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Italy. Even thin and buzzing along the telephone wire his voice had sounded tense and beleaguered, and almost fearful. She’d heard it in the clipped way he spoke, and straight away she’d felt the familiar dread sinking into the pit of her stomach, solid as wet sand. They’ve been married for ten years, and she is minutely attuned to the least sign of distress in him. She knows well enough what can come of it. It’s there now, of course – she saw it the first moment she set eyes on him, as he waved from the car. But sometimes it comes to nothing. She doesn’t want to acknowledge it too soon and risk it coalescing when it might not necessarily.
    Born shy, the only child of parents who never raised their voices, never argued or ever spoke of their feelings, Clare longs for peaceful accord more than anything else; nothing jarring or unexpected, no awkwardness. Over the years, Boyd’s episodes have honed her fear of confrontation to a point of excruciating finesse. For days, weeks, sometimes even months, he is transformed; silent and precarious, unreadable. He drinks brandy at any hour, he doesn’t work, he doesn’t go out, he barely eats. His silence thickens like a black cloud around him, which Clare is too scared to penetrate. She walks on eggshells around him, dogged by her own inadequacy, her inability to bring him out of it. Sometimes, during such spells, the sight of her makes him collapse into violent sobbing. Sometimes days pass and he doesn’t seem to see her at all, and she remembers what happened when she persuaded him to go to New York, years before, and what might have happened, had she not prevented it. Then she can’t sleep or eat herself. She’s a prisoner to his mood, too frightened to make a sound. The relief when it’s over, when Boyd finally rises from his chair and sinks himself into a hot bath, and asks for a cup of tea, is so immense she has to sit until her breathing slows.
    Boyd watches her as she hangs her skirts and dresses in the giant wardrobe that looms along the far wall of the room. He sits on the edge of the bed with one long leg crossed over the other, his hands laced over the uppermost knee.
    ‘I’m sure we could find a servant to do that for you – Cardetta seems to have hundreds of them,’ he says. Clare smiles over her shoulder at him.
    ‘I can manage well enough without a ladies’ maid,’ she says. ‘He must be very rich, then?’
    ‘I should say so. This is one of the oldest and biggest houses in Gioia – well, of those that he could get his hands on, anyway.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Cardetta wasn’t always rich – and he was away in America for twenty years. I get the impression that the signori here – the upper crust – treat him as a bit of a Johnny-come-lately.’
    ‘Well, I suppose that’s understandable,’ she says. ‘Especially if he was away for so long. How did he make his money?’
    ‘In New York.’
    ‘Yes, but—’
    ‘Do stop that and come here,’ he says, with mock severity. Clare looks at the crumpled silk shirt in her hands, and the way the pale yellow of it perfectly mirrors the light-filled sky outside. She wishes she wouldn’t hesitate but she can’t seem to help it. But then she smiles and does as he says, sitting gingerly in his lap. He wraps his arms around her waist and buries his face in her chest, and somehow it’s not sexual, but as though he wants to hide. ‘Clare,’ he breathes out her name, and she feels the heat of his breath on her skin.
    ‘Is everything all right, darling?’ she says, trying to sound bright, trying for offhand.
    ‘It is now that you’re here.’ He tightens his grip until Clare can feel his watch digging into her ribs. ‘I love you so much, my dearest Clare.’
    ‘And I love you,’ she says, and just then notices how very dry her lips feel. Dry and miserly. She shuts her eyes for a moment and wishes that he would stop there, say nothing more. She wishes that his grip would loosen. But he doesn’t