Never Such Innocence, page 11
‘God knows, I hope so,’ answered Julia and then decided to confide a little. ‘One reason I was so anxious to go to Venice was to try to persuade him to come home,’ she said. ‘He told me that the children there needed him so badly, but there are plenty here who must need him just as much.’
‘I know,’ said Comfort. ‘I thought at the time that there was more to his determination to stay out there than he was telling me … He didn’t tell you any more, did he?’
Julia shook her head.
‘He’s never told me anything more than he tells you,’ she said with an easy smile.
Comfort tossed the curls back from her face.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Julia, not altogether truthfully. But with Comfort becoming more and more like the woman who had become Julia’s dearest friend at university, she was not prepared to admit to jealousy. ‘You’re his sister … you’ve known him far longer than I. Why should I mind that you and he knew each other better than I could have done?’
‘I’m glad,’ said Comfort, her brilliant, slate-grey eyes softening. ‘And I’m sorry that …’
‘Hush,’ said Julia, thinking that neither of them could cope with an emotional scene just then. ‘The war’s over now. Let’s try to forget.’
Comfort said nothing, peering into Julia’s eyes as though she were thinking of drawing her again.
‘OK,’ she said at last. ‘And while you’re out there you can try to find out what it is that keeps him in Italy and …’
‘And get rid of it?’ suggested Julia with a laugh in her voice.
‘Well, I think you ought to try,’ answered Comfort sternly.
‘You know, I …’ Julia was beginning when she caught sight of the kitchen clock. ‘I must run. See you tonight. Are you in?’
‘No. There’s a party at Marcus’s gallery. I’ve said I’ll go. D’you want to come?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ answered Julia, buttoning up the jacket of her black suit and checking her face and hair in the mirror that Comfort had hung beside the big kitchen dresser. ‘I find parties very lugubrious these days.’ She seized her heavy black briefcase and hurried out of the room.
Chapter Nine
Anthony’s conviction that he would find the renewal of his married life easier with David Wallington in the house was shaken in August when David wrote to him from Rome asking him to testify at the trial for murder of one of the partisans who had fought with them in the mountains.
The man, whom they had known only as ‘Paolo’, had always been a troublemaker, but he had been a ferocious and loyal fighter, very brave and completely dedicated to ridding his country of the Nazis he hated. Anthony had heard nothing of him since leaving the mountains after the German surrender until he received David’s letter.
He’s on trial for killing a collaborator – a man [wrote David] who went on from profitable dealings with the Nazis to playing a powerful part in the local black market. Paolo ran across him, I think by accident, and finding out who he was beat him up and got carried away. There is no doubt that Paolo killed him, but after what we all went through together, I feel it’s our duty at least to testify to what he did in the war in the hope of a relatively lenient sentence.
David Wallington went on to explain when the trial was to take place and what would be involved if Anthony agreed to be a character witness. Even before he reached the end of his friend’s letter, Anthony was angry enough to start writing his answer.
Dear David [he wrote as calmly as he could],
How can you possibly think of giving evidence for Paolo? After the trouble he caused, and after what we both know of his quite uncontrollable violence, I think the longer he stays in prison the better. I would say that he is a danger to everyone who crosses him – and some who don’t.
I know you’d fight to the death to protect the rights of any underdog you could find, but has it occurred to you that Paolo himself was probably involved in the black market and bumped off this other man because of current rivalry rather than as summary punishment for collaboration? I suppose that if it had happened at the time of the German surrender, when revenge seemed more important than anything else, I might have felt more inclined to help. But over a year later, his wretched temper should have cooled. All he had to do, if his victim was really a black marketeer, was report him, not kill him.
I can’t testify for him, and I have to say that I’m surprised that you of all people are even considering it. The man is a liability and a thug. He ought to be locked up.
Anthony signed the letter coldly and hoped that it might persuade David not to intervene in the trial. There had been times during the war when both Anthony and David had wanted to expel Paolo from their particular band of partisans, but had been unable to risk it, since he had known too much about them all. Even David, who always believed the best about everyone he met, thought the likelihood of Paolo’s going to the Germans to get his own back was too great, and they had put up with him until the war ended.
Anthony expected a protest from David and so he was not surprised to get another letter by return of post. In it, David wrote that he was not trying to persuade Anthony to testify against his will, but wanted to explain why he believed that he himself should do so, because he hated the idea of their being at loggerheads.
Everyone deserves a fair trial, whatever he has done. Moreover, we used Paolo’s violence and thuggery whenever we went out against the Nazis. We’d never have got away after blowing up that supply convoy if it hadn’t been for Paolo. You and I could have been picked up, tortured and even sent to a concentration camp. That seems to me to give us a duty to speak for him now. I don’t intend to say anything beyond describing his courage in the fight to free Italy. There isn’t anything else I can say. Obviously if I’m asked about his temper, I’ll answer as you would.
Anthony thought that letter both critical and absurd, and he wondered what had happened to turn the cheerfully brave young officer he had known so well into a prig. David had always been unnecessarily influenced by his conscience and his devotion to the principles of fair play, but during the war he had at least allowed the demands of expediency and common sense to control his actions. They had trusted each other with their lives then, and without exchanging much information about themselves, formed a closer bond than any of their pre-war friendships had provided.
Anthony had admired David’s gentleness as much as his fortitude and endurance in the often harsh conditions of their life in the mountains, and during the lonely months in Venice had looked forward to sharing his rooms with David. After reading David’s letter Anthony’s enthusiasm turned to profound misgivings.
He began to remember their few but violent disagreements and the occasions when David had done things he thought unjustifiably dangerous; to wonder whether, like so many others, David had been driven by the war to show talents and qualities that he would never bother to use in the ordinary life that peace would let him live. As the days passed and he became gloomier, Anthony even began to wonder whether the friendship they had shared had been no more than an illusion fostered by propinquity and shared danger.
He and Annunziata left the depressing house near the hospital at the end of August, when the heat was at its worst and the canal that ran beside the house was stinking like a primitive sewage farm. They both agreed that the new flat, with its huge, high-ceilinged rooms, was a distinct improvement. Anthony had no time to do more than look round the elegant apartment after he and Annunziata had followed the porter who was taking their luggage there.
As soon as Anthony had left to walk back to the hospital, Annunziata set about allocating bedrooms before telling the porter where to carry the cases and boxes. The biggest and most elaborate of the rooms she decided should go to Signora Giulia, and it seemed obvious to put the doctor in the communicating room next door. That left three rooms on the floor above, the biggest for the young Signor Wallington and the smallest for herself. There was only one bathroom and it was obvious to Annunziata’s experienced eye that the plumbing was poor. She hoped that the Signora Giulia would understand and not expect American standards of gushing hot water all day.
Annunziata spent a blessedly busy day organising the new lodgings, sweeping cobwebs from all the corners and rearranging the gilded, painted furniture until the rooms looked as they should. They were beautifully cool even while she had the shutters open to blow the dust away and clear the air, and when she had finished everything, she sat at her ease in the small kitchen, waiting for the doctor to return for his evening meal.
As soon as she heard his step, she stood up and went out into the hall to welcome him and show him everything she had done to make his home comfortable. The sight of his face drove every thought of housewifery from her mind and she stood dumbly in front of him, the blood draining out of her face.
Anthony reached out to hold her, because she looked as though she might faint at any moment. She shook her head.
‘Come and sit down, Annunziata,’ he said, gently urging her towards the big salon. She obeyed him and waited, her eyes blank and her head bowed. Anthony had been accustomed to delivering bad news for almost the whole of his medical career and he had always found that the most difficult to give was an announcement of the death of a child, but nothing in his life had seemed as bad as the news he had to give Annunziata.
‘Which one is it, dottore?’ she asked, her voice hoarse, when he did not speak.
‘Lucia,’ he said quickly, not wanting to torture her by drawing out her anxiety any longer.
‘What happened?’
‘After she was caught, she was sent to Auschwitz,’ he said, making himself look at Annunziata, although he could hardly bear the agony he could see in her eyes. ‘The Red Cross has just received confirmation that she died very soon after she got there.’
Annunziata said nothing, but Anthony saw that she had gripped her hands together in front of her and was breathing heavily through clenched teeth. He wanted to comfort her, but there was no palliative to be given for the pain she was suffering.
‘Thank you for telling me, dottore,’ she said at last with the familiar heartbreaking dignity. ‘May I go now?’
‘Of course, Annunziata,’ he said. ‘You must do whatever you wish. And you must tell me of anything … anything I can do for you.’
She shook her greying head, which was now held proudly upright on her long neck. ‘There is nothing anyone can do,’ she said, smoothing her hands down over her apron. She looked down at it as though surprised to see herself wearing it, and then she wiped her hands. ‘Your dinner is ready. Shall I bring it in here now?’
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ said Anthony, trying to help. ‘I can get it later.’
‘I would rather work,’ said Annunziata. ‘Now, or later?’
‘Then now, please. Thank you very much.’
Anthony found it almost impossible to eat what she put in front of him, but he knew that his fasting would do nothing to help her, still less help her dead daughter, and he forced himself to finish everything. He then accepted Annunziata’s offer of a guided tour of their new house and, since she obviously wanted it that way, tried to show no sign that the evening was any different from the others they had spent together.
When she had gone to bed he wrote to both Julia and David Wallington telling them what had happened so that neither should hurt or worry Annunziata with tactless questions or comments when they arrived.
David came first, in late September, and Julia followed five weeks later. She flew for the first time in her life and after the first moments of instinctive fear as the earth seemed to fall away from the aeroplane, she found it an exhilarating experience.
Sitting next to her was a tall, dark young man wearing UNRRA uniform. For the first part of the journey he sat absorbed in some papers, while Julia gazed out of the tiny porthole beside her seat and tried to identify the distant cities over which they flew and to imagine what the bomber pilots must have felt all through the war as they took their ‘crates’to those same cities to dump tons and tons of high explosive on to them.
The aeroplane lurched suddenly and dropped down through the clouds so sharply that Julia felt as though her entrails were being sucked out of her body. She clutched the arm-rest of her seat and every thought was blanked out of her mind in a paroxysm of purely physical fear. The man who was sitting next to her looked up from his papers and patted her hand kindly.
‘It’s only the Alps, ma’am,’ he said in a thick, creamy American accent that she would one day recognise as Virginian. ‘You always bump a little bit over mountains.’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia, breathless but determined to display a proper British sang-froid. ‘I was a trifle startled.’
He smiled, which seemed to lighten his heavy square face. Despite enormously thick dark eyebrows and a rounded pugnacious chin, it was a pleasant face, both intelligent and tolerant. Julia decided that she was justified in letting go a little of her assumed phlegm.
‘I’ve never flown before,’ she said. ‘Are you a pilot? You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘I was once,’ he said, ‘but there’s not enough flying going on now to keep us all in business and so I’m grounded. I’m with UNRRA.’ He gestured to his khaki uniform that carried no badges of rank or regiment and then said with a trace of bitterness in his voice: ‘Life in Europe’d sure be easier if there were a few more planes. It’s crazy. But a lot of things’re crazy over here right now.’
‘In what way?’ Julia asked, becoming interested as well as polite.
‘Beyond the impossible difficulties of feeding and housing all the DPs, I mean?’
‘I just wouldn’t know where to start, ma’am,’ said the young American. ‘I suppose the worst craziness is that we’re trying to stamp out this damned, pernicious black market, because if we don’t the relief supplies won’t get to the people who they’ve been sent for. But in some places we have to let it go on, because without it even more people would be starving than are already.’
‘It sounds an impossible contradiction,’ said Julia frankly. ‘Is that what you’re involved with? Stamping out the black market?’
‘Partly,’ he said. ‘We set up a Protective Service earlier this year to work with the indigenous police to deal with the black market in places like Italy and Poland. I’m seconded to the Italian section.’
‘I can imagine that it’s no sinecure,’ said Julia.
‘Excuse me?’
At that very American question, Julia smiled a little and explained what she had meant.
‘It’s difficult to see how it can be contained, though,’ she went on, ‘while there are such shortages of food and pharmaceuticals all over Europe.’
‘I know,’ said the American, apparently bearing no malice for her amusement, ‘and there’re plenty of other problems too: too many old scores being paid off and private battles fought. Stealing, lying, cheating and killing have all been seen as patriotic, anti-Fascist duties for too long, and it’s hard to change that overnight.’ He looked at her and saw that her strong face seemed suddenly very much paler than before. ‘Are you OK, ma’am?’ he asked.
Julia nodded and blew her nose vigorously.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said without even trying to explain to him the realisation he had given her of the kind of world Anthony must have inhabited since his escape from prison camp. No wonder he had found some aspects of the Christmas she and Comfort had tried to give him difficult to accept. ‘By the way, my name is Julia Gillingham.’
‘Hi,’ said the American. ‘Jackson French. My friends call me Jack.’
‘How do you do?’ said Julia, apparently amusing him as much as he had earlier amused her. He ignored her question and went back to their previous conversation.
‘But it’s not only their guys. Our own don’t help with their goddamned “liberating”.’
‘Is there much of that – looting, I mean?’ asked Julia.
He nodded. ‘Guys who’ve been in the firing line think it’s their pay-off. The ones from the battle lines have rules, though. You never liberate anything from a house with people living in it, but you can do what you like with stuff from abandoned buildings. But some of the boys who weren’t here for the real fighting don’t follow the same rules. Some of them will take anything – from anybody. It’s not so bad in Italy, but they think Germany’s fair game to everyone – GIs, correspondents, photographers, the lot.’
Julia said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. After what Germany had done to the world, after the evidence of unbelievable atrocities perpetrated in the camps, after the painful struggle to stop them with all the deaths and agonies that that had entailed, private looting seemed almost trivial. But it shocked her all the same.
‘Do they sell the stuff? If not, how do they get it home?’ she asked.
‘A bit of both,’ came the answer. ‘It’s not a statistic to be proud of, but did you know that in July last year our people in Europe sent home a million dollars more than their combined pay? In just one month!’
And that at a time when Europeans are starving and we are mortgaging our future to the States to do what we can to feed them and try to create a peace that will last, Julia thought, but there seemed no point in saying it.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said the American, leaning across Julia to look out of the porthole. ‘What’re you going to be doing in Venice?’ ‘I’m going to join my husband, Anthony Gillingham,’ she said, ‘He’s been here since the end of the war.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about him,’ said the young man. ‘He’s doing a great job with those orphan kids.’
‘Do you know him then?’ Julia asked, her face alight with eagerness and healthier-looking colour.
‘No. We’ve never met,’ he said. ‘But in the relief business you tend to get to know who the other guys are. Is he meeting you at the airport?’
