LOUISA YOUNG
Devotion

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London

SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by The Borough Press 2016

Copyright © Louisa Young 2016

Cover design Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Cover photographs © Dragan Todorovic/Trevillion Images (landscape); Alexa Garbarino/Trevillion Images (woman)

Louisa Young asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

‘Begin the Beguine’ words and music by Cole Porter © 1935 (renewed)

WB Music Corp. (ascap) all rights administered by Warner/Chappell North America Ltd.

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

Some characters (or names) and incidents portrayed in it,

while based on real historical figures, are the work

of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007532902

Ebook Edition ISBN: 9780007532896

Version: 2017-02-14

Praise for Devotion:

‘Young has conjured up another rich historical novel and I longed to know the fate of this tragic cast of friends. These characters demand devotion – they’ll get it, too’

The Times

‘Young expertly weaves politics, race and loyalty into the family’s narrative’

Observer

‘A stirring story of war and its consequences … tender and convincing. Well-drawn female characters complete an engaging saga’

Mail on Sunday

‘Elegantly written and compulsively readable, Devotion manages to be both thrilling and heartfelt – a real treasure of a book’

JAMI ATTENBERG

‘A sumptuous portrayal of love and war in fascist Rome’

Observer

‘Anybody who hasn’t read her WW1 and postwar trilogy … should get buying. An absolutely magnificent trilogy … three volumes is not enough. I NEED to know more … and sparking such a need is a triumph for a novelist’

BEL MOONEY

‘This moving and vivid historical novel … cleverly interleaves the personal and the political, portraying the conflicts of loyalty produced by troubled times with great subtlety … written with real knowledge and affection’

Tablet

Praise for The Heroes’ Welcome and My Dear I Wanted to Tell You:

‘Young possesses in abundance emotional conviction, pace and imaginative energy, and these qualities will draw readers with her through time and space, as she unfolds the story of the Lockes and Purefoys on their journey through the 20th century’

HELEN DUNMORE, Guardian

‘Powerful, sometimes shocking, boldly conceived, it fixes on war’s lingering trauma to show how people adapt – or not – and is irradiated by anger and pity’

Sunday Times

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Devotion:

Dedication

Part One: 1928

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Part Two: 1932

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Three: 1933–4

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Four: 1938

Chapter Twelve

Part Five: 1938–9

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Part Six: 1938–9

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Acknowledgements

Also by Louisa Young

About the Author

About the Publisher

Dedication

To Derek Johns: Agent Emeritus, consigliere, and friend

Part One

Chapter One

An English school, July 1928

Tom Locke, twelve, tall for his age, goose-pimpled and shivering, practically naked in his knitted bathers, was hopping about under the trees at the end of the lake. They were about to be put through swimming, and Tom felt there was a genuine opportunity to disappear up one of the larches and avoid this frankly absurd dunking, the last of term. Yesterday the Beaks had carpeted him because he’d been swimming – well, yes, without permission – and after dark, but so what, he’d wanted to observe the nocturnal bird life and lake-life, he’d explained it perfectly clearly – or would have, if they’d given him a chance – and now they were forcing him in when it was cold and he didn’t feel like it. This morning the lake looked like a lake which might give a chap pneumonia.

Soft needles cushioned his feet; grey-black water gleamed in front of him. The other boys, squawking, slapped their hard faded towels at each other. A bit of dank sun slid through the branches above.

Tom had goggles and a phenomenal lung capacity for such a skinny boy. He would go under gracefully and glide through the greenest murk, slipping between spirals of slime, hardly disturbing whoever lurked down there. It was like flying through water. Surfacing, he would go eye to gelatinous eye with half-submerged toads, breathe a little, and sink again. Underwater was lovely to him. But today he didn’t feel like it. He flung two quick arms up, grabbed, pulled and slithered, and was up, on a scratchy branch, in the shadows of the shaggy heart of the larch, where cobwebs and grey ghosts of old growth hung in the remnants of winter.

It was bloody cold up there too. Must be some kind of meteorological front, he thought, and glanced around for birds’ nests, insects, lichens.

As it was the third time this term, in the third school of the past four years, that Tom had decided to do what he wanted instead of following instructions, and as the usual measures had had no effect, his father was called upon to appear. Tom knew perfectly well that his father would not appear. His father had only recently started appearing out of his study, where he had been lurking ever since he came home from the war ten years ago. Why would he suddenly appear in front of the Head? He never had been what one could reliably call reliable, why would he start now? Riley Purefoy would as usual take his place.

This delighted Tom. Discipline rolled off his back, but a visit from Riley was a jewel beyond measure.

Tom was standing outside the Head’s study when Riley appeared, and grinned like a loon at the sight of him. Riley grinned back, his constricted harlequin smile. Just then, two seniors lounged past, which distracted Tom for a moment. One of them, Slater, had on a previous occasion suggested that Tom’s mother was negligent, as she never appeared at sporting events. ‘Oh no,’ Tom had said, ‘I have no ma’ – with a flick of his big blue eyes – very like his mother’s, in fact – which had led Slater to think that perhaps Locke’s mater was a runaway. ‘Has she bolted then?’ Slater had asked, scenting prey. ‘You could put it that way,’ Tom had said, with the slightly amused-looking expression he used for covering what he point-blank refused to talk about. His mother – Julia. Julia. Joooolia – had been dead for ten years, died having Kitty, the kid sister – bad bargain probably. Of course he didn’t talk about her. A chap wouldn’t even talk about a living mater, let alone a dead one. And anyway Nadine was a perfectly good substitute.

And anyway if he started talking about mothers he’d have to start thinking about them, and fathers too. Nadine had said, during Tom’s last exeat, ‘Peter is so much better than he has been, isn’t he, Tom, since he went to France with Riley? I’m so glad he’s writing his book now.’

The book was about Homer and the Great War. Tom had shrugged. Perhaps when Peter came out of his study he wasn’t as odd and unpleasant as he used to be, and he smelt a bit better, but Tom still had nothing to say to him.

Not that any of that was any of Slater’s beeswax. So Slater had been confused, and, not being very intelligent, had marked Locke as an enemy and potential victim.

Now, as they ambled by, Slater and his companion caught sight of Riley’s face, or to be precise its unlikely shape, and the scars which held it together. They stalled, walked on, giggled, then turned back and behind Riley’s head started a little dance of mockery, fingers pulling at the flesh of their own young faces, eyes rolling, at Tom.

Tom flared.

‘What is it?’ said Riley, turning. The T was lost in the ghost of the cockney accent of his childhood; the entire phrase just caught in his rebuilt mouth.

‘Wo’ issit?’ leered Slater.

So Tom lurched forward, punched him, kicked the other in the balls, and to his shame let the words escape him, ‘Don’t you bloody laugh at him, you bloody snobs!’

Riley, though he felt as strongly as ever the instinctive, instant urge to pull the lad out, restrained himself. His reason was impeccable: if his patched-up face were to suffer a blow he could lose the remains of his jaw, and be a half-head once again, and God knows what would become of him. He had promised Nadine, after the contretemps during the strikes in Wigan in 1919, to be careful. In fact, he’d promised her again last week, when he’d told her about dropping the splint while cleaning it, and needing to see Mr Gillies about a new one. Of course he had learnt that he had to behave.

So he stood back, just barked ‘Tom!’ and the Head came out. An unpleasant scene ensued. Slater was made to apologise, Riley was made to listen to it, and Tom was expelled.

They thought they might as well go home to London immediately, as soon as Matron had Tom’s trunk packed up.

Tom, a black eye rising mauve and cloudy on his white face, was simultaneously delighted with his fearsome defence of Riley’s honour, and deeply embarrassed by the fact that Riley knew what it had been over.

‘Don’t do it again,’ Riley said. ‘It’s understandable but not useful.’

‘Never?’ said Tom. Though many didn’t, Tom understood Riley’s constricted speech clearly. He wanted to, which helped.

‘Never,’ said Riley.

‘So, you’re saying, violence is never to be used?’ said Tom.

‘It’s very rarely a useful response,’ said Riley. ‘Don’t put words in my mouth’ – with a little smile. He looked tired.

‘Shall we see if we can get a cup of tea?’ Tom said. ‘Evans will probably make one for us.’

So they slipped off to the sickbay, where Evans the under-under-matron, sixteen and as pretty as a Renoir, laughed and glanced and provided not just tea but digestive biscuits, with a fair amount of ‘Oh, I shouldn’t,’ and ‘If Mrs Dale catches us!’ and ‘He’s got us all eating out of his hand, Mr Locke, sir.’

Riley was accustomed to being Mr Locke on such occasions, and let it pass. Evans may well have been wondering why Tom Locke, pale and blond and tall for his age, looked nothing like his broad-shouldered, black-curled dad, but then Tom said: ‘I’m off, Evans – been chucked out again …’ Her face actually fell, and her ‘oh!’ was small and soft.

Riley noticed that Tom did not notice.

Walking out to the car, Riley said, ‘By the way—’ but by the time he said it, Tom had already seen. A long tall figure was leaning against a narrow tree, smoking. Tom found that his face had gone a little hard and he was looking at the ground. He’d have to go in the back of the car now. And – Peter! Out of doors!

‘Hello, Tom,’ Peter said. He dropped his cigarette on the hard muddy path and came forward.

There’ll be hell to pay for someone, Tom thought. Cigarette ends in the grounds. ‘Hello,’ he said, with just enough courtesy not to annoy Riley.

‘Didn’t want to swim, eh?’ said Peter. ‘Thought you liked swimming.’

Since when did you ever know anything about me? Tom thought.

‘Not always, sir,’ he said, and glanced up, and saw that Peter didn’t seem saddened by this response, and that Riley looked almost approving. It’s so hard to tell with grown-ups if they ever actually feel bad about anything at all. They’re just oblivious or happy or angry. Perhaps sadness is only for children.

It was not the first time he’d thought this. But when you are born into sadness, and normality is based on it, it is difficult to winnow out what sadness actually is. Happiness now – happiness was a recognised stranger, to be welcomed with a big embrace and clung to like a departing parent. Tom always had his eye out for happiness, and grabbed it where he could. For example: Tom had very much looked forward to being with Riley, and talking as they drove back up to London. He thought it definitely worth being expelled for. But with Peter there, it could not be. As well as Peter being the gooseberry, it was much harder to follow Riley’s speech over the engine noise when you were sitting in the back. You couldn’t see his face.

Riley said, ‘We need to find you another school. Assuming there’s any left that will have you.’

Tom’s eyes flickered over the dull green fields outside; heavy wet English summer. He appreciated Riley’s attempts to interest him in ordinary education and proper work. He terribly wanted to indulge him, but he couldn’t care less about education – and how could he say anything important with Peter there?

A while after they reached the main road, Peter fell into a doze.

‘There’s really no point,’ Tom hissed, leaning forward to Riley’s ear. ‘Books send me to sleep. Anyway it’s the hols now.’ Without noticing, he repositioned himself so he could see Riley’s face in the rearview mirror.

Riley eyed him, and attempted to put to one side how very much he would have loved to have had this boy’s educational opportunities.

‘Work bores me to sobs,’ Tom said.

Riley’s mouth twisted a little.

‘It’s a waste of money,’ Tom tried.

‘Peter doesn’t have very much else to spend his money on,’ murmured Riley.

At the mention of his father, Tom glanced at him, his worn and pale face, his thin hair, and grew a little mulish. ‘He could buy me a decent pair of goggles,’ he said. ‘Or a motorbike. I could learn to dive. Or fly! Something useful. There are spear fishers in Italy who live in the sea. I could go and live with them.’

‘You must go back to school,’ said Riley.

‘Why?’

‘To make Nadine happy,’ said Riley, at which Tom gave him a mock-evil look and said, ‘That’s below the belt, old man. Totally below the belt.’

‘Like that blow you gave that poor senior,’ Riley pointed out.

‘Different!’ cried Tom.

‘Why?’ asked Riley.

‘That was self-defence!’ Realising he was on slippery ground, he amended it to, ‘I was defending my family honour.’

Riley blinked at him fondly, in the rearview mirror. Tom started laughing.

Riley said, ‘What if – all right – you crash your bi-plane on to a Greek island, while on a diving trip to discover Atlantis. A ferocious peasant with a huge moustache and an ancient blunderbuss approaches you. Would you rather know some Greek, or not?’

‘I wouldn’t crash,’ Tom said. ‘But say I have allowed some second-rate chap to pilot me, and we go belly up, how ancient is the ferocious peasant? Because we only do ancient Greek.’

‘If you speak to him in the tongue of his ancestors, of the wine-dark sea and rosy-fingered dawn, is he more or less likely to shoot you?’

‘More!’ said Tom.

‘Then you reduce me to emotional blackmail,’ Riley said. ‘I would have liked the education you are having. I need you to continue, so that you can come home and teach me all that I don’t know.’

‘Totally unfair,’ said Tom. ‘I’ll work as hard as you like but school is wasted on me.’

‘Ordinary bribery then,’ said Riley. ‘Goggles?’

‘Motorbike!’ said Tom.

‘So you’re open to negotiation. Good. We can ask Nadine to find the only school left in the country which hasn’t yet chucked you out. I dare say she’s still got the list.’

‘BSA!’ said Tom.

‘Possible motorbike, when you go to university, if your father agrees.’

‘University!’ the boy yelped, in new despondency.

‘Would you not rather design your own aeroplane?’

‘I don’t want to be an engineer!’

‘Do you want to spend your life at a disadvantage to other men?’

‘Well you haven’t!’ Tom cried. ‘And you didn’t go to university!’

Riley smiled his crooked smile. ‘Thank you, Tom,’ he said, and only then did Tom realise what he had said. But the car went over a pot-hole, and Peter woke, and didn’t even say, ‘Did I miss anything?’, just started staring out of the window, his mouth slightly pursed. Tom fell silent. After a while he enquired what was for dinner. Riley didn’t know.

Home was not Peter’s house, the elegant and pastoral Locke Hill, near Sidcup, where Tom had spent some months before his mother’s death. Nor was it the grand cottage of his grandmother, Julia’s mother Jane Orris, to which Tom had been snatched during the war. (Mrs Orris was the kind of relative with whom you would have tea if you had to, and whose voice on the telephone filled you with gloom.) No, home now, was in London: Nadine’s father’s comfortable and fadedly glamorous Georgian house on Bayswater Road, which had somehow become, over the years, Nadine and Riley’s comfortable and fadedly glamorous Georgian house on Bayswater Road, in which Nadine’s father lived with them.

Kitty was there in the hall, her arms folded across her smock. ‘Welcome home I don’t think,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? It’s not holidays for boys yet.’

‘It’s holidays for me!’ Tom said, in his most annoying voice. ‘Now go away.’ He checked the foreign stamps Nadine had put to one side for him in the hall – several Italian ones, excellent – and in passing greeted Kitty with a casual clout about the head. Last time they had seen each other, as he had left for school, he had by a mere slip of the tongue called Riley ‘Daddy’, whereupon Kitty had kicked him and bared her teeth, making hissing noises. Not that it mattered in the slightest to him what she thought. But order had to be maintained.

Nadine was coming down the stairs, ink-stained, messy-haired and surprised from her studio in the attic, though she can’t be that surprised, Tom thought. She’d be cross, but Tom knew she wouldn’t be for long. She was concerned, but Tom didn’t concern himself with that; that was what women were for.

Kitty started scampering around Nadine’s skirts, saying ‘Tom’s been sacked again, he’s such a bad boy—’

‘Be quiet, darling,’ Nadine said, and Tom, while vaguely sheepish, could read on her oh-so-readable face that no, this was not the day on which Nadine would cease to find him irresistible.

‘Sorry Mums,’ he said, and tried to say ‘It was a duel of honour—’ but Nadine had interrupted him, saying ‘You will be, when no school will have you and you pass no exams and find no employment and you’ll be bored stiff all your life and your children will starve.’

He could see Kitty behind her, a ‘My children won’t starve’ smirk on her face.

‘I said sorry,’ he grumbled, at which point Dr Aunt Rose, a female relative of the better sort – not a moping romantic, nor a massively tweed-bosomed bossyboots, but a drily amused person who if you asked civilly would show you the contents of her leather medical bag (scalpel, opium, syringes) – appeared from the drawing room and gave him a not unsympathetic look. Suddenly his face felt treacherously insecure, so he barged past them all, heading for the stairs.

In the hall behind him Rose embraced Peter, clapping him on the back as if particularly glad to see him. Grandpa came out to see what the fuss was, patted Tom vaguely as he passed, and mooched off again. And there was Riley, lugging Tom’s bag, and calling him to come back out and help with the trunk.

As soon as he could, Tom raced up to his room. He glanced over at Kensington Gardens across the road. The park keeper was trudging by. The heavy leaves of high summer draped almost to the grass, but between them Tom could just make out glimpses of the Round Pond, a horizontal gleam in the distance.

He wondered if the Household Cavalry had been by yet, exercising their stupendously well-kept horses, in two matched, jingling, shining lines, heading round back to Knightsbridge. He thought about going down to the kitchen, where Mrs Kenton might be persuaded to give him some cake. He considered, too, going back down to interfere in the discussions they were no doubt having about his future. He decided against. Whatever they decided made little difference to him. Wherever they sent him, he would, after all, continue to do what he wanted, bear the punishments when they came, and apologise when he had to. And in due course he would be grown up, and free.

The following morning Nadine, her long curls tidied up, her dark yellow eyes calm, benevolently neglectful over breakfast, patently glad to see everyone in the right place – i.e., around a table and within her view – announced that the Italian cousins had invited them to stay during the summer holiday.

Joy engulfed Tom over his toast and milk. A foreign country! Foreign! And it would mean less time at Locke Hill with Peter.

Nobody had ever met any of these cousins. For years their existence had passed London by, until someone called Aldo Elia Fiore – Tom saw Kitty trying out the name, stretching her mouth round the unfamiliar shapes – son of Nadine’s mother’s sister and her Italian husband, had written to his lost cousin Nadine. And now she, Tom and Kitty were going to visit his family in Rome.

But Riley was not coming. Nobody was happy about this, but everybody accepted it. He had to go to work, of course. Men usually had to go to work, one way or another. This was the main way of telling that Peter was getting better: he was working now. Writing this Homer book for Riley to publish! There was a manuscript to prove it. Peter had shown it to Tom, with an expression on his face similar to the one Tom wore, on the few occasions when he’d liked a teacher enough to want to impress him. Peter had said, ‘Well. There it is. First draft,’ and Tom had looked at it and thumbed it, and said, ‘That’s a lot of words’, and that had seemed to do. Anyway, as Riley said now, ‘Books don’t publish themselves’, so he had to work, and not come on holiday, so the joy was clouded. If Tom had paid more attention he might have picked up that strong, tough, humorous, hardworking Riley, who could cope with anything (and had), simply did not want to take a train across Europe to meet new people, to have to talk to them, to stay in a house as a guest with them when he didn’t know them, and they would not understand his mangled voice (in English or his remnants of Italian), or know that he could not eat most solid food, or that he had to be able to sleep when he needed to, to stop talking sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, to leave the moment leaving became necessary.

Tom thought he knew all about Riley. Plenty of fathers and uncles had lost arms and legs in the war; Riley had lost part of his face. Plenty of men had wooden legs and prosthetic arms (Mr Tanley at school had one with attachments: he had a spork, a gripper for pens, and all kinds of wood-working tools he could just screw in, and he’d let you play with them). Riley had had his face repaired using his own skin from the top of his head. His black hair was thick and curly; he would comb it back with his fingers over the broad strip of scar when he had to take off his hat. He looked jolly good considering. Tom had always known this, and didn’t remember being told. Though he did remember being told about Peter – Dr Aunt Rose saying to him, in the drawing room at Locke Hill, ‘Tom, some men are wounded in their bodies and some are wounded in the heart of themselves, in their soul, and your poor dad is wounded in his soul …’ He had been on the sofa with Max the red setter, and he had thought she was going to tell him off for letting the dog be on the furniture, and she had looked sad, so sad, that he had never wanted to bring it up again.

For a brief period he had thought she meant ‘sole’. If Riley could cope with a wounded face, and be kind, then surely only a nothing-kind-of-man would be bothered by a wounded sole? One afternoon, while his father was asleep in his study, Tom had seen his large white feet flopping over the arm of the leather chaise. There was nothing wrong with them.

When Tom realised what it really was – wounded in his soul – the phrase, if anything, made him more scared of his volatile, sharp-tongued, reclusive father.

‘You all go,’ said Riley, ‘and have a wonderful time.’

‘But you and Nadine went on honeymoon to Rome!’ Tom said. ‘Don’t you want to go back?’

‘I would love to,’ Riley said, and Nadine looked over to him, a grown-up look, tender. ‘And I will, one day. But at the moment I can’t.’

‘It’s not fair,’ Tom said. ‘You went to the battlefields with Peter.’

Riley pulled a face at him.

‘But they live on an island! In the Tiber!’

‘That is a great temptation,’ Riley said. ‘I will come, another time.’

Tom fell silent. Because of the jawbone Riley had left in France, his refusal had to be honoured.

Chapter Two

Towards Rome, Summer 1928

Crossing France, Tom stared intently from the train window, looking for remnants of the war: tanks, or crashed planes like his one at Locke Hill. No luck, so then he just watched north turn to south before his eyes, cabbage patches to vineyards, apple orchards to olive groves, green to gold. The train stopped for an hour somewhere in the Alps and he leapt off, sniffing the air, letting his eyes rest on crystalline distances. Kitty, who was only eight, and Nadine clambered down after him; they wandered along a lane and found wild strawberries in a field, with snow-capped mountains beyond and a cold stream for their feet. Overhead a slow and tiny scrap of black curve circled: an eagle, he decided. How high? Higher than a plane? He wished Riley were there.

Kitty saw it, and cried out that Peter would like the eagle.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Tom automatically. ‘Peter doesn’t like anything.’

Kitty squeaked as she dipped her toes in the stream, so Tom was obliged to mock her again. Nadine said, ‘Be nice, darling,’ as she always did, and flicked the icy water at him so that he squeaked too. The cry of the train guard echoed down, and they grabbed their shoes and rushed back up to the station, breathless and cheery.

The moment they crossed the border into Piemonte he announced ‘Something’s different here,’ even though the goats and the mountains looked much the same and lay under the same blue sky. ‘It’s different,’ he insisted.

The mountains faded from underneath them. At Milan they changed trains, and rattled, rattled, rattled on, itchy, metallic, grubby, south and west: the coastal flats, the sea beyond parades of pine trees, pale cattle with wide amazing horns. It took all day.

They arrived in the sunlit evening. Nadine twisted in her seat, pointing out churches and aqueducts, ruins and piazzas, places she recognised from her honeymoon, nine years before. Tom stared with an immediate and complete jealousy, wanting the adventure she and Riley had had, and the knowledge they had acquired. And then suddenly, right outside the train window, like a massive hot-air balloon crash-landing in front of them, the dome of St Peter’s appeared, and was gone again, leaving the vista beyond of roofs and bridges and the ancient world. And the heat! He was sweating in his English tweed. He was enchanted.

A cab took them from the station along the river, past broken arches and massive columns and tall stone doorways leading to dappled courtyards, past donkeys and peasants and priests and endless bold-eyed dark people. Tom took it all in. He wound down the window: the smell was of hot dusty donkeys, of broth boiling, garlic frying in olive oil though he didn’t know that’s what it was. The light lay golden on white stone. Voices were calling, shouting, chatting, the rhythms unfamiliar and enticing: Aoh! he heard, Aoh! By the time they arrived, a great and dusty expedition in the small piazza, he was like a big dog in the back of the taxi, desperate to get out and be in this city.

Each of the visitors was to fall like plums in a heatwave for the charms of Rome, but Tom fell hardest.

They were in a piazza, on an island, in the river, in the middle of this city which was more like a painting come to life than any actual place that Tom had ever seen. He was practically quivering.

As they drew up, a man lounging on the far side against the river wall caught Tom’s eye through the glass of the window. He would catch any eye. There was something naturally flamboyant about him, an unspoken expectation of attention hanging around his big shoulders and barrel chest. His hair and his coat were long, his waistcoat was striped blue, and he was smoking, with an air both idle and attractive. The bottoms of his trousers, Tom noticed, were soaking wet.

The driver was fumbling with the brakes; Nadine was saying, ‘Oh, darlings, look!’ and as she opened the car door to get out the man strode up, arm outstretched, black curls going back like a ram’s horns from a strong brow, wild eyebrows curling off in all directions. In a fluid movement he opened the door, pulled Nadine up from her seat, and embraced her. Then he pushed her away to look at her, clasped her head with his hands in her hair, and cried out, ‘My sister!’

Nadine was startled, yes – but delighted. Tom found himself smiling. You would think he was in his own house, in this piazza, he thought. Welcoming guests. He launched himself out of the car and stumbled upright. The man turned to him, big brown eyes, a big nose diamond-cut on the bridge and cavernous at the nostril, smiling. Tom felt a flush of infidelity to Riley. He wanted this man to like him. He wished that he wasn’t so very blond. A man should be dark. Like this man.

Some children had appeared. Two skinny boys, smaller than him. Good. A girl, a little younger than him, quite tough-looking, big eyes, a lot of hair which reminded him of ropes. He wondered quickly if she would choose Kitty or him. He thought he was prepared not to mind if the girls went off together, so long as it didn’t mean he had to be with the small boys, but – actually – he knew at first glance that he wanted this girl to want him, and that it was his responsibility to make that happen. First impressions, and all that.

So: ‘When in Rome!’ he cried, and embraced the girl in a huge, ungainly, long-armed hug. He took hold of her head, kissed her cheeks and cried, just as Aldo had, ‘My sister!’

It went down extremely well.

Kitty, pink and fair, saw the tall curly-haired man – the new cousin? – hugging Nadine madly. Kitty was aware that a mother could disappear just like that, and leave one apparently somehow different to other people, so she watched in slight alarm as the only mother she had ever known was engulfed by the stranger. When she had wriggled out of the car, she stared up at him, hoping that he would notice her, and that he wouldn’t. He did. He bent from his great height – and picked her up – something she hated from strangers – and actually – ! – threw her in the air, as if she were two years old. He caught her, very securely, in strong arms.

He said, ‘Signorina, sorry. You are sweet like a doll. I apologise for loss of dignity.’ He set her down, and crouched a little, and held out his hand, and she had to take it or be rude, even though she was breathless, and his look was so frank and nice that she smiled, and then he kissed her hand and she just laughed, and looked to Nadine, and Nadine was laughing too – so following Tom’s example she boldly took the man’s hand, and kissed it right back. At which there came a stream of Italian like a waterfall down a hillside. It sounded beautiful. Her eyes widened.

The house was very simple, plain and bare-seeming, the furniture dark against white walls. It was the heat of the day – ferocious heat! – and Kitty had never seen shutters before. The dimness surprised her and she blinked. Her English habit was to welcome any available sun, at all times, under any circumstances. Her entire life adults had been calling to her ‘the sun’s out children, do go into the garden and run about’. How strange to block it out!

The English tried to carry their bags, and Aldo made his small boys help even though they were only about six and the bags were far too big. Kitty kept an eye out for Tom: after helping carry and being introduced, he spun off the side of the group, and went back out to look at the river.

Kitty and the girl, Fernanda, eyed each other. Aldo said something in Italian and the girl beckoned to Kitty to follow her up the narrow white age-smoothened marble staircase. In a little room at the back, vaulted and whitewashed, the girl said, unsmiling and careful, ‘Do you like to reading books?’ And Kitty said only, ‘Yes,’ because despite the preparatory Italian lessons they had all taken, she was so utterly excited that she had forgotten the word ‘sì’. Nenna fetched one: in Italian, but with pictures. Kitty in turn brought one of hers from her little suitcase: The Legends and History of Rome, retold for children, which Nadine had got for her from the library. Nenna studied it carefully, smiling at the pictures, looking at the English words and working her way through them. Kitty watched her, admiring her face which was not like English faces: bonier, more golden. It was like Nadine’s face though, with the wide eyes. As Kitty watched, a great smile spread across it, and Nenna looked up and thrust the book towards her, pointing at one word: Tarquin.

So Kitty obediently settled in to read about how he had lived and died and how his body was thrown into the Tiber and how – oh – an island – this island? – grew up over his skeleton. Kitty thrilled. Could it be this island?

She looked up at Nenna. Was she being unkind? Was she trying to frighten her? But Nenna’s face was eager. She grabbed the book again, riffled through it, stopped with a look of delight and passed it back, pointing this time to Aes – Aescu – Kitty could not read it.

‘Esculapio,’ Nenna said, watching. Kitty read anyway. She was accustomed to names she could not pronounce. Aescu-thingy did perfectly well. This story told of a medicine god arriving on a boat from Greece to save the Romans from a plague, his staff wreathed with a snake because snakes know the secrets of magic herbs, from crawling on their bellies, and the boat turned into an island in the river – this island. Well, it has to be. There only is one island. Nadine showed us on the map.

Nenna sat patiently while Kitty read, and when she had finished took her by the hand, out of the house, across the piazza, and across the road. Kitty was still wondering about how two children could just leave the house, alone, when Nenna nudged her, pointing upwards: above a doorway, a staff, wreathed in a snake. ‘Ospedale,’ said the sign, and Kitty could read that. Her skin tingled a little. Skeleton, tyrant, hero, god, snake, boat, hospital.

Nenna stood in front of her, tall, languid, expectant. Kitty narrowed her eyes, blinked, and said sì, three times. Then she said ‘ospedale’, knowing from her lessons to say the e on the end. Osspeddarlay.

Nenna pointed at the snake. ‘Serpente,’ she said. Serpentay.

‘Serpent,’ said Kitty calmly.

Nenna pointed at the ground and said, ‘Scheletro.’ Skeletro. There was a naughty look in her eye.

Kitty grinned. ‘Skeleton!’ she said.

Nenna reached over and pinched Kitty’s cheek gently between the knuckles of her two first fingers.

‘Carina,’ she said, and Kitty felt both approved and patronised, and that felt absolutely right to her.

Later, Nenna wondered what she would offer the little pink cousin next. Not the river – she was too small for that. That Nenna would save for the boy. Also it was a bit late to go out. So, inside the house … the stairs!

So she showed Kitty how to slide on a cushion down the shining marble staircase. When Kitty cried out in joy that it was like a boat going over the rapids, Nenna recognised the word boat, smiled and sealed her loyalty, because that was what she had always thought about this game, that she was a boat tumbling down weirs and waterfalls, and nobody else, not even Papà, had ever noticed. Nenna and Kitty said to each other, ‘Barca – boat. Boat – barca.’

It was at this moment that Tom returned: soaking wet, mucky, wildly happy, dripping over the tiled floor in the doorway.

Nenna fell silent, retreated, and watched.

Her mother Susanna, coming into the hall from the kitchen with Nadine beside her, had two hands up in the air, expressing disbelief. She began to shake her head and tut. Her small boys peered out from behind her, interested. Tom gazed at them all with his wide blue eyes.

‘Stop that, Tom,’ Nadine said.

‘What!’ cried Tom, defensive.

‘Charming her!’ she said. ‘Kitty, throw him a towel. Tom – dry off, and either keep out of the river or dry off down there. No dripping on Susanna’s floor.’

Tom towelled his head, hair sticking up. ‘I didn’t know if I was meant to strip off or what,’ he said. ‘So I didn’t. I thought that would be best. I’ll take them off now—’

Nadine took him by the ear and said ‘You’re a little monster,’ then ‘Get upstairs,’ she said, pushing him, and she gave him a kiss as he passed.

Lying that night in bed Nenna listened to the water outside the window, tumbling over the rocks, and felt its familiar chill in the white and patchy plaster on the walls. Kitty, lying beside her, was restless. ‘Nenna,’ she said quietly. She pointed to the high wooden head and tail of the bed, said ‘Barca!’ and smiled. Then she pointed up at the vaulted ceiling of the room, made movements with her hands denoting upside-down, and said ‘Barca!’ again, pleased and wanting to please. Nenna understood, smiled at her, and said ‘Buona notte, carina. Sogni d’oro.’ Aldo stuck his head round the door to kiss them goodnight, and Kitty fell asleep with the look of a child who had just discovered that the world was a very strange and potentially glorious place.

Sometimes, at night, Nenna imagined the island shaking itself free of the travertine stonework that moored it in place between Trastevere and Sant’Angelo. It would pull its roots out of Tarquin’s great skeleton, deep in the Tiber mud, its bonds would fall away, and slow and stately it would begin to move back down the river towards the sea, trailing froth behind it … where it was heading she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that Kitty would turn out to be someone with whom she could discuss these things.

She lay and thought about Tom, who had been into the river all alone, before she even had the chance to offer it to him.

That first night Nadine wrote to Riley.

Isola Tiberina

Rome

17 July 1928

Riley my darling – it sounds like an Irish song that way round, doesn’t it? I want to tell you absolutely everything about everything – the journey (easy); the house – yes, they live on the actual island, right in the middle of the Tiber! Do you remember? With the hospital and the bridge with the head with four faces, that you said was a good symbol of the fallibility of the human race: all looking in different directions, not realising they were one creature? The back of the house slides right into the rocks and the river as if it were Venice or something. You look out the window and there it is. SO romantic. Rushing river noise all the time. And of course rather damp. And inside the house we have Aldo, who is terribly handsome and charismatic – I think you’d like him but perhaps not as he does take up a lot of room. He talks all the time – in English and Italian mixed so we are all learning and picking the language up (some (the children) faster than others (me)). He’s an engineer of some kind and plays the guitar. The little boys clamber all over him while he’s playing and he doesn’t mind at all. Lots of hair, big wise eyes like brown honey. He said tonight: ‘How do you like me? My enemies say is Aldo more Roman or more Jewish? I look like both, of course’ – and he does! You could just picture him in a toga, or in the robes of one of Bernini’s marble prophets. They don’t seem to be religious at all, thank god – can one thank god for that? It seems rather absurd – anyway, of course he doesn’t wear robes, he wears slightly flashy city garb: black suit, a white shirt, a pale blue waistcoat buttoned high at the neck. His English is eccentric but frankly I have no right to complain with my (lack of) Italian. I am reminded constantly of that line of Milton’s about educating children, about how ‘they may have easily learnt at any odd hour the Italian Tongue’. Susanna, his wife, is quite quiet but smiley. I haven’t got hold of her yet but I will though she has next to no English—

Here Nadine was about to write about the delicious dinner that Susanna and Aldo had produced on their first night. Even now, after all this time – perhaps because she was far from home and its everyday habits – it was easy to forget for a moment how unkind it would be to mention such things to her husband whose ease with food had been shot away with his jaw at Passchendaele.

The children are Fernanda, known as Nenna, who has lots of hair and a pale wide face like a Piero della Francesca, inscrutable, and the children terribly want her to like them, and two younger boys who I can’t tell apart – black-haired, naughty-eyed, tumbling and playful: Vittorio and Stefano, a pair of wriggly black-haired shrimps, who seem to be about six. Perhaps one of them is bigger than the other. Nenna is perhaps ten – a bit older than Kitty and a bit younger than Tom, so that’s all right, though I’m not sure what Tom is going to do all day as they – the girls – have already sneaked off upstairs and can be heard singing. The marvellous thing is that the piazza is more or less like the park for us, so they can just go out and lark about and be perfectly safe. I dare say they’ll all be bilingual by the end of the week. People pinch Kitty’s cheeks between their knuckles and call her a beautiful blessed blonde angel: ‘Bella bambina biondina, un angelo, bellissima bionda beata.’

She stopped a moment as she wrote this, and then in a rush she wrote—

Darling – I’m sorry but it’s on my mind again, perhaps because of being here, where we were when we were so young & silly, and when we first so truly came together – tell me, again, please, that you don’t hate me for not being able to give you a child of your own? I don’t mean tell me, or hate me, I mean – I suppose, thank you, again, for not adding your disappointment to my own. Perhaps I might go and get myself blessed by some saint of fertility – I’m sure there is one – several probably – or perhaps I will just remain grateful that Tom and Kitty needed us – oh, that’s come out wrong too. That we were there when they needed us.

She stopped again and considered crossing out the whole passage – which would mean starting the letter from scratch.

No. He could know her thought processes, flawed as they were. One day perhaps her cycle would settle into actually being a cycle; and she’d put on some weight, and her ‘system would calm down’, as the last doctor had put it.

She continued:

I’ll send this now and write in more detail tomorrow. If you see Rose – and please do see Rose, make her come to dinner. She works so hard and you can talk politics and social policy without the children pulling your sleeves and complaining – tell her I will write to her. And make sure she doesn’t go to Locke Hill too often. I still fear she’s going to decide Peter needs her again. How is he? Lord, see how the habits stick! I am not worrying about Peter, or about darling Rose, or even about my dear dad or you. How is my dear dad? How is my dear you? I love you I miss you and I will do my very best to get thrown out of the Sistine Chapel in your honour and in memory of 1919—

Nadine

It was family legend how during their honeymoon in Rome, in 1919, Riley had lain on the floor, the better to gaze at the astounding ceiling, and been thrown out, and gone back, and been thrown out, five times. Long ago, he had wanted to be a painter, but the war had swallowed that notion. Nadine, it turned out, was the artist.

She really wished he were with them. But so be it. His inability to be there with them was exactly the kind of thing that they, nine years into their marriage, could smile about and accept. She could accept all kinds of things now. She had accepted Julia’s death – because there’s nothing to be done about it. And Riley’s wounds – because look how he is overcoming them – though she’d hesitate to use the word ‘accept’ to describe how he was about it. But his practicality, his everyday perseverance … yes, there were times when she didn’t think about it, and, she thought, nor did he. And she accepted not being a great artist – because I am an artist, and to be an artist at all, of any kind, and to be paid for it, is a joy and an adventure. And being mother only to other people’s children – ditto.

But all that said, Rome stirred her up.

Tom woke early and tried to head off out without being seen, but Susanna spotted him, sat him down and fed him hard cinnamon buns and milky coffee, by which time the girls and Nadine had appeared, so after a frustrating delay – Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, he travels the fastest who travels alone, Tom muttered to himself – they were all sent out to acquire onions. Tom and Kitty saw, for the first time, places that would become so familiar later: the butter-coloured synagogue, the small local market and the big astonishing one at Campo dei Fiori, the piazzas and alleys and temples along the way, the giant pines the shape of umbrellas, the scraps of road and ancient wall for larking on. Sheep asleep in the shade of gigantic arches. A cart piled high with baskets of chickens. Nadine walked like a dreamer, smiling and pointing things out. Tom felt her love like a hand on the back of his collar.

They stopped at a café for cool bittersweet spremuta di limone, made from huge lumpy Sicilian lemons with leaves on their woody stalks. Kitty’s feet, swollen in her little brown sandals and speckled with mosquito bites, were hurting, so Tom and Nenna were allowed to go on alone.

He walked beside her, suddenly silent. She wasn’t chatty as he had seen her be with Kitty. He didn’t know much about girls. Some chaps had sisters, some of whom giggled. She didn’t seem to be like that.

‘Vuoi vedere le statue parlanti?’ she said, suddenly.

He looked blankly at her.

‘Sì,’ he said, and thought quickly about it in Latin: parlanti – from parlare, to talk, sounds like a – not a past participle, what’s it called – anyway, the -ing one. Talking. And did she say vedere? To see?

‘Vedere parlanti?’ he said.

‘Statue parlanti,’ she said. ‘Vuoi vederle?’

Statue. Statu-ay. Statue?

She was leading him: up streets, down alleys, round carts, through crowds, through a great marketplace, where onions were forgotten. They came out into a long piazza like a racetrack, with three fountains down the centre; mighty stone figures and dolphins vivid among the water and green streaks of weed. All around, Latin was written across rearing buildings. Tom recognised it from a print Riley had at home, in which it was flooded and filled with boats: Piazza Navona.

See statues talking?

He smiled and imagined how a statue might lean down to you, stone lips moving like flesh, voice creaky and dry, talking Latin. He spun round, his hands in his pockets, to look at everything.

In a small piazza beyond, Nenna stopped, and said, ‘Ecco. Pasquino.’

It was a statue: battered and ancient, with no arms and not much in the way of legs, twisted on a sort of staircase of a plinth which was pasted all over, like the wall behind him, with printed leaflets and notices. A lot of people were bustling about, with bicycles and shopping baskets, and some men in vests and blue trousers were digging a hole in the road.

‘La statua parlante,’ she said.

Tom thought, It must be an oracle, like Delphi or something. There’s probably a procedure—

‘Do you ask it questions?’ he said.

She raised her eyebrows at him, and looked brave. ‘Va be,’ she said, and straightened her shoulders. Then, with a consciously respectful demeanour and a glance back at Tom, she went up to the statue, pushed herself up on tiptoe and called out, softly, towards Pasquino’s distant and lichened ear.

He did not answer.

‘Is that it?’ Tom said, and Nenna grinned and said ‘Yes!’

‘Statua non parla,’ Tom said, having been working on the Latin phrase since seven streets ago.

‘Può darsi una risposta,’ she said, seemingly perfectly satisfied, and Tom realised that he wasn’t that concerned about the statue, or the tradition, or the superstition, or even the answer. He wanted to know what she had asked.

‘Quale est domandum tuum?’ he asked, and she squinted at him.

‘Domando tuo?’ he said. ‘Domanda tua?’ He knew Italian had vowels where Latin used us or um. Couldn’t remember the gender of the word for question though.

Nenna slid her eyes sideways, and said: ‘Segreto.’ Secret.

He wondered whether to tease her to get it out of her. Teasing, in this Latin/Italian mixture? He didn’t think he was up to it. But he wanted to know. He couldn’t let a girl keep a secret from him. It would be undignified.

They walked in silence for a while, through the hot bright streets, turning into the black shadows beneath high yellow palazzi.

Other than physical force and language, what other tools did he have? He was thinking furiously. Nenna glanced at him.

Perhaps she wants to tell me. Why else would she have taken me there?

So I must just give her another opportunity.

As they rejoined the river, he turned to her and said: ‘Io credo che tuo secretus dire a me volunta. Se non volunta, perche me ad statuam parlante portare?’ Which he hoped meant. ‘I believe you want to tell me your secret. If not, why take me to the talking statue?’

She laughed, of course. And then she stopped laughing, and she stopped and thought for a bit, and then she took him by the hand, which was slightly alarming, and pulled him across the road and into a church: cool, dim, empty. Glancing around, she spotted what she was after, and led him over there.

‘La mia domanda,’ she said, and looked at him fiercely. He nodded.

She pointed at a painting of the Madonna and child, folded her arms in the universal sign of holding a baby, and made the universal rocking-the-baby motion. ‘Bambino Gesù,’ she said.

He got it. ‘Baby Jesus.’

She pointed to herself. ‘Io,’ she said.

‘You,’ he said.

She drew her finger sharply across her throat. The universal sign of murder.

And that puzzled him.

And she made the universal hands-out palms-up shrug gesture of not knowing. And stared, waiting for his answer.

‘La Mia domanda,’ she said very clearly, ‘era se io ho ammazzato il bambino Gesù.’

From a language point of view he understood perfectly. Her question had been, did she kill baby Jesus?

It was from every other point of view that he was confused – so much so that he thought he must have got it wrong. But the only alternative was did Baby Jesus kill her, which seemed even more unlikely. But then many things are unlikely.

They left the church, slipping out into the day which had grown brighter and hotter even during the few minutes they had been inside the church.

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Your question. Tua domanda. Why?’

Nenna scuffed her shoes on the road, and did a little dance step. She wasn’t looking at him.

‘L’ha detto un ragazzo a scuola,’ she murmured, and would say no more.

He held on to the phrase.

Dear Heart

Oggi ti scrivo in Italiano! I don’t know what the Italian form of Riley would be. Rilino? Reelee? No, not really – today I write to you in English as usual. But I did go shopping with Susanna in what used to be the ghetto, and I said buongiorno a lot, to all kinds of people who mostly seemed to be cousins on Aldo’s father’s side, I think. Susanna introduced me to everybody as cucina which I thought meant kitchen but apparently not. Or perhaps as well. It is all VERY Jewish – you know how in England people are only Christian when they’re in a church, but here it is a part of everything – food, music, traditional lines of work, all kinds of rules and habits, as well as synagogue. Aldo and Susanna seem to have masses of the culture but none of the religion. Interesting – and nobody seems to hold it against them at all. Aldo has a little gang of chaps he plays cards with – Signor Seta next door is his best chum I think – he has quite a saucy wife who wears her floral housecoat very tight – the men all wear hats and have bright eyes and call for each other like small boys wanting each other to come and play—

This is a short and sweet one – like you! I will be home before you know it. Ti adoro! You probably recall what that means.

She had that day taken a long walk with Aldo. Striding beside him she felt like Kitty scurrying after Tom – after all, she’d never had a brother. She smiled. He glanced back, and slowed down for her.

‘You know we came here for our honeymoon?’ she said. ‘I keep catching glimpses of my younger self, loitering in that doorway, say’ – she pointed at the vast, shadowy entrance to an invisible courtyard beyond. ‘Or eyeing up a statue, or considering the light on the river.’

‘Perhaps we passed in the street,’ he said.

‘1919!’ she said.

‘Those strange days …’ he murmured.

‘I’d been a nurse,’ she said.

‘I was a soldier,’ he replied, and they looked at each other, and they both knew that they did not want to look back at those times when their countries had just been at war, and at their selves in the shock of survival.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘life is long, if you’re lucky, and who knows – who knows what is coming?’ With which she very much agreed.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘The Arco di Tito. Come. I give you a tiny history lesson. So. First Jewish people came to Rome two thousand years ago to ask protection against King of the Syrians, and they stayed. Then later, after destruction of Jerusalem and burning of the temple, Emperor Tito brought Jews back for slaves. Look—’

They were coming up to the great arch, looming against the blue above them.

‘It looks just like the Arc de Triomphe in Paris,’ she said.

‘This is the original,’ he said, with a little swagger. ‘See, look inside.’

The vault of the arch was like a slice through a great church or temple: the ornamental ceiling squares and flowers looking almost Tudor, and the carved stone panels at the sides.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You see the menorah? Trumpets?’

She looked. ‘Oh,’ she said.

‘And the prisoners carrying them – those are the Jewish prisoners. Jews paid their ransom, and took them into their community – where we still live. Our great great great great etc., etc., grandparents. Good, yes?’

She didn’t know whether to smile or cry.

‘And Tito had a Jewish fidanzata, Queen Berenice. A long long time we have been here.’ They gazed for a while and Nadine thought how little she had ever thought about being Jewish.

As they walked on, he said, ‘Most of Roman Jews won’t walk under that arch. Pride and loyalty. But me, I’m more modern. Not so religious. You?’

‘Not so religious,’ she said.

He took her arm and tucked it into his. ‘Come, my little sister. I buy you an ice cream.’

This full relaxation with this new man in her family made her feel safe, in new territory. A good feeling.

Aldo came in to the kitchen with his trousers wet to the knees again. ‘Forgive my trousers!’ he said. ‘I was fishing in boats—’ and he set down a bucket on the floor. Tom looked into it: thick coils of shining silver, sliding around over and under each other. ‘I make a marinata. Susanna, mi dai l’aceto! Vinegar, for the marinade. Tommaso, you like to cook?’ He was pulling a sprig of leaves from his pocket. ‘Oh – are you kosher?’

Tom didn’t know what kosher was, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t.

‘Bravo!’ Aldo said. ‘It’s no problem because anyway eels have scales – the rabbi says not, but they do – but I like no religion. Your mother is not religious.’

‘Not in the least,’ said Tom, wondering whether Aldo knew that Nadine was not their actual mother, and staring as Aldo, a cloth round his hand, pulled a yard of big gleaming eel by the tail from the bucket.

‘Brava!’ cried Aldo. ‘Religion is no good – stand back!’ and he swung the beast through the air, a great silver arc, and thwacked its head with a loud crack on the marble table-top. And again.

‘It’s still alive,’ said Tom, aghast and delighted.

‘No. That is nervous system.’ Now he was tying string round its tail, and hanging it from a hook on the wall.

‘But it’s writhing—’

Aldo was cutting round its neck. ‘Now we skin,’ he said. ‘You take pincer.’

‘But it’s alive—’

‘No,’ and then with a look, Aldo took the eel off the hook again, laid it on Susanna’s wooden chopping board, and with two blows cut its head off.

‘You want to see something?’

Tom wasn’t sure.

Aldo dropped the eel back in the bucket.

Tom peered in.

The eel was swimming around, coiling on itself like before, headless.

Tom stared. He could say nothing.

‘Not magic. Not a miracle,’ Aldo said, with a grin. ‘Science. Nervous system continues. Don’t tell the girls, eh?’ He grabbed the creature again, hitched it back on to its hook and started to rub salt on his hands. ‘It moves again with salt: look—’ and he put his hands to the skin which twitched and wrinkled even as he started to get a purchase on it. ‘Pincer!’ he cried, and Susanna handed him a pair of pliers. Gripping, he began to pull the skin off, a thick tight leathery sleeve. Then ‘Stand back!’ he yelled again, grinning at Tom as he gutted it, strong slashes down the silver abdomen. A little slither of red and blue fell out on to the floor.

Tom blinked.

At supper, Aldo asked what they had done all morning, and Tom, taken off guard, said they had been to see Pasquino the Talking Statue.

‘And did he talk Nenna?’ Aldo asked, and Tom was worried, he wasn’t sure why, that he had betrayed her in some way. But she just laughed and went and stood behind her father, her elbows on his shoulders and her head resting against his, her greeny-gold corkscrews resting on his smoothed-down black ones, while he explained that Pasquino and the other talking statues were all nonsense and superstition, people used to ask them questions, now they stick up leaflets and notices around them. That was all.

‘But there are notices stuck up all over Rome,’ Tom said, thinking of the ones he’d seen, mostly from the government, against communists, who were dangerous and would prevent jobs and wages and food, or from communists and anarchists, against the government. Plus all the ancient ones in Latin, carved into stone.

‘Respectable people sign their notices,’ Aldo explained. ‘People who put things at Pasquino don’t. People say what they want and they aren’t punished.’

Tom was surprised that adults weren’t allowed to say what they wanted, without being punished. He had only come across that before at school.

‘I read some of the notices,’ he said. ‘They weren’t very interesting.’

Upstairs, during the siesta, Tom took his little Italian/English dictionary, and worked out Nenna’s phrase. L’ha detto un ragazzo a scuola. ‘A boy at school said it.’

He put the dictionary in his pocket. He would need it, he thought, during these linguistically challenging days.

Tom and Nenna were not often alone, and the opportunity did not arise for him to pursue the question of the boy at school and the death of Jesus. Out with Kitty, Nadine or the small boys, Nenna introduced them to every stone animal in the neighbourhood, and many others. Later, in the Piazza della Repubblica, she showed them the fountain full of naiads. Each naiad had a creature of her own: a swan, a horse, a monster, a dragon. Which animal, Nenna enquired, do you want? Kitty walked them all the way back practically home, to the turtle-fountain in Piazza Mattei, because she did not know the word for turtle, and Nenna could not get it from her impersonation, waddling round on all fours, poking her head in and out, much to everyone’s amusement. Tom considered telling them that it was a foolish game, but as the idea formed he realised – with a sense of wonder – that he didn’t have to. He wasn’t at school. He wasn’t even at home. He was just with girls, in a foreign country, and he could do whatever he wanted.

‘Centaur,’ he said.

Whenever they went across into Sant’Angelo, to the ghetto, or Piazza, as Susanna called it, as if it were the only piazza in Rome, which it most certainly was not, they had to touch and greet the four worn and weathered faces on the bridgestone as they passed. It was called the Bridge of the Four Heads, but there was only one head, with four faces. Nenna knew her city so well she could just swagger through it, which filled Tom with a fierce jealousy, because he wanted Rome, he wanted to belong to it, and he – so fair, so pale-eyed – so very clearly didn’t. She had names for the skinny wild cats at the Portico d’Ottavia, and for the fat, ferocious lion and the slender greyhound carved into the front wall of the buildings down the road. The madman on the corner who sang opera greeted her: ‘Nenna La Bella, bella Nenna!’, and sometimes they sang scraps of Puccini and Verdi to each other, joining together in duets and choruses.

One day early on, sitting on the river wall, Nenna sang: folk songs, Roman songs, Venetian songs, Neapolitan songs, boatmen’s songs, songs in dialects, songs in Italian. Songs she knew from her father.

Tom hummed along quietly, picking up words, asking for translations. Michelemmà = Michele mio = My Michael.

Roma divina! The warm air, the wind on his neck, the magnificent smells … Kitty in turn sang ‘London’s Burning’. They sang it as a round, and giggled, and tried to think of a more sophisticated song about London, so Tom sang ‘Ratcliffe Highway’, which Riley’s father John Purefoy had taught him, with its haunting tune and tale of the man who kept running away from the recruiting party, and ended up hanged. Nenna stared at him in sorrow all the way through, and sang a Neapolitan song about four moccatoras, which they could tell was equally sad, whatever a moccatora might be. Nenna taught them a melancholy lullaby: Lucciola, lucciola, vien’ da me, io ti darò il pan del re, il pan del re e della regina, lucciola, lucciola, vien’ vicina. So Tom and Kitty, who did not know that a lucciola was a firefly, and did not know what a firefly was anyway, but understood the insect connection from Nenna’s buzzing flying gestures, and the pan del re from a quick run to the bakery across the way and some gestures into the window, sang ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’, with the animal noises – but then feared that they were trying too hard, and felt foolish, until Nenna smiled and started singing ‘Nella vecchia fattoria … ’ to the same tune.

They were quiet for a while after that, till Nenna said carefully: ‘How is it London?’ and Tom said: ‘È bella. Tu vien vicina. Io ti darò il pan del re.’ It’s beautiful. You come near. I will give you the bread of the king.

They sat for hours on the various stone and mud beaches of the island comparing things, playing games, as the river ebbed and flowed. They laid out their opinions and thoughts and preferences for comparison, proceeding with increasing alacrity as each test was passed and each admission approved. Kitty tried to express her regret that they hadn’t met earlier. Nenna was able to make it clear that she had always wanted a sister. Tom relaxed in the company of females. It was very satisfactory.

Later, family legends developed about these first meetings: that this was the first time Tom ever embraced a girl and he never got over it; that Kitty, who thought herself plump and dull, saw a Mediterranean nymph with skin like honey and hair the colour of olive oil, and that Nenna, who thought herself plain, saw a princess, a rosebud, a pink and golden creature out of a fairy tale, and a silver-haired prince like King Arthur. Everyone recognised it as some kind of love at first sight, and when it was time to go home, sadness prevailed.

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