The Villa Triste (7 page)

In the weeks that followed, I did not see much of my family. My new duties increasingly kept me late at the hospital, and demanded that I arrive early. I even began, on occasion, to stay through the night, sleeping in a chair in the staffroom, when I slept at all. Autumn deepened. The nights drew in, and seemed, when I was at home, to bring ghosts with them. They clustered in the rooms where I had grown up. Flocked under the old cedar tree and lingered by the shed. But mostly they seemed to stare at me through my mother’s eyes, as if they had come to dwell inside her.

She left me plates of food. Pieces of cheese. An apple with a silver knife beside it. A slice of ham on the increasingly frequent nights when I did not get back in time to cook dinner. When I did, she often sat at the kitchen table, watching, and smiled at me, her face wistful, her fine features faintly blurred, as if she were looking out from behind a mirror. The sensation was alien and unexpected, and made me feel so guilty that I began to fancy our roles had been suddenly reversed. That I was now the one who had never paid enough attention, never given enough love, and that my neglect had somehow left her prey to phantoms – allowed them to lure her into a strange cold place beyond the glass.

The sensation was deeply uncomfortable. Yet in some strange way, it drew us closer together. We never spoke of it again, but I became quite certain that – even though she had the luxury of knowing he was still alive – she kept Enrico close beside her in the same way that I kept Lodo. More than once, when we found ourselves alone, I had the mad thought that there were not two of us seated over breakfast, but four. That Mama and I were both sharing our toast and our thoughts, not only with each other, but with Lodo and Enrico, too. The angels who hovered at our right shoulders.

The children’s hospital was reopened in a borrowed villa. The arrangements were made quite quickly, largely thanks to the German command, who vacated one of the properties they had requisitioned in order to allow the children to move in. They were, by all accounts, exceptionally helpful, even volunteering to set up the makeshift wards, an act of generosity that left everyone involved feeling both grateful and confused.

By mid October the Italian ‘government in exile’ – in other words, the King and Badoglio who were hiding safely behind Allied lines in the south – had finally got round to stating the obvious and declaring that Italy was at war with Germany. We had resented the Germans and been afraid of them before, of their marching and their flags and their tanks. Now they became officially our enemies. What they might do terrified us. But they were also, on occasion, capable of such civility. Even outright kindness. It was hard, sometimes, to understand exactly what one felt about them.

At about this time, rumours began to seep out of Rome – stories of raids on the Jewish ghetto, of sealed trains travelling east. We believed them and didn’t believe them. We told ourselves that most of the German soldiers probably loved this war and Adolf Hitler no more than we did, and were just decent men trying to serve their country.

No such conflicting feelings, on the other hand, were aroused by our compatriots. Enrico had been exactly right in his prediction. The Fascists were not only back – they had returned bloated on triumphalism and bent on revenge, and were, if anything, more loathed and more loathsome than before. Certainly they were more dangerous.

It became clear that the German command had more or less turned the policing of Florence over to the forces of the Republic of Salo – or as we called it the Republichini, the little republic – and in particular, to one Mario Carita. No one knew much about him, at first. But as summer died and autumn dropped down, his black-shirted thugs, known as the Banda Carita, had begun to appear on the streets. Rumours travelled with them the way flies travel with corpses. There was a house on the Via Ugo Foscolo where it was said screams were heard at night. And another, on the Via Bolognese, which people began to call the Villa Triste.

At the end of the month, the weather broke. There was a chill at sunset. The thick honey light of late summer, the light of harvest and evening walks, vanished and was replaced by a succession of sharp, crystalline days. So sharp, that one morning, when I had got up very early, I realized that I would be quite cold cycling with just my thin coat over my uniform. It occurred to me, as I laced up my shoes, that I might borrow a coat of Issa’s, or ask Mama if she had an old one. But no one else in the house was stirring, so instead of waking them I tiptoed into Enrico’s room, just down the hall from mine, thinking I would take one of his old jackets. But when I opened the wardrobe, it was empty. There was nothing in it at all. Not even on the rack where his shoes and boots had been lined up. I stood for a moment, confused, trying to push back the now-familiar feeling that time was not running in an orderly progression, that instead it had got all mixed up and tipped me into a future where we no longer lived in this house, no longer even existed.

Telling myself that these fancies were one thing when there were shadows – I had always been afraid of the dark – but altogether too stupid for the morning, I turned to the bureau, and was more relieved than I should have been to find his box of shirt studs and cufflinks in his top drawer beside the silver-backed brushes that had been my parents’ twenty-first birthday present to him.

It was the night after that when I came home so late that there was not even a sliver of light showing through the chinks in the shutters. For the first time I could remember, the house was completely dark.

I left my bicycle in the shed and crept along the path as quietly as I could, turning my key in the front-door lock, and actually freezing, stopping dead when it clicked, as if I were a thief. Easing the door closed behind me, I slipped my shoes off, then turned and locked the door again. My stockings whispered on the tiles. I started towards the kitchen, thinking that, unappealing as the offerings left for me usually were, perhaps I was hungry.

I had my hand on the door when something stopped me. There was no sound I could make out, no change in the shadows. But nonetheless I stood there, absolutely convinced that someone was waiting for me in the darkness on the other side.

I could hear the faint huff of my breath, hear my heart beating. Or was it someone else’s?

My hand lowered slowly. I stepped backwards, shuffling on the cold floor in my stockinged feet. When I bumped into the edge of the dining-room table, the noise hung in the air.

Without thinking, I turned and darted across the hall. I grabbed the stair banister, no longer caring how much noise I made, and once in my room, turned the key in the lock and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering if I was losing my mind.

Finally, I stood up, went into my bathroom, and splashed water on my cheeks. When I looked in the mirror, I felt a pang of relief that Lodo was not actually standing beside me to witness the fear on my face. The thought made me smile. It wasn’t until I’d peeled off my uniform, and pulled a nightdress over my head and walked back into my room, that I noticed that the wardrobe door was ajar.

I stood for a moment, looking at it. Then I told myself not to be idiotic. Crossing the room, I yanked the door open and jumped backwards.

My wedding dress had been delivered and hung in my wardrobe on its padded and scented hanger, swaying gently, as if it were dancing to unheard music.

I heard about the train the next afternoon. By this time, it was impossible to tell where stories, bits of information, or rumours came from. They simply sprang up, travelled like seeds on the wind, and took root. This one had grown, and was even bearing fruit, before I became aware of it.

I was standing in an upper corridor, looking down over the hos-lucretia pital’s courtyard. The building had once been a convent, and the square at its centre was still ringed by a fine cloister and planted with brightly coloured beds. The patients loved them, but a few days earlier it had been decided that we could no longer afford the luxury of a garden. At least not for flowers. I was watching as the last rose bushes were lifted out and the soil was turned and tilled and made ready for the planting of potatoes. And cabbages. And beans. Food was getting more and more expensive. While flowers were good for the soul, it was becoming increasingly obvious that, regardless of when the Allies arrived or didn’t, we needed to survive the winter.

My thoughts were running aimlessly along these lines. I was considering carrots, and whether I could afford to buy myself a new coat, and whether it had been entirely frivolous to tell the old gardener when he had sidled up to me that of course he could keep the clump of irises in the western corner since they were the emblem of the city, when I sensed someone standing beside me.

It was the same nurse who had told me about the sealed trains at Campo di Marte. Had I heard, she asked? Her voice was hushed. She was standing close enough to touch my shoulder, but was not looking at me. No, I murmured in reply, I had heard nothing. She nodded, a slight almost imperceptible movement of her head. Then she told me. Three nights ago, the partisans had sabotaged a signal box on the railway lines just outside the station. A night train destined for Fossoli, the transit camp that was a first stop before worse to come in the East, had wheezed to a halt. As soon as it had, the carriages had been stormed. Two hundred Allied POWS had been freed.

As she spoke, the courtyard below me vanished. I no longer saw the rose bushes, their root balls tied neatly in sacking, or the old gardener with his bent back and his hand hoe. Instead, I saw Issa’s face. And Massimo and his rabbit gun. And heard Enrico’s voice, and remembered his empty wardrobe.

Late that afternoon the radio announced that the rules had changed. From now on, aiding and abetting the enemy, and any and all acts of sabotage that previously might have earned a court martial and imprisonment, would be immediately punishable by death.

That night, I left the hospital early. It was just after seven when I got home. I left my bike in the hedge by the gate and walked up the drive as quietly as I could, sticking to the neatly clipped grass verge so I would not make noise on the gravel. The upstairs windows stared glassily out onto the garden. The downstairs shutters were closed. Chinks of light slipped through the slats, winking against the dark.

Before I opened the front door, I stood for a moment on the step. Then I walked quickly back to the gate and looked up and down the street. Nothing looked different. All the other houses looked like ours – still, and glowing quietly from within. A man was making his way up the pavement. I heard his footsteps before I saw him, and instinctively stepped back. I watched as he turned into a drive down the hill. The home of a new family, whom I did not know and who had only been on our road for a few years. The door opened. Light flooded out and was cut off. Then there was no one. I turned and walked quickly back, staying on the verge again, then slipped in through the front door, quiet as a cat.

From where I stood in the hallway, I could hear the murmured rise and fall of conversation. Straining, I tried to make out the words, but I was too far away. The kitchen door was closed, the voices were muffled. I considered taking my shoes off. Then, even as I had begun to bend down to unlace them, I realized that I was too frightened. And too angry. I could hear Enrico’s voice in my head,
You’ll have to take care of everything. Of Mama and Papa. The house
. I stood up, my heart hammering, took a deep breath, and walked quickly across the dining room and shoved open the kitchen door.

I don’t know what I expected, but it was not what I found.

Isabella was standing at the sink. My mother was in the act of placing a very large pot on the stove. They turned towards me at the same time, their mouths open in surprise.

To say that this domestic tableau was uncharacteristic would have been generous. With their golden hair, their fashionable dresses, and their lipstick, my mother and Issa looked like bad actresses playing housewives. Beyond that, I knew for a fact that neither of them cooked.

Mama recovered first. She smiled, wiped her hands down the front of the apron she was wearing, and then, as though she was doing a bad imitation of Emmelina herself, said, ‘Cati, how nice. You’re home in time for dinner.’

Issa’s eyes caught mine, and I thought I saw her smile. Before I could be sure, she turned back to whatever she was doing deep in the well of the sink. The radio babbled on the table. Mama turned it down.

‘Racket,’ she said, too brightly. ‘So loud it’s hard to hear yourself think. Supper’s nearly ready, if you want to go up and change.’

She picked up one of our largest bowls that had been brought out from the cupboard and was sitting on the counter.

‘I’ll set the table,’ Issa muttered. She took a stack of plates and slipped past me into the dining room.

‘If I’d known you were coming home,’ Mama added, ‘I’d have waited. So you could have had a bath. Papa’s in his study,’ she added, for no apparent reason.

The brightness in her voice was almost as alarming as the apron. Without saying anything, I crossed the room and went into the pantry.