The Wedding Officer

22

AFTER A couple of days, James spotted something strange about the food they were eating.

“It’s an odd thing,” he remarked to Jumbo, “but every single meal seems to contain at least one dish that’s red, green and white. Yesterday it was that wonderful salad—tomatoes, basil and that white mozzarella stuff. Today it was some sort of herby green paste on white pasta, with tomatoes on the side.”

Jumbo screwed up his face. “What’s so odd about that?”

“They’re the colors of the Italian flag.”

“So they are.” Jumbo thought some more. “Probably a coincidence, though. After all, they eat a lot of tomatoes, so the red’s there from the start.”

“Probably,” James agreed.

But later that afternoon he made an excuse to drop by the kitchen, and peer over Livia’s shoulder at what she was preparing for dinner. “What are these?” he asked casually.

“Pomodori ripieni con formaggio caprino ed erba cipollina,” she said tersely. “Tomatoes stuffed with goat’s cheese and chives.”

Ignoring the fact that his mouth was watering, he said, “They’re the same colors as your flag.”

Livia affected to notice this for the first time. “So they are. How strange.”

“As was one of the dishes at lunch. In fact, every meal you’ve cooked us has had something similar.”

Livia, who hadn’t reckoned on her employers spotting her small gesture of defiance, decided that the best form of defense was attack. “Well, there’s hardly any choice in the markets at the moment, thanks to your ridiculous restrictions. And what little there is goes for outrageous prices. The only people who can afford to eat properly now are foreign soldiers, and their whores of course. You’ve turned us into a city of beggars and thieves and prostitutes, and I’d like to know what you’re going to do about it.”

James blinked. “We are doing our best to protect the civilian population.”

“Well, you’re not doing a very good job of it.”

To her surprise he said helplessly, “I know. We’re letting you people down. But it’s an impossible task, and there are so few of us to do it.”

“Huh,” she said, turning away. Captain Gould was probably not such a bad person after all, she decided, but on the other hand there was no point in letting him know that.

Gina Tesalli was pregnant. A crescent of taut brown belly peeked out between her skirt and the thin white shirt she was wearing. She put her hands on the bulge protectively and smiled at him.

“It’s Corporal Taylor’s, there’s no doubt about it,” she said. “I’ve never had another boyfriend.”

James scratched his head. Gina was proving a hard one to turn down. Before the war she had been a student at the university. Now she lived with her family, or at least the female members of it, her four brothers and father all having been conscripted by the Germans. They were good, middle-class people, although struggling in these times like everyone else.

If James refused to give Gina permission to marry, an Englishman’s child would be born out of wedlock. But if he gave her permission on those same grounds, he knew exactly what would happen—as soon as the girls of Naples realized that all they had to do to secure a wedding was to get themselves pregnant, all birth control would be thrown to the winds. The spread of syphilis and gonorrhea, already at epidemic rates, would multiply overnight, and on top of that there would be tens, if not hundreds, of babies born for no better reason than to guarantee their mothers a ticket on the promised war brides’ ships to England.

It was a complicated problem, and one which his orders seemed completely inadequate for dealing with. Between the conflicting demands of a well-intentioned, perfectly sensible policy on the one hand and the happiness of three human beings on the other, he faltered.

He told Gina he would have to make some further inquiries before he wrote his report. It was a lie—he was going to leave her case to one side for the moment, in the hope that a solution would eventually turn up.

“Of course,” Gina said, clearly trying not to sound disappointed. “Our baby won’t be born until the summer. There’s plenty of time.”