There were two cups on the tray.
He shook his head. ‘Who knows? Today has not gone well.’ His face said he felt sad for her. He waited.
‘Would you like a cup then?’ she asked.
Her loneliness filled the room.
Quinto Navarra was used to standing in for his boss and it seemed to happen more and more often. He smiled at her, poured himself a cup of tea and sat on the long sofa opposite la signora. Tea. He hated tea but they both affected to like it and he was never offered coffee these days. Ever since the gastric ulcer, coffee had disappeared from the menu of Il Duce. Like so much else, the days of extra strong espresso were long past. The March on Rome had been fuelled by coffee as black as pitch. Now the Regime ran on camomile, he thought glumly. Quinto had habituated himself to it. It was the least of the things he had learned to get used to.
In twenty years, his boss had never once asked his opinion on politics but he sought it on everything else. The only other person as close to Il Duce was Clara. Until she came into his life, Mussolini had been a lonely man. He had never had a friend that Quinto knew of. He regarded the woman seated before him, thinking that nowadays being Mussolini’s lover was not all that much fun. She was very pale today. Getting very thin. So was the boss. This stupid dieting of his was killing them both. He had always been a picky eater but it was becoming obsessional. With every month, the boss’s dietary restrictions got harder and harder to understand. He must have lost twenty kilos. Every week he had a new complaint but if you said anything, you got your head bitten off. If anyone else mentioned the health of Il Duce, it was almost regarded as treason.
‘Tell me who he has seen today,’ said Clara.
She could not, he knew, abide silence. She was always on the lookout for information, about the people around Ben and especially about her competitors. Quinto leaned back in his chair and recounted the morning’s discussion about the progress of the secret shelter being built for the Duce, deep beneath Palazzo Venezia. Then he related the amusing story of a visitor who had been thrown out for wearing a beard – could there be anyone left in the country who did not know of the Duce’s aversion to beards? He moved on to the details of the gruelling meeting with the Foreign Minister; the Duce’s son-in-law, Count Ciano, had left the meeting an unhappy man. Ciano had lost faith in the war and was urging the Duce to find a way to bring it to a conclusion. He argued ever more openly with the Duce’s policies and was ever more critical of the Germans. The Count was becoming careless, thought Quinto. Nevertheless, the Duce had noted with satisfaction that Ciano’s diaries were being kept up to date. The diaries were their insurance against carrying the blame for Hitler’s excesses, though it was important the Germans never saw them, as Count Ciano was well known to be no great friend of theirs. The Red Cross notebooks, filled with Ciano’s cramped script, lived in a small safe in the Count’s office.
Quinto knew, however, that Clara wanted to know about the others – the women. Her jealousy was legendary – the shouting and weeping and scenes of recrimination regularly leaked out beneath the heavy doors and washed over Quinto and the rest of the entourage. Il Duce’s habit of fathering children by his mistresses meant many of them remained in his life. The list was a long one. Angela Curti Cucciati – the mother of his favourite daughter, Elena – was a permanent thorn in Clara’s side, and Quinto was relieved to be able to say with impunity that she had not visited today. In fact there had been no female visitors, no ‘fascist visitors’, recorded in the usual slot in the log of Palazzo Venezia today.
There had certainly been the full complement of fervid letters from crazed female admirers. Some of them were quite disgusting, but the boss loved it all and always read their letters aloud to his staff and to Clara. He fucked more than the odd one or two as well. Said it was good for his health. Sometimes as many as four in a day and he even boasted to her about it. La Signora Clara seemed to take it as his due. Quinto shook his head. Doesn’t seem natural to me, he thought.
The camomile finished, he rose. ‘I will take this away and bring a fresh one when he comes.’
She had not touched the delicate biscotti.
Clara glanced at the cards and could not be bothered with Patience. Her nails – she could paint her nails, but then, Ben might come early and they would not be dry. She rummaged in the bottom of her bag for her cloisonné pillbox and extracted one small pill. Just one would not hurt. Well, perhaps two. She threw her head back, swallowed the pills without water and stood an instant, as if awaiting their effect. Gently she lifted the gramophone needle onto her favourite recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes, fished out her stitching and stretched on the sofa in the cavernous centre of the room, beneath the lapis and gold of the Zodiac. Her gilded cage.
Another long evening yawned in her face. She yawned back, tossed aside the stitching, took out her diary and flicked back through the pages of cramped handwriting. We passed like two gods over the clouds. Ben’s words to her after one of Hitler’s visits. She uncapped her pen. Writing their life had become her great consolation. She had written constantly to Ben since their first meeting, letters mostly, which she kept meticulously, along with his to her. The diaries she began in earnest the year after their love affair started, recording everything: every telephone call, every conversation. God knows she had enough time for it and for reflecting upon Ben and his mysteries. Sometimes she thought her life was actually lived more between the pages of her diaries than in reality.
By the time the sentries in the corridor stamped to attention for Ben’s arrival, the shadows had lengthened to become the dark. Clara jumped to attention herself, turned on the lamps and rushed to recline casually upon the sofa in what she hoped was an enticing pose, her skirt draped a little high. One look at his face told her she might as well not bother. Quinto Navarra followed him with a fresh tray of tea, which he placed on the table with the small dish of Ben’s medicines, then withdrawing without a word.
‘Would you bring some fruit as well?’ Clara asked as he neared the door.
‘I don’t want fruit. I’m not hungry.’ Ben did not sit but strode to the darkened windows where he planted himself, hands on hips, feet apart.
His jowls quivered, his neck now too scrawny for his collar. Why hadn’t Rachele ordered him new collars? It was the least she could do.
She suppressed a sigh. She could feel her shoulders going up. Don’t start, my love, she thought. Do not start. Tonight I cannot take it.
But she smiled and said, ‘Come and sit with me, amore. Has it been hard today?’
Time, Clara had learned, was a mutable thing. Some days it whirled and swirled and curled and left her dizzy. Other days it stalled and crawled. ‘Time is not linear’, Ben once said, in his schoolteacher voice. She was not sure what he meant but she certainly knew that time was heavy, that it weighed upon her and often pressed inexorably on her chest. Today it was suffocating her.
‘I am not feeling well at all.’ He paced and postured. ‘My head aches and my bowels are playing up again. I did not sleep at all last night.’
Nonsense, Clara thought, though her face did not say so. Ben affected to sleep little and his loyal subjects believed him to be always alert and working on their behalf, but she knew her Lion slept like a cub and could sleep through a war. In fact, he often slept through this one. I’m the one who doesn’t sleep for worry, she sniffed silently. Most afternoons while Ben slept on the sofa, she sat awake beside him, watching his face in repose, covering page after page of the heavy blue notepaper she used for her letters, notes and diaries. Navarra knew to awaken him only in the most extreme circumstances.
‘My son-in-law has been at it again. And I’ve been locked up with Achille for most of the afternoon,’ Ben continued. ‘He has some thoughts on a new national holiday. It might have merit.’
Achille Starace. She hated him. The feeling was mutual. ‘I’ll