The House at the Edge of Night by Catherine Banner

Author:Catherine Banner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-12T07:00:00+00:00

“Someday years from now, when I’m dead…” murmured Carmela.

“I won’t tell.”

Carmela took her wrist again, with a cool pressure. “You’ve a kind face, cara,” she said. “It’s a relief to me to tell someone, after all these years shut up in those empty rooms, speaking to no one. And you’ve given me hope, for I see that you could find it in you to love him, cara. Tell me the truth. You could.”

“Sì,” admitted Maria-Grazia. “I could.”

Carmela gripped both her hands. It was a smooth grip, uncalloused as a child’s, the kind of grip achieved only through a lifetime spent in white gloves. Then she was gone, so that Maria-Grazia, light-headed, watching her recede across the piazza, believed for a moment that she had only dreamed the encounter. The piazza was calm again. The palm tree’s shadow moved listlessly across the tiles of the veranda, marking time like a sundial’s needle. The lizards crept out from the cracks in the houses to seek the day’s sun.

But Maria-Grazia found herself raging in a whisper as she went about the early morning business of igniting the coffee machine, rolling the blinds up, arranging the chairs. What claim did this Carmela have on her? Was she, Maria-Grazia, to become the repository of everybody’s secrets? What was it they wanted from her, they with their shames furled within them, their guilty eyes, piling upon her these troubles that had occurred before she was born?

And yet the thought of Andrea sleepless, tormented, pained her as the fear for Robert once had. Did this mean love, or only pity? She could not love Andrea the way she had loved Robert. She knew that to be the truth; she had used up all her capacity for that kind of adoration. And yet Robert was gone and Andrea was here, and was sick with love for her. No one else had ever paid her that honor. For Totò and for the widower Dacosta she had been merely a potential wife, replaceable. Perhaps Robert had long since replaced her, too, with some English girl, some sweetheart from before the war. Not Andrea d’Isantu.

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