“Because I want you to remember him as you knew him here,” she said.
“You have your picture of him, in this house.
He was your Ambrose then.
Let it stay like that.
The last months were mine, and I want no one to share them with me.
You, least of all.”
I did not want to share them with her.
I wanted her to close all those doors belonging to the past, one by one.
“You know what has happened?” she said, turning round from the window and looking at me.
“We did wrong when we opened those boxes in the room upstairs.
We should have let them stay there.
We were wrong to touch his things.
I felt it from the first moment, when I opened the trunk and saw his dressing gown and the slippers.
We have let something loose that was not with us before.
Some sort of bitter feeling.”
She had become very white. Her hands were clasped in front of her.
“I have not forgotten,” she said, “those letters that you threw into the fire, and burned.
I pushed the thought of them away, but today, since we opened up the trunks, it is just as though I had read them once again.”
I got up from my chair and stood with my back to the fire.
I did not know what to say to her as she paced up and down the room.
“He said, in his letter, that I watched him,” she went on.
“Of course I watched him, lest he should do himself some damage.
Rainaldi wanted me to have the nuns in from the convent to help me, but I would not; had I done that, Ambrose would have said they were keepers, brought in by me to spy upon him.
He trusted no one.
The doctors were good and patient men, but more often than not he refused to see them.
One by one, he asked me to dismiss the servants.
In the end, only Giuseppe remained.
He trusted him.
He said he had dog’s eyes…”
She broke off, and turned away.
I thought of the servant from the lodge by the villa gate, and his desire to spare me pain.
It was strange that Ambrose too had believed in those honest, faithful eyes.
And I had only looked upon the servant once.
“There is no need to talk of all that now,” I said to her: “it does no good to Ambrose, and it only tortures you. As to myself, what happened between you and him is no concern of mine.
That is all over and done with and forgotten.
The villa was not his home.
Nor, when you married Ambrose, was it yours either.
This is your home.”
She turned and looked at me.
“Sometimes,” she said slowly, “you are so like him that I become afraid.
I see your eyes, with that same expression, turned upon me; and it is as though, after all, he had not died, and everything that was endured must be endured once more.
I could not bear it again, not that suspicion, not that bitterness, going on and on, day after day, night after night.”
As she spoke, I had a clear picture of the villa Sangalletti.
I saw the little court, and the laburnum tree as it would be in spring, with yellow blossom. I saw the chair there, with Ambrose sitting in it and his stick beside him.
I felt the whole dark silence of the place.
I smelled the musty air, I watched the dripping fountain.
And for the first time the woman who looked down from the balcony above was not a figment of my imagination, but was Rachel.
She looked at Ambrose with the same pleading look, that look of suffering, of supplication. Suddenly I felt very old, and very wise, and full of a new strength I did not understand.
I held out my hands to her.
“Rachel. Come here,” I said.