Never Such Innocence, page 17
‘He was shot by partisans just after the Germans surrendered,’ said David. ‘Giovanna was there when it happened. It would take a lot to get over seeing your husband machine-gunned in front of you, whatever his politics,’ he went on. Julia silently agreed but continued to reserve judgment.
They walked on in silence through low lintels into covered passageways, across little squares and past leaning towers, half-tripping sometimes on uneven paving stones. Julia seemed to smell decay all around, not just the familiar rotting vegetation and sewage from the canals, but mildewed paint and decomposing wood and crumbling stone. In the darkness the city seemed secretive and rather sinister. The contrast between the miasma of decay and the strength of David’s deep voice beside her was peculiar and unsettling.
At last they turned a corner and stopped in front of a shabby old palace. David turned to grin at Julia in the dusk and hammered on the front door.
‘Sorry it took so long,’ he said as they waited to be let in. ‘Are you worn out?’
‘No, merely cold and rather confused,’ said Julia. ‘I suppose that one day I’ll learn my way about this place.’
‘Good heavens, yes,’ said David. ‘Ah, Giovanna, come stai? This is Signora Gillingham. Julia, Signora Sassanta.’
The two women shook hands and Giovanna Sassanta invited the other two up to her apartment on the second floor. She must have been in her early fifties, a short, stoutish woman who gave an impression of unshakeable confidence and authority. She spoke fluent, if heavily accented, English and after a few polite remarks came straight to the point in a business-like way that Julia appreciated. They negotiated for two lessons a week, for which the signora asked only a tiny fee, and then she asked whether Julia would consider teaching English to some refugees who were also living in the house. After some thought Julia agreed to give two-hour lessons each Wednesday and Saturday evenings for nothing.
There were six of them, living on the lower floors of the house with their children, and Julia was taken down to be introduced, while David stayed upstairs. Signora Sassanta called each of the women by her Christian name and referred to Julia simply as Signora Giulia, explaining that it would be easier for all of them if they did not have to bother with unfamiliar surnames. Julia, watching the thin, wary, dark-eyed faces of five of her prospective pupils, agreed. She thought it would be difficult enough remembering one name for each of them until she had got to know them.
Only one of the women stood out enough for Julia to be certain of being able to put the right name to the right face. Introduced as Raffaella, she looked quite different from the others. Where they were dark-eyed and brown-haired, she was fair, with a light, slightly sallow skin and pale greenish-blue eyes. Dressed like the others in dingy black, she somehow managed to look completely different. Her eyebrows were plucked into high arcs above her eyes while theirs were shaggy and unkempt, and she looked both younger and less tired than the others, but there was more to it than that.
It was not until Julia had said goodbye to the six women and gone upstairs again to collect David Wallington that she realised that the main difference was that Raffaella looked healthy and far better fed than the others. She was very slim, but her skin was smooth and clear, the whites of her eyes very white, and her blonde hair was glossy. She looked well cared for and far from destitute.
‘Who are those women?’ Julia asked David as they walked towards the Accademia Bridge.
‘I don’t know specifically,’ said David. ‘I’ve never seen or spoken to any of them, but I know that Giovanna houses and feeds them because they are alone and without resources. Apparently some are widowed, others deserted; what they all share is that they have no one else to support them.’
‘And perhaps have had trouble with people hunting down collaborators?’ suggested Julia.
‘Perhaps,’ answered David quietly. ‘But the war’s been over for nearly eighteen months. There has to be a stop to revenge at some time. Someone has to draw a line and start again. Giovanna is trying in a small way. It seems to me worth doing.’
‘I rather agree,’ said Julia, judiciously.
‘And you must remember,’ added David, before she could say anything else, ‘that not all the so-called partisans who killed and looted after the war had had anything to do with resistance to the Germans; nor were all their victims collaborators.’
Julia said nothing and after a few minutes David courteously found another subject for them to discuss.
‘How are you liking Venice?’ he asked.
Julia took a moment to think about her answer. She was not going to tell him that she had never expected to feel lonelier living with Anthony again than she had done in London during the war and that she was still afraid she had made a terrible mistake in coming to Venice.
‘I like the quietness,’ she said after a while. ‘And the fact that the only collapsing buildings have been ruined by time and not by bombs. I like the oddness of it, too, although sometimes it seems almost frightening. I find it theatrical and unreal, but that’s probably because it is still strange. When I’ve been here a few weeks, I’ll be able to answer you better. And you?’
‘I love it all,’ he said, sounding more relaxed than she had yet heard him. ‘The sadness of it, the glamour, the pinnacles and the fretted windows, the statues, the colour of the bricks, the mucky canals, the dead ends, the slinking cats, the paintings, the history, the romance, the … the allure of it all.’
‘The voice of a lover,’ said Julia, sounding warmly amused and David laughed. He liked her frankness and her amusement, too.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ he said and was about to ask her about her tastes when she said:
‘Ah, Anthony must be at home.’ They had reached the house in the Campo San Maurizio and there were lights flickering in the windows of the first-floor salon. David was conscious of disappointment as he watched Julia go straight up into the salon.
Before she could say anything to Anthony, he greeted her with an immediate apology for his outburst of the day before.
‘I’d had a hellish battle to stop a post-operative haemorrhage and I wasn’t sure I’d succeeded. But it was no excuse, Julia. Will you forgive me?’
‘Of course,’ she said, taking both his hands between her own. David stood in the doorway, forgotten by both the others. ‘It surprised me a bit at the time, but even then I understood. Don’t worry about it, Anthony.’
He leaned forward to kiss her and David backed quietly away.
‘How is Flavia today?’ asked Julia a little later. She had felt bitterly guilty that she had not been able to redeem her promise to visit the child again. Anthony seemed to have forgotten that Julia had ever met his favourite patient and he talked happily of the things she had said and how she was just beginning to allow Sister Caroline to come close to her. Trying to suppress her residual annoyance that Anthony had never allowed her to help with the child or even acknowledged that she had managed to reach through Flavia’s defences, Julia listened in silence.
‘But that’s enough of me and my hospital. How is your work going?’ said Anthony, at last remembering his wife as more than an audience.
‘So so,’ said Julia. ‘It’s a little frustrating to know that however well I do my part in preparing the case, I shan’t be able to have any say whatever in the trial itself. Still, it’s a military tribunal. I can’t expect to be part of it. And I’m going to make the most of my time here and learn Italian properly.’
‘That sounds excellent,’ said Anthony, getting up off the sofa. ‘Perhaps you won’t be too bored here after all.’
‘Not at all,’ she said, pleased that he should have been worrying about her. ‘In any case, it’s quite nice to live at a slower pace than we did in the war.’
Her conviction that he did not want her in Venice lessened and gradually life became easier. Having been professionally involved in several matrimonial cases since the war, Julia knew that their difficulties in readjusting to married life were far from unique, and she worked as hard on repairing her marriage as she did on preparing her part of the case against Kesselring. She never risked arousing Anthony’s anger by going to the hospital again, although she often thought about Flavia and the way the child had obviously trusted her. Julia hoped that the child would have forgotten her promise and not feel betrayed by her continuing absence.
Anthony repaid her patient labours with friendliness, showed interest in anything she told him about her work, and was ready enough to talk of his own, but there was a distance between them that there had not been before the war. He never revealed anything of what had happened to change him so much, and as the days drifted into weeks Julia gave up trying to find out; there seemed to be no point.
Gradually, as he realised that she was not going to probe into the past or nag him to return to London, Anthony grew more relaxed and managed to accept her presence in Venice, and even to share her bed sometimes. The modest happiness Julia had glimpsed the previous Christmas seemed to be coming within their reach at last as the New Year approached.
There was only one main shadow left between them. Despite making love to her rather more often than he had ever done in the old days in London, Anthony was determined not to conceive a child.
Julia continued to dream her agonising dreams of fulfilment and unbearable loss, but she said nothing about them. Sometimes watching the controlled desperation in Annunziata’s eyes, Julia asked herself caustically why she was so anxious to have children when they laid one open to such pain, but although there was no answer to her questions, the need remained. It ate into her so badly that she even found herself unable to look at the innumerable paintings of the Madonna and Child that hung in every Venetian church she entered.
Letters from Mark and George Wilson helped her to regain a sense of proportion by keeping her in touch with her own world, relaying all the gossip of legal London, accounts of particularly interesting cases that never reached the Law Report in The Times, and the reactions of her colleagues to the manoeuvrings of the Labour government.
They seemed to be getting home affairs more or less under control, George wrote one week in December, and the public appeared to have accepted the increasingly austere life that was imposed on them as all available resources were directed to the export drive, but foreign affairs were a different matter. The Russians and the Americans were causing serious anxiety as they battled for supremacy; the demands for Indian independence and a separate Muslim state were growing uncontrollably; the situation in Palestine looked utterly intractable as the government tried to effect a compromise between the conflicting needs of the Arabs and the Jews, and Ernest Bevin was thought not to be handling it well.
Julia read the letters with a mixture of interest and regret that she was so cut off from direct news. Paper shortages still meant that The Times was skimpy, so that even when they managed to get hold of it, it was unsatisfying. She often discussed George’s gloss on the news with David, who was anxious to know what informed members of the public thought of all kinds of questions, so that his frequent letters to his sponsors at Transport House and the likely members of the selection committee in the constituency he hoped to represent at the next election would be as impressive as possible.
He wanted to know Julia’s views and those of her friends on the international situation, on whether the British would put up with austerity for long enough to get the country back into economic stability, and on less important matters such as the different talents of the patrician Hugh Dalton and the proletarian Ernest Bevin, whether many people believed that Dalton would have made a better foreign secretary than Bevin, and whether they really thought that the King had intervened because he so disliked Dalton. He also wanted to know what the majority of people in Britain thought of the Americans.
When he asked her that one morning just after Christmas as they were walking to their office, Julia smiled.
‘To give you a single example: almost the only unifying view on Palestine,’ she said, ‘is that it is monstrous of President Truman to publicise his demands that the British allow unrestricted immigration into Palestine while suppressing the fact that he refuses to increase the quota of visas for Jews who want to get into America. From some of his pronouncements you’d have thought he was the only person in the world with sympathy for the Jews, but he won’t give any practical assistance. That is thought to be typical: massive power, massive wealth, but not a corresponding sense of responsibility; free with advice but unnecessarily tight with money.’
‘Don’t most people at home accept that there should be a Jewish homeland?’ David asked, surprised and ignoring the Americans for the moment.
‘Nearly everyone agrees that there must be reparation made for what the Jews suffered in the war, but not everyone believes it is fair to banish the Arabs from Palestine to make room for them. And these continual attacks by the Irgun and the Stern Gang are turning opinion against the Jews,’ said Julia.
‘I know,’ agreed David gloomily. ‘It’s an impossible situation.’
As they talked on their way to and from the office every day, Julia had discovered that David was not nearly as doctrinaire and fanatically left wing as Anthony believed, and she grew increasingly to respect his ideas. She liked him too and as she and Anthony grew happier together, Julia lost most of her irritation with David’s presence in their home, but she never let herself forget Anthony’s warning. He had not repeated it, and seemed much less inclined to criticise and provoke David, but Julia was too cautious to trust anyone described in the terms Anthony had used of David.
She sometimes asked him about his war, as though that might have helped her to see him more clearly. He talked easily enough of Anthony’s achievements but very little of his own. Once when Julia pressed him, he reluctantly explained that he had been sent to Italy by an intelligence organisation and was therefore bound to secrecy.
‘David, I am sorry,’ said Julia at once. ‘I’d never have nagged you to tell me if I’d known.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said, with his familiar smile. ‘You couldn’t have known and I had begun to feel churlish stalling whenever you showed interest in what I’d done.’
‘I’ve met one or two people from SOE since it ended,’ she said slowly, ‘and they have described some of the things they had to do.’
‘It wasn’t SOE,’ said David shortly. Then, apparently regretting his curtness, he added: ‘It was a small group run by an extraordinary man called Suvarov and set up to monitor the political affiliations of resistance groups. At first it was simply staffed by researchers but as the war developed it became clear that direct intelligence was needed and a few of us were sent in to work with partisans.’
‘How extraordinary!’ said. Julia. ‘I’ve never even heard of its existence.’
‘Very few people have, and Suvarov has always wanted to keep it like that. I ought not to have said anything even now, but I know that I can trust you not to talk about it,’ said David seriously.
‘Yes,’ she answered, wishing that she could be as confident in him; ‘you can trust me.’
She also could not quite bring herself to trust Giovanna Sassanta. She was an excellent teacher and under her tutelage Julia made quick progress with her Italian. They got on well together, too, and always had plenty to talk about, but Julia could not escape the feeling that Giovanna was less than frank about her real feelings towards the Allies.
Giovanna was fanatically opposed to Communism and to that extent shared the American and British ideas of how the postwar world should be shaped, but it was clear that she bitterly resented what they had done to her country as they fought their way up it from Sicily to the Alps and also the way in which they had been administering it since the Germans had been defeated.
The two women talked a lot, sometimes in slow, careful Italian, but more often in English, and Julia grew to like Giovanna so much that she wanted to banish her doubts. One day as they were sitting in the shabby, cold, uncomfortable sitting room at the end of her lesson, Julia felt that she knew Giovanna well enough at last to ask what it had been like to live with a man who believed in something as alien as Fascism.
‘It was not quite like that,’ said Giovanna, rightly assuming that her pupil’s ideas of what it had been like to live in Italy before and during the war had been formed only by the foreign press. ‘Roberto was a good man, kind and pragmatic, and he was my husband.’ She got up and fetched a photograph from a table between two windows and showed it to Julia. The leather-framed photograph showed a middle-aged man wearing spectacles; his hair was receding and he was dressed in a dark suit. To Julia he looked almost nondescript, neither good nor bad. There was nothing she could say about him.
‘He never denounced anyone or damaged anyone,’ Giovanna explained patiently, trying to banish the obvious doubt in Julia’s brown eyes. ‘It’s easy for you English in your island, where everyone is innocent because no one had to choose, but here it‘s different. Roberto was not political. He pursued his business, looked after his workers as well as he could, and – how do you say it? – he turned the blind eye to my activities.’
‘You mean he knew about them?’ said Julia. ‘Wasn’t that dangerous?’
Once again Giovanna shrugged. ‘Everything was dangerous under the Fascists – let alone the Germans. Roberto thought that we could protect each other. Whichever side won, one of us would have the right contacts to ensure the other’s safety.’
Giovanna laughed then, and Julia winced at the bitterness of the sound. She did not know that Giovanna was remembering the day that masked men claiming to be partisans had burst into her house and forced their way to her husband’s study. He had been sitting at his desk and she had just gone in to ask him something. When the door was flung open and three young men with guns stood there, Giovanna had gone straight to her husband’s side. Before she could say anything, the first man had shot her husband at point-blank range while he sat at his desk.
