Deep and Silent Waters

‘Soon?’ Vittoria insisted.

She got a weary, impatient look. Her mother did not want to think about Canfield going back to England.

‘Why do you keep harping on about it? One day he’ll be sent home, but until then he’s here.’ Here with her, her eyes said.

‘The war is over now, they’ll send him back home soon, I expect. He won’t be able to refuse, will he?’ Vittoria’s voice throbbed with satisfaction. She wasn’t going to pretend she liked him, even to comfort her mother.

Anna said sharply, ‘No, he can’t refuse to go. He’s in the army so he has to obey orders. We’re none of us free, Vittoria, you’ll understand that one day. Italy has lost the war. We can’t help ourselves so we have to accept what happens to us.’

‘We don’t have to accept anything!’ Vittoria bristled. ‘This is our country! We don’t have to let the Americans or the British tell us what to do!’

‘You’re too young to understand. We let Il Duce take us into that war, on the German side, and now we shall have to pay for losing. We need all our friends, like Freddy, now.’

‘He’s not my friend!’ Vittoria got up and

ran out of the kitchen. Canfield had taken her father’s place in her mother’s bed even though he was married and had a child of his own. She hated him. Sometimes she felt she hated her mother, yet she loved her, too. She was in such a muddle: she could never sort out what she really felt or why. She was like a piece of seaweed carried back and forth on the irresistible tide, torn from its roots, helpless, lost.

Carlo’s wedding was quite an event in Milan society. The austerity years were coming to an end, people were eager to have a party, dress up, enjoy themselves. It was so long since they had had any fun, but now the greyness of the war was past. Blue skies were back, hope, happiness; they had a future again.

There was no chance of Rachele getting a new wedding dress, so she wore her mother’s, which had been laid away in tissue paper in an attic in her family home. It had been rediscovered after her mother died in 1943 during an Allied bombing raid. Rachele had gone through the dead woman’s clothes. Nobody threw anything away during the war. Everything was potentially useful.

Old biscuit tins were used to keep food fresh, or to store needles and thread, old clothes were made into rag rugs or cut down for children. When Rachele found her mother’s heavy creamy satin wedding dress, she had sat in rapture for a long time, stroking it, feeling the weight, the beauty, the irreplaceable lustre of that marvellous material. It had been rewrapped in the crumpled, yellowed tissue paper in which it had been packed, then hidden again. Rachele couldn’t bring herself to cut it up or use it for anything else; nor could she bear to sell it.

It didn’t fit her, of course: her mother had been tiny, not above five foot, and as flat as a boy, while Rachele was very female with those full breasts, bigger waist and curvy hips. Luckily, the style of the period had meant that there was lots of spare fabric in the skirt. The seamstress had done a good job of inserting panels in the back and at the waist, to accommodate Rachele’s rounded body. Originally the dress had been designed to sweep the floor as the bride walked, but as Rachele was so much taller than her mother the hem ended just below her ankles, which was much more sensible, made it easier to walk up the aisle.

Vittoria wore an old pink silk ball-gown from her mother’s first year of married life. Anna remade it, with puff sleeves, a plain round neckline, long skirt, and the dress was a dream. Vittoria loved it. She had never had anything like it before. She felt beautiful.

The wedding breakfast was crowded with people, many of whom Vittoria had known before she went to Venice. They all looked older and shabbier than she remembered, and there were many noticeable gaps in families: sons, brothers, fathers, uncles gone. Nobody talked about that.

Everyone was determined to enjoy themselves and forget what they had suffered, forget what they had lost. Anna and Vittoria wanted to forget, too, but Vittoria was haunted by the ghosts of Alfredo, Filippo and Niccolo. For her they would always be children; it was hard to believe they were gone for ever.

She caught sight of Frederick Canfield moving among the guests, talking, laughing, tanned and slim in his British uniform, his brown leather belt tight around his waist, his buttons highly polished, his brown hair slicked down. Some people were polite, some openly hostile, more to his uniform than to him, but after a few minutes that charm of his softened most of them, especially as his Italian was fluent. From time to time he looked towards her mother with that intimate, secret glance Vittoria had seen them exchange often before; and each time her mother’s eyes met his in the same way, completing a magic circle of love, which was almost visible.

Vittoria hated Canfield so much that she could barely eat any of the wedding breakfast. Every time she saw him with her mother she felt their love betray her, shut her out.

The war might be over, but Canfield was still her enemy.

After the wedding, life sank back into the exhausted depression of that bitter, post-war time. Going around Milan on the old bicycle Carlo had managed to buy for her, Vittoria hated everything she saw – the blitzed city was a desert of gutted houses, broken stones, shattered glass and tiles, gardens thick with weeds.

The once magnificent centre was a wreck: the Piazza del Duomo, linked by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele to Milan’s pride, the great opera house La Scala, had been reduced to mountains of rubble after the bombing raids. Even the cathedral had been hit, although by a miracle most of it still stood, some parts shored up with great wooden piles. The streets had been cleared now, traffic flowed again, horses and carts, a few vans and cars, most workers riding battered bicycles like hers – but when would the old beauty of Milan be restored?

Vittoria couldn’t believe what had happened to the great glass-vaulted arcade where her mother had so often taken her. She remembered the beautiful, chic women in elegant hats, wandering in and out of the expensive boutiques, drinking coffee and eating rich cakes in the famous Milan coffee-houses. The Galleria, once the envy of Europe, was now roofless, shattered. Everywhere in Milan you saw the price Italy had paid for entering the war, and the more she realised what had happened to her beloved city the more she hated Frederick Canfield.

Over the next few months Canfield came and went all the time, but Vittoria was back at school in Milan and able to stay out of his way. It meant she did not have to pretend to be polite to him.

One day when she came in from school she found her mother in the kitchen preparing a simple evening meal of pasta with basil, garlic and pine kernels.

‘Mmm, that smells good! Is it just us tonight, or are Carlo and Rachele eating with us?’ The newly-weds had their own suite of rooms on the second floor: Rachele cooked their meals in a tiny, makeshift kitchen that had once been a maid’s bedroom.

Without looking round Anna said, ‘Freddy is coming to dinner.’

Flushing angrily, Vittoria said, ‘Well, I’m not eating with him! I’d rather have dry bread in my room than eat with the Englishman. I wish to God he would go back to his own country.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, Vittoria. You can be happy now – he goes tomorrow.’

Vittoria felt as if a bird sang inside her. He was going. Going.

But her mother sounded so miserable that she flung her arms round her, hugged her. ‘Don’t cry, Mamma! I’m sorry. I hate you to be unhappy.’