mother. His father. If he thinks of it, he feels sick and enraged. He doesn’t sleep or, if he does, his dreams are bloody, muddled and vengeful.
Footsteps behind him. Cesare turns, brush in hand, half expecting it to be Dorotea. This happens sometimes: he will be thinking of her, and then she will appear, as if she has felt his thoughts calling to her. Sometimes, they finish each other’s sentences; his English is improving all the time, and he has begun teaching her Italian.
But it is Angus MacLeod, now, standing behind Cesare in the chapel. He is sweating. Through the painted glass of the chapel window, coloured sunlight glints on his forehead, his nose, his unshaven cheeks. He licks his lips.
‘What is it?’ Cesare asks, his heart beating faster. He has only a paintbrush in his hand, and would be no match for MacLeod’s baton and muscle. No match for his gun. His eyes are red, as if he has been crying, but surely that can’t be right. Perhaps he has a fever. But then why come here, to the chapel? Through the whole process of building, MacLeod has kept away, having been warned and threatened by Major Bates.
‘If you are ill,’ says Cesare, ‘you must go to the infirmary.’
‘How did you do it?’ Angus says.
Cesare looks around at the chapel, at the intricate rood screen, at the images that fill him with reverence, as if he hasn’t created them himself, as if he decorated the entire chapel in a dream.
‘I have painted much before,’ he says. ‘In Italy –’
‘Not the bloody chapel, damn you!’ MacLeod snaps, his curses cutting through
