Devotion - Louisa Young

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yet.

      It was not entire chance that she hadn’t got round to posting it. It was so easy out here to neglect things. So relaxing. But that wasn’t it.

      Something in me didn’t want to post it. She could acknowledge that. Because it was not an entirely honest letter. There were several things she hadn’t mentioned.

      On Saturdays, when the other Jewish children were at synagogue, Nenna and the boys, in smart little uniforms and clean white socks, went off to Little Italians and Children of the Wolf.

      There was a song, ‘Giovinezza’, that she really didn’t like. It was too military, and the children would march around to it, and sing, and once or twice she had snapped at them to stop.

      Earlier that week, at Trevignano, a bunch of young men in black shirts had walked into the main café in the piazza as if they owned it. They laughed too loud, and ordered beer, and they didn’t seem to pay for it. They were braggadocio in action and she found herself moving the children outside sooner than she would have.

      And there was the Day Camp to which Nenna and the little boys had gone, to which she had not wanted Tom and Kitty to go – not that they could have, as they weren’t members of the club that organised it. Aldo had said he was sure they could go as guests, and she had said no, they had some reading to do for school, which wasn’t really true. The excuse was the worst thing. If either of the children mention it to Riley, I will have to explain …

      And before they came up to the lake this summer, she had visited Aldo in his office. He laid out drawings before her, in the tall cool room, large and precise. He showed designs for the giant pumps whereby salt water was being sucked out of marshes and beautiful farmland was being revealed. ‘Julius Caesar planned to do this,’ he said. ‘He wanted to bring the Tiber down through the marshes all the way to Terracina, and drain off the water all the way. Leonardo da Vinci too – but it was not done. But we are succeeding.’

      She looked at them politely: they were beautiful, vast and powerful. But she was distracted: a photograph of the Duce, framed, perched on the wall right above Aldo’s broad and tidy drawing desk.

      ‘Would you like to come down there?’ Aldo said, beaming and keen, like a small boy offering a turn on his best toy. ‘I could show you,’ he said. ‘I’d like to so much.’

      ‘Next time, perhaps,’ she said, but she looked at him and smiled, so it wasn’t rude.

      ‘We are digging more than fifteen thousand kilometres of canals and trenches,’ he said, and she kept the smile. Fifteen thousand kilometres!

      ‘Quite something!’ she said. But Riley despises Mussolini. He’s publishing a pamphlet about him this autumn and it is not a fan letter.

      ‘It’s such an important job,’ Aldo said. ‘For the people. There’s so many men down from the north already, rebuilding their lives. We see the results of our work, every time we raise our eyes. Nadina, it’s such a joy!’

      He looked so happy. Dear Aldo!

       But but but.

      The photograph bothered her. Up there in his hat and his Sam Browne, looking like he thought he knew everything. Odd how people think he’s handsome. He looks like a lump. And there’s too many pictures of him everywhere.

      She hated leaving things unsaid. It held a horrid cargo of potential upset.

      So, a long letter, emptier than one would think.

Part Two

       Chapter Six

       Kent, June 1932

      Peter and Riley were striding about on the Downs. Part of the idea of walking, though this too was unspoken, was that striding along, eyes not meeting, mild distractions constantly to hand – ‘Isn’t that a kestrel—?’ ‘Ah, look, St John’s wort’ – was a convenient forum for the exchange of confidences, should either of them be inclined. One could not escape, but neither could one be forced. But today – a drowsy, bee-heavy day, where even the river ran a little slowly and the sweet-bitter smell of clover blossoms languished across the thick meadows – this was not working. They had left the house a little too late; it was too warm for any actual effort. Their muscles were soon limp and their clothes itchy.

      The lure of the river and the removal of shoes was too strong. They rolled their trousers up, sat on the banks among watercress, slow worms and kingcups, and kicked crystalline spray up into the sunlight to make rainbows.

      After a while Riley said, ‘Oh, well, for God’s sake,’ and took his shirt and trousers off, and folded them (which made Peter smile) and plunged in like a shaggy dog, submerging among weed and minnows and rising again, gasping and shaking his head.

      ‘Beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair!’ called Peter, humorously, and Riley made a face.

      Peter had a secret.

      Sitting there, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up above the elbows – God I am so white – and his collar open, he wanted to tell it to Riley. But he wasn’t going to. Things were not calm enough. It is always hard to be rescued – to maintain one’s dignity, and accept that one must be grateful – and Riley had rescued him three times now. Looking back on these rescues, Peter saw how it worked: Riley could drag him out of chaos, yes, but that was as far as it went. Riley couldn’t deliver Peter into a safe and happy haven. He could only leave Peter on the outskirts of what used to be his life, and let him work out his own way back – which is what Peter tried to do. Of course there was nothing to be done about Julia. He could continue to rage, or he could accept the cruel joke that just as they had begun to regain each other, she had to die – and of the most ordinary, everyday domestic tragedy: childbirth. The woman’s equivalent of war, he had realised, after talking to Rose about it, about how many women die that way. In every thousand births, fifty women will die. One in twenty. One in twenty! Can that be right? Rose, who worked with Dr Janet Campbell on her project for a national system of antenatal clinics, had told him about Pasteur and Semmelweis and Alexander Gordon, one of the first to realise that doctors themselves might be passing the infection that caused puerperal fever among the women they were caring for, who for his reward was chased back into the Navy by a horrified medical establishment who did not want to believe what he was saying. Rose had taken Julia’s death hard. She felt she should have been able to help. Poor Rose, Peter thought. Always so helpful, and then, when it was really needed, she simply hadn’t been there. Poor Rose. She had told him something else: before the war, one in four babies born in poverty died. Only one in ten fighting men died in the war! Only – of course only is not the word – But one in four babies! It wasn’t that he didn’t feel so sad for the babies. But those mothers! What women suffer – and people go on about men’s sufferings in the war – trauma and shock – and all the time, which I never noticed, women were suffering under our noses. He couldn’t stop thinking about this. It’s a form of mourning, no doubt – he thought. Mourning for Julia.

       But I’m not dead.

      His book had been respectably received, had an excellent review in The Times and two reprints. This having transformed him in his own eyes into a man of perhaps some value after all, he was preparing a second. It was about this battle, the woman’s battle. Starting with Sparta, the leaving of children on the hillsides and so on, and those Incas in Peru. Rose was to help him, and an obstetrician colleague of hers was going to steer him right medically. It would be dedicated to Julia, about whom nothing could be done. And yes, he hoped that it might be somehow good for his own children.

      He had hopes of the children. With them, he thought, he had time. But though Kitty was willing, Tom held out still, and for all Riley’s optimistic declarations, would

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