reached over and pinched Kitty’s cheek gently between the knuckles of her two first fingers.
‘Carina,’ she said, and Kitty felt both approved and patronised, and that felt absolutely right to her.
Later, Nenna wondered what she would offer the little pink cousin next. Not the river – she was too small for that. That Nenna would save for the boy. Also it was a bit late to go out. So, inside the house … the stairs!
So she showed Kitty how to slide on a cushion down the shining marble staircase. When Kitty cried out in joy that it was like a boat going over the rapids, Nenna recognised the word boat, smiled and sealed her loyalty, because that was what she had always thought about this game, that she was a boat tumbling down weirs and waterfalls, and nobody else, not even Papà, had ever noticed. Nenna and Kitty said to each other, ‘Barca – boat. Boat – barca.’
It was at this moment that Tom returned: soaking wet, mucky, wildly happy, dripping over the tiled floor in the doorway.
Nenna fell silent, retreated, and watched.
Her mother Susanna, coming into the hall from the kitchen with Nadine beside her, had two hands up in the air, expressing disbelief. She began to shake her head and tut. Her small boys peered out from behind her, interested. Tom gazed at them all with his wide blue eyes.
‘Stop that, Tom,’ Nadine said.
‘What!’ cried Tom, defensive.
‘Charming her!’ she said. ‘Kitty, throw him a towel. Tom – dry off, and either keep out of the river or dry off down there. No dripping on Susanna’s floor.’
Tom towelled his head, hair sticking up. ‘I didn’t know if I was meant to strip off or what,’ he said. ‘So I didn’t. I thought that would be best. I’ll take them off now—’
Nadine took him by the ear and said ‘You’re a little monster,’ then ‘Get upstairs,’ she said, pushing him, and she gave him a kiss as he passed.
Lying that night in bed Nenna listened to the water outside the window, tumbling over the rocks, and felt its familiar chill in the white and patchy plaster on the walls. Kitty, lying beside her, was restless. ‘Nenna,’ she said quietly. She pointed to the high wooden head and tail of the bed, said ‘Barca!’ and smiled. Then she pointed up at the vaulted ceiling of the room, made movements with her hands denoting upside-down, and said ‘Barca!’ again, pleased and wanting to please. Nenna understood, smiled at her, and said ‘Buona notte, carina. Sogni d’oro.’ Aldo stuck his head round the door to kiss them goodnight, and Kitty fell asleep with the look of a child who had just discovered that the world was a very strange and potentially glorious place.
Sometimes, at night, Nenna imagined the island shaking itself free of the travertine stonework that moored it in place between Trastevere and Sant’Angelo. It would pull its roots out of Tarquin’s great skeleton, deep in the Tiber mud, its bonds would fall away, and slow and stately it would begin to move back down the river towards the sea, trailing froth behind it … where it was heading she didn’t know. She wasn’t sure that Kitty would turn out to be someone with whom she could discuss these things.
She lay and thought about Tom, who had been into the river all alone, before she even had the chance to offer it to him.
That first night Nadine wrote to Riley.
Isola Tiberina
Rome
17 July 1928
Riley my darling – it sounds like an Irish song that way round, doesn’t it? I want to tell you absolutely everything about everything – the journey (easy); the house – yes, they live on the actual island, right in the middle of the Tiber! Do you remember? With the hospital and the bridge with the head with four faces, that you said was a good symbol of the fallibility of the human race: all looking in different directions, not realising they were one creature? The back of the house slides right into the rocks and the river as if it were Venice or something. You look out the window and there it is. SO romantic. Rushing river noise all the time. And of course rather damp. And inside the house we have Aldo, who is terribly handsome and charismatic – I think you’d like him but perhaps not as he does take up a lot of room. He talks all the time – in English and Italian mixed so we are all learning and picking the language up (some (the children) faster than others (me)). He’s an engineer of some kind and plays the guitar. The little boys clamber all over him while he’s playing and he doesn’t mind at all. Lots of hair, big wise eyes like brown honey. He said tonight: ‘How do you like me? My enemies say is Aldo more Roman or more Jewish? I look like both, of course’ – and he does! You could just picture him in a toga, or in the robes of one of Bernini’s marble prophets. They don’t seem to be religious at all, thank god – can one thank god for that? It seems rather absurd – anyway, of course he doesn’t wear robes, he wears slightly flashy city garb: black suit, a white shirt, a pale blue waistcoat buttoned high at the neck. His English is eccentric but frankly I have no right to complain with my (lack of) Italian. I am reminded constantly of that line of Milton’s about educating children, about how ‘they may have easily learnt at any odd hour the Italian Tongue’. Susanna, his wife, is quite quiet but smiley. I haven’t got hold of her yet but I will though she has next to no English—
Here Nadine was about to write about the delicious dinner that Susanna and Aldo had produced on their first night. Even now, after all this time – perhaps because she was far from home and its everyday habits – it was easy to forget for a moment how unkind it would be to mention such things to her husband whose ease with food had been shot away with his jaw at Passchendaele.
The children are Fernanda, known as Nenna, who has lots of hair and a pale wide face like a Piero della Francesca, inscrutable, and the children terribly want her to like them, and two younger boys who I can’t tell apart – black-haired, naughty-eyed, tumbling and playful: Vittorio and Stefano, a pair of wriggly black-haired shrimps, who seem to be about six. Perhaps one of them is bigger than the other. Nenna is perhaps ten – a bit older than Kitty and a bit younger than Tom, so that’s all right, though I’m not sure what Tom is going to do all day as they – the girls – have already sneaked off upstairs and can be heard singing. The marvellous thing is that the piazza is more or less like the park for us, so they can just go out and lark about and be perfectly safe. I dare say they’ll all be bilingual by the end of the week. People pinch Kitty’s cheeks between their knuckles and call her a beautiful blessed blonde angel: ‘Bella bambina biondina, un angelo, bellissima bionda beata.’
She stopped a moment as she wrote this, and then in a rush she wrote—
Darling – I’m sorry but it’s on my mind again, perhaps because of being here, where we were when we were so young & silly, and when we first so truly came together – tell me, again, please, that you don’t hate me for not being able to give you a child of your own? I don’t mean tell me, or hate me, I mean – I suppose, thank you, again, for not adding your disappointment to my own. Perhaps I might go and get myself blessed by some saint of fertility – I’m sure there is one – several probably – or perhaps I will just remain grateful that Tom and Kitty needed
