Chapter 2

The flat above the workshop had two rooms and a window over the polishing line, and at night the whole place breathed stone dust until you could taste it in your teeth.

Silvia put Nino down at half past seven and he went under like a stone. Bianca fought it. Bianca lay in the dark with her eyes open and her hands on top of the blanket, arranging them, and when Silvia sat on the edge of the bed her daughter said, "You're angry at Marco."

"I'm angry at a lot of things."

"Marco pulled my arm."

"He did."

"He's not allowed."

"No," Silvia said. "He's not."

Bianca thought about this for a while. Down in the yard, someone rolled a slab rack and the iron wheels grated on the concrete, and Bianca did not flinch, because she had been born in this flat and had never slept anywhere that was quiet.

"How do you know him?" Silvia asked.

"Who?"

"The man on the steps."

"He's the fountain man," Bianca said, in the voice she used for facts that everybody already knew, like the sky or the priest. "He sits by the fountain when we come home from asilo. Nino gets the tin."

"What tin."

"The tobacco tin. You put a stone in and he closes it and it sounds like a bell." Bianca yawned hugely, insultingly, and turned her face into the pillow. "Nonno says -"

The word went into the small room and stayed there.

Silvia did not move. "What did you say?"

"Nothing."

"Bianca."

"I said he says hold my thumb," Bianca said, and closed her eyes and refused, with the enormous stubbornness of a five-year-old, to be alive any longer.

Silvia sat in the dark for a long time.

She kept the children's chalk in a coffee tin on the windowsill. Weeks ago they had begun drawing on the outside wall of the workshop, down at the bottom where the plaster was rough and the yard boys walked past it a hundred times a day - a fat sun, a cat with too many legs, and a man on a chair with a flat cap and a stick, drawn and redrawn in green and yellow until the plaster had gone shiny with it. On Sunday Silvia had taken a bucket out to scrub it off. She had got as far as filling the bucket. Then she had put the bucket down and gone back inside.

She went out with the torch now and stood in front of the wall and looked at the man in the flat cap, and at the small figure holding his hand.

A bakery slip was folded into the crack between the wall and the drainpipe, where the children kept things. Silvia fished it out. Tuesday, two loaves, one oil. Paid. The handwriting was thin and upright and slanted hard to the right at the end of the words, and every letter of it was deliberate, the way a woman writes who learned to write in a convent school and never stopped being graded on it.

Silvia knew that handwriting. She had signed her name under it once a month for nine years, on the wage sheets and the rent receipts and the receipts for the children's settlement money drawn in their names and held in trust.

She heard the gate and looked up. Nunzia Ferretti came across the yard in her good black coat with her rosary in her hand, unhurried, seventy-one years old, entirely in charge of the evening.

"The children asleep?"

"Nino is."

"Bianca never sleeps." Nunzia stopped and looked at the chalk drawing on the wall, at the man in the flat cap, for exactly one second too long. Then she said, "I'll put her down. You look like something the quarry spat out."

"Where's Marco."

"Gone to the station to talk to his friend." Nunzia's mouth did not move. "Which is where you should have let him go in the first place, instead of putting your hand on him in front of the whole feast like a woman with no people."

Silvia held up the bakery slip between two fingers.

Nunzia looked at it. Then she looked at Silvia, and something went out of her face - not guilt, something colder and more tired, like a lamp being switched off in a room that still needed light.

"Some men are already dead," she said. "Don't dig them up."

She went up the outside stairs with her rosary swinging, and the little brass key on the ring of it caught the yard light and flashed, and Silvia stood in the wet with the slip in her hand and understood two things at once.

The first was that her children had been walking to a stranger with an adult's permission, for two years, without her knowing.

The second was that she had just been told, in the plainest Italian she had ever heard, to leave it alone.