glanced over at Kensington Gardens across the road. The park keeper was trudging by. The heavy leaves of high summer draped almost to the grass, but between them Tom could just make out glimpses of the Round Pond, a horizontal gleam in the distance.
He wondered if the Household Cavalry had been by yet, exercising their stupendously well-kept horses, in two matched, jingling, shining lines, heading round back to Knightsbridge. He thought about going down to the kitchen, where Mrs Kenton might be persuaded to give him some cake. He considered, too, going back down to interfere in the discussions they were no doubt having about his future. He decided against. Whatever they decided made little difference to him. Wherever they sent him, he would, after all, continue to do what he wanted, bear the punishments when they came, and apologise when he had to. And in due course he would be grown up, and free.
The following morning Nadine, her long curls tidied up, her dark yellow eyes calm, benevolently neglectful over breakfast, patently glad to see everyone in the right place – i.e., around a table and within her view – announced that the Italian cousins had invited them to stay during the summer holiday.
Joy engulfed Tom over his toast and milk. A foreign country! Foreign! And it would mean less time at Locke Hill with Peter.
Nobody had ever met any of these cousins. For years their existence had passed London by, until someone called Aldo Elia Fiore – Tom saw Kitty trying out the name, stretching her mouth round the unfamiliar shapes – son of Nadine’s mother’s sister and her Italian husband, had written to his lost cousin Nadine. And now she, Tom and Kitty were going to visit his family in Rome.
But Riley was not coming. Nobody was happy about this, but everybody accepted it. He had to go to work, of course. Men usually had to go to work, one way or another. This was the main way of telling that Peter was getting better: he was working now. Writing this Homer book for Riley to publish! There was a manuscript to prove it. Peter had shown it to Tom, with an expression on his face similar to the one Tom wore, on the few occasions when he’d liked a teacher enough to want to impress him. Peter had said, ‘Well. There it is. First draft,’ and Tom had looked at it and thumbed it, and said, ‘That’s a lot of words’, and that had seemed to do. Anyway, as Riley said now, ‘Books don’t publish themselves’, so he had to work, and not come on holiday, so the joy was clouded. If Tom had paid more attention he might have picked up that strong, tough, humorous, hardworking Riley, who could cope with anything (and had), simply did not want to take a train across Europe to meet new people, to have to talk to them, to stay in a house as a guest with them when he didn’t know them, and they would not understand his mangled voice (in English or his remnants of Italian), or know that he could not eat most solid food, or that he had to be able to sleep when he needed to, to stop talking sometimes even in the middle of a conversation, to leave the moment leaving became necessary.
Tom thought he knew all about Riley. Plenty of fathers and uncles had lost arms and legs in the war; Riley had lost part of his face. Plenty of men had wooden legs and prosthetic arms (Mr Tanley at school had one with attachments: he had a spork, a gripper for pens, and all kinds of wood-working tools he could just screw in, and he’d let you play with them). Riley had had his face repaired using his own skin from the top of his head. His black hair was thick and curly; he would comb it back with his fingers over the broad strip of scar when he had to take off his hat. He looked jolly good considering. Tom had always known this, and didn’t remember being told. Though he did remember being told about Peter – Dr Aunt Rose saying to him, in the drawing room at Locke Hill, ‘Tom, some men are wounded in their bodies and some are wounded in the heart of themselves, in their soul, and your poor dad is wounded in his soul …’ He had been on the sofa with Max the red setter, and he had thought she was going to tell him off for letting the dog be on the furniture, and she had looked sad, so sad, that he had never wanted to bring it up again.
For a brief period he had thought she meant ‘sole’. If Riley could cope with a wounded face, and be kind, then surely only a nothing-kind-of-man would be bothered by a wounded sole? One afternoon, while his father was asleep in his study, Tom had seen his large white feet flopping over the arm of the leather chaise. There was nothing wrong with them.
When Tom realised what it really was – wounded in his soul – the phrase, if anything, made him more scared of his volatile, sharp-tongued, reclusive father.
‘You all go,’ said Riley, ‘and have a wonderful time.’
‘But you and Nadine went on honeymoon to Rome!’ Tom said. ‘Don’t you want to go back?’
‘I would love to,’ Riley said, and Nadine looked over to him, a grown-up look, tender. ‘And I will, one day. But at the moment I can’t.’
‘It’s not fair,’ Tom said. ‘You went to the battlefields with Peter.’
Riley pulled a face at him.
‘But they live on an island! In the Tiber!’
‘That is a great temptation,’ Riley said. ‘I will come, another time.’
Tom fell silent. Because of the jawbone Riley had left in France, his refusal had to be honoured.
Towards Rome, Summer 1928
Crossing France, Tom stared intently from the train window, looking for remnants of the war: tanks, or crashed planes like his one at Locke Hill. No luck, so then he just watched north turn to south before his eyes, cabbage patches to vineyards, apple orchards to olive groves, green to gold. The train stopped for an hour somewhere in the Alps and he leapt off, sniffing the air, letting his eyes rest on crystalline distances. Kitty, who was only eight, and Nadine clambered down after him; they wandered along a lane and found wild strawberries in a field, with snow-capped mountains beyond and a cold stream for their feet. Overhead a slow and tiny scrap of black curve circled: an eagle, he decided. How high? Higher than a plane? He wished Riley were there.
Kitty saw it, and cried out that Peter would like the eagle.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ said Tom automatically. ‘Peter doesn’t like anything.’
Kitty squeaked as she dipped her toes in the stream, so Tom was obliged to mock her again. Nadine said, ‘Be nice, darling,’ as she always did, and flicked the icy water at him so that he squeaked too. The cry of the train guard echoed down, and they grabbed their shoes and rushed back up to the station, breathless and cheery.
The moment they crossed the border into Piemonte he announced ‘Something’s different here,’ even though the goats and the mountains looked much the same and lay under the same blue sky. ‘It’s different,’ he insisted.
The mountains faded from underneath them. At Milan they changed trains, and rattled, rattled, rattled on, itchy, metallic, grubby, south and west: the coastal flats, the sea beyond parades of pine trees, pale cattle with wide amazing horns. It took all day.
They arrived in the sunlit evening. Nadine twisted in her seat, pointing out churches and aqueducts, ruins and piazzas, places she recognised from her honeymoon, nine years before. Tom stared with an immediate and complete jealousy, wanting the adventure she and Riley had had, and the knowledge they had acquired. And then suddenly, right outside the train window, like a massive hot-air balloon crash-landing in front of them, the dome of St Peter’s appeared, and was gone again, leaving the vista beyond of
