Vita Nuova Read Online Free PDF Page B

singer, but then I was seriously ill. I was in hospital for over a year and I had to give it up.’
    ‘That’s a pity. Do you still sing, though?’
    She shrugged. ‘Sometimes. My voice is still good, but I wanted to be a first-class professional. I’m not interested in being a talented amateur.’
    ‘I can understand that.’ Would she now become the family drudge, helping in the office, bringing up her sister’s child, caring for her mother?
    ‘Your father is going to be all right, you know that?’ Something the prosecutor had checked on with the doctors before telling him the bad news. There was one advantage, then, in a case involving rich people. The prosecutor did some of the difficult jobs usually left to the marshal. ‘And you know that there’s a patrol car outside the gates, so you’ve no reason to be frightened. They’ll be inside the grounds at night.’
    ‘They weren’t there this morning when I took Piero.’
    ‘No, but they’re there now and they’ll stay. You may see some journalists out there, too. Just ignore them. They won’t be allowed to bother you. I imagine you’ll need to go out later to pick the little boy up.’
    ‘I collect him at four. I haven’t told him. He keeps asking me when she’s coming back, and I don’t know what to say to him.’
    Her face flushed red again, her eyes glittered.
    ‘Try to breathe quietly. . . . ’ Tears began to roll down her blotched cheeks, but she made no move to dry them, just continued to gaze at him. Having nothing else to offer her, he gave her his clean white handkerchief.
    ‘Thank you. He’s my responsibility now. I’ll have to tell him sometime.’
    ‘Yes, you’ll have to tell him. The main thing is that he has you. I do think, though, that you need to calm down yourself before you can explain that she’s not coming back. You can’t do it when you’re in this state. In the meantime, do you have any help here? Someone to watch the child if you have to be elsewhere? A housekeeper, a maid perhaps?’ There hardly seemed to be any point in mentioning her mother as a possible help.
    ‘There are two girls who work here. They don’t live in, but Daddy phoned me last night and told me one of them should stay here now. She slept in the main house last night, but now that—now she’s to sleep here in Daniela’s bedroom so that Piero can stay in his own room next door. I have to stay with Mummy.’
    ‘That sounds sensible, but you’ll have to wait for the prosecutor to give his permission for anyone to use the tower. It may not be for a while yet.’
    ‘Why, as I’m here now?’
    ‘Yes. But you’re not here alone. We needed your help to check that nothing was missing, and you’ve been very sensible, but now the doors will be sealed and you must all stay in the main house. Please don’t worry. It’s only until the investigation’s over.’ He was conscious of treating her as though she were a child or a delicate invalid, or perhaps, to be honest, more like a bomb that might explode in another paroxysm of hysterical tears. But she was drying her eyes and waiting quietly for his next question. A pigeon fluttered, trying to land on the windowsill, frustrated by finding the shutters pulled to. What had the technicians been checking there yesterday? Did they think the man had been secretly climbing up to the princess in the tower?
    ‘Did your sister feed the birds?’
    ‘No. I don’t know. Maybe she did. I never came up here. She always brought Piero down to the car, and when she wasn’t studying we spent the afternoons by the pool. Daddy was going to start teaching Piero to swim and now . . . and now. . . .’
    ‘He will teach him to swim. He will. You can’t believe it now, I know, but life will go on. It does for us all. It will be all right.’
    ‘No.’ She said it in a low voice with a dreadful, black certainty and he saw her body hunch, curling in on itself as if rigid with pain. ‘No, it won’t. It’ll never be all