Rare Traits (The Rare Traits Trilogy Book I)

by David George Clarke

Chapter 25 : 1905-1950s

  John watched Sally turn on her toes and walk out of the gallery. Moretti again. Was it a coincidence or was Ms Moreton connected to the other young and awkwardly inquisitive visitors to the gallery?

  Moretti. As he stood there watching her walk up the sunlit street, his thoughts tumbled back to 1940. Images of the Blitz in London streamed across his mind in rapid succession, images of searchlight beams exploring the skies; of the flashing of exploding bombs; of an artist’s pad filling urgently with graphic scenes of destruction and death; of desperate hands with bleeding knuckles tearing at rubble. He put his hands to his ears to block out the memory of the hideous sounds of the booms and whooshes as the bombs exploded; of the droning of the engines of the bombers; of the gasps and screams of frightened and injured people. He turned to look at the landscapes in his gallery. Francesco Moretti. He thought of Catherine. He could see her beautiful, young face laughing at something he’d said and he thought of the time before Moretti, the time when he was Stefano Baldini.

  As Stefano Baldini, living in Virginia in the United States, he had been frustrated and angered by the developments in Europe throughout the 1930s. The rise of fascism in Germany and Italy seemed to him far worse than any of the various extreme political movements that he had witnessed in Europe during the past five hundred years, although the desire to wield iron control over the population was nothing new. His fears had been brought to a head in September 1936 when his son Dominic, a headstrong and idealistic twenty-one-year-old, had decided to sail for Spain and fight as part of the International Brigade on the side of the Republicans. In his first battle, the defence of Madrid in November 1936, Dominic had been killed when a mortar bomb exploded near him.

  Stefano and his wife, Catherine, whom he’d married in 1913, had been shattered. Dominic was their only child and the light of their lives.

  Catherine came from old money in conservative Virginia, but to her father’s constant frustration, she had displayed few of her family’s republican ways as she was growing up. She was her own person, independently minded, and although inevitably moulded by the privileged upbringing her family’s wealth had given her, she would not be dictated to about her future.

  When she’d appeared at her family’s palatial home in 1910 at the age of twenty with the youthful artist Stefano Baldini, her art tutor from the academy from which she’d recently graduated, the family was immediately suspicious. They had been pleased when Catherine wrote to say she wanted to bring home the tutor about whom they’d heard so much, but they were unprepared for the handsome young man who arrived with her, and to whom Catherine was clearly strongly attracted. A little delving turned her mother’s suspicions into horror. The man was a total unknown, extremely vague about his background and origins and had no visible means of support besides selling his paintings and teaching art. At twenty-nine years of age, he was also rather older than most of the men Catherine’s mother had in mind for her.

  None of this mattered to Catherine. She was in love and although she hadn’t even discussed it with Stefano, she was determined that he was the man she would marry.

  They had met at the Eleanor Wray Academy for Young Ladies in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Catherine had been sent by her parents to finish her education. The two-year course at this academy for the daughters of the wealthy was aimed at fine-tuning them socially into interesting and informed hostesses, compliant and responsible wives and, eventually, good mothers.

  Stefano had been the tutor for classes in art and art appreciation since he arrived from San Francisco in 1907 where he had spent two years teaching in a private art college. Those two years had been a time of frustration and worry while he waited in vain for news of Lei-li. He had kept in close contact with Fiona Trevelyan in Hong Kong, but neither she nor Lau Wing-shing in China discovered anything. Then, over a period of two months, Stefano’s links with Hong Kong crumbled to dust. First he received a letter from Lau Wong-shing’s contact that Lau had been killed somewhere in the north of China. The circumstances were vague, but it was possible the Tongs were involved. The second shattering blow was that the risks of dealing with legions of infectious patients in the hospitals that had now become her life had caught up with Fiona. She contracted cholera and despite the best efforts of her doctors, she died in early 1907.

  On receiving this final blow, Stefano had to get away. He didn’t feel much for San Francisco and there was no reason to stay. When his principal said she would give him a good reference for a post in Virginia she’d heard of, he thanked her profusely and headed east.

  He had been teaching at the academy for a year when Catherine started her course in the autumn of 1908. They were attracted to each other immediately. Catherine reminded Stefano strongly of Beth, while for Catherine, Stefano was just completely different from any man she’d ever met. However, she understood that it would be unacceptable for her to have a relationship with a tutor: if anything were suspected, he would be sacked in disgrace, while she might be expelled. So she bided her time, getting to know him slowly, watching him carefully for signs that he might be attracted to her.

  Once her two-year course was finished and she had graduated with honours, Catherine decided it was time to reel in her Mr Baldini. She’d noticed he often appeared distracted, his mind elsewhere, and, more worryingly, he often looked desperately sad. Whatever the cause, she wanted to share it; to help him with the grief that put the sadness in his eyes.

  When her parents announced they were throwing a party in her honour to celebrate her graduation, Catherine made her move. She invited Stefano to the party and to stay on after as a house guest.

  The party passed in a whirl of colour and sound. Stefano put aside his worries, revelling in the pleasure of sharing almost every dance with his enchanting ex-student, while for her part, Catherine watched him carefully, thrilled as she saw him relaxing more and more as the evening progressed, his eyes only for her.

  Despite dancing into the night, the following morning they were up early to ride the estate and surrounding countryside on two of the family’s stable of thoroughbreds. Catherine was surprised to find Stefano was an expert horseman and for two hours she put him through his paces, unable to shake him off as they galloped the hills and valleys of the Virginia countryside.

  Breathless and exhilarated, they stopped by a stream to rest the horses, falling almost immediately into one another’s arms and finally admitting their true feelings for each other.

  “Well, Signor Baldini?” said Catherine. She had kicked off her riding boots and was splashing in the stream as he held her hand.

  He pulled her round into his direction. “Well what, Miss Fletcher?”

  “I want to know your story, mister.”

  “My story?”

  “You have a past, a history, don’t deny it. I want to hear it, to become part of it.”

  He smiled. “Then we’d better sit down; it takes a little telling.”

 

  She was shocked, totally unprepared, but the more he explained his art and the more details of his life he recounted, the more she was persuaded. The real turning point was the story of Lei-li. When later, at the house, he showed her the letter he’d received about Lau Wong-shing, she was convinced. Any final lingering doubts were dispelled completely when he showed her Fiona’s letters.

  Convincing Catherine’s parents that marrying an unknown artist, the son of poor immigrants, was a different challenge.

  “I’m not sure about your father, Catherine. I don’t think I’m exactly the sort of upright establishment figure he had in mind for his beloved daughter. Not really from the right stock, you know,” he added, mimicking her father’s Virginian tones.

  “Oh, under all that bluster, he’s a pussy cat,” she laughed. “I can get anything from him if I approach it properly. I have a plan to win them both over, before we announce anything about our relationship.”

  The plan was simple and foolproof. Stefano was commissioned
to paint a series of family portraits. Catherine’s father, Conrad Fletcher, declared them masterpieces, while her mother wept for joy. Catherine hung on to Stefano’s arm ecstatically, overjoyed at the outcome of what she regarded as her coup.

  They were married in the spring of 1913. They had hoped to go to Europe for their honeymoon – Stefano dearly wanted to show Catherine the various cities in Italy where he’d worked and some of the paintings he’d produced over the centuries. But the gathering war clouds in Europe prevented the trip and Catherine had to be content studying as many art books as she could get her hands on.

  During their wedding ceremony, Catherine looked mischievously at Stefano and whispered in his ear. “Well, Mister di Stefano - Baldini - Crispi - whatever your name is, I can’t wait to find out how the average four hundred and eighty-six-year-old performs. But does this young twenty-three-year-old maiden need to be very gentle with her old, old man?”

  “You can be as rough as you like,” he whispered back, pinching her discreetly. She squealed in delight.

  Two years after they were married, Dominic was born. When he was killed, Catherine’s only solace was that neither of her parents had lived to see it happen.

  Dominic’s death left both Stefano and Catherine devastated. They shut themselves away in their house and made it clear to friends that they wanted to see no one until they could come to terms with their grief. It was during this time that Catherine realised that it would not be long before Stefano would have to address the problem of his apparent age: with a few days’ stubble on his face, the black of his beard was very strong, while his moustache and goatee, which he had worn for some years and had been reluctantly colouring, was white on the tips of its hairs but black below.

  “If you let it go any longer, Steffi, the staff are going to notice,” she smiled at him, rubbing his face with her hands.

  “Cathy, I’m sorry. I’ve been so bound up in grief for the last few weeks that I entirely forgot to take care of myself.”

  “It’s my fault, Steffi, I should have noticed.”

  Her face clouded. “But Steffi, what are we going to do? This problem isn’t going to go away. The older you are supposed to be, the harder it’s going to get to convince people that you are the age you say you are.”

  “Cathy, the reality is that I’m going to have to change fairly soon, sometime in the next two or three years. That will mean us having to go away and reinvent ourselves; to take on new identities. Or at least I will. And that will mean my suddenly becoming young again, back to twenty-something.”

  She nodded. “While I just get older. I knew this day was going to come; I guess I’ve been putting it off.”

  She thought for a moment. “You know, we never did make it to Europe. I really want to go to Madrid, for Dom, when it’s safe there again.”

  Her face clouded momentarily at the thought of their son. Then she brightened.

  “After Madrid, we can do a European tour. I can be the rich Yankee widow and you can be my gigolo. Carry my poodle around and entertain me whenever I have the need, which will be often, my young hunk.” She prodded him playfully in the chest.

  “I think I’d rather be your young protégé, the struggling artist you’d rescued from the obscurity of the gutter and given the opportunity to stun the world with his brilliance.”

  “No fear, mister! You’ll be all dark and moody, full of tantrums and disappearing with your teenaged mistresses. It’s poodles for you!”

  “You know, Cathy, Europe’s a good idea. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. The situation in Europe appalls me like it did for Dom. Right-wing thinking is one thing – there’s more than enough of it here in the States – but these fascist bullies are totally unacceptable. They say that there’s going to be a war in Europe, probably between the Brits and the Germans, a repeat of the Great War but with much greater firepower. And this time, it’s the Germans who have the better resources. I can’t imagine a Europe dominated by that madman Hitler; it’s unthinkable. And to think that my homeland of Italy, unified nearly eighty years ago with all that promise, is now throwing in its lot with the Germans. That revolting little dictator Mussolini is evil; I simply cannot understand how anyone can take him seriously.”

  “He has the guns and the muscle, Steffi.”

  “The thing is, Cathy, I’m a European far more than I’m an American. I feel the need to return to help combat this evil.”

  “Oh God no, Steffi. We’ve already lost Dom. I simply couldn’t bear losing you as well. It’s too much to ask.”

  “I’m not talking about going alone, Cathy, nor going to the front line. We could go there together. I could be useful to them. After all, I speak a number of European languages and dialects, even if my vocabulary and phraseology are a little archaic at times.”

  “Steffi, can we think about it? I don’t think I’m quite ready yet. Could you bear to keep on with the colouring of that beard? I’ll help you like I always have. I’d like to hang on to my Stefano for a while longer.”

  They eventually decided to move to London in the spring of 1939. Their friends were appalled, given the deteriorating situation, and tried all manner of ruses for keeping them there, including flooding Stefano with orders enough to keep him busy for ten years. They finally convinced everyone that the trip wasn’t going to be forever, but that they really wanted to be able to get into Spain – and more specifically to Madrid – to visit Dominic’s grave as soon as it was safe to do so. On April 10, in New York, they made their way from the Waldorf-Astoria to their first class cabin on the Queen Mary and set sail for Southampton.

  The magnificent liner fascinated Stefano. The last time he’d been to sea was when he crossed the Pacific from China to San Francisco in 1905. The Queen Mary was an altogether different experience. For the first-class passengers, she was a floating high-class hotel offering every luxury. Stefano watched from the railings in wonder as she cut her way powerfully through the Atlantic swell with grace and authority.

  Although it was officially frowned upon, Stefano often made his way around the entire ship, partly to stretch his legs but mainly to escape the stuffy attitudes of many of the first-class passengers.

  The second day out from New York had dawned with a wild, angry sky and an ocean spoiling for a fight. By midday, the storm was upon them, the ship’s bow pounding into the sea and sending up walls of water onto the forward decks. Stefano had been on the outside deck of the tourist-class area but on the insistence of the stewards, who were making sure everybody was safely inside, he was making his way towards a door on a slippery port side walkway, when above the noise of the waves, he heard a commotion from the bow. A violent struggle had broken out between two groups of drunken men the stewards had somehow overlooked. One had drawn a knife. Stefano looked on as a large man yelling in a strong Irish accent waded into the thick of the group, only to find that the much slighter and younger man holding the knife had lunged at him and buried the blade deep into his stomach. Screaming in pain and surprise, the Irishman grabbed the young man by the hair and flung him across the flooded deck, sending him skidding into the metal support of a side rail. As he hit the rail, a leather wallet slid out of the young man’s jacket pocket and washed along the walkway towards Stefano, who automatically bent to pick it up. Looking up, he was in time to see the youth regain his feet as the Irishman was again upon him. The smaller man ducked and the Irishman’s momentum carried him onto the rail. As the ship’s bow plunged from the highest point of its trajectory, the youth involuntarily stood up again and his head slammed hard into the larger man’s bleeding stomach, propelling the man up and over the rail. One of the man’s desperately flailing hands grasped at and held onto the youth’s collar and the youth was lifted off his feet, disappearing with the Irishman into the foaming, crashing water.

  Seeing their respective friends falling to what was a certain death had immediately rendered the rest of the two groups sober. Three of one group swayed and slipped in stun
ned slow motion to the rail. They were yelling a name impotently into the pounding waters and desperately searching for a sign of the body they knew in their hearts they would never see again.

  “Francesco! Francesco!”

  “Excuse me, sir, did you see what happened?” A steward was tapping Stefano on the shoulder and quietly guiding him back into the safety of the corridor.

  Stefano turned to him, ashen-faced with shock. “Partly, yes.”

  He shook his head to gather his thoughts. “I don’t think either of them had any intention of throwing the other overboard. It just happened.”

  The steward took Stefano’s name and when he realised he was a first-class passenger, raised an eyebrow and pointed out that it would be far better if he remain in the first-class area – you never knew quite what was going to happen here amongst the tourist classes.

  Stefano quickly made his way back to his cabin where he found Catherine reading, oblivious to the rough weather. He poured himself a whisky and sat down with a bump onto the bed.

  Catherine took off her reading glasses and looked up. “Everything all right, Steffi darling? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  He told her what had happened and as he finished, he remembered the leather wallet he’d picked up on the deck. It turned out to be a document pouch containing not only the owner’s American passport but also various other documents, including a British birth certificate. He showed them to Catherine.

  “Francesco Moretti, twenty-eight years old, born in Manchester in 1911,” she read. “Father seems to be Italian, from the name, but his mother’s English — Maureen Jenkins. And there’s a naturalisation paper - his father had British nationality. Look at the photograph in Francesco’s passport, Steffi; he’s not unlike you, allowing for your whiskers and glasses.”

  Stefano nodded. “I guess it’s an ill wind, Cathy, I was going to try to get hold of whatever documents they are currently using in England. Now, I don’t need to. It would appear that I’ve got my new identity.”

  Once they arrived in London, they rented an apartment in Wimbledon. Stefano cut his hair short and shaved off his moustache and beard, the transformation in his appearance dramatic. Two weeks later, reinvented as the twenty-eight-year-old Francesco Moretti, he and his aunt Catherine moved into a more spacious apartment in St. John’s Wood.

  At the Home Office, Francesco was told that he would have to renounce his US citizenship in order to regain his British passport. This he did and by mid-August, two weeks before the outbreak of war, he had a genuine British passport and papers. Reporting to the nearest army recruitment post, he was disappointed to find that the current recruitment was for twenty to twenty-three-year-olds.

  The outbreak of war came and went and life didn’t really seem to change in London, apart from the need to be vigilant about blackouts and carry a gas mask. As autumn moved on into the winter of 1939 and then the spring of 1940, the mood of the population lifted as the threat of immediate invasion appeared to recede. They called it the ‘Phoney War’, and life returned almost to normal.

  The reality of the war hit London and its population a hard and brutal blow with the outbreak of the Blitz on September 7, 1940. With no warning, the Luftwaffe began its long series of daytime and nighttime bombing raids, initially targeting the docks, with the single aim of bringing London, and therefore Britain, to its knees. Initially, the defensive systems were not ready for the onslaught, but within a few days, the number of anti-aircraft guns had been more than doubled, giving Londoners more reassurance that the enemy could be repulsed. Unexpectedly, the main effect was that some of the bombers were scared into dropping their bombs wide of their intended targets, resulting in more civilian casualties and damage to housing outside the docklands area.

  On the afternoon of September 17, Francesco had been at an art supplies shop near Charing Cross Road in central London when the sirens sounded. Both he and the shop owner had little choice but to hurry to the nearest Tube station to take shelter.

  Immediately after the all-clear, Francesco took a taxi back to St. John’s Wood. As he approached his street, he saw a cloud of smoke rising from where only three hours earlier he had left his apartment block standing peacefully in the autumn sun. Catherine had stayed at home writing her regular letters to her brother and sister and their families back in Virginia, letters about her life in London with Stefano that had been increasingly straying into the realms of fiction.

  When the fire was out later that night, it was too dark for the Fire Brigade to continue their search since the use of searchlights was forbidden in the blackout and during the inevitable raid that came as night fell. But Francesco continued manically to search all night, helped by the light of a moon just past full and flashes in the sky from the flares and searchlights hunting for enemy aircraft. He dug with his bare hands until they were raw and bleeding; until he could hardly see through the mist of sweat and tears; until he was pulled away by kind but insistent hands to the shelter of a mobile canteen and an ambulance.

  Catherine’s body was found in the late morning of the following day. In her right hand was a gold fountain pen that Francesco, as Stefano, had bought her for her fortieth birthday. The letters she had written were trapped under her.

  “Was she a relative, sir?” A police constable had taken charge of the scene and was on constant guard against the looters that inevitably crept around, looking for the opportunity of anything they could take and sell.

  “My wife,” Francesco whispered through the grime on his face.

  The constable looked puzzled. Even though her body was covered in dirt, Catherine’s face was hardly marked and it was clear that she was a woman in her early fifties. “Your wife, sir?”

  Through the haze of his mind, Francesco realised his mistake. He tried to speak but nothing came and his head starting spinning. The constable took his arm. “Take your time, sir. Why don’t you sit down here for a minute?”

  Francesco sat and stared at his torn hands. “My wife ... will be devastated. She and my … my aunt were very close.”

  “Your wife wasn’t here then?”

  “No, she’s in the States. She was coming over, but then the bombing started.”

  When a six-storey block collapses after a direct hit by a one-hundred-pound bomb, the contents can reduce to an unexpectedly low and dense pile of rubble. Several other bodies were eventually found, including one of a man who could not be identified. Among the papers found near Catherine was a passport belonging to a Stefano Baldini, aged fifty-nine. Francesco was asked if he knew him and he told the police that Stefano was his uncle, Catherine’s husband. They had been expecting him for several days; he must have turned up that morning after Francesco had gone out. He was asked if he would go to the mortuary to formally identify both bodies. For Catherine, he stood for so long staring at her that the uncomfortable constable who had accompanied him had to cough loudly several times to bring him back from his thoughts. As for the other man, he was so badly disfigured that all Francesco could look at were his hands and two finger rings. The doctor had said the body was of a man in his late fifties and Francesco made a pretence of identifying the rings as Stefano Baldini’s. He arranged for the bodies to be shipped back to the States for burial on the Fletcher estate, sending accompanying letters to Catherine’s brother and sister explaining that he had been a neighbour and that he had got to know them both well during their few months in England. He expressed his sympathies, telling them that he felt their loss very acutely.

  Francesco’s first painting in what was to become a very extensive and famous series documenting the Blitz was of the bleak and ruined block in St. John’s Wood. He had to work mainly from memory since the wreckers needed to make the ruins safe for neighbouring buildings. For the rest of the series, he was sketching frantically as the bombs were falling and the fires blazing, unconcerned for his own safety, not caring if he lived or died, risking his life countless times in the days, months and years follow
ing the bomb that had reduced their apartment building to rubble and taken his beloved Catherine. He would follow up the nights with days working in an almost manic determination, producing one painting after another of London’s darkest hours.

  His paintings were one of the reasons he still found it hard to join up to fight when the age limit was extended: the authorities considered he was doing a valuable job of documentation. He eventually got his wish in 1943 and Private Moretti later saw action in France as part of the D-day landings in June 1944. There he witnessed his fellow soldiers slaughtered all around him, but apart from a very minor flesh wound from a bullet that left a three-inch scar on his left shoulder, he emerged unscathed physically. However, the mental wounds were deeper perhaps than any he had suffered throughout his long life.

  It took him many years to recover from his grief over Catherine’s death. He blamed himself. If he had not insisted on their coming to England only months before the outbreak of war, Catherine would likely have lived comfortably into a ripe old age in rural Virginia. As it was, she had died needlessly and senselessly, a victim like so many others of the anonymous executioners raining their bombs on Britain during those dark war days.

  Although relieved that the war was over, he found he was burned out, unable to paint, and he withdrew from the more outgoing postwar artistic crowd. He moved to the country, eventually taking up his brushes and palette knives again to paint the country houses of the rich, although, despite being highly sought after, his output was far from prolific. Often several months would pass when he produced little, months when he preferred to lose himself walking the highways and byways of rural southern England. He was pleased to renew the strong attraction he’d developed more than a hundred years before for the English and their countryside: the neat fields and hedgerows and picturesque villages undisturbed by grandiose mountain ranges had a beauty all of their own. It was in exploring their nooks and crannies that he eventually found some sort of peace with himself, but the pain lingered for many years.

  PART II

  July 2009