The Wedding Officer

29

INEED TO go home,” Livia announced one evening. “I have to get some more cheese, and to see that my sister and my father are all right.”

“I’ll give you a lift on the motor scooter, if you like,” James said, trying not to sound too eager. “And, er, Sorrento’s meant to be lovely, isn’t it? We could make a day trip of it.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be very nice.”

She likes me, he thought, dazed with happiness. She must like me. We’re going on a trip.

It was another hot day, and the sun-drenched countryside wafted wave after wave of scents at them as they headed toward Vesuvius—orange blossom, myrtle, flowering thyme, and the peculiar smell of baked, dusty roads. There were potholes everywhere, and James deliberately steered around them at the very last moment for the simple pleasure of feeling Livia’s hands tighten around his waist. Perhaps this was why Italians drove so badly, he thought: It was all part of the game to them. He swerved abruptly around a particularly deep bomb crater, and she pinched him.

“Ow,” he protested happily.

“Drive properly,” she said into his ear.

“Like an Englishman, you mean?” But he slowed down a little.

She said thoughtfully in English, “Wheech es dhe pletforum for dhe Roma tren, pliss?”

Eric had lent her The Small Modern Polyglot, which she was using to learn English by a process of backward deduction. It lacked, of course, any kind of phonetic instructions for the English half of the conversation, and in order to have her pronunciation corrected she would regularly break into a sort of question-and-answer routine that was only tangentially relevant to the circumstances.

“The platform for the Rome train is over there,” he shouted helpfully, gesturing at the sparkling sea.

“Pliss ken u hep mey weeth mey luggy edge?”

“I would be delighted to help with your luggage.”

“U ken nurt be urn dhe pletforum unless u hev burt a tea kit,” she said sternly.

“Then I’ll buy a ticket,” he yelled happily. “I’ll buy a ruddy handful.”

They passed a sign to Pompeii. It was a few miles out of their way, but he asked if she minded him taking a look.

They followed the road toward Torre Annunziata, where another, smaller sign prompted them to turn up a narrow track that led toward a cluster of ramshackle buildings. But these were modern: The Roman town was immediately behind them, over a slight rise; imperfectly excavated, but even after two millennia more solid-looking than its modern counterpart.

James switched off the engine. There was no one about. A dog scratched its hindquarters energetically in the dust.

“Have you been here before?” he asked.

“No,” she said, looking around. “It was only in the last ten years, under Mussolini, that they dug this out.”

It was the sheer scale of the place which staggered. He hadn’t expected it to be so large—a whole town, abruptly obliterated by the mountain at its back. The forum, the large buildings that were obviously municipal offices, the private houses that presented only a doorway to the street but opened into large column-lined courtyards—it was not so very different in layout from any of the other Italian towns he had visited, with a forum instead of a piazza and temples instead of churches.

Here and there they came across casts of the inhabitants. Even after so long, you could still sense the terror and despair in their postures. One had been frozen in the act of holding something to his face, presumably a piece of cloth to breathe through. Another had blundered into a wall, lying down to die with his arms curled over his head as if to ward off blows raining from the sky. Yet another had tried to shield his companion from whatever was happening, and had died with his arms curled protectively around her.

“Ehi, signori.”

The croaking voice belonged to a very old man, evidently some kind of guardian, who was calling to them from a doorway. He had a speech impediment, but he managed to communicate that for a small fee he could show the two of them around the excavations. James was disinclined to have company. He tipped the man a few lire and said that they would prefer to look around on their own, at which the old man grinned slyly and gestured for them to follow him.

“He wants to show us something,” Livia said. “We’d better go, or he won’t leave us alone.”

They passed another plaster cast—a body crouched in a doorway, carrying a shapeless sack of possessions. The old man cackled, and muttered something in his odd, stunted speech, gesturing at the heavens. James caught the Italian for “sky” and “coming back.” He understood what the man was trying to say: These inhabitants had been killed not in the act of fleeing, but because they tried to return. They must have thought the worst was over, only for the mountain to have suddenly moved into another phase of the eruption, even deadlier than before. But this was not what the old man was pressing them to see. He was scuttling toward a small building in a side street.

“Prego, signori,” he said, unlocking a padlock and ushering them inside with a flourish, “nu lupanare.”

James looked quizzically at Livia, but she seemed as mystified as he was. The old man winked extravagantly at James and withdrew. Livia looked at the walls, and laughed.

The frescoes were faded, but it was not hard to see what they represented. On every side, men and women were copulating in a dozen different ways. There were women on top, women underneath, women applying male genitalia to their mouths as casually as if they were lipsticks, women lying with women, even a group of both sexes engaged in what appeared to be some kind of mutual flagellation.

“It’s a brothel,” Livia exclaimed. “These must have been all the services you could get.”

James understood now—the old man had thought he was being bribed to show them the pornography. “How ghastly,” he said. “Livia, I’m so sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Livia said thoughtfully. “That one looks quite interesting.” He couldn’t help but glance at what she was looking at, and immediately found himself blushing. She laughed again.

“If all Englishmen were like you,” she said, putting her arm through his, “there soon wouldn’t be any Englishmen left.”

“I’m glad I amuse you,” he said stiffly.

“I think it’s nice,” she said as they walked to the door. “It makes me feel safe.”

“Safe,” he repeated. “Well, that’s great. I’m safe and I’m nice. Just what every soldier aspires to be.”

“There are worse things,” she said, her mood suddenly sombre. For a moment she seemed lost in her thoughts, and he guessed she was thinking about what had happened to her husband.

They left Pompeii and drove up the winding roads toward Fiscino. Occasionally James found himself glancing up at the summit of the volcano. The plume of smoke was leaning out to sea today, like a quill propped in an enormous ink pot. It would have looked much the same in the days before it destroyed Pompeii, he thought: There couldn’t have been much in the way of warning, or the inhabitants wouldn’t have stayed.

“Don’t you ever think about it going up again?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Doesn’t that make you want to leave?”

“No,” she said seriously. “It makes me live each day as if it were another life. Because one life lived here is worth ten lived anywhere else.” She tightened her arms around him, and for an instant he felt it too: a sense that they, and the mountain, and even this war, were all just part of some bigger pattern, some mysterious power that had somehow brought them both to this moment.

When they got to Fiscino, Marisa and Nino greeted Livia with cries of delight. With James they were more guarded, which he thought was only natural, although it seemed to him that there was suspicion in the glances which Livia’s father shot at him from under his craggy eyebrows.

“He thinks you might be my boyfriend,” Livia whispered as they were led to the kitchen to inspect the mozzarella from that morning’s milk. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell him you’re not, although I won’t explain why. He’s quite old-fashioned.”

“Fine,” James said, mystified.

A huge piece of mozzarella, so fresh and moist it still seemed to be oozing milk, was passed to him on a fork, and everyone watched expectantly while he sampled it. He made appreciative noises—which wasn’t hard; the cheese was absolutely delicious. Livia, though, was more critical, and cross-questioned her father at length about the state of the pasture. Then she took James to say hello to Priscilla. When the buffalo saw who had come to visit her she snorted with delight and hurried over to the gate, nudging her massive black nose under Livia’s arm, hoping for a handful of hay.

“We used to have two of these,” Livia explained as she scratched Priscilla’s forehead. “The poor thing gets lonely on her own.”

“What happened to the other one?”

Livia looked at him with a sudden frown that echoed her father’s expression earlier. “Some soldiers shot her.”

“You mean the Germans?”

She laughed sarcastically. “Because obviously, nothing bad is ever done by Allied soldiers? No, the Germans did many terrible things when they were here, but they never shot our bufale. It took Allied troops to do that.”

“When? How did this happen?”

She found herself telling him an edited version of Pupetta’s death—how the soldiers had been tipped off by a neighbor who bore her a grudge because Livia didn’t like him, and how they had taken everything, all the food the Pertinis had, before opening fire on Pupetta. By the time she was halfway through she had to stop because she was crying.

James found himself wanting quite desperately to take her in his arms and kiss her. It was a very different feeling from the time when he’d tried to kiss her during the air raid. That had been excitement and desire; this was horror, and the wish to comfort, but the compulsion was if anything even stronger. He reached forward and slipped his arm around her shoulder, and then, because she so clearly needed the reassurance his arms could give her, and because in her misery she buried her face in his chest, he put both arms around her and hugged her properly. She wiped her eyes against his shirt, and lifted her face to his.

“And then they threw me in their truck,” she said. “Pupetta was lying there, and I had to fight off those animals. And then the officer—the officer—”

“The officer what?”

“The officer tried to give my father money for me,” she said quietly.

James let her go. He was horrified, but more than that, he felt tainted by association. No wonder the Italians resented their liberators, he thought, if this was how they behaved. The fact that it was an officer who had done this only made it worse.

“Livia,” he said grimly, “I’m so sorry.”

“Why? You weren’t there.”

“I’m sorry about what happened. More than that—I’m appalled. But look—we can trace him. Did you notice any regimental markings on his uniform? Or a number on the lorry? I’ll make sure the brute’s court-martialed for what he did.”

It was the first time she had seen him really angry, and she secretly found it rather impressive. “Court-martialed for what?” she pointed out. “We were the ones breaking the law, not him. According to the military government’s rules, what we were doing was hoarding, and that’s a crime. If you’re a soldier, you can proposition as many women as you like.” She shot him a glance. “Or men, for that matter.”

“It’s one thing to offer a prostitute money. But to offer money to a respectable girl…”

“Often there’s not much difference, these days.”

“Of course there is,” he said hotly. But he was revisited by a thought which had struck him when she had laughed at the paintings in the lupanare—and before that, even, when he first read Married Love: that all his received notions of what constituted respectability in a woman might be too simplistic for the times he was living in.

Livia kissed Priscilla’s forehead, hugged her massive neck and said good-bye to her. As they walked back toward the house she said, “Would you take me out to lunch, Shames?”

“Of course. I was assuming we’d stop somewhere.”

“I wouldn’t ask, but my father and Marisa will want us to stay and eat with them. However much they tell us they’ve got plenty to eat, you must refuse. The truth is there’s almost nothing here—I looked in the cupboards earlier. I’m going to give them the money I’ve earned working for you, but prices are so ridiculous now that it won’t buy them very much.”

Livia was right—her family begged them to stay and eat, but James made up some excuse about a meeting he needed to be at, and instead of lunch they accepted a glass of Nino’s limoncello. James saw the wistful way Livia looked around her before she left and realized that this was hard for her. In some ways, Naples was as alien to her as it was to him. It must be wonderful, he thought, to love a place as much as she clearly loved it here. Nowhere that he had ever lived had inspired such affection in him. For him, home was simply where you went when you weren’t away at school.

There was a protracted Italian farewell, with many embraces and protestations of love. This included a long and elaborate series of kisses from Nino for James. After he had got over the shock of having another man’s stubble rasping his cheek, an intriguingly scratchy sensation—surely his own cheek couldn’t be so rough, he thought—it was strangely pleasant to be clasped to another man’s breast like this, both daringly bohemian and childishly comforting.

When he had started the Matchless Livia climbed on the back, and Nino and Marisa festooned the handlebars with canvas bags full of mozzarelle, packed in water to keep them fresh. The liquid dribbled over James’s legs as they set off again, the extra weight conspiring with the limoncello to make the steering decidedly erratic.

Once on the coast road he turned south, toward Sorrento and Amalfi. This side of Vesuvius was wooded and craggy, the sea often hundreds of feet below them as the road twisted up the side of sheer cliffs and revealed a succession of vertiginous vistas. Different smells filled his nostrils now: the salty tang of the sea, mixed with the fragrant, tropical scent of the citrus groves that lined the shore side of the road for mile after mile.

“Ay assed fur a dubble rume weeth ay beth,” Livia told him airily as they puttered along.

“A double room with a bath is not available.” For a moment he entertained a delicious fantasy that he really could book the two of them into a hotel in Sorrento.

“But ey hev a razor fashion.”

“A reservation.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I have a reservation. Ho prenotato una stanza.”

“You really must do something about your accent, Chems. It’s terrible. Like a Tuscan’s.”

On the coast road near Sorrento they found a tiny restaurant. There was no menu, but the owner brought out plates of tiny sand eels fried in batter and soused in lemon juice, some things Livia said were called noci di mare, a couple of sea urchins and a plate of oysters.

Livia picked up an oyster and sniffed it. “No smell,” she said approvingly. “That’s how you can tell it’s fresh.” She took the lemon the owner had provided and expertly squeezed a few drops onto one before handing it to him. “Have you eaten oysters before, Yames?”

“I don’t believe I have,” he said dubiously, inspecting a gray-white puddle of flesh nestled in its shell amidst a little slimy-looking liquid.

“You’d know if you had. They say you never forget your first time,” she said mischievously. “Like making love.”

He took a deep breath. “Actually,” he said, “I wouldn’t know much about that either.”

She smiled. “I know.”

He glanced at her. “You could tell?” He hadn’t realized his inexperience was so apparent.

“Of course. A woman has an instinct about these things.” She was busy sorting out the next biggest and juiciest oyster for herself. She clanked the shell lightly against his, as if they were drinking a toast. “It doesn’t bother me, really. Cincin.”

“Cincin.” They tipped the shells against their lips in unison.

It was salty, it was sweet, it was fishy, it was liquor, it was like a deep breath of seaweedy air and a mouthful of sea spray all at once. He bit once, involuntarily, and felt the flavors in his mouth swell and burst like a wave. Before he knew what he had done he had swallowed, and then there was another sensation, another flavor, as the soft shapeless mass wriggled past the back of his throat, leaving a faint, cool aftertaste of brine.

He felt a sudden sense that nothing would be the same again. Eve in her garden had bitten an apple. James had eaten an oyster, sitting outside a tiny restaurant overlooking the sea by Sorrento. His undernourished heart swelled in the Italian sunshine like a ripening fig, and he laughed out loud. With a great flood of gratitude he realized that he was having the time of his life.

“Another?” She handed him one, and took another for herself. This time he watched her as she swallowed hers—the way her eyes closed as she slipped it into her mouth, the tightening of her cheeks as she bit it, the twitch of her throat as she swallowed, and then the slow opening of her eyes again, as if she were reluctantly coming awake from a delicious dream.

The restaurant owner brought them wine, pale and golden and cool. There were just four oysters each, and when they were all gone they turned their attention to the cecinella. After the soft shapeless texture of the oysters these were almost the opposite: hard, crunchy skeletons whose flavor was all on the outside, a crisp bite of garlic and peperone that dissolved to nothing in your mouth. The ricci, or sea urchins, were another taste again, salty and exotic and rich. It was hard to believe that he had once thought they could be an austerity measure. After that they were brought without being asked a dish of baby octopus, cooked with tomatoes and wine mixed with the rich, gamey ink of a squid.

For dessert the owner brought them two peaches. Their skins were wrinkled and almost bruised, but the flesh, when James cut into it with his knife, was unspoiled and perfectly ripe, so dark it was almost black. He was about to put a slice into his mouth when Livia stopped him.

“Not like that. This is how we eat peaches here.”

She cut a chunk from the peach into her wine, then held the glass to his lips. He took it, tipping the wine and fruit together into his mouth. It was a delicious, sensual cascade of sensations, the sweet wine and the sweet peach rolling around his mouth before finally, he had to bite it, releasing the fruit’s sugary juices. It was like the oyster all over again, a completely undreamt-of experience, and one that he found stirringly sexual, in some strange way that he couldn’t have defined.

After lunch they continued along the coast, the road skirting the green clear waters of the bay. It was hot now, and the combination of sun and moving air was burning them.

“I want to swim,” Livia said. She pointed. “I think we can get down to the sea that way.”

He turned onto the track she had indicated, which led through a grove of lemon trees down to a rocky beach. A goat, seeing them approach, shook its head and scrambled effortlessly away.

James turned off the engine. The sea was the color of a field of lavender, and so clear you could see every rock and seashell on the bottom. Apart from the yelling of crickets, and the faint soughing of the water as it sucked gently at the pebbles, everything was very still. The Matchless ticked and creaked quietly as it cooled. For a moment he felt a pang of guilt that a scene so perfectly beautiful could exist for his personal pleasure in the midst of a whole continent at war.

“We can undress over there,” Livia said, indicating a group of rocks.

The rocks were fifteen feet from the water. “You go in first, if you want,” he offered. “I won’t look.”

But he did. He couldn’t help it—he heard the sound of her bare feet as she ran to the sea, and then a splash and a shriek, and he looked up just in time to see a brown flash of nearly naked Livia, wearing only her drawers, plunging headlong into the water. After a moment she surfaced, pushing wet hair out of her eyes.

“Aren’t you coming?” she called.

“Just a moment.” Behind the rock he took a series of deep breaths before he climbed out of his uniform and ran, as quickly as he could, into the mercifully icy water.

Afterward they lay in the shade of a lemon tree, looking up at the sunlight flickering through the branches.

“My father eats lemons straight from the tree,” Livia said idly. “Even the skin.”

“Aren’t they bitter?”

“Not when they’re warm from the sun.” She reached up and plucked one to show him. “This is a good lemon. We have a saying: The thicker the skin, the sweeter the juice.” Experimentally she took a bite, and nodded. “It’s good.” She held the fruit toward his mouth.

He steadied her hand and tried it. She was right: It was sweet, as sweet as lemonade.

She took another mouthful herself and grimaced. “Pip,” she said, spitting it into her hand. She smiled at him, and in that moment all his delusions of self-restraint evaporated. He took her head in his hands and desperately pressed his lips against hers. Her mouth was sweet and bitter, a faint saltiness mingling with the sharp tang of lemon. He felt the hard edges of her teeth against his tongue—the pips in the fruit of her mouth—before she pulled away.

“Jamus!” she exclaimed.

“Come here,” he gasped. He kissed her again. After a moment’s hesitation, he felt her lips parting as she kissed him back.

There were so many unfamiliar textures—her tongue, now slippery and yielding, now hard and pointed and darting between his own lips; the ridged vault of her palate; the delicate bones of her back, and the muscles in her neck, as they pulsed beneath his fingers.

After a while she pulled free, a puzzled expression on her face. “So you’re not a fennel after all?”

“What?” he asked, perplexed.

“A fennel. You know, a finocchio. A ricchione.”

“A big ear?” he said, his confusion mounting.

“I guess not,” she said. Then she laughed. “I’d never have swum—I didn’t realize—” He kissed her again. She responded more hungrily this time, and he felt so happy it was as if he were falling.

She pulled away again, and this time her eyes had narrowed. “So that was just a trick, was it, pretending to be a culatone?”

“Livia…I never pretended to be a culatone. Whatever a culatone is.”

“Yes, you did,” she reminded him. “When we ate the oysters.”

“I told you that I wasn’t experienced,” he said. “Where’s this…other thing come from?”

“Ah,” she said. She was beginning to realize that her feminine intuition might have been struggling with the translation from British body language to Italian. But the more she thought about that, the more a faint but persistent sense of disappointment that had been constantly present ever since she accepted the job at the Palazzo Satriano seemed to lift, leaving behind it only a pleasant feeling that being kissed by James was rather nice.

She leaned forward to be kissed again, and he quickly obliged. “You don’t kiss like somebody inexperienced,” she commented.

“I’m a fast learner.” This time he went more slowly, kissing the tip of her adorable nose, and the lobes of her ears, and the delicate skin around her eyes before he came back to her lips.

But—he could have kicked himself—it was he who broke the spell. Pulling away, he said, “What about Eric?”

Livia’s expression darkened. “What about him?”

“Do you kiss him too?”

“You’ve only just kissed me,” she said, “and already you want to own me?”

“I just need to know where I stand.”

“I like you both,” she said simply. “I didn’t mean to kiss you, though I’m not sorry I did. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“Of course not,” he said, disappointed. He tried to kiss her again, but she turned her head away. He had changed the mood.

“Can I hold you?” he asked, realizing that she wasn’t going to change her mind.

“If you like.”

She settled herself against him. They were silent for a few minutes. “You have a lot of self-control,” she said at last. “That’s a good thing. But I don’t think you understand women that well.”

He turned this remark over in his mind, wondering what the best response to it might be. Was she telling him that he must be more of a man, that he should be more forceful? Or was she telling him the opposite—that he had ruined his chances by being too presumptuous? Or was she simply saying that he had ruined a perfectly good kiss by questioning it?

He was still wondering what to say when he realized that Livia, at least, wasn’t torturing herself with questions. She was fast asleep.

When they finally returned home on the motorbike, Livia dozed on the back, her head nestled between his shoulder blades.

James rounded the last bend in the coast road and suddenly, across the bay, there was the city again, with the hills at its back, shining in the late-afternoon sunlight. Livia stirred, saw where they were, and slid her arms around him again.

“Do you lick nipples, Gems?” she said sleepily into his ear.

“I lick—I like Naples very much.”

“Eye mm gled. Ees a booty’fuel city.”

That night, Livia announced that she needed a wood-burning oven if she was to do justice to the ingredients they had brought back from Vesuvius. After some thought, she had realized that James already possessed the perfect article—the schedario, his gray filing cabinet.

“We’ll put the wood in the bottom drawer,” she explained. “Then the middle drawer will become a very hot oven, where we can make pizza and roast meat. The top drawer will be a little cooler, for vegetables and mozzarella.”

“The flaw in your plan,” James pointed out, “is that the schedario is already full of archivi, files.”

“But you can put the files somewhere else,” she said persuasively.

Strictly speaking this was true, he supposed. After all, they had managed perfectly well without a filing cabinet before.

For dinner they ate wood-roasted pizza with a sauce of fresh tomatoes and mozzarella, decorated only with salt, oil and basil. He had never eaten anything so simple, or so delicious. But when he finally went to bed it was another taste he dreamt of, the taste of some all-too-brief kisses in a lemon grove above Sorrento.