‘Oh, he doesn’t mind,’ Nenna said. ‘And I like the cakes.’ She was still laughing.
Occasionally, through her childhood, Kitty had wanted to know about her mother. But as youngest children always are, she was born into a family already formed before her arrival. Even in a family as unorthodox as hers, there was an existent mood to which Kitty had not had the opportunity to contribute. The fact of her, of course, did – but it was beyond her influence. Julia and her death were not secret or denied, but nor were they much spoken of. As a result, Kitty’s first emotion was insecurity. These parents were not her real parents. They were not really hers. So she would have to work harder to make sure she was loved. She was a warm little girl; it came easily to her. But she never relaxed.
Occasionally, she had asked. She asked Riley first, when she was seven or eight. (She hadn’t wanted to rock the boat by asking Nadine – of course Nadine knew she wasn’t Kitty’s actual mother, but mentioning it out loud seemed rude almost.) It was bedtime, and he had come up to kiss her goodnight. Kitty had dithered between asking what had happened to Julia, and what Julia was like, and decided on the latter. When she produced her enquiry, cautiously, Riley had fallen silent, rubbed at his chin, stroked her head, and finally said: ‘She was very pretty, and she loved your father very much, and she loved you.’ (Looking back on that as an adult, Kitty thought it sounded like the letters people had saying how their fathers had died in the war: bravely, and without suffering. Every one of them.)
A year or so later she asked Mrs Joyce, the cook housekeeper at Locke Hill, what had happened. Mrs Joyce asked her what she wanted bringing that up again, it had been very sad but what’s done was done, now get out from under my feet there’s a good girl. So Kitty had plucked up an immense courage and asked Peter, one day when he was quiet in his little house in the woods. She remembered it clearly: he had been on his big old chair where he always was, and she had run in and said, ‘Tell me about Mummy.’ He had turned his head a little towards her, and without hesitation said, ‘She was too good for me.’ Kitty had pressed: ‘Tell me a story about her.’ And he had shaken his head, sucked his cheeks in, and fumbled for a cigarette. ‘No,’ he had said. ‘Oh no.’
For a while that was all she had. Her mother was beautiful, she loved Peter, she was too good for him. It was sad, and nobody would talk about it. So after a decent interval she picked up her courage again and took this information to Tom, the beloved, the older, the all-knowing, the unreliable. He had smiled at the question, realising his power, and then sat her down with great seriousness, and sworn her to secrecy. He was always doing that. It added to the importance.
‘Kitty,’ he said, ‘I am sorry to have to tell you this. Our mother was no good. I remember her clearly. She was very beautiful with golden hair, but she was no good. She upset Father by never leaving him alone. She let her mother steal me when I was a baby. She ran away from home without telling anybody. She was always crying and being selfish. And then she did a very terrible thing which you must never mention.’ Kitty squirmed, and promised. ‘She did something terrible to her face,’ Tom said. ‘She sort of burned it off with chemicals, and after that she looked like a terrible frightening clown.’
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