by Alison Love
“Here, let me tie your father’s life jacket.” It was the steward who, the night before, had brought them the tray of pink gin. “If it’s not tight it’ll ride up when you hit the water. Could break your neck.”
The German sailors had stripped naked and were lining up to dive into the sea, fifty feet below. The arc of their bodies was white and graceful as they fell. The water below teemed with men. Some were hanging on to debris from the ship, others were swimming toward the crowded lifeboats. Even as Antonio watched a man was pulled onto one of the rafts, his feet still dangling in the water.
“We’re in a shipping lane,” the steward said. “That’s the good news. It won’t be long before we get picked up. Just try and jump as far from the ship as you can.”
Antonio stared as he realized what the steward meant. “We could wait for another lifeboat—” he began.
“No,” said Peppino, “if we wait we’ll die. Let’s jump. I’ll help you with your father.”
They clambered to the ship’s side. Peppino seized a rope from one of the davits, to help them swing out from the deck. It felt as though they were plummeting from the sky. As they hit the water Enrico’s weight dragged Antonio under. There was oil and salt in his mouth, burning like swallowed fire. Just as he thought his lungs would burst they surfaced, buoyed by their cork life jackets. A wooden bench, floating among the debris, struck Antonio on the shoulder. He seized it, pushing his father toward it.
“Here, Papa, hold on. You’ll be safe if you hold on.”
Antonio encircled his father with both arms, pinning Enrico to the bench. A few yards away he could see Peppino swimming for a life raft; then the ocean swelled, and Peppino disappeared from view. On the deck of the Arandora Star stood a row of men, Italians mostly, staring down at the crowded water. Some were holding suitcases. They had struggled up from the lower decks, too late for the lifeboats, too frightened to jump. The great ship hissed and swayed, its stern dipping obliquely.
“Oh, my son,” said Enrico, “oh, Valentino—”
A wave surged from the heaving ship, knocking Antonio sideways. As he sank he felt his father slide from his grasp. The old man slid away easily, almost willfully, without resisting. Antonio flailed and snatched but his arms closed upon nothing. And then the dark water was over his head, and he was struggling for breath, kicking and fighting his way to the surface. He managed to grab at the wooden bench once more, allowing it to support him. Enrico had vanished beneath the oil-black shimmer of the sea. Antonio tried to call out, to cry, Papa!, but his throat was still burning and the words would not come out.
A dead man floated past, his skewed head bobbing above his life jacket. Antonio gripped the bench. His fingers were numb and slow, as if they belonged to someone else, and he could not get the hang of using them. Perhaps it is for the best, he thought, that Papa mistook me for Valentino. Perhaps it helped him to go in peace. He wondered, quite calmly, how much longer he would be able to hold on. The last thing he heard was a high-pitched whistle like birdsong. He did not recognize it as the sound of men drowning.
News of the sinking of the Arandora Star reached London the following day. By the next morning, it was in all the English papers. Filomena saw the billboards as she was going to Leicester Square, to check on the closed-up kiosk. Her first thought was to go to the police station, and demand to know what had happened to her brother. Then she remembered what Bernard Rodway had said. I would do anything I can to help Antonio. She had only the vaguest notion of what Bernard did but he had struck her as a powerful man. At any rate, she thought, he is wealthy, and where there is wealth there is always a kind of power. I will go and see Mr. Rodway.
Bedford Square, like the rest of London, appeared unclouded, blithely innocent of the risk that, any day now, German ships might appear in the Channel, German planes might appear in the sky. A gaunt young woman in a maid’s uniform opened the door to Filomena. “Yes?” she said unpromisingly.
“I have come to see Mr. Rodway. He is—he was—a friend of my brother’s.” Friend, Filomena knew, was not the right word, and her doubt made her falter. The gaunt young woman pursed her lips, angling the door more sharply.
“Mr. Rodway is out. If you wish to leave your card—”
“Can’t I wait for him?” said Filomena. The maid hesitated. As she did so a pale-faced woman in blue appeared on the stairs.
“Who is it, Avril?”
“A visitor for Mr. Rodway. She says that the master knows her brother…”
The woman’s face changed at once. To Filomena’s surprise she ran down the stairs and grasped both her hands.
“Filomena,” she said, “you must be Filomena.” She drew Filomena indoors, still holding her hands. “Have you heard from Antonio? Is he safe?”
“I do not know,” said Filomena. “I have heard nothing.”
Olivia’s eyes, which were fixed upon Filomena, welled abruptly with tears. For a moment she was unable to speak. Then she said: “Come up to the drawing room, Miss Trombetta. Avril, would you bring us some coffee?”
Filomena gazed about her at the Rodways’ drawing room, with its wrought iron balcony, its silken sofas, the glossy dark piano in the corner. She had never been in so large or so lavish a room before; even the smell of it was expensive, a mixture of wax polish and some kind of spicy perfume, Olivia’s perhaps.
“This is where Antonio used to have his singing lessons,” Olivia said, glancing toward the piano. There was a hunger in her voice that baffled Filomena. “So you have had no word from him?”
Filomena shook her head. “Nothing. I do not even know where they have taken him. Or my father, who is a sick man. And there is the news today, about the sinking of that ship…”
Olivia’s eyes brimmed once again. “We heard the news too. Mr. Rodway—my husband—has gone to find out more. But there is no reason, is there, to believe that Antonio was on the ship?” Reaching out she grasped both Filomena’s hands once more. Her grip was tight and desperate. In that moment Filomena realized that it was not a question of receiving comfort from her brother’s friends; she would have to offer it instead.
“No,” she said, to this curious, beautiful, intensely demanding woman, “no, there is no reason at all to believe it.”
—
Bernard spent the next days bullying and cajoling to find out what had happened upon the Arandora Star. Nobody knew the death toll from the catastrophe, or who exactly had died. Already there were tales of men who had swapped papers to sail, or not sail, upon the doomed ship. The Red Cross tried to get accurate casualty figures but the government claimed that a complete list was impossible.
As the investigation continued two further batches of internees were dispatched to Canada. In Liverpool the SS Dunera was made ready to transport yet more men to Australia. Meanwhile in Ireland and in Scotland bloated oil-streaked bodies washed up on the shingle beaches, one after another. They were gathered up and quietly buried in the nearest cemeteries, their graves unmarked.
After a fortnight Bernard’s chivvying bore fruit. He was grudgingly given sight of the embarkation list for the Arandora Star, which the government was about to lodge in the House of Commons library. In the few moments that he was allowed, Bernard spotted Enrico’s name, and that of another man from the same address, Bruno Montisi. Both were recorded as lost. Of Antonio’s name there was no sign.
Bernard’s first sensation was one of relief. Then he thought of what this information would mean for Filomena. He had been touched by the way she had come to seek his help; it reflected the self he most liked to be, kindly and influential. He had been touched, too, by the sight of his wife holding Filomena’s hands, consoling her. In these last months he had forgotten what tenderness looked like upon Olivia’s face. I will go and tell Filomena what I have discovered, he thought. At least I have some good news for her, as well as bad.
Filomena was sitting in the kitchen in Frith Street, her hands flat upon the table. Beside her lay a sheet of paper, cover
ed in looped untidy handwriting.
“I am afraid there is bad news, Filomena,” said Bernard, standing gravely in the doorway, his hat clasped against his chest. “It is about your father—”
“I know. He is dead. A telegram came this morning.”
“I am sorry, Filomena. He was an old man, I know, but he deserved a peaceful death. That is what any child wishes for their parent. And at least there is hope for your brother. It seems that your neighbor Bruno Montisi sailed on the Arandora Star, and he too is missing, but Antonio was not on the ship. I have seen the embarkation list. His name was not there.”
Filomena grimaced. It was a strange, savage expression; Bernard thought that she dared not express joy, so soon after learning of her father’s death. Then, gently, she laid her hand upon the paper beside her, running her fingertips across it like a blind woman reading Braille.
“He changed places with Bruno,” she said. “They swapped papers so that Antonio could go with our father. Bruno wrote to tell me, he asked one of the camp guards to smuggle out the letter. You are wrong, Mr. Rodway, there is no hope for Antonio. He is lost.”
—
Olivia sat at her dressing table, flouring her swollen eyes with powder. When Bernard had told her the news she had sunk to the sofa, too shocked to make a sound. Bernard did not notice. He was pacing the drawing room, on fire with indignation.
“It is an outrage, we should be ashamed of ourselves. I’m going to a meeting, we’re going to put pressure on the government, we’re going to stop these cursed deportations. At least that will mean Antonio has not died in vain.” He looked at Olivia, white faced, ramrod stiff. “My poor sweet. You were fond of Antonio, weren’t you? Do you remember how he sang at your birthday party? What a gifted young man he was.”
Gently Bernard kissed her hair, and he left the house. After he had gone Olivia sent Avril out to buy meat, tea and butter. She would be a long time, Olivia knew; you had to queue for everything now. Once she was alone, she knelt on the bedroom floor, put her forehead upon the Turkish carpet and howled. She howled like a banshee, like a soul in hell. The noise echoed through the elegant spaces of the house in Bedford Square, primitive, unprecedented.
The sound, at last, of a key in the front door silenced her. It was Avril, returning from her errands. Olivia looked at her wet red face in the mirror. Then she laid both hands against her stomach, to feel their encouraging warmth upon her flesh. And so we live on, she thought, we do not die, we find new ways to survive.
Opening her wardrobe she leafed through her clothes, the expensive silks and satins faintly clammy against her fingertips, until, right at the back, she found the black spangled dress she had worn on the night she met Bernard. It looked shabbier than ever, limp from its long confinement in the dark. For an instant Olivia wavered. Its magic had worked before, but would it succeed this time? I have to try, thought Olivia. What else can I do? She laid the dress upon the bed, its silvered sequins catching the light; then, lifting her head, she began to sketch out the steps of the tango as she awaited her husband’s return.
A cold February wind was gusting through Euston station as Bernard walked along the platform. He was in the dreamily exhilarated state of one who has not had enough sleep for a long, long time.
The blitz had begun in September 1940. Bernard had stepped out of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, where he and Olivia had been watching a performance of Gounod’s Faust, to see the sky blazing sherbet red above the London docks. Since that night his ARP shifts had doubled, and even when he was not on duty Bernard was on the alert, braced for the drone of sirens. He had witnessed horrors, of course—Charles, Dickie’s useful friend from the BBC, had been killed when a bomb exploded outside the corporation’s music library—but all the same there was something insanely thrilling about the blitz. Bernard sensed that nothing in his life to come would equal the drama, the camaraderie, of surviving from day to day upon the very brink of danger.
This morning he was traveling north, on the first leg of his journey to the Isle of Man. He was going there to report on the island’s internment camps to his refugee welfare committee. Since the Arandora Star disaster there had been a shocked change in the government’s policy on internment. Ministers grudgingly recognized that in the pressure of the moment mistakes had been made—deplorable mistakes, the home secretary called them. Even Churchill airily remarked that he thought the danger from the enemy within had been exaggerated. New tribunals were set up to reexamine the cases of those who had been imprisoned, and already ten thousand internees had been released. As for the men who had been deported to Canada and Australia, the government had dispatched a couple of officials to look into their cases. Bernard had had dinner with one of them, Major Julian Layton, an old comrade from his refugee work in the 1930s, shortly before Layton had set sail for Melbourne.
The porter, a bandy-legged man in his sixties, opened the carriage door and hauled Bernard’s suitcase inside.
“Thank you,” said Bernard, reaching into his pocket for a tip. Before leaving for the station he had rung Olivia in Sussex. Her voice on the telephone was breathy and uncertain.
“Are you all right, my darling? Not feeling sick?”
“Bernard, I haven’t felt sick for weeks.” He heard her sigh as she shifted in her chair, trying to find a comfortable position for her unfamiliar bulk. “Did you have a raid last night?”
“No, it was pretty quiet. I don’t suppose it will last, though. Adolf won’t let us off that lightly.” Bernard prodded his leather overnight bag with his toe. “I can’t talk, darling, I’ve got to walk to Euston and catch my train. I just wanted to make sure that you were all right.”
“I’m perfectly all right.” Olivia sighed and shifted once again. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Well, I’ll come and see you as soon as I get back. Take care of yourself and the little one.”
This conversation ran through Bernard’s mind as he heaved his suitcase onto the luggage rack. How like Olivia, he thought tenderly, to become pregnant in the middle of a war. In the past months there had been a shift in Bernard’s marriage. Perhaps it was the fear of invasion, perhaps it was the shock of Antonio’s death, but—quite suddenly, it seemed to Bernard—he and Olivia had rediscovered their passion for one another. More than once he had come home to find her in his study, eyes wide and seductive, and although until that moment he had thought himself too tired to breathe, he found he could not keep his hands from her. My siren, he thought, my mermaid wife. When she told him about the baby he had wanted her to go to Cheshire, to live with his family, but she had insisted on staying in Sussex. Nowhere in the country is safe, she said, and at least in Dickie’s house I feel settled. That has to be best for the child, surely?
The train began to chuff rhythmically away from the platform, with a whiff of burning coal. Bernard settled into his corner seat. In his pocket he had the latest letter he had received from Herr Fischer, who was in Hutchinson Camp, one of the barbed wire enclaves on the Isle of Man. The musician wrote every fortnight or so on the army-issue notepaper they gave to internees, twelve lines spaced wide, no writing across the lines allowed. All his letters asked the same thing: Do you know when I will be released? Well, I have no news on that score, thought Bernard, but surely it will cheer Herr Fischer to see a friendly face. The thought of his own beneficence soothed him, and he allowed the waltzing sway of the carriage to lull him into sleep.
—
A flock of rooks flew across the iron-gray sky, cawing as they landed in the beech trees beyond the orchard. Olivia was standing on the terrace where once, on a sunlit evening, she had drunk juniper-scented Negronis with Uncle Dickie. She was huge and stately in a loose crimson dress, her hair knotted untidily at her neck.
“Filomena! I’ve made some tea.”
Filomena straightened up. All morning she had been working in the garden, breaking the clods of chalky earth with her hoe. The grounds of the house looked very different now. The lawns had been dug
up—Fred the gardener had done it, before he enlisted—and they were divided into neat plots where Filomena was preparing to plant vegetables. This was happening across the country, as the wartime government urged householders to turn their flower beds into allotments.
“How are you feeling today, Mrs. Rodway?” asked Filomena, wiping her earth-smeared hands on her trousers.
“Like a cow,” said Olivia. “Very fat and very stupid. I hope I don’t get my wits back after the baby comes, life is so much easier without them.” She handed Filomena a mug of tea. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Yes, but it’s all right when you’re working. Go indoors, Mrs. Rodway. There’s no sense catching pneumonia.”
Olivia hunched her shoulders, wrapping her long cardigan as best she could over her swollen body. She knew that Filomena was right, but she did not like being on her own in the house. There was something about Filomena’s presence that kept the ghosts at bay.
Filomena took a mouthful of hot weak tea. She could sense Olivia’s longing for company. It dragged upon her as the moon drags upon the sea. You could feed that longing every hour of every day, and still it would not be satisfied.
“Only another hour,” she said gently, “and then it will be lunchtime. Go indoors, Mrs. Rodway, please. I won’t be long.”
—
Filomena had not, in the beginning, wanted to go to Sussex. Soho had always been her home; now, when so much had been snatched from her, she did not want to leave its bustle, its familiar streetscapes. The blitz did not frighten her. In the daze that is bereavement she felt immune to bombs and to fires.
It was Bernard who persuaded her. “I would be most grateful,” he said, a harassed expression on his plump, tired face. “Olivia has set her heart upon staying in my uncle’s house, and I do not like to argue with her in her present condition. We have waited a long time for a child, Filomena. It would put my mind at rest, to know that you were there to take care of her.”