Deep and Silent Waters

by Charlotte Lamb

  Leo shouted, ‘Don’t talk about such things in front of the children!’

  ‘What things? The castor oil they take when they’re—’

  ‘Be quiet!’ he snapped, getting up from the table. ‘You have no decency. My mother would never have talked the way you do. And next time that Englishman comes here, throw him out.’

  ‘It’s important for the boys to speak other languages. If the firm keeps growing you’ll be selling all over Europe one day, and whoever is running it will need to speak French, German, English.’

  Leo’s eyes brightened at the idea of a company that sold its products all over Europe. ‘Well, watch him whenever he comes, and remember anything he says about politics.’

  ‘He never talks about politics,’ Carlo put in. ‘Only art or literature. It’s very boring.’

  Carlo took after his father in looks and nature yet the two were always arguing, but Leo was a man given to angry outbursts over nothing, and he never backed down or even admitted he might be wrong.

  ‘The English are mad!’ Anna heard him say a week or so later, when Frederick Canfield joined them all in the garden for what she hoped would pass as English tea – tiny sandwiches of thinly sliced country ham or cheese, a rich chocolate cake and cups of milkless tea, heavily sugared.

  Frederick accepted a sandwich and a cup of tea, smiling at Anna as he took them while to her husband he said calmly, ‘I won’t argue with you, Signore, but, if I may ask, why precisely do you think we’re mad?’

  ‘What else explains it? Why don’t you make terms with Hitler? He’s offered to come to an agreement, and you’ll have to sooner or later. You know your people don’t have the will to fight – look at the way all the students voted not to go to war! And you have no tanks or planes, you aren’t ready for war. All our newspapers agree about that. Hitler will crush you.’

  To Vittoria’s amazement the Englishman laughed. ‘The British never want to fight, Signore. They look for other ways of resolving problems, diplomacy, discussion, because they’re sane. Only crazy people want to kill or be killed. What good is that for trade? But if we are forced into war …’ He shrugged cheerfully. ‘Well, we haven’t lost one for a thousand years, you know.’

  Reddening, Leo barked, ‘You haven’t fought us yet!’

  The Englishman’s bright blue eyes smiled and his mouth curled up at the edges. He did not seem worried or frightened by Leo’s temper. His manner was always the same, calm, friendly, faintly amused. ‘True, not since the days of the Romans, but you haven’t been fighting many wars, have you?’

  For some reason that remark made Leo’s face stiffen with rage.

  Frederick turned to Anna. ‘These are delicious sandwiches, Signora. I’ve not eaten ham as good as this since I left England.’

  ‘It comes from a farm up in the hills. They breed the pigs themselves. Their cured ham is expensive, but it is the best in Italy.’

  ‘I’ve never tasted better.’ He turned to look down into Vittoria’s eyes. Nobody else had noticed her, sitting silent as a mouse, very small and still, next to her mother, nibbling at a slice of cake and catching the crumbs in her palm to lick them off quickly before they melted. ‘Do you still remember the little poem I taught you last week?’

  Blushing as everyone around the table stared at her, Vittoria nodded. She was always both nervous and elated when she attracted any attention, especially in front of her terrifying but wonderful father.

  ‘Will you say the first verse for us?’

  She hesitated. Her mother took her hand. ‘Yes, say it for us, darling.’

  She hung her head.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Leo Serrati boomed. ‘Do as you’re told, girl!’

  Vittoria began in a rush, ‘I have a little shadow …’ afraid she would forget the words, but she managed to finish the verse without a mistake.

  ‘Well done!’ Frederick congratulated her. ‘Your daughter has a good memory, Signore, and a head for mathematics. You must send her to a modern girls’ school when she’s old enough.’

  Leo Serrati scowled. ‘Girls don’t need an expensive education. I don’t intend her to be a typist or to work in a shop. She’ll marry, of course. The convent school is the best place for a girl – the nuns will teach her all she needs to know to make a good wife.’

  Frederick looked at Anna, who gazed back at him, her pink mouth ironic.

  A week later over breakfast Leo Serrati waved a newspaper at his wife. ‘See? Il Duce has ordered the British out of the country. Your wonderful Englishman will have to go, too. He needn’t think I’ll lift a finger to save him.’

  Ignoring him, Anna helped Vittoria to a warm brioche with some of the home-made black cherry jam from last year. Vittoria bit into it, wishing she dared ask why the British were being sent away.

  Later that morning Frederick Canfield arrived while Leo Serrati was at work, the boys at school and only Anna and Vittoria at home. They were sitting by the window, in the gentle sunlight of early summer, sewing with the radio on. As soon as she saw him, Anna leant over to switch it off.

  ‘You’re leaving?’

  He nodded. ‘I’ve come to say goodbye.’

  Vittoria was startled to see tears in her mother’s eyes. ‘What a terrible world this is! This time next year we could all be dead.’

  The child sat up straight and pale, frightened. What did her mother mean?

  Frederick knelt down by Anna’s chair and took her hands. ‘Don’t despair, my dearest Anna. This evil thing must end one day. We’ll have good times again. Won’t you take me for one last walk through your lovely garden so that I can remember it when I’m back in England?’ He lifted the hands he held to his mouth, kissing each one on the palm with the reverence people showed to the statue of Our Lady in the church.

  Anna Serrati looked at her daughter. ‘Signor Canfield and I are going to walk in the garden. Stay here, Vittoria, and get on with your sewing. I won’t be long. You’ll be able to see us from here, don’t worry.’

  Obediently Vittoria stayed where she was, sitting on her chair, her short, plump legs stuck out in front of her, like a doll’s, and went on primly with the handkerchief she was making. There were spots of blood here and there where she had pricked her finger with the needle, and smudges of dirt from when she had once forgotten to wash her hands before beginning work but her sewing was improving. Mamma said she would soon be good at keeping the stitches small and neat.

  Now and then she looked out of the window. Her mother and Signor Canfield were walking away from her across the lawns. Their hands hung loose at their sides. Vittoria’s plump pink mouth opened in a gasp as she saw the fingers brush, entwine, break free again. Her mother had held hands with the Englishman. Vittoria felt uneasy, the way she did when she was going to be sick from eating too many honey cakes.

  The garden looked at its best in early June before the sun grew too hot and the grass dried into pale, rustling hay. The roses were in full bloom; golden brown bees hummed drunkenly around those great pink flowers whose golden hearts left pollen on your finger if you touched them. Vittoria loved their heady scent, it made her head swim. She watched disapprovingly as Frederick picked a new, tightly closed bud. Papa would have been very cross if he’d seen that. Then the Englishman kissed the rosebud, before offering it to Mamma, who kissed it, too, then slid it down inside her neckline so that it lay hidden against her breast.

  Vittoria didn’t understand what was happening, but she was frightened. She wanted to scream, call her mother back, as though Anna was being taken away from her.

  Her head filled with images she always tried to forget – the things that had happened on her birthday. Papa pushing her nurse down on to Mamma’s bed and doing those strange, frantic things to her. She didn’t really understand what she had seen but she knew it had been bad. Was her mother … Had her mother … done that with Signor Canfield? Or was she going to now?

  Vittoria shut her eyes and deliberately stuck the sharp point o
f the needle into her finger, then screamed, holding up her hand, blood spurting.

  With sick relief she saw them turn. Even from a distance she could see sadness in their faces and didn’t understand that, either.

  A moment later her mother hurried into the room. Vittoria sobbed, ‘The needle went in my finger!’

  Anna looked at the blood, ‘Oh, poverina …’ She gently wiped it away with a clean handkerchief. ‘We must put some disinfectant on it, darling.’ To Frederick she said, ‘She’s always doing it. Look at this poor handkerchief! When it’s finished it will have to be washed and washed to get the blood out.’

  He smiled. ‘At least this blood will wash out.’ He was always saying baffling things. Vittoria looked at him with hostility, and he bent to kiss her forehead. ‘Be safe, bambina, I hope I’ll see you again one day. We must all pray for an end to this war. Give the boys my best wishes.’

  Vittoria stayed obstinately silent, glowering. She wasn’t going to pretend she was sorry he was going away: she did not like the way he looked at her mother, or the way her mother looked at him.

  When Anna told the boys that Signor Canfield had been at the house to say goodbye, Carlo scowled. ‘Lucky he’s going. At school they say Il Duce is going to put the English in prison if they haven’t gone by the end of the month.’

  ‘Probably going to shoot them,’ little Niccolo said, with bloodthirsty glee. ‘I never liked him.’ He mimed machine-gunning. ‘You’re dead, Signor English,’ he shouted, capering about.

  Anna slapped his face. ‘You stupid little boy! You don’t begin to know what war is about. Soon you won’t talk so cheerfully about killing people.’

  Niccolo’s eyes filled with tears and Carlo glared at his stepmother. ‘Don’t you hit my brother! He’s right – we’ve put up with too much from the English over the years. They’ve talked down to us and laughed at us for the last time. Let them try it now, after this defeat in France. In a week or two they won’t have an army. Hitler will smash it to smithereens, and when he’s finished taking over France, he’ll invade England. This war will be over by Christmas. I want to get into it while I can.’

  Carlo should have gone to university in the autumn of 1940, but once Mussolini had declared war, on 10 June that year, every able-bodied young man was expected to join one of the services as soon as he was eighteen.

  ‘We have to be there, fighting side by side with Hitler before he grabs the whole of Europe for the Germans,’ Carlo said. The next day he joined the army and vanished off to officer training, as did so many other young men.

  Alfredo, who was still only sixteen, ran away to join up, too, not wanting to be outshone by his elder brother. He gave a false name to make sure his father could not stop him.

  Leo Serrati tried to track him down, even getting Carlo to ask questions of every soldier he met, follow up every whisper of a clue, but Italian men were being drafted in every direction and it was impossible to get answers out of the overworked, muddled bureaucracy of the army. Leo came back, looking worried and angry.

  ‘They won’t, or can’t, tell me anything. When I do find that boy, I’ll kill him myself!’ It was later that he burst out, ‘You know what I heard in a bar in town today? They say thousands of Italians who joined up were sent to Germany, not into the army, to work as slave labour for the Germans. Some of my workers have vanished, you know. They just disappear without saying a word. I’d assumed they were going off to fight, but now—’ He stopped, his face drained of colour. ‘It can’t be true. Il Duce wouldn’t allow it.’

  No word came of Alfredo until a year later when his father received an anonymous letter from Germany, from another Italian. He and Alfredo had joined up together. They had been put into a cattle truck on a train and sent off to Germany where they had been forced to work as cleaners in an army training camp. After a few months Alfredo had tried to run away. He had been caught and shot as a deserter, as a warning to other Italians not to do the same.

  Leo Serrati tried for months to find out the truth. He pulled every string he had without success. They never heard anything of Alfredo again.

  He was the first of the Serrati boys to die. Carlo fought in the Balkan states and every so often they got a letter from him, telling them as much as he could. Men died around him every day, dirty, bloody and screaming in agony, but somehow Carlo survived to be sent to North Africa for yet another hopeless fight. In the desert he was so seriously wounded in the back and legs, when a shell exploded right beside him, that he was sent home on a stretcher in June 1941, a few days before the news broke that Hitler had attacked Russia.

  After a year in various hospitals Carlo came home, paralysed, knowing he would never walk again. For him the war was over, except as a civilian facing food shortages and spiralling inflation. By then even bread was rationed, although a rich family like the Serratis could buy anything on the black market: millions of forged ration cards were in circulation, and stolen food was available, too, if you knew where to go. The Serrati family did better than most, especially at first.

  Anna had always spent her days gracefully performing social duties, working in charity committees, sewing, running the house, choosing clothes, shopping. Now she was up at first light to hurry off to nurse, part-time, in a service hospital, doing jobs the trained nurses felt they could delegate to these society women whom they openly despised as ‘playing’ at their profession.

  On her way home, she would stop to buy whatever she could find in the shops, then cook lunch for Leo and Carlo, the two younger boys and Vittoria. She gardened in the afternoon, since now they had to grow most of their own vegetables, mixed the food for the hens and ducks they had begun to keep. Vittoria loved feeding the pig, who lived in a little sty and ate any scraps left from their own meals. Carlo had to guard the animals at night, with his service revolver, because black-market gangs were always on the look-out for home-raised animals.

  As the war went on, life in Italy became worse. People were starving in some parts of the country, while it was said that in Rome all the classy, expensive restaurants were packed with rich people eating their heads off. The newspapers did not report any of this, of course, it was all rumour and gossip – but, as everyone said, there’s no smoke without fire. Some of the whispers had to be true: Mussolini had lost control; II Duce was dying; people who saw him that winter said he was pale, haggard, losing weight.

  Leo Serrati knew many of the top medical men in the country and soon had the truth. ‘Poor man, suffers agonies from dysentery. Picked it up in Africa when he went there in July.’

  ‘One of the other nurses told me she’d heard he’s having an affair with some whore who’s given him syphilis.’ Nursing had changed Anna Serrati: she had seen and heard things that made her view life without rose-coloured spectacles.

  Leo bristled. ‘Will you stop talking like that? Ears, remember, ears!’

  Anna looked at her daughter, apparently absorbed in nibbling her rough brown bread and a tiny piece of cheese, made from their own goats’ milk. ‘She isn’t listening – and if she was, she wouldn’t know what I was saying.’

  ‘And I don’t want her to! It’s a lie, anyway! These pains he gets are all in the abdomen, some internal problem … Cancer, maybe?’

  ‘This war is responsible for many terrible things.’ Anna looked sad, and Vittoria, watching her, remembered the Englishman, whose face was beginning to fade in her memory now. That was how Mamma had looked as she walked with him in the garden that day. Where was he now? Fighting the Italian army somewhere? Maybe it had been his shell that exploded near Carlo in the desert. She had never loved her half-brother, had never even liked him much. Carlo could be cruel, teased and pinched her, pulled her hair. But she had hated Frederick Canfield from the first moment she saw him, because she loved her mother.

  Venice, 1997

  At eight years old Vittoria hadn’t quite understand what was going on or how she felt. Years later when she read Canfield’s book The Lily she realised h
ow much she had sensed without knowing it, and she hated him far more, recognising how much of the book was based on her own family and the way they lived, the society they had inhabited, self-indulgent, thoughtless, amoral to Canfield’s eyes; a world that had vanished for ever, about which she, herself, felt wistfully nostalgic.

  It had amazed her to discover that Nico loved the book, admired the style, the smooth, flowing prose, the descriptions of an Italy still as it had been for centuries.

  A country of glorious, golden sunlight, where men lived so close to nature they were almost one, full of laughter, warmth, generosity, winding medieval streets, a land of lakes and mountains, of great art, gardens, church bells, remote villages, street cafés where small bands played and sang old folk-songs under the stars while you ate pasta and drank rough red wine. Nico had read the early part of the book, where Canfield first found Italy and fell in love with it, and excitedly told his mother she must read it. Vittoria enjoyed that part, too, until she began to recognise incidents, descriptions, characters that stripped the veils, one by one, from events in her own past that she had either forgotten or misunderstood.

  She had never told Nico – he must not see his grandparents, his family, his country, through those alien eyes – so she could not explain now why she did not want a film of that book made in their own house.

  She told him instead, ‘My father always said he was a spy, Nico, and Papa was right. Canfield was a British agent. He lived among us, pretending to be our friend, and all the time he was betraying us. His whole book is a betrayal.’

  ‘I thought it was a brilliant book, Mamma. It isn’t hostile to Italy. What on earth makes you think it is?’

  ‘I suppose he never … Nico, did Sebastian say he ever met Canfield? You mentioned that he had been planning this film for years. Canfield only died four years ago. Did they meet?’ Her eyes were dilated, black saucers of shock. ‘What did Canfield tell him that isn’t in the book?’