Never Such Innocence, page 27
Julia looked in the direction of his waving arm and saw an equally tall man in UNRRA uniform stride along towards them. When he reached them, David introduced him to Julia and she shook hands and then turned aside as Bill said something gruffly about how sorry he was. David clapped him on the shoulder and simply said:
‘I know. Thanks. Have you really got transport?’
‘Yup. Over here, and luckily it’s almost legitimate. I’ve got to get over to a village out on the Bologna road and I can easily drive there via Fiesole. Seen Florence before, Mrs Gillingham?’
Julia answered civilly and resigned herself to half an hour’s polite conversation. She did not see much of Florence as they roared through it in the jeep, just a muddled impression of large buildings and a broad dark-green river, but as they began to drive up the steep, swooping hill to Fiesole, David’s friend said:
‘If you look back in five minutes or so, you’ll see the best view in the whole place.’
From the back seat of the jeep came David’s voice, as light and teasing as Julia had ever heard it. She was so pleased that he was able to talk so frivolously that she hardly distinguished what he was actually saying.
‘It’s even better from the terrace of my mother’s house. Don’t you look back, Julia; mustn’t spoil your appetite for views of Florence.’
She did turn her head then, but only to smile at David and marvel that he could look so happy; but even as she watched his face seemed to grow colder and he nodded. Irritated with herself for reminding him, Julia turned back to face the front and said nothing more until Bill had dropped them outside a big yellow house on the edge of Fiesole. She thanked him and waited while David invited him in for a cup of tea. Julia was interested to see an expression of faint embarrassment cross Bill’s face.
‘Thanks, David, but I’ve bent the rules enough; I really ought to get on to the village and see to this wretched food distribution. So much goes missing that we’ve got to find out why. It may simply be inefficiency at this level, but it could be worse. These damned black marketeers are everywhere; they siphon the stuff off as soon as it comes into the country, at the various stores and again at the local distribution points. They’re even sending it out of the country – to Yugoslavia and France.’
‘Really,’ said Julia. ‘But that must be in huge quantities to make it worth their while. How do they get so much out of the country?’
Bill looked at her for a moment.
‘It’s not certain, but there’s a suggestion that they have stolen British army trucks and uniforms and, with forged documents, pass themselves off as official convoys. It’s not generally known, but they’ve got at least 60,000 tons of grain away like that,’ he said
‘Profitable business,’ commented Julia.
‘Yes indeed. The profit is roughly ten or twelve thousand lire per hundredweight,’ Bill said drily. ‘Whoever put up the money for the scheme has made a fortune. We’ve got to stop it before UNRRA is wound up. So long. Goodbye, Mrs Gillingham.’
David hauled their luggage off the back seat and Bill drove off.
‘That scale of operation does make Anthony’s black marketing seem quite trivial, doesn’t it?’ said Julia as they watched the jeep disappearing in a cloud of dust.
‘I’ve always thought so,’ said David. ‘And after all he’s done it for the most altruistic of reasons – unlike Bill’s quarry.’
‘Yes,’ Julia said with an expression on her face that he could not quite read, ‘but the law is the law and one can’t decide to apply it only to those whose motives and characters one dislikes. It has to apply to everyone equally, however “good” or “bad” or else…’
‘It becomes a very bad joke,’ David said. He smiled at her and picked up their luggage. ‘Come along and meet Mama.’
Julia followed him through a tall, wrought-iron gate and waited on the weedy gravel in front of the pale-yellow walls of a large square villa as he pulled a long, iron bell. Within a very short time, she heard the sounds of bolts being drawn back. The heavy, dark double doors opened and in their shadow stood the most striking woman Julia had ever seen.
Dressed in comfortable-looking tweeds that were as old and baggy as Julia’s but did nothing to disguise her tall slimness, Allegra. Wallington had David’s smooth dark hair and elegant hands, but there was no other resemblance between them. Where his face was angular and spare, hers was a flawless oval, and her round eyes were very dark. The lines that radiated from their corners did nothing to detract from their brilliance, but in some curious way made her look approachable, despite her immense style.
To Julia’s eye she seemed to wear no powder or lipstick, but then she hardly needed any. Her skin was a pale olive colour but absolutely clear and her magnificent eyes gave her face all the definition it needed. She looked desperately tired, but there were no obvious marks of grief on her face.
‘Mrs Gillingham,’ she said in a voice that carried only the faintest Italian accent, ‘how very good of you to come and stay with me.’ She held out her hand and Julia shook it, saying:
‘It is charming of you to have invited me, Mrs Wallington. Particularly now.’ Julia wanted to say something more direct about the accident, but could not imagine how to approach the difficult subject in the face of such easy courtesy. All she could think of to do was to step aside so that David and his mother could greet each other.
‘David,’ said his mother, very gently, and then added a sentence in Italian. Julia heard the name ‘Jonathan’, but she made a determined effort not to translate the Italian words, knowing how much the two of them must need privacy. David answered in the same language and then reverted to English.
‘Is much of the house habitable? Where have you put us, Mama?’ he asked cheerfully.
‘Upstairs,’ she answered, linking arms with Julia. ‘Come on up, Mrs Gillingham, and I will show you your room. It’s not been too bad, David. Germans were billeted here, but they seem to have treated the place with considerably more decency than they did the people.’
There was no easy way to answer the bitterness in her voice, and Julia remembered what David had said about his mother’s probable feelings during the war and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mrs Wallington, stuck in Scotland, knowing only a little but guessing all too much of what was happening to her own country – and to her two sons.
‘It’s over now, Mama,’ said David gently. ‘I know that doesn’t make what’s happened any better, but it is finished … We just have to rebuild and make sure that it can never happen again.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Gillingham. You must be so bored with war talk. Here we are.’
She opened a door and ushered Julia into a shadowed room on the second floor. Unlike the apartment in Venice, this room was decorated in the English style and furnished with two plump single beds covered in chintz counterpanes. There was even an armchair that actually looked comfortable. Julia had difficulty in suppressing a sigh of relief.
David dumped her bag on the floor by the bed and then went to open the shutters, letting some real light into the room through the yellowing lace curtains. It allowed Julia to see the glowing rose colours of the chintz and also to notice the shabbiness of the well-washed paintwork and the cracks in the ceiling.
‘I promised her the best view of Florence from here, Mama,’ he said over his shoulder as he wrestled with the catch. ‘Ah, that’s better. Julia?’
Julia went to stand beside him on the minute balcony and stared down across the valley. There, spread out below her in the late afternoon sun, was Florence. In the foreground were small green fields dotted with clusters of red-roofed houses and the dark spires of cypress trees; further back was the great mass of the city itself, with the cathedral’s rust-red dome rising unmistakably in the very centre of the view. Julia could make out dark-green stretches of the river as it wound between the ochre and terracotta of the buildings. Beyond the city rose a line of gentle hills, looking blue-grey in the distance.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, turning back into the room. ‘Mrs Wallington, I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to be here – in all this space – instead of shut up in Venice.’
David’s mother smiled then and her lovely face looked suddenly young and for a moment hardly tired at all.
‘Haven’t I always said it was a dank, sinister, unhealthy place, David?’ she said. ‘I think our guest is very intelligent.’
David responded to the teasing by walking over to his mother, putting an arm around her thin shoulders and dropping a kiss on to her smooth hair.
‘Yes, Mama, she is; and yes, you have always said so. But Venice is full of wonderful things, and even for you I won’t pretend to dislike it.’
‘You always were a stubborn creature,’ she said with a charming tenderness in her voice. ‘From the moment they told me that you were a breech baby I knew I’d have trouble with you.’ Turning to Julia, she went on, smiling still: ‘Haven’t you found him stubborn too, Mrs Gillingham?’
Julia, delighted to see that the affection between them was solid enough to allow such teasing, said, as though she were considering some knotty legal problem:
‘Stubborn? I wonder … I’ve certainly become aware that I wouldn’t like to cross him, particularly on a matter of principle.’ Julia looked at David then and was a little surprised to see that he was not laughing as she had expected. Instead he was standing with his head on one side, looking seriously at her. Mrs Wallington laughed.
‘I said you were intelligent,’ she commented. ‘But this is all irrelevant. Mrs Gillingham, I’ve become Scottish enough to need my tea and I’m sure you’d like some after that horrid train. I think it’s just warm enough to have it on the terrace. Will you come down when you’re ready?’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia. ‘Tea would be wonderful!’
They left her to unpack and she was pleased to find a jug of warm water wrapped in a towel on the washstand. Having scrubbed the train’s grime from her face and hands, she searched for a comb to deal with her hair. It had been far easier to keep it tidy, she thought, in the days when she wore it pinned up; the style she had taken to suited her better – and made her look and feel years younger than she was – but it was a terrible nuisance.
Amused by her burgeoning vanity, she dawdled over the unpacking to give Mrs Wallington plenty of unencumbered time with her son. It seemed to Julia to be the height of good manners to have greeted a stranger with apparent pleasure under such circumstances and then to have included her in the family teasing, but she wanted to make certain that they could forget their manners and talk freely to each other without having to bother about her.
When at last she made her way downstairs towards the terrace, she could hear their voices speaking in English. Slowing down, she listened in case they were in the middle of a talk too personal to be interrupted; but it soon became clear that they were discussing the house and the various improvements that might be made once Europe had reached some kind of normality again.
Much relieved, Julia walked out through the open French windows on to the terrace. At the sound of her step, David pulled himself out of his chair and smiled at her. His mother turned and smiled too.
‘Mrs Gillingham …’
‘Oh please call me Julia – if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Julia. Mrs Wallington inclined her head in an extraordinarily graceful gesture of acquiescence.
‘Julia, come and sit down and have your tea,’ she said, pouring another cupful. Julia sat down and took her tea and a small almond biscuit.
‘David tells me that you have been very ill,’ said Mrs Wallington. ‘It’s that terrible place, you know. How anyone could have expected you to get properly well there I cannot imagine! And David says that your husband is a doctor: he ought to have sent you straight up to the mountains.’
‘I wasn’t as ill as that,’ said Julia, laughing slightly. ‘And he has so many patients with much worse ailments that he took quite a robust view of my case.’
‘Well, now that you are here, you must stay until you are really well, mustn’t she, David?’
David leaned forward to replace his tea cup on the table and then he straightened up.
‘I think she ought to do exactly as she wishes, Mama. After all her husband is in Venice – and she hadn’t seen him in all the war years,’ he said.
Julia was horrified, thinking that the last thing David’s mother would want to hear just then would be about another woman’s wish to be with her husband. Her sympathy for Mrs Wallington helped her to ignore the realisation that it was an enormous relief to be away from Anthony and with people who produced an atmosphere of such calm and ease that she felt immediately at home with them.
‘Of course she must, David,’ came the gentle reproof, ‘but she will get well much more quickly in Fiesole than in Venice. And I want her to know that she is welcome in my house for as long as she wishes.’ David put a friendly hand on his mother’s knee, and Julia thanked her.
‘There are many things to see in Florence, too,’ said Mrs Wallington. ‘David will take you about and show them to you: he knows so much about it all.’
‘He was certainly the most wonderful guide in Venice,’ Julia said, smiling at him.
‘You flatter me, both of you,’ he said, and again Julia was amazed that the pair of them could appear so cheerful. ‘Julia, I hope that you will let me take you down into Florence for dinner tonight; if we went early, we could stroll a little first and look at one or two of the best exteriors.’
Julia looked from one to the other, strangely at a loss. She wanted to say that she would quite happily go and dine on her own in Florence so that they could be alone together, but Mrs Wallington pre-empted her.
‘Unfortunately I cannot join you, because I am expecting a very old friend of my family, who has been here all these years,’ she said. Julia smiled her thanks and then turned to accept David’s invitation.
Her conscience at peace, Julia set off for dinner in a mood to enjoy herself. She and David decided to catch the bus down into Florence and then try for a taxi home. As they were waiting at the bus stop in the main square of Fiesole, about five minutes’walk from the house, she said carefully:
‘David, I hope your mother didn’t think me dreadfully insensitive –’
Before she could complete her sentence, he interrupted her.
‘Why on earth should she have thought anything like that?’ he demanded, sounding almost angry.
Julia touched his forearm lightly.
‘Hush,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’ David sounded much more like himself. ‘But what do you mean?’
‘It’s very difficult. I just … it’s just that I wanted to tell her how sorry I am about … about what happened to your father and brother but, not knowing her, I didn’t want to say it in a way that might upset her. And so I didn’t say anything.’ Julia ended her little speech looking at her feet. When David said nothing, she waited and then at last looked up at him. There was an expression in his blue eyes that she did not completely understand, and so she lifted one eyebrow.
‘You are kind, you know,’ he said rather helplessly. ‘I don’t think I realised quite how kind until they were killed.’ He seemed to be trying to pull himself together and just as the bus appeared at the mouth of the square, he murmured: ‘Don’t worry about Mama; she will have understood what you were thinking, and in any case I can tell her if you’d like.’
‘Would you?’ said Julia over her shoulder as she climbed up into the bus. ‘That would be awfully good of you.’
They found seats side by side and silently agreed to talk no more about the tragedy. Instead, David pointed out landmarks they passed and eventually Julia led him on to talk about his childhood holidays at Fiesole. The first time he had to include his brother’s name in an anecdote, his voice hardened a little, but soon he was talking much more easily, telling her of picnics and expeditions and even fights they had had with each other and with the Italian sons of their mother’s friends and relations.
‘Was it difficult getting to know them?’ Julia asked, as the bus creaked round a particularly sharp hairpin bend. ‘Didn’t they treat you as strangers?’
‘I suppose they might have done at the beginning,’ he said, ‘but by the time I can remember we had become part of the place really. Mama had brought us every year, and we somehow fitted in.’
‘Did your father not come?’ asked Julia, curiously. He shook his head.
‘Partly because of the estate; there was always too much to be done. But mainly because he didn’t like the place and believed that he didn’t like Italians. How he thought he could love Mama so much and dislike her friends and relations on the grounds that they were Italian, I don’t know. And he did love her,’ said David and then was silent.
‘How did they meet?’ Julia asked, not sure whether he wanted to talk or not. It seemed that he did want to, for he answered her question far more fully than he need have done.
‘It was quite funny in fact,’ he said, a real smile lighting in his eyes. ‘Some neighbours of ours in Scotland had unnaturally cosmopolitan views about the best way to bring up their daughters and they had all been sent to stay with family friends in both Paris and Florence when they were about seventeen.
‘One of the daughters, Fiona, who was always known as “the pretty one”, had struck up a great friendship with Mama, who had been invited back to Scotland. Now, Fiona was thought to be a suitable bride for my father – just the right age, pretty and vivacious enough it was thought to appeal to a man who was beginning to be known as a confirmed bachelor.’ He stopped then and Julia supplied a prompt.
‘And he caught sight of your mother and fell desperately in love,’ she suggested.
‘Not at all,’ he answered, the grin coming back to his lips. Julia smiled back, not sure what she was about to hear, but very much enjoying his pleasure in the tale.
‘No, he had been toying with the idea of proposing to Fiona, whom he had known all his life and whom he liked. But just before he could get the words out, she begged him to do her a tremendous favour. My father was a generous man, and so he cautiously agreed to do what he could. After a while she explained that she was in love with someone else – not hopelessly ineligible, but not nearly as suitable as my father – and her parents had refused to allow her to see the man. She therefore proposed that my father should pretend to fall in love with her difficult and very homesick Italian friend so that it would be clear to her parents that there was no hope of getting him for Fiona.’
‘I know. Thanks. Have you really got transport?’
‘Yup. Over here, and luckily it’s almost legitimate. I’ve got to get over to a village out on the Bologna road and I can easily drive there via Fiesole. Seen Florence before, Mrs Gillingham?’
Julia answered civilly and resigned herself to half an hour’s polite conversation. She did not see much of Florence as they roared through it in the jeep, just a muddled impression of large buildings and a broad dark-green river, but as they began to drive up the steep, swooping hill to Fiesole, David’s friend said:
‘If you look back in five minutes or so, you’ll see the best view in the whole place.’
From the back seat of the jeep came David’s voice, as light and teasing as Julia had ever heard it. She was so pleased that he was able to talk so frivolously that she hardly distinguished what he was actually saying.
‘It’s even better from the terrace of my mother’s house. Don’t you look back, Julia; mustn’t spoil your appetite for views of Florence.’
She did turn her head then, but only to smile at David and marvel that he could look so happy; but even as she watched his face seemed to grow colder and he nodded. Irritated with herself for reminding him, Julia turned back to face the front and said nothing more until Bill had dropped them outside a big yellow house on the edge of Fiesole. She thanked him and waited while David invited him in for a cup of tea. Julia was interested to see an expression of faint embarrassment cross Bill’s face.
‘Thanks, David, but I’ve bent the rules enough; I really ought to get on to the village and see to this wretched food distribution. So much goes missing that we’ve got to find out why. It may simply be inefficiency at this level, but it could be worse. These damned black marketeers are everywhere; they siphon the stuff off as soon as it comes into the country, at the various stores and again at the local distribution points. They’re even sending it out of the country – to Yugoslavia and France.’
‘Really,’ said Julia. ‘But that must be in huge quantities to make it worth their while. How do they get so much out of the country?’
Bill looked at her for a moment.
‘It’s not certain, but there’s a suggestion that they have stolen British army trucks and uniforms and, with forged documents, pass themselves off as official convoys. It’s not generally known, but they’ve got at least 60,000 tons of grain away like that,’ he said
‘Profitable business,’ commented Julia.
‘Yes indeed. The profit is roughly ten or twelve thousand lire per hundredweight,’ Bill said drily. ‘Whoever put up the money for the scheme has made a fortune. We’ve got to stop it before UNRRA is wound up. So long. Goodbye, Mrs Gillingham.’
David hauled their luggage off the back seat and Bill drove off.
‘That scale of operation does make Anthony’s black marketing seem quite trivial, doesn’t it?’ said Julia as they watched the jeep disappearing in a cloud of dust.
‘I’ve always thought so,’ said David. ‘And after all he’s done it for the most altruistic of reasons – unlike Bill’s quarry.’
‘Yes,’ Julia said with an expression on her face that he could not quite read, ‘but the law is the law and one can’t decide to apply it only to those whose motives and characters one dislikes. It has to apply to everyone equally, however “good” or “bad” or else…’
‘It becomes a very bad joke,’ David said. He smiled at her and picked up their luggage. ‘Come along and meet Mama.’
Julia followed him through a tall, wrought-iron gate and waited on the weedy gravel in front of the pale-yellow walls of a large square villa as he pulled a long, iron bell. Within a very short time, she heard the sounds of bolts being drawn back. The heavy, dark double doors opened and in their shadow stood the most striking woman Julia had ever seen.
Dressed in comfortable-looking tweeds that were as old and baggy as Julia’s but did nothing to disguise her tall slimness, Allegra. Wallington had David’s smooth dark hair and elegant hands, but there was no other resemblance between them. Where his face was angular and spare, hers was a flawless oval, and her round eyes were very dark. The lines that radiated from their corners did nothing to detract from their brilliance, but in some curious way made her look approachable, despite her immense style.
To Julia’s eye she seemed to wear no powder or lipstick, but then she hardly needed any. Her skin was a pale olive colour but absolutely clear and her magnificent eyes gave her face all the definition it needed. She looked desperately tired, but there were no obvious marks of grief on her face.
‘Mrs Gillingham,’ she said in a voice that carried only the faintest Italian accent, ‘how very good of you to come and stay with me.’ She held out her hand and Julia shook it, saying:
‘It is charming of you to have invited me, Mrs Wallington. Particularly now.’ Julia wanted to say something more direct about the accident, but could not imagine how to approach the difficult subject in the face of such easy courtesy. All she could think of to do was to step aside so that David and his mother could greet each other.
‘David,’ said his mother, very gently, and then added a sentence in Italian. Julia heard the name ‘Jonathan’, but she made a determined effort not to translate the Italian words, knowing how much the two of them must need privacy. David answered in the same language and then reverted to English.
‘Is much of the house habitable? Where have you put us, Mama?’ he asked cheerfully.
‘Upstairs,’ she answered, linking arms with Julia. ‘Come on up, Mrs Gillingham, and I will show you your room. It’s not been too bad, David. Germans were billeted here, but they seem to have treated the place with considerably more decency than they did the people.’
There was no easy way to answer the bitterness in her voice, and Julia remembered what David had said about his mother’s probable feelings during the war and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Mrs Wallington, stuck in Scotland, knowing only a little but guessing all too much of what was happening to her own country – and to her two sons.
‘It’s over now, Mama,’ said David gently. ‘I know that doesn’t make what’s happened any better, but it is finished … We just have to rebuild and make sure that it can never happen again.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, Mrs Gillingham. You must be so bored with war talk. Here we are.’
She opened a door and ushered Julia into a shadowed room on the second floor. Unlike the apartment in Venice, this room was decorated in the English style and furnished with two plump single beds covered in chintz counterpanes. There was even an armchair that actually looked comfortable. Julia had difficulty in suppressing a sigh of relief.
David dumped her bag on the floor by the bed and then went to open the shutters, letting some real light into the room through the yellowing lace curtains. It allowed Julia to see the glowing rose colours of the chintz and also to notice the shabbiness of the well-washed paintwork and the cracks in the ceiling.
‘I promised her the best view of Florence from here, Mama,’ he said over his shoulder as he wrestled with the catch. ‘Ah, that’s better. Julia?’
Julia went to stand beside him on the minute balcony and stared down across the valley. There, spread out below her in the late afternoon sun, was Florence. In the foreground were small green fields dotted with clusters of red-roofed houses and the dark spires of cypress trees; further back was the great mass of the city itself, with the cathedral’s rust-red dome rising unmistakably in the very centre of the view. Julia could make out dark-green stretches of the river as it wound between the ochre and terracotta of the buildings. Beyond the city rose a line of gentle hills, looking blue-grey in the distance.
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, turning back into the room. ‘Mrs Wallington, I can’t tell you how amazing it feels to be here – in all this space – instead of shut up in Venice.’
David’s mother smiled then and her lovely face looked suddenly young and for a moment hardly tired at all.
‘Haven’t I always said it was a dank, sinister, unhealthy place, David?’ she said. ‘I think our guest is very intelligent.’
David responded to the teasing by walking over to his mother, putting an arm around her thin shoulders and dropping a kiss on to her smooth hair.
‘Yes, Mama, she is; and yes, you have always said so. But Venice is full of wonderful things, and even for you I won’t pretend to dislike it.’
‘You always were a stubborn creature,’ she said with a charming tenderness in her voice. ‘From the moment they told me that you were a breech baby I knew I’d have trouble with you.’ Turning to Julia, she went on, smiling still: ‘Haven’t you found him stubborn too, Mrs Gillingham?’
Julia, delighted to see that the affection between them was solid enough to allow such teasing, said, as though she were considering some knotty legal problem:
‘Stubborn? I wonder … I’ve certainly become aware that I wouldn’t like to cross him, particularly on a matter of principle.’ Julia looked at David then and was a little surprised to see that he was not laughing as she had expected. Instead he was standing with his head on one side, looking seriously at her. Mrs Wallington laughed.
‘I said you were intelligent,’ she commented. ‘But this is all irrelevant. Mrs Gillingham, I’ve become Scottish enough to need my tea and I’m sure you’d like some after that horrid train. I think it’s just warm enough to have it on the terrace. Will you come down when you’re ready?’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia. ‘Tea would be wonderful!’
They left her to unpack and she was pleased to find a jug of warm water wrapped in a towel on the washstand. Having scrubbed the train’s grime from her face and hands, she searched for a comb to deal with her hair. It had been far easier to keep it tidy, she thought, in the days when she wore it pinned up; the style she had taken to suited her better – and made her look and feel years younger than she was – but it was a terrible nuisance.
Amused by her burgeoning vanity, she dawdled over the unpacking to give Mrs Wallington plenty of unencumbered time with her son. It seemed to Julia to be the height of good manners to have greeted a stranger with apparent pleasure under such circumstances and then to have included her in the family teasing, but she wanted to make certain that they could forget their manners and talk freely to each other without having to bother about her.
When at last she made her way downstairs towards the terrace, she could hear their voices speaking in English. Slowing down, she listened in case they were in the middle of a talk too personal to be interrupted; but it soon became clear that they were discussing the house and the various improvements that might be made once Europe had reached some kind of normality again.
Much relieved, Julia walked out through the open French windows on to the terrace. At the sound of her step, David pulled himself out of his chair and smiled at her. His mother turned and smiled too.
‘Mrs Gillingham …’
‘Oh please call me Julia – if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Julia. Mrs Wallington inclined her head in an extraordinarily graceful gesture of acquiescence.
‘Julia, come and sit down and have your tea,’ she said, pouring another cupful. Julia sat down and took her tea and a small almond biscuit.
‘David tells me that you have been very ill,’ said Mrs Wallington. ‘It’s that terrible place, you know. How anyone could have expected you to get properly well there I cannot imagine! And David says that your husband is a doctor: he ought to have sent you straight up to the mountains.’
‘I wasn’t as ill as that,’ said Julia, laughing slightly. ‘And he has so many patients with much worse ailments that he took quite a robust view of my case.’
‘Well, now that you are here, you must stay until you are really well, mustn’t she, David?’
David leaned forward to replace his tea cup on the table and then he straightened up.
‘I think she ought to do exactly as she wishes, Mama. After all her husband is in Venice – and she hadn’t seen him in all the war years,’ he said.
Julia was horrified, thinking that the last thing David’s mother would want to hear just then would be about another woman’s wish to be with her husband. Her sympathy for Mrs Wallington helped her to ignore the realisation that it was an enormous relief to be away from Anthony and with people who produced an atmosphere of such calm and ease that she felt immediately at home with them.
‘Of course she must, David,’ came the gentle reproof, ‘but she will get well much more quickly in Fiesole than in Venice. And I want her to know that she is welcome in my house for as long as she wishes.’ David put a friendly hand on his mother’s knee, and Julia thanked her.
‘There are many things to see in Florence, too,’ said Mrs Wallington. ‘David will take you about and show them to you: he knows so much about it all.’
‘He was certainly the most wonderful guide in Venice,’ Julia said, smiling at him.
‘You flatter me, both of you,’ he said, and again Julia was amazed that the pair of them could appear so cheerful. ‘Julia, I hope that you will let me take you down into Florence for dinner tonight; if we went early, we could stroll a little first and look at one or two of the best exteriors.’
Julia looked from one to the other, strangely at a loss. She wanted to say that she would quite happily go and dine on her own in Florence so that they could be alone together, but Mrs Wallington pre-empted her.
‘Unfortunately I cannot join you, because I am expecting a very old friend of my family, who has been here all these years,’ she said. Julia smiled her thanks and then turned to accept David’s invitation.
Her conscience at peace, Julia set off for dinner in a mood to enjoy herself. She and David decided to catch the bus down into Florence and then try for a taxi home. As they were waiting at the bus stop in the main square of Fiesole, about five minutes’walk from the house, she said carefully:
‘David, I hope your mother didn’t think me dreadfully insensitive –’
Before she could complete her sentence, he interrupted her.
‘Why on earth should she have thought anything like that?’ he demanded, sounding almost angry.
Julia touched his forearm lightly.
‘Hush,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’ David sounded much more like himself. ‘But what do you mean?’
‘It’s very difficult. I just … it’s just that I wanted to tell her how sorry I am about … about what happened to your father and brother but, not knowing her, I didn’t want to say it in a way that might upset her. And so I didn’t say anything.’ Julia ended her little speech looking at her feet. When David said nothing, she waited and then at last looked up at him. There was an expression in his blue eyes that she did not completely understand, and so she lifted one eyebrow.
‘You are kind, you know,’ he said rather helplessly. ‘I don’t think I realised quite how kind until they were killed.’ He seemed to be trying to pull himself together and just as the bus appeared at the mouth of the square, he murmured: ‘Don’t worry about Mama; she will have understood what you were thinking, and in any case I can tell her if you’d like.’
‘Would you?’ said Julia over her shoulder as she climbed up into the bus. ‘That would be awfully good of you.’
They found seats side by side and silently agreed to talk no more about the tragedy. Instead, David pointed out landmarks they passed and eventually Julia led him on to talk about his childhood holidays at Fiesole. The first time he had to include his brother’s name in an anecdote, his voice hardened a little, but soon he was talking much more easily, telling her of picnics and expeditions and even fights they had had with each other and with the Italian sons of their mother’s friends and relations.
‘Was it difficult getting to know them?’ Julia asked, as the bus creaked round a particularly sharp hairpin bend. ‘Didn’t they treat you as strangers?’
‘I suppose they might have done at the beginning,’ he said, ‘but by the time I can remember we had become part of the place really. Mama had brought us every year, and we somehow fitted in.’
‘Did your father not come?’ asked Julia, curiously. He shook his head.
‘Partly because of the estate; there was always too much to be done. But mainly because he didn’t like the place and believed that he didn’t like Italians. How he thought he could love Mama so much and dislike her friends and relations on the grounds that they were Italian, I don’t know. And he did love her,’ said David and then was silent.
‘How did they meet?’ Julia asked, not sure whether he wanted to talk or not. It seemed that he did want to, for he answered her question far more fully than he need have done.
‘It was quite funny in fact,’ he said, a real smile lighting in his eyes. ‘Some neighbours of ours in Scotland had unnaturally cosmopolitan views about the best way to bring up their daughters and they had all been sent to stay with family friends in both Paris and Florence when they were about seventeen.
‘One of the daughters, Fiona, who was always known as “the pretty one”, had struck up a great friendship with Mama, who had been invited back to Scotland. Now, Fiona was thought to be a suitable bride for my father – just the right age, pretty and vivacious enough it was thought to appeal to a man who was beginning to be known as a confirmed bachelor.’ He stopped then and Julia supplied a prompt.
‘And he caught sight of your mother and fell desperately in love,’ she suggested.
‘Not at all,’ he answered, the grin coming back to his lips. Julia smiled back, not sure what she was about to hear, but very much enjoying his pleasure in the tale.
‘No, he had been toying with the idea of proposing to Fiona, whom he had known all his life and whom he liked. But just before he could get the words out, she begged him to do her a tremendous favour. My father was a generous man, and so he cautiously agreed to do what he could. After a while she explained that she was in love with someone else – not hopelessly ineligible, but not nearly as suitable as my father – and her parents had refused to allow her to see the man. She therefore proposed that my father should pretend to fall in love with her difficult and very homesick Italian friend so that it would be clear to her parents that there was no hope of getting him for Fiona.’
