The Villa Triste (3 page)

If he heard the insult, he was gentleman enough to ignore it. Instead, he smiled again and said, ‘Then he matched his good taste and courage in choosing someone as beautiful as you.’

I blushed, feeling as badly as I am sure he intended me to. And probably as I deserved.

Massimo had extravagantly lashed rather pale eyes. Just then, they flicked away from me, over my shoulder, to Isabella who was coming down the stairs.

‘Hello,’ she said, and Massimo’s charm, so evident moments before, deserted him. Looking at her, he was simply tongue-tied.

Issa shrugged into her coat, although the night was warm.

‘I won’t be late,’ she told me, although I hadn’t asked. Then she slipped past Massimo and down the steps, and they were gone.

Later, as I dried the dishes, Emmelina whispered to me that she had heard the city prisons had been opened. Cut-throats and murderers, she said, were on the streets. Prisoners of war and who knew who else. It was, she assured me, impossible to buy a lock, or even a piece of chain or stout rope. There were none left in the shops. In all likelihood we would not have to worry about the Germans because we would all be slaughtered in our beds well before they arrived. She hoped I was going to lock my door and windows. As she left for home an hour later, I saw what I recognized as the tip of one of our bread knives sticking out of the folds of her big black coat.

I didn’t put much stock in the story – although it turned out to be perfectly true – if only because it was the sort of thing Emmelina loved. She had been working for us since shortly after Enrico’s eighth birthday when I was five.

Every afternoon, Emmelina had collected us from school, and entertained us while walking home with some dire tale or other, usually featuring automobile accidents or train wrecks. It was Emmelina who had invariably bandaged my scraped knees when Enrico pushed me over. Who had sat with me over countless cups of hot milk at the kitchen table while I related to her all the adventures and dramas of my days.

After she had gone that night, I felt suddenly bereft. Papa was in his study. I knew I could interrupt him, but I had nothing, really, to say. And he would be getting ready for a lecture. I went upstairs instead to check on Mama. The door to my parents’ room was ajar, the lamp on the bedside table on. My mother was curled on the bed asleep, the picture of Enrico she kept on her dressing table beside her on the pillow.

Mama’s grandfather had made a fortune in mining. Marrying our father had been considered a romantic concession to love, but one she could afford. We had a gardener who came twice a week, and a man who helped with the car. When Rico and Issa and I were very small there had been a nanny, who had eventually been replaced by Emmelina. Until not long ago there had been a live-in maid. Now, with Enrico in the army, me at the hospital, and Papa and Issa at the University all day, the phalanx of people who had surrounded my mother had dwindled. On most mornings, she was left alone until Emmelina came just before lunchtime.

I don’t know if I considered whether or not she was lonely, but I had noticed that she had developed the habit, when she thought no one was watching, of running the tips of her fingers over the surfaces of our furniture, as if she could read their history like braille. A desk that had belonged to my great-uncle. The chair that my grandfather had been sitting in when he died. It occurred to me that when we were gone she must drift through the too-big house, picking up traces of ghosts and playing the piano while she waited for the day to unravel.

My mother was not an unkind woman; she was not even what could be described as ‘cold’. It was simply that she had made it clear, from the time we were very small, that she had a single reservoir of love, and that it belonged to Enrico. I don’t know what my father felt about that, other than a vague sort of sadness, but Issa seemed to have decided some time ago that she did not care. I was not so lucky, not so good as my sister at being impervious. I reached for the blanket folded at the end of the bed and slid it over my mother, gently tucking it in at her shoulder.

Downstairs, I wandered into the sitting room and picked up the telephone again, imagining that somehow I would hear Lodo’s voice. That he would tell me to put on my best dress because we were going dancing. Or say that he’d call for me in half an hour so we could walk down to the bridges and watch the lights on the river. This time, however, not only was there no voice – no promise of dancing or kisses in the dark – there was not even a reassuring hum or click. There was nothing on the line at all. Just silence. We had been cut off.

I replaced the receiver carefully, suddenly afraid of making a sound. Through the glass doors, I could see the empty terrace and beyond the balustrade, the city below. Crouched in its valley, it looked like a huge animal holding its breath.

I slept badly, heard Isabella creep along the hall some time after midnight, and left early for the hospital the next morning. Despite my fractured dreams – filled with the sound of cars, and Lodo’s voice mingling with my father’s and Massimo’s – I was glad to be back in my uniform and out in the new light. I cycled fast, allowing myself the fantasy that perhaps the Germans would simply decide to go somewhere else. Or that the landing at Ostia, or even Livorno, would happen today and it would be the Allies instead who came marching down the Lungarno bestowing cigarettes and chocolate cake.

The illusion was pleasant but fleeting. When I arrived, I found the ward I had been assigned to in chaos. Explaining anything to junior nurses was not a priority at the best of times, and it took me almost half an hour to get someone to stop rushing about long enough to tell me what was going on.

Some time during the night it had been decided that we should make a complete inventory of everything – all supplies, medication, linens – and then pack away and hide as much as we could reasonably manage in the cellars, the isolation ward, even the morgue. A rumour was going around that the Germans, on taking control of Bologna and Verona, had requisitioned all hospital supplies and sent them to their own medics at the front. There were no swastikas hanging outside the Palazzo Vecchio yet, but the Director thought we had, at most, twelve hours. After dithering through yesterday, complete panic had broken out.

I spent the remainder of the day carrying boxes downstairs where they were being bricked into a wall which had been hastily torn down for the purpose. Picking my way through dust and rubble, I refrained from thinking about hygiene, or the lack of it, or the fact that any German would surely recognize a newly bricked wall when he saw one. The decision had been made, and we slaved like worker ants. By the time I left, I was so tired I could barely cycle home. The heat had lingered. The sun was silver-pink on the river. People were loitering in the warm evening, just standing on the bridges, staring into the water or up at the hills, as if they were saying goodbye.

I wound through the Oltrarno, where I passed an abnormal number of people pushing carts and wheelbarrows laden with God knows what. Overnight, we had turned into a city of burrowers and hiders – victims of Requisition Fever. Even Papa had been infected. The night before, on one of the few occasions he had spoken after Mama left the table, he had announced that he was having the mechanic come to take the wheels off the car. It would be put up on blocks in the shed. Common wisdom said that if you wished to keep your car at all, this was the only way to do it. I wondered if Massimo was busy doing the same thing at this very moment. Personally, I thought the Germans might find an entire city of wheelless cars somewhat suspicious. It also occurred to me that if Lodo was still alive and somehow managed to appear at the appointed time and hour, I would probably have to walk to my wedding. Or sit on the handlebars of Papa’s bicycle.

I turned up by Santa Felicita and saw that the side gates to the Boboli Gardens were open. I was half tempted to stop and go in, to see if there were digging parties interring knives and forks and pots and pans and whatever else they could manage under shrubs and in the grottoes the same way we had bricked our precious supplies into the cellar walls. But I was too tired and too dirty. My uniform was covered in dust. I could feel grime in my shoes. Even the pins in my hair felt dirty. I made my way out through the Romana Gate. Then my legs failed me. At the bottom of our hill, I got off and trudged, pushing my bike.

I don’t know what it was that made me stop on the hill and look up at the house. But the moment I did, I knew something was different. Even here, higher up where there was often a breeze, it was stifling. The heat pressed down like a broad, heavy hand and in the thick evening light our house seemed to waver like a mirage. The ochre tiles on the roof looked soft, as if they were melting. I half expected to see streaks, long and dull red, on the greying plaster. The gate to the drive was closed, which was odd. Behind it, the huge grey-green pine tree, its boughs dripping towards the lawn, looked as if it were swaying, although the air was perfectly still.

At first, I thought it was exhaustion – that I was so tired I could not keep the world still around me any more but was instead watching it simply melt away. Then I realized my heart was running too fast. It was beating inside my chest, flailing its fists like something trying to get out.

I almost dropped my bike in the street. When I did get to the gate, I was in such a hurry to undo the latch, my hands suddenly all thumbs, that I left my bicycle propped against the stone column and heard rather than felt myself running up the drive. I must have looked wild, with my eyes wide and my mouth gaping, when I burst through the front door and then into the sitting room and saw them all standing there. Mama, Papa, Issa, and Enrico.

I don’t remember what I said, if anything. All I remember is the feel of Rico’s arms, and the smell of his shirt, of mothballs and soap. I remember him lifting me off my feet and swinging me around, the way he did when we were children and he used to tease me about who was stronger.

‘You’re not dead. You’re not dead!’

I do remember, idiotically, that I said that.

And I remember that Rico laughed, and finally put me down and said, ‘No, I’m not dead.’ And that that was when I looked around and realized there was someone else in the room, a tall blond boy I didn’t know.

My hand went to my hair. Suddenly embarrassed, I was aware of my grubby uniform, my armband that had slipped.

‘Cati,’ Enrico said, ‘this is my friend and fellow officer, Carlo Peralta. Carlo, my other sister, Caterina.’

‘How do you do?’

He was a good head taller than I, and, even in what I realized were a set of my brother’s old clothes that were far too short for him at the ankles and wrists, quite simply one of the handsomest men I had ever seen. People say this all the time, but Carlo truly did look as if he had been sculpted by the hand of God. His hair was almost as blond as Isabella’s. The features of his face were clear and strong without being hard. His smile was quick and generous, and in the shadowed light of the sitting room, I could see that his eyes were hazel, almost gold, like a cat’s eyes. I dropped his hand abruptly, and turned towards Rico.

‘But how did you get here?’ I asked. ‘What happened? When did you arrive?’

Papa put his arm around Rico’s shoulders; together they looked like a younger and older version of the same person. Isabella, who was unusually quiet, was loitering by the terrace doors.

‘Supper,’ Mama said. Which was not an answer to my question. She smiled, reached out and touched the side of Enrico’s face, brushing his cheek with the tips of her fingers as if she could not quite believe he was real. ‘I must get the supper.’

As she said it, I looked through the archway into the dining room, and noticed that something was wrong. The table was not set; there was no noise, and no smell of cooking, coming from the kitchen beyond.

‘Where is Emmelina?’

‘I told her not to come.’ My mother answered without taking her eyes off Enrico’s face, as if she was afraid that if she stopped looking at him he would vanish.

‘We thought it better.’ My father looked at me, saying something with his eyes that I didn’t understand. ‘Now, who would like a drink?’ He clapped his hands. ‘There’s something still, I’m sure, in the bar!’

‘I’ll get the food. Everything’s cold,’ Isabella muttered.

I followed her, waiting until the door was shut and we were out of earshot before I asked, ‘Issa, what’s going on? How did they get here? Where’s Emmelina?’

‘I went round this afternoon and told her we wouldn’t need her for a bit. I said Mama had flu and she shouldn’t come in case she caught it.’ Issa didn’t look at me as she spoke.

‘What?’

I could barely remember a time when Emmelina had not been in the house. She even came in at Easter. The idea that she would not nurse my mother, or any of us, if we really were sick, was absurd.

‘Why?’ I asked.

Mama could barely boil an egg, and Issa was not much better. Apart from anything else, the reality of this arrangement meant that preparing meals would be left to me.

‘Issa!’ I protested.