talk. He could go and walk about in the park, or not. Wear his ancient trousers in peace. Nobody wanted anything from him.
And then he would go up to bed and look at the smooth sheets, the pillows all in the right place, the absence of a frock and stockings hanging over the chairs, and feel a pang of loneliness as strong as any he had ever had for her, his lovely wife, an echoey emptiness in his chest and his arms … And then he would open the window and the curtains, how he liked it, not how she liked it, and climb into bed and lie comfortably on his back all night snoring without her rolling him over.
He did very much like her letters.
Isola Tiberina
23 July 1928
Dear Heart—
It all seems to be settling down really nicely here. Kitty and Nenna have completely taken to each other, and I really had no reason to worry about Tom. He’s very self-contained as usual. He’s enjoying asserting his age – he’s taken to wandering off and coming back with the most extraordinary vegetables, mysterious tales, and slang words that make Aldo hoot with laughter – I hate to think what they mean. Terrible misunderstandings arise. Both the children have a terror of being sent out to buy figs, because of some nameless horror which would descend if they got the gender wrong; Tom caused deep confusion by believing that someone called la commare secca – the dry godmother – who had made off with some kittens which had been nesting under the bridge was, actually, someone’s actual dry godmother, and trying to find her, to get the kittens back. Turns out she is actually yet another name for death … Come-si-dice-in-italiano, all one word, uttered constantly, isn’t quite a language course, but they’re picking an awful lot up, running around.
I’ve spent some time with Susanna now, she’s quite placid and intense. Aldo told me that even though she’s Jewish, to the Roman Jews she is practically a foreigner – because she’s from Mantua!
Aldo has told us the complete story of the Jews of Rome: did you know they were here before Julius Caesar? I know, it’s extraordinary to think. Before Vesuvius, before Jesus even, therefore before Popes? I had no idea. I asked if they were Sephardic or Ashkenazi? – I’m pretty sure Jacqueline’s – my – family were Sephardic – and he said, with considerable pride, not either, because they left Jerusalem before the division. And Aldo’s father is from that community, and they all lived in Sant’Angelo, just across the river from the island. It was a ghetto, only for a couple of hundred years. Aldo said that sort of apologetically, as if it were nothing much. In 1870, after Italian unification, the Rome ghetto was opened and, as he put it, ‘all the young men exploded like seeds from a pod, and land all over Europe, to make fortunes’. His father, Daniele, landed in Paris and came back to Rome after ten years ‘with pockets full of gold dust and a young wife of Paris’ – and that was Mariana, my mother’s sister. As she was foreign that too counted as marrying out, but his father was not religious and couldn’t wait to get free of Judaism and religion and the ghetto and everything. So he – the grandfather – bought this house for his mother, so she could be near the old ghetto and the new Synagogue (do you remember it? Vast and modern and yellow, right on the river, with the square-based dome?) and bought himself a little flat north of the Villa Borghese, as far away as possible. I have to say Aldo is most passionate about it all and rather extreme – he calls the orthodox Jews ‘those zionist fools down by the fishmarket with their curls and their Hebrew’! I still have to get him round to telling me properly about his mother, but I have a feeling she may never have got a word in edgeways even when he was a child. He is marvellous, but it is quite a relief when he goes to work. He is extremely handsome though and very funny with the children – he has a game of pretending he can’t see them, which drives them quite wild with delight and fury – ‘I’m HERE PAPÀ! I’M HERE!!!!!’ – ‘Where? What’s that voice? I can’t see anyone here!’ – Or rather they say ‘SONO QUI!!!!’ or even ‘SONO IO!’ which is ‘I am me’ which comes out rather Freudian, doesn’t it? – the ego insisting on its existence to the father …
Are you well, my love? Are you lonely? Any news from Rose? Or Peter? How is the dear dad? I think of you having your peaceful dinners without us, reading your papers undisturbed …
all my love to you both …
your Nadine
The children not being there was lovely and peaceful. The possibility of a pint with Hinchcliffe or a quiet dinner out with Peter, without the nagging feeling that Kitty would not be getting her goodnight kiss.
It had bothered him, when Nadine had brought up the matter of their ‘own’ baby again. He didn’t – he wasn’t – he didn’t know how to answer, beyond plain reassurances. He loved Tom and Kitty. Any doubts he’d had about taking them on had melted away in the strength of their need. And they were enough for him. If Nadine miraculously got pregnant – and the doctors seemed to think it would be miraculous – and yes, he could admit he did not want to have anything more than he had to with doctors – but if she did become pregnant, how would he feel about it?
God knows.
Terrified, probably. Haunted by that grotesque scene of Julia, dead in her nightdress, laid out on the icy lawn, Peter beside her, smoking, out of his mind with compounded grief. Remembering too being downstairs at home while his mother gave birth to his sisters, and to a stillborn brother, a few feet above him, just beyond the floorboards. No, he did not want Nadine to have to face any part of that danger, that fraught and terrific uncertainty, the ferocious play of hope and fear, let alone the drugs, the blood, the timescale, the effort – he didn’t want any of that anywhere near his tender, thin, waxen wife. Her soul had always seemed too big for her skeleton. How could she carry and build another whole body and soul inside her?
To be honest, he would have carried on using johnnies, or her rubber cap, to save them both from all that. But she was in charge of her cap, and when she threw it away he was in her hands. And when the doctor said that pregnancy was extremely unlikely, he was relieved. As was she. Or so she said.
After a couple of weeks he was going crazy with loneliness.
There was, though, one thing that he had to do while they were away. He’d put it off long enough.
In the smart, pale surgery in Harley Street (tall mirrors, white hydrangeas, magazines, a music-box full of sweets for the children), Harold Gillies was a different kind of surgeon to what he had been in 1917, when they were Captain Purefoy and Major Gillies at the Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup. The old wounded soldiers were not neglected, but Gillies had other kinds of patients now. He made new faces for civilians: the burnt industrial worker, the bus driver who had had the terrible crash, the cancerous, the ageing film stars with too many chins. As Riley went in, a small girl with a bandaged eye was coming out.
‘That’s Margaret,’ Gillies said. ‘Lovely girl. Just fixed her drooping eyelid with a bit of kangaroo tendon. She’s doing well.’
Riley sat down, across from him, over the leather-topped desk. He leaned forward a little and placed on it, carefully and respectfully, a small, shiny, greying pink object, arch-shaped and set with creamy teeth. Without this in place in his lower jaw, Riley could not really talk. The spluttery mess which came out of his collapsed mouth when he tried rendered him incoherent, and therefore silent by choice, under the circumstances. It all rather took him back, and as when a thirty-five-year-old sleeps in his old childhood bedroom and feels fourteen again, Riley found, sitting here jawless, that he reverted somewhat to what he had been, back then. Helpless, he thought. Bitter and scared.
‘Well,’ said Gillies, his tone changing. ‘Old chap.’
Riley heard the words and the change of tone, and decided that everything was for the worst. He knew it; had known it for a while. The pain. It had never hurt before,