Page 44 of Daughter of Genoa (Escape to Tuscany)

‘All right,’ I said, and she took my arm and tucked it through hers.

I was pathetically grateful. The last time I’d gone further than the air-raid shelter was when Vittorio had brought me here, the morning after the bombardment.

Weeks, months ago now. I felt exposed, standing there with the sun shining down on me; no safe enclosing walls, no place to hide.

‘Come on then,’ Silvia said. ‘Sooner we’re off, sooner we’re there. Awfully commonplace, I know, but it’s true.’ From his carrier, Tiberio let out a soft meow, as if to agree.

I nodded and took a breath, the deepest breath I could manage. We crossed the road and began the long, steep climb downwards, among the ruins of Genoa.

*

Brignole station was full of people. I’d anticipated that, but I hadn’t anticipated how it would feel after a period of relative quiet.

The crowds surging around me were unbearable, jostling against me, shouting – so it seemed – directly into my ear.

No matter how firmly I told myself that this was good, that there was safety in numbers, I had to struggle with the urge to break away and run outside into the open air.

‘Stay strong, dear,’ Silvia said in an undertone. ‘Bernardo will be back with our tickets in just a moment, and then we shall be in a nice, civilised train compartment and all will be well with the world.’

But all wasn’t well. There was a soldier bearing down on us, a German.

He was fair and red-cheeked with an angry scattering of pimples along his jawline, and I hated him – I hated all German soldiers, but I hated him specifically because I was quite sure that he’d picked us to intimidate, two harmless women standing there in the middle of the concourse with a suitcase and a cat in a basket.

He stopped right in front of us, far too close, and held out his hand as if demanding tribute.

‘Papers,’ he said.

‘Well, really ,’ Silvia said, drawing herself up. ‘A little courtesy wouldn’t go amiss.’

I was afraid for a second that the gamble wouldn’t come off; that the German would be provoked by Silvia’s show of indignation. But he wasn’t provoked, or didn’t seem it. He merely rolled his eyes and said: ‘Papers. Bitte .’

‘That’s better.’ Silvia opened her bag and brought out her identity card.

She turned to me and gave me a sharp nudge with her elbow.

‘Come on, stupid girl. Show the young man your papers. You simply cannot get the help,’ she said to the German, who raised an eyebrow; I couldn’t tell whether he understood her, or had merely picked up on her tone.

‘Your i-den-ti-ty-card ,’ she said, enunciating the words practically in my face as I rummaged in my own bag.

‘Honestly, I despair. I ask the agency for a housemaid, one fit for a respectable home, and this is what they send me. I shall have to send her back, ask for something with a brain in its head. These Sicilian girls are no good. And about time,’ she pronounced as I finally located my papers – they seemed to have slipped to the very bottom of my bag – and presented them to the German with shaking hands.

‘You’re hopeless, that’s what you are, Marta.

Quite, quite hopeless. I really must apologise for her, young man.

She’s making your important work very difficult, I’m sure. ’

The German glanced briefly at my card and Silvia’s and then thrust them back at us. ‘Fine,’ he said, and he turned on his heel and swept off.

We watched until he was at a safe distance, with his back to us, demanding papers from a young couple with a heap of suitcases and a small child clinging to the woman’s skirt; and then Silvia leaned in and said quietly: ‘Well, that worked rather splendidly. Your man would be proud of me, I dare say.’

I nodded. I could have hugged her, but I didn’t dare, not after the display she’d put on. Bernardo arrived then, thank God, brandishing our tickets; I could have hugged him, too.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s leaving in a few minutes.’

Once we were in our compartment, with Bernardo and Silvia on either side of me and Tiberio’s basket settled across my knees, my heart had slowed just a little and I was beginning to feel that it might be all right after all.

The only other person there was a white-haired woman in brick-red, beaded draperies, who sat by the opposite window reading a paperback, a large tapestry bag on the seat next to her.

As the train pulled out of the station, she opened the bag and took out an apple wrapped in a damask napkin.

Looking apologetically at Bernardo and then at Silvia – I, in my drab, schoolgirlish clothes, evidently didn’t count – she said in rather a reedy, aristocratic voice: ‘You don’t mind, do you? ’

‘Whyever should we mind?’ Silvia said, and the woman smiled and thanked her.

She took a large bite of the apple and chewed it vigorously, making noises like a horse.

Bernardo cleared his throat and buried his nose in the newspaper he’d bought in the station; Silvia, perhaps mindful of her society-lady status – for I knew she had knitting in her bag, and was itching to get on with it – folded her hands in her lap and stared determinedly out of the window.

As for me, I was grateful to the lady in the corner seat.

It was amusing to look at her, however surreptitiously, and try to imagine who she was and what she did in life.

I decided that she must be something artistic: a painter, a writer, a composer.

In fact, on appearances, she would have fit in quite well with my mother’s more bohemian friends.

My mother loved to surround herself with unconventional characters, even though she herself never shed her Edinburgh respectability.

That’s why they’re drawn to you, of course , my father used to say fondly.

You’re so very respectable that it’s downright eccentric.

For a little while I entertained myself by wondering what kind of odd things this lady might create in her studio or at her desk, and whether eating apples loudly in enclosed spaces was her only vice, or whether she went in for anything else; like jumping up from table in the middle of dinner to do Swedish exercises, or bringing her own lavatory seat when she stayed at other people’s houses.

(I wouldn’t have thought ill of her for it, not in the slightest. My mother had a very dear friend who used to do both of these things.) But then she closed her book, and I caught a glimpse of the cover: it was a collection of Machiavelli’s verse, for which my father had long ago written the introduction.

I felt quite tender towards her then, and couldn’t bring myself to smile even internally when she reached into her bag and brought out a piece of knitting that looked like a bright-blue, ten-armed octopus.

And I was pleased when Silvia really did smile at her, but nicely, and took out her own knitting.

‘This is cosy,’ the lady said happily, and Silvia agreed.

I ran my fingers over the wicker surface of Tiberio’s basket and wished that I could ask her to lend me her book, even for a moment.

I urgently wanted to read my father’s words again.

But I was a housemaid, I reminded myself: a shy country girl who didn’t speak and perhaps didn’t read, certainly not Machiavelli.

Outside the window, the thick-wooded hills rose up high and jagged.

There must be partisans around here, I thought.

I knew from Massimo that they were growing bolder and stronger every day, harassing the Germans from all sides, even coming into the city to do so.

I looked and tried to see some sign of life, but the trees were too dense and besides, the partisans were surely too clever to build their encampments within sight of the railway line.

I simply had to believe that they were there, and that their efforts would come to something.

I had to believe that the war would end; that, one way or another, I would get to see those I’d had to leave behind.

And I dreamed, in that moment, of seeing Vittorio – my unexpected friend, who loved old books and English slang and tea with honey.

I hoped to make it up to him for the hurt I’d caused; I hoped, above all, to see him well and happy and restored to himself.

I would never see him again.