Peace Work (31 page)

Arriving back home, Signora Fontana looks at her watch: ‘Mama mia’, look at the time, she has to get up early for work. So, with a chorus
oibuona nottes
we retire for the night.

Alas, we collide a little later when we all try to use the loo. Flushes and blushes. I lie in bed going over the evening – how nice this all was, I would certainly miss it.

What was this new terraced house my parents had moved into in delightful Deptford like? Did it have a coke boiler and baths every Friday night? Did my father still wear long underwear in one piece that he shed like a butterfly emerging? Could his socks still stand up on their own? With these fond memories, I fell asleep.

∗

A new dawn, a new day, the same old me. I awake to catch Toni emerging from the bath, wrapped in a towel. Temptation at this time of the morning: she looks glowing. I grab her and kiss her – holding her up so her feet leave the ground, only to drop her at the approach of Gioia who will
have
to be killed.

Toni has arranged for us to have our photo taken by ‘Very good photograph man, best in Rome’. Go on, say it, and the most expensive!! I remember the great days when my roll of money was 72,000 lire – now it’s down to 30,000, just a ghost of itself! The photographer’s trade name is Luxardo; his real name is II Conto Julio Di Sacco. He is of noble blood and six foot tall – so good-looking, it hurts. He speaks flawless English, has been to Caius College, Cambridge, wears a dazzling white shirt and trousers and a black silk neckerchief and is as queer as a coot.

“Good morning,” he says. “Let’s see, it’s,” he looks up his leather appointments book, “Mr and Mrs Fontana.” Wrong. Mr Milligan and Miss Fontana. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

From his posh front office, we enter his studio: very large, a mass of equipment and lights and a young boy. “This is Francesco, my assistant.” And queer as a coot. Would we like to sit on this couch? He stands behind a large wooden box camera, talks rapidly in Italian to the lad who is putting a plate in. The Count comes forward and arranges us with our heads together. He’s different, he
doesn’t
want us to say cheese, he doesn’t take pictures of those unending grinning idiots that plague the world of photography. “I want you both to look serious.” He pauses for a look through the lens. “Are you both in love?” Yes, I’m both in love. “Good, then you think that when I say ready.” He takes a giant stride ‘twixt us and the camera, very much like Jacques Tati. Finally, he settles. “Ready? In love, hold it.” Hold what? A light flashes. “Very good,” he says to himself. “Now I’m going to take you individually. Miss Fontana, then.” He giantstrides towards her and places her hand under her chin. “Like that, very good.” He giantstrides back, lights a cigarette, tosses his head back to eject the smoke and aims through the lens.

“Think nice things,” he says. The flash of light, then it’s my turn. Please, God, can he make me look like Robert Taylor. “No, don’t look at the camera, Mr Milligan, just to the right. Think nice things.” I think of my nice things – a flash and it’s all over. “They’ll be ready day after tomorrow.” With great courtesy, he bows us out.

Toni and I decide to walk for a while. We are on the Via Tritoni, right in the heart of the city – well, actually, more in the kidneys. Toni eulogizes about how handsome the Count was. “He very good-looking man.” Not quite, Toni, a very good-looking
it
. Am I sure? Positive. No! Yes!! We have a nice, long, lazy walk and eventually end up at the Fonte di Trevi, its gushing waters giving a scene of cool relief in the hot atmosphere of the city. “We must throw in money and make wish,” says Miss Fontana. I peel off a thousand lira note as though to throw in. “No, no,” she takes some small change from her handbag and gives me a coin. “We throw together.” She smiles. We watch our coins slither to the bottom. “Make wish now,” she says. What I wished for, I can’t remember. I wonder what, in those distant days, it was…I wonder, too, what Toni wished for and did it come true?…

It’s time for a coffee, etc. We find a small café, etc. and sit outside. It’s a delightful day; it seems that Rome has endless sunny days that pass by almost unnoticed, etc.

Here my diary suddenly stops. All it says is ‘Measured for a suit!’ I remember this was done at the prompting of Toni, who knows a ‘good, cheap tailor!’. He has a shop on the ground floor of the Teatro Marcello. Inside it’s small and dark,
he
is small and dark. He smiles, he has small dark teeth. All the time he nods his head as if the neck is loose. Oh, yes, he can have the suit ready in three days
if
‘we pay a small service charge. I choose a cloth but Toni doesn’t like it. Has she something against purple and yellow check? I’ll be the talk of Deptford. ‘There he goes,’ they’d say, or ‘Here he comes,’ depending on which direction I was going. No, no, no! She chooses a dark cloth, with a faint stripe.

“Theese more elegant, Terr-ee,” says the little devil. Of course, I say yes. If she asked me to wear a transparent loin cloth, gumboots and a revolving hat, I’d have agreed. Standing on a chair, he measures me. Inside leg, which side does the
signore
dress? Near the window, I told him. He takes my chest measurement twice. He doesn’t believe it the first time. Do I like padding? Oh, yes. Where? Everywhere. Do I like wide bottoms? On some women, yes, Boom Boom.

∗

So, dear reader, we come to my two blank days. However, on 23 September my diary continues. “Lazy day, went to Parco Botanico. Lunch in park. Carriage drive back home. Madam Butterfly in evening, awful singing. Toni tells me organized by black marketeers, claque in evidence.”

Yes,
Madam Butterfly
was at the Rome Royal Opera House. Toni has two free tickets that her mother had given to her by a customer at the CIT travel agency. What a treat to look forward to! But it was a night of suppressed hysterical laughter. The whole opera was financed and cast by black marketeers. I couldn’t believe it. When first I saw Madam Butterfly, she was
huge
, with a heaving bosom. I thought, out of this frame will come a most powerful voice. When she opened her mouth to sing, you could hardly hear anything. To accentuate the shortcoming, she overacted, throwing her arms in the air, clasping her hands together, falling on her knees with a groan, running across the stage with loud, thudding feet – all to thunderous applause from an obvious claque. Then we wait for Lieutenant Pinkerton: my God, he’s half her size! He can’t be more than five foot five inches and so thin that when he stood behind her, he vanished. He has a piercing tenor voice, high up in the nose, with a tremendous wobbly
vibrato
that fluctuates above and below the real note. He is obviously wearing lifts in his shoes that make him bend forward from the ankles as though walking in the teeth of a gale. If that isn’t all bad enough, he is wearing what must be the worst toupee I’ve seen. It appears to be nailed down, the front coming too far forward on the forehead with a slight curl all round where it joins his hair.

Trying to laugh silently, I’m almost doubled up in pain. All around me are Mafia-like creatures – one wrong move and I’ll be knifed. So be it, no comedy could exceed this. We notice that when Pinkerton tries for a high note, he shoots up on his toes, putting him at an even more alarming angle. When he and she embrace, she envelopes him completely, his little red face appearing above her massive arms as though he’s been decapitated. I’m carried on the tide of enthusiasm. When the claque jump up applauding, so do I. “
Bravo, encore!
” I shout. It was a night I can never forget.

At the little restaurant after the show, I keep breaking into fits of laughter as I recall it all. Toni is split down the middle, both halves being equal to the whole. She’s ashamed that something so bad should go on at the Royal Opera House. “
Disgrazia
,” she says, but continues to laugh through it.

I remember that, as we sat outside eating, for no reason it started to rain. We retreat inside while a waiter rescues our food. The waiter is amusing; he apologizes for the rain and says even though some has settled on the food, there’ll be no extra charge.

Seated inside, Toni suddenly says to me, “You know, in two day you leave me.”

My mood changed, was it that soon? I was so impervious to days that each one came as a shock. Why wasn’t time timeless?

“Toni,” I said, “I’ll come back as soon as I can and I’ll write as much as I can.”

That’s followed by us just looking at each other in silence.

“I miss you very much, Terr-ee.”

She looks so small and helpless;
I feel
so small and helpless.

“I tell you what, we have some champagne, yes?”

She pauses reflectively. “OK,” she says.

The restaurant hasn’t any champagne. “
Tedeschi hanno bevuto tulto
,” says the waiter. Would we like Asti Spumante? Yes, when in Rome.

When midnight strikes in some campanile, we toast each other. We’d done it so often before, but this time it’s a little more meaningful – our sand is running out. In the taxi back, I sit with my arm around her, her head on my shoulder (sounds like a transplant). I hum her favourite tune, ‘La Valzer di Candele’…We tiptoe into the apartment and I instinctively wait for my mother’s voice, “Where have you been at this time of night.” No, it’s Signora Fontana asking is that Toni. Yes, so goodnight.

∗

The day is suit-fitting day. When we arrive at the tailor’s, a man is leaving wearing a terrible suit that appears to have been made by a blind man. No, no, no, says the little tailor, he didn’t make that. It’s only his father-in-law visiting to collect the alimony. My suit is all ready on a hanger. Will I step into the cubicle and change? The suit is a great success; I can’t wait to get outside for a photograph.

Oh, yes, this is a Robert Taylor suit. Quick! I must be seen walking about the town. What’s the best street? Ah, yes, driver, the Via Veneto and step on it. When we arrive it’s midday and the morning promenade is coming to an end. Nevertheless Toni and I and the suit walk up and down, then down and up. Toni and I and the suit sit at a restaurant and Toni and I and my suit have an ice-cream. All Rome must be talking about me. My suit is now smoking a cigarette. Toni is totally bemused: is this a man or a little boy she’s going out with, or is it a suit? If only they could see me in Brockley now, standing outside the Rialto Cinema waiting for Lily Dunford. My picture would be in the
Kent Messenger
.

By mid-afternoon I think Rome has seen enough of the suit, so we return to the apartment. Gioia opens the door to my suit,
she doesn’t seem to notice it’AW
She’ll
have
to be killed. I have a good reason to take my suit off: Gioia has to go out shopping. It’s the last chance of Toni and I being alone. I draw Miss Toni’s attention to this by making her take her clothes off and getting into bed, where we foreclose on the world. There if a Father Christmas. He was early this year. However, though it was divine making love to her, it lost a bit by Toni breathlessly telling me all the time to ‘hurry up’ as Gioia was due back. I did my best, finishing in under twenty-three minutes – beating Gioia by five and my own record by ten. With Gioia fiddling at the door with the keys, I rush madly back to my room, just slamming the door on my bare bum in time. Worn out by pressurized love-making, I have a siesta. It’s a warm afternoon but nice and cool in the room. I can hear Gioia clinking and clanking in the kitchen…

I awake in the evening to the sounds of Signora Fontana and Lily talking. As this is my last evening here, they want me to have dinner ‘a casa’. They know my love of pasta and have prepared spaghetti Neapolitan. Toni wants her mother to see ‘the suit’, so I put it on and do an ‘entrance’ into the sitting-room. Oh, yes, her mother thinks it’s very smart. But should the flies be undone? Oh, dear. Today is Signora Fontana’s wedding anniversary. She shows me a photo album: that’s her as a young woman on holiday with her mother and father in Savona. Did I know her mother was French? No? Well, I did now. I see grinning photos, from her mother-in-law grinning in Ravenna to her husband grinning outside his soap factory in Abyssinia in 1936. It was possibly one of the best records of grinning I had seen.

We dine to a mixed conversation about the world: things aren’t getting any better. I agree, I know my thing isn’t getting any better. Shoes are very expensive, “
Troppo caro
,” says Signora Fontana. Has she thought of bare feet? They must be economical. The Communist leader Togliatti is a very dangerous man. “He want revolution in Italy,” says Toni. So a ragbag of conversation. Gradually, I’m left out of it altogether as they all jabber heatedly in Italian. As the conversation swung from Toni at one end and her mother at the other, I must have looked like a spectator at a tennis match. I call out the score: “Fifteen, love…thirty, fifteen…” They ignore me, but it’s fun.

Dinner over, they listen to the news in Italian on the radio as I sip a glass of white wine. After the news comes Italy’s premier dance band led by Angelini. Lily wants to know if I can ‘jitter bugger’. Try me. We move back the chairs a little and Lily and I ‘cut a rug’. She’s very good, I am not. Toni and Mother watch on with amusement. Gioia looks on in amazement. The phone rings, Lily hurls herself at it: it’s
him!
She is running her finger up and down the wall. The evening ends with us playing snap. How delightfully simple it was, the simplest of all was me…

∗

Comes the morning of my final departure. I put on my CSE uniform for the journey, then comes amnesia, folks. I remember that I made the return journey by military lorry, a three-tonner returning empty to a depot in Salerno – but as to why and how I managed to get a lift on it, I can’t remember. I’ve racked my brains, I’ve even racked my body and legs, but to no avail. Anyhow. There I was, saying goodbye to the Fontanas: they all cry, even Gioia, the maid. So with one suitcase and a much-reduced bankroll, I depart.