The Villa Triste (8 page)

There was cheese on a cutting board. The bags of pasta and rice I had bought the week before were in their bins. Bread. Eggs. Milk, in the cold store. Two cabbages. A basket of onions. Another of carrots. All supplied thanks to the black market and Mama’s money.

I stood there, not sure what it was I was looking for. I had got very good, thanks to my new job, at doing inventories in my head, but recently I had been gone so much from the house, and certainly from the kitchen, that I was no longer sure what had been taken or replaced.

I could sense Mama watching me from the kitchen. I looked around, taking in the shelves, and the mincer, and the cold store. My eyes stopped at the cellar door. The top bolt was shot. I reached out and put my hand on the porcelain doorknob. It refused to move. Locked. I looked up. Nothing hung on the little hook beside the doorjamb.

‘Where is the key?’ I stepped back into the kitchen. ‘To the cellar?’ I asked. ‘Where’s the cellar key?’

My mother had relinquished the bowl and was now peering into the oven, so I couldn’t see her face as I spoke. But I saw her back. It stiffened. Nothing much, just a reflex action, like someone bracing for a blow.

‘Mama—’

I was about to ask – no – demand to know what was going on, when she closed the oven door, straightened up, and looked at me. At the sight of her face the anger I had built up shattered. It fell at my feet like a broken shell, leaving nothing but the naked fear underneath. The same fear I saw mirrored in my mother’s eyes.

‘Mama—’

As I stepped towards her, Isabella pushed through the kitchen door.

She stopped, looking from one of us to the other. No one spoke.

Then my mother smiled brightly. In the garish light of the kitchen her lipstick was too red. It seemed slightly lopsided, as if she had put it on quickly, not bothered as she usually did to sit at her dressing table or bend in front of the hall mirror. A strand of hair had come loose and she pushed it out of her face.

‘Papa has the key, darling,’ she said. ‘To the cellar. It’s in his desk.’ At supper, Papa and Issa talked too loudly – about the University, a new series of lectures on Dante that someone or other was giving, and about the fact that, although the Allies had finally broken out of Salerno and taken Naples, they were now bogged down again thanks to appalling weather in the south. Papa had heard that there were 400,000 German troops in Italy. Every bridge and road in Naples had been destroyed, and they had booby-trapped their retreat. A favourite trick, he said, was to bury a landmine in the craters left by other mines at the side of what had been roads, so that when planes came over strafing, Allied soldiers who dived for cover were blown to smithereens.

I did not ask how he had acquired this gem of knowledge. I did not ask anything at all. Instead, I sat watching my mother. She, on the other hand, avoided looking at me for the entire meal – which was suspiciously tasty – a chicken, a treat from the back room of the butcher down the road, that had been jointed and baked.

As I ate, I wondered when, exactly, either Mama or Issa had learned how to do this. But then, I thought as I looked around the room, there were a lot of things I wondered. Why, for instance, although I could see no visible change, our house was different. Why a vast pot of potatoes had been boiled when we would eat, at most, one apiece. Why Issa and Papa would not stop talking and Mama would not talk at all. Why, in short, I was suddenly a stranger in the midst of a family that looked and sounded like mine. Suddenly, I wished powerfully for Emmelina, or for Lodo. Or preferably for both of them. For allies in this alien territory I had somehow wandered into.

Mama went to bed immediately after supper, volunteering, quite suddenly, that she had a headache. When I offered to bring her a cup of camomile tea, she shook her head, saying she was merely tired and was sure she would feel better in the morning. Papa stayed in his study. Issa insisted on clearing up by herself. I left her to it and attempted to read in the sitting room, but finally gave up. Upstairs, I locked my door and sat on the bed, trying to push away the feeling that I should march downstairs and demand the cellar key. That I should slip the bolt, and open the door, and follow the stairs down into the dark.

The next morning, when I left very early, the house was silent. The cellar door was still bolted, the key was still missing. The bowl had been put away, and the large pot had been scrubbed and hung up. There was no sign of potatoes.

Issa was waiting for me that night when I left the hospital. There was a thin mist, the beginning of rain, and it was cold. She was on foot, and had a scarf wrapped around her head and her hands dug deep in her pockets. We walked in silence for the first few minutes, my bicycle between us. As we reached the Duomo, the bells began to ring. We stopped for a moment, looking up at the striped marble and the great red hat of the dome that seemed to drift above it. A squadron of pigeons clucked at our feet, then lifted and flapped away, their wings fluttering into the grey evening light.

We had moved on, following a crocodile of schoolgirls, all with long braids and holding hands, and had reached the Baptistry – which looked derelict without its bronze doors, like the hovel of a hermit – when I asked the question.

I asked it without looking at her, concentrating instead on the spokes of my bicycle which were shiny with damp and glinting in the light of the lamp on the corner of Via Roma.

‘How many are there?’

I felt rather than saw her glance at me, then felt the sharp jump of her shoulders as she shrugged.

It had been a long day. One of our patients had died. There was a rumour that Spanish influenza had broken out near Siena. I was tired and cold and had not yet had time to try to buy a new coat.

‘How many what?’

The casual ring in her voice made my temper snap.

‘For God’s sake, Issa!’ I jerked the bike to a halt. ‘Are you going to tell me,’ I hissed, leaning over the basket, putting my face as close to hers as I could. ‘Are you honestly going to tell me that you had nothing at all to do with that train? That at this moment there is no one in our cellar? Eating our food? Wearing Rico’s clothes? Because if you are going to tell me that, I don’t believe you. In fact,’ I added for good measure, ‘if you are going to lie to me, I don’t even want to talk to you.’

‘Keep your voice down!’

She grabbed the handlebars of the bike and kept walking. I stood for a moment, feeling my heart thump in my chest, feeling the colour rise in my cheeks, then scurried after her. Ahead of us, a pair of German soldiers stood on the pavement, smoking, their greatcoats spangled with damp. We skirted them, stepping into the street.

‘Three,’ Issa said a moment later.

I had thought as much. The pot of potatoes on the stove last night had been enough for at least six people.

‘Which one of them is the cook?’

Issa glanced at me and almost smiled.

‘One of the Americans. There are two Americans and one English. How did you know?’

‘That they could cook?’

‘That they were there.’

‘No matter what you may think, Issa, I am not stupid.’

Ahead, in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, the carousel was going around and around, the music high and tinny in the chilly air. There was a smell of chestnuts coming from a brazier tended by an old man whose dog lay at his feet. His wife twisted cones out of newspaper, used her fingers to fill them, and dropped coins into a can. Café Paskowski was already crowded, the tables by the window bright smears of colour behind the glass.

‘Does Rico know?’

Issa smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘And Mama and Papa?’

She did not bother to answer. She knew that I knew in any case, that I had seen it in my mother’s eyes the night before – the knowledge that what was below our very feet as we stood in the kitchen, that what was behind the cellar door, that the very food that she had placed on the stove and slid into the oven, were all reason enough for us to be dead.

I stopped and looked at my sister. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I asked.

Issa looked back at me. She waited for a moment. Then she shrugged.

‘Because we couldn’t trust you.’

There it was again, that thing inside of her. The words were not said with any venom, not laced with any particular malice. Just stated as fact.

I felt them like a blow. Like a slap. So firm and hard, my eyes watered.

Issa was watching me – waiting, I suppose, to see what I would do – so I turned and looked up at the Orsanmichele, pretended to be studying the Della Robbia rondels, some of the few pieces of art actually left in the city, because I could not bear for her to see that I would have been the first person to agree with her. To admit that, in all likelihood, it would not have been wise to trust me. Because I was too weak, and too frightened. I always had been. Even before the war, I had not been as strong or as brave as Isabella or Enrico. I had not had noble thoughts or inclinations. All I had wanted to do was marry Lodo and have the sort of dull happy little life that millions of women like me had had for centuries.

I wiped my eyes with the back of my glove, and turned back to her.

‘I don’t see, then,’ I said, ‘why you’re telling me now.’

‘Because we need you.’

I stared at her. And thought of that boy – of poor Massimo with his big laugh and his cold eyes, who was probably also in this up to his neck, but who, no matter how many Nazis or Fascists he faced, would never come up against anyone harder than my sister.

Snatching the handlebars of the bike, I pulled it away from her and turned towards Via Calzaiouli.

Isabella waited for a moment, then hurried after me. She placed her hand on mine and pulled me to a stop.

‘Don’t!’ I spun around on her. ‘Don’t ask me for anything.’

Issa took a step back, as if I had hit her.

‘It’s one thing,’ I said, ‘if you want to call me an untrustworthy coward to my face – I admit you may be right. But if you hold me in such contempt, you can’t also ask for my help.’

She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. Issa stepped backwards again, up onto the pavement, and I walked away, not certain where I was going, but so angry I could feel myself shaking.

In Calzaiouli, not all of the shops were closed yet. People flocked and separated, walked and stopped to look in windows. Life was doing its old imitation of normality. I could feel myself trembling, biting back tears.

I closed my eyes and wished with all my heart that I could open them and see Lodo walking towards me. He did not want me to be a partisan, or join a fight, or blow up trains, or do whatever it was Issa was going to ask me to do. He just wanted me to be his wife. Because he loved me.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and jumped. Isabella had caught up with me.

‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Cati,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. That was wrong, about not trusting you. I’m sorry.’

I felt my foot falter.

‘Is that what Mama and Papa think, too? That none of you can trust me?’

I stopped and looked at her. She shook her head.

‘No. No.’ She shook her head again. ‘I said that because I was angry, because you’d made fun of us, that day on the terrace. And I wanted to hurt you.’ Wisps of her hair had escaped and curled in the damp air. ‘Papa said I shouldn’t worry you. That you have enough to worry about, at the hospital, and with Lodo. He’s right. I shouldn’t have. It was wrong. I’m sorry.’

‘He’s known from the beginning, hasn’t he?’

Isabella waited for a moment, then she nodded. ‘He was – he and some of the other professors. They were helping at the beginning. To organize.’ She was watching me closely as she spoke, knowing how much this would hurt, this additional exclusion. She put a hand on my sleeve. ‘He didn’t want any more risk than necessary. He said not knowing would keep you safer.’

‘And what about Mama?’

I knew I shouldn’t ask it, but I couldn’t help myself. It was like pulling a scab, then pulling it some more when it started to bleed. Issa didn’t answer.

‘And Enrico?’ I demanded, remembering how we had stood under the cedar tree. ‘Doesn’t he trust me, either?’

Isabella shook her head. Then she nodded. In the strange misty half-light, I saw that her eyes were blurring, welling up.

‘Rico told me I should come to you, if I ever needed anything. I told him you didn’t like what we were doing. He said it wouldn’t matter.’

‘You’ve seen him?’

She nodded.

I reached up and touched the bottom of her eye with the fingertip of my glove. The fawn-coloured leather darkened, matching the smear left by my own tears.

‘I’m not as brave as you or Rico,’ I whispered. ‘You know that.’ She shook her head.

‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘We’re different, Issa. I’m not like you. I’m afraid for all of us. All the time. I don’t want to fight. I just want this to be over.’

A couple skirted around us. We began to walk again, reaching the corner and turning down towards the bridge. The smell of chestnuts hung in the air. I stopped at the next brazier and bought a paper twist of them. For a moment Issa and I walked and chewed in silence.

‘It’s not safe for Mama and Papa,’ I said, lowering my voice until it was not much more than a dull murmur swallowed by the crackling of the paper cone. ‘I don’t care if Papa helped to organize it. We have to take care of them. We have to do everything we can for them. That’s what makes me most angry with you,’ I added. ‘If they’re found, Mama and Papa could be shot. You have to get those men out of the house.’

Issa nodded. ‘I know.’

I glanced at her.

‘I’ll only help you if you promise – no, swear to me – that no one else will ever be in the house. Never again.’

She nodded.

‘All right. Yes.’

‘For Mama and Papa’s sake.’

‘Yes.’

‘No matter what they say. Swear?’

She looked at me.

‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I want you to swear. On Mama’s life.’

‘I swear on Mama’s life.’

‘All right,’ I said a moment later. ‘Then tell me what it is you want me to do.’

We had come to the bridge. Despite the fact that it was damp and cold, there were still people hurrying home or crossing from the Oltrarno down into the city. A few were feeding the fish, dropping crumbs and the husks of chestnuts into the river. Issa took my elbow and guided me to the edge. We looked down, just able to make out the dark floating shapes, the ripples in the water, the occasional snap and gaping mouth.