The Wedding Officer

9

ATINY LIZARD, seeing that James was awake, scuttled into a crack in the wall. It was the first time in months that he’d had the luxury of sleeping in private, let alone in such an enormous bed, and for a moment he couldn’t recall where he was. Then he saw painted shutters enclosing tall windows. Getting out of the bed, he went to pull them open. The painting was a kind of trompe l’oeil, the scene on the inside exactly matching the view of the Bay of Naples outside, though with naked nymphs frolicking in the sea instead of bombed-out ships. Across the bay, Vesuvius puffed a tiny, perfect smoke ring.

He put on his uniform and shaved in a foxed, silvery mirror under the inquisitive gaze of a cherub. It annoyed him that he still needed to do this only once a week. He squinted at his reflection. With the soap covering his chin, it was possible to see what he’d look like with a beard—older, more authoritative. When he had scraped the soap off, the face that stared back at him was once again that of a boy. It seemed to him, though, that the curly ginger-brown hair on the top of his head was already thinning. Some of the men believed that the army-issue shampoo made your hair fall out. He couldn’t be going bald, he thought, not yet: He was only twenty-two.

At school he had been a classicist. He found both the history and the language of ancient Rome reassuring, dealing as they did with an empire not dissimilar to the one his school had been founded to serve, but with the added advantage that nothing about them ever changed. Latin was like cricket, only more so: Once you had mastered a set of fixed grammatical rules, everything made perfect sense, even if it wasn’t actually possible to find an ancient Roman to make perfect sense with. When he was called up, his linguistic skills were enough to get him assigned to an intelligence corps—or, more exactly, to the Field Security Service—where he had been given a choice of learning Italian, French or Arabic. Italian seemed the most similar to Latin, so he had chosen that. He had spent several pleasant weeks under the tutelage of a lugubrious Tuscan count, who had made him read Dante aloud until he was fluent. Then, with typical FSS bloody-mindedness, he had been posted to Africa. It had taken the intervention of his commanding officer to get this transfer.

He went to see if Jackson was still around, but the other man had mentioned an early start and it looked as if he had already left. James decided to start by inspecting his new quarters. On this floor there seemed to be about a dozen large rooms, grouped around the courtyard below. The first room was a kitchen, which also contained a tin bath. Presumably this was the domain of Malloni, the orderly. He looked in the cupboards, which were empty apart from a few tins of army rations. His heart sank a little—they were all marked “Meat and Vegetables,” a tasteless slop he had become all too familiar with over the past eighteen months. Apart from that, there seemed to be precious little for Malloni to work with.

The next room was one of the larger ones. Two men in plain clothes looked up from their desks as James entered. “Hullo,” he said, somewhat surprised to see them—Jackson had mentioned a couple of civilian staff, but James hadn’t expected them to start so early. “I’m Captain Gould.”

The Italians did not seem particularly interested in this information. “Carlo,” one of them said curtly. He nodded at his companion. “And Enrico.”

According to James’s watch it was not yet eight o’clock. “What are you working on?” he asked politely.

Carlo seemed quite taken aback to be questioned in this way. “Filing,” he said economically.

“Filing what?”

“Expenses.”

“May I?” James took the piece of paper Carlo was writing on. “‘Captain Teodor Benesti, informant, two hundred lire,’” he read. “‘Marshal Antonio Mostovo, contact, two hundred lire. Carla Loretti, gift, one cheese and a blanket, value fifty lire.’ What are these?”

“Payments,” Carlo said, taking the paper back.

“Payments for what?”

“For information.”

James experienced a sinking sensation. “Bribes, you mean?”

Carlo shrugged. “If you like.”

“I don’t like,” James said firmly. “I don’t know how Jackson ran this show, but paying informants is completely against the rules.”

Carlo looked at him without expression. “You are mistaken. These figures do not relate to the payment of bribes. They are a record of the bribes we have been offered.”

“Oh, I see,” James said, relieved. It was clearly correct to record any attempt at corrupting FSS personnel, even if no money was actually changing hands.

“And the money we are given,” Carlo continued, “goes into a tin in the cupboard. So we always know exactly how much there is.”

The sinking sensation returned. “What happens to the money in the tin?”

“We use it for the bribes we give out,” Enrico said. The two men watched James impassively.

He took a deep breath. “There must be no more payments. Of any kind, given or received. Is that clear?”

“Sì,” Enrico muttered.

“Of course,” Carlo said. But he carried on writing out his list, just the same.

“While I am here, we will…” James struggled to think of an appropriate metaphor. “We will play with a straight bat,” he suggested. No, damn it, that wasn’t right. He had just told them that he would be playing with a straight owl, or possibly a straight pigeon. “With a straight mallet,” he said, miming helpfully.

“Ah, your English cricket,” Carlo said, with a practiced lack of interest. “Unfortunately we cannot play today. We are much too busy.”

The two Italians said nothing more for several minutes. But when James left the room Enrico murmured under his breath, “Ogni scupa nova fa scrusciu.” Every new broom makes a noise.

By noon James had sorted the mess of papers into three large piles, which he had mentally dubbed Fascists, Criminals and Madmen. Most important of all, he had located the Black Book, the log of known criminal elements in the area. Unfortunately, Jackson seemed to have been less than meticulous about this as well. It started reasonably enough, with a neat list of names and addresses, and “fascist” or “mobster” written next to each one, together with a brief summary of the evidence against them. As James turned the pages, however, the information became more and more scant. Against one man’s name Jackson had written “believed to have three nipples”; against another, the single word “effeminate.” A certain Annunziata di Fraterno was “aristocratic; known to have nymphomaniac tendencies,” while one Giorgio Rossetti was “pathologically afraid of wasps.”

Fascinated despite himself, James had sat down to read further when the door opened and three men walked in. As one of them was a major, and presumably James’s CO, he jumped to his feet and saluted sharply. Carlo and Enrico glanced up disdainfully, before carrying on with whatever it was they were doing.

Major Heathcote was a harassed-looking man of about forty. “Frankly, I don’t give a duck’s arse about the Eyeties,” he told James. “I simply want to get this district under some semblance of control. We all thought we’d be in Rome by now, but unfortunately the Jerries have dug in about sixty miles north at Monte Cassino and it’s getting pretty grim. Come to me if there’s anything you can’t handle, but I’m really hoping you won’t have to.”

James agreed that he would probably need to bother the major very little, and the CO started to leave. “Oh, and weddings,” he said, suddenly swiveling round and fixing James with a steely expression. “Try not to let the men get married. It causes no end of resentment, and it makes the soldiers soft. No one wants to die when they’ve got an Italian senorita keeping the bed warm for them sixty miles behind the front lines.”

“Signorina, sir.”

“I’m sorry?”

“‘Senorita’ would be Spanish.” Conscious that Major Heathcote had probably not come there to have his Italian corrected, James moved swiftly on. “Don’t worry, sir, Jackson briefed me very thoroughly on the marriage situation.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

The major left, accompanied by one of the men. The other man, a captain with startlingly blue eyes, stuck out his hand.

“Tom Jeffries, A-force,” he said cheerfully. “Jumbo to my pals. My office is just upstairs, though of course I’m not there much.” He winked conspiratorially.

A-force were the cloak-and-dagger boys. Presumably Jeffries meant that he was usually away doing top-secret work behind enemy lines. “Oh, of course,” James said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Listen, do you fancy a spot of lunch? There’s a place down the road which does a very nice veal chop.”

And so, for the second time in twenty-four hours, James found himself being ushered into Zi’Teresa’s. If the maître d’was surprised to see him he didn’t show it, though Jeffries looked a little nonplussed when Angelo showed them, with a hint of a wink, to “Captain Gould’s usual table.”

As they ate, Jeffries quizzed James about his combat experience, which up to that time had been limited, to say the least.

“Not to worry. We might be able to slip you into something of ours now and again,” Jeffries said. “We’ve usually got a few people popping in and out of EOT, killing Jerries, and to tell the truth an Italian speaker’s always welcome. It gets our boys into no end of trouble, not being able to speak the language.”

James made some vague noises of enthusiasm intended to imply how much he regretted that he was too busy to pop into Enemy Occupied Territory alongside a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs who didn’t speak Italian. In an effort to change the subject he lowered his voice and said, “Shame what Major Heathcote was saying about the advance.”

“What about it?”

“Well, that it’s got bogged down at this Monte Cassino place.”

Jeffries’s eyes twinkled. “That depends on how you look at it. Think about it. Why are we here?”

“To beat the Germans?”

Jeffries shook his head. “To tie up as many Germans as possible while the main show gets underway in France, that’s why. The last thing Churchill wants is for the Jerry divisions in Italy to nip back over the Alps and reinforce their defenses over there. So while they think they’re holding us back, they’re actually falling into our trap. Look, Gould. Can I give you some advice?”

Zi’ Teresa’s certainly seemed to be the place for being given advice. “Of course.”

“This whole show,” Jeffries said, “this whole country, in fact, is just a massive ruddy diversion. If I were you, I’d allow yourself to be diverted. Enjoy it while it lasts.”

A woman approached the table. She was tall and extremely beautiful, with long black hair artfully pinned and curled around her head, and a slim dress of some slinky material that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Mayfair dance hall. She also, James noticed, had a glass eye, which looked at him fixedly as she bent down to kiss Jeffries’s cheek. There was a faint waft of expensive perfume.

“Speaking of which—may I introduce Elena, my girl?” Jeffries said. “Darling, this is Captain Gould.”

“Pleased to meet you,” James said, getting to his feet.

“Actually, she doesn’t speak much English,” Jeffries said. “Completely charming, though. She’s a schoolteacher.”

“Buongiorno, signorina,” James said. “Molto piacere di conoscerla.”

Elena smiled. “Voi parlate italiano?”

“Not as well as I thought, it seems,” he said in Italian. “Your local dialect takes some getting used to.”

“Well, you speak it a lot better than Jumbo does. Will you tell him I’m going to the ladies’ room, please?”

“Of course.”

“What did she say?” Jeffries asked as Elena left them.

“She said she was going to powder her nose. Look, is she really a schoolteacher?”

“Why shouldn’t she be?”

James thought of mentioning what Jackson had told him the previous night about Zi’ Teresa’s celebrated glass-eyed employee, but Jeffries was glaring at him fiercely and he thought better of it. It was possible, after all, that this was how schoolteachers dressed in Naples. “Perhaps I’m mixing her up with someone else,” he said lamely.

“Actually,” Jeffries said, “I wanted to talk to you about Elena. There’s a bit of a language barrier, you see.”

James tried to look as if this possibility had only just occurred to him. “Really?”

“I need a few phrases translated. Only some of it’s a bit delicate.”

“That’s all right,” James said dubiously.

“For example, how would one say, ‘I’m feeling a bit tired actually’?”

“Adesso son un po’stanco.”

“And what about, ah, ‘That’s very nice and all that, but I’d really rather you didn’t’?”

“Well, it’s difficult without knowing the exact context, but it’s something like, ‘È molto bello ma preferirei che no lo facessi.’”

“And what about ‘It’s actually getting rather painful now’?”

“Sta diventando un po’doloroso.”

“And ‘Please stop’?”

“Smettila, per favore.”

Jeffries’s lips moved as he silently practiced the unfamiliar phrases. “Well, that should cover it,” he said at last.

Elena rejoined them, her nose sufficiently powdered. She and Jeffries smiled at each other coquettishly, holding hands across the table. “Tell me, James,” she said in Italian, “how do I tell him ‘Aspetta!’?”

“Er—‘Wait,’ I suppose.”

“Wet?” she said, trying it for size.

“Wait.”

“Wayt. Wayt! And how do I say ‘Non smettere!’?”

“Don’t stop.”

“And ‘Facciamolo ancora ma più piano lentamente’?”

“That would be—‘Let’s do that again but more slowly.’”

“Slewly,” she repeated. “Slooowly. Good. And ‘Svegliati, caro’?”

“Wake up, please, darling.”

“Wek erp plis dah’leeng. OK, I think I have everything.”

“Jumbo?”

“What?”

“Anything else I can assist with?”

“No, I think I’m fully kitted up now. Thanks.”

“In that case,” James said, “I’d better be getting back. Can I pay my share?”

Jumbo rolled up his left sleeve. His forearm bore no fewer than six wristwatches, each of them, James saw, of impressive proportions. “No need, old chap,” he said, unbuckling one and laying it on the table. “I met some Germans recently, up in Abruzzo. This one’s on them.”

As James entered the Palazzo Satriano he became aware of a commotion echoing down the marble staircase. It sounded as if there was some kind of party going on—no, not a party, he decided: The voices he could hear were raised in anger and alarm, some of them shrilly.

He rounded the first-floor landing and found his way blocked by a mass of women—young women, all dressed to the nines. They appeared to be pushing and shoving with the intention of getting closer to the door of the FSS office. Near the front, a fight had broken out, which provided an opportunity for those not directly involved to try to slip past the protagonists and take their places, which in turn was leading to yet more altercations. With some difficulty, James battled his way past waves of scent, screeching voices and glossy black hair.

“What on earth is going on?” he asked when he reached the safety of his office.

Carlo shrugged. “It’s three o’clock.”

“I’m aware of the time, Carlo. Why are there so many women outside?”

“They are the fidanzate. The women who want to marry Allied servicemen.”

“What, all of them?”

“No, these are just the most recent ones, the ones who have not yet been given a time when they will be interviewed.”

“Then—good Lord—how many have we already arranged to see?”

Carlo rummaged in a cupboard and produced a thick sheaf of papers. “Forty? Fifty?”

“And how long has this been going on?”

Carlo shrugged again. His shrugs, James was coming to realize, were remarkably expressive, almost a dialect in themselves. Sometimes they communicated that Carlo did not know the answer to whatever you were asking him, but more often they suggested that he either did not wish, or did not deign, to enter into discussion on the subject.

No wonder Jackson had been unable to do anything about the black market, James thought. All his time must have been spent on processing would-be war brides. The uncharitable thought crossed James’s mind that Jackson, knowing he was about to be posted home, might even have allowed a backlog to build up, secure in the knowledge that it would be his successor who would have to deal with it. “Right,” he said. “The first thing to do is to make a list. Carlo, could you go outside and tell those ladies to form an orderly queue?”

Carlo’s face was expressionless. “I could. But first you will need to explain to them what an orderly queue is.”

It took nearly three hours just to take the girls’ names and addresses, and by the end of it James was exhausted.

At seven o’clock precisely, a tiny Italian man entered James’s office. He was wearing a very ancient tuxedo and a white bow tie, which was almost exactly the same size and shape as the mustache on his upper lip.

“Dinner she served,” he said darkly, as if announcing the death of a favorite pet.

“Ah,” James said. “You must be Malloni.”

“I ’ave the honor, yes. Wet there.”

Malloni vanished, only to reappear a moment later with a steaming tureen in his arms. “Ees dinner.”

“Right. Where do you usually…” James gestured at the table, which was still covered in Jackson’s papers, albeit sorted into piles. He watched as Malloni pushed them haphazardly toward the center of the table to make room for his tureen. From behind the door he produced a small bronze gong, which he struck with great ceremony three times.

One by one a handful of other British officers appeared and introduced themselves as his dining companions. Kernick, Walters, Hughes and French occupied offices in various other parts of the building, carrying out bureaucratic duties even more obscure than his own. They all seemed quite haggard with exhaustion.

Malloni produced some rather green-looking silver cutlery and some ancient chinaware and proceeded to lay the table, putting a plate in front of each person. There was also a candelabrum, which he did not light, and a number of smaller dishes with lids. James touched the plate in front of him. It was quite cold.

Eventually Malloni wrapped a white cloth over his left arm like a matador’s cape, and with his other hand triumphantly raised the lid of the tureen.

It contained, as James had suspected it might, several portions of “Meat and Vegetables” removed from their tins, mixed together and warmed through. Surreptitiously, he lifted the lid on one of the side dishes. It, too, contained “Meat and Vegetables.” He tried another. “Meat and Vegetables” again. He looked up. Malloni was going round the table, standing next to the left side of each man and holding the tureen for them to spoon some onto their plate.

“Jackson warned me this fellow wasn’t up to much,” he muttered to Kernick.

“He’s better than the last chap,” Kernick whispered back. “He used to put garlic in it. Said it made it taste more Italian, but actually it just made us all stink.”

“Why do you keep him on?”

“He’s a very good source of Scotch. And occasionally he can lay his hands on a few cigars.”

With even more ceremony, Malloni placed a bottle of Vat 69 whisky on the table. Producing a stiletto knife, apparently from nowhere, he cut the seal with a casual wave of his hand and poured generous measures for each diner. James sipped his. He was not a great drinker, but even so this seemed to him to be a particularly poisonous brand, with a distinct aftertaste of petroleum.

He was grateful to have filled up at Zi’Teresa’s, and ate as little as possible. His companions, however, consumed theirs with enthusiasm, a haste later explained by the eagerness with which they pushed their plates aside to get on with the real business of the evening, playing cards. Malloni, too, seemed newly galvanized as he opened a large ledger in which to record the bets.

“Scopa,” Kernick explained. “Local game. Really quite addictive. You’ll play, Gould, won’t you?”

French turned on the wireless. The clipped tones of a BBC presenter said, “And now some messages for our friends in Northern Italy. Mario, your mother’s cow is unwell. Giuseppe, it may rain by dawn.”

“Giuseppe’s going to have a busy night,” Kernick commented. He caught James’s blank look. “Instructions for the partisans,” he explained. “All in code.”

“I had rather a rum do today,” Hughes said conversationally as he shuffled the cards. “Had to arrest an entire orchestra for promoting Hun culture. There’d been a complaint that they’d been playing Beethoven.”

“Did you charge them?” Kernick asked, studying his hand intently.

“No. Turns out Malloni here knows a thing or two about classical music, and Beethoven is actually Belgian.”

“Bravo, Malloni.” The cook shrugged modestly.

There was a deafening crash from downstairs, followed by a painful squealing noise. A second crash echoed up the stone staircase, accompanied by more squealing. “What on earth is that?” James asked.

“According to the Americans,” Walters said, “it’s called jazz.”

Now that James listened more closely, he could just make out a hint of a melody in the strangled squeaks, which were presumably coming from a clarinet, although the drums still sounded as if they were being used in the manner of a punch bag rather than a musical instrument.

“They’ve not been at it very long,” Walters added unnecessarily. “Quite keen, though. They practice every night.”

After he had lost half a crown at scopa James went to bed. The jazz continued late into the night, making sleep difficult. When he did finally drift off he found himself dreaming of Neapolitan fiancées.

He woke with a start, just as the clarinet downstairs gave a sudden squeal of excitement.

But it wasn’t the clarinet that had woken him. He listened. There it was again: a soft tapping at the door. Getting out of bed, he went to open it.

There was a child standing there, her ragged clothes, grubby bare feet and tangled hair immediately marking her out as a scugnizza. His first thought was that she was stealing. But then he remembered the knock. Presumably even in Naples thieves didn’t announce themselves before they robbed you. “Buona sera,” he said gently. “Come stai?”

The girl seemed undecided between advance and retreat, like a deer startled at its grazing.

“I’ve come for my blanket,” she said, in a Neapolitan dialect so thick he could barely understand her.

“What blanket?”

She pointed at the bed. “The man who lives here gives them to me.”

As blankets were a recognized currency in every occupied country, James understood that she was talking about some kind of transaction. “What does he give them to you for?” he asked. She looked at James, and he suddenly felt foolish. Her eyes were not those of a child, but of the women who walked arm-in-arm past the bars. “Oh,” he said.

“Are you going to give me a blanket?” she asked.

He went and fetched all the blankets he could spare. “Take these,” he said, as kindly as he could. “I’m afraid there won’t be any more.”

She nodded, and carefully shook each blanket out and refolded it before vanishing as quietly as she had come. James remembered what Jackson had said, the night before he left. There aren’t any rules here, only orders.

Knowing that sleep was unlikely now, he reached for his shirt and undid the pocket, searching for a cigarette. Like everyone else, he had abandoned the British-made Bengal Lancers for the superior soft-wrapped Camels and Chesterfields the Americans got in their K packs. He lit one, letting the smoke mingle with the scents of jasmine and bougainvillea that wafted through the open windows.

Next to the pack of cigarettes was a letter. He hesitated, then drew it out. The letter had been traveling with him so long, and had got damp and then dried out again so many times, that it had started to come apart along the seams and now resembled one of those lacy patterns made by tearing folded newspapers. But the words were legible enough.

Wendover Farm,

Wendover,

Bucks

14th November 1943

Dear James,

This is a beastly letter—beastly to write, and even more beastly to get, I suppose. I wish I could have said this to your face, but I’ve thought and thought about it and it seems to me that it’s better to let you know how things stand now than to wait until I see you, which mightn’t be for months. Besides, I don’t want to do anything behind your back, and it wouldn’t be fair on Milo either to keep him waiting for your next home leave, whenever that might be.

Dearest James, please don’t be upset. Of course your pride will be hurt at being jilted (hateful word, but I can’t think of a better one) but apart from that I have this feeling that you’re going to absolutely understand. Now that I’m away from home, and able to talk to other girls about their boyfriends (I didn’t gossip about you, I promise, but the work is very boring and some of the girls just like to talk anyway), I realize that what we had together was really a lovely warm friendship rather than a love affair. In fact, I still feel exactly the same way about you that I always did—absolutely fond & affectionate, as if you’re my brother, and a very nice brother at that. It’s just that now I’ve got a whole new set of feelings as well—my feelings for Milo, I mean. If it hadn’t been for the war I would probably never have met him, and you and I would have got married without even thinking about it very much, and you would have gone on calling me “old girl” just the way your father does your mother, and we would have managed to have some children and it would never even have occurred to us that anything was missing. I suppose I’m talking about passion. But please don’t think I’m trying to reproach you, James, I’m just trying to explain why it’s a good thing that we’ve come to this parting of the ways sooner, rather than waiting until we’d got more deeply involved with each other before we’d found out….

There was more, three or four pages of it, but the gist was that she’d met a Polish airman who was able to supply whatever it was James had not been able to. Passion, he supposed. It was true that their kisses, when he took Jane to the back row of the pictures or to a dinner dance, had been a little awkward. But he had put that down to their mutual inexperience. He had assumed in his innocence that a well-brought-up girl would not want to be taken advantage of until their wedding night, an occasion he had looked forward to with warm anticipation. Perhaps he should have discussed it with her? But she had never given any indication that she would be anything other than mortified if he had raised the subject. Indeed, the extraordinary frankness of the letter had itself been a shock—as if this other man had been able to stir up not just a new set of feelings, but a new openness about them as well. Or perhaps it was being a land girl that had done that.

It was obvious that one reason Jane had written to him was to clear her conscience before she made love to her new boyfriend. That was almost the first thing that had occurred to him when he read it: She will have slept with him by now. Perhaps the very night after she posted this letter she had…. No, he must not think about it. He put the letter away, and lay down on the bed again.

“Passion,” he said out loud, around a mouthful of cigarette smoke. But what was passion, when it came down to it? Surely it just meant making a spectacle of oneself—it wasn’t that the feelings were any different, just that one allowed them to go on display, as it were. And what was so wonderful about that? These Italians were passionate, he supposed, but as far as he could see that simply meant they were overexcitable, talked too much, and treated women with a complete lack of respect. What was even more extraordinary was that the women seemed often not to mind.

He sighed. Sex was yet another thing that this war had turned on its head. Many of the men saw anyone who was still inexperienced as simply needing a push in the right direction, such as being dragged to the nearest brothel. Even before his dinner with Jackson, whenever James was asked if he had a girl at home, he said he had. Having a girl at home got you out of all sorts of difficulties.