2.

THE VILLA WAS NO LONGER set up to accommodate houseguests. The spare bedrooms had all been annexed by the widows’ apartments, or given over to clutter. The cavernous, frescoed dining room had been losing a decades-long battle with rising damp and mildew. So when Rose insisted we all share a meal that first night, Donata stood in her flower-print pinafore and directed us down to the taverna—an Etruscan trench, carved into the tufa and bedrock below the villa. Over time, it had become a cellar for storing wine and the taxidermal kills of our forebears. The head of an ibex, cryptic and antlered, presided over the stone mantel. A petrified lynx prowled from one corner.

‘That lynx was shot in Sardinia by our great-grandfather,’ said Violet. As elder sister, she always sat at the head of the table. ‘They were thought extinct, the lynxes, for a century, then a farmer found one trotting along the roadside.’

I sat at the other end of the table, dressed in a suitcase-rumpled blazer and tie. The widows were all wearing evening dresses and when they shifted in their chairs I could smell the pungent chemistry of mothballs and dry cleaning. In the long silences before Donata brought out the antipasti, we sipped our prosecco and watched Milo tend the fireplace. He wore a pair of asbestos gloves, his shop-coat sleeves rolled up, so that he could reach into the blue-white mouth of the flames to rearrange a piece of burning wood.

‘The chestnut smokes too much,’ said Violet to Milo’s hunched back.

He spoke quietly into the flames: ‘Only some of the blend is chestnut, Signora. Mostly oak.’

Violet seemed satisfied with this answer and gave me a little nod to show it. In her cerulean-blue dress, with a lavender shawl and diamond-teardrop necklace, she looked as if she might be headed for the opera, but I suspected she’d spent the afternoon watching Italian pro wrestling on television. She’d become an avid fan in her old age, and you’d sometimes hear her jeering at some fottuto imbecille barbaro from inside her apartment. She also watched boxing and horse racing or, when she needed to relax, British professional dart or snooker tournaments. Of all the sisters, she was the one who’d inherited her mother’s pale, freckled skin, and she seemed to take pride in looking the least Italian. My mother had been dark-haired and olive-skinned—a resurgence of Umbrian blood.

Donata wielded the charcuterie board, her gout giving her a slight hobble, serving each of us in turn. In the subterranean light, the smoke-like grain of the wooden board, the hunks of bread and the thin, curling ribbons of meat—capocollo, mortadella, bresaola, culatello—all reminded me of a Dutch still life.

‘A toast to our dear nephew,’ said Violet, raising her prosecco.

Iris and Rose took up their glasses and I did the same.

Violet said, ‘We hope your stay with us, Hugh, will be very fruitful. I know you will soon be restored to the cottage that our father gifted to your mother, the lastborn of the Serafino sisters, and that she, God rest her soul, gifted to you. You are always welcome here.’

‘At least until we all slide into the valley,’ added Iris.

Violet closed her eyes for a second, willing her sister from her mental landscape. When she came blinking back to the room, she said, ‘Here’s to Hugh’s sabbatical in Umbria. Salute!’

‘Salute!’ said Iris.

Rose raised her glass, blew a lipsticked kiss at me, and drank. She had a raffish smile that revealed small teeth and that bowed her blue-pencilled eyebrows. Years of reading Vogue had rescued her from the broach-and-pearl severity that many Italian widows wield. Instead, she wore an opal necklace and an ivory dress with a cherry-blossom print and kimono sleeves. It was hard to believe that she was the most religious of the sisters, the one who made an annual pilgrimage to a basilica in a remote mountain town in southeastern Umbria, where she paid homage to Santa Rita, the patron saint of lost causes and heartbroken women. Rose was the only sister without children, and it haunted her. I suspect it was part of why she’d beckoned me up to the rooftop terrace during those sunny afternoons in the 1970s. She’d returned to the villa in her forties after escaping a childless, abusive marriage that ended only when her alcoholic husband died of a stroke at dinner one night. In the rooms that would become her apartment, I remember seeing the pictures of all the children she’d sponsored over the years in Africa and Latin America. I miei figli del mondo, she called them, my children of the world.

Violet said, ‘Now, I let Nonna know that you arrived. Perhaps you can visit her tomorrow. She does better in the mornings, after she has her fennel tea and soft-boiled egg. Nina and Sofia are the girls who come to help with her. One of them will be there.’

‘I’d like that,’ I said.

‘Naturally, we’re not telling her about the intruder from the north. It will only upset her. So not a word,’ said Violet.

‘Of course,’ I said.

Violet said, ‘She deserves to turn one hundred in peace. We are planning a big party for her and we’ve invited some of the old residents. Many of them have not come back to the town since they left decades ago.’

Iris had emailed me about the birthday party but had made it sound like a small family gathering. ‘Susan is coming for the celebration,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t realise it was going to be a big party. Is it a surprise?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Violet. ‘There is no surprise. Mother was put in charge of the guest list. She started writing invitations six months ago.’

I tried to imagine the villa hosting a large gathering without a working dining room. I pictured Donata hobbling between rooms with platters of food. Making sure Donata and Milo could hear me, I asked in Italian, ‘How many people do you think will come?’

‘Who knows?’ Violet said, returning to English. ‘We will make a tally before too long.’

Milo wouldn’t meet my eyes. Standing beside the Sardinian lynx, Donata said, ‘Unless you bring in caterers, it has to be a small gathering. Otherwise, it will send me to my grave.’

Violet gave no indication that anyone had spoken. She said, ‘Hugh, I was standing out on my balcony when you arrived and I noticed you watching the squatter over at the cottage. Did you meet her?’

‘No, not yet.’

‘Her name is Elisa Tomassi,’ said Iris.

Violet draped a piece of mortadella over a hunk of bread. ‘She can call herself whatever she likes.’

‘The family lawyer, Orlando Fiorani, advises us to treat her hospitably until we can investigate her claims,’ said Iris. ‘My old colleague, a retired criminologist, is arriving in a few days from Milan to help us. Rest assured, he will get to the bottom of it all.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said Violet to her mortadella, leaning into the grudge she’d had with Iris since they were girls, ‘the old colleague from Milan riding in on a white Vespa.’

To her dinner plate, Iris said, ‘Rinaldo Fumigalli, you will find, is unparalleled. A true gentleman and an expert in his field. Believe me, he wouldn’t be caught dead on a Vespa. He drives a Moroccan-blue Alfa with kidskin motoring gloves.’

This sounded pretentious, even to my academic ear, and I knew Violet would rush to the net. ‘Perhaps,’ Violet said to me confidentially, ‘you should tell your aunt to marry this fop. Though she should probably ask for a physician’s exam first.’

Iris had married a series of tall, barrel-chested A-type Italians with chestnut hair and enormous wristwatches and vulnerable internal organs. Two died of heart attacks, the third of liver cirrhosis, all before the age of sixty-five.

Violet continued, ‘The husbands die on her like large-breed dogs. At a certain point, it’s a problem of the choosing, not just the pedigree.’

‘At least,’ said Iris, turning to me, ‘I didn’t marry the first fertiliser salesman to wander across the footbridge.’

This clearly stung Violet, but she took a sip of prosecco and let a brief silence take hold. I knew from my mother that Violet and Rose had both married young, settling on industrious older men from nearby towns to help the Serafino household stay afloat after Aldo disappeared. There was a photograph in my grandmother’s apartment of an eighteen-year-old Violet sitting sidesaddle on a donkey, being led across the footbridge by her new husband, a stout, curly-headed man in his thirties. In the photo, Violet has a carpetbag slung over one shoulder and she’s staring out from under an enormous sun hat with the expression of someone carrying out a penance.

Rose—wedged like Switzerland between two warring nations—told Donata to go ahead and bring out the primo course whenever she was ready. Milo removed his asbestos gloves, his fire snapping in the hearth, and followed after her. Rose turned to me, arched those blue-pencilled eyebrows, and asked how Susan was getting on at Oxford.

‘She likes it,’ I said. ‘She’s found her little tribe of friends. A brilliant Miltonist in the making, a Rhodes scholar who wants to cure cancer … She lives in a college called Lady Margaret Hall, which has some beautiful gardens.’

‘Reclaiming her British roots,’ said Violet. ‘Before Australia, our mother’s family tree branches back to East Anglia on the paternal side.’

‘Norwich, in fact,’ added Iris.

‘Remind me what she is studying,’ said Rose.

‘Economics,’ I said. ‘She’s currently studying how people make decisions when faced with ambiguity.’

‘How marvellous,’ said Violet. ‘Whatever does it mean?’

‘She studies the relationship between reward and risk in economic decision-making, especially as it varies by age and culture and gender.’

They all looked at me, nodding politely but without interest. Donata arrived with little bowls of risotto topped with shavings of truffle and Parmigiano-Reggiano and I nudged the conversation elsewhere. ‘What was this room used for when you were all growing up?’

Iris craned up at the barrel-vaulted ceiling, chewing into a memory. ‘Before the war, it was used just for storing wines and cheeses. Mother didn’t like the taxidermy so she banished all the dead animals down here. Your grandfather wanted them in the billiard room upstairs, because he thought that’s where aristocrats would have kept them. They were terrifying to us as children. I used to come down here to feed the lynx so that he wouldn’t rip my throat out in the night.’

‘Then,’ said Rose, ‘this is where the children slept during the war, starting in February of 1943. I remember because it was my birthday month and we had a little party down here.’

‘You all slept down here?’ I asked.

‘No, no,’ said Violet, running the tines of her fork through the steaming risotto, ‘the refugee children.’

I looked at Rose, waiting for an explanation.

She said, ‘The children who came to us from Turin and Milan. Mother had to make an extra birthday cake to feed them all. She had to make it with chestnut flour because of the rationing.’

‘And if we are to believe Elisa Tomassi,’ said Iris, ‘her mother was one of those children.’

My mother had been eight in 1943, so surely this family lore should have filtered down to me from her, or from my aunts or grandmother during my interviews in Valetto for my book. They would have known that refugee children sleeping in the villa’s cave-like cellar when the Allies began bombing Italian cities near the end of World War II might have been of interest to a professional historian. I felt the need to downplay my shock at this revelation because I knew my incredulity would stifle the flow of information. If you wanted to get something out of a Serafino sister, including my own mother, you had to appeal to her British sense of indirection and pretend you were already in the know, that you were merely asking for confirmation. And so I met the glaucous-yellow gaze of the lynx and imagined that I was trying to coax a wild animal into a clearing. Then I tried to imitate a reasonable person eating a bowl of risotto. ‘Remind me,’ I said, ‘how long did the children stay?’

Violet turned to Rose. ‘More than a year, if I’m not mistaken, even after Father left in the spring of ’44. Is that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Rose. ‘They brought the children from the north in two cars and drove through the night. They carried the younger ones across the footbridge, a few at a time. Ten of them, mostly girls, brought inside while they were still sleeping.’

‘How old were they?’ I asked.

‘Mostly four and five,’ said Rose. ‘The oldest girl was seven when they arrived.’

‘The big one was Elisa Tomassi’s mother,’ said Iris. ‘Again, allegedly.’

Rose continued: ‘They arrived with a nurse, who told us many of their houses had been levelled in the bombing raids up north. I remember coming down here and seeing our mother bathing them with a warm washcloth. She sang to them, fed them soup, but they still cried a lot.’

‘The crying was terrible,’ said Violet.

‘Yes,’ said Iris, ‘human emotion is a terrible thing, especially among war orphans.’

‘Remind your sister,’ Violet told Rose, ‘that they weren’t all orphans. She might not remember since her nose was always in a book. Some of them had parents working in the factories and warehouses up north, but their mothers wanted them as far away from the bombing as possible. They sent letters and we would read them aloud to the little ones.’

I heard our silverware dinning against the china plates, amplified under the barrelled ceiling. I saw the four of us sitting twenty feet below ground, chambered in the volcanic rock of the town’s pedestal. Family histories are porous, I thought, and full of seismic gaps. Without any emotion, I said, ‘And they stayed down here so no one would see them?’

Now Iris took control, leaning into her years at the lectern. ‘You will remember that there were a quarter of a million Germans in this country during the lead-up to Mussolini’s fall. We all thought the American flying fortresses were going to drop bombs wherever they pleased. So the children were hidden away, kept secret, in case word got out to the fascist militias or the Germans. We didn’t want to be punished as Allied sympathisers.’

‘Also,’ said Rose, ‘a lot of these children had been sleeping in tunnels up north, below the city streets, so Mother thought it would be a good idea to give them a sense of security. Sometimes, she would lead them out into the gardens at night, if the moon was full, and I remember seeing them standing at the edge of the terraces, lined up like little birds planning a flight over the river valley, their blankets draped around their shoulders like wings …’

In a faraway voice, Rose said, ‘I wonder what happened to them all.’

‘I remember tiny Nicoletta,’ Violet said between mouthfuls, ‘the deaf mute with the terrible fainting spells … I don’t remember much about the other girls.’

‘I remember Alessia very well,’ said Rose. ‘She was our mother’s little kitchen helper and we were all jealous of her. She stayed on after the others left.’

‘No, no, I can’t quite picture her,’ said Violet.

‘She lived with us for at least two years,’ said Rose. ‘She and your mother, Hugh, were the best of friends. Inseparable.’

‘They were?’ I’d never known my mother to have a close friendship, so the thought of her befriending this refugee girl from the north was touching.

Violet took the last bite of her risotto and set her fork against the rim of her bowl. ‘There must be cheerier topics.’ She dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, careful of her lipstick. ‘Hugh, are you ready for Donata’s famous cinghiale?’

It was wild boar hunting season, when the cinghiali gorged themselves on truffles, and teams of dogs and men pursued them through the Umbrian countryside. I had eaten Donata’s wild boar many times over the years; it was marinated in red wine and herbs overnight and then stewed with tomatoes, lard, olive oil and spices. I said that I was indeed ready for the wild boar, but for the rest of the meal my mind went to this omission from my family’s history, to these children bundled through the night. Then I thought about the Etruscans settling this seismically doomed hilltop to get away from malaria, pictured them digging this trench, perhaps as a burial site, not knowing that it would become a hiding place for war refugees a few thousand years later. We want history to be a unified narrative, a causal, linear plot that cantilevers across the centuries, but I’ve always pictured it like the filigree of a wrought-iron gate, our unaccountable lives twisting and swooping against a few vertical lines.