Tell Me No Truths

by Gill Vickery

  ‘Was he really?’ Amber asked. ‘Hiding a British spy?’

  ‘Yes, and when the Black Brigade got here they found other partisans too. There was a terrible fight. Gaetano managed to get the spy away, and Elena and some others too.’

  ‘That was lucky,’ Jade said, wondering who the ‘others’ were.

  ‘It was, though not for Gaetano’s family. They took them away for deportation – his mother, his sister and her husband, and their little daughter – and when Gaetano’s father tried to stop them he was shot dead here, in front of the house.’

  From dozens of TV news reports she hardly noticed any more, Jade suddenly recognised the string of small holes gouged across the face of the farmhouse wall for what they were: bullet holes.

  Teo handed Mrs Baxendall her tea in a china cup before he lounged into the soft leather sofa with his coffee. As Nico leaned forward to pick up his orange juice he caught sight of familiar books lined up on a shelf. ‘You’ve got all the E. J. Holm novels!’

  ‘You know these books?’ Teo asked.

  ‘We’ve got them at home though not as many as these.’ Mrs Baxendall seemed to have several different editions in different languages. ‘My mother’s mad on them, even more than me. She’s exploring Lucca at the moment, chasing up the locations in The Prince Without a Country and tomorrow we’re going to San Gimignano to look for sites in Murder in the Fifteenth Tower.’

  ‘You have read these books also?’ Teo asked incredulously.

  ‘Take no notice, Nico, and tell me what you like about them.’

  ‘Everything, though mainly I want to know what’s going on with the serial killer and why he keeps leaving flowers with his victims.’ Nico grinned. ‘Mum says the books only have one flaw.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘She doesn’t know why Alessandro has to be so tragic all the time.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Mum says it’s because people like being harrowed.’

  Teo was mystified: ‘’arrowed? What is ’arrowed?’

  ‘Tormented,’ Mrs Baxendall said. ‘Tormentati.’

  ‘I think it’s Alessandro’s fate,’ Nico said, ‘to struggle, to do his best to try and bring the truth to light even though it costs him.’

  ‘I think so too,’ Mrs Baxendall said.

  Nico was pleased she understood: Alessandro had seen too much, knew too much about the evil human beings could stoop to. It was his fate to be a tragic hero.

  The abandoned house was neat and clean inside. The huge main room, dusty and cool, had its original old table and benches, and there were more seats around the generous fireplace.

  ‘This is where Gaetano and his family sat on winter evenings and told stories to each other,’ Caterina said.

  And our nonno as well, thought Jade, imagining him as boy, listening open-mouthed while everyone sat around the fire in the flickering darkness with the wind moaning outside. Jade shivered; the people whom Nonno had once sat here with had been killed or taken away to die in a labour camp.

  ‘What sort of stories?’ Amber asked.

  ‘Tales of country life – how the peasants worked and worked without stopping – there were chickens and cows and oxen to look after, and the land. They even made sugar from beets and used the leaves of the mulberry trees to feed silkworms.’

  ‘Did they tell ghost stories?’

  ‘Yes, they did! If we have time I’ll tell you one some day. For now, let me show you round.’

  The rooms off the main hall were empty and desolate except for one with a winding staircase behind its door. ‘Where does this lead to?’ Jade asked.

  ‘The top of the tower,’ Caterina said.

  ‘Whoa!’ Amber raced up the stairs. Jade and Caterina went more cautiously. At the top Jade breathed in the scent of the honeysuckle and wild roses scrambling up the sides of the tower. A strengthening wind lifted her hair like a caress. She was almost happier than she’d ever been in her life. If only Caterina hadn’t said that Nonno was a fascist.

  Mrs Baxendall wanted to plant the viperina as soon as possible. She walked Nico through the garden, down a path leading to a hollow filled with tumbled boulders covered in ancient moss, squeezed past a vast stone head with ferns sprouting from it like wild green hair, and went into a wood.

  ‘Is this all your land?’ Nico asked.

  ‘Father’s and mine. He bought the land as well as the house after the war.’

  ‘The Second World War?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The woodland came to an end on the edge of a small, perfectly circular grove fringed with trees. Garden flowers and wild flowers grew together in the grassy centre. It felt eerily familiar to Nico.

  Mrs Baxendall stopped in front of an oddly shaped shrub, fished a trowel out of her pocket, slit the turf and dropped in the viperina. She tamped down the soil and folded back the grass. ‘Let’s hope it survives.’ She stood up and they walked back. By the time they reached the stone face Mrs Baxendall was far away in the past. ‘In between making the garden and restoring the house, Father set up the farm. It was hard at first, even when I was old enough to help out. Father was never an easy man and the war did him no favours. When he grew too frail for heavy work, I engaged Teo as our estate manager. He’s a treasure.’

  ‘I thought Teo was the gardener.’

  ‘I say that to tease him – he enjoys it. And he does have pollice verde – green thumb in English, green fingers as we’d say. He actually manages our land as well as the oil- and wine-bottling plants. He’s very good at it – don’t let the looks and the charm fool you.’

  ‘Your father, where’s he?’ Nico asked, hoping he was being tactful. Mrs Baxendall’s father had to be ancient – maybe dead or senile as the elderly man at Il Nido was supposed to have been. Though, Nico reminded himself, that was only what the Signora had said. He hadn’t been so sure; he thought the old man had simply been enraged about something and lost it, big time.

  ‘He’s gone off gallivanting with a friend,’ Mrs Baxendall said. She glanced at the sky. ‘A storm’s coming on. I hope he has the sense to come back before it breaks.’

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ Caterina said.

  Jade peered out of a window. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It usually starts like this, with the wind, and the sky darkening. Soon there’ll be a storm. We should go.’

  ‘Can we see the stables first?’

  Caterina shook her head. ‘We need to get back – we can return another time, if you’d like to.’

  ‘Oh, yes please,’ Jade said.

  They closed up the house and went out to the car just as the first sizzle of lightning and a huge bang of thunder collided overhead. Amber dived into the back seat.

  ‘Chicken!’ Jade said getting in the front. A warming sense of satisfaction spread through her as they drove out of the courtyard and down the stony path through the trees. Amber was the brave one, the strong one, except where thunderstorms were concerned. She’d lie on the back seat all the way to the Villa dei Fiori, arms over her head. Only pride would stop her from shrieking. Jade, on the other hand, wasn’t scared at all.

  ‘How long will it last?’ she asked Caterina.

  ‘Oh, for a long time, two or three hours maybe.’

  There was a moan from the back seat. Jade smiled and settled back to watch lightning dart around the purple hills.

  Mrs Baxendall explained her obsession with flowers. ‘As a way of supplementing my income I write about life in Italy. At the moment I’m researching Tuscan flora, which is why I’m busy collecting plants.’

  ‘You have to write for Mrs Bax where you found the viperina,’ Teo said.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Each flower and plant I find,’ Mrs Baxendall said, ‘has its own biography, including where and how it was located. And
whoever discovers it has to write the account.’

  Nico was doubtful; he’d not really discovered the plant, the viperina had simply been flowering next to his foot as he sat on the chapel steps. It was Mrs Baxendall who’d spotted it.

  Teo was looking at Nico sympathetically. ‘You have to do it. She make me write about the cornflower I find when I fall over the gate helping her to run away from the sheep.’

  Teo turned to the old lady. ‘You ’arrow me, you ’arrow him.’

  ‘It’s fine, I want to help,’ Nico said. He liked Mrs Bax and Teo and wanted to keep in touch. He looked at his phone. With a jolt, he registered the time.

  ‘I can’t do it now – I have to get back to my mother.’ He’d forgotten all about Mum. ‘I can write it when I get back to the flat and bring it the day after tomorrow if you like?’

  ‘Then so you shall, caro,’ Mrs Bax agreed. ‘We’re out of the way of buses as you know,’ she said. ‘It might be easiest if I collect you and it’ll be useful for me – I’ve someone I need to meet in Florence. Shall we say at about ten?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mum and the others would be well gone by then, on their way to Torre del Lago to soak up the seaside atmosphere of The Coloratura Assassin.

  Still, he ought to explain the situation at home to Mrs Baxendall and that meant explaining about the twins too. Nico gave an edited version of the truth saying that Jade and Amber were visiting relatives in their grandfather’s home town and he’d meant to join up with them in Borgo Sant’Angelo but couldn’t because he caught the wrong bus.

  ‘Who are these relatives?’ Mrs Baxendall asked.

  Nico thought that was an odd question at the same time as he realised he’d given away information about the twins’ secret. Truthfully, he said, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘So, your parents aren’t aware that you and your friends are roaming around Tuscany on your own?’ Mrs Bax said.

  ‘It’s for the best really, our mothers get worried, especially mine. She thinks the world’s out to get me.’

  ‘What the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. You’re protecting your mother while stretching your wings and flying freely on your own.’

  ‘I suppose.’ It was a generous interpretation; Nico only wanted the stretching wings part. Mum didn’t need any protecting now: she had the muppet James.

  Jade and Amber helped Caterina chop vegetables for lunch. They weren’t used to it. Amber was slicing a courgette into large random lumps. ‘We get our food from the supermarket.’

  ‘In Italy we do things the correct way,’ Caterina said firmly, taking over the courgettes and dicing them neatly.

  Jade couldn’t help laughing as she hacked at a pepper. Her family were all for short cuts and ready meals and chips and kebabs. ‘Nonno had an allotment,’ she said to show they did actually eat fresh food, sometimes. ‘Mum still goes there.’

  ‘What is “allotment”?’ Caterina asked.

  Jade explained about Nonno’s little plot down by the railway line and how they used to go there together, especially when they were small.

  ‘You were so close to your nonno?’

  Jade nodded. ‘I suppose because we lived in the same house. Dad moved in when he married Mum and they looked after Nonno together.’

  ‘Gaetano is very old and we want him to move here with us but always he says, Not yet. It was good that your family helped each other.’

  ‘It was hard for Mum,’ Jade said.

  ‘We loved Nonno telling us about Italy – how he missed it,’ Amber said, waving her knife. ‘He made us speak Italian to him – then he felt less homesick.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t even try and learn Italian,’ Jade added. ‘Mum said he didn’t have to. It never mattered because Nonno could speak English all right, he just wouldn’t.’

  ‘He definitely forgot his English after his second stroke,’ Amber recalled. ‘He hardly said anything, in any language.’

  ‘That’s true.’ Jade turned to Caterina, trying hard to turn the conversation around and stop Amber getting even more angry. ‘But before it he told us what it was like when he was a boy here. Yesterday we found the pool where he used to swim and it was exactly like he’d said.’ Jade stopped chopping her peppers. ‘It’s weird though – the Villa dei Fiori isn’t like he described it.’

  ‘The outside is,’ Amber said, ‘it’s the inside that’s different.’

  ‘The house changed,’ Caterina said, ‘because things are different from when your nonno was a boy.’

  ‘He’s your nonno too,’ Jade said.

  Caterina nodded. ‘I know, cara.’ She added the vegetables to a sauce simmering on the hob. ‘It was the war and its aftermath that brought changes. My nonno and nonna – Gaetano and Elena – left the old farmhouse with its sad memories and came to live here. After Elena’s parents died, she inherited the house. Gaetano worked hard and paid for the house to be improved. Nonna Elena was so proud of this kitchen!

  ‘When my mamma, Sofia, married, she and my babbo moved in. Soon my little brother and I arrived and it was then that Nonno and Nonna decided to move to a flat in the town.’ Caterina sighed. ‘Things changed again and Nonna Elena died and then my babbo. Now I live here with my husband and our children, and my mamma of course.’

  Caterina leaned forward and stroked Amber’s face gently. ‘Cara, try not to be angry. I’m glad you came to us. My brother and I have talked about Roberto – who, as you said, is our nonno too – we wondered what he was doing in England and whether we would ever meet him. We thought it was too late. And then . . .’ Caterina’s smile blossomed. It was impossible to believe she wasn’t truly glad. ‘. . . you and Jade came with your letter.’

  ‘Have you told Sofia?’ Jade asked.

  ‘I rang Mamma. She is eager to see you if she can though she won’t be back from Milan for a while.’

  Caterina stirred the sauce. ‘We would like to learn more from you about Roberto. We can meet up again soon perhaps?’

  ‘We’re going out with Mum and Dad and some friends tomorrow,’ Jade said. ‘We can try and come the day after, on Friday.’

  ‘We’ll bring pictures and stuff,’ Amber said. ‘Then you’ll believe us that Nonno cared.’

  ‘I do believe you, cara. It must be a terrible misunderstanding.’ Caterina shook her head.

  ‘We’ll sort it,’ Jade said. Caterina was right, someone had told her lies – the question was, who? And why?

  A car horn blared. ‘Time to go,’ Mrs Baxendall said. ‘Teo’s going to run you home if you don’t mind a short detour – and if you can survive his driving.’

  Nico joined Teo in an old 4x4.

  ‘Goodbye, my dears, safe journey.’ Mrs Bax waved and the car crept past a small loggia, then gathered speed and shot through a crenelated gateway guarded by two grumpy-looking stone lions crouched on plinths. At that moment, the sky let go of the rain it had been carrying closer all morning. Torrents of water thrashed at the windows and hail clashed on the roof like handfuls of broken glass. At the end of the road Teo swerved abruptly left and drove fast under trees bending in the wind as if they were trying to grab the car and hurl it over the top of the woods. He drove with macho panache though the road was barely visible except when lightning momentarily lit the way and showed Nico how close they were to the drop down the hillside. He closed his eyes. He didn’t care how Teo got him to Florence; he just wanted to get there in one piece.

  The storm reached its climax: rain veiled the windows and the sounds of wind and thunder filled the house. Jade listened to Caterina begin the grace. She sneaked a glance at Amber. She was frowning again. Nonno always used to say grace. Now no one bothered any more.

  Suddenly the door flew open and threw in a slop of rain and a small explosion of wind that swept in two figures holding waxed jackets over their heads. The taller one shook off his coat and a glitter of r
aindrops flew from his dark hair. He beamed at Caterina. ‘I came as soon as I could.’

  ‘That’s got to be the little brother, Matteo,’ Amber whispered.

  Jade nodded. With those looks it couldn’t be anyone else. ‘Who’s the other?’ she whispered back.

  Jade began to say, ‘No idea,’ then stopped, eyes wide in amazement as the figure shucked off its coat and ran a hand through its spiky wet hair.

  ‘Nico!’ she said, ‘what are you doing here?’

  Gaetano knew from the look on Roberto’s face that his hopes had been shattered and the rejoicing in the farmhouse was almost more than he could bear.

  ‘The war will soon be over,’ Tecla sang, twirling round with her little daughter laughing in her arms while her husband beat out a drum roll of victory on the table. Even Babbo was smiling as he chewed on his half-smoked cigarette and twiddled with the dial on the radio repeating the astonishing news: the Duce had been overthrown.

  Mamma put her hand gently on Roberto’s shoulder. ‘You should be glad. Did you want me to lose both my sons in a senseless war?’

  ‘No.’ Roberto shook his head. ‘I’ll go for a walk and think for a while.’

  Mamma nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. Go into town and see if you can find any rice for sale.’ She gave Roberto money. He smiled faintly and left. Gaetano noticed him pause at the door and glance back into the room, his face dark with anger.

  Gaetano snatched up his jacket and followed his foster brother. ‘Wait!’ Roberto was running down the track. Gaetano caught up with him.

  ‘Leave me alone!’

  ‘Not when you’re in this mood.’

  ‘How do you expect me to be? I’m sickened by how happy you all are. The father of our nation has been betrayed by the king and that puppet Badoglio and none of you care!’ Roberto turned his back on Gaetano and refused to talk all the way into town. It was even worse for him there: red flags were flying everywhere, people danced in the streets and the local band was busy playing in celebration. Gaetano tried to distract him. ‘Let’s look for that rice.’