Deep and Silent Waters

And she had. In the end. She had been the victor at last, no longer the victim. She had had to wait, but she had learnt patience and tenacity as a child. That was why the Jesuits had said, ‘Give us a child until it is seven and it is ours for life.’

Milan, 1945

She had been just in her teens when her mother took her back to Milan. She hadn’t wanted to go and had cried bitterly at parting from Aunt Maria and Rosa.

‘You’re going home, you’ll be happier, now,’ Aunt Maria had said, trying to look cheerful in spite of the tears in her tired old eyes. Vittoria had wanted to believe her, but she knew nothing was as it had been before she went to Venice. Three of her half-brothers were gone, so was Papa. Life would be different at home, and in Venice she had been happier than she had ever been in Milan before the war. She couldn’t even remember Milan – it was all so long ago and far away.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she had sobbed.

‘You must,’ Aunt Maria said, patting her heaving back. ‘We’ll miss you. The house will be so quiet, without you running up and down the stairs, chattering to Gina and Olivia. But your mother needs you at home now and you must go.’

They returned to Milan in Frederick Canfield’s Jeep. Squashed into the back with the luggage, Vittoria had pretended to sleep, but from under her eyelashes she had silently observed her mother and the Englishman. They talked quietly to each other, looked at each other and smiled, the intimacy between them evident even to a girl of thirteen. Vittoria could never remember her mother looking at her father that way.

Had Mamma ever loved Papa? Had her father loved her mother? She had seen him kissing her, putting his arm round her, as if he did, but if he loved Mamma why had he done … that to her nurse?

They had left Venice at first light, but it was dark by the time they reached Milan, and Vittoria was genuinely fast asleep as the Jeep pulled up. Drowsily she stirred and her eyes opened. Disorientated, she stared out at lighted windows, at a shadowy building that rose up very high.

Frederick Canfield got out and began to unload the luggage. Her mother whispered to him, ‘Stay the night. There are plenty of empty rooms.’

‘No, I have too much to do tomorrow,’ he said, just as Carlo came out to welcome them.

Vittoria stumbled out on to the gravel driveway.

Carlo stopped dead. ‘My God, are you Vittoria? Last time I saw you you were just a baby.’

‘You’ve changed too. You look—’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, not knowing how to say what she was thinking.

Last time she had seen him he had been a slumped body in a wheelchair. A man like a sack, except for the arms that had developed great muscles from having to propel the wheelchair. Since then he had taught himself to walk using two sticks, swinging along on them at an amazing speed, his lean, wiry body seeming weightless between them.

He had lost so much weight that he looked taller and younger, his arms, shoulders, chest powerful. His thick black hair and black eyes reminded her of her father, but Carlo was better-looking, with a determined, tenacious air about him. Pain had etched itself into his face; his eyes burned with it. He had been to hell and back, and it showed.

Her mother had already told her how brilliantly Carlo ran the company. He was, Mamma said, a better businessman than their father had been, perhaps because he had suffered so much, had had to learn to adapt and to cope with whatever life threw at him.

‘I’m okay,’ he said, grinning suddenly. ‘Life’s been hard, these past few years, but it’s going to get better now.’

‘Oh, I hope so! It can’t get worse.’

He crossed himself. ‘Don’t say that! It’s tempting God.’ He had not always been so religious – perhaps that was something else the war had taught him.

Mamma said, plaintively, ‘Why are we standing around out here in this cold wind?’

‘Of course,’ Carlo said hastily, ‘come inside. You missed dinner, but it won’t take ten minutes to throw some supper together. There’s minestrone, and you can have pasta and tomato sauce. Our new cook’s food is pretty basic, but it’s always eatable.’

‘I’m starving,’ Vittoria confessed, and followed him, as a thin, black-haired young man came out to take the luggage into the house.

‘This is Antonio. He was in the army until a few months ago and now he’s working for us,’ Carlo told her. The young man gave her a faint bow and a brief glance from slanting eyes like wet liquorice.

Vittoria smiled at him. ‘Hallo,’ she said shyly, noticing that the white shirt he was wearing was far too big for him. Suddenly it occurred to her that it had belonged to her father: she could see it was well tailored, still in good condition, way beyond a servant’s means. It hung on his skinny shoulders and ballooned as he stretched to pick up the cases.

She wondered if Carlo, too, was wearing her father’s clothes. That shirt fitted him, but the quality of the material was so good that it couldn’t have bee

n bought lately. You simply couldn’t get shirts made of such cloth, so generously cut. Everything was skimped, of poor fabric and hard to come by. Well, it had been in Venice. Perhaps Milan was better off.

A little later, they sat down to supper in the high-ceilinged kitchen, by candlelight, a mean little fire in the hearth. As they ate the thick minestrone, Carlo told Vittoria at length about his plans for a new, even more magnificent house to replace the home that had been destroyed in the bombing.

She looked around the shadowy room at the copper pans hanging on the walls, the closed wooden shutters on the windows, the huge fireplace that gave out so little heat.

‘Mamma said you were renting this place?’