Read Online The Italian Romance by Joanne Carroll - Free Book Online Page A

shadows as leaves and boughs swam in its current, she did not want to let go of that hand. He seemed to know. He had carried her around in the crook of his arm when she was a tiny girl.
    â€˜When is it going to be over?’ she said to him.
    â€˜They will be here soon,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. My sister wrote to me about it.’
    â€˜Did she say when?’ Sonia asked, a child again. She had sat at the kitchen table many weeks ago and listened as Alphonso read out, awkwardly, the letter from New York. She knew its contents as much as he.
    â€˜Very soon,’ he said.
    Her brother’s voice sang out, ‘Are you going to stay there all day?’
    â€˜Coming, coming,’ she said, and she pulled away from the old man.
    The two boys and her brother mounted the steps. Alon couldn’t restrain himself from plucking a luscious dangle of wisteria,pulling at it till it gave and the stem snapped back. He barely looked at his prize, shook it once or twice and casually dropped it over the side to fall at Sonia’s feet.
    As she climbed behind them, she heard Alphonso’s unsteady tread on the pebbles lying scattered over the dry, dusty earth.
    Her father was just inside the doorway. He’d gripped Jacob’s elbow and was already in a concentrated passion, explaining his point with his other hand, fingers webbed. He saw her and said, ‘Ah, here she is,’ but he did not want to release Jacob. He hesitated between his two children for a moment. Then he said, ‘Come on, come on in, you two,’ and continued his conversation as he slowly walked her brother into the drawing room. The two boys had already disappeared.
    She caught sight of her reflection in the huge, gilded mirror on the wall. She was quite a beautiful woman, dark, the bones of her face setting her apart from many others. Anyone seeing her on any Italian street would consider that she’d a fine Roman nose, classic and refined equally. Her eyes were large and dark, almond-shaped. For a woman so blessed, she oddly lacked sensuality. It just brushed by her, somehow.
    She brushed at the collar of her linen jacket. She had never enjoyed the vanity of gazing at herself. When she heard Alphonso, the heaviness of his breathing, the click of his step, she looked away. She placed her handbag down on the ornate, high-backed chair sitting quietly against the wall, and walked into the drawing room.
    Her mother was playing the grand piano positioned exactly between the two large windows. Rachel was always there on the brocaded stool, white sheets of music propped in front of her, a thumb and finger plucking at the corner of a page to turn it without breaking her rhythm – unless a faithful acolyte stood ready by her shoulder or, to be precise, a step back from her so not to create a tension in the air around her. Always there, or so it seemed to her daughter when she considered it.
    She was playing a tune from an American movie. She could do that, easily enough, or Schubert or Chopin or even Liszt. It wasn’t true that Rachel lived her whole life at the piano, but she’d spent an inordinate amount of time there over the past year or so. She didn’t stop now, though she was speaking to her son as Sonia entered. She was saying, ‘You should have brought her, Jacob. She needs the fresh air. It’s getting so hot down there in town...’ and she closed her eyes and began to hum.
    â€˜Hello, darling!’ she said suddenly. ‘Are you all right, my lamb? Look at her, Papa, she’s so pale.’
    â€˜I’m fine, Mama,’ Sonia said.
    His gaze fell on his daughter from where he stood in a huddle with Jacob, and he said, ‘She looks all right to me.’
    Her mother raised her eyebrows. ‘Ah, well,’ she said, bemused at the world. She brought the Hollywood song to a crescendo and finished it off with a few downward chords.
    Her father, noting his wife’s temporary