The Perfect Couple Read online

  Sarah looked up at me just as my gaze fell on the slipped bra strap resting on Sofia’s bare shoulder, glistening in the sun as if beckoning. Sarah cast her eyes back down again, regaining her steely focus.

  Even though my wife was no longer turned in my direction, it felt as though she was watching me. That was the problem with working alongside her. I could never let my guard down. It the only downside to what was, otherwise, a faultless working partnership.

  While my team packed up their tools, I realised that I’d barely said a word to Sarah all day, despite the fact that we worked within a twenty-metre radius. She was the trench supervisor, the level below me on the site hierarchy. She was quietly authoritative without being overbearing and although she was an exceptionally hard worker, she always made time for everyone, which is perhaps why the team all seemed to admire her.

  Sarah continued to plunge her handpick into the soil, seemingly unperturbed by the heat. ‘You’re staying?’ I asked.

  She wiped a strand of hair from her damp forehead, locking her eyes on me. ‘I’m not ready to pack up.’

  She said it in that tone of old, as if she were trying to prove that her resolve was stronger than mine. But the beads of sweat around her neck and above her lip told me otherwise.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I said. I was long past defending my work ethic. ‘I’m off to swim at Le Pavoniere pool. If you change your mind, that’s where you’ll find me.’

  In what felt like another lifetime, we could barely keep our hands off each other. We would sneak kisses on excavation sites when the others looked away. We would exchange glances across a full lecture hall and escape early to each other’s rooms. I remember running my hands over the pale skin of her body, her white flesh, unblemished, untouched by anyone else’s hands, or so I told myself. I felt like her guardian and protector, her body an offering meant only for me. I would make a mental map as I felt her breasts, her torso, her thighs. I couldn’t get enough of her.

  She used to coil her body around mine and tell me she didn’t want to picture her life before us. It was the only history, she had said, that wasn’t worth revisiting. We were so in love that I never contemplated that my desire for her could fade.

  ‘Enjoy the swim,’ she said.

  I pecked her on the cheek. Perfunctory. She smiled faintly and looked back down, picking up her brush to dust away the dry sand.

  I turned back as I reached the scaffolding surrounding the excavation site and watched her, the lone archaeologist left on the vast grounds. How small she looked. How focused and deep in thought. Even after more than twenty-two years, two children and two decades of travelling and working together, there was so still much about my wife I didn’t know. Maybe that’s why I had fallen for her all those years ago … because her mind was a mystery to me; like an ancient codex I couldn’t decipher.

  Le Pavoniere was an outdoor pool set in the largest park of the city, Parco delle Cascine, which ran along the Arno River. I went there often to cool off but avoided it on the weekends when it was overrun with children.

  There was barely a breath of wind. The pool was packed, which was unsurprising given the heat and the few places there were to swim in the city.

  The sun lounges were all taken, so I put my towel down and took off my sweat-soaked shirt and trousers, and changed into swimming trunks. I always did laps of the pool for cardio along with running a few times a week with my sixteen-year-old daughter, so I was fit for my age. I took pride in my appearance and made sure that every morning I did a thirty-minute abdominal workout, which kept my stomach firm and toned, although, admittedly not like the carved six-pack I had in my youth.

  I dove into the pool. The water rushed over me like an embrace. My mind was so occupied with thoughts of the necklace that when I looked up to the surface of the water, the refracting light made it appear as though it were sprinkled with diamonds. When I came up for air, I turned onto my back and floated with my eyes closed, imagining what it would feel like to see and hold the San Gennaro necklace in my hands – the fire and sparkle of each diamond, the brilliant blues of the sapphires, the vivid emeralds. I thought of the fame that would come to me if I ever found it. The most valuable piece of religious jewellery in the world. The greatest archaeological discovery of the century. And how my name would be emblazoned in history.

  I wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted in my life. And I knew I would stop at nothing to get it.

  SARAH

  It would have been impossible to picture the nomadic life I have now back when I was growing up in the quiet country town of Berry in Australia. I lived with my parents as an only child in the same house on the same street and went to the same school right through to graduation. Berry is a two-hour drive south of Sydney and it’s beautiful, offering the best of country living while also being a short drive to the coast. In winter, the trees turned gold and amber and I’d wake up to a blanket of thick white fog covering the mountaintops and the scent of woodsmoke. In summer, we’d spend our days at Seven Mile Beach National Park, dipping in the cool waters of the ocean.

  My parents owned a bookshop for as long as I could remember and were a fixture in the town. Unlike me, they were never hungry to see the world. In fact, my mum and dad had never left the country. Their form of travel was through the stories told in the books on their shelves.

  Their lack of desire to so much as venture a town away from home used to frustrate me. It’s only now as an adult that I can understand and appreciate their humble existence. How many people can say they are content with their lot in life and don’t yearn for anything more?

  I knew early on that I didn’t want that life. I didn’t want to have dinner in front of the television every night, or gossip about the local ladies, or know every one of my neighbours by name. I didn’t want to go to the only university near home and marry the boy I dated at school and go on to have kids who would live in the same house until they married. I wanted more.

  So, I saved all the money I had from babysitting jobs and working in my parents’ bookshop and bought a beat-up Volvo with scratched yellow paint and torn leather seats.

  The day after I got my driver’s licence, at eighteen, I packed my bags and drove as far away from home as I could until I ran out of money for petrol. Of course, I was riddled with guilt. I never said goodbye to my parents. I couldn’t face them. So like a coward I called them from a payphone and told them I wasn’t coming back until I’d seen the world.

  That was twenty-six years ago. And now I’m sitting at the dining table in our apartment in Florence, in the residential area of San Domenico, just ten kilometres from the historic centre. Marco and I have lived here with our children, Daniel and Emily, for close to two years now, in one of the three apartments in what once was an eighteenth-century Tuscan manor house. From our balcony we have a serene view of the hillside and the garden below, which is surrounded by rows of olive trees.

  My laptop is open, my work papers, notebooks and maps are spread out; a jar of pencils has fallen onto its side. In the corners of the room are boxes carefully labelled, storing the different geographic chapters of our lives. We rarely unpack more than our clothes each time we move to a different city for our work because we never know how long we’ll stay in each location.

  ‘Daniel, can you lower the volume of your music?’ I yell down the hallway to my twenty-year-old son’s bedroom, from which the beat of drums is making my ears feel like they are bleeding. I don’t know if I expected a reply, but of course I don’t get one. There is no way he could hear me through all that noise. Frustrated, I get up and knock on his door. He doesn’t answer. Being this close to the music source makes me feel like I’m in a nightclub – it is certainly not a serene home environment conducive to getting work done. I knock impatiently now, heat rising in my cheeks.

  Finally Daniel opens his door a fraction, enough for me to glimpse inside and see that his clothes are strewn across the floor and empty plates are piled on his desk. His p
rized acoustic guitar is at the foot of his bed, surrounded by crumpled pieces of paper.

  ‘What’s up?’ Daniel says as if he can’t think of a possible reason for this interruption.

  My son is studying a combined science and arts degree but you wouldn’t know it from the state of his room. His shelves are filled with vinyl records and his walls display posters of his music heroes. The drum kit I bought him when he was fourteen sits proudly by the window. Daniel has loved music since he was a toddler, but Marco has always made it very clear that creative pursuits are not viable careers so he steered our son onto an academic path instead.

  I gesture to his computer, where a backing track continues to play at an excruciatingly loud volume. ‘Your music,’ I say, trying to keep my voice even, ‘is deafening me. Do you think you could do this when I’m not at home?’

  ‘That would be no fun then, would it?’ he grins, cheekily. My son has a way of diffusing my moods. He is always frustratingly laid-back. He never took school seriously despite being one of the smartest in his class, so I’m relieved that he seems to be enjoying his university degree, which he selected when we decided to relocate here. Our children have travelled with us to various European cities for our work and regularly to Australia to visit my family. They’re accustomed to changing schools, homes, cities. In fact, it’s all they know.

  Daniel flicks back his brown hair, which is so long that it almost reaches his shoulders. He wears it messily, with loose strands often falling over his face. He has Marco’s dark colouring and brooding good looks but I still have no idea where my son gets his musical ability. As far as I know, everyone on my side of the family is tone-deaf, so I can only assume it comes from my husband’s side. Despite having been married to Marco for over twenty years, his family is still a mystery to me. All I know is that his father was an abusive alcoholic and that his mother abandoned him. He won’t discuss anything more than that no matter how sensitively I probe. In our early days I used to encourage him to confide in me about his childhood, but now I’ve come to grudgingly accept that there are some things about my husband that I will never know.

  ‘I’ll put headphones on,’ Daniel says to placate me. ‘But you should listen to music sometimes, Mamma, it’s good for the soul.’ Both Emily and Daniel slip between calling me Mum, which they picked up from our visits to Australia, and Mamma in Italian. Daniel moves to close the door again but I put my foot out to halt him.

  ‘So, what are you doing, anyway?’ I ask, hoping to get a glimpse into his world.

  ‘Il dolce far niente,’ he replies in Italian with a grin. My grasp of Italian isn’t perfect but I manage to translate it roughly to the sweetness of doing nothing. My children are both bilingual, speaking English as their first language and also fluent Italian thanks to their father. They can even speak some French and Spanish, an advantage of our nomadic lifestyle.

  ‘I didn’t know “nothing” was so noisy,’ I say sarcastically. ‘What I meant was, is it for an assignment for your elective music subject? Is it something you wrote?’

  He gazes at his guitar when he answers. ‘Yes. It’s for an assignment.’

  ‘I’d love it if you would play me something,’ I say, almost pleading.

  ‘Another time.’ And with that, he smiles and closes the door. I can only assume that Daniel is shying away because of Marco’s continual dismissal of his music interest, and I resolve to do the opposite.

  Now that quiet has been restored, I return to the dining table, my makeshift office, determined to make some progress – especially now that I can hear myself think.

  When Marco began his examination of the letters and the replica San Gennaro jewellery box ten years ago, we made the decision that I would set aside my own research interests and assist him. At the time I didn’t envision that it would end up dominating a decade of my career but still, as his wife and with young children to care for, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make.

  Given that the San Gennaro treasure is considered to be more valuable than the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom, Marco’s theory that the necklace wasn’t lost at sea drew uncanny attention, not just from archaeologists and historians but from the general public. He quickly became known as the pre-eminent expert on the subject. He was already in the public eye, having done scores of televised and radio interviews. He hosted an eight-part documentary series on Italy’s megastructures and underground cities, and has appeared on shows that aired on the History Channel, National Geographic, the BBC, CNN, Sky Italia and the Travel Channel. With his good looks and charisma he has become something of the George Clooney of the archaeological world; indeed, I once read an article in which a journalist stated that ‘Marco Moretti makes archaeology sexy’.

  So, when Marco released his paper and applied to excavate beneath the courtyard of the castle, he was given the approval and the necessary funding with relative ease.

  Over the years I have come to know the necklace as well as my husband does. Each donation to the necklace by various dynasties tells the story of the constant devotion to the saint over the centuries. Among the documented pieces of jewellery added to the necklace is a three-piece clasp with diamonds and emeralds, a monstrance in gold and silver with precious stones, a cross donated by Charles de Bourbon in 1734, another cross offered by Maria Amalia of Saxony and a further cross with diamonds and sapphires dated 1775, bestowed by Maria Carolina of Austria, a crescent-shaped brooch given by the Duchess of Casacalenga, another brooch with diamonds and chrysolite, and a regal ring.

  The necklace was just one of a collection of treasures made as a tribute to Saint Januarius, who was believed to be martyred at the turn of the fourth century. After his beheading for professing the Christian faith, legend has it that a devout woman collected his blood in two vials. The people of Naples hold a ritual three times a year, during which his congealed blood ‘miraculously’ liquefies. If it doesn’t liquefy, it is believed to be a portent of bad things to come. The last occasions on which the miracle failed were followed by disasters such as the Nazi invasion of Italy, a cholera epidemic and a deadly earthquake.

  As I settle in front of my laptop, I have an uneasy feeling when I read an article that has just been published that states that the recent ‘blood miracle of San Gennaro’ has failed. Though I’m usually not one for superstition, I can only hope that it doesn’t have any negative repercussions on our work.

  I’m relieved to be distracted by the sound of my daughter, Emily, giggling as she unlocks the front door, fresh from a run. Her ear is pressed to her mobile phone and she barely looks up at me as she mouths ‘hello’ before walking to the kitchen to pour a glass of water. I lean back to see her twirling strands of her strawberry-blonde hair as she chats animatedly in Italian. She speaks in Italian to her friends and English at home. She sees me gazing in her direction and lowers her voice so I can’t hear what she’s saying, but every few minutes I catch her gossipy sixteen-year-old schoolgirl tone and I just know she’s discussing her latest crush.

  Our nomadic life has suited Emily’s social nature. She’s outgoing and bubbly, makes friends easily and is incredibly athletic. You could put her in a room full of strangers and she’d have them eating out of her hand in no time. I, on the other hand, prefer to make myself wallpaper and observe from a distance. Maybe it’s that trait of mine that has made me feel out of place on the arm of my charismatic husband.

  I still feel other women’s eyes on me at events and the sting of jealousy in their false, tight-lipped smiles. He’s charming, intelligent and exceptionally handsome. It’s not that I’m insecure about my appearance; I’m aware that men have always found me attractive, being tall and slender, with unusual and striking features – flowing red hair, pale green eyes and sharply defined cheekbones. It’s that I know Marco could have had any woman he wanted and yet, he chose me. I remind myself of that in moments of doubt, like right now, as I wonder where he is for another night as the late-setting Tuscan sun begins to disappear behind the
terracotta rooftops, making the sky look as if it were sprinkled with gold dust. I assume he won’t be home for dinner again.

  So, I pour myself a glass of pinot grigio and do what I always do in times of doubt: bury myself deeper into my work and pretend that everything is fine.

  After having dinner with my children, I mindlessly flick through the 3D model of the excavation area that we mapped out using ground-penetrating radar, a geophysical method that uses electromagnetic pulses to image the subsurface. We almost always use the non-destructive technique as it allows us to detect subsurface objects, patterning, changes in the material properties and voids. Indeed, when we received the survey data it revealed three areas within the terrain with hollow spaces, but we haven’t focused our efforts too heavily on them because they’re often false positives – areas in the construction that weren’t filled in for no apparent reason. Of course, Marco and I have toyed with the idea of one of the voids being a secret chamber or even a hole big enough to hide a treasure. But it’s one of those things that we can’t get excited by because more often than not, they are simply building anomalies.

  The silence around me is broken by the beep of my laptop alerting me to an email from a Spanish company specialising in taking high-resolution, advanced recordings of historical sites that are closed to the public for conservation or preservation, and then using the images and data to create exact facsimiles of these sacred places. They had produced the facsimile of Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt, which was identical in scale to the original and was now open to the public. We had employed them to take high-resolution photos to document precisely the current stage of our excavation.