Never Such Innocence, page 25
Julia closed her eyes, so that Comfort should not see the sudden dislike that she felt. The emotion was so unlikely – and such a betrayal – that Julia wanted to believe that she had never felt it. She heard Comfort pick up the sketch pad again and simply lay, letting her draw whatever she liked.
There were no other distractions from the difficulty of breathing, the pain, the falling over chasms of unconsciousness, the dreams and miserable awakenings until Anthony appeared well after eight that night to give his wife an injection. Julia was so far out of her usual self-control that she whimpered at the prick of the needle.
‘It’s all right, my love,’ said Anthony, wiping the puncture with a spirit-soaked swab. ‘We’ve got some penicillin for you at last. You’ll be all right again in no time now.’
She rolled her head sideways on the pillow and murmured, ‘I’m so sorry.’ She had not meant Anthony and Comfort to hear, but something must have been audible.
‘Did you hear that?’ she heard Anthony ask.
‘She was mumbling so,’ answered Comfort. ‘But it seemed to be an apology. She’s always hated being a nuisance.’ Julia’s shoulders tightened, and almost at once she heard her husband’s voice:
‘Julia’s not a nuisance, Comfort. I only hope to God she’s not in too much pain. Pneumonia is no joke, you know. But she’ll be all right now. With this drug it’s only a matter of time.’ His shoes squeaked on the hard floor and Julia heard him walk towards the door. Comfort, believing Anthony without reservation, knew that Julia was no longer in any danger and went back to her chair and her sketches with the anxiety draining out of her.
The penicillin injected into Julia’s veins four times a day killed the infection inexorably, and within three days the oxygen tent had been removed and she was sitting up in bed waiting for her meals with real hunger. She no longer needed a constant attendant by then and Annunziata and Comfort came and went as they chose. At last Anthony allowed David in to the sickroom.
He came, looking as he always did, huge, a little untidy but with a smile of great sweetness on his lean face, from which the tan had almost completely faded. Julia was pleased that he did not tiptoe or whisper, but spoke in his normal voice.
‘So, the miracle drug did its stuff,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Thank God. I hope you haven’t had too beastly a time.’
Julia pushed the lank, greasy hair off her forehead and smiled up at him.
‘It could have been a lot worse; but I’m sorry about the penicillin.’
‘Good God why?’ demanded David, looking astonished. ‘Without it you’d … you might have … you’d have taken far longer to get well.’
‘I might have died, you mean,’ said Julia in the first lawyerly voice of her convalescence and then was sorry when she saw his face. ‘But, David, I might not have. People do get over pneumonia, and …’ Her voice faltered, but then strengthened: ‘I hate the thought that my illness took Anthony back to the black market.’
At that David leaned forward and stroked her horrible hair. Thinking of its dirty stringiness, Julia could not help flinching. David quickly removed his hand and sat back in his chair.
‘There was no question of that, Julia,’ he said. ‘After what happened to Flavia, he would never have risked injecting illegal penicillin into you. This came to Venice officially.’
Julia said nothing, but from the way she relaxed into the pillows David realised how worried she had been.
‘Yes,’ he said slowly, still looking at her in that peculiar way, ‘you really are rather a remarkable person.’
‘Nonsense, David,’ said Julia, ‘there’s nothing remarkable about me. I’m as ordinary and self-interested as the next person.’
He shook his head, but did not speak. After an apparently unbreakable silence, Julia decided that she would have to say something else and so with considerable truth, she told him that she had missed him.
‘Did you? I missed you almost intolerably. Not even being allowed to come and see you – if it hadn’t been for the Suvarovs I think I’d have gone mad.’
‘Felicity,’ said Julia, suddenly remembering the morning they had spent together just before she fell ill. ‘Did she catch it?’
David shook his head.
‘She was fine when they left,’ he said, ‘and Anthony explained that pneumonia is very quick to develop. She’d have shown symptoms long before they went. They both sent their love to you,’ he added, remembering the day when he thought that Julia was going to die and had gone to them in despair.
‘What is it?’ she asked, seeing his face harden in front of her. She held one of her hands out to him. ‘David, what’s happened?’
He took her hand between both his own, turning it palm upwards and gazing down as though he were a fortune-teller, searching the damp pinkness of her flesh for answers to all sorts of impossible questions.
‘I wish to God I knew,’ he said, but he could not look at her, because he did know.
Chapter Eighteen
As she slowly regained strength, Julia began to be able to think of things beyond her own physical state, and whenever David came to see her she urged him to tell her what had been happening at the trial. He took care never to stay with her for more than twenty minutes, obeying both the spirit and the letter of Anthony’s orders, but he tried to give her a clear account of the eight days Kesselring had spent in the witness box, watching her face all the time for signs of boredom or exhaustion.
Julia’s questions about the line the defence lawyers were taking were as acute as anything she had ever asked David, and they filled him with relieved delight. The sharpness of the terror he had felt during her illness had revealed to him just how much he loved her, and once she began to recover he had been afraid that they would never again be able to talk simply as friends. The easy, informed arguments they had about the Kesselring case proved him wrong: as they talked, the two of them might have been no more than friendly colleagues. David began to think that it might be possible to go on living in the same house as Julia and Anthony without either betraying himself or suffering unendurable frustration.
One day he reported that the defence had claimed that partisan warfare was contrary to the Hague Convention, that the Germans therefore had every right to take reprisals against the partisans, and that any excesses on their part were explained if not justified by their horror of what the partisans did.
‘“I am a hero of the resistance. You are an irregular soldier. He is a terrorist”,’ Julia suggested.
‘I know. Double and treble standards. And it is hard not to think of one’s own horror at some of the things that the Irgun and Stern Gang are doing in Palestine, for instance,’ David said after a long silence.
‘True,’ said Julia, ‘but in Palestine the British army does not burn villages, hang hostages and leave their bodies in village squares for days at a time as a warning, whatever horror they feel at things like the bombing of the King David Hotel and the murders of those sergeants. You can’t deny that the Germans’actions were excessive.’
‘Believe me, I don’t,’ said David seriously. ‘Although if you read the American papers, you can see that they have been accusing our troops of committing “atrocities” in Palestine. No, I just have doubts about the legitimacy of some aspects of these trials.’
‘Such as?’ asked Julia, who had had her own doubts for some time.
‘Outlawing the defence of following superior orders, for one,’ said David, noticing that Julia was beginning to look tired. He got up to go, saying: ‘But we can keep that for another time. You ought to rest.’
Julia denied feeling the least bit tired and she pressed him to explain what he meant.
‘It is difficult to justify when you think of that British officer who was convicted for refusing to obey orders to take part in the assault on Le Havre because his superiors had not allowed the German commander to evacuate the French civilians first,’ said David. ‘They say that twelve thousand French civilians were killed there in the preliminary bombing, let alone during the actual fighting. The man who refused to take part was court martialled, cashiered and sentenced to a year’s hard labour. To me that puts us in a difficult position when trying Germans, whose crime was obeying their superiors’orders, whatever our horror at what those orders led to.’
Julia nodded. It was a piece of official hypocrisy that had often worried her. She let her eyes close for a moment.
‘I really must go,’ said David. ‘I’ve worn you out and worried you. Anthony would strangle me if I caused a relapse.’
‘No he wouldn’t,’ said Julia. She had meant to be comforting, but even to herself the words sounded depressed. David looked down at her as she lay against the white pillows, pale and thinner than ever, and thought how much easier it would be to keep himself in check if her husband treated her with the gentleness she deserved.
‘Tell me once how you’re really feeling,’ David said, ‘and then I will leave you in peace.’
‘So so,’ said Julia, looking up at him from her pillows and smiling at the affection and the anxiety in his face. ‘Physically almost all right again, though a bit weak, but I get gloomy and exaggerate all sorts of minor difficulties into terrible tragedies.’
‘I expect that’s just convalescence,’ said David, longing to take her in his arms and comfort her.
‘That’s what Anthony says,’ she said sensibly. ‘Thank you for coming in. It’s cheered me up no end to be reminded that I do have work and a brain and something to do when I’m allowed up again.’
David looked rather odd as she said that, but he left so quickly that she could not ask him anything about it and picked up her book to absorb the time until Annunziata brought in her supper.
It dawned on her as she was eating the liver and polenta an hour later that there was something different about Annunziata. There was a light in her dark eyes that Julia could not remember seeing before her illness and yet there was sadness too. When Annunziata came to collect the tray, Julia asked her tentatively whether she had had some news.
‘My son is alive,’ said Annunziata, her dark eyes gleaming in the candlelight.
Julia got out of bed, took the tray back from Annunziata, put it down on the chest of drawers and hugged her.
‘I’m so glad,’ she said in Italian. ‘When did you hear? When is he coming home?’
Annunziata, who had accepted the hug, made Julia get back into bed and then told her the whole story. Anthony’s regular enquiries of his colleagues around Italy had at last borne fruit and Annunziata’s son had been discovered in a Roman hospital recovering slowly from serious wounds to his head and spine. He had been caught in an explosion at Monte Cassino. His dog tags had been blown off in the blast and the head wound had severely damaged his memory so that no one had any idea of his identity. Patient care had gradually restored his mind until he had been able to remember who he was.
‘And the spinal wound?’ asked Julia carefully. ‘Can he walk?’
Annunziata stood absolutely straight and with all the dignity that Julia so admired in her shook her head.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Julia said, thinking of all she had read and heard about the battle at Monte Cassino.
The Allies had found their way to Rome blocked there by Germans who were using the ancient Benedictine monastery as their base and flung a series of attacks against it. By the time the British, the Americans, and the ultimately successful Rifs from North Africa had made their assaults, the monastery was almost completely destroyed for the third time in history. The first had been during an attack by the Saracens in the Middle Ages and the second during an earthquake.
Giovanna Sassanta had given Julia a rather different view of the fighting in the Cassino valley from the one she had gained from the British newspapers at the time. Trying to explain her husband’s loathing of the Allies and all they stood for, Giovanna had told her that there had in fact been no German or even Italian troops in the monastery and that its destruction had been unnecessary. As she listened, Julia had not been able to escape the thought that Giovanna must have shared more of her husband’s convictions than she had admitted.
Annunziata, who had so personal a reason for resentment, made no such criticisms. She told Julia only that the doctor had been wonderful in finding her son and in promising to let him live in the Campo San Maurizio.
‘The hospital say he can’t be moved for two months yet,’ said Annunziata, picking up the tray again, ‘but then il dottore will arrange everything. He is a good man, signora.’
‘I know he is,’ said Julia. ‘I’m glad that he has been able to help.’
She looked forward to his usual visit that evening, but he did not come, and it was Comfort who appeared at half-past nine to remake Julia’s bed and see that she had everything she needed for the night.
‘Is Anthony all right?’ Julia asked a little wistfully.
‘He’s fine,’ said Comfort, ‘but he had to go back to the hospital after dinner. So I’m his deputy.’ She sat down on the edge of Julia’s bed and offered to brush her hair.
‘I can do that,’ said Julia. ‘But can you move over a bit? You’re sitting on my feet.’
‘Sorry,’ answered Comfort cheerfully, moving down the bed. ‘What would you like to do tomorrow? Anthony left instructions that you could get up for a couple of hours if you felt up to it. Shall I hire a gondola and take you up the Grand Canal to the sound of trumpets?’
‘Oh, Comfort, you are wonderful!’ said Julia, happy that Comfort was her old extravagant affectionate self again. ‘You know very well how I’d hate that. Besides I don’t think the gondoliers work in the depths of winter. What I’d most like to do is go to the court to listen to what’s happening in the trial, but…’
‘No. Anthony said no work and no court for at least another week,’ said Comfort, relieved that she would not have to accompany Julia to anything so dull. ‘We could go and look at pictures, or walk to Florian’s for a drink, or just sit downstairs and talk. Whatever you like.’
‘I’d love to get out of the house for a bit,’ said Julia, plumping for Florian’s. The walk there took only about ten minutes and she thought that even with the frightening weakness in her legs that she had discovered the first time she got out of bed she ought to manage that distance.
She did, but only just, reaching the café breathless and with her knees trembling. Comfort piloted her to the nearest seat and hailed the waiter to order a brandy. Julia lay against the hard, red velvet back of the bench, staring up at the painted walls around her.
Before the brandy came a familiar American voice penetrated Julia’s tiredness and she sat up straighter.
‘Why Mrs Gillingham! How good to see you up and about again. I’d heard you were sick.’
‘Mr French,’ said Julia, holding out her hand. ‘Thank you. I may say that my recovery is wholly due to your organisation’s producing some penicillin just in time,’ she added. ‘Thank you for that too.’ She watched his heavy dark face and wondered why it looked rueful.
‘Yes, I heard about that too,’ he said. ‘Doctor Gillingham sure burned the wires between here and headquarters when he was trying to get it.’
‘And with reason,’ said Comfort, coming back with the brandy.
‘Ah, Comfort, this is Jackson French of UNRRA. Mr French, this is my sister-in-law, Comfort Gillingham, a compatriot of yours.’ Julia watched in amusement as Comfort’s spectacular looks and casual elegance had their usual effect on the young man. She was also amused to see that Comfort was shaking his hand and even inviting him to share their table. Her immediate antagonism to David Wallington had led Julia to expect her to display a similar hostility to Jack French.
During the course of their conversation, to which Julia listened with only half her attention as she sipped her brandy, she learned that Jackson French was likely to be posted to London to play a part in the winding up of UNRRA later in the year and that Comfort herself was due to leave Venice in two days’time ‘now that Julia is getting well again’. Comfort gave Jackson French her address and told him to be sure to call her when he got to London.
‘Is the black market conquered then?’ Julia asked him during a pause in the others’talk.
‘I don’t suppose it’ll ever be that,’ he said with resignation. ‘But supplies are beginning to get through in better order than before. The new penicillin factory is almost finished and the Italians we’ve been training to run it are due back from Canada any day now. Food is still a problem, of course, after last year’s dire harvest.’
‘And presumably,’ said Julia, who had been reading the backlog of newspapers that had accumulated during her illness, ‘the appalling winter will have done for this year’s as well.’
‘I guess so. But the new organisation will have to handle that. I’m heading Stateside when I’ve done my bit in London. When are you going back, Comfort?’
‘I’ll never go back,’ she said. ‘I’ve become too European. Besides, the part of my family I care about is here now,’ she added taking Julia’s hand for a moment.
That evening, knowing that David was dining out, Anthony came home in time to have dinner with Comfort and looked in to talk to Julia before changing out of his hospital clothes.
‘Comfort says you took a walk today. How do you feel after it?’ he asked, untying his tie and pulling the cuff links out of his shirt.
‘Rather feeble, actually,’ Julia admitted. ‘And absurdly inclined to self-pity.’
‘That’s convalescence,’ he said. ‘And it’ll last for a while yet. I’ve been thinking that you ought to get away from here for a bit, but I don’t quite see how I could leave the hospital just now. But…’
‘Please don’t worry about it,’ said Julia, childishly hurt that he was not prepared to let her needs take precedence over his work, but struggling as usual to be reasonable.
‘But,’ he went on, ‘David has suggested that we should all borrow his mother’s house outside Florence at Easter. Would you like that? You ought to be strong enough by then to cope with the journey, and I can try to organise things at the hospital so that my assistants can cope.’
