by Louisa Young
‘Far from any border we are likely to cross,’ she said.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘But—’
She leaned in and whispered to him: ‘When a girl is stopped from doing anything, she has to find something to do.’
He still didn’t get it.
‘You opened my eyes, Masino,’ she said. ‘And now they are open. Sometimes people need papers they don’t have. And my handwriting is – flexible. And my friend Tullio has a little press.’
He was astounded.
‘So, we’re, um, married?’ he said. The term gave him a little sexual thrill. Sposati.
She laughed. ‘Are you pleased?’ she said.
He found he was.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Bouquet,’ gesturing the roses. ‘Prosecco. Congratulations, darling.’ How had she done that? How had she turned so quickly, from her father’s lamb to a forger? Look at her! She’s so pleased!
‘Congratulations to you too,’ she said, looking right at him, with her open eyes – and she leaned across the table to kiss him – and as she did, her hair, her cheek – it struck him like cold silver water all over his skin, shivery and brilliant – he wanted her to kiss him. He wanted to kiss her.
He moved his head. He took her kiss with his mouth – surprised her. And suddenly everything was very different.
As they came out of it, she said cautiously, ‘But we’re not in love.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Odd.’
They looked at each other.
‘Odd,’ he said again. ‘Puzzling. Or perhaps just—’
He shook his head, as if shaking water out of his hair, and looked at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I—’
This is it, he thought. This is something.
‘Come on,’ he said, and as they left the café he took her face in his hands and kissed her, properly. Properly properly. Long enough for some wag to shout an incomprehensible bit of Romanaccio as he walked past them.
Nenna pulled away.
‘Ah!’ she said. And Tom said ‘ah’, in a very surprised way, and then turned sideways and took her arm in his. Fraternal. The street felt suddenly too small for them.
They walked together. After a moment they had to unlatch their arms.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘If we’re married now,’ and he grinned, ‘you have to obey me. Come to London.’
‘Marinella,’ she said.
‘Bring her.’
‘My parents,’ she said, her eyes bright.
But it was different now. Why? Nothing had happened. A forgery, and a surprising kiss. And, of course, her acknowledgement of the truth.
They both felt as if anything were possible. They were a team. Finally on the same side again.
He smiled at her so broadly, like an angel’s wings.
‘Who keeps the certificate?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you can have that one,’ she said. ‘I made two.’
He folded his up and tucked it into his inside pocket. ‘You’ve broken several of Mussolini’s laws with this,’ he said, gently. ‘Um …’ he said, wanting to ask, but tentative. But wanting to be sure.
She looked up. ‘You want to know? What’s going on in my heart? Just ask, Englishman, just ask. I’ll tell you – bitterness. Confusion. Fury. Loyalty. Confusion. But, to be clear: I have pulled my head out of the sand. Look, you can see it streaming from behind my ears. I have’ – and she closed her eyes for a second, giving the words their due weight – ‘torn the Duce from my heart. I hate him, what he has done to my family and my country. I fear him. I would come with you, Tommaso. I would! But now that I understand, I can’t leave my family alone with him. Irony, yes? What you have revealed to me makes it impossible for me to come away as you want me to. You should have just seduced me, left out the politics.’
‘I probably would have,’ he said. ‘If things had been different.’ Then they laughed at some length, at the concept of ‘if things had been different’.
*
Later, he took her to meet Johnny, who was sceptical but quietly encouraging.
‘She’s seen the light, Johnny,’ Tom said.
‘She was born and bred in Fascism,’ he replied. ‘Do you think that can change overnight? Even for your lovely blue eyes?’
‘It really hasn’t been overnight,’ Tom murmured. ‘It’s been years, actually. But now I just want to get her to England, and we’ll deal with the rest of them from there.’ But he knew he hadn’t been able to help them from there before. And it wasn’t as if anything was getting easier.
He would persuade her. It would just take a little time. Long haul.
*
Walking Nenna back to the island through the empty dark stone streets, Tom trod quietly, feeling the echoes of other people’s lives from behind the closed shutters. The occasional voice, calling; a little dog yapping, a shaft of light as someone adjusted a shutter or a curtain. Clouds were scudding around the moon, between the high walls, and a light chilly rain started. He put his arm around her and the cobbles beneath their feet began to gleam.
After a while, without breaking step, he murmured, ‘So, Nenna, are you my girl?’
And for the rest of his life he regretted that he had not turned to look at her and see the expression on her face. She stopped, she turned to him, and suddenly she was weeping and kicking him and bashing his chest like a girl in a silent movie, though she was far from silent, she was yelping and hiccupping, and he had to enclose her in his arms and hold her until with her ear against his heart and his hands holding her, she said, to the cloth of his coat, ‘You idiot, you idiot.’
‘Is that yes?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was always your girl. Stupid man.’
When they walked off, the angels’ wings had spread to his feet.
*
She didn’t sleep that night. She left her shutters open and moonlight fell on her bed, and it filled her. I give up, she said to the moon. How can I make this choice?
The moon didn’t care.
At around three in the morning, a thought skipped across Nenna’s mind, like a water boatman across a calm dark pond. It’s not just Mussolini you hate. It’s your father. Perhaps your mother too, for not protecting you. Your brothers, for not opening their eyes. Let them rot, all of them, before they kill you with their fear and stupidity.
It is only Tom who has come back over and over, to help you.
Across the bedroom, Marinella mewed in her sleep.
I can take her with me.
*
Alas there was no time. Someone, it seemed, had been noticing Tom’s articles in the Chronicle. He, his foreignness, his anti-Fascist opinions, his nom de plume – fake identity, as they saw it – and his putative Judaism – had been identified and added up into a diagnosis of undesirability. The policemen – God knows which of the myriad forces they were from – returned and invited him, as an alien, a Jew – ha! The irony – and a spreader of lies about the Duce, to—
Bertolini’s uncle
—leave the country. On the next train.
His first thought was of his own idiocy. I should have expected this.
The tall one was strolling round his little room, glancing at things, picking them up and putting them down again in a mildly insulting way. Tom was so surprised by the sudden immediacy and reality of these men being in his room, saying and doing these things, and so simultaneously relieved that they weren’t punching him or bundling him down the stairs, that he wasn’t even able to make up his mind whether or not he should be demanding to take his wife with him. If I do, will that simply bring her and the family to their attention? What if she still says no? What if they find the friend’s press – what if she is in danger already? And that is why they’ve come for me? The what-ifs tumbled around him; he could not get his hands on any of them long enough to see it properly, and part of him was still thinking this is all nonsense, things like this don’t happen, not to English gentlemen who have done nothing wron
g …
And thus, he thought, it moves. More real every day.
They allowed him to step into the café to ring Johnny, and tell him briefly what was happening.
‘Try to let her know,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’ll be back.’
Then they put him on the train north, sat down with him, changed with him at Milan.
*
Their fellow travellers avoided his escorts, looking away and taking distant seats. At the border, these same people queued with them: families and couples, small suitcases, overcoats, misty breath hanging on the air. It was cold; the mountains in the distance snow-topped. He was following the general movement when the short one tugged his elbow, steered him round a corner of the station building and swiftly, effectively, knocked him to the floor.
Tom was still wondering how he got there when he felt the first blows, heavy swipes to his ribcage, a thud on the back of his head, a powerful kick in the small of his back and one to his belly. Pain, nausea, inability – and the two men stood back.
‘We have plenty more for next time,’ the tall one said. The short one was slipping something back into his overcoat pocket, and the word came to Tom: manganello.
‘Show the bruises to your mother,’ the short one said. ‘Now come along!’ – and he sighed impatiently as Tom took his time trying to stand up, trying not to vomit.
‘That way!’ the short one said, and the tall one handed him his hat, with a smirk, and Tom rejoined the queue almost as if nothing had happened.
‘Plenty more, any time you like,’ the tall one cried, and Tom realised this was absolutely nothing, to them. Absolutely nothing. A way of amusing themselves during a boring job. He raised his head, and bit his lip. I have a lot to learn. Self-discipline. Patience. How and when to apply physical courage.
He thanked the thug for his hat, and put it on at a gangster angle, tipping it just so. He didn’t brush himself down. He turned and put out his hand to each of them, his eyes as blue and clear as they could be. ‘Thank you for accompanying me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right on my own now. Goodbye – till we meet again. Arrivederci’ – and he went up into the crowd around the desk, where someone was saying, ‘All owners of Austrian passports who cannot show an entry visa to Switzerland are to be turned back,’ and, ‘These passports were issued after 15 August 1938 …’ as if that explained everything, why these families were standing here and could go no further. One guard was calling for advice. ‘Should I telephone the Police Department?’ Tom heard his boss murmur, ‘One can assume that the holder is a Jew, if the passport is valid for only one year.’
He didn’t look back, and his companions did not come after him. He thought he heard a chuckle, but he was trying to breathe through what felt unavoidably like a broken rib or two.
As he came to the front of the queue, the mother of the group in front of him was examining the document which had been returned to her. ‘Turned back,’ it said, and a stamp saying ‘COMO’, crossed out.
Tom had no visa, but his passport was old and British, he was tall and blond, and no doubt his companions had some arrangement for the chucking out of foreigners. Cleared and checked, he wanted to return to find the woman, and ask her where they would go, what they would do now. But he had been handed over, his suitcase thrown after him, and was being steered through to customs dogana douane zoll. Pyjama bottoms, he felt, would be the best thing to try to strap himself up with. He smiled politely. What else could a chap do, at this stage?
*
It was, to Aldo, a simple matter. If somebody is damaging the unit, well, it’s like in war. Or as with Matteotti. You don’t keep and protect someone who is betraying the brigade. You get rid of them. Just as well that the Orivietos and the Setas have gone. A curse on the other fainthearts who insult me. May they all go. Good riddance.
Tomaso, I am not an idiot. There is a limit to how much trouble you can cause in my household before I throw you out. You think I don’t know what you are doing when you go on about Kristallnacht, about war, about passports, about Herr Hitler? You think I haven’t noticed? How you undermine my authority, how you insult the Duce, and try to break our loyalty, which is our strength?
And Tommaso. Do you think I don’t know my daughter? Do you think I don’t see how she ebbs and flows around you? How this summer she hated you, and now she comes home with you, her eyes alight, laughing like the full moon? You think I am blind?
White roses, Tomaso? Please.
He conceded it would have been more honourable to throw Tom out of the country himself; to beat him up a little or frogmarch him to the border personally. But he remembered the scene on the riverbank and the look on Nenna’s face that night. It was clear he would have to get someone else to do it. He could not have Nenna looking at him like that. That would be self-defeating.
All your talk of trouble to come, Tomaso – this is one trouble which will not come. If there is war, it must be very clear which side we are on. You go on about Jews being in danger! Our loyalty and our Duce are our strength and our safety, they are, they are. And my girl will not be in love with a boy who is on the other side. You won’t dismantle us, Tomaso, and there will be no Romeo and Juliet here.
Part Six
Chapter Seventeen
London, Autumn 1938
As soon as she got back to London from the summer in Italy, Nadine sat on her bed and rang up Rose and Peter to invite them to Sunday lunch. Her purest happiness was having everyone round one table. She knew by instinct who should be there, and flickered momentarily over Tom’s absence. The recent oddnesses in Rome just made having the family together all the more necessary. She looked at all that and it made her tired. Or perhaps it was just being forty. Perhaps it was having to acknowledge that this was her life, this was all there would be—
It wasn’t that she minded, enormously, not having her own child. It had sort of made sense, particularly as there was Kitty and Tom. There had been so much to be set in the right direction that introducing something new had for a long time seemed irrelevant. But there had always been the possibility – at least, they had thought there was the possibility. The doctors had said there were things they could do … but she and Riley had not wanted to do things. They had not even wanted to talk to doctors. Perhaps, looking back, that was a pity. And forty – well, this seemed the moment to recognise that the little tiny dead baby, that half-formed thing, the baby that wouldn’t – couldn’t – didn’t stick – well, that was her only baby. Her belly clenched at the memory of it. As it always has; as it always will.
Anyway.
Never mind! she thought, and the words brightly sprang into her head. She hoped she wasn’t being bright about it. But even so. Que sera sera, and so forth.
At least Kitty had gone to stay with a friend this weekend. Nadine didn’t mean it badly, but Kitty was moodier than a girl of nineteen should be, and with all the goodwill in the world, it was tiresome.
Peter, when she spoke to him, said, ‘Put Riley on the line, would you?’
Nadine still hesitated. Though of course it was up to Riley. It was only Peter.
When she handed the receiver over to Riley, she couldn’t make out what Peter was saying – not that she was trying to – but she heard the liveliness, and the sudden warmth and enthusiasm of Riley’s ‘Yes! Of course!’ in the middle of Peter’s stream.
‘What was that?’ Nadine asked, when Riley hung up, grinning.
‘He said, “Look here, Mabel and I are engaged, I blame you, and I couldn’t be happier. Would it be mad of me to ask Nadine if I can bring Mabel on Sunday.”’
‘Engaged?’ said Nadine. ‘Mabel?’
‘Yes,’ said Riley.
‘But who is she?’
‘She’s a singer,’ Riley said.
‘Have you met her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why does he blame you?’
‘I’ve been in favour of it. She’s a wonderful woman.’
Nadine didn’t understand.
<
br /> ‘So you’ve known all about it?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t tell me,’ she said, a little bewildered.
‘I was respecting his privacy,’ Riley said gently.
‘But the children!’ she said.
‘His business?’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Really?’
‘Have I done wrong?’ Riley said.
‘Riley – darling – Peter is to marry a singer! What kind of singer? “She’s a wonderful woman”?’ Nadine sat down again. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said. ‘You should have told me. Who is she?’
Riley explained Mabel. ‘She’s American, a jazz singer.’
Nadine may have raised her eyebrows—
‘At the better sort of club,’ said Riley drily, ‘a respectable person, a proper musician, don’t worry.’
‘I’m not being bourgeois!’ Nadine said. ‘But Peter is a catch, you know. Any – disreputable woman – would want him. It must have crossed your mind.’
‘He’s in love,’ Riley said. ‘Mabel is good news. They will need our friendship. So, family blessing, all right?’
‘Of course,’ she said, and as he left the room another thought grabbed her. Kitty will be back on Sunday, and does she know? Perhaps Peter has told her – or not – should I check? Should I tell her? Nadine remembered sitting Tom on the kitchen table to tell him Julia was dead; not knowing if that was her job or not, and making the decision that it was. Of course – because that’s the point of a woman in a family, isn’t it? To fill in all the gaps, and occupy all those positions. Even in a sweet marriage like ours.
She started trying to find the telephone number of the place where Kitty had gone for the weekend. ‘It’s in Wolvercote,’ she was saying to the operator. ‘It should be under Thomson. No, I don’t know the initials. Wolvercote, Oxford.’ No luck. Well, it’s Peter’s business to tell her, she thought. But she was in doubt.
What Nadine didn’t know was that Riley had forgotten to tell her that Peter had said, ‘And I might bring someone else.’ Or indeed that Mabel was black, or any other bit of information which might have helped to prepare the family for these sudden new members.
