Devotion

by Louisa Young

  ‘I think not,’ Tom said, after a moment.

  ‘You’re right. England, Great Britain, you are a much older country, you are united, you have your great Empire; you have proved your discipline. You are a different kind of people.’

  Well that was true. Tom laughed. Good old Brits, so cool and disciplined … and that thought brought an image of Nenna, and the recognition he was not, naturally, entirely, cool and disciplined.

  ‘I don’t think Fascism would ever take, in Britain,’ Tom said. ‘We have Fascists, of course, and plenty of people really admire the Duce, and Herr Hitler too—’

  ‘Oh, it’s all different things!’ Aldo cried. ‘We are not German, you are not Italian. Your Mosley is idiotic. We are all free humans within our countries, living in the real world …’

  They walked on. Tom was considering this opportunity. Usually, if Tom didn’t bring something up, Aldo didn’t mention politics. Ideals, yes. History, yes. Current politics, beyond admiration of the Duce, no. And on ideals, they agreed: peace and justice and respect and family and prosperity … Well, even Herr Hitler would probably agree on all that, Tom thought. Except the justice and respect and family and prosperity is only for Nazis. Not for the people he’s annexing … Campanilismo writ large? That’s the rub with that type – it’s all for them, and nothing for anyone who is different, or foreign. Tom had seen that close up; blue-eyed, blond-haired Tom, about whom people sometimes made assumptions. That ass in Cambridge …

  ‘But, Zio Aldo,’ said Tom. ‘What about the violence? The squadristi? And the Duce had Matteotti killed, didn’t he?’

  Aldo turned to him, stopped him, put his hands on his shoulders. For a moment Tom was alarmed – had he gone too far?

  ‘Aoh,’ Aldo said. ‘My boy. Listen. Here is something: One: do not slander the powerful. How old were you then? Six years old? You do not know what happened. Here is another thing. The Duce acted like a man. He took responsibility for what had been done by men of his party, full responsibility, because he is the leader of the party. He did what was honourable. And then, though he had many enemies, and the law is strong, he was not prosecuted. Would he not have been prosecuted, by those enemies, if there had been evidence? There is no proof or evidence that he gave the order. But here is another thing. A more important thing. If he did, so be it. The English did not build England or your Empire without shedding blood. Power is dirty. Now, your government can run the country all by the rule of please and thank you and oh excuse me; you don’t need the Tower of London and the cutting off heads. Good for you. But one must be realistic! A wise leader knows what his nation can afford. Matteotti was undermining the Duce’s efforts to build Italy, with his whining about this and that, about necessary discipline and rigour and, yes, violence. As if he thinks you can win without fighting!’

  Aldo took his hands away and gave a little sigh. ‘Matteotti was an enemy,’ he said, ‘not of the Duce, but of Italian advancement. That is the truth. Sometimes violence is a tool of development. Also’ – and he turned again to Tom, with a knowing this-is-not-our-fault, this-is-how-things-are look – ‘It’s a man’s nature. Isn’t it?’

  Tom thought of the little toff, and laughed, and rolled his eyes. Yes, it was a man’s nature.

  For a moment, he thought of Riley. Well, it’s different for Riley. Riley had enough violence, and it did more to him than to most people. Of course he feels differently about it.

  They walked on, and after a while scuffing through the dust Tom, enlivened to confidences by the wine and his quasi-uncle’s gentleness in the face of a difficult question, asked him another: ‘What was your father like?’

  It wasn’t that Riley wasn’t a good substitute. It was that a boy who ever needed a substitute will always have some kind of vacancy available.

  Later, the term ‘it’s man’s nature’ returned to him.

  Man’s nature, eh. Sex and violence.

  His mantra that year: she’s fourteen.

  *

  Kitty missed Tom unspeakably when he went off to university. All right, he was an oaf, and didn’t seem to care about her at all, and was being a grown-up now, with patches on his jacket elbows, and all those tall friends who didn’t know she existed, and just talked about bumps and chaps and philosophers and yards of ale. She’d managed to worm her way into his room to join them one time over Easter, during his first year, and one of them pointed at her and said ‘Locke, there’s some kind of tiny munchkin lurking in that corner. What can it want?’

  It is not right, it is not right. Why such humiliation just because I am a girl?

  Their cricket games were now grown-up affairs: six-footers in whites, with girls watching, and mothers, and cucumber sandwiches. No more bunches of children all with muddy grassy knees. They wouldn’t even let her play chess with them. They wouldn’t let her sit with them. And anyway, they weren’t there: they were out, in places to which she would never go. She was defenceless.

  She wished she had a sister. Or a bicycle she was allowed out in the streets on. Or a crow that would sit on her shoulder, and fly off, and come back, and talk to her and only her. She lay on her bed and rolled her eyes so far back in her head they saw universes, and hurt. She resolved to read the Bible all the way through, and even made it through an entire chapter of Enochs and Mahalaleels begetting each other, but the first mention of a girl being begot was when the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose, and then she cried, because no son of God would choose her because she was fat and fluffy, and anyway she didn’t want to be chosen, or to get married, she wanted—

  She wanted—

  I want—

  Well at least I can agree that I want, she thought, and went outside to water the sweet peas. It was that spring, watching the emerging leaves each day, the astounding strength of the power of tiny shoots against black London earth, little drops gathering and running down the sharp-folded leaves, the plant throwing up its hairy stalks and wild cycling tendrils, that she thought – I bet no man will ever write a book about why there aren’t any exciting women in the Bible – all you get is to have a baby, even if it is the son of God, or weep among alien corn, or cut some man’s head off and get thrown to the dogs …

  I don’t have to be like Mummy. I don’t have to have babies and get thrown to the dogs. I could be like Daddy, and write books. It’s either that or I must run away from home. She was not brave enough to run away from home. She didn’t want to.

  Sometimes she would listen at Nadine’s studio door, and hear her humming happily to herself as she worked. She knew she could go in, and Nadine would be kind, and give her some paper and charcoal. But she didn’t want to disturb Nadine’s strange joyous world of concentration, which though she could sense it she could not yet achieve for herself. It seemed to her to be a precious thing.

  She cleared the surface of the little desk in her bedroom, and thought: this is not my bedroom any more. This is my room.

  She started her first novel the afternoon she watered the sweet peas, in a shiny blue notebook: ‘The True Story of Etheldreda Emmerham, by Katharine Locke’, and spent most of the next three hours thinking up new noms de plume for herself.

  *

  Summer of 1934 then, Tom was thinking. What happened in 1934? First long vac from Cambridge – I took the language and Italian culture course, and met Carmichael for the first time, and spent a fair amount of time with him.

  Nenna was running around with one of the Seta boys, Daniele, a nephew of the Setas who lived next door. That’s what happened. She had turned idiotic. She was rolling her sleeves up in some special way, and giggling a lot, and he had turned his back, rather, because she was a silly fifteen-year-old and he was eighteen now and at university and frankly, he had more important things on his mind, as a young man would. Dante, for example. He and Carmichael – Johnny – walked the streets, bought their own coffee, took up smoking. They carried their Boccaccio and their Dante an
d read them where they liked, in the Forum, on the Capitoline, with their backs against white marble and their feet in the river. Carmichael rather specialised in street slang and Romanaccio, and getting it a bit wrong: ‘anvedi oh!’, he’d cry, at anything unusual, and ‘nnamo a magnà?’ when inviting Tom to eat. Together they learnt the names of the many marbles on the floor of St Peter’s, and teased the children in the piazza, playing football with them and joking.

  Tom really wasn’t bothered by Nenna and the Seta boy. Though her parents were, rather, and would suggest Tom as a third – a gooseberry! – when Nenna wanted to go somewhere with Daniele.

  Nenna, Tom felt, was rather fast. Out with Carmichael, or back in Cambridge, he didn’t mind girls being fast at all. Rather older girls, more interesting and with more to offer. But he didn’t want Nenna to be.

  Other than that, he read a lot, and went back fairly soon to London. University actually required quite a lot of work, it turned out.

  Chapter Ten

  Rome, 1935

  When he saw Nenna again, in the summer of 1935, suddenly it was all different again. He practically threw up his hands in submission. Jesus, the beauty. What is a man to do. Jesus.

  And now, apparently, she was old enough to be taken on trips. Out for the day, by bicycle or train: ‘Just keep her out of trouble,’ Susanna said. But more often, it was out for a few hours with the baby.

  The baby! There it was, fully formed, a calm, fluff-headed infant with saintly ways, a knowing look, hands like starfish and a dirty laugh which made everybody about her laugh too. Her name was Marinella, and even Tom acknowledged her qualities: he played the drums on her tummy which reduced her to fits of giggles of such charm that he stuck his finger in the honeypot and let her suck it, gurgling and smiling her curly smiles.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ Nenna murmured, taking her sticky little sister in her arms and blowing raspberries on her. ‘I can never have one of my own without having some husband, some boy, to be its father—’

  ‘You could have your choice of boys,’ Tom said. ‘They all love you. When you’re not shouting at them to behave.’ Signorino Seta had disappeared. His aunt, the chirpy saucepot next door, seemed rather disappointed. Ha!

  When they took Marinella out with them, strangers thought she was theirs. There was a particular approving look that came with all the cheek-pinching and cries of ‘ma che bella’ and all that. They were stopped thirty-three times on one day alone in Campo dei Fiori by people needing to admire the baby.

  ‘In Campo dei Fiori, son già trentatré!’ sang Nenna, to the tune of ‘Ma in Spagna son già mill e tre’, Leporello’s song about how many women Don Giovanni slept with in Spain.

  It was as if they both retired a little from the previous times, and for a while a strange apologeticness was on them, as if they could almost acknowledge what had disrupted them the summer before. And then that dispersed like morning mist, and they looked at each other anew. Anew, but all the ballast of the past. Everything to play for. Nineteen and sixteen. Sixteen, actually, was not too young.

  But if that was true, another territory opened up for Tom, the gist of which was: did he mean it? This wasn’t something he could do anything about. He couldn’t tell her, or kiss her, or anything like that. This wasn’t some bold-eyed Girton twenty-one-year-old with her own fags and plans for a flat in London next year. This was family. Marinella, smiling up at them, demonstrated exactly where all this stuff led.

  But it had lurched back. He glanced at her and she looked away. She glanced at him but he was thinking about something else. He thought, She is not even on the same page as me. She is too young. I should not be thinking these things. Feeling these things.

  Damn.

  They sat out in their old spots on the low walls of the island, the river rumbling away beneath; they retreated into the house, to Susanna’s cool and respectable rooms where they had to sit upright in respectable chairs. And then they wanted to go out out out. Being out was the real involvement. Being in the house was a limitation; being out was really being in – being in the world, in what really mattered. In the great human reality of it all.

  When the family left Rome for the lake, Tom and Nenna broadened their expeditions: to Tarquinia to see the towers and Etruscan tomb paintings; up to dusty Tolfa for the Donkey Palio. Two lakes north, at Bolsena, they ate their lunch in a miniature Palladian temple on an island of miniature Palladian temples and dived off a small boat to a sunken sarcophagus. Back on shore they sneaked in to the church of an ancient nunnery, where Nenna sang arias and showtunes – Puccini and Verdi and ‘Stormy Weather’, and ‘Indian Love Call’ – and Tom was surprised at how strong and real her voice had become, echoing in the dome. They ate ice cream, read each other’s diaries, and plotted itineraries for when they could go to Florence and Venice, when Tom had his motorbike, when they could go anywhere. They swam in new lakes, Bolsena and Vico, and the bewitching indecency of her swimsuit contradicted him very effectively when he tried saying to himself, still, she’s too young.

  Their eyes caught, from time to time. He wanted to kiss her, all the time. All the bloody time. Well, most of the time. He had not the slightest idea what she wanted.

  *

  Nenna, of course, recognised Tom’s perturbation immediately. She had been wondering when, rather than whether, Tom would start behaving like every other moo-faced idiot male she met, whose inability to ignore her bella alta bionda body in favour of her interesting mind and sarcasm and capacity for shenanigans she was starting to find quite … cramping. After Daniele Seta – which was nothing, really, nothing! – Aldo and Susanna had forbidden her from going round with boys at all. Not even the dull cousins from the ghetto were allowed, so Tom’s arrival was a blessing dropped straight from heaven – but if her parents were to notice that Tom was also starting to moo, then no doubt he too would be banned – but thank God, he was English and so repressed that no one had spotted it. Apart from her.

  She responded as she did to them all. Let’s see what you mean by it. Is this just you being male? Or is it about me, in particular, me? Let’s wait and see. Meanwhile the admiration soaked in, and was transformed by that alchemy of adolescence into a self-confidence which in turn radiated out again, shone like the sun in her hair and her walk and her look – and drew more admiration in.

  And then, when they were back in Rome, a ludicrous upsetting thing happened.

  They were heading out to meet Carmichael and go to the cinema. La Moglie di Frankenstein! They hadn’t told Susanna that was what they were going to see. Strolling through Piazza, passeggiata time, a girl Nenna knew from about the place appeared on the other side of the road: Stella, pale, broad-browed, black-haired, with her eyebrows plucked like a movie-star’s and her pouty, droopy cupid mouth.

  ‘Stella!’ Nenna called out, and she looked up, like an animal hearing its name and looking around, a little sleepily, for the caller.

  ‘Stella! Over here!’ Nenna cried, and as Stella identified her, her unfocused face lit up with a slow smile, a little twist to the plump lip. Nenna had reached her by now, and was saying, ‘Ciao, amore, what are you up to?’ Stella’s smile spread to her creamy cheeks. ‘Walk with us?’ At this Stella beamed; silently she tucked her hand behind Nenna’s upper arm, and hugged it a little. She turned to glance at Tom, and gave him a coy flash of her big eyes.

  ‘Salve, Stella,’ he said. ‘Sono Tommaso.’

  Stella didn’t reply. She just glanced up again, like a celluloid doll: painted irises, up/down eyelids, and a brush of thick lashes.

  ‘Stella doesn’t talk much,’ Nenna said. ‘Do you, darling?’ Stella kept her smile, her eyes down.

  They walked like this as far as via del Portico D’Ottavia, where it seemed to be time for a little ritual.

  ‘So d’you want a bun, Stellina?’ Nenna asked. And Stellina did – they smiled complicitly – so they went to the bakery on the corner to get one of the really hard ones that Tom practically broke his fine Engl
ish teeth on, but that everybody else loved.

  Stella grabbed it and laughed, making a sideways head-wobble denoting joy, gratitude and affection. Nenna felt the satisfied glow of a person who has done a simple kind thing on a sunny morning, when Stella, after a moment of hesitation, suddenly reached up and, putting the bun-holding hand round the back of Nenna’s neck, kissed her, on the mouth.

  It was sweet, gentle – a little open, a touch of breath. Nenna jumped in her skin, recognising it instinctively for what it was: sexual. She was electrified. Stella retreated a little, smiled demurely, and batted her great lashes, as if waiting.

  Nenna was rigid, with shock, outrage and an undercurrent of thrill running all over her. She pulled herself together with a little shakedown and said: ‘Stella, no. You mustn’t do that. That’s wrong.’ She looked as if she wanted to laugh. Or something. She wiped her mouth.

  ‘No, Stella,’ she said firmly.

  At the word ‘No’, at the insulting wipe of the mouth, Stella’s face clouded. Eyebrows and mouth drooped, the chin went back and under. Hurt gathered. Then she pouted her lower lip and gave an actual little hiss at Nenna, like a cat. For a moment Nenna thought Stella was going to thrust the bun back at her, but instead she clutched it closer to the front of her dress, and turned, and stalked off.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Nenna, shaken. Tom, having no idea what to do with a girl who has just been kissed and then hissed at by another girl, went to put his hand on her shoulder, then didn’t.

  Nenna turned to him, a little breathless, and said: ‘My first kiss! Dio mio – but she really mustn’t – oh dear …’

  ‘She’s presumably not all there,’ said Tom, looking worried, as if concerned for Stella’s moral vulnerability, which he was, and so was Nenna, but Nenna said ‘Don’t change the subject! That was my first kiss. That! So much for young love!’

  And she did start laughing, shaking her head, and then she had to sit down.

  Around them the street was neither crowded nor empty, but nobody seemed to have seen the moment, for which she was grateful. ‘It’s lucky nobody noticed or I would have to marry her!’ she said, and her laughter turned into the choking, teary kind, so Tom was able to pat her back helpfully, and her arm, until she said ‘Do stop that, Masino.’