The Wedding Officer

38

IN FACT, the eruption of Vesuvius in 1944 caused fewer casualties than anyone had a right to expect. The evacuation of over two thousand people from the area of Massa and San Sebastiano proceeded smoothly, thanks to the efficiency of the relief plans and the heroic efforts of hundreds of Allied volunteers who helped implement them. In San Sebastiano, which was almost completely destroyed, the lava eventually came to a halt only yards from the church, a clear sign—to the inhabitants at least—that the saint had once again intervened to protect his own. Many smaller villages and farms, however, were not so fortunate.

The fall of lapilli—the technical name for volcanic hail—continued off and on for eight days and nights, like some biblical plague, closing roads and making the whole area impassable. Then, with a final deafening roar, a great cloud of gas and ashes exploded thousands of feet into the air. Ten days after it had started, the eruption was over, the vast ash cloud drifting slowly southeast as far as Albania, where it contributed to some of the most spectacular sunsets anyone could remember. The top of Vesuvius, which had been smoking gently for more than two centuries, was now completely still, its peak truncated by around sixty feet.

Livia and Marisa applied a poultice to Nino’s shredded feet and hands, but although Marisa had braved the falling rocks to fetch a dozen bees to sting the skin around his wounds, he was beyond the reach of folk remedies. Soon he was in shock, running a temperature and thrashing around in sheets that were damp with his sweat. Livia sat up bathing him with salves, but there wasn’t enough water to cleanse the wounds properly, and he became increasingly delirious as time went on.

“I don’t know what else to do for him,” Marisa confessed as they watched him shiver. “I think the wounds are becoming infected.”

“How bad is it?”

Marisa hesitated. “It’s possible he’ll die.” Livia buried her face in her hands. “Livia, he needs a proper doctor. Burns are difficult.”

There was no way of getting him to Naples during the eruption. Even if there had been, the journey would have killed him.

“The only thing that can help him now is penicillin,” Marisa said. “But I don’t know where we could get hold of any.”

Livia smoothed a damp cloth over Nino’s shoulders. She knew someone who could supply her with penicillin, but it was too dreadful a prospect to contemplate.

All the next day, as her father’s condition worsened, she sat up with him. Gradually she watched him weaken, his thrashing replaced by terrible juddering tremors. The charred skin on his legs was slowly turning white. His breathing was shallow and fast as he drifted in and out of consciousness.

They were still effectively cut off from the outside world, marooned on their volcano by the endless expanse of gray clinkers, as surely as if they were castaways marooned on an island by the sea.

“I think he’s getting worse,” Marisa said. “I’m sorry, Livia. All I can do now is make him more comfortable.”

Livia made a decision. She stood up. “Wait here with him.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get him penicillin.”

The rocks had stopped falling, but gray ash and black volcanic grit covered everything—every plant and path, every tree, even filling the dried-up streams. It was like moving through a lunar landscape, utterly bereft of any features. Or perhaps, she thought, it was like a landscape from a dream, a world in which things that ought to be impossible suddenly take on their own inescapable logic.

I have no choice, she told herself as she trudged through the great gray drifts. I have no choice. For my father to live, this part of me has to die.

It was nearly a mile to the farmhouse where Alberto Spenza lived. It was an old place, very remote: a good place for the camorra to store contraband. She knew he would never have allowed himself to be evacuated, since it would have meant leaving all his black market spoils behind. Sure enough, she saw his Bugatti parked in a barn, although even there it had not escaped the eruption unscathed. Stones had broken through the roof and dented the paintwork, and the bonnet was covered in ash.

Alberto was cleaning his car with a cloth. When he saw her approaching he straightened up, though he said nothing.

She stopped in front of him. “I need some penicillin. Urgently.”

“Why?”

“That’s my business.”

“Then it’s my business too. Since it’s my penicillin.”

“I need it for my father.”

His fleshy lips made an “o.” “You know it’s expensive?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll need enough for a couple of weeks, if he’s very ill. How are you going to pay me?”

“We have some money saved up. You can have it.”

“Whatever you have saved, it won’t be enough.” He was playing with her, drawing it out. “But perhaps we could come to an arrangement.”

“What sort of arrangement?”

“That depends on how much you want the penicillin.”

“Alberto…” She hated to beg, but she had no choice. “Just let me have it, and I’ll pay you back somehow.”

“I don’t want your money, Livia.”

“What, then?”

He simply looked at her and waited.

She had known all along what his price would be, and she had come knowing she had no choice but to pay it. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do what you want.”

“Come inside.” He offered her his hand. After a moment’s hesitation she accepted it, and they walked together into the house.

In the kitchen he led her to his larder and threw open the door. It was full of every kind of luxury imaginable: foie gras, lobster bisque, jars of cassoulet and bottles of Armagnac.

“One of the advantages of fighting a war alongside the French,” he commented. “They still believe an officer should be fed in a way befitting his rank. And then, of course, there are the Russians.” He pointed to a small stack of tins. On the labels, under the strange backward-twisted script, was a picture of a fish. “Caviar.”

“I don’t know what to do with any of this,” Livia said helplessly. “I’ve never cooked with these things before.” She felt a sense of panic as she thought of Nino, his temperature creeping ever upward. She just wanted to do what she had to and leave with the penicillin, but she knew that if she made her impatience obvious Alberto would spin it out even longer.

“Use the caviar as a sauce for maccheroni. And the foie gras can be seared, like a steak.”

She fetched a pan in which to boil water for the pasta, then opened the tins. The foie gras, when she tasted it, was so rich it almost made her gag, while the caviar was oily, sweet and very salty. She added some butter and nutmeg, but otherwise she kept the accompaniments to a minimum.

All the time she cooked she was aware of Alberto watching her. Avoiding his gaze, she tried to lose herself in the familiar rituals of the kitchen: stirring, seasoning, heating. Anything was better than dwelling on what she was going to have to do.

“It’s ready,” she said at last.

“Lay two places. Today you’re joining me.”

She set two places at the table. On his plate she placed a huge mountain of pasta, while on hers she put just a spoonful.

“Why so little?” he asked.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Perhaps one of the other courses will be more to your liking.” He leered.

He had opened a bottle of French wine, and now he poured two glasses and pushed one toward her. Then he tucked a napkin into his shirt and began forking the pasta into his mouth with exclamations of pleasure.

“To the cook,” he said, raising his glass. He drank without bothering to finish his mouthful of food first.

He continued to work his way through the huge pile of pasta, washing it all down with frequent refills of wine. “The goose liver too,” he grunted. “I’ll have them both at once.”

She went and got the seared foie gras from the stove. Alberto took a forkful of meat, following it with another mouthful of pasta and a swig of wine. He rolled a mound of pasta onto his fork and pointed it at her. “Now you.”

“Me? Now?”

“Why not? Today I’m going to have all three courses together.” He gestured at the table. “I’m sure you know what to do.”

As if she were watching someone else, Livia saw herself get up from her chair and pull her dress over her head. When she was naked she climbed onto the table. After that she forced herself not to think about anything at all.

When it was over she went to the sink and rinsed her mouth out with his fancy French wine.

Alberto got to his feet and went to the larder. He took out a small package, and tossed it to her. “Your penicillin.”

She looked at it. “But this is only one ampoule,” she objected. “You said yourself, I need enough for at least two weeks.”

Deep in his eyes, she saw a glint of triumph—the triumph of a man who knows he has come off best from a deal. “Then you’ll just have to come back tomorrow.”

“And tomorrow you’ll give me the rest?”

“No,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll give you one more. And the day after that, another one.”

“You pig,” she said furiously.

He reached out and pushed his thick fingers through her hair. “You should be flattered, Livia. You are the one dish a man can eat and eat, but never have enough of.”

She was almost home when she felt the waves of nausea overwhelm her. She bent double beside the path and vomited Alberto’s rich food into the volcanic grit and ash.

Nino, in his delirium, felt the prick in his arm, and then Livia’s soft hair brushing his cheek as she bent over him. “Shh,” she said. “It’s only another bee sting. A bee sting. It’ll make you better.”

The airfield was cut off from the outside world for the duration of the eruption, with even the radio producing nothing but howling static and garbled, hiss-swallowed voices. Then, as the lapilli storm eased, contact began to be reestablished. Faint voices from Naples promised that bulldozers had begun the job of clearing the roads, but the reports also made it clear that the job of getting back to normal was going to be a long one. An area of twenty square miles had been blanketed with clinkers. Roofs had collapsed under their weight. Vineyards had been flattened, crops destroyed, livestock wiped out. People spoke of seeing villages half submerged, their roofs poking out of the black stones as if they had sunk into the ground. And that was in addition to the damage done by the lava itself, which had melted the tracks of the funicular railway as well as burning the towns and villages in its path.

James found himself in the unaccustomed position of being considered something of a hero. Quite apart from the fact that he had been ready with an evacuation plan, the story of his epic journey from San Sebastiano to Terzigno was, apparently, becoming the stuff of local legend.

“You know what these Eyeties are like,” Major Heathcote explained by radio link. “Superstition and miracles at every turn. Now they’re saying that to get to Terzigno, you must have flown over the lava. The fact that it’s quite impossible just makes it a better story as far as they’re concerned. Anyway, although you and I both know that you were simply doing your job, the Germans are making a big deal out of the fact that our side had to bomb some monastery or other at Cassino, and it can only help our relations with the Italians to have saved so many civilians from Vesuvius. We’re going to organize a little ceremony, with a news photographer there to picture the general shaking your hand. You might even get a ribbon.”

“Really sir, there’s no need—”

“I know, Gould. Everyone hates a fuss, but the Bureau are insisting.”

It was gratifying, but the only thing he could think about was whether Livia was safe, and if so where she was. To begin with, he assumed that Fiscino must have been evacuated along with the other villages. Then he began to hear stories of one group of Vesuviani who had refused to leave.

Not knowing for sure whether she was among them was agony. His love for Livia up until then had been a thing of sunshine and optimism. Now the fear that she might be injured or even dead filled him for the first time with all love’s terrors. He had been mad, he realized, to let her go from his side, even for a minute. But he was trapped both by the volcano and his orders. He waited impatiently for the roads to reopen so that he could go and check on her.

If she’s all right, he promised himself, I will ask her to marry me. Even if we have to keep it a secret from the rest of the world, she needs to know how I feel.

Nino was no better, and no worse. Day by day, like two armies battling it out deep in his blood, the infection and the antibiotics struggled for supremacy. To begin with, the contest was too close to call. But gradually, the fact that he was no longer deteriorating was in itself a sign that the infection was not following its usual course, and Marisa became more hopeful.

Every day that week, Livia went back to Alberto Spenza. Every day she kept her part of the bargain, and every day he handed her one more ampoule of penicillin.

By the fifth day, she no longer felt sick afterward. It was simply what she did.

Back at Fiscino, she went to the room where Marisa was sitting by Nino’s bedside.

“He’s sleeping,” her sister whispered.

Carefully Livia prepared the precious syringe of penicillin, and slid the needle into her father’s shoulder.

For the first time he opened eyes that were not vacant with fever, and saw Livia beside his bed. He smiled at her. “Hello,” he murmured. “What are you doing?” He twisted his head to look.

“Shh,” she said soothingly. “It’s only another bee sting.” When the syringe was empty she pulled it from his shoulder quickly, so that he wouldn’t see what she was doing. Moments later he was asleep again.

“He looks well,” she said, softly, so as not to wake him.

“He’s getting better,” Marisa agreed.

“Can we stop the penicillin now?”

Marisa shook her head. “If the infection comes back because we’ve stopped too soon, it will kill him for sure.”

“How long?”

“It depends how strong he is. Another few days. A week, perhaps.” She shot her sister an anxious look. “Perhaps it depends how strong you are.”

“I can do this,” Livia said angrily. “I can do whatever I need to do to save him.”

“He wouldn’t want you to blame yourself.”

“Maybe not. But the fact remains, it was my fault. It was I who wanted to stay and dig, instead of going with the soldiers.” She felt the tears spring to her eyes, and wondered that she had any left to cry. “If it takes another week of penicillin to save him, then a week of penicillin is what he’ll have.”

She could barely even begin to think about what would happen when he did get better, and what the consequences of her deal with Alberto would be. It was, she suspected, probably going to change everything. That was part of the price. All she knew was that it was all her fault. She had forfeited any right she might have ever had to be happy.

At last a bulldozer from Naples reached the airfield, opening up the road to Vesuvius. James immediately applied for leave. His request was granted, and he was even loaned a four-wheel-drive jeep, courtesy of a grateful Fifth Army.

Most of the routes up the mountain were still blocked, and it was only when he gave a lift to some refugees returning to San Sebastiano, who showed him the hidden tracks that led through the woods, that James was able to get to Fiscino. As he neared the village he realized that one of the lava flows had come very close to it. Several of the houses had been damaged, and he felt a great pressure in his chest as he realized that one of them had been the osteria. But then he could see Livia, picking through the debris, and he was out of the jeep and running toward her, calling her name.

“So you see,” he explained, “if it hadn’t been for you, I would never have come up with the plan, and if it wasn’t for the plan, hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of people would have been caught on the mountain.”

“Well done,” she said. “You must be pleased.”

She seemed strangely subdued, even allowing for the fact that her home had been damaged. “But you were really all right here?” he asked anxiously.

“As I told you, my father was the only one who was badly burnt. He had a fever, and for a while we thought we might lose him, but he’s getting better now, thank God. Marisa’s been looking after him.”

“You’ve all had a lucky escape.”

“Yes, I suppose we have.”

She was barely meeting his eye, and she hadn’t even kissed him. He wondered if she was angry that he hadn’t come to look for her. “I tried to get here sooner,” he said. “But then the rockfalls started, and no one could move.”

“We had them too.”

“But you were really all right?”

She shrugged. “We coped.”

“Livia,” he said gently, “aren’t you even a little pleased to see me?”

“Of course,” she said. “But now I have to prepare my father’s lunch. He’s staying at our neighbor’s house, over there.”

As he walked across to the other house with her he said, “I’ve got a few days’ leave.”

“That’s good.”

“I could stay here. If you’d like me to, that is. To help you clear up.”

“People would talk.”

“Does it really matter if they do?”

“Not to you, perhaps,” she snapped.

“You are cross with me. Livia, what’s wrong?”

She shrugged miserably. “You can stay if you like.”

“Really?” he said, confused. “You do want me to?”

“I want you to.”

His heart lifted. She was just upset because of what had happened, not with him.

When she had given her father his lunch, James took her for a walk. As he put his arm around her he felt her flinch. Hopefully, he thought, what he was about to say would give her something to be happy about.

“You know,” he said, “it’s possible that all this may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.”

“Why?”

“I’m fairly sure there’ll be compensation to rehouse your family somewhere else, because of this.”

“What do you mean, somewhere else?” she said with sudden anger.

“Well, now that the osteria has been damaged, you can consider where the best place to situate yourself really is—”

“We’re already situated here,” she snapped. “This is where we live.”

“But if you simply repair the damage here,” he explained patiently, “sooner or later there’ll be another eruption, and next time your family might not be so lucky.”

She gazed out over the pine woods toward the sea. “Yes, we have been lucky,” she said quietly, “but not because we were spared. We were lucky because we lived here in the first place.”

“I understand,” he said, not understanding, “but now there’s the future to consider. Staying here would hardly be a sensible—”

“Why would I want to be sensible?” she cried. “I told you once, one life here is worth ten lived somewhere else. And if you don’t see that, you’re simply an idiot.”

He was flummoxed, and just a little angry, though he tried not to show it. To the rest of the world he might be a hero, but to Livia he seemed to have become the lowest of the low. “Well, that’s you Italians all over,” he said drily. “Always choosing the grand gesture over common sense.” He searched for the most hurtful thing he could think of. “Just bear in mind that next time, the Allies might not be around to clear up your mess.”

She laughed scornfully. “We managed perfectly well before you came, thank you very much.”

They were rowing now, and he couldn’t understand the cause. “Livia,” he said patiently, “let’s not quarrel. I’m desperately sorry about your father, and the damage to your restaurant, but you must surely see that it opens up choices you didn’t have before—”

“You mean I could choose to come to England,” she snapped.

It was exactly what he meant, though he had been intending to work up to it gradually. “So that’s what this is about, is it?” he said stiffly. “You were worried that I might use this eruption as an excuse to propose to you and drag you away from all this. Well, you needn’t have any fears on that score.”

“Good. Because I can’t think of anything worse.”

She had gone too far, and she knew it. But she was too miserable to tell him why she was so miserable, and she made no move to stop him as he strode angrily to the jeep, climbed into the driver’s seat and set off down the mountain in a spray of volcanic stones.

She watched him go. A tear sprang to her eye and she blinked it angrily away. Then she got to her feet and began to walk down the grit-filled path that led through the woods.

She found Alberto sitting at his kitchen table, waiting for her. The aroma of fresh coffee filled the house, and a full napoletana sat on the table, along with a bottle of brandy, but Alberto was unshaven, as if he had been sitting there a long time.

She knew what was expected of her by now, and she went to the larder to see what he had chosen for her to cook. But he stopped her with an outstretched arm.

“I’m not hungry.”

She kicked off her shoes and began to undo the buttons of her dress.

“You can leave your dress on.”

She stopped, and lifted the dress up so that she could unfasten her drawers. “That’s not what I meant, either.” Abruptly he got up, went to the larder and handed her a fistful of penicillin ampoules. “Here. Take them, if you want them so much.”

“All of them?”

“They’re a gift.”

“Thank you.” She reached for her shoes, to put them on again. “So I can go?”

“If you want to. All I ask…All I ask is that you come back sometime of your own free will.”

“Alberto,” she said, “you know that’s not going to happen.”

His eyes flashed. “Then come back and pretend. Pretend that you’re not simply here because you have to be.” He gestured at the ampoules in her hand. “You can have all those, but just remember what I did for you.”

For a moment she hesitated. Then she leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

By the time James reached the bottom of the mountain his anger had turned to misery. He had mishandled the situation completely. He had had no choice but to go to Terzigno on the day of the eruption, but he had failed to explain that properly to Livia. He would have done better to let her vent her feelings of anger at being abandoned, rather than retaliating as he had done. But he had been stung more deeply than he had let on by that sarcastic reference to taking her back to England.

He had known for a long time that what Livia and he had together was more than just a wartime love affair. Livia’s English, it was true, was idiosyncratic, but he had vetted plenty of girls whose command of the language was much worse, and language, after all, could be learnt. It was also true that Livia would experience a culture shock in England. The England he knew, with its dried-egg rations, Woolton pies, National Dried Milk and margarine would never do for her. But after the war, things would surely start to change, and it was only reasonable to expect a wife to make certain sacrifices for the chance of a better life.

But Livia, it seemed, had not been thinking along the same lines at all. For a moment there was the awful suspicion that he was just a stopgap, that any Allied officer with a good job to offer and occupation money in his pocket might have been an equally acceptable cushion during these difficult years. He had thought she loved him—no, he knew she loved him. But the fact remained that in wartime Naples, with its atmosphere of fleeting intimacy and casual sex, love had come to them easily—much more easily than it would have done at home. Perhaps it had all been too easy. After the war, when a more conventional morality reestablished itself, would they actually discover they had the basis for a life together? Or would a relationship that had so far been based almost entirely in the bedroom and the kitchen turn out to be inadequate for an English drawing room, and the whole grown-up, practical business of married life? Had she, in short, done him a favor by choking off the proposal he had been about to make?

Her reaction today had thrown him. Livia’s volatility, which had always been part of the reason he loved her, suddenly seemed as alien and perplexing as the flavors of an Italian meal. He had vetted so many women as prospective war brides; yet when it came to making up his own mind, he was suddenly assailed by doubts.

Livia sat by a window, watching the sun set over the Bay of Naples and thinking. She had been sitting like this for over an hour.

Despite her misery, she had been telling the truth when she told James that she couldn’t be a war bride. There was no way she could leave here now, when so much had to be done. She and James had, at best, until the end of the war together, and then he would go back to England without her. What would happen after that she didn’t know, but it was clear to her that her first duty was somehow to help her father rebuild the farm and the restaurant, to provide for him in his old age.

But quite apart from that, it was not going to work with James. She saw that now. The locked box in her mind where she was shutting away her dealings with Alberto was already refusing to stay locked. What she had done would always be there, seeping its poison into their relationship. She either had to tell James everything, or accept that it was over.

But to tell him everything was simply another way of ending it. She thought back to Enzo, how he had hated it when another man so much as looked at her. James was outwardly less possessive, but he was still a man, and a man moreover with strong views on sexual conduct. However much he sympathized with the women he dealt with in Naples, the women who had prostituted themselves, she knew that he would never have allowed himself to fall in love with one of them.

No, it was going to end, and she would probably be lucky if she even ended up having someone like Alberto to fall back on.

The only choice she had now was of how it would end. Would she tell James about Alberto, and have it finish in anger and recrimination, or would she simply tell him it was over, and spare herself the added pain of a confession?

She watched the sun slipping under the sea, turning the sky to fire. Her eyes filled with tears, spilled and filled again.

She made a sudden decision. Jumping to her feet, she went in search of paper and a pen.