The Villa in Italy. Elizabeth Edmondson
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been before the war. He had spent a fortnight there in the languorous hot days of 1938, guest of a fellow scientist, unusual for being of a background and wealth quite unlike most scientists.
His host, he recalled, had gone on to enjoy a distinguished war, adviser to Churchill, honours, position.
And, no doubt, a sound digestion and a good conscience, and the ability to sleep at night. Any destruction he had wrought on his fellow human beings had been a remote affair, a matter of memos and committees and impersonal, reasoned decisions.
I should have been a biologist, George told himself. Or a botanist, what harm had botanists ever done to anyone? Would he ever have imagined, as a bony boy, that his passion for mathematics could bring him to a state of such despair? His first teacher had warned him how it might be. ‘Numbers will get the better of you, George; you will never be able to escape them. They will be the master, not you.’
Prophetic words, if only uttered to take a brilliant youngster down a peg or two.
Lulled by the steady rhythm of the train, George slept despite himself, overcome by sheer exhaustion. And for once his sleep wasn’t trampled on by the hobgoblins of the past; he slept soundly and dreamlessly, and awoke to find the sun straining through the blind, and the conducteur rapping at the door to tell him that they would soon be arriving in Nice, and that petit déjeuner was being served in the restaurant car.
‘Take your passport with you, monsieur. It is not far to the border.’
There was something about borders, Marjorie told herself as she made her way along swaying corridors to the restaurant car for her petit déjeuner. Red and white poles and no man’s land and customs and officials, and the knowledge that you were passing from one country to an entirely different one.
The restaurant car was surprisingly full; who would have thought there would be so many people travelling to Italy at this time of the year? A waiter hurried forward, shrugging deprecatingly. Madame would sit here, if the gentleman permitted, a fellow English traveller…
Marjorie looked at the seat, where a tall, balding man in round spectacles was staring out of the window. The waiter coughed, and the man turned his head, looking at Marjorie with dark, intelligent eyes.
George saw the nervous, bony face of a woman whom he would have known anywhere in the world for an Englishwoman. He half rose, made a little bow. ‘Of course, please…’ with his usual courtesy, although he would have preferred to have his table to himself, not to share it with a woman who would doubtless feel obliged to make conversation. It was odd how English people had reverted to their old habits of reserve and suspicion after the war. Conversations with strangers at bus stops and on trains, being invited in for a cup of tea by neighbours you had never spoken to before, the very unEnglish sense of camaraderie—all of that had vanished. While queues and saving string and old envelopes had stayed. It was very odd.
Marjorie was eyeing the basket of croissants and brioches and fresh rolls in a hungry manner. ‘Please,’ he said, passing Marjorie the basket; she took a croissant, and sat back to allow the waiter to pour her coffee.
How long would he be staying in Italy? The lawyer had been vague. ‘In fact, Dr Helsinger, I have to admit that I know little about Italian legal procedures. It might be a few days, or perhaps longer. There are other interested parties who will be arriving at the Villa Dante, one of them is an American, and of course I have no idea as to his movements or time of arrival. Since the late Mrs Malaspina specified that all the beneficiaries of her will should be brought together at the villa, we must abide by the conditions she laid down.’
‘Then there are other people going to Italy from England?’
The lawyer’s face had taken on a shuttered look. ‘I think I can say yes, but of course under no circumstances can I divulge any details of anyone else named in the will. That would be most improper.’
‘No, indeed, quite improper,’ George said, at once annoyed with himself for being drawn into the kind of language this stiff-necked lawyer used.
‘Delicious,’ Marjorie said. ‘One has forgotten how food should taste.’
They talked in a polite and distant way about France, France before the war, Paris in the thirties, when George had been a student there, Paris now, as they had glimpsed it during their brief time in the city.
‘I, too,’ George said, ‘was only able to stay one night and I should have liked to stay longer. To revisit old haunts, although of course nothing will be quite the same as it was. It is impossible that it should be.’
‘Are you travelling on business?’ Marjorie asked.
She had torn a roll apart—why did the English rip at their bread, instead of dissecting it neatly with a knife?—and was spreading it liberally with butter.
‘Personal business,’ he said.
‘Not work. You don’t look like a businessman.’
He was startled. What did he look like? He was wearing a suit, a concession to the purpose of his journey. What was there to mark him out as different from his fellow men?
‘You look as though you lived by your brains. I see you in a laboratory. Not smells, though, or germs. Too much equipment around you. Are you a scientist?’
Now he was even more startled. ‘As it happens, yes. But I find it strange that you can tell. Have we perhaps met…?’
‘No.’ She was quite definite. ‘I’d remember it if we had. Although during the war one met so many people, nearly all of them strangers.’
‘So, then, there is something about me that marks me out as a scientist. What would that be?’
Marjorie added a spoonful of raspberry jam to her roll and took a mouthful.
George waited.
‘It just came into my head that was what you are,’ she said eventually, giving her mouth a determined wipe with her napkin. ‘It sometimes does. Are you at a university, or do you work for a company? Or are you that mysterious thing, a government scientist?’
The habit of secrecy was so ingrained in George that he found this impossible to answer. ‘I do scientific research’ sounded lame, but it was the best he could manage. ‘And you, are you travelling for pleasure?’
‘Hardly likely or possible, with the sum the government allows us for travel. No, I, too, am here on personal business.’
‘Are you going to Rome?’
‘No, I shall leave the train at a place called La Spezia. Do you know Italy? Is it a pleasant town?’
‘A naval port, I believe. Heavily bombed during the war. I have never been there.’
Marjorie seemed to lose interest, her eyes focusing on the scenery outside the window. ‘It’s very pretty along here. The hills and the sea. Very dramatic. I’m not staying at La Spezia, so I’m not really interested in what it’s like. One just says these things, in a conversational way, does one not?’
She picked up her handbag from the seat where she had laid it. It was, he noticed, very shabby, but once it had been an expensive bag. Crocodile. He guessed that she wasn’t in comfortable circumstances; there was something of a child with its nose pressed against a shop window about her. She did not look as though she were accustomed to travel of this kind.
Well, she would get off the train at La Spezia, as would he, and vanish to catch her train or bus, or be met by an aunt or a friend, and he would not see her again.
She was holding out her hand. ‘Thank you for letting me share your table. Goodbye.’
She was walking away; too thin, and why didn’t she hold herself straighter? Then she stopped and looked back at him, a faintly puzzled look on her face.
‘Does the name Beatrice Malaspina mean anything to you?’
He was so surprised that he dropped his