Deep and Silent Waters (36 page)

When they visited Aunt Maria for afternoon tea Domenico came with them. The old woman was pink with pleasure. She had never before entertained one of Venice’s aristocrats in her own home. As they left two hours later she whispered to Vittoria, ‘Come again, alone, I can’t wait to hear all about the palazzo.’

Every evening the men went out – to Harry’s Bar, or one or the other of Domenico’s favourite drinking spots where he introduced Carlo to his friends, smooth Italians, bluff Englishmen, rich Americans who spent their days moving from the first aperitif of the morning to the last brandy of the night, with many stops in between. There were women, too; tough American journalists, elegant English girls, sultry Italians with red, red mouths and hot eyes.

After his two days were up Carlo stayed on. Vittoria had no idea what he did all day but if she saw him come back he often smelt of strong perfume and was almost always drunk.

She was having a wonderful time, too. Olivia had insisted on taking her shopping, talked her into buying clothes Vittoria would never quite have dared buy without Olivia’s persuasion.

Tight-waisted dresses, in pastel colours, poplin shirts in lavender or green, pretty high-heeled shoes or flat black-leather ones. Olivia chose carefully for her to give her more height, make her look slimmer.

Rachele kept ringing up asking when Carlo was coming home. At last one morning she wired that she was coming to Venice to get him.

Carlo grimaced. ‘Well, that’s the end of my holiday. It was too good to last, but never mind, I’ve had the best time of my life. I’ll go up and pack and catch the next train to Milan.’

Just before he left for the station he said, ‘Enjoy the rest of your time here. Domenico’s a great fellow, I like him. We’ve had some long chats, talked it all out, I approve.’ He patted her shoulder clumsily. ‘I’ve told him I’d be delighted.’

‘Delighted about what?’ Shy, excited, uncertain, half hoping yet afraid to let herself believe it, she looked up into his face and Carlo grinned at her.

‘Oh, you know! I’m pleased, Toria. It’s just what I want for you.’

Questions rushed to her tongue but he didn’t wait for her to ask them. Looking at his watch he groaned.

‘I must go. If I miss that train, Rachele will be waiting for me with a rolling pin!’ He kissed her cheek and was gone, swinging along between his crutches at his usual fast pace. She ran out to the landing-stage in time to see the d’Angeli boat chugging away. Carlo waved to her, then he was gone.

Vittoria stayed on another month. In summer Venice was a place of heady pleasures; glorious open-air parties, dances, picnics on the Lido beaches.

As the heat of August passed into the first, cooler days of September, Domenico took Vittoria out into the familiar, elegant gardens of Ca’d’Angeli and, standing in the shade of a great, ancient yew tree, said, ‘Vittoria, I have spoken to your brother and he has given me permission to ask you to marry me. Will you be my wife?’

She was so overcome she couldn’t answer for a moment. Domenico had kissed her a few times, gently, once when they walked home together after a dance, once here in the garden after dinner, but he had not spoken of love.

He looked down into her face searchingly, then smiled. ‘I promise, I will always take care of you, Toria, you can trust me, I won’t ever let you down.’

He took her face between his palms and bent to kiss her, slowly, softly, with a new intimacy, parting her lips, turning her bones to jelly and making her so happy she was almost faint. He did love her. He must love her. He hadn’t actually said he did. But why else had he asked her to marry him?

‘Will you marry me, Toria?’

This time she managed to whisper, ‘Yes.’

When they went back into Ca’ d’Angeli Olivia was waiting, eyes wide and excited. When she saw their faces she gave a whoop.

‘She said yes?’ Flinging her arms around Vittoria she hugged her like a boa constrictor. ‘I’m so happy. Now you’ll be my sister. When is the wedding? I
must
be a bridesmaid! Will you have it soon?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Domenico said quietly. ‘Carlo wants us to wait until you are in your last year at university, Toria. He feels you should finish your degree course and then train as an accountant. One day you will inherit your family company and it is important that you are prepared for that.’

‘Oh, but I don’t want to wait so long, I want to get married right away.’

‘Of course she does! It’s not natural, getting engaged and then waiting a whole year!’

‘Carlo won’t hear of you giving up your degree course,’ Dominico told Vittoria.

‘But I can go back to college after we’re married.’

‘The university faculty frowns on married women taking degrees, and if we were married it would be very hard for you to concentrate on your studies – and hard for me, too, to let you go away for months at a time.’

He smiled at her, his mysterious dark eyes glowing. ‘No, we must wait, Toria. It will be hard, for both of us, but we have our whole lives in front of us. There is plenty of time.’

She returned to Milan a week later to get ready for her first term at university. Carlo was delighted with her engagement.

‘Do we have to wait, Carlo? If we got married at once I could go to America with Domenico and start university in California.’

Her brother looked surprised. ‘I suggested that to Domenico, but he felt it would be too much of a distraction for you both. If you got pregnant you would never finish your degree. I told him you must get some qualifications. If you’re going to run the firm you have to know what you’re doing. You could get a manager, but how could you be sure you could trust him? It was a relief to me that Domenico agreed with me and was ready to wait.’

She ached with frustration, poured all her passion out on paper every day. Domenico wrote less frequently. His were not long letters: like Olivia he was a poor correspondent, but he filled his pages with tiny pen and ink drawings of things he had seen during the day, some funny, some fascinating, some sad. He had an eye for the strange, the weird, the pathetic and Vittoria read and re-read those letters every day. They made her feel close to him, although he was back in the States where he was joined by his sister.

Suddenly Olivia wrote to announce that she was getting married. Vittoria was sick with envy but at least the news meant that Domenico was coming back to Italy for a few weeks. In the spring of 1952 Olivia married her American, Greg, with a long and magnificent nuptial mass. Vittoria was her bridesmaid. The wedding breakfast was held at Ca’d’Angeli and many of their schoolfriends were invited. The only one who did not come was Gina, who was working abroad.

Curious, Vittoria asked, ‘What job is she doing?’

‘She’s on a year’s scholarship, at an art school in the States.’

‘Really? I thought she would go into her family business. Did Domenico help her get the scholarship?’

‘He wrote her a reference, I think. Oh, I’m going to miss you. But I’ll come back to be your matron-of-honour. And you must write to me! You know me, I hate writing letters, but I’ll drop you a postcard every week, I promise.’

She and her husband were going to live in Chicago. The Murphy family had given up the palazzo they had been renting and had returned home. Greg was working in the family firm, learning the business he would one day inherit.

Domenico was sailing back to the States on the same boat as his sister and her husband so Vittoria saw little of him during that spring holiday and when she did he seemed distant and cold. She tried to talk to him about how she felt, to say what was burning inside her, that she loved him and needed him now, not in a year, that she wanted him to make love to her, but he always changed the subject before she got the words out, as if he guessed what she was going to say and was determined she shouldn’t.

Then he was gone and she was back in Milan, working hard but intensely depressed. Did he regret having proposed? Didn’t he want to marry her? Did he love her?

In her next letter she asked him to name the day. Shouldn’t they be planning the wedding? Rachele kept reminding her that there were masses of things to do: they had to book the church, plan the wedding breakfast, make lists of guests, send out invitations. But first they needed to know the date. It would take months to set everything up here in Milan.

‘I’ll let you know soon,’ he wrote back. ‘I promise. I can’t be certain yet when I shall get back from here.’ He filled up the rest of the page with drawings of a beach – girls in bikinis, men with huge chests, children digging in sand. Funny, lively, charming.

Vittoria didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That winter Carlo and Rachele were driving home from the opera when their car skidded on ice and crashed. Rachele was killed outright. Carlo had head injuries and a broken shoulder.

Domenico flew home the day before Rachele’s funeral and held Vittoria while she sobbed into his shirt. She was relieved he had come, inexpressibly glad to see him, yet she had, too, a strong sense of foreboding. Her instincts kept telling her that something was wrong, but she didn’t know what it was.

‘How’s Carlo?’ he asked, lightly kissing her hair.

‘They won’t tell me. They keep saying it’s too soon to know if he’ll ever be the same. He just lies there, his head all bandaged, so white and still. He’s out of the coma but he doesn’t react when you speak to him. He just lies there, hour after hour, not moving.’

‘I’ll come to the hospital tomorrow, see for myself. It sounds like shock to me. You’d expect it, wouldn’t you? He knows Rachele is dead, does he?’

‘I told him. He just lay there as if he was deaf, staring at the wall.’

‘I expect he already knew. Didn’t you say she was killed in the crash? He must have realised she was dead.’

‘Do you think he blames himself? But it wasn’t his fault. The crash was an accident. There was ice on the road. Rachele couldn’t control the car when it went into a skid.’

‘Poor Carlo. He’s had very little luck.’

When they went to the hospital, after the funeral, Carlo was limp, white, silent, but there were glistening tracks down his face where he had cried.

As Domenico drove her home he said, ‘He knew. That the funeral was today. He may not react but he’s conscious of what is going on around him. The specialist told me he’s not too confident about the prognosis. Carlo doesn’t have any real future, long term.’

‘You mean he’s going to die?’ She knew her voice sounded raw, as if torn out of her. Domenico glanced at her sideways and sighed. ‘I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, darling, but somebody had to. The doctors weren’t sure for a while, but now they are. Carlo isn’t going to live beyond a year. We must get a specialist nurse for him. But, more than that, he’ll need you, Toria. His physical needs are easy. It’s the emotional side we have to deal with. We must put off our marriage. I can’t ask you to marry me and walk away from your dying brother. That would be too cruel.’

Vittoria was rigid with despair. Time stretched ahead, bleak and grey and empty. But she didn’t argue. There was no point. Domenico had made up his mind. In some ways he was as obstinate and immovable as her father, and she was afraid of losing him. Her instincts told her he was looking for a way out of their marriage; she mustn’t give him the chance. She had to hang on, by this tiny thread that still bound them together. She wasn’t letting go of him. She never would.

Her life became a ceaseless round of work and anxiety. She couldn’t have managed without Antonio. They employed a nurse for a while but Carlo disliked her; he couldn’t speak but he made his feelings clear enough, growling in his throat like a dog whenever he set eyes on her, and glaring at her. After a month she gave notice, and when she had gone Antonio did most of the physical work involved in caring for Carlo. He lifted him in and out of bed, washed him, dressed him, fed him, unless Vittoria was at home when she took over, and kept him in touch with whatever was happening at the factory, in the offices. God alone knew if he understood it all, but she felt he listened keenly. He blinked replies. One blink for yes. Two for no. Three meant, I don’t understand, explain. It took an age to communicate in blinks and long pauses but she often needed Carlo’s advice before she made a decision concerning the firm.

She was working long hours every day, continuing with her university course, sandwiching her studies between working at the company in Carlo’s role. Normally, she did a morning at the college, had a quick lunch then spent the rest of the day at the firm. Exhausted, pale, at the end of her tether, she would return to the house each evening. Antonio would meet her at the front door and make her sit down. Then he knelt, took off her shoes and massaged her hot, throbbing feet. He gave her a glass of wine, then left her relaxing while he got her meal – melon and Parma ham, soup or bruschetta, heaped with roast peppers or tomatoes, then pasta or risotto or some fresh grilled fish.

While she ate he told her how her brother was, and asked how her day had gone. ‘Another glass of red wine, for your blood. You need it, you’re so pale,’ he would insist.

‘I shall get fat.’ She sighed, but drank the wine, although she wouldn’t have any dessert or coffee.

‘You’re too thin.’

‘They say a woman can never be too thin.’

‘Whoever said that wasn’t an Italian.’

‘It was that American woman, the Duchess of Windsor.’

He made a face. ‘Oh, her. She isn’t a woman at all. More like a man, with that hard, ugly face.’

They no longer talked like employer and servant, they were friends. He knew her better, was closer to her, than any other friend she had ever had, including Olivia.

After she swayed one evening and fell downstairs out of utter exhaustion, Antonio got into the habit of coming upstairs with her, his arm around her to support her. They would go into Carlo’s bedroom and if he was awake, as he often was, drifting in and out of consciousness, day and night, she would talk to her brother for a little while, then she would go to her own room. Once she was so tired that she collapsed on her bed fully dressed and slept there all night. After that Antonio insisted on helping her change into her nightdress. He would lift her between the sheets before turning out the light and leaving her to sleep. At first she had protested, been embarrassed, but when you were almost dead with weariness such intimacies no longer seemed to matter.