Never such innocence, p.20
Never Such Innocence, page 20
Appalled at herself and her disloyalty, Julia reminded herself that she was married. However high the interest on her debt, she had undertaken to pay it and must pay to the end. David had shown her a self that cried out to something it had recognised in him, but she knew that she had to ignore it all. She understood at last she was falling in love with him, but with that realisation came the knowledge that she must stop herself before she did any more damage.
‘Never mind,’ she told herself energetically. ‘Treat it like a cold: ignore the symptoms and they’ll clear up in time.’
Her letter reached Comfort by the last post on a raw January day, when she was just leaving the house to go to an exhibition sponsored by her own dealer. Comfort stuffed the envelope in her crocodile handbag, straightened her hat and hurried out to find a taxi.
Until he had invited her to the exhibition, Marcus had not told her that he was supporting a small group of refugee artists, mostly from Eastern Europe, but as soon as he did she badgered him to introduce her to them. It had never occurred to her that Julia’s departure for Venice would leave her lonely and she was unprepared for the depression that settled on her as the winter began to bite. The painting DPs promised a diversion at least from her accustomed life of queueing for rations, trying to work in the freezing studio, battling with the consequences of the transport strike, and seeing friends who seemed to be just as miserable as she was herself.
When she reached the little gallery in Chelsea that Marcus considered adequate for the new painters, she looked eagerly at the twenty-four paintings he had hung. Only a few interested her at all, but there was one that seized her imagination. It was a small landscape, desolate and snow-covered, and yet indescribably beautiful.
‘Like it, Comfort?’ Marcus’s slightly nasal drawl woke her out of her silent contemplation and she turned with an eager smile.
‘Very much,’ she said. ‘Whose is it?’
‘Tibor Smith,’ he answered. ‘Come and have a glass of tea and meet him.’
‘Glass of tea?’ said Comfort as they walked to the far end of the room, where a few people were huddling round a paraffin heater. They looked discouraged and almost abject. Comfort, who thought that she had had enough discouragement of her own, decided to back away, but Marcus gripped her wrist and insisted on introducing her.
Later he also insisted on sending her home in a taxi with Tibor Smith as her escort. Comfort insisted that she was quite capable of going on her own, but the Hungarian kissed her hand with such an air and begged to be allowed to go with her in such an attractively accented voice that she smiled on him and let him take her home.
By the time they reached Brunswick Square she liked him enough to invite him in for a cup of ‘English’tea and felt a rare sense of embarrassment as she took him up through the big house to her studio and learned that he and the other five painters were camping together in the three small rooms over Marcus’s second-best gallery.
A week later she offered him the use of Julia’s rooms on the first floor and a space in the studio in which to paint. It was only after he had moved in and she was handing him her ration book so that he could go and do the necessary queueing for her food that she rediscovered Julia’s letter, tucked in a pocket of her bag. While Tibor went off into the bitter cold outside, she huddled over her scanty fire and read of Anthony’s need for her.
When Comfort’s belated reply reached Venice, it gave Julia a welcome distraction and a faint hope that there might soon be an end to Anthony’s deliberately solitary unhappiness. Comfort wrote that she would come to Venice as soon as she could, but that that probably would not be until late February.
I’ve written to Anthony, of course [she ended her letter], and I’m pulling all the wires I can find to get a flight sooner, but it does not look hopeful. I have to go to Paris early in the month to see Bob Storrington, who is making arrangements for a big exhibition of my stuff there and it may be possible to come straight on to Venice. I’ll let you know. Thank you for telling me.
With that Julia had to be content and she settled down in the freezing cold of that most bitter winter to wait out the time until Anthony could be freed of his load of guilt and depression and she could rid herself of her unsuitable affection for his friend.
Chapter Fifteen
The trial of Field Marshal Kesselring opened at ten o’clock on 10 February in the dark-panelled courtroom under the slogan ‘La Legge è Uguale per Tutti’. David and Julia and the other court personnel had been in their appointed seats for an hour and a half before the proceedings began. The important visitors filed in after them, and then the members of the press corps. When they were all settled, the President of the Court, the four colonels who made up the tribunal and the Judge Advocate General appeared, followed at last by the prisoner. Kesselring, impressive and solid-looking with very short silver-grey hair, was unmistakably a very senior Prussian officer.
Watching him, Julia remembered Mark Heathwood’s descriptions of the favourable impression Kesselring had made when he gave evidence at Nuremberg. She was interested to know how his lawyers would conduct his defence since he had made no denials of his actions and ideals during his London interrogation, but the prosecution case would come first.
The prosecutor rose to give the opening address, but before he could begin Kesselring’s chief defence lawyer, Dr Hans Laternser, asked the court to grant an adjournment. He had arrived in Venice from Nuremberg only the previous day after two nights’travel. He had had no time to confer with his client and only twelve hours to study the charges.
After much discussion and with obvious reluctance, the court was adjourned for a week.
The trial was resumed a week later, only to be adjourned once more after the opening proceedings and the prosecution’s opening address, setting out the charges. The Field Marshal was to be tried on two counts: the first, that he had been responsible for the killing of 335 Italians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome and the second that he had incited his troops to act with unnecessary force against the partisans.
On Wednesday 19 February the trial at last began in earnest with the cross-examination of Lieutenant Colonel Scotland. There was a light moment that morning, when the prosecuting lawyer asked his witness a question about the organisation of the German army. Dr Laternser immediately rose to protest that the witness had never been in the German army and therefore could not properly be asked or answer any such questions.
Prosecuting counsel then said quietly to his witness:
‘Colonel Scotland, were you ever in the German army?’
To the astonishment of almost everyone in the court, the answer came in the affirmative. Later, Julia discovered that the German army in question had been in South Africa and that Colonel Scotland’s appointment had ended some years before the Great War.
His evidence was also remarkable for his insistence that Kesselring had exaggerated his own importance as Officer Commanding Troops in Italy, and was therefore not in fact responsible for the atrocities of which he stood accused. It was curious, Julia thought, to hear the chief prosecution witness speaking so forcefully in favour of the defendant.
It was not until the following Monday that the affidavits on which Julia had worked so hard and for so long were presented to the court. It had eventually been decided to limit the statements to accounts of atrocities alleged to have been committed only between June and August 1944, so that they could be tied precisely to Kesselring’s orders.
Very few witnesses had been found who were prepared to come to court to repeat their statements in the flesh, but some did and their words were translated first into English and then into German, causing some confusion as to the precise meaning of what they had actually said. The translations were not the only technical difficulty: there were only two shorthand writers in the court and they were hard pressed to keep up with the proceedings, causing the court to be adjourned more than once so that they could transcribe their notes.
After the affidavits one of Kesselring’s subordinates, a man named Krumhaar, was cross-examined about an operation in which he had had twelve men from the village of Burgo Techino shot because two of his men had been severely wounded by ‘terrorists’during a parade through the town. The bodies of the executed men had been left in the main square for twenty-four hours to serve as a warning to the rest of the inhabitants.
Krumhaar’s examination was completed by Wednesday and on the following day the court was adjourned once again, leaving only one more prosecution witness to take the stand. Julia spent that Thursday very much at a loose end. She was not accustomed to having nothing to do. In London, even if a case were delayed because a witness had not presented himself or the judge was ill, there was always plenty of work waiting for her in chambers. In Venice she had nothing beyond the one case except for learning Italian, teaching English, sightseeing and trying to be patient with, and understand, her increasingly morose husband.
By then she felt that she had seen enough paintings, churches, marble floors and medieval palaces to last her for a long time. She could hardly descend on Giovanna Sassanta’s house without an appointment, and Anthony had made it abundantly clear that he did not want her to cross the threshold of his hospital. Comfort was due to arrive soon, but had not yet specified the day.
Deciding to use up some of the time writing letters, Julia wondered how married women without either little children or work managed to fill their empty hours. For the first time she felt a faint stirring of compassion for her own mother, whose obsession with her appearance, shopping, flirtation and gossip Julia had despised for as long as she could remember. When she had written to Mark Heathwood and to George Wilson, asking whether he had managed to find out whether Raffaella had any chance of getting permission to live in England, Julia pulled a new sheet of writing paper towards her and wrote a chatty, cheerful letter to her mother.
Just before she had finished it, Annunziata came into the salon with a telegram addressed to Julia. Conditioned by the war to expect only bad news from those familiar yellow envelopes, she opened it reluctantly. Comfort had sent it from Paris to say that she would be arriving in Venice in the evening of the following Saturday. The telegram ended with an unnecessarily extravagant extra three words: ‘Missed you vilely’.
When Anthony arrived spent and ill-looking from the hospital later that evening, Julia handed him the thin yellow sheet and was relieved to see a lightening in his dark-grey eyes and a faint smile on his thin lips. He made the effort to say something pleasant to his wife and they drank a glass of wine together for the first time in weeks.
The following morning Julia accompanied David to the gloomy courtroom again with a sense of relief. After the last prosecution witness had given his statement, Kesselring’s defence counsel rose to give his opening address. Julia listened to it with professional interest, expecting the usual Nazi defence of obedience to superior orders. In fact it became clear that a considerable part of the defence was going to be that of justification, that the laws and usages of war permitted reprisals to be taken against hostages.
When the proceedings were adjourned for lunch, Julia collected the notes she had been conscientiously making and pushed them into her briefcase, before looking for David to see whether he wanted to have lunch with her. He seemed to have escaped before she had and so she made her way out of the court alone, trying to decide whether to lunch in the tea room upstairs or to go out to a restaurant.
‘Julia!’ David’s familiar deep voice called out to her as she walked into the hall and she felt herself smiling involuntarily. ‘Julia, come and meet a friend of mine. He and his wife have just arrived here.’
She walked a little reluctantly across the hall to where David was standing beside a thin, dark man in civilian clothes. As she got closer to them Julia thought that she had never seen a man with such brilliant dark eyes or so saturnine and yet handsome a face. He exuded both power and a compelling attraction. Julia wondered who on earth he could be.
‘Suvarov,’ said David, ‘this is Mrs Gillingham, who is here in Venice with her husband. Julia, this is Peter Suvarov, whom I knew during the war.’
‘How do you do?’ said Julia, realising that she was shaking hands with the man who had sent David to fight with the Italian partisans. She tried to remember the little he had said about Suvarov, but all she could think of was that without him neither she nor Anthony would have met David. She often worried about her feelings for David, but the thought that she might never have known him made her feel almost ill.
‘Are you here for the trial?’ she asked Suvarov, trying to stop herself from thinking about those feelings.
‘Not really,’ he answered in an intriguingly accented voice. ‘I’m here on a belated honeymoon. My wife and I are staying at the Danieli, but she’s not been feeling well and urged me to take up the offer of an observer’s seat here.’
‘I do hope it’s nothing serious,’ said Julia politely, thinking that it was rather hard on his wife to spend her honeymoon feeling ill while her husband sat in on a war crimes trial.
‘No, no,’ said Suvarov. ‘She just feels rather under the weather sometimes. David and I were wondering if we could take you out for a spot of lunch. Will you come?’
‘You must have so much to talk about that you can’t possibly want a stranger,’ said Julia. ‘Perhaps another time?’
‘I very much hope so,’ said Suvarov seriously. ‘What about this evening? Perhaps you and your husband would come and dine with us? David is coming and my wife would be so pleased if you would too.’
‘That’s extraordinarily good of you. I’d like to come very much,’ said Julia. ‘I’m afraid that my husband is often caught up at the hospital and so I simply don’t know whether he will be free.’
‘Never mind. We’ll see him if he is and not if he isn’t,’ he said with a relaxed informality that charmed her. ‘Until tonight then, Mrs Gillingham,’ said Suvarov. ‘Well, David, we’d better be off if we’re to be back in time for this afternoon’s session.’
After that the question of Julia’s lunch was settled and she went straight back to the Campo San Maurizio to warn Annunziata that neither she nor David would be in for dinner. Food was far too scarce for Julia to bear the thought of wasting any. Annunziata agreed that Anthony was unlikely to waste time going out to dinner with the others even if he did return in time and promised to cook something quickly for him if he appeared wanting a meal.
‘Annunziata, are you all right?’ asked Julia when the question of dinner was settled, relieved to be able to talk to her at last with reasonable fluency.
‘Yes, signora,’ answered the housekeeper, but the weariness was horribly evident in her voice.
‘Is there no news?’ said Julia with pity in her eyes.
‘No news. They must all be dead,’ she said.
Julia took Annunziata’s hand at once and said with desperate urgency:
‘No, that is not true. When my husband was lost people told me he must be dead, but I would not believe it. And he was not dead. While there is no news, there is hope. Please believe that, Annunziata.’
The woman clung to Julia’s hand and broke down for the first time, weeping and pouring out a torrent of Italian that Julia was incapable of translating for herself. She just waited until the storm was over, when she pulled a clean handkerchief from her sleeve and handed it to Annunziata, remembering with a tiny moment of irrepressible pleasure the time when David had done the same for her.
‘You are kind, Signora Giulia,’ said Annunziata, tidying her face and hair and standing upright again. ‘So kind.’
‘Hope is all any of us has now,’ said Julia carefully choosing her words to make certain that they meant what she wanted them to mean.
Annunziata looked directly at her then and nodded.
‘You are right to hope, signora,’ she said as slowly. ‘The doctor will get well again soon.’
‘Thank you,’ said Julia. Then, catching sight of her watch again, she added: ‘I must go, Annunziata. Will you be all right now?’
Annunziata nodded her head gravely and held open the door for Julia, who returned to the court wondering how much else Annunziata had seen and understood in her unobtrusive way.
That evening Julia dressed for dinner with unusual care and even did her hair in a new style. Giovanna had recently taken her shopping among some of the newly reopened antique shops in the city and had persuaded her to buy a pair of small tortoiseshell combs. When Julia had washed and dried her hair, she borrowed a pair of old-fashioned curling tongs from Annunziata and curled the tips of her thick hair under so that it lay sleekly against her shoulders. Taking wings of it back on either side of her face, she anchored them with the combs and stood in front of the looking glass to assess the result.
It was not a style that she had affected before, but she decided that it suited her better than the severe chignon had ever done. The fullness around her forehead balanced her square chin and the waterfall of glossy brown hair softened her angular bones and made her look younger than usual.
The only evening dress she had brought with her was the colour of well-polished copper, which added a little colour to her pale complexion, but it was not going to be warm enough and so she took the mink that had been part of her trousseau from the wardrobe and slung it around her shoulders. The colour was not good with her frock, but warmth was more important than aesthetic perfection and so she ignored the clash.
She went downstairs to find David waiting for her, dressed in uniform, with his British warm over one arm.
