Where My Heart Used to Beat

  I suggested we take them all to dinner at the officers’ club in town.

  “The girls and I were going to go to their uncle’s for dinner,” said Lily. “He has a villa on Capri.”

  A consultation followed, but it was brief. The uncle’s villa could wait. We arranged to pick them up from their pensione at seven and headed back towards Winter and Onions in the café.

  Donald had left his glasses there when we went swimming, and I was hoping to settle beyond doubt that Luisa was “mine” and Magda “his” before he had a chance to put them on again.

  “What do we do about Ms. Prism?” I said, as we trudged up the sand.

  “Who?”

  “The governess. The American chaperone.”

  “Oh, I like her,” said Donald. “She’s my favorite.”

  For a moment I wondered if I had missed a trick. Being older and American and probably not Catholic, might Lily be the best bet? It was too late. I was already thinking beyond this evening.

  By the time Donald and I arrived at the pensione—showered, shaved, and in pressed tropical uniform of khaki shorts with long socks—the three women were waiting outside. They wore cotton dresses and lipstick, and their dried hair was held in place with slides and combs. Donald’s knowledge of cars made him the natural driver. We put Lily up front with him while I sat with the sisters in the back, the wind blowing over the windscreen and through our hair. They squealed as Donald’s driving caused us to slide to and fro across the shiny leather. Magda was next to me and seemed happy about the contact of our thighs as Donald threw the car into the long curves above the bay; Luisa laughed but held tight to a strap on her side. Her cotton dress had a print of red hibiscus flowers.

  The officers’ club was near the middle of town in a crumbling pink palazzo with palm trees in front. We went into a cavernous room with tables and easy chairs beneath a ceiling fan of great age. The house had been requisitioned from a rich family; the wooden bar and shelves had been installed overnight by two REME sergeants. Supplies were erratic, but the cooking, by Italian chefs, was usually of a high standard. We bought American cigarettes and ordered vermouth.

  There were perhaps fifty people there, of whom less than half were British officers. Their guests included Americans, Canadians, French, and Italians, all of whom seemed intent on drinking as much as possible.

  Lily Greenslade had a voice with a hint of the South; it rose and fell with a quizzical melancholy. She wore shoes with an opening at the toe, through which you could see a scarlet nail.

  “Do your people have connections in the United States?” she asked us.

  “My father has done business there, I think,” said Donald.

  “And what is his business?”

  “Tobacco.”

  “Oh, really? I wonder if he knows the Carnforths.”

  “Who?”

  “Edgar and Mae, an old Virginia family. They’re friends of my parents.”

  “I couldn’t say. Perhaps. Is this your first visit to Europe?”

  “Oh no. I came when I was at college. Most of us did. Paris and Rome. Florence and Pisa.”

  “Did you come this far south?”

  “I wanted to, but there wasn’t time. And our guides didn’t recommend it. Edgar Carnforth was at Caporetto in the last war, in the field ambulance. He had a low opinion of the Italians.”

  “But not you?”

  “No, I loved the culture and the people. I jumped at the chance to come here with the Red Cross.”

  “And your husband?”

  “I’m unmarried.” She made it sound like a decision, not an oversight, as she held up a ringless finger. “Unless you could say I’m married to my work.”

  “Indeed,” said Donald. “I’m surprised that a lady like you…”

  I thought it was time to end his stumbling gallantries. “And how do you three know each other?” I said.

  Glancing to the sisters, I finished by looking at Luisa for an answer. Reluctantly, she gave voice: “We all work for the Red Cross. Magda is a nurse in a hospital; I work in the office with Lily. And many other women…”

  She spoke English with an accent but quite naturally. When she had finished speaking, she looked down at her hands before daring to raise her eyes again and engage the rest of us with a smile. There was something about the three-part procedure that made you want to see it again.

  There is a way in which some men appraise women—and for all I know the other way round—in which, while talking and laughing, they are also making rapid calculations. How old is she; how many men has she slept with; what sort of man does she admire; will her belly be flat or round when she takes off her dress; will the flesh at the top of her thighs be firm or puckered; will it be worth it; and if so, how much time am I prepared to invest?

  There was no such silent assessment going on when I spoke to Luisa. I was intent only on watching her eyes, hearing her voice, which spanned an unusual range, from bell-like high notes to the fading contralto when she looked down: “And many other women…” As for the sensual audit, maybe I’d already done that, in an instant on the floating platform in the sea. If so, I was unaware of it. All I knew was that I wanted to hear her speak again.

  Magda was soon included in the conversation, so that by the time a waiter called us to the dining room the formalities had been observed: we were friends. The other diners were making a rowdy noise beneath the old chandeliers. The men wore insignia of rank and identity, but the chatter and the laughter suggested a world where such distinctions didn’t count.

  Wine always seemed scarce, though there were supplies of vermouth, beer, and officers’ whisky. Dinner was a fritto misto with a spoonful of risotto and a salad made of chicory and red lettuce. It was the first time I had eaten fish since leaving England, and it tasted exotic; I couldn’t believe that I had once been able to eat such things at will.

  The drink made everyone talkative. Lily Greenslade told us more about her family, her smart relations, and her early wish to be an actress. She had apparently studied at an actors’ studio in New York.

  “It was the movement that was so difficult. No, not even the movement—more the standing still. But there was a girl there called Ella Somerley, and when she came on stage she just became the part. She barely moved; she didn’t seem to act at all. She was so much better than the rest of us. It was kind of dispiriting.”

  Donald continued to compliment her, going so far as to suggest that it was still not too late for her to have an acting career. I was certain that his own knowledge of the theater was limited to school-certificate Shakespeare and a Feydeau farce for which we had once been given returns in Exeter.

  Magda rescued him by proposing a game in which an orange was passed round the table from beneath one chin to the next, no hands allowed. The first person to drop it was to perform a dare. This was the sort of nonsense that often took place in officers’ clubs at this time of the evening. I thought I saw a moment of alarm in Luisa’s eyes, but, after a glance down at her lap, she rallied with a smile. We had moved from vermouth to beer and were now drinking glasses of Strega with dessert.

  It seemed polite to let Magda organize the game, which she did with gusto, telling Donald to start by passing it to Luisa on his left. This was achieved without much fuss, Donald holding the cigarette away from the table and clinging onto Luisa’s shoulder. It was my turn next.

  As I leaned into Luisa, I felt it was wrong: I shouldn’t be allowed by the rules of some child’s game to intrude on her privacy. At the same time, I knew when my hand touched her shoulder and I inhaled the smell of her neck and hair that I had met some hopeless destiny. I swallowed hard, and my Adam’s apple almost dislodged the fruit. I could feel myself blushing at the impropriety; it was as though it were no longer Luisa’s dignity but my own longings that had been laid bare. Somehow I managed to detach the wretched orange and, with my chin towards my chest, turned to the expectant Magda. Mercifully, the angle of my head meant that I could make no eye c
ontact with anyone.

  Having got rid of the orange, I picked up my napkin from where I had deliberately dropped it on the floor and did some fiddling with a cigarette, tapping it on my case to firm up the tobacco, searching my pockets for a light, so that a good minute had passed by the time I had to meet anyone’s eye. The sisters were looking elsewhere: at an ungainly transfer between Lily and Donald. The orange fell with a thump to the table and Donald was declared the loser.

  The women conferred about what forfeit should be paid. Lily wanted him to eat the orange, peel and all; Luisa suggested he sing a Neapolitan song; Magda wanted him to kiss a Canadian nurse at a table in the corner. I suggested he explain to the entire room, in Italian, the joy of the Hillman Wizard. In the end he was allowed to choose, and he opted for the song.

  The idea, I thought, was that he would stand on his chair like a naughty schoolboy, but before we could stop him, he made off to the far side of the room and seated himself at an upright piano. He struck the opening chords of the Tchaikovsky B-flat-minor piano concerto to gain everyone’s attention and then sang three verses of “Santa Lucia.” I had never heard this song before but was struck by its beauty, even in Donald’s reedy tenor. It had a folk tune that sounded instantly familiar, like a half-remembered lullaby.

  Donald stood up, blinking, as the room applauded. The timing had been lucky: people were ready for entertainment but not drunk enough to be abusive. He played “Shenandoah” and “My Old Man,” favorites from the old smoking concerts in the junior parlor, before returning to our table.

  Others were taking a turn at the piano as we left the club and, with Donald once more at the wheel, we drove off down the coast. Once the singing had begun, it gathered momentum; every tune reminded someone of another one. There was the best part of a Bohème aria from Luisa, sung rather sotto but tunefully against the noise of the engine; an Episcopalian hymn from Lily; and from Magda a song about Genoese fishermen that may have been indecent.

  Back at the pensione, I suggested a late swim, but Lily said it would be too cold. Luisa, as having the lightest footfall, was sent upstairs to find a bottle of something alcoholic that had been spotted in a sideboard. The rest of us waited in the small walled garden that ran down to the sea.

  An hour or so later I found myself sitting on the sand with Luisa, our backs against a tree trunk. We had given the slip to the others.

  The war was at a safe distance.

  After the breakout from Anzio in May, my battalion had marched into Rome, taking the salute from the vain and panicky General Clark, who had been in such a hurry to enter the capital himself that he had allowed an entire German division to escape. Meanwhile, the west coast of Italy, from Salerno to Rome, was in a pitiful state, having been bombed first by the Allies, then by the withdrawing Germans, who were said to have laid mines in many of the seafront buildings of Naples before they were driven out. The fishing fleet had for a long time been confined to port and the minimal food supplies had to be augmented by what could be scrounged or stolen from the occupying armies. The city teemed with informers, pimps, and foreign soldiers with not enough to do. Apart from the sung prayers of the odd religious house there seemed to be no normal life there at all.

  The second front had opened with the landings in Normandy, and it looked as though we were at last beginning to get the upper hand in Europe. Yet there remained months, perhaps years, of fighting ahead. The Germans, in our opinion, were not like the Italians: they would not cut their losses or go meekly; they would rather see their bones ground to powder and drain the last drop of Bavarian blood into the Apennines. And then what sort of world would be left to us?

  There were these questions we knew would take years to answer; on the other hand there was a light-headed sense of having stepped out of battle and into a holiday resort. It was the combination of the two feelings as we sat there in the sand with no sound of guns that made us feel free.

  “How long is your leave?” said Luisa.

  “Two weeks. Then I have to report for a medical. To be passed fit.”

  “And your wound? It is bad?”

  “I think it’s all right. But we won’t talk about it. Have you lost any friends or family?”

  “No. We’ve been lucky. My cousin was wounded. That’s all.”

  “That really is lucky.”

  “Tell me,” said Luisa, “what do you do when they are firing at you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you know you have to fight, to risk your life again?”

  I laughed. “We pray.”

  “All of you?”

  “Yes. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, all of us.”

  “What about the atheists?”

  “There are no atheists in a slit trench.”

  Something about the way we had sneaked off from the others gave us a sense of conspiracy, and we began to talk as though there were already an agreement between us. I can’t remember what we discussed; I don’t think either of us was concentrating. I do remember that we agreed about trivial things—“Yes, I love figs too”; “Of course! Puccini’s arias are the best”; “Yellow is not a good color in a dress”—and so on, as though no one had ever had such thoughts before. The more humdrum the opinion, the more remarkable was our discovery that we shared it. I think we were both embarrassed by how out of step things seemed to be; we wanted to square this stuff away so that our conversation could more accurately reflect a deeper bond.

  Well … we talked of “bonds” and “ties” as though the impetus were towards some sort of merger, but that is the opposite of what I felt. What I loved about Luisa was that not a pore of her skin was mine. Her Ligurian eyes, her rising and falling voice, her small hands as they gestured in the near-darkness, all the events of her childhood and her life, father, mother, sister—all that had made her what she was now, sitting next to me on the sand … Not for a moment had I been there or influenced one detail of it.

  The wonder was not in union; to me the exhilaration was in finding myself alive, heart beating, mind turning, in the shape of another—in this delicate, gesturing girl who was so utterly not me.

  * * *

  THE RED CROSS headquarters was in an old building that overlooked the docks. It had a horseshoe marble staircase and a landing off which opened various grand rooms now filled with desks and filing cabinets. There was the atmosphere of a down-at-heel girls’ boarding school created by the typewriters, the coarse-grained paper, and the hum of low female voices.

  I became a daily visitor, making sure I was welcome by bringing U.S. Army rations from Naples, where on the first night of my leave I had befriended a master sergeant called Stark. Chewing gum, chocolate, and tinned fruit guaranteed me an hour of Luisa’s company, sometimes shared with other girls; what they wanted most was silk stockings, and even here my friend could help.

  I used to wait on a bench outside the large room where Luisa worked; an internal window from the landing allowed me to see when she was gathering her things to come out for lunch. Then we’d usually go and sit on a wall that overlooked the harbor. I could get hold of some white bread, and from Red Cross parcels Luisa was allowed a weekly tin of ham. For several days we shared this unremarkable food and washed it down with beer or bottled water from a café. Our conversations became better informed as we got to know each other, but if ever I moved closer or put my hands on hers, Luisa would look uneasy or find a reason to stand up.

  One day I arrived early. I found a seat in a cloistered gallery on the first floor that overlooked a courtyard. There was a large houndlike dog asleep on a step; it was a pointer cross with lemon and tan markings and the outsize feet of the puppy that has not fully grown. Two or three women came out of a side door and stopped to play with him; one of them was Luisa. She knelt beside the dog, which thumped his tail on the ground. This was not enough for Luisa, who made him stand up while she stroked his long ears and put her face close to his as she talked to him in a torrent of Genoese. The hound began to
nibble at her ears, his nose wrinkling in pleasure.

  With a farewell pat on his back, Luisa stood up and hurried across the courtyard to catch her colleagues, her flat-soled shoes flying over the dusty ground. Intrigued by the little scene, I went down the steps and followed them at a distance. They had gone into what looked like a classroom, though whether the building had once been a school or whether they had simply installed the forms and desks I couldn’t say. Through the window, I could see Luisa, her black hair held back by a red band, standing up and talking to a dozen volunteers. On the blackboard she drew a diagram in chalk: a supply chain or a system of triage, perhaps. Her brow knotted, she rotated her left hand from the wrist as she explained the difficulties. The seminar lasted only a quarter of an hour, and I pulled back behind a pillar as the women came out. I looked at my watch and found there were still a few minutes until one o’clock.

  Feeling a little ashamed of myself, I continued to follow at a distance. Upstairs, outside the main open-plan room, the women separated, and I saw Luisa return to her desk while I took up my usual waiting position on the bench outside. Luisa initiated a telephone call, and I watched as she argued with whatever military bureaucrat was frustrating her. There was some arm waving and some laughter too, before she finally replaced the receiver. A young colleague, a woman I’d never seen before, approached her desk, and Luisa gave an animated account of what had just happened on the telephone. In her outrage and enthusiasm, Luisa gripped the other woman’s wrist. Then she looked up at the clock on the wall, and her hand flew to her mouth. She took out a compact from her bag and checked herself before squeezing her friend’s wrist again and pecking her cheek as she left to come and meet me. I wondered what I needed to do to win that ease and confidence.

  * * *

  IT WAS PAST noon on Pereira’s island when I reached this point, and it was as far as I cared to go.

  “How gallant of you,” he said. “To draw a veil.”

  “There’s nothing over which I need to draw one.”

  “Shall we go and have an aperitif?”