The Wedding Officer

33

HE TRIED to work, but it was no use—his attention kept wandering as he experienced a series of delightful flashbacks to the afternoon’s activities. Getting up from his desk, he went into the kitchen.

Livia was cooking. “Hello,” he said, grinning at her. He felt ridiculously pleased with himself.

“Hello.”

“I’m finding it hard to work.”

“Me too.”

“And I’m ravenous too. What’s for supper?”

“Wait and see. But since you’re here, would you come and stir this for me, please?”

He took the bowl of egg whites she handed him and gave it a stir. She watched, rather critically, he thought.

“Yes,” she said after a moment. “I see what you’re doing.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Too much force. And not enough wrist.” She put his hand on his and guided him. “Like this. As if you’re pushing it gently away from you, not bashing it. And move your hand around. It shouldn’t always be in exactly the same place.”

“Does it really make that much difference?”

“Egg whites are funny things,” she said enigmatically. “Sometimes they fold, and sometimes they don’t. You’re just a little—well, overenthusiastic.”

“Oh,” he said. He had just realized that this conversation was not actually about egg whites at all. He slowed his movements, and tried to copy what she had just demonstrated. “How’s that?”

She watched him. “Yes.” She nodded. “That’s really quite promising.”

The next morning she returned from the market with a large piece of beef.

“I’m wondering whether to grill it or stew it,” she announced. “What do you think?”

He was flattered—she had never consulted him about a menu before. “Well, a simple grilled steak is always nice,” he ventured.

“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, a lot of men think that. But it all depends how hot the stove is. If the stove is really, really high, you can just throw the meat on without thinking about it—it cooks quickly, without getting dry. But if the stove isn’t quite so hot, you’re better off going for a stew and simmering it slowly. Do you understand?”

He was becoming accustomed to this code by now. “I think so, yes. So tell me, is the stove hot today?”

“Today, the stove is still fairly fierce,” she admitted. “But that won’t always be the case. We should practice making a stew, just in case.”

“It’s a damn strange thing,” Major Heathcote said, “but A-force seem to be having trouble finding any women of low repute for this disease-spreading scheme of theirs.”

“Really, sir?”

“Yes. Odd, when you consider we’re putting over five hundred servicemen through the VD hospital every week. Makes you wonder who they’re all sleeping with.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hear A-force have handed over responsibility for the rastrallymenties to the Italian police now. Though, frankly, I’d be surprised if that produces any better results. These Eyeties are as tricky as a brass sixpence.”

“Some do seem to be less than scrupulous, sir.”

“Hmm.” The major looked at him shrewdly. “How about you, Gould?”

“Sir?”

“No problems I should know about?”

“Everything seems to be under control, sir.”

“Good.” Major Heathcote paused. “Between you and me, I’m not too upset that disease thing didn’t come to anything. I’m not saying you had anything to do with that, but…just watch your step. We don’t want you going native.”

For lunch one day, Livia served the British officers a steaming dish of snails, which exuded a delicious aroma of garlic and tomato. James looked around for a knife or fork, but Livia had not put any cutlery out.

“These are a real delicacy,” she said. “We call them maruzzelle. They’re harvested from plants that grow by the sea, which gives them a special salty flavor. Then we just cook them like this in their shells.”

Horris picked one up and looked at it doubtfully. “In England we don’t really eat snails. Or slugs, come to that.”

“There’s a lot of things you don’t do in England,” she said. “Or so I gather.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Horris asked suspiciously.

James had also picked up a shell, enticed by the rich, deep, earthy smell emanating from it. “How do I eat this?”

“Just as it is.”

James put the mollusk to his lips and sucked. At first, nothing happened. “You may have to loosen it,” Livia added.

He wriggled his tongue into the shell and sucked again. This time, the flesh moved a little. He wriggled harder, sucking at the same time, and felt a slither as the meat popped into his mouth, followed by the buttery juices. It was heavenly, and he gasped with pleasure.

One by one, with varying degrees of squeamishness and dexterity, the other officers followed James’s example. Livia, however, seemed particularly interested in how James was doing. “There are more juices in the shell,” she instructed, watching him. He pushed his tongue in again, working the tip around the shell’s crevices until all the sauce was gone.

“That’s fantastic,” he breathed as he put the empty shell down. “Livia, you’re a genius.”

“Good,” she said. She sounded pleased. “Have another.”

When the snails were all gone she brought out a bowl of fresh peas, still in their pods. “Now, the way to eat peas,” she explained, “is quite like eating snails. You need to open the pod with your thumbs, like this.” She demonstrated. “And then you need to put your tongue in and lick the peas up with it, like this.”

James tried to copy her, but all the peas rolled off onto the floor.

“It’s a funny thing,” Jumbo said, “but when I was in officer selection, they used to tell us that there was a proper way to eat peas too. But that was something to do with using a knife.”

James tried again. This time he managed to lick up all the peas except the very last one, the smallest one at the very tip of the pod. “Can’t quite get the last one,” he complained.

“It’s the last one that’s important,” she said. “Trust me.”

Peas skittered over the table like tiny green marbles as the British officers tried to wrap their tongues around the elusive legumes. “Actually, the knife was a lot easier.” Jumbo sighed.

“Don’t worry; it comes with practice,” Livia said.

James waited until she was clearing the dishes, then followed her to the kitchen. “Livia,” he said, putting down the empty dish he was carrying, “what’s all this about snails and peas?”

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, they’re both very interesting. Let me put it like this. Sometimes it’s nice to have the peas first. Usually, though, you want to start with the snails, and then go on to a few peas, and then have a few snails again before you finish off the peas. But that’s when you have to be sure to get the last one in the pod.”

“Well, that’s as clear as mud.”

After lunch, though, when everything was quiet, she came to his room again, and suddenly it all did become clear. He realized then that the little cries of pleasure he had wrung from her previously were nothing compared to the shuddering, gasping spasms he could elicit when he went from snails to peas, then back to snails, and finally worked his tongue under the very last pea in the pod.

It had never occurred to James that bed could be such a good place for talking. Sometimes in the long afternoon hours of the siesta it was hard to tell exactly where the talking ended and the lovemaking began, and those were the very nicest afternoons of all.

To begin with there were the secrets all lovers share: When did you first decide, and what does it feel like when…And then there were their upbringings, the comparisons between two countries that were completely different but also in strange ways similar. There were the friends they had each lost to the war, and the gossip about their new friends in Naples. Livia turned out to be a very good mimic—her takeoff of Major Heathcote was quite brilliant, her only prop James’s army hat as she strutted up and down stark naked, lambasting him—“Captain Goo, you are a absaloo disgrease. Pull yoursel’two gather! You must be farm but fear wit dees Eyeties!” And then she would come back to bed, still laughing, and they would find other ways to continue the joke of his firmness with the Eyeties.

The body, he now understood, had its own language, somewhere between speech and silence. Sometimes it echoed the courtly, musical rhythms of Italian, at others the hard, urgent gutturals of Anglo-Saxon. And as with any language, one slowly became fluent, mastering the nuances, getting the accent right. There were so many unfamiliar intonations to practice: the gentle sibilance of a kiss, the delicate staccato of a tongue touching skin, the precise inflection of a gasp or moan—each one a complex burst of meanings, each one capable of being conjugated a dozen different ways.

In this language there were no phrase books and no dictionaries. You learnt to speak it by learning how to hear it, by trial and error, by saying back what had already been said to you. There was no one moment when you could say you’d finally got it, just a gradual realization that no translation was needed anymore—that what had been said was more important than how you’d said it, and that what you were doing together was not just sex, but the start of a long conversation.