Deep and Silent Waters

‘Will you marry me, Toria?’

This time she managed to whisper, ‘Yes.’

When they went back into Ca’ d’Angeli Olivia was waiting, eyes wide and excited. When she saw their faces she gave a whoop.

‘She said yes?’ Flinging her arms around Vittoria she hugged her like a boa constrictor. ‘I’m so happy. Now you’ll be my sister. When is the wedding? I must be a bridesmaid! Will you have it soon?’

‘I’m afraid we can’t,’ Domenico said quietly. ‘Carlo wants us to wait until you are in your last year at university, Toria. He feels you should finish your degree course and then train as an accountant. One day you will inherit your family company and it is important that you are prepared for that.’

‘Oh, but I don’t want to wait so long, I want to get married right away.’

‘Of course she does! It’s not natural, getting engaged and then waiting a whole year!’

‘Carlo won’t hear of you giving up your degree course,’ Dominico told Vittoria.

‘But I can go back to college after we’re married.’

‘The university faculty frowns on married women taking degrees, and if we were married it would be very hard for you to concentrate on your studies – and hard for me, too, to let you go away for months at a time.’

He smiled at her, his mysterious dark eyes glowing. ‘No, we must wait, Toria. It will be hard, for both of us, but we have our whole lives in front of us. There is plenty of time.’

She returned to Milan a week later to get ready for her first term at university. Carlo was delighted with her engagement.

‘Do we have to wait, Carlo? If we got married at once I could go to America with Domenico and start university in California.’

Her brother looked surprised. ‘I suggested that to Domenico, but he felt it would be too much of a distraction for you both. If you got pregnant you would never finish your degree. I told him you must get some qualifications. If you’re going to run the firm you have to know what you’re doing. You could get a manager, but how could you be sure you could trust him? It was a relief to me that Domenico agreed with me and was ready to wait.’

She ached with frustration, poured all her passion out on paper every day. Domenico wrote less frequently. His were not long letters: like Olivia he was a poor correspondent, but he filled his pages with tiny pen and ink drawings of things he had seen during the day, some funny, some fascinating, some sad. He had an eye for the strange, the weird, the pathetic and Vittoria read and re-read those letters every day. They made her feel close to him, although he was back in the States where he was joined by his sister.

Suddenly Olivia wrote to announce that she was getting married. Vittoria was sick with envy but at least the news meant that Domenico was coming back to Italy for a few weeks. In the spring of 1952 Olivia married her American, Greg, with a long and magnificent nuptial mass. Vittoria was her bridesmaid. The wedding breakfast was held at Ca’d’Angeli and many of their schoolfriends were invited. The only one who did not come was Gina, who was working abroad.

Curious, Vittoria asked, ‘What job is she doing?’

‘She’s on a year’s scholarship, at an art school in the States.’

‘Really? I thought she would go into her family business. Did Domenico help her get the scholarship?’

‘He wrote her a reference, I think. Oh, I’m going to miss you. But I’ll come back to be your matron-of-honour. And you must write to me! You know me, I hate writing letters, but I’ll drop you a postcard every week, I promise.’

She and her husband were going to live in Chicago. The Murphy family had given up the palazzo they had been renting and had returned home. Greg was working in the family firm, learning the business he would one day inherit.

Domenico was sailing back to the States on the same boat as his sister and her husband so Vittoria saw little of him during that spring holiday and when she did he seemed distant and cold. She tried to talk to him about how she felt, to say what was burning inside her, that she loved him and needed him now, not in a year, that she wanted him to make love to her, but he always changed the subject before she got the words out, as if he guessed what she was going to say and was determined she shouldn’t.

Then he was gone and she was back in Milan, working hard but intensely depressed. Did he regret having proposed? Didn’t he want to marry her? Did he love her?

In her next letter she asked him to name the day. Shouldn’t they be planning the wedding? Rachele kept reminding her that there were masses of things to do: they had to book the church, plan the wedding breakfast, make lists of guests, send out invitations. But first they needed

to know the date. It would take months to set everything up here in Milan.

‘I’ll let you know soon,’ he wrote back. ‘I promise. I can’t be certain yet when I shall get back from here.’ He filled up the rest of the page with drawings of a beach – girls in bikinis, men with huge chests, children digging in sand. Funny, lively, charming.

Vittoria didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That winter Carlo and Rachele were driving home from the opera when their car skidded on ice and crashed. Rachele was killed outright. Carlo had head injuries and a broken shoulder.

Domenico flew home the day before Rachele’s funeral and held Vittoria while she sobbed into his shirt. She was relieved he had come, inexpressibly glad to see him, yet she had, too, a strong sense of foreboding. Her instincts kept telling her that something was wrong, but she didn’t know what it was.

‘How’s Carlo?’ he asked, lightly kissing her hair.