Early One Morning by Virginia Baily

Author:Virginia Baily
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2015-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

She found Antonio in church, officiating at mass. It must be a holy day of obligation because the congregation was quite big. Assunta would know. When people started filing out, she went up the side aisle to the altar. He was snuffing out the high candles, and there was a strong scent of burning wax.

‘Chiara,’ he said, turning to her with a smile, holding the brass candle-extinguisher aloft, ‘what a nice surprise. Oh, but you’ve been in the wars. Poor thing, what happened?’

‘It’s not serious. It’s fine. I need to talk to you,’ she said, ‘about something else.’

‘I’m hearing confessions now,’ he said, nodding back down the church to where a few congregants were kneeling in the rows next to the confessional. ‘But I’ll be free in about an hour.’

‘I haven’t got an hour,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be at the station at two.’

‘Come into the confessional then,’ he said. ‘Don’t look so horrified. I just mean we could have a quiet and private little talk straight away. Walk with me so I can explain to the ladies who are waiting that you have special dispensation to jump the queue.’

There was someone already ensconced inside the confessional who wouldn’t be budged.

‘Ten minutes,’ Antonio whispered to Chiara. ‘As soon as this one leaves, just come on in.’

He still had the candle extinguisher in his hand. Propping it against the church wall, he ducked into his part of the confessional box, leaving Chiara standing in the aisle, staring at the carved door, where cherubs with fat little stomachs blew bugles among oaken leaves. She didn’t want to wait. She wanted to get this conversation over and done with.

She took a seat and allowed thoughts to come of that last time.

They had been in the office at the pontifical library. There was a penholder on the desk, a bird made of alabaster with a hole in its back where the pen rested, and one of its fluted wings was broken, snapped clean off. The curtains were drawn, and it was stuffy. She remembered the penholder and the curtains and a desk lamp and a sort of tray-cum-basket containing envelopes and paper and paperclips. Daniele was next to her, both of them facing Antonio. If she had known she would never see Daniele again, then she might have found the strength to turn and behold him, and she would have that picture of him in her head to keep. But she hadn’t.

In among the stationery in the basket-tray thing was the shorn-off wing, lying there, carefully kept, as if one day someone might glue it back on.

She did not have a clear memory of that meeting. What was said. How things were decided. At some point Daniele had left with Antonio to go and collect some of his things from the apartment, and then Antonio had returned on his own and given her back Daniele’s keys. Daniele had gone and wouldn’t be bothering her again, and she wasn’t to worry, she was just to look after herself now and get better.

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