Free A Darkness Descending by Christobel Kent Page A

him. ‘Six weeks,’ he said obediently.
    ‘Six weeks.’ Her face was calm, immobile. ‘That’s a dangerous time.’ He looked at her. ‘Isn’t it supposed to be? A difficult time for a woman, they can behave uncharacteristically. Become violent, all sorts of things. For those first weeks after a baby’s born.’
    Sandro hardly dared speak: after their daughter had been born, with a syndrome that had meant she lived a bare thirty-six hours, Luisa had descended into a state of bleak, impenetrable withdrawal from which he had feared she would never emerge. For some time he had thought that his vivid, energetic, sharp-tongued wife might sit with dull eyes at the kitchen table for the rest of their life together. He still marvelled at her recovery, one spring morning, when she’d got out of bed, put on lipstick and gone back in to work.
    Calmly, she went on. ‘Post-partum psychosis, isn’t that what they call it? You should get Giuli to talk to the woman’s midwife, the people at the Centre.’
    ‘I don’t know if she was treated at the Centre,’ he mumbled. ‘I’d have to find out.’
    Luisa nodded, apparently still serene. Could it be that she no longer connected that phrase – post-partum – with herself? She spoke.
    ‘Giusy – in the shop. She knew he had a baby, a wife. She was at school with Rosselli. Can you imagine that?’
    ‘They were never married,’ said Sandro. ‘Rosselli’s mother seemed to think that was significant.’
    ‘More significant than the child? They’d been together how long?’ He was surprised by her calmness, her tolerance; for some reason he had thought Luisa approved of the institution of marriage as much as Maria Rosselli seemed to. But then he was regularly prepared to believe that he could assume nothing at all about his wife of thirty-odd years.
    She smiled at him. ‘If you ask me, I don’t think Maria Rosselli ever wanted them to get married. No one could be good enough for her Niccolò.’
    ‘It sounds like they’ve been together more than twenty years,’ said Sandro. ‘That must have been tough.’ Remembering the curl of Maria Rosselli’s lip, as though twenty years might still count as an aberration. As though she’d spent all that time waiting for her son to extricate himself from an unsuitable relationship.
    ‘Yes,’ said Luisa.
    The coffee was set down in front of her just as the untidy rabble of demonstrators came alongside the restaurant terrace, chanting cheerfully now. Most of the diners smiled back: it was all very amicable. Sandro tried to see what it said on the posters: LEAVE SCANDIGCI ALONE. NO TO MORE ROADS. Hardly contentious stuff. The banners had the crude insignia of the Frazione Verde pasted to their corners, a green lightning bolt across a representation of the Duomo’s cupola. He smiled to himself: the protesters all looked so young, so disorganized, they could hardly even chant in time. Had they just assembled themselves, in the absence of Niccolò Rosselli, their figurehead? How long ago had this little march been organized? He wanted to take one or two of them by the elbow and ask about the Frazione, what it meant to them. But it wasn’t part of the case: the case, now, was finding Rosselli’s wife, and never mind his political activity.
    ‘She’s obviously taking charge,’ said Luisa. ‘The mother. She’s the one who’s paying? For you to track the wife down.’
    Sandro shifted anxiously. ‘We need to talk about it,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know – she hasn’t even talked to her son about it yet. She seemed just to decide, on the spur of the moment.’
    Out of spite: he’d seen the look Maria Rosselli gave Carlo Bastone as she made the announcement. ‘Get her back,’ she’d said, drawing herself up under the high, dark, coffered ceiling of the lawyer’s office, looking down at them as though they were all pygmies. Focusing on Sandro. ‘Find her and bring her back to face the music. I won’t have her treat