Deep and Silent Waters (22 page)

It was so cold that she was wearing a woollen vest under her black dress and two thick cardigans over it. They still used open fires to heat the great, barn-like rooms because they’d been advised that central heating could cause serious damage: it would dry out the medieval wood, opening great fissures, and might make the marble crack.

In weather like this the only way she could keep warm in the evenings was to sit hunched over the fire with a rug over her knees. During daylight hours she kept busy, and there was always plenty to do, especially since Nico had insisted on letting Ca’ d’Angeli to Sebastian.

The Contessa and the servants had been hard at work from morning to night getting the house ready for the invasion. They were leaving the tapestries and furniture in place since Sebastian wanted the atmosphere of the palazzo to be intact during the filming, but everything breakable or particularly valuable had been hidden away upstairs in locked rooms or in a bank vault. The Contessa saw no reason why she should risk having one of her beloved possessions broken or stolen, however much the film company were paying and however good the insurance. Money would not compensate her for the loss of something she loved.

Most of the film people were staying in small hotels nearby, but Nico had invited Sebastian and Laura Erskine to stay with them, which was something else that was preying on the Contessa’s mind.

She was his mistress, obviously: the whole world believed it. Would they do it under her roof, in the bedroom Nico had picked out for the girl, overriding all protests, all pleas?

No, no, she must have that room, the best in the palazzo, the master bedroom, Nico had said. That red hair of hers would burn like a forest fire among the green and gold of the bed-hangings, the tapestries, the floor-length curtains.

The Contessa ground her teeth, a jagged, icy pain inside her, a pain that had been with her for many years. Was the anguish and humiliation never to end?

It had been her husband’s bedroom – but she had never shared it. She had been given another room, on the floor above. After Domenico died, she had moved into his room but after one freezing, sleepless night in it she had fled back to her own room and never tried to sleep in his again.

Outside the window, the wind howled like a wolf – if her own sense of dignity were not so great she would have howled, too. The patterns of her life kept on repeating, as if time was a record stuck on one note, shrieking it over and over again.

She was so cold: her breath froze on the air in front of her. Draughts blew under the heavy wooden doors, down the long, endless corridors, bringing her memories of other, even colder, lonelier winters.

Venice, 1942

The winter of 1942 had been terrible, not so much because of the weather as because they had little food or fuel to make it bearable. The Italian army was defeated in the battle of El Alamein, and people in the streets wept openly, for their sons, their brothers, and themselves. Grief was hard enough to bear, but hunger made it worse, especially when they were always cold. People burned anything they could find: trees, shrubs, driftwood, old shoes, the wood from attic floors, books. Beds were piled with coats, and to save fuel everyone retired early, kept warm like moles, by tunnelling through the bedclothes with shutters closed over the windows.

Carlo slept downstairs so that he could be wheeled out of his bedroom to the kitchen, where he insisted now on working, preparing vegetables, cooking, washing up.

By then they had only one servant, who had stayed on because she was too old to get work anywhere else. Leo Serrati had been furious when Carlo first suggested that he worked in the kitchen.

‘My son will not be a servant in my own house.’

‘At least that way I can be useful.’

‘If you want to be useful, come and work in the factory for me.’

Carlo’s face took on that grim, mutinous look, which signalled one of his angry moods. ‘And have them all staring at me and whispering behind my back? You know how men despise cripples. They wouldn’t respect me – and they wouldn’t take orders from a man in a wheelchair.’ He stared at his father. ‘Would you, Papa?’

Leo went red and walked away without another word.

Carlo began work the next day. At first he was clumsy, kept breaking things, but slowly he got used to it, and soon he could be heard all over the house, singing Italian opera as he cooked.

Just before Christmas that year Anna collapsed with pneumonia and overwork. She was kept in hospital for several weeks, then sent home with orders to stay in bed until she was completely recovered.

The only servant they had left, old Agnese, nursed her, but had no time to do much else. Carlo couldn’t cope with a lively child as well as the other household jobs he was now doing, so it was decided to send Vittoria to Venice to stay with her mother’s aunt, an old woman of seventy who lived in a small house in the maze of streets behind San Marco.

‘I don’t want to go away! I want to stay at home with Mamma,’ Vittoria sobbed.

Carlo patted her heaving shoulders roughly. ‘We all have to put up with the way things are. Mamma is sick, she needs a rest. Be a brave girl and stop crying. Tears do no good. When Mamma’s better, we’ll send for you.’

The journey by train was long and frightening. Vittoria travelled with a neighbour, Signora Rossi, who was visiting her daughter whose husband had just been killed in North Africa, leaving her with two children and another on the way. They had to be up at dawn and the station platform was packed with people. The train was hours late, and when it finally set off it jerked and dawdled through the countryside, the compartments crowded with soldiers and sailors, who drank cheap wine from bottles they passed around, laughing, shouting, growing ever noisier the more they drank. Signora Rossi became tight-lipped and angry. Even the corridors were full of people standing up, crammed together like sardines.

Vittoria was crushed into a corner of a compartment beside Signora Rossi, who had achieved a seat by pulling a young man out of it, glaring ferociously at the other people, daring them to say anything. At intervals she fed Vittoria furtive titbits of unappetising food produced from a large carpet bag while the other passengers watched hungrily.

‘Like seagulls at a picnic,’ muttered Signora Rossi, in Vittoria’s ear. Vittoria was too unhappy to eat, especially under those fixed, ravenous stares. If the other people had been seagulls she would have thrown her food to them just to get rid of it and stop them watching her. But she was afraid of Signora Rossi.

When, at last, the train drew into the nineteenth-century railway station of Santa Lucia, it was dark. They could see nothing of Venice but the outline of a huddle of roofs pierced here and there with spires.

Vittoria’s name had been pinned to her coat, printed on a luggage label, but Signora Rossi felt she had to stay with her. She danced from one foot to the other, eager to go to her daughter, yet duty-bound to look after the child. The noisy, echoing railway terminal filled and emptied with people as trains arrived and left, while the Signora impatiently watched the clock over their heads.

At last a young girl ran towards them, panting, red, out of breath, staring at Vittoria and trying to read her label. ‘Are you the little girl? From Milan? Oh, thank heavens – I thought I might have missed you, and then the Signora would have killed me.’ She looked apologetically at Signora Rossi. ‘I’m sorry, I left in good time but I didn’t know the way and kept taking wrong turnings.’

‘Have you some proof that you have come from the little girl’s family?’ demanded Signora Rossi, still holding Vittoria’s shoulder as if expecting to have to fight for her.

The girl pulled a large card out of her coat pocket, with Vittoria’s name printed on it. ‘I’m Rosa Bonacci. I work for Signora Bari – she sent me, she’s very old, you know. She lives just off the Frezzeria and she cannot walk this far.’

Signora Rossi bent down and kissed Vittoria. ‘Be good, do whatever your aunt tells you. I’m sure you will soon see your mother.’

As she was taken away Vittoria began to cry silently, with Rosa clutching her hand tightly to make sure she didn’t get lost.

‘Don’t cry,
la Signora
is very kind and I’ll look after you. But don’t cry, because we have to hurry, to get in before the curfew.’ Rosa squeezed her hand comfortingly, but Vittoria went on crying. She was so tired she could scarcely walk, her head ached, she wanted her mother, and her own home. She was afraid she would never see either of them again.

An hour later, after a bowl of hot onion soup and a chunk of new-made bread, she was tucked up in a narrow little bed, with a heavy old quilt piled over her, Her stomach full, her body warm, sheer weariness made sure she slept soundly all night.

Next morning she had her first, dazzling glimpse of Venice by winter sunlight when Rosa took her out to a street-market to buy whatever they could find.

Carlo had told Vittoria that Venice was a city of water and reflections, of canals instead of roads, of ancient houses and churches, a magic city, she would love it – but how could she have imagined what she saw that first time? Silvery herring skies, slate-blue roofs, crumbling, fading pink brick, a watery sun mirrored in the winding canals, the forest of black poles at which gondolas were tied up, bobbing on the water. Vittoria remembered the fairy story her mother had often read her: she felt like the little girl who was flung into a well and came out in another country down below the water, a country so beautiful she wanted to stay there for ever.

While Rosa bought onions, cheese and oranges, Vittoria wandered around the square in which the market had sprung up overnight: green-canvas-topped stalls with green baize under the fruit and vegetables. She paused to stare at heaps of nuts on one stall and tears came into her eyes. To her nuts meant Christmas, and Christmas meant home – and Mamma.

Sobbing, she turned away, only to freeze in shock at the sight of grey German uniforms. Two soldiers in peaked caps, guns on their hips, were strolling across the square, pausing now and then to eye the market produce. They bought lemons and oranges, a bottle of wine, and walked off laughing, their German voices making everyone turn to stare.

Vittoria ran back to Rosa, tugged at her skirt, pointing. ‘Rosa, look! German soldiers!’

Rosa was calm. ‘Don’t be scared. They come here for a holiday. We aren’t at war with them, you know. And they have lots of money. Now that the English and the Americans can’t come we need German money more than ever.’

Aunt Maria was a quiet, gentle old woman, with thin, fine white hair, plaited on top of her head; her eyes were pale and dreamy, her brown skin wrinkled, weatherbeaten. ‘You will be safe here, child,’ she promised. ‘We had a bad time in the First World War – we were bombed then, and they sent the horses away to Rome—’

‘The horses?’

‘The four bronze horses of St Mark – you’ll see them above the central doorway of the cathedral but they’re not the originals. Those are safely hidden away inside.’

‘We stole them,’ said Rosa gleefully.

Vittoria stared at her. ‘What do you mean?’

Her aunt intervened. ‘Rosa means we seized them from Constantinople, centuries ago. That wasn’t stealing, the horses were prizes of war. But in this war I’m sure we’ll be safe. They’ve put up air-raid shelters everywhere, just in case …’

‘They look like little hats, all over St Mark’s Square,’ Rosa said.

‘But they will never be needed,’ Aunt Maria insisted. ‘After all, we aren’t a military target. Venice is too precious to be attacked.’

Vittoria’s life soon settled down into a busy, comfortable routine. Every morning Rosa got her up, gave her breakfast, of whatever they had, then walked her to the convent school a few streets away. Later, and for the first couple of months Rosa met her and walked her home but after that Vittoria was allowed to make her own way back.

They lived in a dark, narrow little street off the Frezzeria, a street that took its name from the
freccie
, the arrows, that had once been sold there in the Middle Ages.

Vittoria loved to wander at her leisure on her way home, gazing into the shops, breathing in the smell of herbs and spices from one, salty fish from another, new-baked bread from the next. Even in Venice, food was rationed, but people here seemed to eat better than they had in Milan since the war began. There was always plenty of sea-food: crabs and clams, squid, prawns, mussels, as well as every type of fish that swam in the sea beyond the lagoon. They ate plenty of game, too: hare, rabbit and wild birds from the marshes. Aunt Maria had taught Rosa to cook and expected Vittoria to eat whatever was put before her.

‘Hunger is the best sauce,’ she said, if Vittoria tried to refuse anything. ‘Think of our soldiers, dying for you. They would give anything for a plate of this squid in tomato and clam sauce.’

But Vittoria could not force down the squid. It tasted like scraps of the boots she wore on rainy days when the tide sloshed over from the canal and ran through the streets.

She quickly made friends at school – Gina, the daughter of a grocer who lived a few houses away, and Olivia, whose family lived in a great house on the Grand Canal to which Vittoria and Gina were never invited.

The girls dawdled on their way home, sometimes visited Gina’s family in their dark little apartment above the shop. Gina was two years older than Vittoria, and far more sophisticated. She was already a beauty, having inherited red hair and fine, pale skin from her mother, a Florentine who had once been head parlour-maid in a big, aristocratic house.

Signora Cavani doted on her only child and spent hours curling Gina’s hair, making her pretty clothes, showing her how to walk and sit down gracefully, sew neat, straight stitches and, most important of all, she said, how to speak Italian with the right accent. ‘We are not peasants!’ Signora Cavani would say. ‘We’re not like these shop-keepers, even if we live among them. You must keep up your standards, Gina. Act like a lady and people will treat you like one.’

Vittoria observed that Signora Cavani lived by the standards she preached: she treated Olivia with flattering warmth because Olivia came from an old-established Venetian family, but towards Vittoria she was coldly offhand, hostile. All that changed when she discovered that Vittoria’s family, although undoubtedly in trade, was also very wealthy.