Page 21 of Daughter of Genoa
‘I think that’s Nurse Dora,’ I said. ‘She’s the one who found me, when… you know. I don’t think I’d have survived if not for her.’
‘And you called her a wee girl,’ Silvia said reproachfully.
Bernardo protested, and the two of them fell into amicable bickering while I went back to looking at my card. I’d never seen a finished one before, and now I had one in my hand, and it was mine.This is what I’m working for,I thought, and the thought made me happier than I had been in a long time.This is my purpose.
*
Vittorio came the next morning with his black bag. He put the bag on the table, opened it and took out a slender purple-and-gold stole, which he kissed and laid reverently to one side. Then he reached in again and brought out a little brown-paper parcel. He held it out to me.
‘The list’s inside,’ he said. ‘But this is also for you. Mr X asked if I had anything for you to read, and this is the best I could manage.’
I opened the parcel and found a paperback novel: an Italian edition of Graham Greene’sBrighton Rock. The cover was a lurid affair with cars and guns and men in sharp suits, and the whole thing looked delightful.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thank you! Thank you, Father Vittorio.’
‘It washed up in our library, somehow – people bring us all kinds of things. I suppose Greene is a Catholic, at least. Thank you,’ Vittorio said as Silvia put a cup of tea on the table in front of him. He sat down and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. He seemed better than the last time I’d seen him, at least. But there was something about the set of his mouth I didn’t like, and his chest was rising and falling in a rapid, shallow rhythm.
‘Drink,’ Silvia ordered him, and he brought the cup to his lips and made a wry face.
‘There’s honey in this.’ It wasn’t quite a reproach.
‘Of course there is,’ she said. ‘And now get on with your work, the two of you, and I shall get on with mine.’
‘Very well. Let’s get started, shall we?’ Vittorio rubbed his hands together. ‘Now, Marta, I thought about trying a sophisticated system where you would tackle the first ten names on the list while I take the second, and then we would swap over and start again. But on reflection, perhaps we ought to carry on working in shifts, as we did before. We’ll tire quickly without breaks, and tiredness leads to sloppiness. What do you think?’
‘I agree,’ I said; and Silvia, who was knitting by the stove, nodded approvingly.
‘Good,’ Vittorio said. ‘Then I’ll let you take the first shift and perhaps drink another cup of tea.’
And so we embarked on our routine. It’s a strange thing, but I think of those mornings with Vittorio as one of the great constants of my life. It seems as if we spent months, years together in that way, working comfortably at right angles to one another. But it wasn’t like that at all; we had only a little time.
During the final stretch of that particular morning, while Vittorio was applying signatures to the last ten cards, I glanced over at Silvia and realised she’d fallen asleep with Tiberio curled upside down in her lap. I found myself wondering if she had stayed as a sort of chaperone: a way for Vittorio to be alone with a woman without infringing his Jesuit discipline. But is a chaperone still a chaperone if she’s unconscious? What would Ignatius of Loyola say about that? I smiled to imagine it, and then realised I was smiling and stopped.
Vittorio set down the last of the cards. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Another batch done. We are getting very efficient.’
The vivid cover of the paperback caught my eye. It was so very un-Jesuit. And yet Vittorio, who barely knew me, had lit on just my sort of book. Had Teglio told him something, even though he’d promised he wouldn’t? Was that even a real promise he’d made, or was it all part of his charming-Mr-X routine? I thought back to our first conversation and how I’d let my guard down with him, how I’d chatted on merrily about Conan Doyle and Machiavelli while he took notes in his head, and I felt suddenly exposed.
‘Have you read it?’ I asked before I even knew I was asking. ‘Brighton Rock, I mean.’
‘Oh. No. No, I haven’t read any Greene at all. But I have read his great preceptor, G.K. Chesterton. I enjoyed theFather Brownstories very much.’
‘Did you read them in Italian, or…’
‘In English.’ He was looking at the table, but he was smiling. A soft, involuntary smile. ‘I like to read in English.’
I have rehearsed that conversation so many times since then, playing it over in my mind. I should never have said what I said next. But I wanted to know exactly what he knew about me – what Teglio, whom I was already coming to like and to trust like I hadn’t dared to trust anyone in years, might have given away without my knowing.
‘Then we can speak English with one another.’
For one startling moment, his green eyes were fixed on mine. I knew then that Teglio hadn’t said anything about who I was. He had kept it all to himself, and I felt thoroughly disloyal.
Vittorio looked at the kitchen door and said: ‘Well, I… my English isn’t very good. Sorry. I try to speak when I can, but I have few chances.’
‘You speak it very nicely,’ I said. ‘How did you learn?’
‘I spent time in London many years ago. At Heythrop College, for my regency. After I was a novice,’ he explained – simplifying it, I suspect, so that I could understand. ‘But before I was a priest. And then also I have been to St Beuno’s in Wales, where was Gerard Manley Hopkins. I do not much like his poetry. But you speak better than I,’ he said, still talking to the door. ‘Like an Englishwoman, or perhaps not quite an Englishwoman.’
I hesitated for a moment, weighing up what to tell him. ‘My mother’s from Edinburgh,’ I said at last.
