CHAPTER 19

THE TOWER wasn’t a tower in the sense of it being part of another, larger, structure. It was simply one room on top of another—three in all—becoming increasingly narrower as it rose. We all managed to live, eat and cook on the ground floor in a large salon and antiquated kitchen, and the Principessa and son slept in the adjoining room. As she had warned me, my room shared with the children was above this, as was my tiny bathroom, finished all but for a gaping hole in the wall at the end of the bath. Through this hole an endless procession of lizards and spiders crawled to watch me bathe. Perched on top, yet again, was Brunella’s room. The staircase was narrow and slippery—disastrously so in the rain—and wound precariously round the outside of the building.

A woman friend, Sheila Smart, came out from England to keep me company and was accommodated in a cottage in the stable block amongst the pregnant dogs, hens, pigs and peasant retainers. She was my only ally against the charming but totally unscrupulous Principessa, and we took it in turns to cook the meals and release the field mice each morning from the Italian traps set for them by the Principessa the previous night. The mouse traps were square houses, not so small as not to be palatial to a field mouse, well stocked with cheese; and the grateful mice we set free on the tennis court each morning must have broadcast its comforts, and limited dangers, as the traps became ever more populous.

The cooking was a more hazardous affair. Whoever touched the oven door received a fairly hefty electric shock. We boiled or fried our food as much as possible.

The children thrived. Brunella was my rock. I did not miss my husband in the sense that I missed him later, and in cities. It was a time of peace and adjustment, embalmed in boredom and country events, enlivened only by the necessity to make minor decisions. Our days were spent lying in the spring and early summer sunshine by the concrete swimming pool. The pool had been a handsome legacy left by the occupying Germans who had commandeered the villa during the war. Alas, the Contessa could not swim and though happy for our sakes to have the pool, was determined that it should cause her no personal discomfort. Each day she would arrive in our midst in a splendidly frilled romper suit with parasol to match, with her shining black plaits of hair wound round her ears, followed by Michaele. Michaele was neither butler, nor gardener, nor bailiff, but something of all three, his duties ranging from mending a fuse to killing the poisonous frogs—deadly I was told—who frolicked in the pool and on our bathroom window sills each morning. When the Contessa arrived we would exchange our morning pleasantries while Michaele killed the frogs and occasionally a snake.

Then, her parasol aloft to protect the gleaming black dye on her hair from the sun, she would wade into the two feet of water which were our daily ration and lie on the bottom—feet and bloomer frills floating gently on the surface. In these two murky feet my children gradually learned to swim: we adults could do no more than duck. Seamus began to talk—a hideous Caprese dialect being his first language—and my friend Sheila and I devised our rigid social life.

At 4 o’clock each day the train to Milano passed through the village station and in the station waiting room were sold the best ice creams in all Italy, and, so it follows, in all the world. At 3 o’clock Sheila and I dressed ourselves carefully, made up our faces and did our hair, and walked the mile or so to the station to watch the 4 o’clock train go by, eating our ice cream of the day. The flavours were raspberry, strawberry, nougat, pistachio, lemon, peppermint, vanilla—the daily decision an agony. A few workmen played dominoes at one of the other tables: we exchanged daily nods.

Occasionally, we actually caught the 4 o’clock train to Milano and spent an evening at La Scala. Once we were late: the train was pulling out of the station as we came round the top of the hill and started to run, hampered horribly by our wooden clogs (a hangover from rationed shoes). The guard saw us, pulled out his whistle; the driver stopped the train and all the male passengers clapped and shouted in unison as we clattered down the hill—‘Due bella signora!’ Due bella signora!’—and then hauled us aboard.

Sometimes we went back to the villa and dressed up once more to drink an after-dinner coffee with the Contessa and her house guests. They were all of them old generals, mouldering Russian princesses, Austrian barons escaping from a more vague boredom to our life of tiny and precise discipline. That is what it was—the discipline of doing nothing and yet occupying the mind and senses—a discipline since forgotten, its loss sadly regretted. We were given one tiny, strong black cup of coffee each and one tiny, strong glass of Strega; and we sat gossiping under the light of the twenty-five-watt chandelier in the gilded and brocaded splendour of the palazzo, peering at each other through the gloom. Sheila and I bought stronger light bulbs for our own quarters but lived in fear of being caught using too much electricity, it being included in the rent. We also devised a much more satisfying drink for the nights we were not invited to join the Contessa. A bottle of the cheapest grappa poured in the morning into two glasses of raisins would swell by evening into a drink of rich and fiery delight.

As we settled in to this routine I had no plans for the future. The house in London was let for two years—perhaps at some later date we would visit my father in Australia—and meanwhile there was wonderful, sturdy, cheerful, constant Brunella for me to lean on. One day Brunella seemed less cheerful; the next she sang not at all; on the third she said she did not feel well, and thought she should see a doctor. The local doctor had already been encountered over the affair of Seamus’s finger, and so I took Brunella to see him.

She emerged smiling. ‘Is not serious,’ she explained. ‘Is making tests. For getting in Como in three days.’ She sang again. I gave her not another thought beyond wondering how I could ever manage without her in my life again.

In three days, I was driving into Como and Brunella asked me if I would pick up the results of her tests. Still naively unsuspecting, I paid over the counter what seemed a disproportionately large sum of money—for what? For a slip of paper on which was written one word: ‘POSITIVO’.

I spoke hardly any Italian: it was not necessary. All was clear. ‘Brunella,’ I said, ‘Is it possible you are going to have a baby?’ (‘Oh, God,’ I thought, ‘not another baby!’) Brunella burst into tears: in between wailing about her mother in Capri she assured me it was not possible because she was virgin but that Forte was a very naughty man. Forte, she enlightened me, was her fiancé—very rich, very Greek, very naughty. Forte had made her do something on our last night in London, but she did not know what: she was virgin and so she did not understand.

Dimly, I remembered our last hectic night—scuffles on the stairs late at night, a dark, polite face encountered at the door on other nights asking for Brunella. Now, having divested herself of her problem to me, it became my problem—Mama in Capri, the baby, Forte. All was up to me, with Brunella eagerly complying with all suggestions. The secure thought of Brunella in my life forever vanished: I would be left alone in what had suddenly become an abyss of the unknown and Brunella must be packed off to London and to her hitherto unsuspected and unsuspecting fiancé. First, the fiancé must be informed and Brunella had every intention that I should tell him. They had little language in common and none that both of them could write. Thus began the long history of my correspondence with Brunella’s lovers; imperceptibly, I had gained a third child.

Forte, as a lover, was quickly disposed of. To my calm and indulgent letter, assuring him of my care for Brunella and asking only for details of her return journey, he replied ‘Dear Dalton—I know not of what you speak.’ Further letters ended in abrupt and angry silence. Brunella wept a great deal and wailed louder about Mama and how she would kill her. I foresaw once again the permanence of Brunella in my life, but with an added problem—her baby.

But she was determined not to have the baby, and in this I could not shake her. My Italian was barely a month old, not equal to the task of finding an obliging doctor in Milano. The local doctor was out of the question. I hung around the likeliest of the Austrian baronesses one night after coffee, and in the smoothest conversational tone I could muster, asked her if she knew of a good abortionist nearby.

She was a duck, that baroness. Hers is a name I shall never forget—Litzi Thun. A council of war was held next day over morning coffee in her room and distant acquaintances were dug up—each one further removed from Brunella. Names were provided who could supply other names and we had now only to do battle with the telephone.

I had no telephone. I had a contraption on the wall of the salon, in full range of the beady eye and eager ear of the Principessa, which was a sort of one-way extension from the main telephone in the palazzo. The one way was a capricious arrangement—sometimes I could hear the other party—sometimes they could hear me. About half the time some somnolent servant lurking in the dim corners of the main house actually answered the tinkle and connected me to the outside world. From then on, it was anyone’s guess as to who was hearing whom. But a doctor was indeed located in Milano, and, in a series of frustrating calls, it was established that he would see Brunella, would perform the operation, would keep her in his clinic overnight, and would charge eighty guineas.

I could not leave the children. Sheila was delegated to take Brunella and it was agreed that they should go separately and meet on the steps of the Duomo in time to go together to the doctor. The day was baking hot. Sheila left early for a day’s sightseeing in Milano and I put Brunella on our 4 o’clock train. Sheila was a handsome and elegant woman, sympathetic and capable and not apt to be unduly disturbed by the ambience, whatever it should prove to be, of an abortionist’s rooms, being of an age best described as ‘past child-bearing’. However, the day having been exceedingly hot and tiring, she was in some despair when Brunella had not appeared well past the appointed time when they could still have met the appointment. Best to go to the doctor on her own and explain she had lost Brunella. The doctor was in an apartment building a bus ride away. A considerably more hot, tired and dusty Sheila found the door only some ten minutes late and pressed the bell. In no time, she was let in, pounced on, surrounded, and nearly strapped down before she was able to convince the eager and aggressive nurse that it was not nerves which made her reluctant to undress and submit, but mistaken identity. But, contact was made, and so was another appointment. Brunella was found, at the wrong end of Milano, and she lost her baby on another appointed day.

The summer drifted by. The Principessa left in a flurry of unpaid bills; the Contessa and I became fused in friendship by our joint ill-treatment at her hands. Our involvement in the life of the villa was enlarged to include invitations to watch excruciating television programmes—all chosen by the Contessa’s husband who, inexplicably, was never addressed as ‘Count’, but always, by all including his wife, as ‘Enginere’. The Contessa had seemingly married beneath her in the social sphere but not in matters of influence. The tubby little enginere had built some of the grander of Mussolini’s roads and buildings and, having been suitably financially rewarded in Il Duce’s day and created his Finance Minister, was never thereafter allowed to forget it. If he fitted at all into a scheme of life at the villa, it was as an engineer and, for want of a more appropriate title, that is what he would be called.

Sometimes we went on picnics on the lake—to an island where we were rowed in a flotilla of little boats by footmen who then laid out white damask, wine buckets, delicious food, and waited on us at the water’s edge. Michaele came along to hold the parasol over the Contessa’s head as she billowed in the water. No picnic has seemed worthy of the name since, no water more limpid or dappled with sunlight, no feast more luxurious, or wine more tantalising, no setting more idyllic.

In September, the fogs began swirling up and around the shores of the lake and down from the Alps, blanketing our little community in damp greyness. The generals and the barons began their farewells; relatives were remembered in cosier climates, and it became evident that we, too, must move on.

Other arrivals during that year, at other houses, as we moved slowly down Italy following the sun, were fraught with shock and despair, but none had been so complete as our first cold, damp night in our tower. But somehow, I look back upon our months at Fino Mornasco as calm, peaceful and regulated. I, too, remember the doves and the peacocks pecking food from our table, the beauty of the park, the sunshine, and the delightful Contessa. I have forgotten the agony of worry caused by the tiny outside stone staircase and the sheer drop from the tower windows; the field mice in our beds and cots; the capricious water supply; the lethal stove; the mad Principessa. As we left Milano, I felt great sadness. Brunella looked back along the autostrada—‘Mama Mia, Mrs Dalton. I leave plenty memory behind me here,’ she said mournfully.

* * *

We took a hideous modern apartment next, at Sori, near Genoa. The view was breathtaking and made up for the veneer of our dining-room sideboard, the Burmese gongs and three-piece suite. It was built on a bend of the coast, perched above the main coastal road and nothing was to be seen from the windows but the sparkling sea and rocky cliffs. Peace was visual—not aural. Lambrettas and Lamborghinis shrieked round the bend below our windows night and day. Slower and more commodious vehicles had their radios on full blast. They hooted at each other incessantly. The children and Brunella slept at the front of the apartment directly above this parade; my bedroom was at the back in relative quiet. Until the night I was shaken awake by Brunella wailing, ‘Mama Mia—come quick—house falling down—get children quick!’ It did not seem to me inconceivable that we could in fact topple off our bit of cliff onto the road below, and so I sprang from bed expecting the ground to tremble beneath me. ‘Where, Brunella? How?’ I entreated as the ground remained remarkably firm. ‘Big noise,’ she cried, ‘Awful noise. Me fright.’ There had indeed been a most appalling crash directly beneath her window: a huge lorry hung, headlights streaking far out to sea, half off the road edge—another crumpled van across the road; but to look out the window had been for Brunella far too fearsome a thing—far better to get me and retreat up the mountain side at our backs as best we could.

As the children had to be propelled across this road if we wanted to reach the village or the beach far below us it was clear that Sori must be only a temporary stop. It served to advance the children’s swimming, begun in the concrete pool and now aided by rubber alligators in the Mediterranean. Seamus had his second birthday in a rowing boat, captained by a beautiful and insistent young Italian whom I had picked up, hopefully for Brunella, but whose object soon turned out to be to get me to the local dance hall. ‘Per che non ballare?’ he repeated plaintively day after day as he rowed me and the children out to sea and Brunella giggled on the shore.

The sun was retreating southwards—Brunella had not seen her family for more than a year—Capri was, to me, a picture postcard name, a place for youthful visits never taken but not a haven—but I agreed to go as far south as Positano and at least look at Capri. And so, granny knots tethering our belongings to roof racks once more, we went off.

I installed us in a grand hotel in Salerno where, in nearby Positano, I had a painter friend, Peter Ruta. The children went to bed: Brunella and I shared a splendid room-service dinner at the foot of Seamus’s cot. She was ecstatic. She had come home in great style.

The next day, Peter, Brunella, the children and I set off on a day trip to Capri. By the end of that day I had rented a four-bedroom house looking out towards via Tragara and the Faraglioni and had returned to Salerno for our belongings. I left the car in a garage on the mainland and sent for a friend of Emmet’s to come out and stay with us, drive the car home, and sell it—the equivalent of boat burning.

* * *

Capri was an instant seduction. I have never seen it in summer, but in autumn, winter and spring, it beguiled and charmed. Brunella had eleven brothers and sisters, a mother, father and various nieces and nephews on the island. I wanted for nothing: a sister sewed for me; a nephew delivered the vegetables; a brother kept my evening table at a cafe in the square. The children made friends with the younger nephews and nieces—I made friends with a few charming residents—friends came out from England to stay—and here, I thought, I shall settle. The children will go to the local school and will grow up Italian.

I began to sense a permanence and stability in our lives. There was a village school; there were new friends; there was Brunella. Perhaps the time had come to get Seamus christened as a good Italian Catholic. Emmet and I had never had the time between illnesses. And so Brunella was dispatched to the local priest, an appointment made, all of us interviewed, and a date and local godparents set.

Nearer the day, when a cake had been ordered and his putative godfather, a delightful Italian nobleman, ‘Franchi’ Lanfranchi, had organised the christening party, we had word from the priest cancelling the ceremony. It seemed that the Bishop of Naples, whose diocese we were in, refused to sanction it because I was neither a Catholic nor a guaranteed permanent resident.

Dr Cuomo was the only doctor on the island; so when Seamus developed a large lump in his neck gland and a daily fever we all bundled off through the ferocious winter storms to Dr Cuomo. From Dr Cuomo we were sent to Naples on the churning winter sea to the International Hospital, for X-rays. There were four trips across the bay, numerous trips to Dr Cuomo, when finally tuberculosis was diagnosed, and Seamus was injected with a fearsome dose of antibiotics. Dr Cuomo was far too grand to visit himself; so a fat and dirty woman appeared twice daily with a worn leather bag and a huge and dirty needle, which she plunged into Seamus’s buttocks before she waddled to the window, filled the syringe, and screwed syringe into needle.

Three weeks of this and I was desperate for any remedy. The only other medical care on the island, and that most resorted to by the island people, was at the hands of the nuns. So one night Brunella smuggled (for Dr Cuomo was not to know) one of the nuns into the house. ‘Pouff,’ she said; a little ointment was all that was needed, and a jar emerged from her sleeve. Seamus’s lump remained—the charms of Capri receded—I panicked into the arms of the P&O Line and a ship from Naples to Australia. My children never grew up Italian. Nor Seamus a Roman Catholic.