‘Haven’t heard yet. It would ease things if they did. How about you?’
You were as busy as ever. There were the complaint procedures you needed to reorganize. You were putting the finishing touches to a consultation document about the matter, and would have it done that evening. Back over the river, people were climbing in and out of boats. On the far side, in the distance, under Salt’s statue protruding from the trees, the cricket match continued, and a sudden burst of clapping and cheering let on that an innings had come to an end. Nearer, circles of friends were settling themselves on the grass, playing games of catch with family and offspring, chatting together, eating picnic food. Further removed, there were couples lying intertwined.
The two girls dressed in what looked like their national costumes had also settled themselves in the grass and were throwing the ball for their toddler to chase. A larger group, gathered in a ring nearby, fell into talk with the two maroon girls. Perhaps these two were from the Trentino or Ticino, the areas south of the Alps that we travelled through to reach Italy, and then managed to get home across all those years before. Perhaps they would be speaking in faintly imperfect syntax about the boy’s age, where it was they came from, the Alto Adige perhaps, how long they were planning to be in Yorkshire, when they expected to go back home.
The tea had arrived. Jean leaned forward, being mother. You were helping yourself to a piece of scone with jam and cream, taking a large bite and, rocking back on your chair in the sunlit afternoon, allowing your eyes for a moment to close. Yes, you were right. You were right enough again. It was time to let it go.
CHAPTER 19
Visiting Milan in recent years, riding on the airport bus from Linate, it’s been getting more and more difficult to catch even a glimpse of the city that we came to for that trial. There might still be the odd policeman armed with a short-barrelled automatic standing guard outside a bank. The bus might still be shaking over uneven road surfaces or getting stuck in traffic beside a grimy apartment block’s exterior. Yet, waiting for the bus to move, I would see mothers dropping in and out of shops with pushchairs, or men deep in animated conversations by the doors of bars. I would see the usual sights and sounds of a busy metropolis. There, once more, were the broad avenues with tramways running under trees down their centres, a few crisp leaves still gusting about months after autumn was over, the avenues and piazzas appearing no more threatening than an average London street—and rather less so, if anything, than some of those around about King’s Cross.
True, you can still see the occasional hate-daubed parapet, or waste-ground littered with abandoned cars; but the porno cinemas have long since given way to video shops, and the spectrum of political slogans from the hammers and sickles to rashes of reverse swastikas breaking out everywhere have been multiply painted over, or covered up by spray-gun graffiti art like the stuff on railway coaches everywhere. Now the underground system, at least beyond the central station, is clean and efficient, with escalators that start to move as you approach them. Strolling around the surprisingly compact central streets, it’s almost impossible to see what was so threatening back then in the appearance of this city’s inhabitants. Milan’s the centre of fashion, of course, and people do dress to make an impact. Yet now they appeared, for the most part, to be calmly going about their business—calling ‘Buon lavoro’ to each other as they set off in their different directions.
Climbing the steps of the Metropolitana a few weeks back now, I resurfaced once more into the middle of Piazza Duomo right opposite the main façade of its famous white stone Porcupine. It was a bright sunny day just before Easter, the sort of day that tells you not to take life too personally, and one that required the sunglasses slipped into an inside pocket on leaving my hotel. Polishing their lenses with a handkerchief, I headed straight towards the statues on the shining cathedral’s bronze doors.
There I found the emblematic slumped gypsy with a sick-looking child-in-arms begging by the entrance. Familiarity with the scene across the square allowed plenty of time. I took a few coins from a pocket and stooped down to drop them into her basket. At that moment, a couple of German women in late middle age came out through the sprung cathedral door, revealing how dark it was inside. A glimpse of that darkness visible, the flickering patterns of sun and shade on the flagstones of the Piazza Duomo, accompanied by the musty smell of old incense mixing with their rather stronger perfume, all seemed to say how much better it would be to remain outside.
Yes, half an hour early, on a day like today, everything said there was really no need to go straining my eyes again to make out the works of art in the shadowy side chapels of its five different naves. This would be, after all, the last afternoon of a flying visit to put in one final bit of spadework on my (probably) forthcoming monograph, Genre Painters of Nineteenth-Century Italy. The book’s practically written—and, so long as the last of the footnotes can be nailed and all the transparencies for illustrations tracked down, it might even be got out before the cut-off point for the next round of government research assessment. Our head of department has been dropping dark hints lately about the width of my bibliography, and that long-meditated, much revised book had anyway stayed a skeleton in the cupboard for far too long. What’s more, I had an added reason now for the occasional research trip to Italy.
A year or so back, growing restive in the dog-eat-dog environment of London’s advertising industry, my sister had suddenly found herself falling in love with an Italian entrepreneur and, on what seemed an impulse but proved a lucky break, emigrated to Lombardy. She soon mastered the language and on the back of her London experience was engineered a job by her fiancé as an accounts manager with a Milanese agency. So, given my interests, during vacations or on bits of study leave, I could easily be tempted to fly off and pay her a visit. And that’s how I came to be waiting for my sister to escape from the office for a leisurely lunch one spring day almost a quarter of a century after first setting eyes on Milan.
At one of the piazza cafés a waiter immediately loomed over my chosen table. Not bothering with the menu’s range of choices, I ordered a cappuccino and a small San Pellegrino. There were still twenty-five minutes to kill, or more should Christine be unable to get away. The coffee wouldn’t last long; but the bottle of water ought to keep the waiter off my back a while. The order quickly arrived. Sipping at the warm coffee, with the sudden onset of a familiar sinking feeling, I realized I’d left the hotel without so much as a magazine to read. So, in the shadow of the sun umbrella, with nothing else for it but to sit and wait, I let my thoughts go drifting back over the years.
Not long after she first became involved with her businessman fiancé, I spent an evening with them out in the suburbs of Milan. That must have been the first time I’d passed any length of time in the city since our ‘processo per stupro’, as I learned it hadn’t been. No, it had been violenza privata all along. The flat my sister occupied while she and Giovanni waited to marry was comfortably furnished, with every amenity, and the meal her husband-to-be prepared was delicious, particularly the osso bucco, a Milanese speciality, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine why they were eager for her to move.
Cinisello Balsamo was a raw development of high-rise blocks on the outskirts of the city. It had been constructed to house southern immigrant workers. The area was a Kingdom of the Two Sicilies at the end of an autobus line from the station, buried in the heart of Lombardy. As we walked along the street towards her flat, the old women’s eyes tracked us eerily. Nor was it difficult to associate that place and those eyes with the people’s looks at the Agip petrol station or at the trial, and, indeed, with Cesare Moretti himself. Out of her brief residence in that part of the city, I started to imagine a history for your violator’s blank smile: a southerner, he might have migrated to the north in search of employment and was living with all his family in some such vast district of poor apartment blocks, no love lost between them, under the shadow of who knows wh
at frustrations and resentments.
And I could certainly remember wondering out loud as we were walking down towards the River Itchen by way of the water meadows whether he might have been a family man. Speculating like that naturally led to the question of what had happened to him, whether he got a long sentence or not, how it had affected his life, the lives of his family. It must have been a Sunday in early autumn, because we were out on one of our habitual afternoon strolls to St Cross. We’ll have taken the usual route through cathedral close, down College Street, past No. 8 where Jane Austen died, over the stream at the little footbridge, then out of town along the towpath and into still fresh-looking countryside.
Yet even so much as mentioning Cesare Moretti or his imagined children that day had, at first, seemed like another big mistake. Your face lost its animation. Yes, you’d insisted on going back to Milan for the trial, but hadn’t wanted to remain for the verdict. That would have felt, you said, like taking judicial revenge; of course it was also your way of coping with the whole business. You would do precisely what you believed was right, not concern yourself at all with what its consequences might be, for better or worse. Still, though firmly established now in one of the caring professions, you weren’t going to have me milking sympathy for the family of your aggressor with my bits of remembering and fictional reconstruction.
A light breeze was rustling the leaves on the branches of the oak and ash, the sycamore, and chestnut trees. Scales of ivy and moss patches clung to their trunks and boughs. Down in the river sallows with their small gnats and leafy reflections, the air stood thick with light, and still. Your cheeks flushed to a rosy hue, you were lifting your eyes in the direction of Twyford Down, to that rolling curve hacked into a white chalk cutting through which a stream of trucks, buses, and cars rumbled on towards Southampton and the coast.
‘The fault was mine. The fault was mine,’ I would quote to myself, and for years it seemed as if I were to blame for everything. Yet if what once appeared a precipitous slide of events had never happened, if we’d found things to enjoy in Italy and come back to a different autumn in England, there would have been little that needed forgiveness, little with which to burden myself down the years. A brief affair, that’s what she’d said.
How self-important long-nursed, guilt-like feelings can seem to become. Our trusting innocence, or innocently self-interested calculation, had provided that man with his opportunity. We could have told him that we had money to pay for the lift. He was obviously poor. It was also a stroke of his bad luck to have found us there that September in the rain.
If he did try to defend himself with his idea that the rape was a payment in kind for the lift, then the fact of the gun looks difficult to explain. We had always assumed that he went away from the service station saying he’d return because he had to go and get the pistol. It’s more than possible, though, that living in Milan during those leaden years of the mid-Seventies, he had a gun in the glove compartment anyway. So why, if he went to get the gun on purpose or had one with him, didn’t he use it? Maybe it wasn’t even loaded and he just waved it to get what he wanted. Perhaps he thought we would go back home and he would get away with it anyway. Perhaps he’d even got away with it before. No, we never found out for sure that he didn’t get away with his bit of ‘private violence’.
Over the years, on those occasional research trips to Italy it would have been perfectly possible for me to make inquiries at the Palazzo della Giustizia. As my Italian got better, I could have asked to read a transcript of the trial, as if discovering what happened to Cesare Moretti would definitively close the case for us. There was equally the risk, of course, that finding out how he got away with it, or had been given a light jail term, might start a whole host of unwanted emotions. Frankly, it’s likely that if he didn’t get off scot-free then he received a short sentence. There was no medical evidence of rape having happened. It was just our word against his.
So why was there even a case to answer? Perhaps it was because Mr. Draper sent that letter to Roy Jenkins. If the British Government had made a formal enquiry, then the Italian authorities might have needed to show that justice was appearing to be done. Britain had joined the EEC only two years before. If that was the case, then he might just have been given a serious sentence—so that the British Consul could be officially informed of the outcome. Yet no one ever contacted us about what transpired, and everything else points away from such a conclusion. You were never interviewed by any women police officers. The only woman in the room when I was being cross-examined had been that embarrassed interpreter.
Recently I read in an Italian newspaper how some politician announced that a girl wearing jeans couldn’t, strictly speaking, be raped. She had to have consented. Which probably only went to show that he’d never been obliged to do anything by having a gun pointed at his, or his loved one’s, head. So, despite the opportunities, I had never gone back to find out for sure how the trial had ended. And sitting at that café table in Piazza Duomo, still waiting for my sister to arrive, it didn’t look likely that I ever would either. By the Itchen outside Winchester, all those years before, I’ll have agreed with you that it somehow seemed better not to know, as if it weren’t any of our business.
‘It wasn’t,’ as you said. ‘It was Italy’s.’
Italy. And it wasn’t as if you hadn’t tried, but you simply couldn’t get to like it, nor ever feel at home there. One year I booked a holiday on the Ligurian coast, but for whatever reason we seemed doomed always to relive that first journey through the country. Every day, around lunchtime, we would end up quarrelling about where to go or what to eat. Visiting Portovenere, we managed to get as far as the hillside cemetery, a resting-place above the sea for tourists to pause between the white-domed Christian temple and its mountain commanded by a cavernous fort.
The little seaport’s graveyard was completely deserted. Relieved by its quiet, the walls of the dead lain out in terraces like olive groves, we stopped and caught our breath. Tended jam jars, used as flowerpots, nestled in the dust. Mounted over the names of the dead were tiny faded snapshots. It seemed as if the family albums had given up their ghosts. Posed in their Sunday best, those old people seemed faintly to smile with the assurance of an everlasting life. There, head framed in its entrance arch, a sepulchral niche railed off with rusted spears, you had paused to be photographed.
Unfortunately, back home in King Alfred Terrace, when we got them developed that one came out as nothing but a blur. The camera must have shaken at the crucial moment. I couldn’t make out your sunburnt forearms, the bruised thighs you had that year from moving furniture around, or your features bitten by mosquitoes. No, you never got used to Italy—which, given my research interests, was to prove a problem. So, in the end, the only practical solution was for me to make brief visits to the galleries and archives on my own. I would stay in cheap hotels or be put up by the odd expatriate scholar I happened to meet through my work. It was while away on just such a trip, the one to see the Pisanellos in Verona, when Alice’s Christmas card with the phone number mysteriously disappeared.
But why, today of all days, why torture myself with those memories? For years I thought that giving you most of the holiday savings to change into traveller’s cheques made out in your name was the crucial mistake, the thing that causally linked my infidelity, if that’s the right word for it, with the bag-snatching and our overnight hitchhike home. Now it seemed there was far too much casual happenstance interspersing the sequence of events: the forty-eight hour rail strike, the decision to hitchhike that we made together, and the good luck of that lift in the Alfa. The fault was nothing like mine alone. There was no clear blame for me to take, however bereaved I might feel by that fact. Yet what if I’d simply realized as much all those years ago, and acted upon it immediately? It was as if my exculpation from the lack of blame somehow required the long years it would take.
Then why go on torturing myself? W
hy did I have to be chained to a memory?
It was such a lovely spring morning in the Piazza Duomo, with a dazzle reflected off the cafés’ sun umbrellas. The large paving slabs were variegated with patches of shifting shadow, a bright blue sky flecked with soft white clouds moving rapidly above the grand Vittorio Emanuele arcade and the Palazzo Reale that edged the square.
Though spring is here, I thought, and let the lyrics of the old song play across my thoughts yet one more time.
CHAPTER 20
Remember how we bumped into each other leaving one of those cattle-market discos from the first term at university? Out of our simultaneous apologies there came that flurry of shared views about what a waste of time those bad scenes were, what trashy music they played, and how everyone was only after what they could get. Which is why, understandably enough at that tipping point in our lives, we opted instead to head for the bar and get to know each other better.
By Christmas, others had caught on to the idea that we were an item, as people like to put it now. Your parents and my mum had both had us down to stay. We were already in the habit of escaping from halls for weekends of walks in the Dales or Moors. So when, for the second year, it came time to move out of college, of course the thing to do was find a bed-sit together.
Sharing that tiny flat for the next two years, we fell into the uninterrupted conversation of lovers who were also friends, friends who would talk over everything and everyone as if for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death would tangle up the tapes inside us. That’s how we went about forming our conspiracy of two. It would stand us in good stead through those years of university, what with the mind games people played, the mental cruelty of tutors, or the usual character assassination that competitive types would go in for.
And then there was the star system. Over cups of coffee in a college snack bar, friends of ours would privately grade the people they were paired with for tutorials and seminars. They were the first to accuse me of being a bookworm, of spending my life in the library. But how did they know if they weren’t there too? We have our spies, they’d say.
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