Devotion

Kitty had trembled, she’d bitten her lips closed, she’d wept and denied, and then she had to run away. For years afterwards she had dreamt of the bad mother with a glaring white clownface, carrying a suitcase, running down a railway platform, waving from an airplane, coming into her bedroom at night. She never spoke of it to anybody.

Later, upstairs, Tom was surprised to hear Kitty ask, ‘If the Jews had just converted, would they have been let out of the ghetto? And so, why didn’t they?’

Nenna shrugged. ‘God would be angry I suppose,’ she said.

‘It’s the same God, though,’ said Tom, who didn’t believe in God. ‘Isn’t it? It is. Jesus was Jewish, after all. So why would God mind either way?’

He didn’t know. He couldn’t imagine. It was like Shakespeare, or the Bible. People always doing ridiculous things for God, when you never even knew if he was real or not. How could they really believe in hell? He had read the whole of Shakespeare the year before and had been quite concerned about Measure for Measure. Would a girl really let her brother die rather than lie with a man? Not that he was sure what lying with someone entailed, and not that his English teacher had had much to say on the subject – but really – let your brother die? He wouldn’t let Kitty die. Or Nenna. Not if he could save them by doing something perhaps just a bit bad. The lesser evil being justified if it prevents a greater evil, and all that. If God did exist, if he was any good, he’d understand anyway.

Tom was annoyed by Kitty’s questions. He felt that he should know about these Jewish things. Nadine had been his mother first – she was his mother. So that made him Jewish.

At dinner that night, Aldo being away, they asked Susanna, cautiously, the question about conversion. Tom asked. He had told himself to be bold in Italian, or get nowhere, but so many delicate matters crumble under a badly chosen word. ‘I mean to say,’ he said, ‘you’re not religious. Nor is Aldo. So why didn’t people just, you know, stop being religious before? If it would help them?’

Susanna stood to start clearing the plates, which for a moment the children took as a sign that they were not going to get an answer. But Susanna was thinking.

‘The modern world is very different,’ she said, after a moment or two, clattering a little. ‘Our ancestors, in the old Italy, had nothing other than religion. Nobody would have let them escape their religion. Nowadays, we have united Italy to believe in. Not everybody makes the same choice, but now we have a choice.’

That didn’t seem to make any sense either. If the Christians were so keen for Jews to convert, how could they not let them escape their religion? Surely they wanted them to escape their religion?

‘Riley says it’s the same God anyway,’ said Tom. ‘Jew or Christian. Or Muslim! It’s all offshoots from the Jewish god, and people have given him different names.’

That night they decided that the best way for Tom and Kitty to become Italian and Jewish was if they all became blood brothers, which had the added advantage that it would make Nenna English as well. It was particularly important because they saw so little of each other. After bedtime, a small knife was procured from the kitchen, jabs were made in fingertips, and fingertips were pressed together in a rather bloody mess, for probably longer than necessary. The squeaks of excitement at this mass martyrdom alerted Vittorio and Stefano, who bounced in and, once they realised what was going on, insisted that they too should be blooded. Vittorio made a huge fuss about it, and then let Kitty swaddle his finger in a grubby handkerchief.

Kitty fell asleep clutching her sore finger, tightly. She was happy.

This was the first year they went to the lake. After Rome, the lake was a vision of a different paradise, like something just beyond a wall, glimpsed through an arch in a Renaissance painting, tiny in the distance through the just-discovered law of perspective. It was a place one could become thirsty for, Tom felt, as he approached it for the first time: the hills behind him, black with forest; the green irrigated meadow beneath his feet, rolling down to the shores; and the great blue limpid eye of the lake itself, dozing in the sun, relaxing in the arms of its tree-robed promontories. Look at it! Flat, cool, reflective, a surface like blue slate. Over to one side, a handful of chestnut horses stood in the water, long-legged sentinels of the little harbour. They raised their heads at his appearance, up to their ankles in their own perfect reflections. A very strange effect.

Everyone walked down together.

‘Show us the other beach, and the stream,’ Nadine was saying to Aldo, but Tom had already pulled off his shirt and kicked off his shoes and was running out through the shallow sweet water to dive into the perfect surface, and revel. About twenty feet out, the sloping muddy-sandy lake-bed dropped off beneath him, suddenly, into deeper, colder water. Tectonic plates! he thought. Marine cliff-faces. Here be monsters. The drop-off was marked by a swathe of tall narrow tubular reeds, growing like an inner halo all around the lake. (Later he knew them well. You could break them off and use the pointed ends to pick your teeth. They’d draw blood on your gums if you weren’t careful. If you broke them open the inside was a strange almost-solid white foam.) Then just beyond the reed-bed was a bed of weeds: to go out into the lake proper, to dive and frolic in deep water beyond this little safe shallow harbour, you had to swim through those weeds. Their long subaqueous strands bore leaves like the glass leaves on Venetian necklaces, and jewel-coloured dragonflies were alighting on their tiny tufts, which just pierced the surface, as if for that very purpose. Below, the misty slime-clad stalks gradually became invisible, disappearing down into the cold depths. They trailed against Tom’s legs like something which might grab his ankle and pull him down. Tom swam through fast, front crawl, legs kicking mightily. The water was superb; an unspeakable joy.

He came out shaking parabolas of iridescent water drops off into the sunlight, and lay himself down. Can’t I be a lizard, and lie in the heat, on the black sand, immobile? I shall soak in all the sun till the sun is all used up; I shall radiate, I shall never ever move. Above him, twinkling poplar leaves, tiny blades against the bluest sky. Around him, a very low buzz, the quietest hottest most silent sound: one insect, perhaps, dozing off. Beneath him, a thin worn towel and the heat of the black sand coming through it. To one side: the lividly green field, riven with swampy irrigation channels, and spangled in the mornings with bright blue chicory flowers which, he would learn, at the stroke of noon folded their stringy petals in and disappeared till the next day. And just there, inches from his pale toes, the round and lovely lake. No wind yet – that, he would learn, came later, after the chicory had retired. No movement, no ripple. A slight smell of what Nenna called mentuccia – mentoooooooo-cha. How she mocked his accent. How he mocked hers. Late morning. Summer. Bliss. Swallows and swifts dipping and softly cheeping, way overhead. When he asked the name of anything, he got a shrug and a word meaning something like ‘fat face’ or ‘Chatterbox’, or else ‘you can’t translate it’. He looked things up in the Latin dictionary, in case there was a connection, like lacerta and lucertola: lizard. Rondine, rondone, rondicchio: swallow, swift, martin. He kept sketchbooks, and wrote everything down: sizes and colours, where he’d seen it, what time of day, what it was doing. His little drawings were not only accurate, they were charming.

Nadine and Kitty came wandering back. They had seen a massive tree stump, semi-submerged, which looked like a horse’s head. You could see the castle of Bracciano from just round there, and there was a rock you could sit on, out in the water. Kitty and Nenna had swum out to it; they looked such mermaids with their hair.

And now they could hear Susanna calling them to lunch; her voice faint down two fields and across the little road. Tom’s greed woke his hunger, and he rolled over. He could see Nenna, out in the water. She had made a coronet out of the emerald weeds and was putting it on her father’s head: he emerged from the water like a Triton, hairy chested and dripping, Nenna a naiad beside him, laughing. They shook themselves, water flying off their thick curly hair, and pulled on their sandals to set off up the field. Tom dragged himself off the towel and followed them, muttering under his breath the names of all the delicious pastas which Susanna might have made: in bianco, con ragù, carbonara, all’amatriciana, all’arrabbiata, l’aglio e olio, alla puttanesca …

They walked on up.

‘Come on, perfidious Albion!’ Aldo called back to him. Tom took off at a run, and overtook them at the gate, vaulting it: hands to rung two on the near side and rung one on the far, body horizontal, fly over – yes! He landed skidding on chamomile. The dusty scent of it erupted at his feet, and Nenna smiled. He walked up the hot white-dust road to the shade under the umbrella pines and the pale gigantic eucalyptus.

Nadine wrote to Riley.

Bracciano

August 1929

Dearest,

The children are just in heaven, I think. This is an entirely new heaven. Nenna told us that Romans don’t like lakes, traditionally – because the Etruscans live there, so it’s all left over from Lars Porsena of Clusium swearing by the nine gods and so forth … but Aldo finds the seaside too busy, and has enough of it trying to drain it at work. This place is a kind of agricultural ruin, part of a farm belonging to some Roman princes who never come here. One of them, Don Alessio (?) is a bigwig on the Board of Drainage, and an admirer of Aldo’s work at the Agro Pontino, so when Aldo wanted to rent it Don Alessio said yes. It used to be a stable, and still has great stone troughs and iron mangers inside, but from outside it looks more like a tiny castle, with a tower full of pigeons, floors more or less of brick, and the roofs held up with wooden beams. The walls are speckled with lichen, greens and gold, and somewhere on top of the tower, rooks and bright blue sky. It’s a bit of a camp – water from the well, milk from the cows. Farther up the path live a bunch of lovely men in vests – Renzo, Roberto, Armando, Angelo – and their families, in small farmhouses. The men look after the cows and the women make vast vats of tomato sauce in a tiny stone house specially for the purpose. Barns and fields and vineyards recline in the golden sun on all sides; there’s a stream down the side where a Frog Orchestra quack and trill all night long.

High up in the vaulted kitchen (so-called, there’s no stove and no sink; just a stone basin and a big fireplace) ceiling there’s an iron bar for hanging hams off so the rats can’t get them. The very first night, there was a bat hanging from it! Like a trapeze artist, or an acrobatic mouse. Tom made Nenna really laugh when he tried to explain to her why acro-bat was funny, in this context. She got the joke and he was so proud and happy.

Sorry! Forgot to finish. It’s two days later. The lake itself is round in its volcanic crater like an egg in a mountain of flour (this is how you make pasta – I’ll explain when we try it at home) surrounded by boggy emerald meadows and Etruscan legends. A soldier made of solid gold lies asleep on the lake’s bed, silent in the deep water with nothing but eels for company. Last night little bats were flying in and out of the children’s bedroom window; livid green crickets cackle all night. I don’t know if it’s the same grasshoppers with scarlet underwings that fly across the meadows all day. Tom is looking it up. Kitty sits for hours damming the stream by moving stones and rocks, daydreaming and talking to herself, tying her wrists with strands of tiny pink and white striped bindweed, and not noticing when dragonflies land on her … Aldo loves this of course, and told her he does exactly the same at work. Sometimes he sits and joins in with her, pointing out the pitch of the land, and how water always takes the shortest course downhill. She got awfully bitten by mosquitoes, and one of the women here said ‘Sei tutta rovinata!’ – ‘You’re all ruined!’ She does look rather dreadful but they all say these aren’t the malaria kind and it’s the wrong time of year – So—

‘The dragonfly hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky’ – What song is that from? That lovely one – Vaughan Williams? Tom swims, all day if you let him. The rubber mask and snorkel for staring at fish is very popular. I think he might be beginning to entertain ideas of being a naturalist. There’s a little wooden dinghy; Aldo is teaching them to sail. Tom and Nenna are old enough to go out alone together; Kitty, much to her sorrow, just can’t swim well enough yet. Yes we’re taking our quinine!

I will post this – I haven’t been to town yet so I haven’t had the chance. Day five or six now.

Angelo and Renzo have taught them how to milk a cow! On a three-legged stool, with their cheeks resting against the great beast’s smelly side. The milk comes out warm and scary, and it tastes quite different to English milk. The rough-tongued calves with little nubs of horns on their curled brows come up and lick our hands; they sucked appallingly on Kitty’s fingers as if they were udders, and she thought they were going to pull them off. Even so she wants to be a dairymaid, or a cowgirl. There’s a gang of ugly lumpy-faced ducks who line up on a stone water trough by the cowshed which I’m certain must be an Etruscan sarcophagus (Kitty then decided perhaps an archaeologist would be more interesting). They do their homework, play cowboys in the barn, pick peaches as if they were apples, and take jugs up the dusty lane to where huge wooden doors open into the hillside, and Angelo’s wife fills the jugs with wine from a tap on a barrel twice as tall as a cow.

All my love to you my dearest—

Nadine

And so Italy became regular. 1928, 1929, and then the 1930s, so modern and new. Each summer’s visit became a part of a whole, studding the overall experience with its individual jewels. The year Kitty could swim. The year Tom fell out of the tree. Memories grew on memories. And it was all lovely. And each passing year the children were different in themselves as they grew.

Kitty progressed from cute-like-a-doll to rather stout and serious and, in her eyes, unwanted – unlike Nenna, who, in Kitty’s eyes, was wanted by everybody, especially by Kitty herself. This led to an uneven combination of envy and desire, a watchful attitude, and a sense of dumpy plainness which was not entirely justified, and – had Kitty only known it – more the result of the stultifying school she attended in London, with its obsession with sport and manners over intellect or joy, than of any actual plainness in herself.

Nenna became aware that she didn’t entirely want to be a girl. Not that she wanted to be a boy, but she wanted to stay free, an unregulated sort of companion-at-arms to boys, one who could take them or leave them. She was not amused by the responsibilities of girlhood: cleanliness, white socks, helping in the house, being told when to be back. Being worried about. There was a march where the boys of the Balilla swung by with novantuno rifles, and the girls with baby dolls. She didn’t mind real babies, and God knows there were enough of them about, but why would one want a toy one? And also she felt rather put on the spot. Understanding instinctively that nobody would want to hear about this, she said nothing. In fact she developed something of a habit of silence, and grew charismatic, attracting attention by not wanting it.

And Tom? He wanted everything. To swim, to fly, to run away from school, to fight, to swear eternal loyalty, to mind. He wanted to be older. He wanted to get into trouble.

It was in the summer of 1932 that Nadine found herself confused by something which should have been very simple – writing a letter to Riley. They were staying a little longer than usual that year and perhaps that extra exposure made it all that bit stronger.

Darling,

It is lovely to be here again. The beauty! I know it’s so dull to go on about it and I promised myself not to be one of those English people who wafts about Italy saying ‘Isn’t it lovely isn’t it beautiful’ all the time, as if nobody else had ever noticed, and it was in any way an interesting thing to say – but it’s awfully hard. Because it is so beautiful! I allow myself to do it only on the first day, and after that I just say it to myself. Aldo has been teaching us to fish, off the little boat. The lake fish are called coregoni – they don’t even have a name in English. Did I tell you about Ferragosto? The night of celebration of the Virgin Mary’s ascension into heaven? We all walked round the lake in the evening to Trevignano, a loopy road, and when we got near (Aldo had to drag Kitty some of the way I’m afraid) we could see the little fishing boats all lit up with coloured torches, and fireworks were launched from the decks of Il Batello, the lake’s ferryboat: they reflected off the dark water and it made the strangest effect, as if all barriers collapsed between two sides of anything – between water and sky, above and below, then and now … life and death, hope and fear … I wanted so much to have you there to lean back on and share the beauty with. It was almost spiritual for a moment – even though all to the sound of fairground music and the taste of warm nut brittle. Usually, apparently, the ruined castle up the hill behind the town catches fire from the flares marking the path up through the dry dry grass. One year, Aldo was telling us, it didn’t, and everyone was disappointed, so the young men grabbed up the flares and ran about setting the fire on purpose. Then all the older men had to set up a run of buckets to the lake to put it out.

Where was I? Sorry, Susanna called us for dinner and I have been quite bad about helping out – well, we’re swimming every day, obviously; eating far too much and getting as fat as little olives. The bats are driving Kitty quite bonkers. She read somewhere that they get tangled up in your hair … also she’s reading The Castle of Otranto which would keep anyone awake at night. She said yesterday that she’s writing a story about bats, so I hope that will get it out of her system. Tom is quite superb, diving and sailing and swimming, drawing a lot – not in his mask and snorkel obviously. I love to see them all together – each year I am worried that age and distance might mean they don’t get on so well together, but they do, every time.

all my love,

Yours not in flames,

Nadine

Oh dear I didn’t post this and now it’s two days later! Who would have thought being so lazy would take up so much time? I am drawing a lot though – close-ups of leaves and any little creature I can get to stay still long enough. Beautiful scorpions and spiders with sections, if you see what I mean. I am terribly lazy about going into town – No desire whatsoever! Even though I could stroll about in the market looking for fresh burrata and ice cream to bribe the children with. I am sorry. How’s Papa? How are you darling? But don’t write back, the post is awful – I don’t even know if you have written, we haven’t received anything. But now we’ll be leaving the day after tomorrow so we’ll be home before you get this. I am beginning to miss you rather a lot now. I’m trying to soften Aldo up to bring them all to London next year, but I don’t know if it’s going to work. He seems to think there’s too many of them, but I shall hold out. —He has decided that Shakespeare was Italian! – or at least stole all his best stories from Italians: Romeo and Giulietta, from Verona, Two Gentlemen, also from Verona, Giulio Cesare, from Rome, also Antonio (from Rome) andCleopatra, Tito Andronico—! They’ve been translating that bit of Antony and Cleopatra for him, because Nenna has decided that Cleopatra’s barge, as Enobarbus described it, sounded like their island:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne

Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them. The oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made