Free The Italian Romance by Joanne Carroll Page B

say.’ He looked at Jacob as he spoke. Jacob listened, waited, and finally bowed his head.
    Sonia tugged delicately at the neck of her blouse; she felt there wasn’t enough air in the stuffy drawing room. ‘I’ll just see where ... Maria’s got to,’ she said.
    Her mother stilled, glanced up at her. Sonia caught her eye as she turned to leave the room, and walked away quickly. As she closed the door behind her, she heard her father’s voice raised in some pleasant distraction now, some amusing story to soften Jacob’s surrender.
    The large mirror in the hallway captured a perfect still-life: the afternoon sun drew silent shadows of the rosewood bureau on the papered wall, and yet glossed light reflected in the buffed bulging of its rounded edges; a vase of Lady-fern was etched in tender green, more tender, more mysteriously green in its mirrored self than in its own duller nature. As Sonia leaned over the high-backed chair to pick up her handbag, the fall of her hair caught the light too and glowed in the mirror, but she did not see it.
    She sat down, slowly, opened the clasp again. She’d been waiting for months for the letter. Every day she’d listened for the slow, rhythmic wheeling of the postman’s bicycle, held her breath as Alphonso’s voice drifted up from the back door. And this morning she’d come running down the stairs, had tried to slow whenshe’d noticed Berta through the half-opened doorway of the sitting room; the other woman glanced up from her work, the bottle of furniture polish grasped in her hand, the tang of oil and lavender around her. Berta, too, had spotted the young Rinelli lad a minute or so before, his head bobbing above the green hedge. She heard the Signora’s high-heels clatter onto the stone floor of the kitchen, and she shook her head. She rubbed at a smear on the glass-like surface of the side table.
    Sonia had stood motionless then; a pot of water simmered on the range, waiting for pasta. She saw them framed outside in the bright light of the kitchen garden. The boy’s bicycle rested against the yellowed wall. She did not want to intrude too soon on Alphonso’s enquiries, the important snippets of news, the goings-on. The postman was as good as the wireless these days. Better, even.
    Alphonso had turned. He made the doorway dark. As he came towards her the Rinelli boy peeked in, smiling, eager. Her heart thumped very hard.
    â€˜A letter,’ Alphonso had said. The smell of his sweat became hugely strong as he approached. She held out her hand. He hadn’t shaved that day, or for a few days perhaps, and his stubble was grey. His blade, mysteriously, was missing.
    He’d slid the envelope between her thumb and fingers. He said again, ‘A letter.’
    And now, as Sonia sat facing the huge, gilded mirror, holding the letter in her right hand which was shaking, strangely, and her eyes fell again on the elegance of his script, the brevity of the note, the perfect politeness of it, and on the ink-smudged word where one of her tears must have dropped as she’d first read it, some awful truth that she had not wanted to hear whispered from deep inside herself, water against stone. It rose like a wave. He was not hers. She was not his, no matter what she did, nor what passions she endured for his sake.

I thought I’d be late for the bushman and I caught a taxi to make up the time. Here I am now, five minutes early. I’m glad the young fellow showed me to a table near the pond. The tortoises move so slowly that I’m beginning to breathe calmly myself. I smooth my fingers across the almost imperceptible damask pattern of the white tablecloth. The black tortoise, repugnant little head, has been struggling to get up on that stone since I arrived. His pathetic neck bobs this way, that way. Now his mistress, a fast mover by comparison, has climbed on his back and he loses his tentative grip. He slides back.