A Darkness Descending Read Online Free PDF Page B

to a time when he’d been idealistic, had believed in – something. Had he ever? ‘You think he’s in danger? You think there’s some kind of a conspiracy.’
    He couldn’t keep the dull scepticism out of his voice. It sounded wrong to him: it sounded false and melodramatic; it didn’t sound like Giuli. ‘But you don’t know who’s behind it. Is this you talking, Giuli? Or some kind of mass hysteria?’
    For a long moment they stared at each other and Sandro felt a shiver of foreboding, saw the breach ahead. Had he seen Giuli through so much only for some tinpot little bunch of green zealots to steal her from him?
    And then she spoke. ‘You don’t know what it was like,’ she said, her voice cracking, the fervour gone, and with a relief he dared not show Sandro knew he still had her.
    ‘To see him go down like that.’ Her eyes were wide at the memory. ‘Keel over, like he’d been shot, or poisoned. And I saw it coming, you know? Had like a – a premonition. It seemed like – like all those assassinations: we really thought that’s what it was. It means something, Sandro, I just don’t know what, yet.’ And he could see that she was holding her hands together tight so that he wouldn’t see that she was shaking.
    ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. We’ll see if we can get to the bottom of it, shall we? We’ll see what we can do.’
    And for now the insurance claim and the briefcase and even the second cup of coffee receded beyond hope of return.
    ‘We start with the college friend,’ he said. ‘The lawyer.’
    *
    In the café opposite the post office – where she had just dropped off a parcel – Luisa stood at the red marble bar and hoped it was going to be all right. The kind of involuntary thought she tried, actually, not to have: Luisa preferred to take the position that it would be all right. One doubter and fretter in the family – if you could call it a family – was enough. Slowly she stirred the coffee that sat in front of her on the bar, saw the barman glance over.
    And what exactly did she hope was going to be all right? Well, a number of things, that was the trouble. One problem at a time, then. Fine.
    Sandro would forget that it was her annual check-up next week, she was pretty sure of that.
    It didn’t worry her. It wasn’t the check-up, it hadn’t even been the breast cancer itself, when it came, that frightened her, only what came with it. The look on other people’s faces was what it boiled down to. Even three years later there was still the ghost of that look. Furtive, guilty, evasive.
    If truth be told, Luisa rather hoped Sandro had forgotten about the check-up, because she’d prefer to slip off there on her own without having to look into his anxious face in the waiting room. She remembered last time. His expression when she came out of the cubicle in the backless gown, as if she was already in her shroud: after that she hadn’t let him in for the mammogram for fear he’d faint dead away. It didn’t count as an invasive procedure but it sure enough felt like one, and looked like one, being cranked and squeezed and manhandled into a machine.
    ‘Signora?’ The barman was peering into Luisa’s face with concern: she must have been grimacing. Did he know? She couldn’t remember if he knew about her missing breast, this young man who served her coffee a few times a week. He probably did. Sometimes it seemed to Luisa that everyone in Florence knew, and it irritated her. She raised the coffee hastily to her lips. It had gone quite cold, but it was still good. She gave the barman an imperious look.
    Dairy products were bad for you: so was coffee, so was wine. Luisa had never smoked, although both of her parents had; she must have absorbed more nicotine than a fly-paper as a kid. She had pored over the risk factors and causes, and had emerged none the wiser. It had made Sandro angry to see her frowning, and refusing a glass of wine: ‘What’s the point?’ he’d say.