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) and Cleopatra, 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
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes.
I’m writing it out for you in full because it does sound beautiful in Italian. Not sure of its grammatical accuracy but here it is:
La galea dove sedeva lei, come trono brunito
splendeva sulle acque. La poppa d’oro;
Viola le vele e profumate tanto che
i venti vi languivano d’amore. D’argento i remi,
in cadenza al tono dei flauti, e l’acqua
battuta di loro li seguiva rapida,
quasi amorosi di quei loro colpi.
And Aldo’s response? ‘Shakespeare stole the story from Plutarch, and he was a Roman …’ To which Nenna says, surely he was Greek, and Aldo says ‘Roman citizen’ – you’d think every half-way talented person in the world was Roman to listen to him. So Nenna says, all innocent, ‘And Shakespeare, was he Roman?’ ‘Crollalanza,’ says Aldo, with his devilish little smile. ‘Sicilian name.’
Anyway my love we’ll see you soonest soonest. I will have to post this now, or be utterly embarrassed by having brought it back to London in my suitcase.
Your Nadine
She looked at the letter as she folded it. It really was quite long – five sides! Full and chatty, lots of news, how he liked it. A good letter.
And yet. And 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
