About Voice of Destiny

Lucia Visconti is feted in opera houses around the world. But it has been a long and arduous journey to the top and her personal life is a disaster…

Born to an Australian father and Italian mother in the Mallee country in the 1920’s, Lucia is taken to Italy by her mother shortly before World War II. Trained at the word-famous Toscanini Conservatorium, she survives the horrors of war to become the world’s greatest dramatic soprano.

But she quarrels with her domineering mother, and spends years separated from her true love, while accusations of wartime collaboration threaten to destroy her reputation.

It is only when she discovers the love she can truly give to others that Lucia is able to come to terms with her own past.

Inspired by the lives of great singers such as Maria Callas, in a superb piece of storytelling Voice of Destiny lays bare what it means to be a woman and an artist in a world in conflict.

CONTENTS

About Voice of Destiny

Dedication

Epigraph

PROLOGUE

Part One

THE MOTHER 1917–1936

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

Part Two

THE STUDENT 1936–1946

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Part Three

THE DIVA 1946–1980

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Part Four

BEYOND THE CURTAIN 1980

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

About JH Fletcher

Also by JH Fletcher

Copyright

This one is for Max

Il mio destino è questo: O morte o amor!

(My destiny is either love or death!)

Arrigo Boito (La Gioconda)

PROLOGUE

The ten-minute bell started to ring.

Ten minutes, Lucia thought. Ten minutes to the last curtain of her life.

As she had done so many times, Lucia examined herself carefully in the wall mirror: the make-up of the young courtesan, the scarlet satin dress with the fitted bodice and elaborate floor-length skirt of mid-nineteenth century French fashion.

This, too, was for the last time.

Beyond tonight’s performance of La Traviata, the tempest of Violetta’s ecstasy and despair, beyond the applause and tears, the roses and adulation, lay …

Blackness. Of the unknown; of being unknown. She wondered how she would live with it.

There was a knock on the dressing-room door.

Lucia frowned; her foibles were well known and one of them was that never should she be disturbed before the start of a performance. There had been times when she would simply have ignored the knock, others when she would have yanked open the door and blasted whoever it was for disturbing her concentration. Even after a performance, come to that. A US county sheriff had tried that in Chicago, years before, and the picture of her lambasting him had gone around the world. On the other hand, tonight’s performance was the last she would ever give. From tomorrow there would be no more room for foibles. Perhaps tonight was time to start practising her tolerance and humility. Humility …

She almost laughed. That would be the day. ‘Come!’

Otto, her secretary for many years, a tall, spare, grey-haired man clad in self-effacement and a beautifully tailored dinner jacket to suit the occasion, stuck his head cautiously around the dressing-room door.

Tolerant or not, she still gave him one of her looks. Opera buffs might worship her but she had her hellcat side, too. Over the years Otto had grown used to her ways, and a smile, at this stage of the evening, would have troubled him more than a scowl. ‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Full house! Jammed to the roof!’

It was no surprise. Every ticket had been snatched up weeks before, within minutes of the box office opening; it was not every day, after all, that Sydney farewelled one of opera’s greatest performers. One of their own, what was more, despite everything. Today’s Telegraph had assured its readers that, Italian background or not, Lucia Visconti was as Aussie as meat pie. Controversial at one stage of her career, oh yes, but … WE LOVES YER! the headline had screamed and it seemed they did: all the more, apparently, for having spent the last thirty-two years flying the flag — if that was what she’d been doing — in every major opera house in the world.

No, it was no surprise, but quite a change from how it had been only five years before, when the auditorium had been packed with enemies as well as friends, each as vociferous as the other. There had been punch-ups all over the house that night, a near riot on the steps outside. Afterwards she’d heard the police had come close to using tear gas: all in a country that prided itself, without a hint of irony, on the individual’s right to self-expression.

It was all over now, all forgiven and forgotten. Or so it seemed, but there were times when Lucia found it hard either to forgive or forget. Tonight, in particular, Khieu Pen was very close. So many lives, so much waste and terror and ruin. And for what? Khieu Pen, who had been her friend … She sighed, returning to the present with Otto, who was almost girlish with delight.

‘It’s going to be huge, I tell you. Huge!’

‘That’s good.’

She even managed a smile: razor-edged, it was true, but still a smile. She asked: ‘Television?’

‘The lot. Overseas teams as well. Whole stack of them.’

Which was gratifying, of course, but no real surprise, either. Australia’s commercial channels had never been into art, least of all opera, but from the moment she had first stepped onto the professional stage Lucia Visconti had been big news.

Otto coughed diffidently and pulled a typewritten page from his dinner jacket pocket. ‘They’ll expect you to say something at the end. I thought this might help.’

She took the proffered notes but did not look at them.

‘So long as you’re not expecting me to sing “There’s No Place Like Home”.’

It had become something of a tradition — Nellie Melba had sung it at one of her oh-so-numerous last performances during the 1920’s — but Lucia Visconti made her own traditions and had never seen herself as a ballad singer.

She tossed Otto’s notes on top of the dressing table; they both knew that, if she said anything at all tonight, it would be whatever came to her at the time. As she had lived, so would she go out: her own woman.

Admittedly, there had been times when she had wavered in that resolve. No-one had ever called her promiscuous but there had been one or two men before whom she had stripped emotionally, as well as physically. Harry Lassiter, Jacques Mazetta her first true love and, finally, out of all the dozens who had pursued her in recent years — an old woman, in her late fifties! — Denzil Ryan. Government minister and prize ratbag. She had given him her trust and love and look where it had got her.

‘I wonder if that bastard will be in the house tonight.’

No need to say whom she meant. Otto did not answer, which was wise of him. Not that it mattered now; it was a comfort to know that she, who once had hung on his smile, no longer cared whether Denzil was there or not.

‘I’m going to have a look at the house,’ she said, and saw Otto’s glance of surprise. Another breach of tradition: her own, this time. She had always believed it was unlucky to look at the audience before making her first stage entry but it would make little difference now.

‘They’ll love me to death tonight, whatever I do.’

Which didn’t mean she didn’t want a genuine triumph: anything less would demean the career that from the time she was thirteen years old had been the focus of her every thought. Nevertheless, now might be a good time to start reining in the superstitions that until this moment had played so large a role in her life.

She checked herself once more in the big mirror. Now for the final ritual of touching with her fingertips the good luck painting on the wall of her dressing room. It was a miniature by the Persian painter Bihzad, quite valuable, or so she’d been told. Two robed figures sat beneath a flowering tree; its pigments shone like gems. A friend had given it to her, years ago, and she took it everywhere. It was centuries old but it had picked up its latest legend only ten years before, when she had decided it brought her luck.

All artists were superstitious and, from that moment on, it had been a regular feature of her dressing room. On one occasion she had been performing in Vienna, having flown there from Milan, and somehow, she never knew how, the miniature had been left behind. She’d found out only on the evening before the premiere. Catastrophe! It was out of the question for her to go on without it, so she’d arranged for it to be collected from La Scala and flown over to her. It had cost Lucia a packet but had been worth it. The performance — Anna Bolena — had been one of her best.

There’d be no more performances to worry about after tonight but she would still keep the Bihzad by her, wherever she was. Good luck wasn’t to be sneezed at.

She swept out of the dressing room with Otto at her heels. With so much going on there was an iron rule that the cast, even the stars, should approach the stage only when cued, but tonight Lucia could make her own rules. She went to the peephole at the side of the stage. One of the hands stepped back politely when he saw her. It was one of the privileges of being a diva: the world always stood back for you.

And tomorrow? Lucia thought. What will the world do then?

She looked out at the auditorium. A packed house, indeed, the stalls bright with evening gowns, the sober affluence of dinner suits. Lucia studied the faces carefully. Brendan Hicks, the former PM, was in the second row, surrounded by his usual mob of sycophants; she recognised the blow-dried hair and fleshy face at once. He’d been chucked out at the last election, which showed there was some justice in the world, but she’d known he would turn up. When it came to music, Brendan was as knowledgeable as a chair leg but he loved the cameras and there would be no shortage of those tonight. She only hoped he didn’t snore. Of Denzil she could see nothing.

‘Five minutes to curtain.’

The murmured caution circulated, adding to the tension. In the backstage spaces, the air quivered expectantly. From the front of the house, the orchestra’s zoo-like noises died into silence.

The house lights went down.

Stillness.

The eyes of the chorus showed white in the shadows.

Lucia thought: All this for the last time.

Still she waited, no longer apart in the star’s dressing room but here, with the rest of the cast. I should have done this more often, she thought. It’s something I’ve missed.

Too late now.

A burst of applause from the audience as Sir Georg Solti came to the rostrum. Lucia watched as he raised his baton.

The strings’ soft entrance heralded the beginning of La Traviata, the opera she had chosen to end her career.

She watched the sweeping baton draw glory out of the breath-held silence. Dear Georg. They had been mates for years, since she had performed Mahler’s Eighth with him in Munich. She had asked him to conduct her final performance and he had agreed, rescheduling his commitments and flying all the way from Europe to please her. ‘And myself, too,’ he had assured her earlier that day.

The overture was timed for just under four minutes; when it ended, the curtain would rise to discover the revellers, herself among them, at the ball where Violetta meets Alfredo Germont and takes her first gay and uncaring steps towards catastrophe.

Behind the curtain all was soft movement as the cast took up position on stage.

A minute’s wait. Time for nervousness to claw. Lucia permitted herself to show nothing of the stage fright that had gripped her, too. The last time … The overture ended. Amid applause, full-bodied but still decorous, the curtain rose.

Images, inextricably mixed:

Violetta, no longer Lucia, tremulous between doubt and joy, fearing the commitment that she makes in full measure.

Oh gioia ch’io non conobbi, esser amata amando …

To love and be loved …

Time and again the applause came crashing, breaking the action, mutilating the music; the awareness of virtue draining from herself Violetta, from herself the messenger; her stage clothes drenched with sweat; changing costumes and make-up, she had always been noted for the stark realism of her Violetta’s darkly shadowed and haggard face, the tubercular woman doomed in health, doomed in happiness, doomed in love, the woman betrayed by love, lover, herself; the applause coming in like the tide, bursting higher, higher still, the sense of adoration flowing out of the darkness to surround her; she, alone, in a wilderness of yearning and sublimation and despair: Violetta and Lucia and the music, love denied, love fulfilled, and addio del passato. Violetta’s last words. Farewell to all that is gone.

And it was indeed gone, over, finished amid the tears and acclamations, Solti holding her hand aloft to the audience that loved her, that worshipped her, and herself alone on the stage accepting their adoration with modestly inclined head and practised humility.

Silence, expectant and still adoring. Lucia Visconti, the great artist, even perhaps the woman, one with the audience and the music’s sonorous aftermath.

She looked out at the faces in a blurring of tears. She could not speak, knew that the throat that had contained such beauty would close if she attempted a word. Instead she raised her hands to the audience as though to draw them close to her in acknowledgement and acceptance of their love, while her smile mimed helplessness. A man’s voice shouted from the auditorium.

‘You are opera!’

A crash of cheering, of approval, and Lucia found that she could speak after all. ‘No!’

Silence returned, as deafening as the applause.

‘I am not opera. No-one is. Opera is art, and beyond any of us. We do not own it; we are its servants. It is a hard master, sometimes very hard. It demands of us all we have to give, more than we believe is possible. It drives us, crushes us, at the last uplifts us. It is pain and despair and glory. And it is you, the audience but so much more than that, the participants in the greatest of all rituals, the creation and sharing that is art’s essence, who uplift and sustain us. Because without you, without the opportunity that you give us to share it with you, there would be no art. So it is I who should acknowledge you, pay homage to you.’ The words came instinctively. And instinct it was that caused her to kneel before them now, arms outstretched in obeisance, amid the tribute of flowers covering the stage, while the audience rose stamping and shouting and weeping. And at last, truly …

It was finished.

Lucia could scarcely gather the strength to make her way through the mob of smiling, loving faces to her dressing room. The door was open. The room was packed with more flowers, more adoring faces, more voices and cheers battering and battering until she wished that she could have driven all — well-wishers, opera house, herself — into oblivion.

Brendan Hicks was centre-stage, the politician predictable in his publicity grabbing antics and self-regard. He grabbed her, embracing her, and she caught a whiff — more than a whiff — of stale cologne and fresh whisky.

‘The empress of all divas!’

She smiled at him as the flash bulbs exploded around them.

‘And I always thought you were a republican,’ she said, feeling the lingering imprint of his damp palms on her shoulders. And managed to get away: one of the less-vaunted skills of the prima donna.

It was at best a temporary escape. At once others were after her, the voracious slavering of media men and self-proclaimed personalities, hangers-on in merciless battalions.

Juliet Jones, host of a current affairs chat show, sharp in red and black, cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘Your choice of tonight’s opera. La Traviata: the woman betrayed. Is that how you see yourself?’ Bitch. No shortage of brain, there. Give Juliet a heart and she might have been a whole woman.

‘Nothing to do with myself. I chose it in tribute to my mother, because without her I might not have had a career at all.’

Determined to stifle any reference to Denzil Ryan, Lucia spoke more sharply than she’d intended. Juliet’s ears were fine-tuned to nuance; she honed her eyes and tongue.

‘Yet your mother isn’t here tonight.’

‘She couldn’t make it. She’s not a young woman.’

‘She’s saying she wasn’t invited.’

Lucia laughed: not for nothing was she known as much for her acting as her voice.

‘Since when does my mother need an invitation to attend one of my performances?’

Again she turned away, cutting off what was rapidly becoming an interview, but there was no escape. Within seconds someone else was on her, and someone after him. Eventually it was Solti who rescued her, white-faced, reeling with fatigue.

‘Madame Visconti thanks you all for coming. She loves you with all her heart. But she has another appointment. And the police say there is a huge crowd waiting for her outside the opera house.’ They got rid of them eventually.

‘Thank you. Thank you …’

It seemed she’d said it a thousand times before the last of them had been eased out of the door. Behind them was wreckage: glasses half full or broken, plates clean and dirty, the remains of the buffet that the opera management had provided.

Lucia looked about her.

‘Oh dear!’

Georg, considerate as ever, shook his head.

‘Don’t worry. They’ll soon clear it up.’

Lucia smiled brightly.

‘Of course.’

But they wouldn’t, because what Lucia was looking at was not the wreckage of a party but of thirty-two years of her life. Georg, bald and tanned, left to go to his own dressing room, while Benedetta, generous heart in a generous body, the middle-aged dresser who had been with her fifteen years, was trying to organise the forests of flowers. Each was a token of love but Lucia couldn’t keep them, however much she might wish it. Love might be joy but was seldom very practical.

‘Arrange with the opera house to have them sent to the hospitals.’ First, though, Benedetta had to help her out of her costume. Lucia looked at her in the mirror as she did so.

‘It’s ridiculous, I know, but I’m so exhausted I really don’t think I could have taken it off by myself.’

There was no time for a bath; that would have to wait until she was back in the apartment. Benedetta removed her wig, creamed her face and sponged her down. Lucia put on lipstick and eyeshadow, very modest after the earlier theatrical make-up. She tidied her hair. Between them they got her into her Balenciaga-inspired gown, ordered especially for the occasion: silver, with a standaway collar to emphasise her long neck, and three-quarter sleeves, accentuating her height. She gave her reflection a critical look. She was still pale. She was beginning to look her age, she decided, but with her chestnut hair still lustrous, her enormous sapphire eyes and pronounced cheekbones, she hoped she might still be thought interesting by some. She smiled ruefully at Benedetta.

‘Better not keep my public waiting.’

She left the dressing room — the last time? — and went to meet the conductor. With Otto’s shadow behind them, they walked out of the stage door — the last time? — into pandemonium.

Somehow they got away at last, with Lucia besieged by love that was its own exhausting burden. There was a car waiting. They piled in and drove to the quay where a launch was waiting to ferry them to Hector Godolphin’s yacht, which she knew from previous visits. The yacht was lit up like a Christmas tree in mid-harbour. Hector was both tycoon and barbarian. He would not have known a stave of music had one poked him in the eye but, like Brendan Hicks, knew the value of publicity and had put on a party for Lucia aboard the yacht that the media — his media — had described as Australia’s answer to Monte Carlo. Lucia told herself she would have preferred to go straight to the apartment, have a long bath, hit the sheets and sleep, but in truth it was not how she felt at all. She was obsessed by images of emptiness, of one life ended with only uncertainty to take its place. For the moment she was not sure about anything.

Hector Godolphin was introducing her to one of his co-directors.

‘Harry Dann …’

‘Good evening.’

Someone else, a face she thought she recognised.

‘Ruth Ballard …’

Of course. The writer. Another celebrity, then. But writers, presumably, could practise their craft in solitude. How I wish, she thought, but knew she would have hated it.

In the distance she caught a glimpse of an even more illustrious author. Patrick White, she thought. What a sour-faced bitch. Always sneering at functions like this yet somehow always managing to be there.

There was dinner: caviar flown from Russia, salmon from Scotland, price no object where Hector Godolphin’s ego was concerned.

‘I won’t be able to manage a mouthful …’ Did so, all the same, washing it down with champagne that no doubt had also been imported.

Do we have to import everything? she wondered. Do we have nothing of our own? She saw Ruth Ballard on the other side of the table and thought yes, there at least was one genuinely Australian product. And I? she asked herself. Part Australian, part Italian, wholly international like all musicians. What am I?

And had no answer.

After dinner they wanted her to sing but she would not.

‘I am not a cabaret performer.’

Hector tried to pressure her. She turned on him.

‘Those who went to the opera have heard enough for one night.’

‘And the others?’

‘Missed their chance, didn’t they? They can go without.’

Georg Solti, who had appointed himself her escort for the evening, took her home eventually. It was past two but still she wanted him to come in. He would not.

‘I’m not a young man any longer, Lucia. I need my sleep.’

She closed the door on him. She was alone. Her head rang with music and memories.

What had that cow Juliet Jones said tonight?

The woman betrayed. Is that how you see yourself?

Lucia popped a bottle of champagne and poured herself a glass; she didn’t drink much, as a rule, but tonight seemed the night for it. She walked onto the balcony, kicked off her shoes and lay back in a lounger, feeling the soothing coolness of the breeze, watching the lights on the far side of the harbour.

La Traviata: the woman led astray.

She wasn’t a fool. Others besides Juliet Jones would believe she’d chosen the opera to get back at Denzil Ryan. Of course he had betrayed her but Juliet and the rest were way out if they imagined she would dignify him by confessing such a thing in public. No, she had told Juliet the truth. She, the greatest dramatic actress in opera, had chosen it for her mother because her story, too, had been one of the highest drama. The libretto of Traviata contained more bathos even than most operas, yet there were similarities between it and her mother’s own experience. To that extent it provided some explanation for the way she had sought to control her daughter’s life and the endless friction that had existed between them because of it.

La Traviata: the woman led astray. Oh yes. No doubt of its original meaning: the harlot — at home in society but a harlot nonetheless — whose lifestyle brought upon her the tragedy that consumed her, no doubt to the moral gratification of the audiences of the day. Serve her right: that was what many would have said, although some of the men would have contributed to her downfall, had they had the opportunity.

It was a title resonant with ambiguities. Lucia liked to believe that Piave, the librettist, had intended it to have another meaning altogether. If he had …

The cobbled streets are bright with excitement, the clatter of hooves and iron-shod wheels. Through the windows of the stone-faced mansions that line both sides of the street shines the tender brilliance of candlelight from a hundred chandeliers. Several of these houses are holding receptions of one sort or another. Elegantly dressed women, many young and beautiful, are accompanied by men resplendent in cloaks lined with scarlet silk, their shirt fronts bejewelled with decorations. In chattering groups, in pairs, they dismount from their carriages and enter the open doorways past liveried footmen who wear the powdered wigs of an earlier century. The jangling street absorbs the mingled sounds of music and laughter.

The woman, Violetta Valéry, enters the grandest of all the mansions in this street of grand mansions. She is a courtesan, twenty-three years old and the toast of those — all men, mostly rich, some young — who frequent the world of Violetta Valéry and others of her trade. She is on the arm of Alfredo, a young man whom she met two weeks before at another party. She is tubercular and in love.

For anyone in Violetta’s business, love is a dangerous delusion. At their previous meeting Alfredo told her he was tormented by his longings for her, but her world is full of young men who talk like that and at the time she laughed at him. Far better to remain free, she told him, to make the most of life’s pleasures while she is still young enough to enjoy them. Yet he pressed her and when he begged her to accompany him to this ball that will be attended by some of the biggest names in the city, she agreed. She is still teasing him as they enter the vast reception hall, warm and full of the scent of banked flowers, but is aware that her own feelings have been captured by this man whose protestations of love she now finds herself wanting so much to believe.

During the ball her feelings for him deepen and when Alfredo urges her to go away with him, she agrees. They find a house in the country and settle down to an idyllic life together. But, despite their happiness, there is a problem. Alfredo has no money and Violetta has been dipping into her savings in order to keep them. Now, three months later, she has exhausted her funds and is forced to explain the position. Tormented by guilt at her sacrifice, Alfredo leaves for the city, where he hopes to raise money. In his absence Violetta is visited by his father. Alfredo’s relationship with a woman of Violetta’s reputation has put his sister’s marriage into question. The father appeals to her to give Alfredo up. At first Violetta is scornful but eventually he persuades her. She agrees to leave his son. When Alfredo finds out, he is distraught but it is too late. Violetta has gone. His father attempts to console him but Alfredo will not listen. He leaves the old man standing there and gallops pell-mell to the city, determined to find Violetta and win her back. Eventually he does but, once again, it is too late. Violetta’s illness, re-inflamed by poverty and emotional stress, overwhelms her and she dies.

Well.

Lucia drained the last of her glass. She got up, went into the bathroom and began to draw herself a bath.

Melodrama, indeed. Yet, if her alternative and perhaps anarchic thought were correct, Violetta — the woman led astray — had erred not because of her choice of career but for permitting herself to fall in love with Alfredo, a man from a background vastly different from her own, and to pin her future life and happiness on her being able to make a success of it.

Just as her own mother, Helena Sforza, had when, at the end of the First World War, she married an Australian airman in search of freedom and travelled sixteen thousand kilometres with him to the eucalypt-choked wastes of the Victorian mallee and to the reality of the life that had awaited her in that distant and arid place.

That was how her own destiny began, Lucia thought. In the Italy of her mother’s youth, during the closing years of World War I.

Part One

THE MOTHER

1917–1936

CHAPTER ONE

1

Helena Sforza, tall, ardent, hair like a black flame, left her aunt’s house a little after daybreak and rode her mount across the stream and down the steep flank of the hill into the pine woods. The air was sharp with the scent of the trees, the slope steepened ahead of her and the noise of the torrent was loud in her ears. Her companion said, ‘It’s still not too late to change your mind.’ Helena did not answer. Guido disapproved of her going, especially in such a fashion. She had not asked for her cousin’s company but he rode with her anyway.

There was a long-barrelled pistol in his saddle holster and the silver-chased scattergun that had been his father’s was slung across his shoulders; for Helena’s sake, Guido would have been willing to take on the whole of the Austro-Hungarian army that rumour said was loose in the mountains ahead of them. He would keep her company as far as the track that was the only road. It led northwards through the forest to Tolmino, or Tolminska, as their Slovene neighbours called it: this was frontier country and turbulent, like most frontiers. If they were lucky, they would reach the track in time to meet Michelangelo and his cart, as he made his twice-weekly journey into town with vegetables for the market: it would take more than a war to stop Michelangelo from doing what he had done now for fifty years. He would take Helena on to her parents’ farmhouse, while Guido would go back with the horses.

The November air was cold up here in the mountains. A chilly rain began to fall as the two cousins followed the stream down the steeply plunging slope. Helena drew her coat collar closer about her neck. She was wearing a pair of her cousin’s breeches and rode astride, partly because it made sense but mainly because she had known it would scandalise her aunt.

It would have been hard to say who was the more pleased to see her go: the fifty-something woman who looked for stillness and obedience in her niece, or the eighteen-year-old who was prepared to offer neither.

Helena had been a visitor, by arrangement, for three weeks now. There was talk of a battle coming in the mountains outside Tolmino and her parents had wanted her out of the house, for safety. So she had come here, to her aunt’s farm, which was even more remote than their own, but the two women — each wilful and dominant by nature — had fought each other from the first. Last night’s argument about nothing, about everything, had put the cap on things.

‘You are a guest in this house. Respect: that is what I require. And for you to come with me to Mass on Sundays.’

Because her niece, black eyes flashing, would not, or at least had not.

‘Guido needed help with the calf.’

‘That is man’s work.’ And then the edict: ‘You will come next week.’

Helena did not answer, which was answer enough. She walked out of the house and went to the stables, where Guido was working.

‘Will you lend me a horse?’

‘It’s not safe to go back by yourself.’

Nevertheless she would go, and both of them knew it.

‘I will come with you.’

He had been kind and she knew how fond of her he was. That was why she was willing to grant the concession, if it would make him happy.

‘As far as the track, if you like.’

He wanted to take her all the way but to this she would not agree: she was not a parcel to be delivered. She would make her own way.

‘To the track.’

They reached the track at a point where it passed through a deep cutting made by the centuries-old passage of cartwheels. The ground rose steeply on either side, closing them in so that they could hear nothing but the hooves of the horses, then the track regained the high ground. The vastness of the Tolmino valley lay before them. In the distance the mountains were a wall of grey and white against the sky and for the first time they heard the distant rumble of the guns.

They reined in the horses.

The rain had eased but the sky was murkier than ever. In the gloom, they could see the yellow flashes of artillery fire.

‘It’s not safe.’

‘You’ve already told me that.’

‘I’d be happier if you changed your mind.’

She did not answer; both of them knew she would not.

‘Then I shall wait here with you until the cart arrives.’

Guido delivered his ultimatum fiercely, daring her to challenge him. She would have liked him to believe it made no difference to her whether he stayed or not but in truth she was glad of his company, not because of his opinion that an unescorted woman could soon find herself in trouble, but because it was more dignified to wait in the saddle for Michelangelo’s cart than to stand like a waif beside the track in the rain that had once again begun to fall. They were too far away to see troop movements but she could visualise very clearly what was happening down in the valley: the trudging columns of men with their ponchos and rifles, bodies shapeless with the ammunition pouches that each man carried on his belt. Several times during the last two years she had seen the soldiers, first of one army, then the other, marching behind the snub-nosed howitzers along the poplar-bordered lanes that ran down the valley to the town below her parents’ farm. Neither side had bothered them, nor would: or so her pepper-hot father always said.

‘Any of those bastards sets foot on my land, he’ll be leaving a lot quicker than he came.’

As though he really believed he could drive off an army at the end of his gun. He sounded convincing enough, but had still packed his daughter off to his sister-in-law for safe-keeping.

And now, battle or no battle, she was going back. She was unrepentant. Why should they bother us? she asked herself. Let them mind their business and we’ll mind ours. Like father, like daughter, she thought, laughing out loud both at herself and with relief that she was free at last from Guido’s harridan mother.

Guido looked at her, smiling uncertainly, and she felt affection for this man, four years older yet in some ways much younger than herself, who was armed like a bandit yet so docile underneath. She gestured towards the mountains, sharing memory like a reward.

‘You remember how we went up there together?’

It was ten years ago; it was yesterday. The day after her eighth birthday the two of them had made the long climb up from the valley to the ridge of Razor Mountain, with its views of the distant Adriatic swooning in haze. It was spring and the alpine meadows were covered with crocuses, snowdrops, narcissi, peonies, cyclamen and orchids of various kinds. As the track grew steep, rock showed through the turf, and on either side the ground fell into chasms where streams raged downhill, their waters grey with ice-melt. Just before they reached the ridge, they saw an eagle sailing on outspread wings. They stood and looked at the world far below, the black-white world of rock and ice, the green rectangles of fields in the valley. She had been tired, the track seemingly endless; but at the top she was exultant. It was the first time she had measured herself against something outside herself and won. The sense of winning filled her with delight.

‘I carried you on my back on the way down.’

So he had. ‘Not all the way, though.’

Exhausted though she had been, she had insisted on getting down and walking through the village and then up the path between overgrown banks to the farmhouse. She knew Guido had thought it was because she had regained her strength but the real reason had been because she wanted people to believe she had been all the way to the top and back without help.

Now memory was displaced as her mount pricked its ears.

‘Listen!’

The creak and clang of the labouring cart came clearly through the wet air. Soon they saw, cresting the rise, the lop-eared mules, the open cart heaped with vegetables, the driver hunched on the bench, the reins jerking as he harried the team onwards through puddles that gave rain-pocked reflection to the grey sky. They could hear the creaking of the wheels and the old man’s harsh voice urging the mules. Between them they made enough noise to drown the distant sound of the guns. Perhaps that was what Michelangelo meant to do, Helena thought: to use routine to shut out the reality of the war. Neither guns nor war existed because he willed them not to exist. She was the same. Shielded by the same wilful disregard of reality, she was returning to a world where there were neither guns nor danger, soldiers nor war, because she refused to acknowledge them. ‘We must go on. That’s it. We have to deny any other possibility. Then, perhaps, it won’t exist for us at all.’

She saw Guido’s expression and realised she had spoken aloud. No matter; she was determined that her own reality should overcome that other reality of battle and guns and death.

Neither of them moved as the cart trundled towards them. Helena did not look at Michelangelo, whom she had known as long as she could remember or even longer. The old man, creased face and hunched shoulders on the driving bench of his laden cart, was as much a part of her awareness as the mountains, pine woods and fields that gave expression and framework to her life, all of them part of both past and future, of the unceasing circle of lives and seasons that made up eternity. Nor did Michelangelo look at her. Faded eyes fixed somewhere in the distance, he seemed not to see her at all. Nevertheless the mules drew to a standstill and were at once asleep, like identical pieces of brown rock.

Helena dismounted, took the reins forward over her horse’s head and handed them to Guido. She unfastened the leather straps that secured her suitcase behind the saddle, then lifted it into the back of the cart among the cabbages, Michelangelo not raising a hand to help her. She did not kiss her cousin but touched his knee before climbing onto the bench beside the driver. Michelangelo flicked the reins against the necks of the mules, who stood for a moment longer, seemingly inert, before breaking once again into their hypnotic gait. The cart settled to its rhythmic clatter. Guido, motionless in the saddle, hand raised to the broad brim of his hat, was gone. Helena did not look back.

‘Guns.’ She did not look at Michelangelo as she spoke.

‘For three days now.’

‘Any fighting?’

He did not answer, as though the concept were beyond his ability to comprehend or discuss.

Instead his gaze settled upon the white-capped mountains blocking the distant horizon. His cape sheltered all of him save the rain-dewed moustache drooping low over his mouth. From beneath his hood he cocked an eye at the downpour, daring it to dispute his assessment. ‘Cold winter coming. No fun being a soldier in the snow.’ He cackled a little, seemingly delighted by the misfortunes of others. ‘Not any time, I’d say.’

Helena did not answer, nor did he speak again. The mules drew the cart ever onwards. The rain-shiny track pointed the way towards the valley still partially hidden behind the shoulder of the mountain. The steady creaking of the cart enclosed them, cutting them off — cart and mules, man and woman, cabbages, potatoes and cauliflowers heaped in the wooden bed behind them — from a world inconceivable and outrageous. The cart crested another rise. Ahead of them the flank of the mountain drew back like a curtain to reveal the ordered shapes of cultivated ground, the bare soil darkly furrowed and gleaming in the rain.

‘Your folks’ll be glad to see you.’

Helena was not so sure, her father was not a man to be crossed even in something like this, but she said nothing. Again Michelangelo cackled, a man who knew her father as well as or perhaps better than she did.

‘Onion tarts tonight, I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe pork dumplings, too, if you’re lucky.’

These were the things they understood, the things that mattered: the possibility of early snow, the moist furrowed earth, the long gun that had been her great-grandfather’s, its barrel tightly bound with wire, standing ready as always behind her father’s chair, the food in the warm kitchen to welcome her return.

Pork dumplings, Helena thought. A shift in the wind threw a splatter of rain into her face. For the first time since leaving her aunt’s house, she felt hungry. Perhaps they would have them, at that. Onion tarts, too, as Michelangelo had said. If she was lucky.

The track had straightened. Now they were heading up the final slope before the descent to the village, with her father’s farm standing on the crest of the hill above it.

Michelangelo said: ‘Be there directly.’

She had been away many times before, yet something — perhaps the proximity of the war, perhaps the constant squalling with her aunt — gave her a sense of added urgency, as though now she was so close she could not bear to contemplate the last half-hour before she would be home. Memories …

She thought of the wood fire burning on its platform in the farmhouse, above it the cavernous chimney with a copper cauldron full of water suspended from chains. In the winter, when the world outside the farmhouse walls was white, the fire burned all the time, the flames forming a red and gold barrier against the frost, and the room was acrid with wood smoke. The stone floors scrubbed white, the brass-ornamented door of the big cooking stove gleaming. In the furthest recesses of her memory Helena could just recall the figure of her grandmother, dressed in black — headscarf, gathered skirt very full, satin apron — sitting as stiff as starch with her knees almost touching the brass rail around the stove. In her memory the old woman never moves or speaks, a ghost-like image, a face carved in deep furrows by eighty years of weather. It is a face of mystery and silence, stern as the countryside itself is stern. Stern and bitterly cold, with the burja, a wind so ferocious that it has been known to upset carts. People said it would cut the eyelids off anyone left to face it overnight. As a child she was always being threatened with that: to be locked out in the burja, to face the bitter morning with eyes staring and filled with blood, her eyelids sliced away, her cheeks brittle with ice. But her thoughts lingered in the kitchen now, its smell — of polish, warmth, food, life — contrasting with the seldom used and forbidding parlour, its high-backed chairs as cosy as carabinieri, the air stiff with probity and dust.

All of it the recognition of who, and what, she was.

Even the individual rocks along the sides of the track were familiar to her now. That slope there, with outcrops of rock like grey teeth through the turf, was where she broke her wrist one winter’s day when her sledge overturned. That corner beneath the overhang was where she found the orchids. There …

While the cart seemed to stand still behind the swaying rumps of the mules, the crest itself advanced towards them as though it and not the cart were in motion. Four hundred metres. Three. One. Through her skirt Helena felt the sharp edge of the bench cutting the underside of her thighs as she leaned forward, waiting for the moment when absence would be repealed at last and she would be able to see …

Pork dumplings, she thought, then shook her head. Anyone would think she was the biggest glutton in the mountains, yet she hardly ever thought about what she ate or when. It was not the food itself; it was the idea of the food in the polished and wood smoke-smelling kitchen that brought to her on the rain-drenched mountainside the security and continuity of home.

Fifty metres.

The mules had been labouring doggedly, their feet splashing and slipping in mud that was more water than soil. Now, as they crested the rise, their movement eased and Helena saw the ground fall away in front of her, the valley lying open at her feet.

Afterwards she always remembered how her first sight of home had been the valley, inert and sombre in the rain, the stillness of the countryside familiar and unchanged, tranquil, when all the while …

Michelangelo was looking ahead of the cart as he had since the moment she had first climbed up beside him yet now there was a new quality to his regard, an alertness in the way he sat forward abruptly on the bench, that drew her questioning eyes first to him, then to the valley to seek out what it was that he had seen. Even then she did not see it at first, obvious though it was, as though mind and therefore eyes refused to take in what lay before them.

Michelangelo pointed.

‘Smoke!’

The village was burning, the fire consuming the buildings not in explosive excitement but slowly and implacably, the surly flames orange and black-edged beneath the blows of the rain. Many roofs were already gone, walls had fallen here and there, while smoke rolled in an ominous cloud above the gutted buildings. There was no sign of movement, either of animals or men.

‘There’s no-one there. No-one’s fighting the fire at all.’

There was outrage in Helena’s voice, as though the absence of the people was more monstrous than the fire itself. For the moment her only concern was how such a thing could be. She had still not seen what reason told her she must see. Then Michelangelo’s hand gripped her arm tightly and instinct told her she could defer reality no longer.

She turned her head to look at the knoll above the town where her parents’ farmhouse lay hidden behind a screen of trees and saw a column of smoke standing, rain-smudged, above the foliage.

A silence akin to disbelief fell not so much upon her tongue as her spirit, yet it was not disbelief she felt but the cold certainty that her home, like her village, was on fire, that everything that it represented was gone, that belief in her own inviolability was lost with the burning buildings and the people who had lived in them. With the silence came rage and the wish to kill.

At her side, Michelangelo was on his feet, lashing the reins against the necks and backs of the mules. Responding to his sudden fury, they picked up their feet and galloped down the hill with the cart clattering and swaying behind them.

2

Marija’s sharp features were smeared with soot and tears, her torn dress pocked with brown-edged holes where the sparks had fallen on her. Dark eyes working constantly, the nine-year-old child tried to tell Helena what had happened.

Her own mother had been working in the farm kitchen, giving Helena’s mother a hand as she did every day. The child had been at the back of the chicken house when she had first seen the men.

‘In grey uniforms. With guns and helmets. Like this.’

With her hands she sketched the outline of a helmet around her own head, the shape low across the neck and covering the ears.

‘Germans?’

It was the first she had heard of German troops being in the district but the helmet shape was unmistakable.

‘They were on bicycles. They came into the chicken house.’

‘Did they see you?’

‘No. I hid in the hay shed.’ Her furiously blinking eyes were shadowed by the memory of what she had seen, then and later. What she still saw.

The men — tall, purposeful, clattering in heavy boots — were in a hurry. They snatched at eggs, at the hens that exploded about the shed in an outrage of squawks and feathers. They grabbed what they could and ran. Through the shed’s open doorway Marija saw the bicycles stacked in the hedge. The men went to them, hens dangling from their fists. There was a sudden gunshot, a spurt of grey smoke as, from the open window of the house on the other side of the cobbled yard, someone fired at the soldiers. One of the men cried out, staggered, then fell. The other soldiers threw themselves down, sheltering behind this wall or that. With the same purpose they showed in the hen house, they returned the fire, chips of stone flying from the walls of the farmhouse as the bullets struck. The soldiers ran full-tilt, they crashed through the door, there were screams, shouts, a rattle of shots, a window exploding outwards. Silence, while Marija watched in terror from the shadows. Afterwards …

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Try.’

Weeping, face screwed up. ‘I can’t.’

The evidence before Helena’s eyes said it plainly enough. What was left of Marija’s mother lay sprawl-legged, eyes staring, skirt yanked high. Blood had pooled between the naked thighs. She had been used, no doubt more than once, then shot.

The farmhouse, roof fallen in a debris of sparks and burning rafters, kept its secrets. But Helena knew, while the flames consumed what was left of furniture, of memories, that her parents, too, were gone. The flames were consuming her future as well as her past. Because where could she go?

The war was nothing to do with her: she had said it and believed it, as had everyone she knew. So stupid! Look what had happened: the village gone, the farmhouse gone, the people gone. The Helena who had believed herself insulated from the processes of war was also gone, with the self-deception that had created her.

What remained was an eighteen-year-old woman, alone and unprotected, seeing before her the evidence of what happened to unprotected women in times of war.

I must get out of here.

Then she saw the frightened face of the child and at once amended her thought. I must get us both away. Because there was no limit to brutality in this new and terrible world where the safety even of children could not be taken for granted. She would go to the village where there might, perhaps, be survivors. Where there might be soldiers, too. Her eyes did not wish to see, yet were once again drawn to the blood-caked thighs. No, she would not dare go to the village. She thought: Michelangelo. She took out of her suitcase the few possessions she could carry and put them in a cloth bag that she hung about her neck. She led Marija away down the lane. The child did not ask where they were going, nor did Helena tell her what in any case she did not know. Two zombies, they walked side by side from lives that existed no longer: from the burned house, her dead parents, Marija’s dead mother, themselves. Into emptiness.

As though they had planned it, she met Michelangelo’s cart coming back up the hill. Again he seemed not to see her. He said nothing but drew to a stop at her side. She lifted the child into the back of the cart still full of the vegetables that he had intended to sell in that world that now was gone for ever. She climbed onto the driver’s bench. It was as though she had never been away at all, yet in that interval the world had changed. She had seen neither soldiers nor villagers, she had received no explanations of any kind, yet life …

What life?

Behind them, on the far side of the valley shrouded in rain and smoke, the invisible artillery roared its challenge at the world.

3

The highlands into which they now came were a wilderness of stone, a land seemingly far older than the soft lands of the valley. The scattering of people, semi-nomadic like the black-faced flocks they herded across the steep slopes, were hard; as the crags like eyries, the gorges shrouded by mist, were hard. Hard and old. Here, even the children were old, as wild as the sheep, with the secrets of the centuries locked behind their eyes. They climbed until it seemed their heads must touch the rain-swollen clouds. The clop of hooves, the clatter of the swaying cart that before had seemed so loud, were lost in the indifferent vastness of peat and rock and water, as the humans themselves were lost. Helena found herself watching from the corners of her eyes a desolation whose very emptiness was a threat, while Marija whimpered, pressing herself against the back of the driver’s bench. Only Michelangelo, who lived on a patch of fertile ground in one of the alpine coombs ringed by hills, was at home here. He spat over the side of the cart. ‘Have to eat my own vegetables for a bit.’

Water and cabbages and maybe an occasional cut of lamb: Helena could believe that others in this region were used to less.

‘You and the child can stay overnight, if you want. Have to sleep on the floor, mind.’

Which was his way of saying they could stay no longer. They were into the cloud now. They passed a group of shepherds, as wild-looking and ragged as their flocks. The men stood at the side of the track and did not acknowledge the cart’s presence in any way. Then the cloud swallowed them and they were gone. Helena thought that they had looked savage enough to eat them all alive. Alarm overwhelmed the stunned disbelief that had paralysed her since her first sight of the burning farmhouse. She wondered how she and the child, strangers in this wild place, would get on in the morning, yet the anxiety did not last. She was too tired to worry about such things. They would go on, because they must.

4

Soon the track began to go down. The mules picked up speed over the descent, sensing a full hopper at journey’s end; Michelangelo brought them to a halt before the stone dwelling and the darkness of its open doorway, the door itself battered and devoid of paint, giving no hint of what lay within. He turned, looking for the first time directly at the face of the young woman seated on the bench beside him. ‘Get on into the house. You’ll find my woman in there. She’ll see to you while I deal with the mules and these cursed vegetables.’ It was the first Helena had heard of any woman.

‘I wouldn’t want to be any trouble.’

His voice overrode her objection: ‘Go. Go!’

Inside, lamplight formed a tranquil pool amid the darkness. Helena and the child stood side by side near an ancient bed, while Michelangelo’s woman stood at the stove, ferociously attacking the steaming contents of a metal pot. Michelangelo followed them in with a load from the wood-pile in his arms. He tipped the logs into the corner and the woman spoke at once, without turning her head. ‘Good. We needed some.’ She bent swiftly, taking two logs and pushing them into the glowing firebox.

‘They can stay here overnight. In the corner,’ she said, as though she’d been both expecting and resenting them, the strangers bringing with them echoes of unwelcome change.

‘I’ve already told them that.’

‘They’ll need blankets.’

‘I told you we don’t want to be any trouble,’ said Helena.

The woman at the stove ignored her protest just as she ignored the unseemly spectacle of a woman in breeches. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she asked.

Michelangelo answered: ‘The soldiers burned the village.’

Helena nodded. ‘That’s right. And the farmhouse. My parents are dead. We’ve nowhere to go.’

‘In the morning he’ll take you over the mountain to the road on the other side,’ the woman said. ‘Perhaps you’ll find someone there to take you further.’

Nobody suggested where that may be; that was tomorrow’s problem, and Helena’s. Michelangelo left to see to his mules and his vegetables, and the woman turned back to the stove.

5

After a night when exhaustion had drowned fear and grief, the light came silently.

The woman got off the bed, put on the same black skirt and blouse as the previous day and dragged her grey scrag of hair into an untidy knot on the back of her neck. She went out to the lean-to at the back of the house and then took the cow to the pasture. When she came back, Helena said: ‘I would like to help. If I may.’

The woman ignored her, raking the firebox, laying and lighting the new fire. Again Helena said: ‘I would like to help. Please.’

‘I’ve done this for nigh on fifty years. I don’t need no-one showing me how it should be done. Nor get under my feet while they’re doing it.’

And clanged the pots ferociously to threaten the new day.

‘Out of my way!’

She fetched a broom and bucket of water and began to sweep the dirt floor with short, angry strokes, chucking water, careless of whether they got wet or not.

Helena took Marija outside. The rain had stopped during the night and the sky was clear, the air cold in this high place, and she remembered Michelangelo’s prophecy of snow. Michelangelo followed them out, grouchy and unspeaking, scratching his furred chest. He squinted at the pale sky before disappearing behind the back of the house.

Marija looked up at Helena.

‘Are we staying here?’

‘No.’

‘Where are we going?’

Helena didn’t know but her pride would not allow her to think about it. Michelangelo, a peasant, had told her they could not stay here. Very well. She was only eighteen but she was a Sforza. She would not plead, or tolerate in Marija the fear she would not acknowledge in herself. ‘Don’t be afraid. We shall manage very well.’

The woman thrust her head out of the doorway behind them. ‘Come and eat.’

There was coffee and bread, coarse and hard.

Then: ‘Michelangelo will take you to the road.’

Helena would not permit herself to doubt. As a child on her way back after climbing the mountain, she had insisted on walking rather than permit the villagers to see how weary she was; the same courage sustained her now. She set her lips.

‘Very well.’

She heard the clop of hooves and rumble of wheels as Michelangelo brought the cart out of the shed. They went outside. She lifted Marija into the back of the cart, where a few vegetables remained. She clambered up on the driver’s bench. She stared ahead of her. She did not speak. Like Michelangelo’s woman, her expression became one of stone.

6

Michelangelo dropped them at the place where the track joined the road. They had seen no-one since leaving the coomb. The road itself, little more than a lane flanked by poplars, was also empty.

He looked down at them standing in the muddy lane and pointed south. ‘Head that way.’

Helena refused to speak. Since the catastrophe of the burning village, her jaw felt as though it had been cemented shut. She had been thinking of going to her aunt’s, which was in the other direction, but she would not talk about it, or anything, to this man who had chosen to abandon them, it might be, to their deaths.

Perhaps he read her thoughts. He said: ‘Go the other way, you’ll likely run into the soldiers. Here, take some vegetables. You may need them.’

She did not move, so he threw them down beside her: a cabbage, a cauliflower, a handful of late nuts. She put into her voice all the arrogance she could muster.

‘Thank your wife.’

If wife was what she was.

He raised the hand holding the reins. She could not have said whether it was a gesture of farewell or to convey a message to the mules. The cart broke into its arthritic movement. Side by side, she and Marija watched it head back up the track into the mountains. Only when it was out of sight did she bend to pick up the vegetables he had thrown down to them. She turned to the child.

‘We’d best be getting along. We’ve a way to go before dark.’

CHAPTER TWO

1

Water was Ted Fisher’s god. Small wonder, when he’d been born two hundred miles south of Lake Eyre, the driest corner of the driest continent on earth. He wouldn’t have put it like that; most of the time he wasn’t even conscious of it. A harsh land: that he knew, in his bones and blood, in the earliest awareness of his being. Beautiful, too, to those who could read the beauty in the stone, the distant blink of salt pans, the sunsets flooding sky and plain with a pink seemingly too fragile for the harsh and empty landscape. Not that he would have dreamed of saying such a thing. Ted, tall and spare, with pale, almost colourless eyes and a shock of tow-coloured hair, wouldn’t have had the words. He’d never been much of a talker. As for opening up his feelings to anyone else …

Forget it.

There was something else that first the boy and then the man knew: that the vastness, like the preciousness of water, and the heat and dust, was a fundamental part of life, both a freedom and a jail. The emptiness that gave him breath also imprisoned him. There was so much he did not know, out there beyond the emptiness. He was brought up on the cattle station where his father worked as mechanic, horse doctor, roustabout, a jack-of-all-trades as bleached and taciturn as the land itself. The station was vast, without boundaries either physical or psychological to separate it from the even greater vastness beyond its borders. That was all there was: the emptiness that was life, the ache that was also life and that said to him: Out there …

Out there was what took him, when the time came. His mother, driven scatty by loneliness, had taken off when Ted was twelve. Six years later his dad died in a fool accident with a runaway horse. Driven by an impulse that was more than a simple longing for water yet had all the characteristics of thirst, he travelled the hundred and some empty miles to the recruiting office where he agreed to fight for a king and country of which he knew nothing and another country, his own, that he knew hardly better than he knew the king. They sent him first to a dust-and fly-plagued camp, then to France, a name on a map as Sydney and Melbourne were names on a map. In France he found water in abundance, and other things.

2

Ted knew he was lucky to be alive, although there were times when he wondered whether the dead were not the truly lucky ones in a world where death was the only constant.

Yet this life was what he had chosen. Chosen twice. And continued to choose, every day: because there was always the alternative. Everyone in the squadron had come to recognise the look on the faces of men who, beneath the grins and cheery acceptance of danger, had reached the point of fracture. The signs were as recognisable as death itself and, like death, came in several guises. The nerve twitching beneath the eye; the fingernails bitten until they bled; the fingers that drummed unconsciously, incessantly, on knee or table or the air itself. Afterwards there was the aircraft that crashed on take-off or landing or that, unwounded, fell like a shot bird out of the sky, spiralling earthwards, deathwards, the fragile wings of cloth and wire ripping away under the stresses of the dive until that moment of fiery immolation when aircraft and pilot broke and burned upon the ground. There was yet another way: the solitary pilot taking on an enemy flight, diving with blazing guns into a dogfight as brief as it was hopeless, with death as the inevitable and welcome consequence.

So many ways since he had enlisted at the beginning of the war. That had been the first choice. He’d hoped to see the world, had found mud. Mud and death, which had been a novelty then, like the endlessly falling rain that was a strange sight to a man from the desert, where rain once a year was something to crow about.

To begin with there’d been no fear; that had come later. He had been made a machine gunner, promoted to corporal, and in 1915 had been offered the chance to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.

In those days the planes had been so fragile that a dirty look was all it took to knock them out of the sky.

‘Go up in one of them things? I’d have to be crazy.’

Nevertheless, he had gone, to get away from the trenches, the mud, the clatter and hot stink of the machine gun that obliterated the enemy as efficiently and impartially as the wind erasing kangaroo tracks in the sands of his childhood. That had been the second choice. Still there had been no fear but now he discovered that, with his transfer to the three-dimensional world of flight, his war had become a good deal more personal and dangerous. The Vickers .5 machine gun he and his gunlayer had used in the infantry had been accurate over a mile: more than enough to insulate him from the actions of gun and gunner. Distance, in those days, had eradicated guilt but now death was no longer a mile away. The way to win a dogfight was to get in close. At a range of fifty feet you could see whether your opponent had shaved that day or not: you could damn near tell what he’d had for breakfast. No room, now, for the impersonality of distance; you saw the blood, the expression of fear and disbelief as your bullets bit home. When you killed a man, you knew as much about it as he did, perhaps more. You became the man you killed. Death was no longer a concept, remote and unbelievable, but an intimate companion that watched you every minute, as closely as a lover.

They had made him what they called an observer-airgunner, flying in a BE2. Twin-seater planes were death waiting to happen; somehow, by luck and a steady aim, he had survived at a time when few did.

If you could call it survival.

That was when the fear started. In his case, too, it flickered in the pulse below the eye, the teeth-ripped nails and staccato clicking of fingers, yet still he survived. He transferred to the faster and more manoeuvrable Bristol F2B. More enemy planes went down before his guns. Now death became the only thing in life. Most of his mates were gone. Each day he flew. Each day he fought: Vickers against Spandau. Each day fear settled more comfortably on his shoulder, making itself at home there.

3

‘Italy? What the hell’s down there?’

Wine and warmth and signorine, or so they hoped. Anything had to be better than this world above a brown and green landscape, the barely discernible lines of trenches scribbled in the sullen earth, where Albatros, Sopwith and Bristol wove their deadly rituals on wings as brightly coloured as the plumes of fighting cocks. They flew south to discover not wine, warmth and signorinas but another facet of the same war. The Italian army had broken at Caporetto and was in full retreat, that was all they knew. That was why they were here: to stabilise the front.

‘What the hell can we do?’

The squadron leader stroked his throat with nervous hands. The pulse jumped beneath his eye.

‘Show the flag. Otherwise the Eyeties may pull out of the war altogether. Bye, bye Verdun, if that happens. The French are shit-scared of that.’

Which made their presence in this new land, so close to the mountains, sound as though it had something to do with strategy. Very grand; although the war itself seemed no different from the one they’d been waging for the last two years in Northern Europe.

As for wine and signorine …

They were stationed at an airstrip that had been hastily thrown up on a stretch of barren land north-east of the town of Udine. They had hoped for good things from Udine but for all they’d seen of it they might as well have been stationed in the Carso, the mountainous plateau twenty miles away that people said was a howling wilderness of baking summers, bitter winter winds and stones as sharp as knives. Udine could have been packed to the rooftops with beautiful signorinas but since they never got there they had no way of finding out.

‘I don’t reckon they exist at all.’

Such was the popular opinion, one that Ted Fisher shared.

4

With his friend John Hegarty at the controls, Ted Fisher buckled the strap of his leather helmet beneath his chin and clambered aboard C2677, the aircraft that had seen them through a good many months of combat; to prove that, it carried on the front interplane strut the symbols of their kills, marked in white paint.

Ted hated the braggart marks and would not look at them. He had a superstitious fear that they were an invitation to providence to kill them, too. They were there only because the mechanics, who never took their feet off the ground, liked to boast about the successes of the planes they serviced. If it had been his choice he would have got rid of them but it was the custom and so they stayed.

One after the other, engines bellowing, the planes that made up the sortie taxied across the grass, turned to face the light breeze and took off into a pellucid dawn. Planes were at their most vulnerable when they were just off the ground and they climbed swiftly before assuming formation and heading north-east, where there’d been reports of German Albatroses harrying the retreating army.

The reports were not to be wondered at; beneath them the whole country seemed to be on the move. Ted stared down at roads clogged by a sluggishly moving tide of men, by columns of unmoving vehicles and peasants’ handcarts piled high with the bits and pieces of their lives. Here and there the retreat had spilled across the paddocks, leaving vehicles axle-deep in mud, with individual groups heading this way and that without apparent purpose. Away to starboard, near the supple green curve of the river, a house was on fire. They turned and flew low over it but could see no sign of activity, simply the house with fingers of flame thrusting through the broken roof. Perhaps an enemy plane had bombed it, perhaps soldiers had looted it: there was no way to know.

Before they had taken off they had been told that tens of thousands of men had surrendered, perhaps more. They had also heard that the Italian battle police were pulling officers off the road and shooting them. Perhaps it was true. It made as much and as little sense as everything else. The looting and violence was real enough, though; it proved to anyone who had doubted it that a defeated army could be as dangerous as the enemy.

They flew on, eyes watching the skies for the first sight of enemy planes. Which came, on cue, diving out of the east with the rising sun a blaze behind them.

The air was filled with a swirl of brilliantly patterned wings, the howl of stressed engines, the clatter of gunfire. An Albatros with red-and-black chequered wings dived head-on at them, lifting at the last instant to climb over them, coming so close that its wheels almost touched them. In the open cockpit Ted swung the machine gun frantically, firing at the Maltese Cross on the other plane’s side as it powered past. He missed and felt his cheeks tighten as John Hegarty threw the Bristol into a side skid that took them away from the enemy fire. It was only a momentary respite. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Evasive action was their only hope, and only if the accompanying Sopwiths came quickly to their aid. Fortunately they did; within seconds the air was full of the smoke of tracer bullets, a burst of fire from an Albatros ripped away a section of the lower wing, they lurched as a strut parted then were clear as the enemy aircraft made off northwards with the Sopwiths in pursuit.

Bloody hell.

Panting with adrenaline-soured mouth, Ted stared over the side of the cockpit. For the moment they seemed to have lost contact with the retreat. Far below them, the countryside was empty of people. A solitary farmhouse sat amongst a spinney of trees. A track led up to it from a lane bordered by poplars. There was no sign of movement. So peaceful … He felt a lust for peace, for freedom from fear. The sensation was so sudden and intense that he caught his breath, bemused that he, a man of the desert, should be so entranced by the close green landscape lying below him. He shook his head, trying to smile at such thoughts.

Waste of time.

The Bristol flew on, yet the image remained, the farmhouse with its sturdy walls immersed in the emerald landscape seeming to epitomise all that was desirable and unattainable in life.

‘Where is this bloody army, anyway?’

He spoke aloud to himself, to the empty rushing air. Below them the land that a minute ago had witnessed what might so easily have been their deaths was now tranquil, as though the war did not exist.

At the end of the valley that branched off the main pass leading from the mountains, they again joined the retreat: a mass of trudging figures that filled the road, that spilled onto the paddocks on either side, that seeped into the deserted valley with the isolated and peaceful farmhouse above which they had just flown.

Perhaps the house that moments earlier had filled him with such yearning would be spared. He hoped so, but with little confidence. From what he had seen in France, it didn’t seem very likely.

CHAPTER THREE

1

It was incredible, but for two days Helena and Marija had been moving through a countryside where commonsense said an entire army was on the move, yet they never saw a soul. The rain had not come back; the weather was pleasantly warm for November with not even a hint of snow and the barren mountains had given way to a lane that meadered through poplar-spiked meadows. There were no people, no sounds but the wind in the trees, the wings of birds. It was as though no human had ever set foot in this soft and fat-seeming land.

Dark eyes twitching, the nervous child asked about it. ‘Where is everyone?’

‘I think they must have run away from the soldiers.’

‘Are the soldiers coming?’

In Marija’s face Helena recognised the shadow of all that she had seen three days ago, events that her mind had shut off from memory but that remained nonetheless. It would be easy to lie but Helena had told herself that the only way to come to terms with what had happened was to be completely honest, both with the child and herself. ‘I think they are, yes.’

‘Will they do things to us?’

The woman, sprawl-legged, eyes staring, the pool of blood.

‘No, they won’t.’

She would kill them both before permitting that. Except that she had nothing to kill them with, not even a knife.

It was in search of a knife that she turned off the lane onto a track that led towards a farmhouse whose roof she could see within a copse of trees. Good judgement warned against it. The house might contain soldiers or civilians fearful for their lives who might kill them, or worse, but the need for some kind of weapon had become an omen, more pressing even than food or safety. Let me find a knife. Only that. Then we shall survive.

Helena reached the head of the track and looked across the yard at the house waiting for them behind its shutters of sun-scarred wood. The walls, with tufts of grass growing within the cracks, were silent, waiting. On the far side of the yard a low outbuilding, its thatched roof furred with moss, stood quiet.

Even the air was on tiptoe here.

Helena felt her skin contract as she came into the yard. Now the windows of the house were barely an arms-stretch away. The house and the stillness watched. Marija sensed her fear. Her skinny fingers clutched Helena’s hand. Nothing moved.

Helena took a deep breath and walked around the side of the building where there were more shutters, more silence. The shelter of the house offered a sun-pooled warmth. Now, having summoned the courage to come so far, she was looking for more than a knife. If the house were truly empty there might be food, a place to sleep, a refuge.

She paused in mid-stride. What was she thinking? If the soldiers came down the road, the house was the first thing they’d see. They would come, looking for loot; they would break in, they would find them. They would smile the woman sprawl-legged the greasy unshaven triumphant faces leering with broken teeth, with foul breath, with veined and merciless eyes the pool of blood.

‘What are we going to do?’ Marija’s voice barely creased the silence.

‘We are going to break in.’

She prised a large stone from the tumbledown wall that enclosed the yard. She marched to the nearest window, forced back the shutters on their protesting hinges, raised the stone and smashed the glass. Quickly she cleared the jagged shards from the frame and pushed the black hair off her face before lifting first herself and then the child through the opening.

2

‘Be careful not to tread on the glass.’

Helena closed the shutters behind them. The shadows were slashed by horizontal bars of yellow light shining through the slats. About them the house was filled with silence; it might have been, perhaps was, peopled by ghosts.

She looked about her while, at her side, Marija’s feet were nailed to the dusty floorboards.

It was a living room, larger than she had expected, its corners deep in shadow, with several bulky pieces of furniture — table with tasselled cloth, wooden chairs, cupboard whose mirror reflected the pallid light — thrusting heavy shoulders into the space. From the papered walls frowned unsmiling faces: a woman dressed in a fashion long past, a bearded man in an iron-stiff collar. ‘It must be their parlour.’

‘Isn’t anyone here?’

‘I don’t think so.’

The house, and the shadows, watched the intruders. Even the mice were silent. It was easy to imagine monsters, or skeletons.

She told herself crossly not to be ridiculous. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet as she moved to the closed door leading into the rest of the house.

‘Let’s see what else we’ve got.’

Marija hung back. ‘I don’t like it here.’

‘Nonsense!’

Helena spoke with a briskness she did not feel. She threw open the door. Light gushed; at the back of the house, a shutter was ajar. It was a kitchen and had been lived in.

‘You see? No ghosts.’

By her expression Marija was unconvinced but Helena was determined to explore, to show the house who was in charge. She checked the wire-fronted cupboards that lined one wall.

‘See what I’ve found!’

A ham. Saliva filled her mouth. She sniffed the meat cautiously. It was fine. She found a knife — the knife she had been seeking — and hacked off a slice for the child, another for herself. She was already chewing when it occurred to her that the owners of the house might have poisoned it.

Too late now.

Fortified by ham, they explored further, confidence climbing. Off the kitchen, in a small room with a flagged floor, homemade sausages hung from the, rafters. Three bottles contained what proved to be a thin, tart wine. Inside the door, a butt bound in metal hoops held fresh water.

‘Why did they leave all this food behind?’

Whoever they might have been.

‘Perhaps it was too much for them to carry.’

At the top of a narrow stairway, very steep, were two bedrooms. The beds were neatly made; chests of drawers held folded clothes scented with dried flowers.

There were no skeletons or monsters, no open cupboards or scattered clothes. No signs of a hurried departure. Nothing. Cautiously Helena eased the shutters a crack. Dust motes swirled in the sunlight. She looked out at the valley, the track up which they had come, the lane running between poplars. What remained of the poplar leaves shimmered golden in the sunshine. Somewhere a bee was working, otherwise all was still.

There was food here, water, a place to sleep. A refuge.

It was also a trap, if the soldiers came.

They went back down the stairs and into the yard. The outbuilding proved as empty as the house. A feeding trough had wisps of hay clinging to its iron framework, more hay was stacked in a lean-to at the back. A cesspit stank. Otherwise there was nothing, Helena made up her mind.

‘We shall stay here.’

‘How long?’

‘As long as we can.’

Provided no-one came.

3

It was so easy to slip into self-delusion. The burning farmhouse had represented the loss of everything she had believed safe and serene in her life. Even now the loss of parents, home and what had been her life had not properly sunk in. All the things that had happened since had given her no chance to come to terms with it. Perhaps that was why this farmhouse, with its bulky furniture, its unknown faces spying on her from the walls, had seduced her so quickly. Within minutes of their arrival she was convinced that the deserted house had been placed where it was by fate, to ensure the survival not only of herself and the child but of her conviction that everything that had happened to her had been no more than a ripple on the surface of a life that would now resume its peaceful and predestined progress.

The war had passed them by. They ate the food that providence had provided, they drank the water with a little wine in it, they slept without thought or care and, when they awoke, the world was as it had been before they fell asleep. The next day was the same. The unseasonal sunshine warmed them, the air was filled with birdsong, the yellow drifting of poplar leaves the only sign of change. Marija, too, had come to terms with things. The house frightened her no longer. She talked to herself, she played, she fashioned what Helena supposed was a doll out of a twist of grass and some animal hair that she had found in the dung-smelling shed. She, too, had shuttered herself from reality and the past. She took the doll for a walk down the track. She chattered to it amid the birdsong, the drifting leaves. She came back running, eyes staring, face white.

‘Soldiers!’

Terror came lunging.

‘Quick!’

Helena knew the soldiers would not pass them by. She would have snatched food from the kitchen, had there been time. There was not. Grabbing the child’s hand, she half ran, half dragged her out of the house and across the yard. A moment to consider and reject the shed, then they went through the sagging gate. They raced across the meadow to a hollow at the bottom of a rise that she had discovered the previous afternoon. They flung themselves down in the damp November grass. They stared back at the tranquil house within its setting of meadows and permanence. There was neither movement nor sound, the lull long enough for Helena to start wondering whether the troops had passed by after all, even whether Marija might have been mistaken, when there was a flicker of movement, a sound of Italian voices, and a dozen or so uniformed men came up the track and into the yard. Italian … she felt her spirits lift, then caution returned as she saw them more clearly. They shouldered their way truculently, seeming not to care whether there was anyone to protest their coming or not. No, they were not to be trusted.

The child moved uneasily. ‘Be still!’ Helena spoke through stiffened lips, the words not even a whisper. Marija lay unmoving.

The men split into groups of two or three, questing here and there. This was the moment of greatest danger; if any of them came into the meadow they would be sure to see them. Helena pressed herself down into grass that at this season would scarcely have concealed a beetle. Luckily the men’s attention was focused not on the surrounding fields but the house itself, a focus that became all the more intense as a man with unbuttoned tunic went to the door and, without testing to see whether it was locked or not, raised his boot and kicked flat-footed so that it splintered and flew open.

There was a low growl. The men crowded inside.

Now was their chance; run and they might be over the brow of the rise before the men saw them. Helena was tempted but knew she daren’t risk it. It needed only one man to see them out of a window and they would be lost. Eyes fixed on the house, she prayed that she had made the right decision.

From within the building came a chorus of shouts that grew steadily more raucous. They heard the sound of breaking glass and furniture. It went on for a long time. At last the men spilled out again into the yard, some of them clutching bottles and what remained of the food, and made off down the lane. It was such a relief to see them go, yet Helena remained where she was, fearful that some of the men might still be inside the house or that those who had gone might change their mind and come back. Then she saw the first blue smear of smoke drifting through the still-open doorway, heard the ominous crackle of flame. Caution forgotten, she ran to the building but it was too late. Having vandalised its interior, the men had set the house on fire.

Why?

There could be only one reason: hatred. Hatred of the war, of the army that had defeated them, perhaps of themselves most of all. Such dangerous, angry men. Thank God they had not found them.

Helena stood with her hand about the child’s thin shoulders, watching as the flames flickered first through the doorway, then the windows, finally roaring as the roof collapsed in a welter of sparks. The rising wind brought the heat gusting towards them. They continued to watch until at last the dusk came sifting out of a pale and smoke-smeared sky. Only then did Helena made herself move.

‘Come …’

The house was a glowing shell but the shed was untouched. Would other soldiers come during the night? She did not think so. They fetched hay from the lean-to and spread it, lying down and waiting in a daze of hunger and fatigue for morning. Helena felt unseen creatures burrowing in the hay and had no hope that she would sleep after all that had happened. She did so, all the same, to wake, smarting and itching but rested, with the first light and the sound of steady rain. They had no food, no water but what they could find in puddles. Like dogs they lay full length to quench their thirst, then, bellies rumbling, they moved on.

Helena studied the lane and surrounding fields. There was no sign of the soldiers. All the same, the lane was too dangerous; someone might appear around a bend at any moment. She decided instead to head across the meadows towards the line of woods that lay like a dark shadow in the distance. Get there, she thought, and they would be safe.

They were two-thirds of the way to the trees when they heard it without knowing what it was. A grumble, a roar, a howling cataclysm of sound that swallowed the distance, overtaking them with such speed and unrelenting energy that they barely had time to turn their heads and stare up at the rain-dark sky before it was on them and past them: two or perhaps three aeroplanes had swept overhead and vanished, leaving them stunned with a sensation of movement, of wings and the leather-helmeted heads of men.

They had not even had time to be afraid. That came later, when Helena realised that the planes could have fired at them with the guns she had seen protruding from the cockpits; that they could have been dead without even knowing that death was coming to take them.

4

Into the woodland, then. The leafless trees provided a measure of protection yet Helena discovered that fear was here, too. She remembered childhood stories of outlaws hiding in the forest; why should it be different now, in a world without order or reason?

She stared at the undergrowth that enclosed them, that would so easily swallow their cries. Marija’s hand clutched in her own, she took one tentative step, then another. Beneath its spreading branches, the forest was very dark, with roots that writhed like snakes beneath the leaf-mould, waiting to trip them.

One more step.

It was so easy to imagine the faces of tree people, trolls, men.

‘Which way do we go?’ the child said.

‘Through.’

Deeper into the darkness.

Marija, too, was looking about apprehensively, seeing not the trees but her own formless fears. ‘Are there wolves?’

‘Of course there aren’t wolves.’

Helena spoke crossly, yet who could say? In this wild place there could be wolves; even bears, perhaps. Step by step they pushed deeper into the shadowy wood. With the fear, memory now accompanied her. She did not feel regret or sorrow, the shock of bereavement still too recent for that, but she found herself remembering the days of her life that had brought her to this place.

Voices: can’t you see her she thinks herself too good for the rest of us too proud, while the sniggers ran like knives through the air behind her, too many airs and graces that one oh yes she thinks she’s very smart just because her father owns the farm has money smart clothes go to rome one day my mother says see the pope i shouldn’t wonder while she’s about it too good for us too good, the needle sniggers wounding, all i want is a friend just one friend, weeping, her mother’s voice, yes dear but you must get used to it the fact is they’re right we are too good for them but i don’t want to be i want to be like everyone else …

The remembered words whispered along with the wind that stirred the branches, turning the moss-dark ground yellow and red with the wreckage of the falling leaves. As a child she had run through the leaves that had lifted and swirled and crunched brittle-bright beneath her feet, the sting of autumn crisp and glowing upon her cheeks, the sky brilliant between the friendly trees. There had been a lake where she had been forbidden to go, her mother calling it dangerous. Its bank had been spiked with reeds, green in spring, yellow in summer, in winter charred black by the frost, the water’s surface skinned with brittle ice, do not go you must not go i absolutely forbid it, but going nonetheless, as a child solitary, because it was forbidden; later, as what she considered a mature woman, not alone, although that, too, was forbidden, that above all. Feeling the hot and forbidden warmth rising, the fear, and yes, i cannot and will not but oh how i want but no and no, and earning herself the name of a tease who promised but would not deliver, too good for me that’s what you think isn’t it too good you’ve always thought so i don’t know why i waste my time with you. Seeking companionship and acceptance, no that was not right, there had been more to it than that, the lure of the forbidden, once a woman loses her self-respect she loses everything, the ancient prohibitions stopping her even as she wanted so much …

To be loved. That, above all. She had not wanted to be the precious ornament of her mother’s devising, the landowner’s daughter keeping herself apart, keeping herself …

As, until this moment, she had indeed kept herself, even as she had rejected her mother’s fantasy of a splendid marriage with bells and roses and an estate in the country, a townhouse in Udine or Verona or even Rome.

Even so, she had been brought up to think herself special, the old jibes true enough as far as that went. Certainly it had affected her attitude to Michelangelo and his woman. And where had it got her? To this situation: alone, with a child not her own, lost and wandering in a hostile and unknown place, frightened of trees and air, the creatures of her imaginings. Making her way ever deeper into the wood, Helena understood something that until now had been concealed from her. The country of her birth, the land that had been her home and refuge, was lost to her for ever. All that had given her life form had vanished with the burning farmhouse, the gutted village, the deaths that had snapped every link binding her to her past.

As a child she had thought herself alone. Now, with her bereavement still largely unreal to her, she understood that she had been wrong. Even the isolation that her mother would have preferred to call separateness had existed within a framework that was now lost. In contrast with those days, her sense of being alone in a world without pity had become the only reality.

I can protect Marija, she thought, because she trusts me. But how, when I am so full of doubt, do I protect myself?

5

Away from its edges, the wood became easier. In its depths, brambles no longer spiked their path, the open spaces between the trees granted them passage. They saw squirrels putting the final touches to their winter stores of nuts but there was no other movement. Whatever trolls there might be remained hidden.

Walking ever deeper into the wood, Helena felt her confidence returning at last. The old legends of forest and wickedness ceased to frighten her. She was a new woman in what had become her new reality.

On they went until, after walking without pause or food for most of the day, she saw ahead of them a lessening of the shadows and realised they were coming out of the wood at last. As they emerged into the open, Helena saw that once again the rain clouds had gone. Afternoon sunlight the colour of honey lay upon the countryside. Behind her, the trees marked the boundary between the present and the lost world of the burnt-out farmhouse, the woman lying sprawl-legged on the cobbles, from all the things and people of her past life. She was a willow wand peeled and white, new, a woman fully grown yet newborn, too.

Hand in hand with the child who was her sole connection with the vanished past, Helena Sforza walked forward, her sapphire eyes staring steadily into the future.

CHAPTER FOUR

1

She saw the open field in front of her, the spindly uprights of a wire fence and, beyond it, the flat roofs of a few shack-like buildings. In front of the buildings were objects that she had never seen properly before but that she sensed held a special significance, their outlandish forms and chequerboard colours holding the future that she had embraced even before she knew what form it would take.

They crossed the grass towards the fence. The aircraft parked before the buildings had men working on them. The engine cowl of the nearest machine was open; a truck was feeding what she thought were belts of ammunition to a man standing inside the cockpit. It was this man who now turned and, no doubt seeing the approaching woman and child, called out something in a sharp voice. A man wearing a round steel hat, rifle slung from his shoulder, came running and shouting in excitement as though the arrival of two unarmed girls threatened not only the aeroplanes and progress of the war but the world itself.

‘Oywheredyouthinkyouregoineh?’

The bellow consisted not of words but a flow of incomprehensible sound that Helena recognised must be another language without knowing which one it might be.

Armoured by incomprehension, she walked on.

‘Halt!’

The man — sentry, if that was what he was — unslung and cocked his rifle, pointing it at her through the wire.

‘Donyoucomenocloserorright?’

Another man appeared from the far side of the aeroplane. He took a look at her through the wire before saying something to the sentry, who lowered his rifle while still keeping it ready for any antics the foreign woman might be planning. The second man came forward and took hold of the wire, towards which Helena and Marija were still walking. They walked right up to him until the wire was the only thing keeping them apart. Helena stared at him appraisingly. He was tall and lean, with fair hair blowing in the wind, a man a few years older than herself, his face tanned but tired-looking, lines beginning to score the corners of his pale eyes. ‘What do you want?’

He was articulating clearly, breaking the sound into what she recognised must be separate words, but she had no idea what they meant.

‘Food. Something to drink. Shelter.’ It was what they wanted so she asked for it, determined somehow to overcome their mutual incomprehension.

‘Dunnowotyoretalkinabout.’

And he turned away, leaving her with the taste of hunger and loss in her mouth. He walked to one of the buildings that appeared flimsier even than the aeroplanes they existed to serve. Within minutes he was back with another man, short and dark, beside him. This man wore civilian clothes and spoke to her in Italian, with a strong Udine accent.

‘What do you want?’

‘Something to eat. Some place where we can rest.’

‘Out of the question.’

The full lips sneered in the pudgy face. The man was turning away, dismissively, but the blond airman stopped him.

They talked while Helena watched through the wire, uncomprehending. She thought they were arguing, in which case the tall man must have had the better of it, because eventually the Italian speaker turned to her again with unconcealed impatience.

‘Both of you go down there.’

For the first time she saw there was a gate further along the wire, with another rifle-carrying man beside it. Helena looked at gate and sentry, then back at the Italian.

‘Who’s going to let us in?’

‘We shall.’

And they did so, sure enough, but then neither man seemed to know what to do with the woman and child. The Italian was still strutting.

‘This is a military base. You have no business here.’

‘We need food. We have been walking all day, and yesterday —’

‘Nor is it a restaurant.’

Again the blond man intervened, seeming to press for replies to questions that he threw out quickly, one after the other, and to which eventually, scowling, the Italian responded.

‘He says, if you and the child are hungry, he will get you coffee. Bread, too, maybe. Then you must go. Understand?’

The blond man walked with them to the nearest building where he spoke to another, older man, seeming to explain their presence. The interpreter did not conceal his satisfaction.

‘The officer is unhappy you are here. This is an airfield. Military operations take place here. There is no room for civilians, or women.’

‘Aren’t you a civilian?’

‘I am an official. I keep the records. Important war work.’

A clerk, Helena thought. That’s all he is. A puffed-up clerk.

The tall man brought coffee and bread, a few slices of cheese. While they ate he spoke to her again through the officious interpreter.

‘Where are you from?’

‘How did you get here?’

‘Where are you going?’

How are you going to survive?

The last question he did not ask but it underlay everything he said. It was a question to which she did not know the answer. Finally he went away and spoke once again to the officer. When he came back he said: ‘We need some cleaning done, washing plates, that sort of thing. The woman we had before went off two days ago and never came back. We don’t know what happened to her. The pay isn’t much but —’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘We’ll have to find somewhere for you to stay.’

It was apparently out of the question for them to stay at the aerodrome; the war, or perhaps the Italian official, would not permit that.

‘There may be something in the village.’

Which it seemed was just down the road.

‘I shall ask.’ She was determined to find somewhere, whatever she had to say or do to get it: she wanted no more experiences like the one they’d had the previous day, lying terrified in the meadow while the soldiers ran riot through the farmhouse. ‘I shall find somewhere.’ Speaking as much to herself as the two men.

The Italian warned: ‘There is nothing for the child to do. If she makes mischief …”

‘She will be no trouble.’

Nor would she be: Helena, who had taken care of them so far, would take care of that, too. She began straight away, washing and drying dishes, sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows. Until it occurred to her that, if she were too quick to do all there was to do, there might be no job left for her in the morning.

2

That evening Giovanni, the officious official, accompanied Marija and herself to the village, half a kilometre from the aerodrome.

‘Do the airmen stay here?’

What she meant was does the blond man stay here?

‘They all live at the camp. There is no room in the village for them. It is a very small village. There will be no room for you or the child.’

She saw that Giovanni was determined to make things as difficult for her as he could. Let him. As determined as he, she intended to make sure he did not succeed.

He insisted on accompanying her to all the houses where accommodation might be found. It did not take long. As he had warned her, the village was very small. He invited her to speak to the cottagers herself.

‘Perhaps you can persuade them.’

She tried, explaining that she had been offered work at the airfield if she could find somewhere to stay. It would mean money to anyone willing to take her but it seemed that Giovanni had been right: no-one was prepared to admit they had any room for them.

When they had been everywhere, Giovanni, punctilious in ensuring that not one cottage was omitted from their search, spread his hands in what might have been a gesture of regret, or triumph.

‘You see?’

It was obvious that he did not want her here. Helena could not think why. Could it be because the airman had been willing to give her a job after Giovanni had tried to send her on her way? Was that all it took? She and Marija could die in a ditch because Giovanni thought he had been slighted? She could not have imagined such behaviour, would have gone back to the airfield to speak to the blond man had she been able, but with no common language, that was impossible. Giovanni watched her, smiling.

‘There is nothing I can do. There is no place for you here.’

It seemed so, certainly.

‘Perhaps you will find somewhere in Udine. Or further away still. You should try Verona, perhaps. That might be best. These are dangerous times. We are very close to the front line here. People are afraid of strangers and no-one knows when your friends the Germans will come.’

‘My friends? I know no Germans.’

He gave the smile of one who knew better. ‘So you say.’

‘It’s the truth!’

‘And you with your Slovene accent.’

She came close to spitting at him. ‘My name is Helena Sforza and I am as Italian as you are.’

He eyed her spitefully. ‘You are a liar. The Sforzas are big farmers near Gorizia. Members of that family do not tramp the roads. You were their kitchen maid, perhaps.’

‘My parents are dead. The farm is burned. There is a war. Or perhaps you hadn’t heard?’

It was the first time she had put her bereavement into words. It gave her the keenest pang, not so much of loss or even sorrow but of anger. There would be time for sorrow later; now she felt fury that her parents were dead, her home burned, for no reasons that made sense. Because of that she was indeed forced to tramp the roads, as Giovanni had said. Now this no-account being, whom in the old days her father would have whipped without thinking twice about it, had both the obtuseness and power to deny the truth. Because of him and his disbelieving contempt she would have to go on with the child, to die even, because — ‘Wait a minute!’ She had something. She scrabbled in her little bag, found what her mother had given her on the occasion of her first communion: a prayer book with her name and an inscription in her mother’s hand and a photograph of herself, ethereal in a white dress.

She thrust it at him.

‘Look at it!’

He did so, uncertainly, frowning at her vehemence. He stared at the portrait and its inscription, then at her again. Still he said nothing.

Again she was close to spitting at him, afraid he might try to deny the evidence of his eyes.

‘Read it! If you can read. A Slovene, am I?’

He, too, began to spit with rage and what she thought might be fear. ‘How was I to know? Your accent is different.’

She snatched back the book that she had almost forgotten she possessed but that now might prove a passport to renewed hope. She thought how this was the type of man who had to be kept in his place, that he would continue to bully if he were not himself bullied.

‘I shall say no more about it if you find somewhere for us to stay.’

She saw he might have hit her but was afraid to do so.

‘I was not to know. You should have explained properly.’

‘Just find us somewhere to stay. That’s all you have to do.’

3

He managed it somehow, talking and laughing with a woman who had earlier refused them but now, it seemed, was willing to change her mind. Laughing … A man like this would always find something to laugh at, not from happiness but out of contempt for the world and himself. Yet she knew that now things would be all right. Treat him like a dog and he would respect her for it.

So she worked at the aerodrome, as she had determined she would, and at night she slept with Marija in the single narrow bed in the attic room of the widow Gambetta’s house. She did what she could to learn English so that never again would she find herself unable to communicate, however hesitantly, with the men who had the power to control her future. She found she had a knack for it. The discovery neither pleased nor surprised her. It was a fact to be accepted with all the other facts that made up her new life, where everything was unknown. The pudgy clerk had tried to drive her out. Now Giovanni changed his tune, telling her she should be grateful that he had fixed things up for her. Helena laughed scornfully. He raised his hand to threaten her. If he had thought to frighten her she soon put him right. ‘Just you try it.’

4

The war went on. The rumour was that the front had stabilised. It was certainly true that the Germans never came. The fliers knocked down several enemy aircraft and lost a few themselves, although the blond airman survived.

The months passed: the frosts and brittle stars of winter, the irony of spring with its promise of life in a world of endless death, the yellow blaze of summer when, under a mad August moon, the farmers went out with their horse-drawn machines, the revolving cutters slashing the grain that, war or no war, must be brought to barn. Helena’s ferocious determination not to be driven out had found them a haven. They were safe here, as far as anyone could be safe in a world where violence could consume them at any time. The airman, whose name she had discovered was Ted Fisher, showed in a dozen ways that he liked her and Signora Gambetta liked her, too; there was once again a place for laughter in her life.

And yet.

Loneliness became an agony. She had come to accept the reality of her parents’ death, the destruction of her home and past, her youthful expectations for the future. It was a painful process yet somehow she managed to overcome the pain so that her daily life went on, more or less uncrippled. Yet only in part. In coming to an awareness of her parents’ death, she had to accept that the void in her life would have to be filled if she were ever to be whole again. How she would do it was another question.

CHAPTER FIVE

1

There was a blurring in Ted’s life, an awareness of distraction from the hard-edged realities of flight and death. After two years in the air he had learned only two things, each indistinguishable from the other. Day after day, men flew. Day after day, men died; other men, so far, although he had known for a long time that the daily witnessing of death was itself a form of dying. Concentration — on flying, on killing — was the key. Now he found he could do it no longer. During off-duty hours he walked for miles through the countryside, no idea where he was going, lecturing himself about the need to regain the focus that offered the only hope of survival. Still he couldn’t do it. The world pressed about him, reminding him there was so much more to life than fearing and inflicting death. Once again his overstrained nerves tightened to breaking point.

A member of the flight, a recent arrival whom he had barely known but who had been a man, nonetheless, a comrade, burned to death before his eyes when tracer from an Albatros ruptured his fuel tank. Ted was horrified yet felt something like envy for the man whose anguish was now over.

One evening in August 1918, a day when the mingled scents of harvest and heat overcame even the petrol and hot oil stink of the engine, he came back from an uneventful patrol. The crews were debriefed, they washed and changed into fresh uniforms, they ate what little their jangled nerves would accept. Afterwards the others headed for the room that served as a bar, there to get comprehensively smashed in the only ritual that offered them even the possibility of sleep. Ted considered joining them but recently had found that even a skinful of hooch worked its magic no longer. Instead he walked through the camp past the skeletal shadows of the aeroplanes. He put up his hand to touch the fabric-covered fuselage of his own machine. Gotta be round the twist to go up in somen as wonky as this.

Although it hadn’t let him down yet. He patted one of the slender struts. Just as bloody well, mate.

He walked past the sentry and through the gate into the lane. Without conscious decision he turned away from his normal route and headed down the hill towards the village. Preoccupied not so much with images as a lack of them, increasingly detached from a world where even the realities of life and death had lost their meaning, he found himself walking along the single street of houses before he had even realised it was there.

His pale eyes studied the dwellings that lined the rutted street. Most were thatched, with wooden window frames, and doors chipped and broken; in the gathering dusk they looked as though they had seen neither paint nor maintenance since Italy had entered the war.

There was no-one in the street but here and there the doors stood open to the summer evening. He heard the liquid sounds of Italian voices and saw shadowed figures moving in the candlelight. He reached the last buildings and stopped. In front of him the darkness of the countryside was broken by the yellow gleam of lanterns as farmers headed homewards, creaking wagons piled high with sheaves of grain. Back home he had spent weeks without need or even thought of other company, yet here the awareness of other humans accentuated his loneliness. Even the imperatives of death and flight had become unreal to him. He wondered whether he really cared whether he lived or not. Death, after all, was inevitable: perhaps not tomorrow but certainly one morning, perhaps on a day bright with sunlight, in the future unfolding of a war that seemed destined to go on for ever.

He turned and walked back along the street, head down as though studying the footsteps that he had left five minutes before in the brown dust. No longer aware of the village, its inhabitants or even of himself, he walked in a vacuum of his own non-feeling until he heard the sound of someone calling his name, and looked up with the startled astonishment of a man woken suddenly from sleep.

2

Helena had been in the room, sitting in the dark to save the fragment of tallow candle that was all the widow Gambetta permitted her within the rent she charged for the low-roofed attic room. A shallow window ran below the eaves and overlooked the street. Marija spent hours there before sleep, staring out at a world where for the most part nothing moved. The summer evening dissolved in a deepening purple haze until at last darkness came to hide the houses and distant hills. ‘See! It’s the sergeant from the aerodrome.’

Helena moved to stand behind Marija, staring over her shoulder at the tall figure of the airman passing along the road below them. She saw him nearly every day at the airfield, heard the now-familiar howl of engines as he roared down the field with the rest to take off into the dawn sky. She never looked up when, hours later, the planes came back, yet believed that something in the sound of the engines would have told her had he not returned. She supposed that one day it might happen. If it did, the pain that the war had already caused her would be made that much worse by the loss of a man to whom she had not spoken above a dozen times in her life, but that time was not yet. At the airfield, conscious of him passing her in his fleece-collared jacket, leather helmet and goggles dangling from his fist, she had never looked properly at him, the gap between his world and her own too great for that. Now it was different. By coming into the village he had moved from his world into hers. Watching him walking so aimlessly, she felt a pang of recognition. This man, too, was lost and alone. The gap between them had vanished or might, provided she took the steps needed to make it happen.

Still she did not move, watching with hand to lips as he passed slowly in the almost-vanished light, his steps inaudible behind the window’s smeared glass. After he was gone she felt a pang of regret that she had not gone down into the street and made the approach that instinct told her she would have to make if …

If what?

He was a foreigner. He knew nothing of her life or culture or even herself, as she knew nothing of him. He was a man with whom she could have nothing in common, a man whom she might not even like if they got to know each other better, who might prove not to like her. After that first generous impulse at the time of her arrival, he had shown no sign that he was even aware of her existence. There was something else, too: safety. Her life might be no more than a circle enclosing emptiness but at least the circle was unbroken. Go downstairs, speak to this man she did not know, make the approach that tradition said she must not make, and she, might be safe no longer. She would have given up the security of her non-life for the dangers of the unknown.

Now she told herself she was glad she had not gone down to speak to him in the midst of a village where even in the darkness unseen eyes would have seen, unseen brains judged and condemned.

How could she have contemplated such a thing? To accost a man in the street, a man who for all practical purposes was a stranger, would have been the action of a harlot: she, who had never been with a man, who knew little of such things, who even now did not wish to know but who wanted, so fervently, an escape from loneliness, from a life without meaning or apparent destination.

Too late, now.

Safety, and emptiness.

Marija looked up at her from her place beside the window.

‘He’s coming back.’

Helena flew to the window. She looked down at the slowly pacing figure and was at once moving, without conscious decision or even awareness. The wooden treads of the staircase clattered as she ran down them. She threw open the door that led to the street and stood in the warm darkness, her feet in the dust that still retained something of the day’s heat. In a mingling of disbelief and terror she asked herself what she was doing, knowing it was too late for such a question, that by coming out in this way she had entrusted herself to a stream that from this point would carry her to a destination that she could neither see nor imagine. Too late to stand there and not speak; too late to avoid the eyes that even now would be marking her. Having yielded to the impulse, having taken this first step that even she found incredible, how could she avoid the extra step that was the only reason for her being here at all?

‘Sergeant Fisher …’

A moment of horror as she thought how he might ignore her, continue unspeaking on his pensive and solitary way. Then the rhythm of his stride faltered and she knew that, if only in that, all was well.

She saw him smile.

‘How ya goin’?’ he said.

3

Knowing the lonely terrors of a hundred flights, the giving and observing of death, the savage echo of the voice that he heard before sleep and when he woke, that left him not even for a moment — next time perhaps next time — knowing that things could not go on as they were, that there had to come a time when …

The voice from nowhere, piercing the shell of obsession: ‘Sergeant Fisher …’

He looked up, once again aware of a world that until that instant he had forgotten, recognition returning with the rush of the warm night air, the scent of dust and summer and harvest, and saw the woman smiling tentatively at him in the shadowed street, saw her arms wrapped protectively about her body even as she spoke, and thought What? and Who? before he realised that he knew her. ‘How ya goin’?’

Thinking nothing of it but pleased to see her in the same way that a lonely man might bend to pat the head of a friendly dog.

‘Live here, do you?’

She nodded, still smiling, still nervous.

‘Yes.’

‘Handy, I suppose.’

Smiling cheerfully at her, willing to be friendly but already filled with the lost feeling of not knowing what to say to this woman whom he barely knew, who had sprung from nowhere, who seemed to expect something of him.

‘Ten-minute walk to aerodrome, yes?’

He realised that she, who he remembered as having no English, was now speaking English to him. A sort of English. It was a safe subject, a chink in the wall of awkwardness and incomprehension that separated them. ‘You’ve been learning English?’

‘Giovanni teach me. Little only.’

Her smile formed a protective barrier against him and the world; she, too, did not know what to do with the situation that she had created.

‘Sounds pretty good to me. Better than my Italian, that’s for sure.’

His lips were stiff with smiling. He felt as well as saw her smiling back at him. He thought there might be more to his feeling than just his awareness of her smile yet was uncertain what it could be.

‘Well …’

Wanting to escape from this sense of something he did not understand.

‘I’ll see you, then.’

‘Goodbye.’

For an instant longer they stood smiling at each other, then she turned and vanished through the doorway of the house outside which they were standing, he staring after her for a few seconds before turning to look up and down the empty street.

He headed back to the airfield, following the dusty road without thought, yet knowing that, inexplicably, something in his life had changed.

4

When she saw him next morning, she with bucket and broom in her hands, he heading with the other aircrew towards the planes that stood waiting outside, she did not speak, nor did he acknowledge her, yet she sensed that each was aware of the other as never before. That night, watching through the window at Marija’s side, she waited without admitting to herself what she was doing, but he did not come.

He did not come for three days. She had given him up when …

‘Hullo …’

Standing as before in the deserted yet observant street, feeling the weight of the eyes and gossip that she knew would now follow her for however long she remained here, and not caring. She laughed without knowing why and did not care about that, either.

This time he had not seemed abstracted, nor did he stare at her as he had before, with the startled expression of an awakened sleeper. Now he looked her in the face, first grinning, then laughing back at her so that she thought he had come here to look for her. Again she greeted him.

‘Hullo …’

As though it were the most important word in the world.

He raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘You walkin’?’ She did not understand and stood frowning while he repeated the words more slowly and carefully.

‘Are. You. Walking?’

Her face lit up and she nodded.

5

He had thought she would join him in a stroll down the street between the rows of houses. Instead she turned, vanishing once again through the doorway behind her with all the grace and speed of a startled bird. He thought he must have misunderstood her or that she, perhaps, had misunderstood him. He did not move but stood, perplexed but still waiting, until in what seemed no more than an eye blink she was back with the child’s hand clasped firmly in her own.

Of course. She cannot walk down the street alone with a man, after dark, in full view of all the village.

And thought what a fool he had been not to understand that at once. For that reason he did not take her hand as might have been his earlier intention but walked, slowly and decorously, leaving plenty of space so that the child could walk between them. Like the married couple they were not and had no intention of becoming, they strolled in silence through the darkness, Ted thinking how this moment of peaceful sharing towards which he had been moving since their meeting three days before had somehow assuaged the fear that had been his constant companion.

6

Helena was not thinking at all but had abandoned herself to the stream that once again she sensed flowing ahead of her towards a future still indiscernible yet seemingly less empty than it had been before.

They reached the end of the village street. They stood and watched the lanterns shining in the darkness as the farmers brought the harvest home. One of them passed as they stood with the child between them. From his perch on the piled sheaves the man looked at them no more than did the horse that with bowed neck and harness bright with brass drew the creaking wagon homewards, yet Helena knew he had seen everything there was to see of all three of them, observing them down to the shoes on their feet and the feelings that she did not yet understand but that she could sense forming an aura about them in the warm and cicada-singing night.

Unspeaking, they watched as the wagon passed them, swaying steadily into the darkness.

‘We’d better get back.’

She was conscious of Ted looking down at her as he spoke, mouthing the words slowly and carefully so that she understood the sense if not the individual words. She would have preferred to stay out longer or even go with him into the fields now shrouded by night, but she nodded, knowing he was right.

Again they neither spoke nor touched as they made their way back along the street. Only at the last, glancing up at him in the instant before turning with the child to enter the dark and silent house, she said: ‘You will come again?’

‘Tomorrow.’

7

God willing. The qualification was automatic, like the crossing of fingers to ward off disaster. But he no longer believed in that disaster. Helena had brought an easing not only to loneliness but fear itself. Ted could not imagine why. The Italian girl was a pleasant companion, someone whose presence provided a distraction from the iron realities of war, but no more than that. Yet the fact remained that in her company, for the first time in so long, he was no longer obsessed with the prospect of approaching death.

It was ironical, therefore, that the next day they were attacked by Albatroses that ambushed them out of cloud, coming in a screaming dive upon them before they even knew they were there. There was a rattle of machine gun fire that blew holes in the wings and sides of the fuselage, yet miraculously missed them both. Ted swung the machine gun on its mounting, trying with deliberate fury to blast their attackers out of the sky.

Not now, of all times. Not now. Thinking, What the hell, before the frenzy of the firefight, the aircraft looping and chasing each other about the sky, drove away all thought.

Again the Sopwiths saved them, again the Germans fled, again they returned safely to the airfield. Or almost.

As they landed, the wheel strut that must have been partially severed by a random bullet, the damn strut painted with the boastful emblems of their victories, collapsed. The failure threw the plane violently to one side. It sagged, swerving, to tip forward on its nose with a crash and crunch of rending wood and metal, followed by a silence more threatening than all the uproar that had preceded it.

CHAPTER SIX

1

The plane’s crash earned Ted a crack on the nose. He staggered out, blood everywhere. Helena came running with everyone else. Now she stood just outside the building, alarm turning to relieved laughter.

Ted wiped away blood, cursing, and turned to see her laughing, hand over her mouth.

‘What’s so bloody funny?’

She was sober at once, although her eyes still sparkled. ‘I am sorry.’

And she did a runner, while he watched her go. His nose was sore; by rights he should have been as mad as a cut snake but was not. He felt his heart twist and instead of renewed anger he laughed, too, as far as his swollen and still-bleeding nose would let him.

Later, after everything had been sorted out, he went looking for her, found her working in the deserted and tobacco-smelling room with its half-dozen sagging easy chairs where the aircrews waited between missions. He smiled while she regarded him cautiously. He said: ‘I have four days’ leave.’

It was not clear whether she understood.

‘Leave?’

‘Holiday. While they repair the plane.’

Cheerful and relaxed once more, she laughed. ‘Oh, yes. Your nose …’

Right.

‘I know a bloke who’s got a cabin in the mountains. Got a car, too. And some petrol. Said I could borrow it, if I liked. Be good to get up there for a few days.’

‘The mountains? But that is where the fighting is.’

‘Not those mountains. Further over. Dolomites, I think he called them.’

‘That will be nice for you.’

‘Yairs. I wondered …’ And he hesitated, feeling her eyes watching him. ‘Thought I’d maybe go tomorrow. Sunday. Sunday’s your day off, isn’t it? I wondered if you’d like to come? Just for the day. I’ll bring you back in the evening. Could be fun. Be good for the kid, too. Give her the chance to run about a bit.’

As though the child’s welfare were his sole concern. Her dark eyes watched him with the speculative intensity of one who did not understand or — his thoughts racing, trying to keep up with his changing impressions — who perhaps understood very well but had not decided what she was going to do about it. ‘I must go on with my work.’

And she turned away as though to put distance between herself and what he was saying to her.

‘Leave it. Dammit, I said leave it.’

So that once again she stood motionless, clutching the wooden handle of the broom and staring at him with the same concentration as before.

‘I’m going to have a cup of coffee. Would you like some?’ he said.

‘The tenente may not like that.’

Using the Italian word, presumably because she did not know the English one.

‘The tenente can take a jump.’

He went into the kitchenette that adjoined the room and made the coffee and brought it back, all the time wondering what he was getting into here, unsure whether he really wanted it or was just being crazy.

‘Here.’

Still she stood uncertainly, not sure what to do with the broom. He took it from her and propped it in a corner.

‘Sit.’

She did, very cautiously, parking her bum on the edge of the easy chair as though it might bite her.

He grinned at her, feeling a fool. Now he’d got her here he didn’t know what to do with her. He began to talk about anything or nothing, the spikey words tangling his lips awkwardly, not caring whether she understood him or not.

‘Back home I used to live in the Centre. There’s space. Very dry. That’s it, really: very dry and a helluva lot of it. No mountains, nothing like that. A few blackfellas wandering about, a few graziers. Otherwise nothing. Good place, though. Bloke can breathe there.’

Thinking he was making it sound not like a good place at all but dreadful. Not that he cared. He knew what he meant and felt, what the country back home meant to him. She was watching him with the same speculative concentration as before, the mug of coffee forgotten on the scarred table in front of her. As far as his words went he knew they could not possibly mean anything to her, yet was convinced that she understood the sense of what he was saying.

Now it was her turn to struggle for words.

‘When you go home …’

‘After the war?’

‘Will you go back to that dry place?’

He had never thought about it, had until that moment taken it for granted that his life would continue exactly as it had before. Now, listening to her question, he knew it would not. Too much had changed. He could not hope to go back when the man who returned would be so different from the one who had gone away.

‘Might try my hand at farming.’

He had never given it a moment’s consideration, could hardly believe that he was expressing an intention that until that moment he had not known existed.

‘My father was farmer,’ she said.

He looked at her. ‘Was?’

‘The German soldiers killed him. My mother, too. That’s why I’m here.’

‘I didn’t know.’

He had invited her to go to the mountains with him, not even bothering to hide what the invitation might mean, yet knew nothing about her at all. His ignorance shamed him. ‘Your parents. Tell me what happened.’

‘There is nothing to tell. I was staying with an aunt. To get away from the war, you understand? I was not content — content, yes? — with her so I decided to go home. When I got there the farm was burning and my parents, I think, were dead.’

‘Don’t you know? Didn’t you see them?’

‘The house was on fire. They would have been inside.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘There was another woman in the yard. Marija’s mother. She was dead. She had been raped. My mother would also have been raped, I think. I prefer not to know. I would not have wanted to see that.’

‘Damn right.’

It made him realise how little he knew about what the war meant to the people who were its true victims, the countless inhabitants of towns and farms and villages who, because of the war, were homeless or vandalised or dead. We fly. We kill and are killed. We know nothing.

Even the child Marija he had assumed was Helena’s sister.

‘I am very sorry.’

Sorry for what happened, for not knowing, not imagining.

‘What will you do after the war?’

She shook her head.

‘My mother wanted good marriage for me. But now …’

‘Got any brothers? To run the farm?’

‘Cousin, only. But he wishes to be schoolteacher. He has no interest in the land. I do not think he would make a good farmer.’

‘You wouldn’t farm it yourself?’

‘Not now.’

He saw that she, too, did not want to go back to the old life. The only thing either of us can do is move on.

He had been on the edge of taking back his invitation for her to come to the mountains with him, even of apologising for suggesting such a thing. Now he changed his mind and said nothing, letting the invitation lie for her to take up or ignore as she chose. Because that, truly, would be to go on, for both of them.

2

That evening, her cleaning duties over for the day, Helena went back to the village. She had not made up her mind what she was going to do. Come to the mountains. Come for the day. Bring the child.

It would be possible to accept the invitation, to go and still not make a commitment to him or to anything, but she did not want that. She must go with him with a full heart or not at all. She prepared the evening meal without paying any attention to what she was doing. After Marija had helped her with the dishes she sat and stared out at the street and at the days set like beads upon a string that had brought her to this place, and that now, in one way or another, would carry her into the future.

She was tied to the past yet could not go back. All the traditions of her life warned against accepting Ted’s invitation but tradition was dead, like the way of life that had created it.

She went downstairs and spoke to Signora Gambetta. Afterwards she came back to the room and spoke to Marija. When it was time for bed she took off her clothes and lay down beside the child, holding her until she fell asleep. Her eyes stared unseeing at the ceiling above her head. She ran her hands repeatedly up and down her body, feeling the heat of her skin and blood, the muscle and bone beneath the blood, the sense of anticipation and — yes — trepidation within the unquiet flesh.

Towards morning she must have fallen asleep, because when she awoke it was full daylight and her first thought was that it was too late, that Ted would have left already. Then she became aware of the pristine stillness that came only in the first minutes of a day not yet sullied by heat or the sound of voices. Beside her, Marija still slept. She eased herself out of bed, dressed and picked up the small parcel containing all she intended to take with her. She tiptoed down the stairs and went out of the house.

And stood.

There was still time. She could go back upstairs, take off her clothes and lie down again. She might even sleep. Do that and she would be safe, yet she would have lost the opportunity to free herself from a past that no longer had any meaning but would still hold her prisoner, if she permitted it.

In the street nothing was stirring, yet there would be eyes, even at this hour. Go, and the priest would be told. He could cause her endless trouble, if he wished. He might even be able to drive her out, if he wished.

She could go and Ted could dump her. Or be killed.

She lifted her head. She turned her back on reproach and fear. She walked up the road towards the airfield.

3

Ted was waiting, packed bags and a box of provisions beside the car. ‘Where’s Marija?’

She did not answer him directly. She went to the car.

‘Are we going? Or not?’

He looked at her.

‘We’re going, all right. No need to worry about that.’

He stowed the luggage behind the seats. They climbed in and drove away across the sun-bright plain, the noisy thrashing of the engine their only companion.

They were stopped once at a roadblock. The red-and-white pole was across the road. Two Italian battle police stood beside it, hands resting ostentatiously on the butts of their pistols. They came and stood on either side of the car.

The bigger of the two thrust out his hand.

‘Carta d’identit …’

Ted knew a load of crap when he heard it. Or saw it.

‘What?’

‘He want to see your papers,’ Helena said.

‘Why the hell can’t he say so?’

‘He did say so.’

‘But —’

‘Don’t annoy him. He make plenty trouble for us, if he want.’

She was right; of course she was. Ted dug out his leave pass and gave it to the cop, who eyed it suspiciously. Again he spoke.

‘He ask where we are going.’

‘Gambordino. Near somewhere called Agordo.’

Apparently it was the right thing to have said. Suddenly happy, the cop smiled as he handed the papers back, speaking voluminously to Helena as he did so.

‘He say very nice place. He say you will be happy there.’

‘Say thanks for me. Tell him I intend to be.’

The two men went back to the barrier pole. They raised it and stood back. Both saluted lavishly, still smiling. Ted and Helena smiled back. Ted saluted more moderately. This Italian temperament, he thought. Never know where you are with them. They drove on in a gust of comradeship and hot engine oil.

Fifty kilometres beyond the roadblock, the road began to climb, snaking this way and that above precipices and through hills that grew steadily higher and more steep until, beyond a massive shoulder of rock, they caught the first distant glimpse of white floating against a background of blue sky.

4

They discovered Gambordino: at least, they thought it must be Gambordino. There was no way of being sure. There were no houses or shops, no people, nothing to indicate a settlement of any kind. There was a lake whose steel-blue waters reflected the white-capped peaks that surrounded it. The lake lay amid an expanse of sedge grass and green and brown moss puddled by marsh water and whipped by a needle wind. The cottage stood alone on a promontory that stuck out into the marsh like the prow of a stone ship.

The road had degenerated into a switchback-bucking track that meandered between hollows glinting with water. They followed it cautiously, the car swaying beneath the weight of the wind, and came at length to the cottage.

Ted switched off the engine. For a moment they sat listening to the wind, the eerie bubbling of curlews in the distance, then climbed out, stretching the kinks out of their bodies after the long drive.

The cottage was built of sawn timber, each tarred plank set horizontally and overlapping the next. There were no windows on this side of the building but there was a locked wooden door.

‘I’ve got a key somewhere.’

He delved in his pockets, found what he was looking for. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. Inside, the cottage was dark and consisted of a single room with wooden windows that faced the lake. Ted grappled with latches and pushed the windows open to let in light and air.

‘At this time of year mosquitoes, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’ It seemed very likely. ‘We’ll have to make a fire. That’ll keep them away.’

The previous occupants had apparently had the same idea; the stone grate was clogged with ash. Helena explored to see what else the cottage had to offer. It wasn’t much. There was a table and two sagging chairs, a basin and bucket, a wood-burning stove, a few pots and pans, some crockery that looked as though it had been there since Napoleon’s day, two tarnished brass oil lamps, a bed with army-style blankets, a fishing rod with hooks and a tangle of line.

They brought in their bags and the box of provisions. There was coffee, sugar, rice and bread, some vegetables, a few cans of meat, a slab of cheese.

‘Doesn’t seem much,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Plenty, plenty,’ she reassured him. ‘It will last.’

They only had four days, after all.

Ted looked at her assessingly. ‘When you turned up without the kid, I knew you wouldn’t be going back after one day. I told the lieutenant about it. About you being away for a few days, I mean.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He wished us luck.’

‘You must be glad you don’t have to take me all the way back again tonight. So far …’

‘I’m glad for more reasons than that.’

Ted found a pile of cut logs under a tarpaulin outside the door. While he lit the stove, Helena remade the bed, found a broom and swept the floor.

‘Don’t you do enough of that at the airfield?’

She ignored him and swept on until she was satisfied.

‘You planning to eat off the floor?’ he said.

‘Cleaner than the table, I think.’

She made coffee. After they had drunk it out of the chipped mugs that were the only drinking vessels, she took them and the plates outside and washed them in the lake.

Ted watched her. He thought: Next thing she’ll be expecting me to change my shirt before we eat. With the fire burning in the stove, floor and plates polished, bed remade, they went out to walk around the lake. To mark the territory, as Ted said.

5

Helena walked beside the man in a stillness made up as much of disbelief as anticipation. Disbelief that she was here, in this place she had not known existed, that she was poised upon the edge of another place as unknown to her as the lake and mountains.

What was she doing here, with a man she did not know, whose history and culture were so far apart from her own? What was she thinking?

They walked a long way around the lake, and the evening was rising out of the wet ground by the time they turned back. They arrived at the cottage in a whining dusk.

‘You were right about the mosquitoes.’

They banked up the fire with green timber so that it smoked, driving the mosquitoes away. Ted coughed. ‘Damn near drive us away, too.’

Helena cooked up a stew with tinned meat and tomatoes and rice. They trimmed and lit the oil lamps, closed the windows against the darkness and mosquitoes. Decorously they sat at the table and ate the food that she placed before them and smiled and had nothing at all to say to each other. She saw the light of oil lamp and stove reflecting from his eyes, sensed his glance each time he looked at her. Still he didn’t do anything and she realised that he was waiting for her to make the first move, that he would wait all night, if needs be. She got up and walked around the table and put her arms around his neck — she who had never kissed a man in passion in her life, now guided by the same instinct that had caused her to make a home out of the sawn-wood cabin that she would always remember as the place where — and coaxed him to his feet and led him, still embracing, to the bed.

6

Even here she had to lead him, following her instincts without even thinking that this was not how she had expected things to happen. He stood while she undressed, slipping her clothes from a body that was neither cold nor hot, that simply was. She was naked, while Ted stood tree-like, staring at her with an expression that had something of awe in it. She came to him, delving clumsily as she tried to undress him, fumbling with unfamiliar buttons, pulling away with sudden impatience the constrictions of shirt and shoes and trousers until they stood, twin figures of ivory and rose and cream, in the shifting red and orange shadows of lamp-and fire-light. Their bodies formed a pattern of shadow and softly gleaming flesh, breath as well as shadow mingled, flesh touching, eyes touching with glances both ardent and cautious. She lay back upon the bed, feeling the roughness of the blankets against her skin. He joined her, touching her now until sensations like sparks from the stove circled and focused and …

There was time for apprehension, now, both a tightening and loosening amid a crescendo of sighs, tension climbing, sensation swarming over her before focusing in a union of yearning and a sharp and startling pain.

Afterwards …

I had not thought of blood.

Soreness lingered, a sense of pride and tenderness and, secretly — is that all there is? — a little disappointment, too.

7

Helena awoke to see the grey light of dawn showing through the cracks around the wooden windows. She got up, went to the door and looked out. The air was still, the white crests of the mountains shining against a pale sky, while here beside the lake the world lay in shadow.

She went out naked, her feet sinking into the cold moist moss, and waded into the lake that was as calm and cold as ice. When the water was deep enough she began to swim, the water growing colder as she went further out, as cold as anything her body had ever felt. Its coldness both embraced and penetrated her with a chill and sense of cleanliness that took away the lingering ache of mind and body that was all that remained of the physical conjunction that she now had difficulty associating with the actions of love or even of lovers.

Her teeth were chattering, her muscles taut in the first intimations of cramp. She turned and looked back at the shore and the cabin standing, silent and still as the encircling mountains, upon its tongue of land.

Had it not been this place it would have been somewhere else. If not this man, another man. She suspected that it would have made little difference. The significance of what had happened lay not in externals but in herself: the body that had changed, the knowledge, the attitude towards the world that said, yes, this has happened. Because I willed it.

She would have liked to spend the day by herself, to be consciously apart. Before last night she had been herself, inviolate. She had thought little about it but now she had become acutely aware of the body and being that were no longer exclusively her own. She wanted time and space to get used to the idea, to be naked and alone with the water and sunshine, the ice-white serenity of the encircling peaks.

It was not to be. Floating in the cold water, the morning’s fragile tranquillity, she saw the man come out of the cabin. He shouted to her, boisterously, and ran down the shore to plunge into the lake in a crash of waves that fractured the mirror-smoothness of the water, the silence, the sense of breath-held wonder at herself and the world.

He came ploughing towards her, splashing and laughing with the exuberant commotion of a child. She saw that his awareness of her had been both heightened and diminished by what had happened. He thought that in the sharing of their bodies they had been drawn so closely together that no space could remain between them. Because he had known her flesh, he imagined that was all there was to know. He knew nothing of her inner stillness. She had welcomed the prospect of sharing her stillness with him, imagining that this was the truth underlying the physical: to be of and with another being, to share the essence. Instead she had known only a joining of what was unimportant. Her inner being was untouched. In one sense she was glad, yet saddened, too, aware that she was now more alone than ever. She had seen the possibility of the true sharing that had both frightened and compelled her, yet at the last it had escaped her.

‘You’re up early. Sleep well?’

‘Very well.’

‘I woke up and thought she’s done a runner. Gone back and left me standing.’

She did not understand all the words but knew what he was saying, that he was laughing at her, not unkindly. She saw that he did not believe what he was saying: this, too, was an aspect of sharing. Perhaps it will be all right, she thought. Perhaps all we need is time.

They swam back to the shore and he turned to her hungrily — there, in the open, with the dampness of moss beneath her — and this time, yes, it was better. Not more significant, her inner self as inviolate as before, but more tender. Perhaps that would be enough. If they could share pleasure, tenderly, if they could lie as one and smile at each other, perhaps, in time, the rest would follow. The danger was that, knowing what she did not have, she might settle for second best because nothing more was possible. That, she did not want.

They put on their clothes. Ted made a fire. They brewed coffee, dark and smoke-tasting, which they drank standing. About them the mountains glittered in the sunlight. A hawk mewed, swooping overhead in a tilt of sickle wings. It was very lovely here. This man had brought her to this place, had in his fashion been good to her; they were able to share warmth and laughter as well as flesh. It was not for her to set objectives beyond the possible, to destroy the good they had for want of what might be for ever out of reach.

They put out the fire, they took bread and tomatoes and cheese, they walked high in the mountains. There was a stream gushing between grey rocks. The way lay up one bank, climbing steeply in the bright sunlight, while the fall boiled in a rainbow of spray far beneath them. At the top, the two banks were no more than a metre apart. They leapt the stream and went on, still climbing. They reached a ridge from which for the first time they could see the bones of the mountains, the scree slopes and coombs, black with shadow, that supported the upper ramparts of ice.

Helena said: ‘I would like to go there.’ Into the realm of ice.

Ted held her hand, shaking his head as he stared upwards at what, to a less prosaic man, might have been a source of wonder.

‘Bloody different from the place I come from, let me tell you.’

8

That night she asked him about the desert land from which he had come. He did his inarticulate best, telling her of vastness and heat, of a landscape whose principal feature was its lack of features.

‘It’s pretty flat. No mountains. Nothing like here.’

She frowned; she had lived her life surrounded by mountains and found it hard to imagine a country without them.

‘Maybe in Victoria. Or so they say. I’ve never been there. It’s a long way, eh. Big place, Oz. Deserts. They’ve even got jungles, up the Top End.’

Communication remained difficult. Every day she was growing more familiar with the new language but much of it still eluded her.

‘Deserto?’ Yes, that she understood. But jungles, what were they?

‘Albero. Albero grande,’ he said. Big trees … Ted, too, had learned one or two words of the language of her country, but a bloke could feel a dill, with sounds like that in his mouth.

Helena’s forehead creased, then cleared as hand signs proved more helpful than words. ‘Ah yes. Giungla …’ Yet she found it hard to sort out the confusion of such images.

‘After the war, you say you no go back to your desert?’

For a moment he sat staring with absent eyes into the stove, at the thrusting fingers of flame.

‘There’s talk the government’s gunna hand out land to Diggers. Along the Murray, that’s what I heard.’

‘Murray?’ She shaped the word in her mouth, feeling it as fragile as glass.

‘A river. Pretty big, people tell me. At least there’ll be plenty of water, eh?’

There was so much about his own country he did not know. Still, if it was as big as he said …

And you? She asked herself. What do you know about Calabria?

‘What will you grow on this farm of yours?’

‘Dunno.’

She saw he was not a man for detail. Yet she was a farmer’s daughter and knew how important details were. Perhaps it’s the war, she thought. Perhaps he doesn’t want to think about what’ll happen when it’s over. Just in case.

9

There were three days, then two. She would not think of time, of the minutes falling one by one, taking away what they had here together; that would have been too heavy a burden. Instead she concentrated on the diminishing stocks of food. There had been six cans, then four, now two. The potatoes and tomatoes were almost gone, the cheese down to about a third. She stared not so much at what remained but what had gone, as though at an enemy.

We shall finish it. Then we shall go. All this …

Would seem as though it had never been.

No, she thought. That was not true. Because what she had brought with her she would not be taking back. And was unsure whether she meant her virginity or the expectations of delight and fulfilment that, like the stocks of food, were now much reduced.

10

On the last day Ted went for a walk by himself. She watched him on the far side of the lake, a lean man whom she knew better than she had but still did not know, the signposts to his nature as confusing as the descriptions of desert and jungle that he had used to describe his country, the source of everything he was.

She watched him pacing, head bent forward as though to harangue the ground as she had observed him that morning haranguing the sun-shiny waters of the lake.

Why? and How? and When? The words as clear as though he had really spoken them.

So for him, too, the time here has changed things.

He came back. She saw the set mouth, the eyes focused and determined, and knew he had made up his mind, although to what end she did not know. He came straight to her, walking into her and crushing her in his arms, looking down at her so that she stared up at him in amazement.

‘You thought what’s gunna happen next?’

‘I think maybe I cook something to eat, afterwards we maybe go for a walk —’

‘Not that. What happens when we get back?’

‘Why we need think of that?’ Knowing that he thought she meant why should anything be different? But what she was really saying was that she had not thought about it and refused to do so. She would abandon herself to the future as she had since the day, seemingly so long ago, when she had ridden away from her aunt’s house.

It made her realise how unlike her he was. He wanted to see the future set out tidily in front of him, whereas she thought that was foolish. You could make all the plans you liked and things would happen just the same.

‘We gunna have to work out how we want things to be. Between us, I mean. We’re not gunna end, you know. This wasn’t just a few days in the sack, not for me.’

She heard his meaning clearly through the miasma of half-comprehensible sounds.

‘You think it was for me?’

‘That’s why we gotta sort things out.’ He spoke crossly. Perhaps the only way to survive as an airman was to plan ahead. But how could you plan for times when the enemy did something new? He was thinking like a husband, she thought. Telling her, and himself, how things were going to be and losing his temper when they turned out differently. Perhaps, if he really had been her husband, she would have liked him to organise her life, however foolish it was to try. As it was it made her feel vulnerable. The need to plan was to deny faith in the future. It made her wonder how he felt about her, about everything.

‘What you want should happen?’

He did not answer. Instead he removed his hands from her shoulders. He took two steps away from her and she saw that in his mind he had gone further away from her than that. He squinted across the lake, the moss, the sedges shrilling in the constant wind, at the snow-clad mountain peaks.

‘When this lot’s over I’m going home. To Australia.’

She thought that he, who had raised the issue, was now trying to avoid it.

‘Before that. What you want to happen tomorrow?’

Still he did not look at her but stood with eyes fixed upon the mountains as though only there could he read his own thoughts.

‘I reckon that’s up to you. We’ve had this time together. It’s been great. But I dunno. Your family’s rich. You told me your mother wanted a grand marriage for you. The war won’t last for ever. It could still happen.’

She watched his back. ‘My parents are dead. The farmhouse is burned. There’s nothing there —’

He talked through her. ‘A house can be rebuilt. The land’s still there. There’ll still be some bloke, some count or earl or baron or whatever you call them,’ speaking with mounting savagery as though determined to cut them both to the heart, ‘who’ll be happy as Larry to have you —’

Her fury matched his own. ‘And my land? That what you think? That I should sell myself to a man willing to take me and my land? Take me because of my land?’

‘If it wasn’t for the war —’

‘The war is fact! You could say, if my parents not die … But they did die. My mother, the soldiers they rape her before she die,’ the images so long denied rising like filth to the surface of her thoughts, the blood and screams, the wide-flung legs, ‘and the house it burn —’

He took two swift steps towards her. He held her tight while she wept in rage and horror, wanting both to cling to him and pound him with clenched fists at what he had said and made her see.

‘If I want to marry count, like you say, live in palazzo,’ once again the English word escaping her in her rage, ‘with car, children, fine clothes, you think I would come into the mountains with you?’

Still he held her close and she knew that her anger had not reached him. ‘You still gotta make up your mind what you want.’

She felt the length of his body against hers, the stalwart beating of his heart. ‘I must think of Marija, too.’ Now it was her turn to avoid the issue but she knew that the child was indeed a problem that would have to be resolved.

‘Is she important to you?’

‘I would not abandon her.’

‘That wasn’t what I said. You’ll have to take her back to the village after the war. She must have relations.’ Her body jerked, instinctively rejecting the idea of ever going back. With his arms still about her he felt the movement at once. He said: ‘You gotta go back. Even if it’s only for one day. Forget the kid. You gotta do something about the farm, either run it yourself or put in a manager or sell it. You can’t just walk away.’

At that moment she could have walked away from it very easily but knew he was right. All the same …

‘The war may go on for years.’

‘I don’t think so. Everyone’s sick of it. I’m tired to death most of the time. It’s gotta be just as bad for the Jerries.’

‘What difference it make, people being tired?’

‘Because sooner or later they’ll just stop. Maybe it’s the only way it ever will stop. God knows it should never have started in the first place.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘That’s what I’m saying. What happens afterwards? What happens to us?’

Again she found herself avoiding the issue.

‘Better we wait till then.’

‘No. We gotta make up our minds. If you’re gunna marry some count, we’ll just have to pretend none of this happened —’

‘Too late for that. Everyone in the village will know by now.’

‘That won’t matter. Counts never hear village gossip. I dunno much about counts but I know that much.’

She felt her breath and her heart, her thoughts a whirling confusion of no and yes and it’s impossible and why not.

‘I think we may forget about the count.’

‘Okay. Then things will be different.’

‘How different?’

‘Because I’ll want to marry you and take you back to Oz with me.’

She had suspected that he was about to say something of the sort. She had even tried to deflect him from what she found so astounding: that this Australian airman should have asked her, an Italian farmer’s daughter, to marry him.

She felt her will rise to meet the challenge. Yes, she would go with him, if that was what it took to fashion a new life for herself in place of all that was gone. And later would abandon it, too, should that prove necessary.

There had been no mention of love.

‘Why you want marry me?’

He looked blank. ‘Reckon I just do.’

Eloquence would not be part of the package but she could manage without eloquence. Yet still she would not give him her answer.

‘Tomorrow. I tell you then.’

She was not troubled by doubts about whether she was ready to marry or how their lives would work out when they were so different from each other. She didn’t care about the language or how far away Australia was. What mattered was strength. She knew she was strong enough but wasn’t so sure about Ted. He was kind and caring. As an air gunner, he was presumably brave, too, but a farmer needed courage of a different kind. She thought that an air battle would call for speed and heat: the speed of reflex, the heat of temperament. A farmer did not need bravery so much as the courage to endure. The evening passed. She opened the last can of meat to make the last supper they would eat in this place, she washed the dishes meticulously. Careless of mosquitoes, she stood outside the cabin and stared at the lake, silver under the moon, and beyond it the hint of distant snows against a black and star-spangled sky.

This was her land, her place. Could she leave it, and be content? Could she use her own strength and courage to carve from the unknown land the fulfilment that her life required?

She would never be able to manage it alone. She would need support; Ted would have to play his part, too.

He knows the land, she thought. He will come to terms with it, do what must be done.

Yet doubt remained.

She went back into the cottage and closed the door behind her. The glimmer of the oil lamp showed that Ted was already in bed. Outside in the moonlight she had not known what she was going to do but now she did not hesitate. She took off her clothes and got into bed. She clung close, caressing him, seeking not his flesh alone but the confidence she needed in them both and in the future. For some minutes he did not respond, as though he, too, had doubts, but she persisted and eventually he turned to her. Afterwards, feeling for the first time the release of fulfilment, she lay at peace. She felt the slow seeping of her body, the easing of nerves and muscles, an end to doubt. She said: ‘Yes.’

He turned on his elbow, banging her thigh with his knee and not caring.

‘What was that?’

‘I say yes.’ Speaking from the midst of the dream that was welling like smoke to swallow her.

‘You mean …?’

‘I say yes.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

1

For a few months nothing changed: not, at least, in the externals of life. Helena continued to live in the village with Marija. Every day they walked to the aerodrome. Every day the child amused herself as best she could while Helena went through the motions of sweeping, cleaning, washing up, helping in the kitchen. Within herself, however, things had indeed changed. Time, even light, became more concentrated. Every part of her awareness acquired an added intensity because now she had something of herself tied up in the war, and who could say what the future might bring?

Every day she watched the skies, her mind troubled by chimeras of flame.

The priest, long nose and black soutane, came to interrogate her. Accusations had been made, immorality alleged. The devil was loose, or so it was claimed.

Helena seethed but would not give him the satisfaction of showing it.

‘The devil? You do me too much honour, Father.’

Now faces turned away when she walked through the village. It might have been awkward had Signora Gambetta been one of them but her landlady was no church-goer. As long as Helena paid her rent she would remain an ally, perhaps more stalwart even than before.

‘Priests? Busybodies, the lot of them.’

Until one day in November Helena leaned on her broom and watched as one of the pilots came running and stumbling towards her, his face bright with news.

‘The war …’

Between one moment and the next, or so it seemed, the war was over.

2

It left a silence: no more sorties or killing, no more fear that this would be the day when Ted would take off never to return. But silence and an end to fighting were not true peace. Instead there came an emptiness peopled by a new form of apprehension. After the blood and battles, change would surely come. No-one knew what form it would take, although Helena and Ted, lying side by side on her bed in Signora Gambetta’s house, were already aware, instinctively, of one aspect of it. The Armistice was three days old and the world that until now had seemed to be dragging itself like a wounded beast towards death was still. They lay within a vortex not of their own devising that had come upon them with the ending of the war. The outrage of some of the villagers at the blatant behaviour of the two foreigners might have meant trouble for them at one time, but not now. Now it could neither reach nor harm them because, with the silence of the guns, the old world and its values were gone. Now was different from all the nows there had ever been, present and future distinct from what had been the past.

Into this new existence Ted said: ‘I’ve fixed up for a car to take you back to your village.’

She thought she could not have understood him correctly. ‘A car? To take me back?’

‘And Marija. You can find her rellies, decide what you want to do with the farm, whether you want to keep it or get a manager in or —’

Incredulity rose in a wave within her.

‘No!’ She erupted in a froth of words, gesticulating with outraged hands as she turned and seized him, shaking him out of the contemplation with which he was regarding the ceiling above them. ‘What you say, eh? Now the war is over you want to be rid of me, is that it?’

She could not sustain her English in her fury. Mortified, tears bursting from her scalded eyes, she ranted at him in Italian mixed with the Slovene dialect of her childhood, outrage needing neither language nor even coherence to express itself. Her clenched fists pounded his naked chest, her tears and words assailed him until he took her fists and held them while she bucked and fought against him and at length lay still.

He spoke patiently, as to a child: ‘What’s all that about?’

Screams and abuse gave way to silent tears. She would not answer. He held her and gentled her, very slowly and quietly. At last, in a voice rusty with tears, she said: ‘I not want to go alone. I want you come with me.’

‘That’s im—’

Again, in the face of his denial, her voice began to rise. ‘No! You no understand? We one person, now. Is that not right? It not right for you to turn your back, send me off to arrange these things alone …’

Her strength lay in her determination to deny strength, to tell both him and herself that without his support she would be lost, while all the time she was bludgeoning him with an outpouring of emotion that she sensed was a source of embarrassment to him. Do it, because I am weaker than you.

Do it, because I am stronger than you.

‘I want you come with me.’

3

It was market day and the village had come back to life. At intervals from a sea of weeds arose the ruins of houses, gaunt and staring, carrying within their soot-stained bricks the memory of the past and a warning of what might one day return to trouble the future. Around them surged crowds, indifferent to the fire and death that had visited them so recently.

Helena stood with Ted and Marija beside her. She felt lost amid the throng of unfamiliar faces. Passers-by glanced at the three strangers but no-one seemed to recognise her. Am I so different? Or has memory discarded me, too, with the past that no-one now wishes to acknowledge?

It made her feel invisible; she said as much to Ted, whose answer — phlegmatic, unimaginative, probably correct — helped ease her mind.

‘When the village was burned most of the people must have pushed off. Had to, didn’t they, if they weren’t gunna sleep out? This mob here’s probably come down from the hills. They wouldn’t know you, would they?’

‘Perhaps Michelangelo is here.’

‘Who?’

She did not explain, nor did she find him. The world had changed, indeed, but it did not excuse her from the things she had come here to do.

Marija had spoken of an aunt living in a cottage a kilometre from the village. They explored a valley spiked with pines and other trees, perhaps oak, that now, in late-November, were stripped of leaves. A stream gushed between boulders. The footpath seemed to lead nowhere, the only sound the voice of the stream.

The cottage lay around a bend in the path. It was jammed between massive boulders much higher than itself, with the stream running almost at its door.

‘She gets flooded out every year.’ Marija sounded proud that a member of her family should live in such an exciting place.

Helena knocked on the door. Presently it opened a crack and a suspicious face — black eyes, black headscarf — stared out at her. ‘What do you want?’

The woman spoke not in Italian but dialect. Helena replied in the same tongue, while Ted stood behind her in awkward silence. ‘We have brought your niece.’

The woman was angry. ‘My niece is dead.’

And then Marija burst past Helena and thrust open the door so that the woman staggered and nearly lost her footing as the child partly fell, partly threw herself, into her aunt’s arms. Screams, laughter and tears as the woman and child peeled away desolation and bereavement. At first standing apart, Helena was quickly drawn into the maelstrom of joy and weeping, shrieking along with them, while awkward Ted stood as still as stone, his mind filled with the red desert of his memories and its silence.

There were more tears and wails when the time came to part but eventually Helena and Ted were walking back down the path towards the village, Ted, after the floods of emotion, feeling that he could breathe again.

Marija’s aunt had told Helena that the remains of her parents had indeed been found in the burnt-out farmhouse. She offered no more information, nor did Helena enquire, preferring to imagine without knowing, than to know with certainty and be haunted by nightmares for ever. ‘They are buried in the churchyard.’

The little cemetery, dominated by the church with its tower, was already a place of memory. Helena saw the path beyond the low, lichen-stained wall and remembered walking along it as a child with her cousin Guido on their way to the ridge of Razor Mountain with its views over the Adriatic. It had been springtime and the meadows had been bright with flowers shining amid the grass. Now the flowers were gone, the grass lank beneath the rain that fell continuously out of a grey sky. The sodden day was appropriate to her mood and the purpose of their visit.

She walked between the gravestones, each with its portrait of the dead. There were many new stones, some bearing faces that she recognised. Some of these had no doubt been victims of the attack that had left the village and the lives of so many in ruins. She found the graves of her parents. She had brought a scarf for this moment. Black hair decently covered, she went and stood before the graves, staring at the humped earth, the gravestones still unmarked by time, each face, so well-loved and remembered, staring back at her from its ceramic plaque.

She wanted to pray, as seemed proper, but could not. Instead she stood silently, staring at the graves through eyes blurred with tears, thinking of nothing. The people who lay here were her past. Like the past, they were dead, whereas she was alive, with most of her life ahead of her. The gulf between them was too great to be bridged by tears or purposeless regrets. Tears consoled the living; they gave nothing to the dead.

Nevertheless she stood unmoving, apprehensive of the future, while the rain ran down her neck. This earth, even this rain belonged to her, as she belonged to them. The memory of this day — the feeling of the air, the scent of the earth, the impact of the rain — would remain with her for ever.

She turned away and walked to where Ted was standing, going on past him and up the track to the site of what had been her home.

It had become a place of silence and of ghosts.

The gutted stones stood jagged among weeds. Here had been her life. There was the skeleton of the doorway through which, times without number, she had watched the snow drifting out of a winter sky while, behind her, her grandmother’s voice had complained of draughts. Clusters of stocks, clove-scented, had grown against that wall. That pile of fallen stone, half buried beneath weeds and rubbish, was all that remained of the range. Here had been warmth and love and life. And, at the last, death.

Not two paces from where she was standing had lain the body of Marija’s mother, used, broken and discarded. Helena stepped carefully around the place and the remembered blood that had been dissolved but not obliterated by the months of sun and rain.

Beyond the yard’s stone wall the fields, untended, lay dark and sullen.

Ted stood at her shoulder.

‘Good land?’

‘I think so.’

Although her father’s complaints had been like a wind in the chimney. She walked over to the shed where she had found Marija. She looked through the open doorway but did not go in. Here, too, remained the unquiet spirits of the past.

‘Maybe I sell, one day. Not yet.’

It made no sense to sell now, when no-one had money and the future was so uncertain. ‘I see my cousin. Ask him to sell it, when right time!’

4

With Helena directing, Ted drove through the rain and mud to the house on the far side of the mountain. Behind it the mass of the Carso rose like a black cloud beneath a sky barely less dark.

Her aunt greeted them, eyeing Ted with a curiosity as sharp as knives. Not that Helena planned to enlighten her.

‘I was looking for Guido.’

‘He is not here. He has gone to Monfalcone to seek a position at the school.’

‘Will he get it?’

‘Of course he will get it.’

The aunt’s eyes showed affront at the notion that he might not and at this unworthy woman who had tried to become friends with her son. More than friends, no doubt. Now here she was, with a foreigner. Probably she could get no better, nor deserved it.

‘I shall write to him,’ Helena said.

‘Remember to congratulate him when you do.’

Driving back down the winding track that would lead them to the airfield, Ted wondered: ‘How d’you know he’ll look after things for you?’

‘Because I know him.’

She wrote to Guido explaining the situation and asking him to sell the farm when he thought the moment was right. She said she was sorry she had missed him and hoped he had got the job he wanted.

She sent the letter to him at home, but to avoid the risk of her aunt destroying it, she also sent a copy care of the Monfalcone school. Trusting in the future did not prevent her trying to cater for every eventuality. For this reason she asked Guido, when he sold the farm, to remit half the money to the address that she would send him from Australia and keep the rest for her here.

Just in case.

5

The liner City of York took them south, with other soldiers, other wives. Into a future far from Europe and its troubles.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1

They got the land, no worries, then discovered, like all the other soldier-settlers who had listened to the politicians’ siren songs, that they would have to pay top dollar for it. It was a section located five miles south of the Murray River and deep in the wilderness of contorted eucalypt scrub that the locals — what there were of them — called the mallee. The individual trees weren’t very tall: no more than twenty to thirty feet, in most cases. Helena had expected a towering rainforest but there was nothing like that, only an endless wasteland where each plant threw up from ground level a multitude of boles, tangled and impenetrable, that covered every inch of the land they now owned.

Helena saw in the closely woven growth a potential for resistance far exceeding her worst fears.

‘What do we do with it?’

‘We clear it.’

‘How?’

‘Roll it first, then burn it.’

She thought she had misheard him. ‘How do we roll it?’

‘With a steel roller.’

‘Where do we get this roller?’

‘We buy it. Through the bank.’

Soberly, she measured what he was saying against what her eyes could see. ‘It will take all our lives.’

‘Don’t you believe it. We’re self-reliant blokes in this country. We’ll manage.’ As though that was supposed to comfort her. Oddly enough it did: not the words but the way he said them, gaily and confidently, as though he believed absolutely in what he was telling her. Perhaps, after all, his strength would prove equal to the task. Yet doubt remained, as it had from the first.

Air-gunner bravery.

Pray God there was courage, too, she thought, the courage to endure and, eventually, to overcome. She said: ‘There’s one thing we shall need, first of all.’

‘What’s that?’

She stared at this man who had boasted of his self-reliance. ‘A house. Or shelter, at least.’

Ted built them a little iron-roofed shack constructed of poles and superphosphate bags, with a stone oven outside. It wasn’t much but for the moment would have to do.

The next day he started work on the land very early, as he was to do every day thereafter. Little by little the ring of trees was pushed back. More and more, the limits of what was possible matched the limits of what they could see.

It was slow work but after a year Ted was able to say: ‘We’ve done a fair bit. We gotta remember what it was like when we first come here.’

Already that had become Ted’s mantra, an affirmation directed at the question that he read, or imagined, in Helena’s eyes. Not only at the question; more, perhaps, at the mallee itself, which fell back sullenly, yard by yard, but never surrendered. Sometimes he thought it would fight him for ever. He scowled at it: clenching fists and jaw.

‘I’ll crack the bastard yet …’

2

Helena felt in danger of being drowned by the bush that continued to press close, for all Ted’s work. When the wind came gusting, the contorted branches threatened the humans who had dared invade their space.

The trees were not the only threat. There were snakes, too. At the start of their first winter, snakes seeking warmth had sneaked into the house through holes in the bagging. They had gone after them with axe and spade, killing them and tossing the bodies outside. Neither of them had been bitten but the flimsy dwelling was hardly safe.

At night Helena lay watching the walls vibrating in the wind. She listened to its alien threatening voice, and was afraid. She clung to Ted, trying to bury apprehension in the man’s warmth. They could not afford to waste candles but there was a full moon and in the grey light shimmering through the shack’s sacking walls she could see her husband’s thin, introspective face, the fair hair dark against his forehead. This man, she thought, so inarticulate and awkward, with whom she had shared such intimacy, offered the only warmth between herself and the cold threat of the bush. ‘We must get another house,’ she said. ‘One with mud walls, at least.’

It was another burden, on top of all the rest, but Ted did not protest. There was a stand of pines not far away, and the next day Ted felled them, then used the trunks to build a more sturdy structure with a galvanised roof, the wooden walls sealed with mud against snakes and weather. Parked behind the house was the steel roller, made from a rust-pitted boiler, that was the chief weapon in his war against the bush. After he had used it to crush the scrub, he planted the cleared land to wheat. Now Helena lay next to her husband at night in their new house and tried to revisit with him the dreams of the future that had brought them to this place. The resentful bush had set its face against them but she remained convinced that the two of them, working together, sharing pain and joy together, could triumph. The relentless hard work was a barrier but Helena would not let herself be beaten by anything as basic as fatigue. She clung to her husband, she coaxed him with the touch of her hands, the steady flow of her voice. She was comfortable with her new language now but her accent remained strong. With others she was self-conscious about it but when they were alone together she spoke freely and it was like the first time they had made love in the mosquito-haunted cottage beside the mountain lake.

Her body slack after love, she talked to him of the future, the children they would have, the successful farm they would build, the prosperity and fulfilment they would share together. Such rosy dreams in the wooden hut.

‘Maybe we can even go to Italy, one day. On a visit. I would like that.’

While Ted said little, settling towards sleep beside her. She did not mind. There was no need for him to say anything. What mattered was being together; she had enough dreams for both of them.

The mallee continued to live underground, constantly throwing up shoots, so after harvest, Ted fired the stubble. The theory was that, in time, repeated burning would kill the roots so that the ground would be truly cleared. Perhaps it would, but Helena had her doubts. She feared that the wilderness could not be vanquished so easily.

With the planting of the wheat came rabbits by the thousand. At least they could eat the rabbits; at times it was about all there was to eat.

The wood from the felled trees fired the oven. It did a good job, burning slowly with a steady heat, yet the comforting glow of the fire did little to dispel the menace of the eucalypt scrub. Particularly at night, it drew a tight circle around the little house, its darkly stirring shadows witness to the inhabitants’ every breath.

3

There were other settlers now. Weeks went by without their seeing a soul but the stillness of isolation was gone. The bush rang with oaths and the crack of axes on pine as, one after another, cabins were built. Even when the sounds were out of earshot the air itself heard them, conveying to Ted and Helena the presence of other humans. Thank God for the rollers. To clear ground like that with axes alone would have been a lifetime’s work. Or damn close.

‘Christ, mate, she’d be flamin’ impossible …’

Without rollers and fire it certainly would have been. Even with them, progress was a crawl.

4

The swagman came walking up the red sand track. Helena knew it led from the distant river, although in the eighteen months they had lived on their section she had never seen it. The man had a swag and a fire-blackened billy dangled from his belt, a broken hat was pushed far back on his head. From hat to boots he was red with dust. Even the lines that furrowed his sweat-shiny cheeks were red, so that his eyes, pale blue and over-large in a face as whip-thin as the body that supported it, seemed to stare at the world from a map marked with tracks leading nowhere. He stopped at the house and knocked, the sound of knuckles an echo of the anger and impatience that Helena sensed in him as soon as she came to the door. Yet he spoke civilly enough, asking for water.

She fetched him a mug brimming with the alkaline-tasting water that she fetched every day from the government well two miles away.

‘It don’t taste much, I’m afraid.’

Nor did the harsh idiom she’d picked up from her husband, but it was the only English she knew.

He up-ended the mug. ‘It’s wet.’

She looked him over with frank curiosity. ‘You look like you come a long way.’

‘Damn right.’

She made a guess. ‘Mildura?’

‘A lot further than that.’ He studied the partially cleared land around the house.

‘I’m looking for work.’

Which explained the belligerence: a man outfoxed by circumstances he did not understand, knowing only that they were too much for him.

‘None around here.’

He gave the briefest of nods as though he had expected nothing else and handed back the mug. ‘Got enough to spare to fill me water bottle?’

‘Of course.’

She took it away and filled it for him.

‘I’ll be gittin along, then.’

She watched his back, proud, erect and stubborn, as he walked away from her across the clearing. Impulsively she called after him. ‘Where you goin’?’

She did not know whether he had heard her or not. At all events he did not answer but walked on, shoulders squared to confront whatever life had in store for him. The bush swayed as he passed, she caught a last glimpse of the pugnacious shoulders, and he was gone.

That evening, when Ted came back to the house, she mentioned the man.

‘Yairs. Had a word with him, meself.’

‘He told me he’d come from a long way. I asked him but he didn’t say where, or where he was going. I don’t know who he was.’

‘A bloke like us. Forced off because he couldn’t keep up his payments. Told me the bank took all his gear. No plough, no seeder, what’s he to do, eh? He’s stuffed.’

‘He said he was looking for work.’

‘None round here that I know of.’

‘It’s not right, is it?’

‘Na. But that’s life.’

And he would have turned away had she not pursued him.

‘Don’t you care? Is there nothing anyone can do?’

He stared at her as though puzzled that a person could ask such a question. Survival was what interested him, and everyone else he knew. As for the rest … Words.

‘Don’ reckon there is.’

‘But it’s —’

Your country, she had been about to say, but it was hers, too, now. Yet already she knew she would never be a true Australian. She could not swallow her anger. She had to protest, let it out.

‘You have no passion. None of you.’

Again the questing, thoughtful look. ‘Could be right.’

And he went to wash up, leaving her to vent her anger in a clatter of pots and pans.

5

Three years after their arrival Helena gave birth to a daughter. She stroked the downy head and thought how the child was the future, her offering both of defiance and submission to her husband and the land. She thought of her own faraway country and dead parents, of her cousin Guido and the aunt whom she had never liked but whom she could tolerate more easily now, enmity softened by time and distance. Aunt and cousin were doubly precious because they were all that remained of the family who had become lost to her in daily life, if never in heart and memory.

In their place she now had this child. At her insistence they named her Lucia, although to Ted and the scattering of other farmers who inhabited the area she became, inevitably, Lucy.

‘Lucy Fisher …’ Ted was delighted — you couldn’t get much more Aussie than that — while Helena kept her daughter’s true name inviolate in her heart.

Lucia, Lucia …

She watched the baby, thinking how, God willing, she would grow to become a woman. She might become famous or infamous. Might become anything or nothing. The future contained the threat and promise of all that might be, might not be. All was possible, now.

6

In later years Lucia, or Lucy, came to believe that the spirit of the mallee had entered into her even before her birth, perhaps when her father had entered her mother at the moment of her conception. In the blind, red months before memory, the unconscious awareness of the trees had flowed into her with the circulation of the blood, so that by birth she had become one with them and the mallee lands.

Without that awareness, she would have been a different being.

7

Even the coming of a baby made no difference to the remorseless cycle of the year.

For the settlers it started with the rains of April or May. Lanterns cast pools of pale light as the men — women and kids, too, where there were any — sat up late, pickling bags of seed in a solution of copper sulphate to protect it from smut. Hard bloody yakka and no error. Each bag had to be lifted into the solution and left for a minute before being hoicked out again, streaming blue rivers and as heavy as lead. Put it down, move on to the next one. The solution left blue puddles in the dirt.

Some blokes joked to their wives about it. ‘Blue blood, that’s what it is. We’ve joined the bloody aristocracy, girl.’

Right. It was the same joke, year after year, but better than a bunch of fives, which some favoured. Either way, if you spent five or six hours pickling, you knew all about it.

Each morning the men were up at four to harness the teams. At first light they were off, figures dark-shadowed against a pale sky promising heat. All through the day they worked, following the stump-jump drills as they seeded the slow acres, seeing through salt-circled eyes the ways of freedom they had chosen and that now had them by the throats. It didn’t do to think too much about it. Heads down, bums up: it was the only way.

Some bloke wrote an article about it in one of the papers. Talked about the stoic heroism of the settlers, the epic struggle against nature: whatever that was supposed to mean. Epic struggle against the pollies or the system that saw commodity prices fall while debt grew ever higher: they might have related to that. As it was …

‘Loada shit, you ask me.’

Then it was dusk. Back home through the gathering darkness, a quick wash, bite to eat, back to the pickling shed.

‘Brick short of a load, that’s us.’

Damn right.

By the time the seed was in the soil, the underground roots of the mallee were sending out fresh shoots. The men prowled the seeded acres like sentries looking for infiltrators. They went after the new growth with shoot hooks, cursing the bush for resisting them so stubbornly.

‘Don’ you worry, mate. Your time’s comin’.’

End of winter, August or thereabouts, the settlers got together to carry out the next phase of the war. A ten-foot roller on an offset linkage could clear ten acres a day. The horses’ necks bowed in the collars and the world was a concussion of shattering noise as the steel rollers smashed their way steadily onwards. By the time he got home a bloke was half deaf, with the felled timber left to dry like corpses in an unending battle.

‘Unending’s bloody right …’ Josh Conrad, the giant who was one of their closest neighbours, wiped his red and streaming face. ‘Turn your back five minutes and it’s growing again. Stand still a month, I reckon you’d not know you’d done anything at all.’

Not that there was any question of doing that.

October brought haymaking. The year was hotting up but the horses had to eat. Nowadays, where the cockies could afford to put in fences, there were sheep in the mallee and the hay might be needed for them, too, during the winter.

Some seasons there was bugger-all hay to harvest. The rabbits were another story. Some days, with all the shooting, the forest sounded like the Western Front but ammo didn’t come cheap and there was a limit to what a man could do.

Harvesting whatever the rabbits had left put paid to Christmas. Just another day for the cockie driving his team.

A six-foot stripper could clear ten acres a day. Afterwards the winnowers were dragged into the paddocks to separate the grain. That was a beaut job, no error. Shovelling grain, straw, all the crap into the machine, shaking the tray by hand for hours on end until the grain separated, while all the time the gusting wind sent explosions of chaff dust to plaster sweat-streaming bodies. More dust than man, time you’d finished for the day. And the heat … Enough to crush skulls.

The chaff was kept for feed, the grain bagged. Some time in January the bags were hauled to the railway siding for pick-up. That job could be fun, too, with the trolleys bogging down every five minutes in the sandhills that were everywhere.

Come February there was ploughing ahead of the new season, and the time for burning.

A hot day with a stiff breeze was best to get the fire going. Of course there were risks. Let the fire get away and you had major dramas. Everyone cleared firebreaks to make things as safe as they could, tipped off their neighbours, too, so that blokes knew what was going on. Nearly everyone.

8

There’s some you’ve only got to look at to know they couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. Merv Hunsdale was like that. What a dill. He’d made a mess of things from the day he’d moved in: from the day he was hatched, most likely. Tried to use an ordinary plough on his place, swore it was as good as a stump-jumper. With the ground full of mallee, how was that ever going to work? But Merv was as stubborn as he was stupid. Result? He buggered up his plough, had to beg, borrow and steal from his neighbours to get by.

Let fly at a rabbit with that old .22 of his, he’d be more likely to murder a tree.

It was a miracle he survived at all but, full quid or not, he was a decent enough cove in his way, and blokes used to give him the time of day when they saw him, like he was a friendly dog.

‘How ya goin’, Merv?’

Then came the day of the fire. A stinking hot day it was, with a wind that kept changing its mind about the way it wanted to blow. Tricky weather, even if you weren’t a brick short of a load.

Seemed that Merv had hopped out of bed, saw the sort of day it was and lit up. No firebreaks, no word to a soul. By the time it had finished, that fire had gone through six sections, burned up Merv’s shack with all his furniture and whatever cash he’d got, and had destroyed the wooden platform of Josh Conrad’s windmill, thirty feet up in the air. If the wind hadn’t gone round, driving the flames back over the burned ground so that they ran out of fuel, it would have been even worse.

It left acres of burnt-out land and smouldering stumps. It was like hell come early, with a dozen blokes looking for Merv’s blood.

They couldn’t find him. People thought he must have done a runner but a week later his body was fished out of the Murray, twenty miles downstream. He’d been skating pretty close to the edge for years and most people thought that the fire, and knowing what a muck he’d made of his life generally, was what finally put him over. Perhaps; but one thing was sure: it needn’t have ended the way it did. He had no family to worry about but he did have a horse that had somehow survived the flames. He could have saddled up and ridden away. Could have walked, come to that. There was no reason for him to have gone anywhere near the river, which everyone knew was as dangerous as a snake in a rat hole along that stretch. Yet there he was. Fire or no fire, everyone in the district turned out for the funeral. A helluva way to die: lonely in mind as well as body, if the rumours were correct.

The local vicar had doubts about holding the funeral at all, whingeing on about suicide and consecrated ground until blokes put him right.

‘Accident, Reverend. That’s what it was. Terrible tragedy. Okay?’

So it was, however it had come about.

CHAPTER NINE

1

Ever since they had moved onto the section Helena had felt stifled. She was surrounded, not only by the silently watching mallee itself but by the frustration of knowing that she was not truly a part of the endeavours that she needed so much to share. It was a man’s world — she had grown up well aware of that — yet somehow she had hoped that the demands of the wilderness would change things. They had not. Very well. She would change them herself.

She begged a couple of chooks from a neighbour. She built a run, enclosed it in close-mesh wire fencing against snakes and wild dogs. She held the first still-warm eggs in her hands and felt herself alive once more. The first eggs she gave to her neighbour, to pay for the chooks.

‘No need for that.’

‘I’d rather pay, if it’s all the same to you.’

Her courtesy was out of place. She knew it was resented — to offer payment in this country was to refuse the hand of friendship — but could not help herself: it was the way she had been brought up to think, to speak.

‘I’ll bring more.’

‘Suit yourself.’

She saw there would be no more offers of assistance from that quarter but there was nothing to be done. She was as she was, and increasingly stubborn about it. In the meantime, the supply of eggs did wonders for their diet.

2

She’d had the chooks a year now.

Perhaps they were what made the difference, giving her a sense that, different or not, she had at last become part of the life that surrounded her. Whatever it was, there was certainly a change in the way she looked at the countryside. Before, she had seen only darkness, the unspoken threat of the wilderness. Now she saw it with new eyes.

The flowers, so beautiful once she had taught herself to see them, marked the passage of the year. From another neighbour she learned their names: June’s Pink Burr Daisy, the brilliant red Noon Flowers of September, the aptly named Ice Plant that came a little later. There were the red bells of the correa, the banksia’s showy candles, the grevillea blossom with its multiple stamens like gigantic crimson insects; in spring, the airy tracery of flowering stringybark. She pointed out all these things to her child, hoping that she would absorb beauty as well as privation into her blood. Privation there certainly was. There were days when Helena’s heart was full of anguish that her child should be brought up in such a place, such circumstances, yet Lucy was a healthy child, growing and thriving despite all the odds. Mischievous, into everything, a flame amid the grass. With her dark brown hair blazing with red lights, her enormous eyes the colour of sapphire, she had the makings of a beautiful woman. Barring accidents. A mile away another child was bitten by a brown snake, was dead within the hour. It happened. Helena spoke to Ted about it.

‘What do we do?’

He scratched his head. ‘What can we do?’ Like the mallee itself, the snakes were a fact of life. ‘Just have to be careful, that’s all.’

‘How?’

But that Ted could not say.

Helena challenged him bitterly. ‘You don’t care.’

Ted did not answer. It wasn’t true but words, in the war against the unrelenting bush, were harder to find than ever. Once again he took refuge in the endless cycle of work.

3

The building of the school hall was a communal effort. No-one could say whose idea it had been but all agreed it was a worthwhile project. It would set them back close on two hundred quid, which was beyond their reach, but there was an election coming and, with luck, they’d be able to con the government into kicking in half.

It was important: not only because the kids needed an education, but because it showed faith that the soldier settlements were here to stay.

With its eye on the ballot box, the government agreed to put up fifty quid to get them going, another fifty when the hall was ready.

‘Reckon we can trust the bastards?’

The election would be over by the time they built it, so no-one was too confident of getting the full hundred, but if they wanted the hall there was no choice. So they said yes sir, no sir, grabbed the fifty and got stuck in.

They made the walls out of mixed stone and concrete, set in moulds and erected with the help of Josh Conrad’s kerosene-driven tractor, the first in the district. They fashioned joists from pine, used sheets of galvanised iron for the roof. By the time the last nail had been hammered home they’d got themselves a hall forty foot long by twenty wide, with a lean-to at the back.

They stood and looked at their work admiringly.

‘School? Big enough for an indoor footy match, just about.’

‘You never know how many kids we’ll end up with.’

‘You plannin’ to fill that, you’d better tell Pete to get back on the job, eh?’ Pete and his wife already had four, with another on the way.

Helena shook her head when Ted, in one of his rare bursts of conversation, passed on the remark to her.

‘In that tiny hut. I don’t know how they manage.’

Nor was she anxious to find out. The single child she had was enough for her.

4

Tractors and cultivators, seeders, binders, strippers, winnowers … There was no end to it. Blokes got in over their heads but no-one had any choice; without the machinery the work couldn’t be done.

‘Only sixty hours in a day, right?’

Sometimes it seemed like it.

‘A good hoick in prices, she’ll be sweet.’

That was right, too, but it didn’t happen. Instead prices fell, like water down the gurgler.

Two families, not far away, were wiped out and walked off.

‘On the wallaby with three young kids?’

‘It ain’t bloody right!’

No, it wasn’t, but government action was needed and none was forthcoming. Fingers were pointed but did no good. Blaming others, with whatever justification, achieved nothing for a man who had mortgaged his whole life, only to be mocked by dreams of a freedom that remained for ever beyond his reach.

5

Something happened, she never knew what. Overnight the chooks took sick and died. No-one could explain it. She wept for the foolish things but more for herself.

Ted was angry, not understanding what she was on about.

‘Bloody chooks, for God’s sake. That’s all they were.’

To Helena they had been a lot more than that.

‘We’ll get you some more.’

She had no heart for it. She saw that even in this she was alone. It crushed her.

One day she stopped him as he was going to wash.

‘Please …’

He looked at her, his face as expressionless as bone.

‘I want to help. I want to be part of you: in the farm, in our life here. In everything.’ That, she could say, but not what she really meant: I need to feel needed. That you still want me.

Not even to save life or marriage could she say that. From his lack of expression Ted might not have heard a word. Anger throbbed in her blood at the thought that she must implore him for what should be hers. ‘We were close once. We talked to each other. Now you have shut me out.’

Still he stared with his pale and unblinking eyes. At length, after what seemed like hours: ‘Dunno what you’re on about.’

He went to wash up. Helena looked after him, hands clenched.

6

Helena stood in the open doorway of the house, her eyes challenging the land. Everything in her life irked her: a country that would be for ever hostile, a husband who never spoke, the house itself.

All right, it was not the bag-and-pole shanty they’d started with but it was still the shabbiest shack in all this part of the mallee. She would have hated it, and the man who after seven years still thought no shame in making his wife and daughter live in it, had hatred served any purpose. She knew it never would; she had put hatred aside deliberately, as she had all emotion and softness in her nature and her life. In the beginning, in those distant days of courtship when the flight of gaudy aircraft across the dangerous skies of northern Italy had each day brought her both pride and terror, she had thought she could sustain with her love and strength the man whose weakness even then she had suspected.

She knew better now. She had been willing to love, but it had evaded her and her failure had brought her only hurt. Now she thought it was just as well. To love would have meant opening herself to others and the world, and anyone forced to survive on a diet of willpower and privation could not afford that. The days of thinking of Ted as an active component of her life were gone. He was there, as the mallee and the years of unrelenting hardship were there: facets of the life that had brought grimness to her jaw, wariness to a face lined and weathered by sun. There was no more point railing at him than at the mallee itself. Helena knew she had to work out her own life, keeping herself inviolate from both man and landscape. She would show herself harder than the life that from its beginning had bruised her whenever she had given it an opening. She would survive.

7

In the year of Lucy’s fifth birthday the rains came early to the mallee. Along the banks of the river, in cleared sections further into the interior, the ex-soldiers looked up at the clouds and told themselves it was going to be a good year. Ten years after the Armistice they still had the ingrained optimism of men who had survived the war and were determined to make a go of this, too. Most were strong men, with strong women to back them. It was as well. Prices had been falling steadily, making it hard to keep up the repayments on the land and the equipment they had bought to work their holdings. There had been other problems. After several years of planting and burning, the soil was showing signs of wheat-sickness: the paddocks guttering after rain, the air heavy with dust during a dry spell.

The blokes from the Agricultural Department had warned them. The experts had said that planting to wheat year after year would eventually rip the guts out of the soil. Let it lie fallow, they had told them. Give it a chance to recover.

The settlers heard what the experts said. In their hearts they knew the advice was right but what was a man to do? Let the land lie fallow and the mallee would have them by the throat. The only way to deal with the stumps left by the rollers was to burn and, without the build-up of trash from planting, the fires of February and March would not generate enough heat to kill them. No-one who had survived Lone Pine and Menin Road was going to be frightened by a bit of dust.

One good year was all they needed. Good rains, good crops, good prices, and they would listen to what the Inspectors had said. One good year. That was a promise.

Now, with the rain bucketing down weeks before anyone had expected, perhaps that one good year had arrived.

8

Two years after that one good year, people were saying the same thing. It hadn’t happened the first time, the season ruined by late rains, but this one …

Out of the box. Or so the world said. From the way their neighbours were talking, the words should have been written in fire, traced in wind-frayed letters across the sky.

A good year …

Perhaps, but out of the deep wells of her bitterness Helena had learned to be suspicious of good years. When the crops were bagged would be the time to talk. In the meantime …

What had changed, after all? The drudgery of all the years since they had come here, expending so great a portion of their lives upon the recalcitrant land, without promise or even expectation of return: that had not changed. All the times she had told herself how she hated this foreign land, rejecting it and herself for coming here: that had not changed. Yet, because the sun had smiled, the rains fallen, because there had been no bushfire, flood or other catastrophe, the world believed that all, now, would be well.

Fools.

And yet, after harvest, it seemed they might have been right. This year, Ted had garnered three thousand bags of wheat.

Three thousand bags …

Each night he sat at the beat-up table, sweat-stained hat on the back of his head, fashioning from a confusion of figures, sprawling and clumsy, a world of dreams. Seven bob a bushel. Seven and six, maybe. So much for the bank, gotta keep them bastards happy. So much for a new plough. Down-payment on a tractor, one of them crawlers that the salesman claimed would make light work of the crumbling and sandy soil …

‘Might even manage a new dress for you, girl! And for the kid! What d’you say to that?’

Ted, it seemed, could not live without hope. Yet hope unfulfilled, far more than any disaster, could kill. So Helena said nothing, watching his enthusiasm with all her fences raised.

They brought the bags to the siding, stacked them neatly, along with all the other bags from the settlers throughout the district. Side by side, waiting for the train, they made a proud show.

‘Bumper year, that’s what it is! Real bumper year. We won’t forget this one in a hurry!’

Nor would they. It was 1930 and a few months earlier, on the other side of the world, bankers had been jumping out of windows as stock markets across the globe collapsed.

9

There was a letter. Helena watched as Ted frowned over it, lips working as his finger laboured along the typewritten lines. Eventually he looked up.

In the doorway Lucy, now seven years old, watched in silence while her toes drew nervous lines in the dust.

Helena did not speak.

‘It says …’ He scratched his sunburned neck.

Still she waited. A rock could not have been more still.

‘The bank reckons we should hold on.’

‘Why?’

The question scratched the air like flint.

‘Because the price is down. Tad under five bob a bushel. Which is ridiculous.’ Now the words were pouring in a torrent as hope replaced the initial shock. ‘They’ll store it for us.’

‘The bank?’

‘Some mob they know. They’ll store it until prices go up again. No charge! That’s what it says here. They’ll pay us an advance — three and six a bushel, not bad, eh? — and we can sell whenever we like.’

‘And if prices go lower?’

‘How can they? Five shillings’s already way below where it should be.’

The dresses, certainly, would be on hold. The plough might manage another season. But the down-payment on the crawler: that might still be possible.

To Helena, who once might have fancied the figure of her man on a motor tractor, the prospect held the reek of doom.

10

Months passed. Whenever Helena saw her neighbours the words to celebrate what all had thought would be a bumper year were no longer etched in fire above their heads.

There were more failures. Men, overcommitted, destitute of both money and hope, took off, some with their families, some without. Like wind-blown sand streaming across the dry countryside, the ruined families drifted in steadily increasing numbers towards the shanty towns that rumour said had sprung up around the cities. The price of grain? Lower still, now.

Four bob, three and six, two and nine …

Another letter came from the bank. Again Ted’s blunt finger traced the rows of needle words. He stared at Helena in horror.

‘They say we gotta put up the difference.’

‘Difference?’

‘Between what they lent us and what the grain’s worth now. To regularise our account is what it says here.’

‘Have we got it?’

‘Of course we haven’t!’

‘And if we can’t?’

‘Dunno.’

But he did; they both did. If the bank foreclosed, they, too, might join the drifting columns of the lost.

‘I don’t reckon they got the right!’

He searched, feverishly, for the agreement. He dug it out and read it with eyes willing to pour flame. His shoulders slumped.

‘Oh God …’

The bank, master of fine print, was right. Of course it was.

Helena watched her husband. She knew how close he was to tears. Weep and she thought he would break. She had never told him about the money she had in Italy, from the sale of her parents’ farm. She could bring it over, save them, at least temporarily, from ruin.

She went to the doorway and looked out at the land that had consumed so much. She knew she would not do it. Bring the money here, pour it into the endless sink of this land, and her last avenue of escape would be gone. She would not commit the rest of her life to what, more and more, she was convinced was a hopeless cause. She turned on her heel and walked back into the shadowed room.

‘You’d better go and speak to that tractor salesman.’

For Ted, the tractor had been both hope and future. No longer. Regrets helped no-one.

The supplier cancelled the agreement for the crawler. It had never been out of the shed, Ted had not so much as sat on it, but the cancellation cost them. What was left of the deposit went to keep the bank happy: at least for the moment.

Still prices fell. A sheep that had cost two quid to raise was now fetching ten bob. Barley? Forget it. And wheat was down to one and nine.

Once again the bank was pressing.

‘If those bastards hadn’t told me different, I’d have sold the lot at five bob!’

Which might, or might not, have been true. Either way, it made no difference now. They sold eventually. One and seven.

Bloody, bloody hell.

Helena came into the house one afternoon to find Ted staring into space.

She watched him. She wished she was able to do what she would have done once: go to him, put her arms about him, use the warmth and consolation of her presence to restore him. She tried to make herself do it but could not. Her body resisted her. Her will, adamantine in other things, could not prevail in this. Even if she went to him, she knew that his bruised sensibilities would recognise the falseness of the gesture. A man near breaking, he deserved better than that.

She filled the kettle and made him, and herself, a cup of tea. At least there was still tea to make.

11

Whenever she could get away, Lucy went out into the mallee. Her mother would have scolded her for going out alone but she would have been wrong. Lucy was never alone nor would be, because the mallee was her friend. Its tangled black branches enfolded her. She lay full length on the warm ground; she listened to the voices of ants, the burrowing roots of grasses. They filled her with their singing. They belonged to her and she to them. She stood surrounded by the bush, she sensed its spirit. The land was her own. Here was peace. She could hear in the distance the clank and crash of the iron rollers as her father and the other men waged furious war upon the bush. Her mother, too, was at war with the life that held them all. Lucy loved her mother but could not share her pain, because this land was hers, and its myriad voices sang in her heart.

CHAPTER TEN

1

It was 1932 and Helena’s resentment had become a stone, pressing ever harder against her heart. Ted had married her, brought her far from everything she knew to this new and uncouth world like a desert where she could relate to nothing, where she could make no friends, where he alone was the sole beacon to guide her. And he had failed her, or — more and more it seemed to her — he believed that she had failed him.

Why?

Again and again she ripped the question from the depths of her hurt and incomprehension. What have I done? Failed to do? Tell me what you want of me. I am your wife. I would love and support you if I could. If you would permit me, trust me. Yet pride, too, had a place. He would not explain and she would not demean herself by pleading for what was hers by right. Yet it was not her nature to remain silent for ever. She was filled with a steadily increasing certainty that her life was being wasted, each day blowing into oblivion like the sand that filled the arid air.

A dozen times she tried to talk to Ted about it. Her protests broke like waves upon the rock of his own incomprehension.

‘Lots of other women in the same boat. They don’t belly-ache all the time.’

She could have beaten her head against the branches of the trees that more and more she believed would end by strangling her.

I am not these other women. They were born here; perhaps that makes it easier. I am myself, and lost.

She would have torn out the mallee by the roots, had he given her his trust. At his side she would have fought the world, the indifference of a land whose heart seemed barred to her. She would have accepted rage, even blows. What she could not accept was Ted’s endless silence. More even than the contorted branches of the mallee, it was this that imprisoned her. Yet the problem lay not only with her husband. From the first she had spoken to Lucy in Italian, hoping to hold her more securely to herself. By the time she was five the child spoke it fluently but with increasing reluctance. One day she would not answer when Helena spoke to her.

‘I am Australian! Speak to me in English! I want to speak English!’

It was to be expected, yet was a blow to Helena’s heart. With every day her child, with friends and a life of her own, seemed more of a stranger to her. Even when she was alone …

There were days when Helena watched the little girl, seeing how she fabricated a life of wonder and imagination out of the air, from fragments of earth and stone, from leaves. Here, too, there seemed no place for the mother who was more and more cut off.

Helena walked for miles through the scrub, she talked to the silence. It would have been irrational to blame the child; instead she cried aloud against fate and the man who had shut her out. She beat clenched fists against her loneliness. Even her husband’s weariness conspired against her. In the evenings he was so tired, a man almost dead. The hope that had sustained them for so long had vanished and its absence was more burdensome than fatigue. There remained only a sullen refusal to admit defeat, an exhaustion that each night plunged them both into unconsciousness.

Speech had no place, yet she knew that silence, like the mallee, would end by strangling her, if she permitted. Exhausted or not, she had to get him to talk, yet knew she would never get through to him. Despair and guilt made her angry; that, too, did no good.

‘What d’you want me to say? You know how crook things are.’ What made it even worse was that he was right. She did know how things were. They were the three no’s: no rain, no markets and no hope. Ted might be determined not to let them beat him but talk resolved nothing. She could have borne even his silence, had they been united. There would have been a grandeur in defeat, had they shared it. But not this. His silence shut her out. She was useless, irrelevant, unwanted.

She could not bear it.

‘I am doing no good here.’

‘Good as anyone else, I reckon.’

Perhaps he was right but that, too, was no good. It meant she could look forward to nothing better. She made a final effort.

‘Maybe we could go somewhere else? Make a new start?’

He stared at her. ‘And give up everything we’ve put into this place? We’d have to be barmy!’

She might have been talking Zulu.

2

The school had been open four years. Now there were thirteen children with a teacher, Sylvia Powell, who to some settlers didn’t look much more than a child herself. Knew what she was doing, though. She started a library, asking the parents who could manage it to chip in. Current prices didn’t leave much room for generosity but those who could — and some who couldn’t — put in a bob or two.

The children created a garden outside the hall, grew flowers and a few vegies. Lucy presented her mother with a radish. It was woody, as hot as flame, but the child watched with the fierce concentration of an incipient tyrant until Helena had forced it down.

It seemed that Lucy had the potential for things other than tyranny. Or so Miss Powell said.

‘Lucy has a really remarkable voice.’

That was nice, if not very practical. They had a bit of a singsong to mark Arbor Day. Lucy sang a solo — fancying herself no end, said one mother, nose out of joint at Lucy’s selection ahead of her own pride and joy — but others, more charitable, remarked how well she’d handled the occasion, and the song.

Helena took her home and made her sing it through again. And again. The teacher was right. Lucy did have a good voice, or better. It was early days but Helena had an Italian pride in her own musical judgement. She thought she was listening to the first flourishes of what might become a very good voice indeed. Even, perhaps …

It was too soon to be thinking of that. All the same, she went looking for her husband. She told him what Miss Powell had said, what she herself thought.

‘She needs lessons.’ Singing lessons in the middle of a depression. He didn’t even bother to answer: it was out of the question and both of them knew it.

Helena turned away and saw Lucy looking at her with wide eyes. Her frustration overflowed. ‘Yes,’ she told her daughter bitterly. ‘You might have been a great singer, with the right training.’

But what hope was there of that, in this place? Again she thought of the money that Guido was holding for her in Italy. She hesitated but eventually decided to leave it where it was. Even with the money, proper coaching would be impossible in a place as remote as this. And how could they move? Everything they had — money, past and future — was here. To think of selling up in a world without buyers was no more than a sick joke.

Besides, she was beginning to think she might have other plans for her money.

3

1935 was the year Helena finally accepted the inevitability of change. It was to be another year before the shutters of her life came down on the past, as they had in 1917 when she had returned from her aunt’s house to face the cataclysm of blood and flame, but it was on 10 April 1935 — the date as well as the moment engraved for ever on her memory — that Helena knew that her world, for the second time, was coming to an end.

Yet it had started as a day like any other.

They were in the lull between harvest and sowing, the one time when it was possible to draw a breath without grudging the time it took to do so. The overpowering heat of summer was gone, the rains not yet arrived, and there was time to patch walls, clothes and the mind that had never ceased to ask itself Why? And: For how long? Time, even, for Helena to try to patch up her relationship with a husband who had grown as taciturn as the mallee, which she sometimes thought had found new life in the man who had dared attack it with roller and axe and fire.

Outside the house the air was fresh with the first hint of autumn. A light breeze brought the scents of sandal-and sour-bush, of banksia and dust rich with remembered heat, but around mid-morning it died. All became still, the leaves of the mallee standing as though turned to stone. It grew dark with heavy clouds piling up in the east. Through the open doorway, Helena saw her husband pause as he crossed the cleared ground. He turned and looked up at the sky, raising spit-moistened fingers to test the wind, which returned as he did so, a sudden eddy raising dust.

A splattering of raindrops left damp craters in the parched ground. For a few minutes that was all, then the rain came again and stayed, in the company of thunder.

Ted came into the house. Helena had grown used to a life when for days on end her husband never spoke, but now he did.

‘We’ll start sowing tomorrow.’

‘You think the rain will keep up?’

He turned in the doorway and scowled with what might have been hatred at the clouds now extending to every horizon. The rain was falling in rods of silver light upon ground where meandering streams had already begun to make their way. Through the roar of the rain on the roof she heard him say, although not to her: ‘It had better.’

Helena nodded impassively but his expression as well as his words had pierced her. She had seen this look of thwarted rage in men’s faces before. In Italy, a neighbour whose only child had died had worn it for weeks before one day fetching his gun and killing both his wife and himself. Last year, with commodity prices through the floor and debt out of control, a settler had picked a fight with every human and tree in the district before getting up one morning, mounting his horse and riding away, leaving life and family behind him. On both occasions the expression, like the subsequent action, had signified the fury of helplessness. The realisation was a lock clicking shut in her head. The man to whom until that moment she had entrusted her life, despite all her doubts, would betray her not because he wished to do so but because it was not in him to do anything else. The only question was when.

She could wait for that moment, accepting its inevitability, or she could write to her cousin in Monfalcone and ask him to use the funds he was holding to arrange passage to Italy for Lucia and herself. Do that and she would return to the land she should never have left. All this — the harsh and malevolent scrub, the man whose silence betrayed her every day, whose ultimate defeat she had just glimpsed — would become as though it had never been.

And yet …The rain continued to fall. She had read only the other day that prices might at last be on the way up again. A good season with rising prices …

Could it be enough to bring them back from the brink? There was the question of money, too. She had put some of the proceeds from the sale of her parents’ land into the farm when they had first bought it. If she left now she could kiss it goodbye. One good season and, even if Ted didn’t come right, there would be at least a chance of getting something back. That night, with Ted sleeping at her side, Helena lay with eyes open to the darkness and saw visions: the cauldron hanging from its chains above the fire; the farmhouse kitchen warm with the gold and red of polished brass and copper, of flame; the winter wind screaming outside the windows. The glass was patterned with frost, the cart creaked doggedly through the stone hills, the lake waters reflected the icy peaks of mountains, the gravestones lay silently.

The life she had left but that had not left her. All night she thought about it. By the morning she had made up her mind. She would give it one more season and then decide what she would do.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1

From that moment there was a momentum in her life that Helena could not have described or explained. She knew only that events had begun to move, unseen yet inexorable, that the pace of the movement, already beyond her control, would increase until it arrived finally at a conclusion. She watched the unrolling of the days. She saw Lucia, twelve years old now and in some ways already a woman. More than just a woman. A woman with the potential to be a singer. Not just a singer, either. A great, a very great singer. She was twelve, totally untrained, and sang like a woman of twenty. Helena heard her daughter singing around the house, outside among the trees. Her voice was a wonder and delight to her. Also a source of outrage, stoking the furies that simmered hotter and hotter inside her, mocking her for all her unfulfilled dreams.

She knew now that she had ruined her life by coming to this country. One hope alone remained: that, through her daughter, something of value might be saved from the catastrophe. It would never happen if they stayed here. She owed it to herself as well as Lucia to do something about that; Lucia’s success. would give meaning and achievement to her own life. She would sacrifice herself and everything she had, gladly, if that could be achieved.

But how she was to do it she did not know. This was an added frustration, and had its impact on her. Ever since she had come to this country she had crushed her native temperament. Now it burst forth again; the volcano, dormant for so long, erupted into new life.

She was sullen and withdrawn no longer. Now she hurled her hands and voice into the air, spilling her rage amid the enigmatic silence of the trees.

One day, as for months now she had known it would, came the climax. Ted turned up at the house, not two hours after he had set out for his normal morning’s work. Helena was displeased — she, too, had developed her routines — but saw his eyes staring out of a haggard face drained of blood beneath the tan.

‘What’s happened?’ Thinking even as she said it, despite the concern that arose within her, Yes and Yes.

Ted stared, as at a stranger.

‘Big Josh …’ It took him a while but he managed to get the words out eventually. Big Josh Conrad, whom everyone had thought the toughest of them all, had gone into his shed that fine morning and blown his head off. There were no bleatings from the vicar this time round. He knew when to shut it if he didn’t want his house burned down. The widow, dry-eyed, saw Josh into the ground and took off at once for Sydney, where, hopefully, her sister would be able to put her up.

Helena and Ted, fresh from the funeral in what was the closest they had to fine clothes, watched as the trolley carried her towards the railway halt. When she was out of sight, Ted shook his head, staring at the ground before his feet. ‘It ain’t right!’

But there was no longer any fury in the cry. Catastrophe had doused his flames, along with so many others’.

And Helena knew.

Afterwards she thought how there was a pivotal moment to all things, when the maybes and should bes became yes and now, introducing a cold certainty to what moments before had been doubt.

She raged, screaming her fury at this country that would destroy them all, if she permitted. She did more than scream; fury was no longer enough. She wrote to her cousin, explaining her plans and what she wanted him to do.

While she waited for the reply that would restore her to the tastes and sounds of what had been her previous life, now desired with a fervour that increased with every minute, she studied her husband, not with regret but purposeful calculation. Ted had never been a man for words but that she had not minded: love transcended words. What mattered was communication to fill the void that would otherwise overwhelm every individual on earth.

Helena remembered her wedding in the small Italian village, so long ago yet ever present in her mind, in front of the prune-mouthed priest who had not bothered to conceal his disapproval and indeed contempt for them both. She had sensed that Ted, sturdy at her side, had wanted to knock him down. The idea had made her choke with laughter that, in response to the glares of the impudent priest, she had barely troubled to hide.

That moment’s sharing, knowing without words what each was thinking and feeling, had been the essence of what she had expected would be their life together. She still retained the anguished memory of those moments and of the times they had shared in their first years in the mallee. Afterwards, when communication between them had ceased, she had wondered whether what had happened had somehow been her fault. She knew better now. The gulf between the perennially silent man and herself, ultimately so destructive, had been inevitable, brought about by differences of background and temperament.

Now all that remained was to bridge that gulf for what would be the last time.

2

The letter came. Guido warned that life in Italy was very different from how it had been. It was a fascist state now and Mussolini had doubts about the loyalty of the Slovene-speaking districts that until the war had been part of Austria-Hungary.

He is forcing the population, or at least the officials, to move to other parts of Italy away from the frontier, he wrote. Many teachers have already gone, to be replaced by Italian-speakers from the south.

So far it hadn’t happened to him, probably because his family, like the Sforzas, was Italian-speaking, but that was no guarantee it wouldn’t do so in the future. Indeed, it probably would: a local official of the Union of Fascists had spoken of a need for teachers in the countryside outside Parma.

As you can see, life here is uncertain. Nevertheless, should you wish to share it, you will of course be welcome. As for music training for Lucia …

There were teachers of sorts in Monfalcone and Trieste, while in Parma, birthplace of the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, the world-famous conservatorium was available for students of exceptional talent.

Helena folded the letter meticulously, as though to enclose within the paper all her precious desires for Lucia and herself.

She walked to the door and looked out into the yellow slant of evening sunshine. In the middle distance the mallee lay like an overly familiar shadow, dark beneath a sky without cloud. After all these years they had succeeded by unremitting toil in pushing it back a certain distance but it was still there. As the dead Josh Conrad had said, take your eyes off it for half a minute and it would be back.

The air was full of dust; even so early in the season, Helena could taste it on her tongue. It had all the makings of a dry year. Well, she would not be here to see it out.

If she were to have a chance of life, she had to return to her roots. She would take her daughter with her, this child brimming with the talent that Helena could sense so strongly. Through Lucia she would obtain the position in life that she had abandoned when she had agreed to marry the Australian airman whose soul was as arid as the mallee itself.

Ted came home, arriving as always with the dusk. Everything always the same, on and on for ever …

Helena watched him as he went to wash up. Neither spoke.

He came back and sat at the table, his head’s white crown in stark contrast with the leather-burned face. For the first time she realised that Ted, not yet forty, was losing his hair. She should have felt guilt that such a precursor of age and death could happen without her noticing it, but the dryness that had entered her soul expunged guilt as it had all else.

Ted finished eating. As usual, she had not eaten with him. She watched him, not with eyes but senses, to detect any change in him. She found nothing. She took his plate.

‘Where’s Lucy?’

Of the child he might occasionally speak, but for information only, not to seek her out. Which did not mean he did not care for his daughter but that life had wearied him to the point where more complex communication was no longer possible.

‘Staying with Alison.’

A friend from school.

He neither answered nor acknowledged the information in any way; an observer might have doubted he had heard her.

Ted Fisher sat in silence while the lantern light cast bronze shadows across his furrowed features, the texture of his muscled arms. Helena came to the table and sat facing him, drawing her chair close so that her back was straight, the better to give or receive a blow.

‘I have had a letter.’ She unfolded it slowly under the gaze of his pale and expressionless eyes.

She read it to him, translating it with neither pause nor inflexion. When she had finished, it was as though her voice had been swallowed by the silent room. Helena watched her husband, waiting for him to speak.

For a while he sat, still wrapped in his silence, then nodded several times, quickly, as though behind the pale eyes he were assessing the truth and significance of the words.

Now she thought he would speak and so he did, but not directly of that.

‘There was a bloke come through here once, a drifter who said he was looking for work. Not that he was looking that hard.’

‘I never saw him.’

‘He saw you. You must’ve been up the school and he spotted you as he come past. Someone must’ve told him you were from Italy. He said,“People been telling me you’re the bloke with the wog sheila. All right, is she?’”

Ted’s eyes were still, inward-looking; his voice, rusty with disuse, was uttering more words than it had in a year. And words like this … They would have been unbearable once, but Helena had shut both mind and heart from the moment she had decided to write to her cousin. Now the words, quiet, reflective and utterly unexpected, beat unavailingly against her. She heard them but they did not enter. ‘What did you say to him?’

‘Told him to get on down the road or I’d flatten him.’

‘You should have told him the truth. You should have said no, I wasn’t any good. Because I never was, was I? Not from the first.’

She spoke without apology, the words flowing proudly out of the upright body, as cold and plain as the slow unravelling of circumstance that had brought them to this moment.

His eyes returned from whatever place they had been. He looked at and into her, perhaps seeing her properly for the first time. ‘Dunno what you want me to say. I promised you a life. This is what it is. It ain’t much, I know that, but it’s the best I could do.’

‘A life? Is that what you call it?’

‘Reckon you may be right.’ That was all: except that, getting ready for bed, he said: ‘You’d think maybe a woman’s job was to hold things together.’

‘You never let me.’

Again it seemed that he had not heard her.

‘Never thought you’d do a runner. Always thought I’d be the one to break. I was wrong. It was you.’

She would not have that.

‘I have not broken. I knew that from the first — I still know — that we could have beaten this land, if we’d been together. Together, we could have done anything. But we never were.’

He did not speak but she knew from his expression that, once again, he did not know what she was talking about. It became important that he should, if not understand, at least hear her thoughts.

‘You turned your back on me. You left me alone to face a land that was never mine because you would not share it with me. I am leaving, yes, not because I never wanted to hold things together, but because you give me no choice.’

She was right, of course she was, yet felt a fleeting spurt of hatred for the man who had not spoken properly to her in years, but who now had managed in so few words to make her doubt. She grew fierce, reinforcing her denials. ‘I have no life here. No future for myself or Lucia. Nothing. I have not broken, not at all. I intend to do something about what is lacking. That is not surrender. It is a challenge to life. And I shall win, make no mistake.’

‘That right? And where does Lucy fit into all this?’

‘She will help me regain the position I once had.’

3

Lucy was doing what she did so often nowadays, when she had the opportunity. She was wandering alone through the mallee, singing. The sound filled her and overflowed effortlessly into the sunlight. The black branches of the mallee were arms, applauding her as she sang. She thought no further than singing to the trees; this was her place. Yet she was singing to herself, too, listening to the purity of her own voice as it reached nimbly higher and higher, to the treetops and beyond them, to the white puffs of cloud and beyond them, too, then down again, up and down, up and down; songs she knew, songs she made up, a seamless paean of praise.

She was radiant with singing, with the land that enfolded her. Then she went back to the house that was her home, set amongst the trees that were also her home, and found her mother waiting to tell her that they were leaving.

Others had left, forced out when their money had run out. That was the way of life in the mallee. That she would have understood. But not this, the idea that they would not be going together, that she and her mother alone were leaving while her father stayed behind … The notion was horrible. She refused to believe it. She did not despair; she told herself her father would not permit it. She waited for him to rescue her from the impossible, and was devastated when he did not.

He said nothing. She pleaded with him, demanding that he prevent what she refused to believe could be happening. Still he said nothing.

‘I don’t want to go! This is my home! You are my father!’

‘Your mother is unhappy here.’ He spoke with enormous difficulty as though the words were being torn bleeding from his throat.

‘Then let her go. I shall stay here with you.’

But that, it seemed, was impossible.

‘You want me to go?’ Anger as well as hurt enabled her to ask the question.

Her father shook his head. ‘No, I don’t. But you must stay with your mother. A girl needs her mother. It wouldn’t be right for you to stay here with me.’

Lucy understood that her mother had made up her mind to go and that she would have to go with her. Like it or not.

‘To Italy? Never! I’ll run away!’

But where would she go? Hot tears scalded her eyes as she realised it had all been settled, that all her protests were wasted, that she had never had any choice.

Disbelief and denial were followed by anger. She did not want to go to this foreign place across the sea or say goodbye to her friends. She wanted to stay in what was her home, with the familiar sights and smells and sounds about her. Above all, she did not want her parents to break up.

Helena tried to reassure her. ‘You will write to him. And he will write back.’

‘It’s so far away. No-one will know me or understand me. No-one will like me.’

‘You already speak the language. I made sure of that. As for people not liking you … Of course they will. Why should they not?’

Lucy was not consoled; she shut her ears to her mother’s words. The prospect of living in another country, surrounded by strangers, made her feel lonelier than she ever had in the bush, where the air and emptiness talked to her comfortably, like friends. She went for a walk, by herself.

She spoke to the trees, the birds and air, the bright sky.

‘I shall not forget.’ She could not say it to her father, whom she knew she would miss most of all. He did not speak, either. He never did but she understood his silence, which was part of him. Words were unimportant because each of them understood the other. She knew whose fault it was, this situation that neither she nor her father wanted. But he, it seemed, would not fight and she was too young to defy her mother. The day would come when she could. Then I shall come back, she told herself.

They went to Melbourne and boarded the ship that was to take them to Italy. After they had put to sea she did not speak to her mother for four days.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

On the Italian liner, Trieste-bound via Aden and Suez, Lucy breathed the night air, fresh after the tourist-class cabin shared with her mother and two others, a man and woman who snored all night in time with the metallic creaking of the hull. She rested her hands on the rail, feeling her hair lift in the breeze, and watched the steady unwinding of the wake behind the vessel.

Memory, not grief, filled her as she stood there, joined with thoughts of an unimaginable future. All her feelings came together beneath garlands of stars that filled the sky, hanging low towards an ocean brilliant with phosphorescence.

As she stared at the wake it seemed to point not only to what she had left but what was to come. In particular, to her feelings for the mother who had always been the centre of her life, who had forced her out of the only environment she had known and was now dragging her halfway around the world. Ahead of her was a country and life about which she knew nothing. The prospect scared her. Already she felt lonely, thinking about the years of isolation that she feared lay ahead.

All this, because her mother had decided it must be so. She had taken the first thirteen years of Lucy’s life and cut them away as though they were no longer important. Her life gone, she had to face the future unarmed, as helpless as a baby before the new life she did not want.

Even her name had been changed. Everyone else had called her Lucy but to her mother she had always been Lucia. It had not mattered before; it had been one of the many oddities of having a mother who was not like other mothers, who spoke with a strange accent, who came not from Adelaide or Mildura or even Melbourne but a country far away and unknowable, whose existence she had been able to comprehend only in the stories that her mother had told her, the memories that had come and gone like shadows across her mother’s face.

One particular image remained: of herself in bed, the lamplight yellow about the room, her mother’s face staring down at her as she sang softly the song that in time would become familiar to her, in the language that her mother had taught her from childhood but that she resolved now would never be her own.

A Roma c’è una strada;

in questa strada c’è una casa;

in questa casa c’è una stanza …

In Rome there is a street;

in the street there is a house;

in the house there is a room …

Now, standing on deck in the starlit night, she remembered how it had always made her feel unhappy. She had asked her mother about it once.

‘That’s a sad song.’

‘Of course it’s not! It’s a happy song. About Italy and a wonderful story …’

‘It makes me feel sad, anyway. You sound sad when you sing it. Are you sad?’

‘Of course not.’

But she was. Lucy knew it.

Lucy … Lucia … Perhaps it hadn’t mattered before but it did now. Because she knew, without anyone having to tell her, that she was Lucy. And Lucy was dead.

Her mother had dragged her away from everything she knew, the home and friends that she swore now, watching the silver churning of the wake, would for ever be her own. Why had it happened? Because her mother had been unhappy with her own life. It wasn’t fair; her mother’s unhappiness wasn’t her fault. But it was the reason; she had known it for a long time. Lots of her friends’ parents had fights, it seemed it was something grown-ups did, but recently her own mother’s fights had never been like others.

She would be silent for days, the silence bitter, razor sharp. She would flounce angrily with much muttering and heaving of shoulders, while Lucy watched in apprehension. Finally, one day, there would be screams, tears, the smashing of plates. Lucy had felt she was being smashed, too. Afterwards all would be calm again. Her mother would dry her tears, shrug, even laugh, and all would be well. Until the next time.

The first time it happened, Lucy had told her very special friends about it, as a secret. They had stared round-eyed, admiring her for having a mother so like the volcanoes they had read about at school, whose fires burned everything about them.

‘Maybe she’s a dragon in disguise?’

Lucy had not been sure about dragons. But different … Oh yes.

Now she was going to the strange country of which her mother had talked so often, where presumably everyone would be as different as her mother was. How was she going to survive? Where would she find a friend?

2

All the way across the ocean her mother, speaking Italian with each word articulated as though in a school lesson, told her of this new country. Lucy tried to make sense of what she was hearing but the images remained strange. The thought of the new country frightened her but she took care to keep the fear locked up inside herself. Only once had she let it out. It had been the first thing she had said after leaving Australia, and her mother had screamed at her for hours.

‘How can you say you’ll be frightened? I shall be there to look after you! Italy is going to be your home!’ Much better to keep her terrors covered up, if she could.

Something else she could not forget, words that her mother had repeated to her, again and again, during the voyage.

‘You are going to be a great singer. An opera singer, you understand? Not only great: the greatest opera singer the world has ever known.’

The idea had seemed very strange to her, even crazy. A singer, yes. She would always carry with her the memory of herself singing amid the trees of home. But an opera singer? It was unbelievable, an alien notion in an alien world. Her first response was that she would have nothing to do with it. An opera singer? She had thought once she would like to be a dentist. She could relate to that. It seemed possible. But a singer … Yet it was true she had a good voice. It must be; everyone was always telling her so. Even the captain of the ship had said so the previous day, when he had paid a visit to the tourist class and heard her singing.

‘You must sing a solo in the church service.’

She had not wanted to do it and said so.

‘Then you must come and sing for our guests in first class. Come tonight. They will love it. All those rich people … Who knows what may come of it for you?’

She hadn’t fancied that, either, but the captain had spoken to her mother, who had insisted.

She had sung and the rich passengers had indeed loved it. A contessa had kissed her and the captain, bowing, had handed her a rose.

Afterwards her mother had hugged her, weeping.

It was hard to decide what frightened her most: her mother’s rages or the thought of being compelled to become the great singer that her mother was determined she should be.

Her mother’s eyes shone, as bright and hard as diamonds.

‘You see? They loved you. You and I together … We shall have the life that I always wanted for us both but could never have in that place. The mallee! Never mind. All that is behind us now. We shall be famous, you and I. Rich and famous! As soon as we get to Italy I shall find you a teacher, Italy is the home of opera. You will have to start working. It will be hard for you, dearest, very hard, but I shall help you. It will be worth it, you will see. Worth it for both of us.’

One thing she knew: her mother was the only person she had in the world, now. If she wanted her mother to love her, she would have to obey. She remembered the applause of the previous night, the contessa’s kiss, the captain’s gift of the flower. It might not be too bad, she thought, but bad or not she would have to do it. Her mother’s love depended on it. We shall be famous, you and I. Rich and famous.

The echoes of her mother’s words, demanding and obsessive, filled her dreams.

3

Helena’s cousin met them off the boat in Trieste. During the long years of separation Guido had buried his mother and made a new life for himself as a schoolteacher in Monfalcone. He seemed to have aged very little. Still unmarried, he was very gallant with both of them, bowing and kissing their hands, and Helena knew from his smile, the fleeting graze of his lips on her skin, that there was or could with some encouragement be more to his greeting than the elaborate courtesy that, after Australia, she found so strange. She enjoyed the feeling of being admired; she had forgotten how flattering, even exciting, it could be.

Guido snapped his fingers, found a dock labourer who was willing for a few lire to carry their bags from the boat to the railway station, half a kilometre away. The streets were crowded with jostling people. Lucia clung while Helena came close to swooning with the voluptuous pleasure of hearing once again the accents of the Triestino dialect.

They boarded the train and watched from the window as it followed the track around the edge of the Carso, stark and brooding to the north, while through the other window they could see at intervals the shining waters of the Adriatic. They passed hamlets spiked with poplars, their crumbling, honey-coloured feet in the sea. At length the train turned north past the western end of the Carso and the sea was behind them.

‘I have a small house in the country, just outside town,’ Guido said as they left the train at Monfalcone. Helena nodded, understanding that to a country boy wheatfields and sky would always be preferable to a city of bells and people and streets.

Guido had left his horse-drawn wagon with a friend. They climbed aboard, he clicked his tongue at the mare and they set out. Beyond the town the slight wind of their motion brought to them the mingled odours of horseflesh and the dust of the hedgerow-lined lane. Like the meadows beyond them, the hedgerows were white with dust and Guido told them there had been no rain for months. It was September, still too early for the rains, and hot. They crossed a succession of riverbeds almost empty of water, the iron-shod wheels rumbling across the wooden planks of the bridges while Helena, with Lucia wide-eyed beside her, stared down at courses choked with boulders, massive and marble-white, with pools of emerald-coloured water standing between them.

‘Once the rains start you’ll see a difference.’

Perhaps Guido was afraid their silence indicated disappointment at the parched landscape. If so, he was wrong. Helena sat with parted lips as she drank like water the brilliance of the light, the slowly unfolding landscape of the country that, so peacefully, had taken her to its generous heart once more.

Only now did she discover how much, during the long years of exile, she had missed this land.

Lucia was tugging at her arm. ‘I thought we would see more mountains.’

The child was right. They had passed close by the southern flank of Mount Hermada on the train journey from Trieste, its pine-clad slopes looming high over their heads, but now the air was hazed with heat and dust and they could see nothing of the mountains to the north.

Helena took her daughter’s hand, smiling reassuringly at her. ‘They are there, all the same.’

Being able to see them did not matter. Knowing they were there was what counted.

They arrived finally at the house standing by itself at the end of a narrow track between wheatfields. There were poplars around the house, a stone-walled yard and a well with a bucket hanging on its rope from a pulley. The house was thatched and small, as Guido had said. There were bright rugs on the flagged floor and the air smelt of books and the polish that, he told them laughingly, he had slapped all over the furniture in anticipation of their arrival.

There was an attic room that they reached from the yard by means of a ladder. It was just large enough to take two narrow beds, with a chest of drawers between them. There was a tiny, north-facing window.

Helena stood in the room and sensed how lonely Lucia must be feeling in this strange place made even stranger by her mother’s familiarity with it. She pointed through the window and spoke to her daughter in English for the first time since leaving Australia. ‘The mountains are over there. Perhaps you’ll be able to see them in the morning, before it gets too hot.’

And there, in the morning, they were. Excited, Lucia woke her very early, shaking her shoulder.

‘I can see the mountains!’

‘Italian! Speak Italian!’

They stood side by side and looked through the window at the plain, patterned with the lines of hedges, the fawn-coloured fields harvested of crops, with beyond them the ramparts of the distant range.

Helena looked at her daughter.

‘Do you like it?’

‘The mountains are very beautiful.’ An answer that was no answer. Lucia was like her mother, not a person to give herself too readily. She would wait, judge and form her own opinions about this place as, in time, she would do about everything in her life.

With that, Helena knew, she would have to be content.

4

Helena walked around the town, familiarising herself with the atmosphere of the land to which she had returned.

In many ways things were very different from her expectations. Despite her cousin’s warnings, she had not anticipated the brittle smartness of fascist Italy, the black uniforms she saw everywhere, the banners and vainglorious speeches, the boots of marching men clashing rhythmically on cobblestones. She refused to let them trouble her. She would soon condition herself to ignore them. With her Italian sense of history she thought how, even here in the north, the cobblestones had witnessed both Caesars and barbarians, purple-clad clerics with the characteristics of both, emperors and armies, victims, conquerors, and men and women flung into arenas of blood-lusting crowds and wild beasts. The stones had outlasted them all, as they would outlast the bombastic futility of this latest generation of strutting men. Helena was determined that she and Lucia would survive as well.

Three days after their arrival she found Guido sitting in the shade outside the back door with his nose in a book.

‘Singing lessons for Lucia. How do I go about arranging them?’

5

Seta Cehovin was a little old lady much folded by the years, like the lemon-scented handkerchiefs she always used. She came from Slovenia and was a childless widow who, after her husband’s early death, had made her living singing in the chorus at the Udine Opera House. She had been retired many years now but still gave lessons to those who could afford them. A week after their arrival, Helena and Lucia went to see her in her small house on the outskirts of the town. Helena spoke to the old lady first in Slovenska Spracha, the Slovene dialect that in the past had been widely spoken in the district, but Signora Cehovin put her in her place very quickly, and in pure Italian, at that.

‘We are Italians here, Signora Fisher. I would be grateful if you would speak to me in the language.’

For Lucia’s sake Helena buttoned her lip. ‘Of course.’

‘And the child? Does she speak Italian, too?

‘Yes.’

‘Good. These are troubled times, Signora. The authorities suspect Slovene-speakers of anti-Italian sentiments. It is as well to remember that.’

She turned to Lucia.

‘And your mother believes you can sing. Well, perhaps. I have found that mothers tend to believe many things about their children. They are not always right. Two questions before we start. First, how old are you?’

‘Thirteen.’

Such a sour mouth.

‘Far too young. Second question: you play the piano, of course?’

Lucia looked at her mother for help.

‘No,’ Helena replied.

‘Not at all?’

‘She has lived all her life far from the town —’

Signora Cehovin showed displeasure. ‘We are not interested in excuses. How can you expect me to take seriously anyone who does not play the piano?’

So far Helena had been meek. Now she set her mouth. ‘She has a fine voice.’

‘So you say.’

‘Yes. And if you take the trouble to listen, you will say so, too.’

The two women clashed eyes. After several seconds’ taut silence, Signora Cehovin returned her attention to Lucia. ‘You want to sing?’

‘Yes.’

‘For your mother? Or yourself?’

No thought of dentistry now. ‘For myself.’

‘Why?’

‘When I was nine my teacher told me I had a special voice. Since then I have always wanted it.’

She guessed it was what the old lady wanted to hear; after her experiences on the liner, it might even be true.

‘I daresay I can listen to you. I ask only one thing: please try not to fracture my eardrums. If you would be so kind.’

They went to the piano standing against one wall of the room. Signora Cehovin settled herself on the stool and turned to Lucia, standing at her side. ‘What are you going to sing?’

Prompted by Miss Powell, she had sung a piece at a school concert that had earned applause from an audience that would have applauded a cow, had it been one of their own. Nevertheless she remembered it with kindness. ‘“La Paloma”.’

‘Very well. But first I want to hear you sing your scales.’

She struck a key in the middle of the range.

‘Sing that.’

She listened, frowning, as Lucia obeyed. By the window, ignored for the moment, Helena sat, skin tight to bursting as she listened to what might be not only her daughter’s future but her own.

Had she disappeared at that instant, neither pianist nor singer would have noticed.

‘Sing it again.’

And again. Then, step by step, up the scale to …

‘Enough. We want you to sing, not scream. Now: the other way.’

Down they went, far and still farther, until once again Signora Cehovin called a halt.

‘Hmmm …’

She sat for a while, head bowed over the keyboard.

‘“La Paloma”, you said? Very well. But gently, mind. Quietly. We want nothing loud here. Nothing vulgar.’

And the old lady started at once, without music or warning. Lucia, taken by surprise, came in late in a jangle of broken notes. The claw fingers crashed the keys.

‘No! No!’

‘I wasn’t ready.’

The teacher sharpened her eyes at this spirited child. ‘You must always be ready. Now: again. And remember: pianissimo!’

Afterwards Signora Cehovin dug out a piece of music: the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen.

‘Try that.’

‘I don’t know the words.’

‘Never mind the words. The notes, that’s what I want to hear. Only the notes. And quietly, remember. Yet so I could hear them in the street, if I wanted.’

The trouble was, Lucia did not know the notes, either, or not properly. Three times she went wrong, each note a dagger burying itself in her. When the music was finished she waited for the teacher to tear a strip off her. She didn’t. She walked across to Helena who watched her with eyes wanting, demanding, the world.

‘The child has a great talent.’

Helena’s sigh was clearly audible but no-one but herself could have known how her shoulders relaxed with the loss of tension.

‘Will you take her?’

‘I shall. For piano lessons and voice training. Also she needs to improve her sight reading, but that will come with practice.’

‘When can she start?’

‘Today.’

Part Two

THE STUDENT

1936–1946

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

1

From the first it became obvious that Setra Cehovin was determined to work Lucia to death.

Musical technique, the rudiments of piano playing, vocal expression, operatic history …

Lucia didn’t care. She discovered at once how much she loved it. She spent all the time she could with her teacher, she resented the hours Signora Cehovin spent with her other pupils, she was jealous, prickly, utterly dedicated.

Her voice opened up, she heard it herself, she could sense the future stretching before her in a succession of triumphs, and she was impatient to seize them. She wanted the world and she wanted it now.

Helena was equally impatient. She badgered Signora Cehovin, demanding to know when her daughter would be ready to step onto the stage that both she and Lucia were convinced was waiting only for her, but the teacher was not to be hurried.

‘She is not ready. When she is, I shall tell you.’

The old bat! Helena could have strangled her. She looked back on her life now with a sense of martyrdom, and was determined that her daughter’s success would compensate for the tribulations that war, marriage and the mallee had forced on her; she, too, resented the time Lucia spent away from her teacher. She drove her remorselessly, telling her over and over again how success was the only thing that mattered in life, how upon Lucia’s shoulders rested the responsibility for making up for all her mother’s sufferings. Guido was moved to protest.

‘You’ll make the child think you don’t want her around at all.’

‘It’s for her I’m doing it!’

‘Not only for her; for yourself as well. Be careful. Carry on like this, she’ll end up believing you don’t love her.’

Helena refused to trouble herself about such sentimental nonsense; success, not love, was what mattered.

‘You wait! The world will bow down before both of us, one of these days.’

2

Lucia was less willing to accept discipline from her mother than her teacher. She and Helena fought constantly.

‘Will you do what I tell you?’

She would not.

Helena came after her, hand outstretched to slap. Lucia fought like a wildcat.

‘My father would stop you, if he knew.’

Slap.

‘I’ll write and tell him, he’ll come and take me home with him.’

‘Home? This is your home!’

Slap.

3

There were other times.

‘I do it only because I love you. To be the best you must work.’

If only the child would plead, would beg forgiveness. Then all could be forgiven. Helena imagined the consoling arms, the tears, the kiss of peace. If only Lucia would yield.

She did not.

‘A friend. That’s all I want. What everyone else has. A friend.’

With whom to exchange secrets and laughter, to spread her wings. But friendship bred distraction and could not be permitted, either for Lucia’s sake or her own.

‘Work! You must work! You’ve no time for friendship.’

Lucia rewarded her mother with sullenness. She would give her work, if that was what she wanted, but would tell her nothing of herself, her days or dreams. At night she mourned her loneliness. Her mind formulated thoughts she could not express. I would have shared with you my secrets, had you permitted. I would have opened to you the petals of my trust.

She dared not. To open herself to her mother was to face the certainty of wounds. She would not do it.

4

There was a contest on the wireless each week, an amateur show based in Trieste where performers had the chance to demonstrate any talent they might have, with a small prize for the winner.

Without a word either to Signora Cehovin or Lucia, Helena entered her daughter for the competition.

The confirmation came. Lucia Visconti — the Italian name that Helena now selected for both her daughter and herself as something closest to the Australian Fisher — was required to present herself at the studios in two weeks’ time, with the other competitors. When her mother broke the news, Lucia became hysterical with terror. Helena slapped her back to commonsense.

‘How will you ever be famous if you’re frightened of singing in public?’

Lucia was not reassured. She told Signora Cehovin, who came stamping around to the house in black-gowned fury.

‘How dare you make such arrangements without discussing them with me first!’

‘I would remind you she’s my daughter!’

But Helena’s efforts to put Signora Cehovin in her place failed most dismally.

‘And her voice is my responsibility. She is not ready. You wish to risk her entire future for the sake of five minutes on a radio show?’

Helena, conscious of being in the wrong, was more determined than ever not to give way. Eventually they reached a compromise. It wouldn’t happen again. As for the broadcast, Signora Cehovin would do what she could to make her pupil ready. Compromise or not, she could not resist flinging one last irate remark. ‘Two weeks! You ask the impossible!’

‘I never asked you for anything at all.’

But Signora Cehovin had the final word as she swept out. ‘Amateur hour!’

The old woman gave it her best shot, all the same. She drilled Lucia like a soldier but it was not enough. The judges favoured a harmonica player from Trieste; Lucia came second. For both Lucia and her mother, second place would never be anything but failure and for days both of them were inconsolable.

Helena, in particular, became vindictive.

‘If that woman had trained you properly you’d have won.’

Perhaps; but Lucia still attended her classes most assiduously; Signora Cehovin might be a broken reed, but she remained the only reed they had.

5

Lucia had not won but the radio contest changed her life. A woman from the Fascisti called on them, an imperious scowl in a black blouse.

‘This child is not enrolled as a Giovane Italiana.’

Which was the term given to the young members of the fascist organisation for children over the age of twelve. Helena knew when to be humble.

‘We have only recently arrived in the country.’

‘Our records show that she was never enrolled as a Piccola Italiana, either.’

‘It was too late for that. She was already thirteen by the time we arrived in Italy. As I said, we’ve only been here a short while —’

‘Long enough for her to attend school. To receive voice training. To enter radio contests.’

Silence, while the uniformed bully granted Helena time to contemplate the enormity of her sins.

‘Until your daughter is enrolled as a Giovane Italiana she will not be permitted to attend school or receive an education.’

‘I shall attend to it.’

But the woman hadn’t finished.

‘You claim to be Italian?’

‘I am Italian!’

‘From which part?’

‘From Tolmino.’

‘Tolmino?’

As one might say: Mars? The woman’s lip curled.

‘You are Slovenian.’

‘No! Italian, as I said. My family name is Sforza.’

‘Next thing you’ll be claiming you’re the Duke of Milan!’

The Sforza family had ruled Milan in the Middle Ages; her grandmother had indeed claimed a connection but now was clearly not the time to say so. Helena said nothing.

‘I notice that you, too, have not applied for membership of the Fascist Party.’

‘I wasn’t sure I’d be acceptable.’

‘You may well be right. But the child is a different matter. See to it.’

Arrangements were made. Lucia received a black pleated skirt, white blouse and black beret. She was a Fascist, if only a little one. She wore her uniform for parades, when patriotic songs were sung.

Giovinezza, giovinezza,

Primavera di bellezza …

Even the black-and-white uniform did not make the words of the fascist anthem less stupid, but she kept her thoughts to herself and sang full-voiced.

On one occasion, hoping to impress, she wore the uniform to her singing class. Signora Cehovin looked her up and down, her expression saying all her mouth did not. Not until Lucia left did she refer to it, and then only obliquely.

‘Art is where your future lies. Not politics.’

Now Lucia was feeling uncomfortable about her black-and-white clothes. ‘We have to wear it.’

‘I know. But not to my house.’

6

A dream. Lucia was riding a horse, the same horse she had wanted in childhood without ever having the courage to ask for it. She felt the beast’s strong movements between her thighs, the ground speeding past beneath the thundering hooves. She smelt her own sweat and the animal’s; the hot wind blew back. She could hear the clank of the iron roller as it crushed the branches of the mallee, smell the mixture of dust and leaves and drought. Beyond the branches she caught a glimpse of another place. They passed beneath arching branches through which shone the blue jewel of the sky. She came to a range of mountains. Streams ran white; flowering bushes covered the lower slopes with smouldering fire. In the distance a wall of rock rose, white flecked with grey, while near at hand purple peaks were fissured by gorges dark with shadow. Unlike the mallee earlier in her dream, she did not recognise this country yet still she knew it, in her soul and the steady beating of her heart. It was her homeland. When she awoke, her face was wet with tears in the knowledge that all of it, the remembered and the unseen, was gone from her. She was in exile, beyond contact with her beginnings, and the loss filled her with grief and the sharp thrust of a pain so intense that it was all she could do not to cry out because of it.

It seemed to her that in her dream the two images — of the mountains and the mallee — had existed side by side. They had been at once separate and together, like two truths superimposed upon each other, each of them part of herself in the now and then of her life.

She mentioned her dream to her mother, who disapproved, as she did of anything that reminded her of the life that she had chosen to abandon.

‘Nostalgia is useless.’

Lucia did not agree. ‘Not if I mean to go back there one day.’

‘To Australia? Don’t be ridiculous!’

7

They never discovered whether the fascist woman was behind it or not but, a month later, Guido received notice that he was being relocated to Parma.

‘I hoped they’d forgotten about me.’

It seemed not. Helena was concerned for him but more for herself and Lucia. ‘What will happen to us?’

‘You’ll come with me.’

‘Will they permit it?’

‘Why not?’

Indeed, although officials needed no reasons for what they did. In the event, however, Guido was right. He moved to the small town of Montegallo, in the country outside Parma, and Helena and Lucia went with him: first by train to Venice, then to Bologna and finally to Parma. It seemed very far from everything Lucia had known before: as far away as Australia, she sometimes thought. Even the language was different. In place of the Triestino dialect everyone here spoke Parmigiano, which made life difficult until she got the hang of it.

It was an even smaller house than they’d had before, and at times Lucia felt that she was about to burst. When that happened she went out into the fields and let off steam by singing as loudly as she could, a series of scales and exercises ringing across the flat land of the district with its distances divided only by the multitudinous trellises of the vines.

It was not the same as having proper training, of course, but there were no singing coaches in Montegallo. In the place of formal coaching she carried always before her the memory of what Seta Cehovin had said to her when she had visited the old lady to say goodbye.

‘You have a great gift. With work, you could become a truly fine singer. That is a great privilege but also a great responsibility. You must not let your talent go to waste; that would be a crime. I know how hard life will be for you but do not use that as an excuse. Only weaklings do that. It is up to you to achieve success in any way you can. You will have to do whatever you must to continue with your training. There is a fine conservatorium in Parma. Who knows, perhaps you will be able to win a scholarship?’

Even a scholarship would take far more money than they had. Quite simply, regardless of what Lucia wanted and Signora Cehovin said, to go on with her training seemed an impossibility. The future was empty and intolerable.

8

‘Tell me again about your childhood.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘If we’re going to stay here

Australia would always be home but, for the moment, Italy was where they were going to live. The more she knew about it and her mother’s background the better.

‘Tell me again what happened to you in the war.’

And later: ‘Did you ever hear from that girl again?’

‘From Marija? No, of course not. I went with your father to Australia.’

‘Could you show me, d’you think? Where you lived when you were a child?’

Helena looked thoughtfully at her. The school holidays were coming.

‘I don’t see why not.’

They went by bus, travelling for hours across the dusty plain where the vegetation was bleached almost white by the summer heat and drought. The bus climbed in a grinding of gears into the mountains until at last they reached their destination.

Lucia stared about her at the houses set in terraces on the mountainside, the people with their dark and shuttered faces. They visited the cemetery where her grandparents were buried. They stood amid the grass-covered ruins of what her mother said had been her home. All that remained were the stone slabs of the kitchen floor, piles of broken bricks from what had been walls. Lizards basked; the breeze blew, bending the heads of the seeding grass.

‘Is this all?’

Helena stood looking about her, encircled by sunshine and memories. Or a lack of memories. She had expected to feel a hundred emotions — loss, grief, anger, even joy that she was once again standing in this place — but the wind blew, the grass heads whistled softly and there was nothing. It was unbearable. She turned away.

‘Come …’

‘What about the girl?’

‘She’ll be a grown woman, now, with children of her own, I expect.’

She made enquiries, all the same, eventually found an old woman who told her that Marija had moved away years ago. ‘Trieste, I think it was. Or was it Stanjel?’ Hopeless.

Late in the afternoon they boarded the bus to go home. Lucia looked out of the window as they negotiated gradients that wound steeply past fields the size of postage stamps, with farmhouses that were little more than sheds. Lucia sensed her mother’s disappointment; Helena had been eager to revisit the town of her childhood but, whatever she had been seeking, she had not found it. Tolmino, like the rest of Italy, had moved on. Now even the shadows of the past were gone. They reached the flat ground of the valley. Through the window, she continued to watch the countryside, now with its first rows of vines. Dusk was falling and across the sun-bleached plain the sky turned by degrees from blue to bronze and finally to the grey mistiness of twilight. The driver switched on the lights so that they travelled through the gathering darkness in a capsule of golden brightness. Outside, the last light faded. Fading, too, were the day’s impressions: the terraced buildings on the mountainside, the sense of a living past that had been the purpose of their journey. What remained was not the image of her mother’s childhood but the realisation that, for both of them, the present was all they had. In their differing ways, they were both living in a land of strangers.

9

One month after their visit to Tolmino they were once again visited by a fascist official, this time a cocky-faced young man in boots and a black uniform, who said he had something of the greatest importance to tell them.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1

It was Anno XV in the Era Fascisti when Lucia Visconti, dressed in her pleated skirt, white blouse and black beret, came to the military cemetery at Redipuglia.

The coach dropped her, with her mother and a flock of party officials, half a kilometre from the cemetery and the memorial, which climbed in stone steps up the slope of the mountain.

On either side of the path, vendors of chestnuts, figs and marzipan fruits shouted their wares. Alongside the massive rock marking the Duke of Aosta’s grave, a high wooden platform had been erected, bright with flags and bunting. Around the platform carabinieri stood as stiff as ramrods, the bright-red plumes of their helmets streaming in the wind. Here and there men with watchful eyes circulated through the large crowd, hands poised upon pistol butts.

Lucia walked proudly with the official who had come to their house a month before to inform her that she, out of all the young women of northern Italy, had been selected to sing at the ceremony commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the march on Rome.

28 October 1937. Fifteen years since the Fascists had come to power. One year since Il Duce had stood before the world to proclaim the creation of the Italian Empire. Now Mussolini himself was coming to Redipuglia to honour the war dead who had been exhumed from their graves throughout the region to be interred about the Duke whose last wish had been to lie surrounded by his men. On the slope of this mountain they would bring a reminder of past glories to a regime that grew fat upon glory and its dreams of future grandeur.

The Duce would speak; afterwards Lucia Visconti would sing before the Italian leader and his adoring people. Helena’s face quivered with joy and terror. Lucia was as frightened as her mother but was determined to hide it. Face expressionless, she moved with straight back and raised chin towards her destiny.

The spaces between the cypress trees overflowed with watchers; to one side of the platform was the band, instruments shining in the autumnal sunlight, white uniforms trimmed with gold buttons and ribbons of red and green.

Lucia reached the foot of the platform. Here, obedient to the hissed instructions of the man beside her, she stopped.

All waited.

From this high place, she could see the country stretching away in a mixture of brown, red and golden light towards a horizon blue with haze.

The official, Eduardo Grandini, whispered to her how furious the local party officials had been when they discovered that Lucia had been relocated to Parma only days before the decision had been made to select her to sing on this auspicious occasion. The local secretary, whose head would roll if anything went wrong, had been particularly vexed.

‘You told me she was the best! How can she have been sent away when we need her here?’

‘Il Duce’s instructions …’

‘Have nothing to do with it! How can they? He’s never heard of the girl! No-one had, until that damn radio competition. She could have been moved just as easily after the ceremony.’

However, to an official as resourceful as Eduardo Grandini, all things were possible. On the journey from Montegallo he had explained to her, without any pretence of modesty, how it had happened.

First, he had located Lucia at her new home outside Parma. Then he had visited her to give her the good news.

‘And of course to check that you were suitable to sing before the Duce.’ Eyebrow lifted, he had smiled quirkily at her, as though they were the closest of friends who shared a secret awareness of the pretentiousness of all this nonsense. ‘Then we brought you here. Nothing simpler, really.’

He smiled at her again, a conjurer cheerfully parading his sleight of hand.

‘I thought that fat Mazetta would burst her stays when she heard the party had picked you, out of all the girls in the region,’ he continued. Mazetta, it seemed, was the woman who had taken them to task when she’d found that Lucia was not enrolled in the young Fascists. ‘She’d set her heart on her cousin being chosen, but she sings like a cow.’ Eduardo leaned towards Lucia, his whisper so soft that it barely grazed her ear. ‘Looks like one, too.’

Lucia choked, stiff-mouthed, fighting down laughter.

The party secretary appeared from nowhere: moist eyes in a ferret face. ‘Where is your music?’

‘I don’t need any. I know what I’m going to sing.’

Which was ‘O patria mia’, from Aïda, as well as — inevitably — the fascist anthem.

The secretary scowled, making it plain he didn’t believe her, but it was too late to do anything about it now. He decided a threat was in order: that type of man always did. ‘If you let me down …’

Party secretary or not, Lucia turned her head away from him and looked stiffly across the gold-hued valley.

‘You’ll unsettle her. She’ll be fine.’

She heard Eduardo’s murmur and her heart overflowed with gratitude to him for defending her. She glanced at him. No, he was not old at all. In certain lights he might even be thought handsome.

There was a commotion at the foot of the steps. A huge car, complete with banner and motorcycle outriders, had arrived. An ants’ nest of black-uniformed officials seethed. In their midst, moving purposefully towards the flight of steps, was a short man in riding breeches and black shirt, with squared shoulders and a pugnacious stride. The band broke into a squawk of martial music, and Benito Mussolini came swiftly up the steps. The crowd cheered. The bunting blew in the patriotic wind. He climbed to the top of the platform and looked down on his subjects, black boots gleaming, hands clenched on his hips.

Lucia saw no signal but band and crowd were suddenly still. Silence, but for the voice of a distant crow carried on the wind. Silence, but for the wind.

‘We are come here today to honour the dead.’

His voice was not at all as Lucia had expected. He spoke in measured tones, his chin out-thrust, his personality so magnetic that she, who had secretly thought him no more than a buffoon, found herself cheering with the rest of the crowd when he finally stopped speaking.

‘Your turn, girl.’

No-one else could have heard Eduardo’s encouraging whisper.

Her stomach lurched, she took a deep breath and stepped forward. The plan had been for her to stand beside the band but all at once there was a murmur from the crowd and, looking up, she saw that Mussolini was leaning over the railing of the platform, smiling and beckoning to her.

‘Up here, young woman.’

Mussolini, talking to her?

She hesitated.

‘Come. Up here.’

Obediently, still nervous, she climbed the steps. She stood beside him. He was still smiling at her. For a moment he was very close, close enough for her to catch a whiff of the cologne he was wearing, then he stepped back, applauding her, milking cheers from the crowd whose faces looked up at them both.

An expectant hush. A coolness entered her mind. The churning in her stomach ceased. Neither Mussolini nor the crowd was there any more. She looked down at the band leader and nodded to show him she was ready. The band struck up. The chords of Aïda’s aria flowed golden in the sun.

After Aïda the words of the fascist anthem could only be banal, yet, lifted high on her awareness of incipient triumph, Lucia found them less ludicrous than in the past.

Youth, youth,

Springtime of beauty …

What was ludicrous about that?

She finished. Still wrapped in the isolation of singing, Lucia was at first aware of nothing at all. Then the crowd’s applause beat upon her solitude, cracking it. Their approval warmed her and she smiled at them. She was radiant. The man standing beside her was also applauding most enthusiastically. She turned to Mussolini as he embraced her, while below them the crowd cheered.

He spoke to her, no longer a god but as a normal man would speak.

‘You have a wonderful voice. Where are you studying?’

She felt opportunity open its arms to her.

‘Nowhere. I live outside Parma and there is, of course, the conservatorium there, but my mother can’t afford the fees.’

She waited, breath held.

He frowned and drew a deep breath. He looked at her measuringly, a man who in his time had been asked many favours. He nodded slowly, then more emphatically.

‘We shall arrange it for you.’

He left her standing there and went swiftly down the steps. Watching, she hoped to see him speak to someone about what he had just promised, but he did not. A flunky opened the door of his limousine and he disappeared inside. The car drew away. He was gone.

Lucia had seen the opening and was determined not to let it close again. She ran down the steps and went straight to Eduardo, believing he could help her, if he would.

He looked down at her, smiling with the same cocked eyebrow as before.

‘Hugged by Il Duce. That’s something to tell your grandchildren.’

‘He did more than that. He promised me I’d go to the Parma Conservatorium.’

Eduardo’s face drew still, his expression guarded. ‘And did he say who was going to arrange it?’

She took a deep breath. ‘He told me to speak to you about it.’

The watchful eyes hardened. ‘He’s never heard of me.’

‘He said, speak to the man who brought you here. Check with him yourself, if you don’t believe me.’

‘You think it’s so easy to get hold of him?’

‘Then speak to his office. Are you saying you won’t do what he asked?’

Eduardo’s eyes were still cold. He looked at her for several seconds in silence. ‘Very well. I’ll do what I can. But you must understand, if you’re lying to me

‘He said it. I promise you. He said it!’

2

Lucia held tight to her belief that it would happen. Helena fluctuated between euphoria and despair. If Mussolini had said it would happen, then it would. Everyone knew he was a man of his word, a forthright man who could arrange anything he wanted. On the other hand, how could he, a man with the burden of the nation and the world on his shoulders, be expected to help a young girl of no importance, whose name he almost certainly did not know? He would. He would not.

While Lucia steeled herself to have faith.

Eduardo came to the house. Her heart bounded but he had no news. He had come not to see her but her mother.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

Helena felt naked in a world that she no longer understood. In some ways this new Italy affected her more profoundly than Australia had done. There, she had known that everything would be new; there had been no sense of betrayal in the fact of its newness. But this bellicose Italy of banners and uniforms … She had told herself she would grow used to it; now she began to doubt. She had crossed the world, looking for the past. Instead she had arrived in a country she did not recognise. Revisiting Tolmino had only made things worse.

She knew she could do nothing about it. They were here now and would have to make the best of it. It wouldn’t be easy. They were nobodies; the black-shirted woman who had bullied them had made that plain. How Helena had hated that woman, and the impotence that had forced her, the daughter of a respected landowner, to humble herself. But Lucia, at least, had talent. Lucia the world-renowned opera singer would restore them to their rightful position in life.

She would have to; in this land where all was strange, Helena recognised that she herself had grown timid. Yet she could expect nothing from Lucia immediately; the child was still far too young for that. No, she would have to find a secure place for them both, unaided, and the prospect frightened her. She needed a friend, someone with access to the men of power, someone who would protect her and guide her in the direction she must go.

Lucia’s invitation to sing at Redipuglia had been a godsend not only because of what it meant for Lucia’s future but because it had brought them to the notice of men who could help them, if they would.

Helena would do whatever it took to obtain that help. She had watched Eduardo Grandini, the man who had brought them the news that Lucia was to sing at the dedication. He was a little young, perhaps, but undeniably personable and his eye had lingered appraisingly on her, as she had intended. She had already discovered that he was single, a medium-level official in the Fascist Party who in time might be expected to rise higher. She thought he would do very well. Guido wouldn’t like it, no doubt, but that couldn’t be helped.

It seemed that Eduardo also thought he would do very well. Two weeks after the dedication he visited the cottage on the pretext of seeing how they were settling in. Helena welcomed him, offering him refreshment, which he was happy to accept. Three days later he called again.

2

Lucia made a friend at school and brought her home.

‘This is Angelina.’

She was a peasant girl, fat and plain, altogether unremarkable. Helena did not encourage the relationship. ‘You can’t afford to waste your time. You must work. Your career is the most important thing in your life.’

Lucia was resentful. ‘For my life or yours?’

‘For both our lives.’

Guido overheard. Normally he kept his opinions to himself but, as soon as Lucia had left the room, he gave Helena a warning. ‘She’s had more than her share of upheavals. She needs stability, a friend.’

‘She’s got me.’

‘It’s not enough.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re not her friend. You can’t be. You’re her mother. It’s not the same thing. Besides, you drive her.’

‘For her own good! I want her to realise her talent, become the best. You think that’s easy? To be the best she must work.’

‘Of course. But she needs more. She needs love.’

Helena’s expression showed what she thought of that idea. ‘There’s no time for love.’

Guido sighed, studying her thoughtfully. ‘You mustn’t sacrifice her to your own sense of guilt.’

Helena was indignant. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘You came here looking for something. I warned you things had changed but you took no notice. You’re still looking now, in spite of everything.’

Helena would have none of it. ‘You know nothing about me, nothing.’

‘I’ve cared for you all my life. Sometimes I think I know you better than you know yourself. You’re scared because things in this country aren’t as you expected and you don’t know what to do about them. You would never have made friends with a creature like Eduardo Grandini if it hadn’t been for that.’

Helena laughed scornfully. ‘So that’s what all this is about! You’re jealous of Eduardo!’

‘It’ll be a bad day when I’m jealous of someone like him. No; you’re hoping to use him. It’s becoming a bad habit of yours. But you don’t use men like Grandini. They’re the ones who do the using.’

‘What do you mean, it’s becoming a habit?’

‘Because you’re using Lucia, too, or hoping to. You want her to get you out of the hole you’ve dug for yourself.’

‘Lucia has a great talent —’

‘So you keep saying. But she needs to know she’s loved. Every child does. She more than most.’

‘Mollycoddled, you mean. My parents were killed by the Germans; I saw my home burning with them still inside it. I had to run and hide for weeks, expecting to be killed at any moment. Somehow I managed to survive. Lucia has never had to put up with anything like that. Why should she need more care than I had?’

‘Because you made her come to a foreign country —’

‘Foreign?’

‘To her! A place where she knows nobody, where the language and customs are different. You’re her only support. Yet when she finds a friend, you try to drive her away. If she ever gets the idea you’re sacrificing her for your benefit and not hers, you’ll lose her. Is that what you want?’

‘What I want is for you to mind your own business.’

‘Very well. I’ve said what I had to say. I won’t be here much longer, in any case.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re moving me again. To Bologna.’

Helena had been willing to fight him tooth and claw; now she was horrified. ‘What will happen to us?’

‘You’ll stay here in the cottage, I suppose. I’ll arrange to have the lease transferred into your name.’

‘What do we live on? I’ve no job —’

‘I’ve taken care of that. I’ve spoken to Signor Zaccaria at the bank and he’ll find a place for you. The pay isn’t huge but it’ll be enough for you to live on.’

Even Helena’s gratitude had edges. ‘You mean I won’t have to depend on Eduardo any longer!’

‘You don’t depend on him now. It’s my cottage, not his. But you’ve already told me to mind my own business. I accept that. What you do about Grandini’s your business. Be careful of him, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘I can look after myself.’

‘I hope so.’

He left her to her thoughts, which were uncomfortable, because Guido was right; their life was precarious. Eduardo was a help, for the moment, but Helena knew very well that men like Eduardo were unreliable. Lucia, on the other hand, offered hope. If she became the great singer of Helena’s dreams, her decision to come back to Europe would be justified. If she did not …

Helena would not allow herself to think about that. She remembered what Guido had said about Eduardo.

You don’t use men like Grandini. They’re the ones who do the using.

I mustn’t love him.

It was easy to say. He was young, handsome, a man of power or at least the potential for power. He was a good lover. It was flattering to have the attention — the exclusive attention, she corrected herself — of such a man.

Guido had criticised her for discouraging Lucia’s friendship with the fat child Angelina.

She needs a friend.

Hadn’t Guido thought that Helena, too, might be lonely? Or was she the only one not permitted to have a friend?

A friend: that was safe. Even a lover, as long as there was no question of love. But Helena, in the new job that Guido had arranged for her at the bank, found herself waiting, more and more eagerly, for each day to pass so that she could be with Eduardo again.

They’re the ones who do the using.

It was something to worry about but she did not. She was beyond worry or even thought. Love, however foolish, however dangerous, had made her helpless.

3

Lucia saw that, to Eduardo, she had once again become a child. She watched her mother smiling secretly to herself, dressing up in the only smart frock she possessed, driving off with Eduardo in his shiny car. At first she’d been jealous but by now had learned not to care.

Eduardo was old. He was ugly, whatever the light. She washed her hands of him. She gave up any belief in the conservatorium, her hopes of a career in music. She was fifteen and it would have taken very little for her to hate the world.

4

Eduardo was often away on party business. Then mother and daughter sat at night in the cottage, pretending to be at ease with one another, each thinking her own thoughts.

I am going to make something big of my daughter, and myself.

She thinks she will make something big of me, and herself. She is wrong. What there is in me, I shall make. Her contribution is the blood, the will. I have paid for that already. As for the rest … I shall make something big of myself, alone.

‘You have to learn to dream,’ Helena told her. ‘Not the marshmallow dreams that leave a taste of sweetness on the tongue. Dreams like diamonds, hard and bright. Provided you never lose sight of them, they will carry you to your goal.’

Helena dreamed, too, at times. Once again she was running from fears and dangers across a landscape swarming with the detritus of a defeated army. She hid in the long grass and watched the shingles blowing off the roof as the farmhouse burned on the far side of the stone wall. She sought refuge in the darkness of the forest, her terrified gasps echoing in her head while a succession of gaudily chequered biplanes howled low above her. She closed her eyes and ears, trying to shut out the noise. When she opened them again she found that the wood had changed, become the contorted shapes of the mallee. The branches closed about her. They stifled her struggles and her screams. The dream became a long pursuit. She was stumbling down a rocky hillside in an attempt to escape from unknown dangers. She was alone, with no-one to help her. She was lost in a wilderness of stone, unable to find safety. She was seeking her home, the home where she had been safe, but she knew it was gone, her parents were gone, she would never be safe again. Yet still she ran amid the looming darkness, her feet stumbling over the ankle-twisting rocks. She must not fall, must not, yet all the time knew that falling was inevitable, because she was alone.

5

All through the winter it rained, with many electrical storms. Through the steamy window, Lucia watched the forked lightning across the plain, that stretch of open country the locals called the pianura. Nearby, the melon fields were black and empty, with puddles reflecting the leaden sky; beyond them, extending to an horizon lost in rain, were the trellises of the vines.

Not all the storms took place out of doors. Helena and Eduardo had become increasingly careless of parading their feelings in front of Lucia; night after night she lay awake, listening with gritted teeth to her mother’s passionate groans.

Now they had words, Helena’s fury crackling like the lightning as she threw at him the names of other women.

Eduardo laughed at her, then became angry, his temper flaring to match her own. Finally, when she still kept on at him, he walked out.

Lucia might have been delighted — she’d hated her mother having a lover whom she’d briefly fancied herself — but with him went Lucia’s last chance of getting to the conservatorium, and that was a different matter.

‘He’ll be back,’ she told her mother.

‘Who says I want him?’

Lucia left it for a day or two while Helena prowled about the cottage, making life miserable for both of them, then tried again.

‘Go and make it up with him.’

Eduardo had wangled a transfer to Montegallo and had a room in the village.

‘You think I would chase after a man who doesn’t want me?’

‘He wants you, all right.’

‘Then why isn’t he here?’

‘He’s probably saying the same thing about you at this minute!’

Helena looked at her suspiciously. ‘Why should you care?’

Lucia put on her innocent look. ‘I want you to be happy. Besides, if you really want me to have a career, he’s the only one who can get me into the conservatorium, isn’t he?’

All that evening Helena sat, staring at the wall in front of her, fingers picking at her skirt. Lucia watched, her own fingers crossed, and said nothing.

The next morning was fine. Helena dressed herself up and went out very early. When she came back she was smiling.

‘Make yourself scarce this afternoon, won’t you?’

Lucia obeyed, but spied from a spinney of trees. After half an hour a car turned off the road and came bumping down the track to the cottage. It stopped and Eduardo got out. He went indoors and shut the door behind him.

Lucia walked away across the neighbour’s fields. She’d got what she’d wanted, yet was filled with pain that this man, who should have helped her but had not, should now have come running back, not for her but her mother. There was outrage, too, that her mother was so easily talked into making herself available to him. She shut her mind to the image of the two of them together but it would not go away. It made her angry: worse, jealous. She had told herself that Eduardo would arrange things for her at the conservatorium, but would he? Did he really have that kind of influence? And would he use it, if he could?

He’d better, that was all. But she knew only too well how little she could do about it if he did not.

6

It was a fortnight later that she saw a man on a bicycle riding towards the house. It was February, now, and still raining. Her mother had gone to work and Lucia was alone. She watched the cyclist pedalling, head down, with the dogged determination of one used to overcoming the elements.

It was Giuseppe Puglia, the local postman. His arrival at the cottage was a rare event. Lucia watched as he drew nearer. He passed the window and she went to open the door. ‘Letter for you.’

‘For me? Or my mother?’

‘For you. From the city.’

Lucia’s heart lurched. She held the typed envelope as though it might be a holy talisman. It will be nothing, she told herself.

The envelope was damp from the rain. Giuseppe was watching her, eyes curious in his rain-wet face.

‘Thanks.’

She closed the door and went and sat in the window seat. She turned the envelope in her hands. She tried to be calm but the terror of disappointment dried her mouth.

She opened it.

Inside was a folded sheet of heavy paper, complete with letterhead. A typed letter, neatly paragraphed. It was from the Principal of the Parma Conservatorium, summoning her to an audition the following week.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1

The professor stared at her, as at a bug. On either side of him, two lesser mortals also looked down their noses at the young woman sitting in front of them. The room was dark, green-tinged, gloomy.

If they thought to intimidate her they would not succeed. The professor held up a letter between fastidious fingers. ‘Selection to the Arturo Toscanini Conservatorium is by merit only. Political influence has no place here.’

Which was clearly untrue or she would not be sitting there now. But Lucia kept her mouth shut.

His eyes challenged her from beneath a cockscomb of black hair. Tall, with the keen gaze of an eagle and a profile that might have come from a Roman coin, Professor Menotti was rumoured to fancy himself as a ladies man. There was no evidence of it now.

‘You understand?’

Again Lucia said nothing. A single word here could be a trap.

‘It appears you have friends in high places. They seem to think you have talent.’

Sneering, nostrils flared, he read aloud from the offending letter: ‘… will make a suitable candidate for admission to the conservatorium. Well, we shall see.’ He razored her with his smile. ‘First, a few questions.’

Lucia regarded him steadily. ‘I shall answer them as well as I can.’

Sarcasm dripped. ‘We are honoured!’

He turned to the man on his left, who had a list of questions ready.

‘Name?’

‘Age?’

Badgered by her mother, Eduardo had finally fixed things up for her, arranging with the party headquarters in Parma to write to the conservatorium on her behalf. Now she remembered his warning that it had a minimum age for its students.

‘Sixteen.’

Professor Menotti frowned suspiciously. ‘You look younger.’

Again Lucia took refuge in silence. The professor sighed and gestured with a weary hand for his colleague to continue.

‘Place of birth?’

‘Australia.’

Silence, broken at length by Menotti’s outraged voice. ‘Where?’

‘Australia. In the mallee. A soldier settlement near the Murray River.’

Only the crystal clarity of Lucia’s reply, each word separately enunciated as though explaining something very simple to a fool, gave evidence of insubordination.

‘You are an Australian?’

Yes, she was; in her heart she was nothing else. But she was willing to say whatever was needed to overcome prejudice. She spoke out, daring her questioners to deny what she was telling them.

‘I am Italian. My mother’s maiden name was Sforza. We came back to Italy two years ago. By choice. We —’ It was enough; the man moved on to his next question.

‘After you returned to Italy you received training from a Signora Cehovin?’

As though it were an exotic form of cheese.

‘The opera singer. Yes.’

‘You were selected to sing at the dedication of the Redipuglia cemetery?’

‘In the presence of Il Duce. Yes.’

She would defy them to the last, politely. Eventually they came to the final question.

‘You have something to sing to us?’

They trooped next door, to a large hall with chairs and a stage on which stood a grand piano.

Professor Menotti snapped his fingers. ‘Music?’

She took it from the case she carried and handed it to him. He glanced at it; his lip curled. ‘Donizetti.’

As though to say: What can you expect?

It was from Lucia di Lammermoor: not the mad scene — she knew she wasn’t ready for that — but the ghost story from Act I. It was a good showcase for her voice, requiring range without the challenge of any very high notes.

She sang. Exultation filled her. It was both challenge and vindication. She heard the notes sounding within her head and knew that, although the letter from the local party office might have gained her the interview, it was this that would win her the scholarship.

e l’onda pria si limpida

di sangue rosseggi …

The notes died. She was still.

Professor Menotti closed the lid of the piano and stood up.

‘Interesting. Wait here, Signorina Visconti, while my colleagues and I talk it over.’

They trooped out, leaving her beset by doubts. She hated this arrogant professor. He had made no attempt to hide how much he resented being pressured by the local party. She knew he could ruin her out of spite, if he wanted. She would go to Eduardo, she told herself. To Mussolini, if she had to. She would make them accept her. It would be impossible, she knew. If they turned her down now, she was finished.

Oh God. Please, God.

They came back.

Was it her imagination, or was Menotti looking at her differently now? ‘We have a member of our establishment here. We would like you to sing for her. Her name is Marta Bianci.’

One of the greatest of all the singers of her generation, and a famous coach. With absolute certainty, Lucia knew that she would be able to persuade her.

‘I am very grateful.’

Menotti was not to be won over so easily.

‘So you should be. But talent has its own imperatives.’

She had won.

2

Lucia got on well with her tutor. Marta Bianci was an imposing woman with flashing eyes, very dark, in a face that in her youth must have been of extraordinary fascination. Even now, well into her sixties, it was full of vitality. She was tall, formally dressed in a tailored black gown, and walked as though she owned the world. Lucia worshipped her from the first. Marta Bianci was another who recognised talent — how could she not? — and occasionally offered her new pupil extra coaching. On those nights it meant staying in the city but Marta had a spare room that Lucia was welcome to use. It would have been better had she been able to find somewhere to stay full-time in Parma but the scholarship would not cover the cost, so that was out of the question. The rest of the time she travelled to and from the city every day.

It was a seventeen-kilometre journey. The tram was drawn by a steam engine and left Montegallo every morning at half-past seven, which meant getting up an hour earlier than that. During the warmer months it wasn’t too bad but in winter the compartment was bitterly cold, even with the iron containers filled with hot water on which the travellers rested their feet. By the time she arrived in Parma, Lucia was frozen, but walking as quickly as she could through the city helped warm her up before she reached the conservatorium. Once, when the tram was late, she ran but was reported for it. Professor Menotti had her in and told her coldly that students of the conservatorium — especially female students — did not run or indulge in unseemly behaviour of any kind. Or not in public.

Even that Lucia did not mind, or not much. She was too busy with her studies to pay attention to anything else. She knew how much progress she was making and the knowledge spurred her to ever greater efforts.

After she’d been at the conservatorium for six months she took part in a student concert, singing both the Donizetti that had won her the scholarship and a duet with one of Bianci’s top male students, a tenor, singing ‘Quale occio al mondo’ from Tosca. It was difficult music for a student of such little experience but the applause when they finished heartened her.

Her mother was present, as many parents were. The guests sat in the body of the hall through which the students had to parade before the concert. She managed to flash Helena a smile but that was all. After the final performance they all had to wait for the results: there was a prize for the best performer, for the most promising newcomer, for a host of other categories.

She knew she had no chance, yet hoped, all the same.

The judges returned. They sat in their chairs on the platform and stared out at the audience with doomsday faces. Professor Menotti stood. Lucia clenched her sweating hands in her lap. His ego required that he talk and he did so, seemingly endlessly. About music as a haven of sanity in a world growing progressively more insane. About Italy’s historic role in the civilising process that was so sadly needed. About a dozen other things, while Lucia, writhing silently, urged him on.

Finally he came to it.

First prize for solo instrument. For conducting. Best performer, male. Best performer, female. And then: ‘Most promising newcomer … Lucia Visconti.’

She was swallowed up by tears, joy, disbelief and a defiant sense of self-justification; finally, after all the problems and challenges, she was on her way.

3

It was 1940, the world — including Italy, now — was at war but in Lucia’s life all was well. She had been studying in Parma for two years, she was seventeen years old and had been selected to sing the role of Santuzza in the conservatorium’s production of Cavalleria Rusticana.

A triumph, if she could pull it off.

For weeks she lived the role, memorising not merely her own part but the whole libretto. The same with the score: she could have sung the entire opera from first note to last, had it been necessary. She did more: she tried to understand the character of the woman she was portraying, the better to bring her to life upon the stage.

I shall succeed. I shall succeed.

A dozen times each day she told herself the same thing. Two weeks before the performance, Professor Menotti, who had thawed considerably towards her in recent months, called her into his private office where, after discussing with her the brilliant career that he said he could discern ahead of her, he put his hand down the front of her dress.

Lucia had watched — and imagined — her mother with Eduardo. She had wondered with a nervous quiver of her stomach that was part fear, part lust, how it would feel to have a man do such a thing to her. She had imagined the circumstances in which it might happen, had even taken note of the two or three male students with whom she might have been willing, had the right approaches been made. She had visualised nothing like this. The hard thrust of the fingers awakened alarm rather than lust; it was a violation of herself by an action at once unexpected and undesired. She stepped backwards to escape him. He laughed. He caught her by the arm, drawing her to him again, smiling through wet lips as though it were no more than a game.

She protested, her voice outraged yet little louder than a whisper, as though it were she who should somehow be ashamed.

‘No!’

He took no notice. His strength was beyond anything she had imagined or could control. He had one arm about her. With his free hand he squeezed her breast through her dress. His face was so close to hers that she could see the open pores about his nose, the bubbles of spit on his lips.

‘No!’

Still not a scream, but this time she spoke more loudly. With her clenched fist she punched him as hard as she could in the chest. He let her go, still smiling.

‘No harm …’

Lucia found her full voice. ‘No harm? How dare you!’

His expression changed. No longer tolerant of her maidenly protestations, his eyes grew mean, but Lucia gave him no respite.

‘You are a professor of music! I’m a student! You’ve got responsibilities: to me and to yourself! To your position! How dare you do such a thing!’

Fury flushed Menotti’s sallow features.

‘You admit you’re a student yet still you presume to lecture me? I’ve never heard such impertinence!’

Perhaps Lucia should have kept a prudent silence but she was beyond prudence. ‘You want a woman, why don’t you go out and buy one if you can’t get one of your own?’

Black rage boiling, Menotti threw out his arm to point at the door.

‘Get out! You hear me? Get out! To speak to me in such a way! I warn you, you’ve not heard the last of this!’

Lucia fled in a confusion of tears.

A ladies man. The students had giggled about it. She had, too, but had imagined nothing like this.

That evening, shortly before it was time to go home, Professor Menotti summoned her to his room and formally expelled her from the conservatorium.

It was the worst thing that could have happened to her. Her instinct was to weep, to plead, yet she would not do it. She stared at him, stony-eyed. The ceremony of dismissal took less than a minute. When he had finished she turned and walked with squared shoulders out of his room.

She did not go to see Marta Bianci. She spoke to no-one. She cleared out her locker. She walked out of the building and through the Parma streets. She caught the tram. She huddled in one corner of the compartment, her body aching as though she’d been beaten. The tram rumbled on its steel rails, the sound seeming to echo the catastrophe that had befallen her. She got out at Montegallo without even realising she’d arrived. Her music case in her hand, she walked home between the melon fields, the vines’ taut wires. All around, the flat countryside watched her silently.

The house was empty. She went indoors. She made herself a cup of coffee. She sat and looked out of the window at the ashes of her life.

It was dark before her mother came home. She must have met Eduardo in Montegallo; Lucia saw the lights of his car from a long way off. It came swaying down the rutted track and she heard the sound of its motor. She had not switched on the lights and the headlights cast shadows about the dark room. The car stopped and she heard her mother’s voice, laughter. Still she did not move; even her eyes were motionless.

She heard the front door close. Her mother came in and switched on the light.

‘Lucia! What are you doing, sitting in the dark?’

The tension, the unbelieving stillness, broke. She turned blindly to the mother from whom in the last twelve months she had felt increasingly estranged. She extended groping hands towards her while the tears, so long held back, ran scalding down her cheeks.

Helena’s expression, and her voice, changed.

‘My God, baby, what has happened to you?’

4

They made the journey to Parma together. Helena’s anger made everything about her sparkle. For too long she had forgotten what it was to be a mother, protective of her child who had been so wronged. They arrived in the city and walked to the conservatorium, Helena striding like a cavalryman readying himself for the charge. Her hand clutching Lucia’s arm, she thrust herself across the roads as though daring the traffic to harm them. She marched up the steps and into the entrance. She walked to the reception desk in a clack of heels and demanded to see Marta Bianci.

‘Without delay. You hear me?’

The woman behind the desk, elderly, lips prim in a tight face, saw the conservatorium as a temple of the arts, with herself as its priestess and custodian. Not by a flicker did she acknowledge Lucia, who rumour said had been dismissed.

‘Signora Bianci is teaching.’

Helena was not interested in what Signora Bianci might be doing.

‘Tell her Signora Visconti is in reception and wishes to speak to her.’

‘I have already told you —’

‘Or I shall go and find her myself.’

Priestess or not, the receptionist was unable to handle Helena in her present mood.

‘I shall enquire …’ She picked up the phone and conspired into it, softly and venomously, for a minute.

‘Signora Bianci asks you to wait. She will be with you as quickly as she can.’

It took fifteen minutes, while Helena sat in one of the shiny leather chairs that the reception hall provided. She stared ahead, not deigning to look at the portraits of the famous men that graced the walls: Verdi, Bellini and of course Toscanini himself, the great conductor after whom the conservatorium had been named.

Behind her high counter the receptionist rustled papers, casting glances, but Helena did not favour her with a look. Eventually a distant door banged and there was the sound of footsteps approaching down a corridor. Marta Bianci crossed the reception area towards them. Unlike the lady behind the counter, she smiled warmly at Lucia but it was to her mother that her attention was chiefly directed.

‘Signora Visconti?’

Helena looked up at her. ‘This is a terrible state of affairs.’

‘Indeed. Perhaps we should discuss it in private?’

She led the way to a little room smelling of dust, where she turned to face them.

‘I’ve been told Lucia was expelled for gross and repeated insubordination. The whole school’s been told.’

‘That is a lie! My daughter is being punished for attempting to defend her virtue.’

The teacher’s face became stone. ‘I know nothing of that.’

Helena was in the mood to tackle Mussolini himself, if that was what it took.

‘The question is, what are you going to do about it?’

‘I can do nothing.’

‘This ogre puts his hands on my daughter’s body and you don’t care?’

Fire could not have been hotter, but Marta Bianci was a match for her.

‘I did not say I don’t care! Lucia is the most talented student ever to have passed through my hands. Of course I care! But it’s her word against his, and Professor Menotti is Principal of the conservatorium.’

‘And has a name for this kind of behaviour!’

The stony look returned to Marta Bianci’s face. ‘I know nothing of that.’

‘And there is nothing you can do?’

‘Nothing I can do, no.’ She hesitated. ‘But perhaps you may be able to do something, yourself.’

‘Explain what you mean.’

‘I haven’t told you this, you understand. But I seem to remember that Lucia has sung in front of Mussolini, isn’t that so? It occurs to me that you might have contacts within the Party. If they were willing to intervene on Lucia’s behalf …’

‘That would help?’

The teacher smiled. ‘We are all devoted to the Party, are we not?’

5

Helena and Eduardo had words about it. Eduardo was unhappy about expending still more credit on obtaining favours for a girl about whom he cared nothing, but eventually Helena prevailed.

There was a week’s uncomfortable wait before Eduardo brought them the news they had been hoping for.

‘You’ll have to apologise to him,’ he said.

‘Apologise? What for?’

‘It doesn’t matter what for! He insisted, so do it, that’s all. You understand?’

Lucia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Very well.’

The two women went alone. Helena had wanted Eduardo to accompany them but he had refused.

‘He’ll do it, all right. You don’t need me.’

Professor Menotti sat behind his desk, his face sour. He had been defeated by a power mightier than himself and both these women knew it. He would have killed the pair of them most cheerfully. It was why he had insisted on the apology; that way he hoped to salvage some self-regard from the wreck.

Lucia did not permit him to enjoy even that. The time came for her to apologise. She did not stand with shamed, downturned eyes as he had expected. No; she knelt, most theatrically, arms out-flung, and besought his forgiveness for all the wrongs she, in her ignorance and inexperience, had done him. She praised him for his generosity in agreeing to reinstate her, she swore on her mother’s grave to be his slave.

‘Your mother is standing beside you!’

‘But one day she will die. As we all shall. I just wanted to say that, as long as I live —’

‘Enough! Enough! Get up, for heaven’s sake!’

She rose humbly to her feet. She came around his desk to stand close beside him. He recoiled.

‘What do you want now?’

‘To kiss your hand.’

He buried his hands as far below the desk as he could thrust them, while Lucia watched him adoringly. ‘Oh please …’

‘Get out! Go on: get out!’

Outside in the corridor Lucia collapsed, clinging to her mother while the two women laughed hysterically, not caring whether the professor heard them or not. Lucia was reinstated and that was all that mattered.

It went without saying that from now on her work would have to be of the highest standard, if she were to survive.

6

Helena travelled back to Montegallo on the tram. The wheels screeched on the rails, passengers got in and out. The grey day frowned endlessly beyond the windows, the gloomy countryside threatened like knives. She should have been delighted. She had taken on the professor and won. Yet now she was afraid. She had been forced to enlist Eduardo’s help. He had given it, but not happily. It was yet another debt she owed him and she was frightened that one day he might start asking himself whether she was worth it.

All her life she had been dependent on men. Father, husband, cousin. Each, in turn, had been lost. Her father dead, her husband on the other side of the world, her cousin in another part of the country. Now it was her lover’s turn. What would happen to her if he, too, abandoned her? She would be alone.

She got off the tram and did some shopping before walking home. There were several women in the shop. They looked at her without speaking. She ignored them, refusing to listen to their spiteful silence, knowing how these mouths would rend should Eduardo ever abandon her. Her life was lived on the edge of a precipice.

Yet at the end, as she opened the door to leave the shop, she found a smile of triumph with which to impale them, knowing that Lucia’s troubles at the conservatorium would be no secret to them.

‘My daughter has been reinstated. Professor Menotti has apologised for his mistake.’

And she went out into the raw afternoon. Let them stick that up their pipe.

Helena returned to the empty cottage. She opened the door, stood in the doorway and looked into the dark interior. She knew that eventually Eduardo would leave her. It was the way of men; it was not in him to do anything else. Besides, Eduardo was younger than she was; she could not hope to bind him indefinitely. No, it was Lucia rather than Eduardo who held the key to the future. She went indoors and closed the door behind her. She drew the curtains and switched on the light. The room sprang into being. Lucia would not be home before dusk, yet already she was everywhere, in the house and in her life. She was in the furniture, the picture of Jesus that had come with the cottage, in the shadowed air, the open vastness of the pianura beyond the curtains. She was memory, the child running through the mallee, her bare feet in sand. She was in the light, too, and in the future. In a very real sense, she was the future. It was another reason why Helena’s victory today had been so important. In defending Lucia she had been protecting herself, ensuring that together they would overcome the world. Together, always together. They would triumph, she working, encouraging, driving to bring to full ripeness Lucia’s gifts of voice and artistry. Together. Otherwise all her life — the saving of it during the war, the years in Australia, all the struggles and pain — would have been for nothing.

She knew how hard it would be. She wanted Lucia’s love, not gratitude. She wanted to love the child as well as the artist but doubted whether it would be possible. Without unremitting work all would fail and unremitting work left no room for love.

If she had to, she would sacrifice even love, if doing so could bring her daughter to her proper place. By sacrificing love, she would render her the ultimate gift of love.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

Twice Helena had gone into battle on her daughter’s behalf. She had dragged Eduardo into it, nagging him until, reluctantly, he’d called in a few favours at party headquarters. Between them they’d got her reinstated, her career back on track. It was enough. Eduardo, in particular, had been quite sulky about it.

‘That’s it, okay? I’m not doing any more for her.’

From now on Lucia would have to manage on her own.

Lucia turned to her teacher, and became closer to her than ever. She would have made her into a surrogate mother, had Marta Bianci been willing, but she was not. Day and night she worked with her best student: that, she would do. More and more frequently she allowed her to stay overnight at her apartment but she refused, absolutely, to let Lucia play the role of dutiful daughter, the slave role that was the other face of arrogance. ‘I won’t have you doing my housework. That isn’t your job.’

‘I only want to help you.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Why not? You’ve been so good to me.’

It was evening and they were sitting by the apartment’s window, open now that the warmer weather had arrived. They listened to the cries of traders in the street below, saw the multi-coloured piles of produce — fruits, peppers, tomatoes — beneath the bug-swirled lanterns.

Marta Bianci said: ‘You’re an extremely gifted woman. There’s nothing in the world of opera you’re not capable of achieving. I’m honoured to be your teacher. Any problems and I’ll do what I can to help you, but you ought to talk to your mother about them as well. I don’t like to think of you turning your back on her.’

‘My mother has her own life.’

‘And so she should. But look what she’s done for you already. I’m sure she’d go on helping you, if you let her. An artist should embrace the world, don’t you agree? And she’s always wanted you to be a singer.’

‘She certainly wants that. It’s all she’s ever wanted, for me to be a big name, with money and a place in society. But for her sake, not mine. She thinks it’ll compensate her for never having done anything with her own life.’

‘I’m sure she cares about you, too.’

‘No! Everything I do is for her benefit. If I fail, she’ll never speak to me again.’

She was crying, and Marta took her hand. ‘She’s still your mother. You shouldn’t shut her out.’

‘She’s got Eduardo. He’s the only person she cares about. What’s she need me for?’

‘You’re her daughter, after all.’

Lucia’s tear-stained face challenged her. ‘You’re saying I’m a nuisance to you!’

Marta sighed. ‘You know very well that’s nonsense! I’ve already told you, I’m honoured to be your teacher. But I’m not your mother. You mustn’t expect me to take her place. It wouldn’t be right.’

She tightened her hand on Lucia’s fingers.

‘Being an artist is a lonely business. You have to get used to it but you mustn’t blame your mother for it.’

Lucia attempted a smile. ‘I’ll try.’

She went to stand up, but Marta had not finished with her. ‘Being a prima donna isn’t just singing and acting. How you look also comes into it. I won’t have you doing my housekeeping, because your hands have to be elegant, like the rest of you. Looks are very important. Your clothes, for instance …’

Lucia smoothed her hands self-consciously over the front of her dress. ‘You don’t like it.’

‘I didn’t say that. There’s nothing wrong with it. The point I’m making is that appearance counts. It does to every woman, but particularly to one who’s going to stand in front of an audience. There are some operas where you hardly move at all. Look at Tristan and Isolde, for example, or Lohengrin. The audience has nothing to do but look at you. If they don’t like what they see they’ll tear you to pieces afterwards, never mind how marvellous your voice is.’

‘That’s on stage.’

‘Off stage is just as important. You have to make the most of your looks. You have so much. Hair, eyes, cheekbones … You’re a beautiful woman. But you’ve got to get into the habit of elegance, too. Making the most of yourself. That means working at it all the time.’

Lucia sighed. ‘There’s so much to learn … Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever get there.’

‘How long have you been my student? Three years. And you’re what, eighteen years old? You’ve come so far in so short a time! Of course you’ll get there!’

2

Another student opera — Puccini’s Suor Angelica — and another success. The war raged across the world yet for the moment had little impact on their lives. Lucia still made the journey from Montegallo to Parma, the tram as asthmatic as ever. Every minute of her days was focused on study: her voice, dramatic expression, musical theory, German and French lessons, and — after her talk with Marta — how she looked.

Her mother’s relationship with Eduardo continued, as volatile as ever. There were times when Helena smiled, every movement of her body proclaiming her joy and fulfilment, others when the air inside the cottage was bruised with fury until Eduardo stormed out, yet again, and Helena prowled, eyes bitter in a drawn face. These were the times Lucia dreaded most, with Helena attacking her mercilessly, blaming her for all her shortcomings, real and imagined. By contrast, she never blamed Eduardo for anything.

‘What else can you expect? An older woman with a useless daughter?’

Even Lucia’s successes in the student operas and concerts, the glowing reports she had from her teacher, did not placate her mother.

‘What use are they? They don’t pay the bills.’

And then, shortly after her nineteenth birthday, Marta Bianci took Lucia aside and told her she had found her a job in the chorus at the Parma Opera.

Her first response was joy, then doubts surfaced. It was wonderful news, in its way, but not what Lucia had been hoping. ‘In the chorus?’

Marta reassured her at once. ‘To give you the chance to earn some money and let you get the experience of singing small parts. No-one expects you to sing in the chorus itself.’

So that was all right. All the same, when for the first time Lucia walked through the city, not towards the conservatorium but to the Royal Theatre, she was in such a panic that she wouldn’t have complained had the ground opened and swallowed her.

Things weren’t much better when she got there. Not all the members of the opera welcomed her. She came with a reputation and some were only too eager to challenge the idea that here was a star in the making.

Teresa Sciotto was two years older than Lucia, another soprano. She had black hair and malicious eyes. She was fat, too, or heading that way, a waddle with a voice. But that was the trouble. What a voice. Everyone said she was a rising star; rivalry was inevitable.

Now she pared Lucia to the bone, eyes flashing spitefully.

‘We’ll be all right, now. Mussolini’s girlfriend’s here.’

Let herself be bullied once and Lucia knew that her life would become impossible.

‘You’re obviously disappointed they didn’t ask you to sing for him instead of me.’

‘Giovinezza? A cow could sing that!’

‘Perhaps they should have asked you, then.’

It didn’t come to bloodshed, but it was close.

3

Her first roles weren’t really roles at all. There were a number of plays in the theatre’s repertoire, particularly by Shakespeare and other authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that required singers to stand in the wings and sing the various songs required by the text, while the actors mimed on stage. For a few months she did this, then she was given the small role of Beatrice in Suppé’s Boccaccio.

Elation soared only to come crashing down again. There were to be six performances; she would sing three, Teresa Sciotto the rest. Lucia knew there was nothing she could do about it except treat it as the challenge it was. It would be up to her to sing — and act — her rival off the stage.

All through the rehearsals she was like a woman obsessed; a gun could have gone off in her ear and she wouldn’t have noticed. It was a small part but she was determined to make the most of it. She was early at every rehearsal, she concentrated on every detail of the part, she was professional in everything she did.

Teresa took every chance to remind those who would listen of Lucia’s lack of experience, but she had an answer to that, too.

‘My teacher always warned me never to sing on stage until I had a lot of experience.’ Which left Teresa tangle-tongued and scowling, but most of the time Lucia found it easier to ignore her.

Before the first performance she was once again sick with nerves but, with Teresa watching her spitefully, she took care to keep her feelings well hidden. I’ll die first …

Fortunately there was no need. Before her first entrance she felt as a criminal must on the way to the scaffold. Words and music vanished from her mind; then, at the last moment, terror was replaced by calmness. It clothed her like a garment. She was transported; she became Beatrice to the point where she was shocked by the crash of applause at the end of the performance that woke her, it seemed, from a dream.

The director was ecstatic.

‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’

Both Helena and Marta Bianci were in the audience and they said much the same, but it was only when she read the review in the next morning’s paper that she dared believe it.

Great dramatic impact … In a small part of limited scope, Visconti showed the promise of great things to come.

The theatre decided to stage a ten-part revival of the operetta before the end of the season, with Lucia singing each performance. It was the triumph she had been looking for.

4

By the time the following summer arrived, it was no longer possible for any of them to ignore the war.

For a long time Lucia had had a foretaste of trouble. In Montegallo, Eduardo Grandini was no longer the strutting man he had been. The headlines still blared of triumph and impending victory but no-one believed them any longer. The most basic foods were in short supply, while everyone they knew seemed to have lost a son or father to the war.

It was a time of mingled hope and terror. To some people it was simple. If Italy were defeated, the war would end. Everything would return to how it had been before. The boys would come home, food supplies would be miraculously restored, the world would be put to rights overnight. Nobody could understand why they’d got involved in the first place; the sooner it was over, the better for everyone. Some believed it, or pretended to; for others, doubt outweighed hope.

Knowing that he would be blamed for everything that had happened, Mussolini would never agree to surrender. They’d have to get rid of him first, and who would take over if they did? The king? Marshal Badoglio? It didn’t seem very likely. Even if Italy surrendered, what would the Allies do? Or the Germans? No-one believed they’d just pack up and go home. The Germans were bad enough as allies; the thought of them as enemies was too terrible to contemplate.

In a world on the edge of collapse, opera seemed too trivial to matter. Lucia, needing the comfort she never found at home, once again confided in her old teacher about it. Marta Bianci put her right at once.

‘That’s nonsense! Art is never trivial or unimportant. In a world in ruins, it will be the saving of us all.’

They certainly needed a saviour of some sort. Hunger, literal and perpetual, had become a fact of life. In some areas, it was no longer a question of mere hunger; there was talk of starvation in outlying areas, of both the elderly and very young dying from want. Lucia was twenty years old; there were days when she felt a hundred. In the midst of deprivation, fear a daily companion and hope a forgotten memory, she began to wonder whether her life would ever be more than this: an endless tunnel of darkness without even the faintest glimmer to brighten the future. Her helplessness made things worse. Like everyone else, she could do nothing but live each day as it came, focusing only on survival. One of the tram cars was derailed because the track had not been maintained; the passengers waited doggedly while it was levered back onto the rails. They didn’t complain but no-one offered to help, either; the war had sapped all energy from their bones. When the car was ready, everybody climbed silently aboard again; nowadays even normal conversation had become too much of an effort. Despite everything, life went on. Someone acquired a chunk of horsemeat, dripping with blood, marbled with thin threads of sinew. People queued to buy what in the past they wouldn’t have looked at twice, and thought themselves lucky. A letter came from one of the boys fighting in an Italian division in Russia. Reading between the lines, it sounded as though conditions there were worse even than at home.

‘Where will it all end?’

No-one knew.

On one occasion there was no fuel for the engine that drew the tram. It made getting to the city difficult but Lucia managed it; the opera season was over for the year but she had gone back to Marta Bianci for further coaching and a lack of transportation wasn’t going to stop her. She found a farmer going in by trap. She begged a lift from him, paying for the favour by singing to him all the way. She was delighted when, at the end of the journey, he told her that for such payment he would have taken her all the way to Berlin.

She made a face at him. ‘Who’d want to go there?’

For the next four days she stayed with her old teacher; then, without explanation, fuel supplies were restored and the trams began to run again.

When she got home she found her mother in bed with a terrible cold. Helena was weak from exhaustion, scarcely able to lift her head from the pillow. There was no food in the house and Lucia was afraid for her.

‘Can’t Eduardo help?’

Apparently not; the stresses of the war had begun to affect even the Fascists, and Eduardo had not been seen for several days.

‘We can’t just sit here!’

‘What can we do?’

‘I’m going to look for food. See if I can talk a farmer into letting us have something.’

Frightened, Helena clutched her arm. ‘Don’t!’

Certainly, it would be a risky business. The authorities were coming down hard on black marketeers; they’d heard of cases where culprits had been shot. It made no difference; as far as Lucia was concerned, she had no choice.

‘If I don’t get some food into you, you may die.’ She was hungry herself, come to that, but Lucia was young and youth has its own resilience.

‘Don’t forget there are German patrols, too, nowadays,’ Helena warned.

There had been for months. Lucia wasn’t likely to forget it; none of them wanted anything to do with the serious-minded and ruthless Germans. ‘I’ll be careful. Neither of us is going to starve to death, if I can help it.’

Early the next morning she took her bicycle and her purse containing all the money she had and set out to look for food. She kept to the back roads, reasoning that the patrols would be less likely to police these. The Taro River Valley seemed the best bet; she followed the Salsomaggiore Road, cycling through the peaceful countryside, listening to the dawn chorus of birds and telling herself over and over again that all would be well.

She found a farm. She turned in at the gate and went to the back door, where the farmer’s wife stared at her with unfriendly eyes.

‘What do you want?’

Lucia explained, putting as much heartbreak into her voice as she could, but the woman wasn’t interested.

‘We’ve all got problems …’

And slammed the door in her face.

‘Bitch!’

She would not give up but rode on, receiving rebuff after rebuff, until at last she found someone willing to take pity on her.

‘Poor child!’

There were some eggs, a chunk of cheese, even a small cut of smoked ham. The woman refused money.

‘If you’re stopped by the patrols, just don’t let on where you got it.’

For farmers, too, the illegal disposal of food could mean trouble.

‘Of course I won’t. And God bless you!’

She rode home in triumph but also in terror. Had she been stopped on the outward journey she could have pretended she was simply out for a ride; now, with her pannier full of food, no-one was going to believe that.

Help me, God! Protect me! Over and over again, while the wheels of her bicycle whirled and she thought she might faint with fear. The closer she drew to Montegallo, the worse it became; it was here that the patrols would be most likely to stop her. She considered hiding the food beside the road and coming back for it later, but the thought of someone stealing it was too terrible to contemplate and she rode on.

She saw no soldiers and arrived home safely but the terror of the ride stayed with her for the rest of the day; her mother, struggling out of bed, used two of the eggs to make an omelette and it was all Lucia could do to choke it down.

Eduardo reappeared — drawn by the smell of the food, Lucia thought sourly — and raised his eyebrows at the ham.

‘Where did you get this?’

Lucia smiled at him. ‘We found it outside the door two mornings ago.’

He stared coldly at her. ‘Just like that?’

‘Someone must’ve taken pity on us. More than you can say for some people.’

Because Eduardo had brought no food with him. Naturally he didn’t believe a word of her story — anonymous benefactors were thin on the ground these days — but it was the only explanation he was going to get. Not that it made any difference; suspicion didn’t stop him scoffing what he could grab. Lucia hated to see him gobbling the food she’d taken such risks to get, but at least there was one benefit: he could hardly report them when he was eating it himself.

The food ran out only too soon. Lucia refused to ask Eduardo for help. Helena had no such compunction but it did no good. Encouraged by the success of her earlier adventure, Lucia got out her bicycle and set off once again through the countryside. It was July, high summer, and would be hot later. Conditions across the nation were worse than ever, and there were rumours of anything from the end of the war to the end of the world. Only two weeks before had come the news that the Allies had invaded Sicily, far away to the south, but cycling through a limpid dawn, Lucia found it hard to believe there was such a thing as war at all. There had been late rains and streams bubbled cheerfully on both sides of the road; the grass was thick and green, birds were singing, everywhere was alive. How could she take even the war seriously on a morning like this? She didn’t waste her time with the people who had turned her away before; instead she rode straight to the farm where the woman had helped her. Once again she was willing, but this time Lucia insisted on paying her.

‘Otherwise I’ll feel I won’t be able to come again.’

‘You won’t tell anyone?’

‘Of course I won’t. Not a word.’

She packed her prizes into her pannier—eggs, cheese, potatoes, a couple of tomatoes that were still partially green but with the wonderful smell of freshness upon them — and set out on the return journey. The sun was well up by now; it was already hot and she could feel sweat running down her back as she rode. She smelt the resinous scent of the pine trees, her sandalled feet were covered with dust from the road, she was enjoying the prospect of a meal of eggs, cheese and potatoes. She could taste them so clearly, could imagine the two tomatoes ripening on the windowsill of the cottage in the glow of the evening sunlight. She came around a bend past a narrow track running off into the trees and saw ahead of her a grey motorcycle drawn up at the side of the road.

Her body went numb with shock. She had a crazy impulse to twist the handlebars and take to the track, seeking safety in the forest, but try anything like that and she’d be in real trouble. Her only hope was to carry on and hope she could bluff her way through.

The German soldier raised a gauntleted hand to stop her. She slowed, brakes squeaking. She dismounted, keeping the bicycle between them. She forced herself to look at him. He was tall and lean, shovel helmet threatening, grey eyes like nails beneath the steel rim. He had a gun of some sort slung about his neck.

‘Identification!’

She had her purse in the pocket of her dress. She fumbled in it, took out her identity card and handed it to him. He examined it carefully, checking her face against the photograph. Eventually he handed it back to her.

‘What are you doing, cycling here at this time of the morning?’ His Italian was fluent, if accented.

‘Going for a ride before it gets too hot.’

‘Where are you from? One of the farms?’

She shook her head.

‘From Montegallo. I’m on my way home.’

‘You know it’s against the law to obtain food except with a ration card?’

‘I know’

She was close to fainting; all he had to do was order her to open the pannier. Her body trembled. Even her lips … Summoning all her willpower, she drew them tight against her teeth; she would not let him see how frightened she was. Not that it served much purpose except to salve her pride; from his expression, he already knew about fear, and how to inflict it. They stared at each other. The soldier’s thin lips smiled. He took off his helmet. For all his height, he was suddenly a boy with grey eyes, neck too slight for the high collar of his uniform jacket. A cruel boy, all the same, unpleasantly aware of his status in this world, and of hers. His smile broadened in his pale face; his gaze seemed to finger her through her clothes, letting her see what she already knew, that she was his, should he choose to make her so, and helpless.

Fear made a hollow in her chest. There were so many stories about these soldiers and how they treated their victims; some of them, surely, must be true.

‘Hot, isn’t it?’ As though he’d stopped her just for a chat.

Lucia did not answer, using silence to protect her from the lascivious lips, the eyes that moved appraisingly from throat to breast to thigh. Again he smiled: not merely man to woman, but captor to captive.

‘Taking a ride, eh? That what you’re saying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nice day for it. Nothing in your pannier?’

The suddenly barked question was like a blow. She had to hide her fear, yet how could she? The air stank of it. She swallowed.

‘Take a look, if you want. Nobody’s stopping you.’

‘I’d like to see anyone try.’ Slowly he walked forward. He was so close that she could smell the sun-warmed grey cloth, the whiff of oil from the gun about his neck. His boots crunched on the gravel as he placed his hand on the pannier. Face frozen, she would not look at him but was conscious of his smile focusing on her like the muzzle of his rifle. From the trees beside the road came a commotion of wings as birds flew skywards. Lucia stood helplessly under the soldier’s knowing smile. ‘What’s your name?’

Her stiff lips barely moved; she knew better than to say that he’d already seen her identity card. ‘Visconti.’

‘Visconti? That all? Haven’t you got a first name?’

‘Lucia.’

‘That’s better. So, Lucia, you say you live in Montegallo?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s nice. What do you do there? Nothing to do with farming, I’ll bet, not with hands like that. Let me guess. Teacher? Clerk in a bank?’

‘I’m a singer at the opera house in Parma.’

‘Singer, eh? That’s new. What sort of stuff do you sing?’

‘Opera.’

Again the measured crunch of boots as he circled her, taking his time about it. He stopped behind her. He was so close that she could feel his eyes, his breath.

‘Word of advice, little singer. I could check what’s in that pannier of yours, but I won’t. If I found anything, I’d have to take you in and that’d be a pity. For both of us, especially for you. So I’m going to let you go. But I’m not stupid. Be careful, all right? Another time I might not be feeling so generous. Get me?’

She was unsure whether he was releasing her or not.

‘Get moving, then. Before I change my mind.’

She nodded stiffly and remounted her bicycle. He clapped his helmet firmly back on his head.

‘I’ll be seeing you, then. Lucia.’

His eyes danced. He laughed as though he meant every word of what might have been a promise or a threat. Somehow she managed to ride on. It seemed to take for ever to reach the next bend; all the way she could feel his eyes nailed to her back. She didn’t turn her head or slow down but, as soon as she’d rounded the bend and was safely out of sight, she stopped and buried her head in her hands. She could scarcely breathe.

She arrived home to find her mother listening to the wireless. After what had happened to her she thought that the day, surely, could contain no more dramas, but she was wrong. Helena hurried to her at once and held her hands tight. For her mother to show such emotion was so unusual that Lucia was alarmed.

‘What is it?’

‘Mussolini …’

The once all-powerful leader had been deposed and arrested. The king had asked Marshal Badoglio to form an alternative government.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

1

Crowds were dancing around bonfires in the streets. From the city came reports of some shooting: people taking the chance to settle old scores, or so Helena claimed. Eduardo disappeared once more. She said he’d been called to fascist headquarters for discussions about the future of the Party and the war, although what he had to contribute on either subject was anyone’s guess. The wireless reported that a number of Fascists had been killed in Milan. The German troops around Montegallo were nowhere to be seen and there were rumours they’d been withdrawn. Rumours were endless. Hitler was dead. German armour had been seen heading south across the Brenner Pass. The Italian divisions in the Balkans had gone over to the Russians. Trieste and Udine had been occupied by the SS. The truth was that, in a world in chaos, no-one knew what was going on or what the outcome was going to be.

Somehow life continued. People got up each morning and went to bed at night never knowing what the next day, or even the next hour, might bring. The war would end or it would not. The boys would come home or they would not. Leaflets calling for Italy’s surrender were dropped by Allied aircraft. Tomorrow bombs might replace the leaflets. Uncertainty did not cause panic but made everyone stoical. There was nothing they could do so, as far as possible, they tried to put the war and its attendant miseries out of their minds.

Once again the trams were out of action. Three days later they started running again and Lucia went into Parma. There were German troops at the station, more manning roadblocks in the city. Twice within half a kilometre she had to show her papers. Most of the shops were shut and there were fewer people about than normal. The empty pavements made Parma seem like a city of ghosts. A tank was drawn up on a corner near the theatre. Conscious of the tank crew watching her, she walked past it without turning her head. It was a relief to reach the theatre. She stood inside the auditorium, looking at the white and gold decor, the red plush seating, and thought that here, at least, things still had the illusion of normality. She didn’t stay long. Only the caretaker was there; despite appearances, things were far from normal. Once again she braved the streets as she walked to the conservatorium. No-one was at the reception desk but she found Marta Bianci in her room.

Her teacher — plump, radiant smile, dressed as always in formal black — flung her arms around her. ‘Thank goodness! I haven’t seen you for days. I was afraid something must have happened to you.’

Minutes earlier, passing once again in front of the tank whose cannon seemed to threaten not only the street but civilisation itself, Lucia had been grey with fright; now she laughed. ‘The trams weren’t running, but today they’re back again. The world goes on!’

She was laughing and crying at once; it was so good to see this woman who was not only her teacher but her dearest friend.

‘What’s going to happen to us all?’ Lucia stared at her teacher. The bones in Marta’s face were as commanding as ever but the lines cut deeply into her face and for the first time Lucia thought she was showing her age.

However, Marta shook her head decisively enough. ‘You must put the war out of your head. There’s nothing any of us can do about it. What we can do, though, is talk about the next opera season. As you know, I’m on the programme committee.’

She paced the room, heels clicking, then came swiftly to Lucia and clutched her hands.

‘Tosca.’

Lucia put her hands to her throat. ‘What about it?’

‘Tosca, the voice of defiance: Scarpia, the tyrant overthrown by love! Can you think of a more suitable opera to perform at this time?’ Perhaps none more suitable, but …

‘Do we dare?’

‘Who’s going to stop us?’

‘The Germans?’

‘They’re not running this country yet!’

Lucia remembered the tank but said nothing. She feared for the future but was willing to hope she could be wrong. For the moment there were other considerations.

‘Who’ll take the lead?’

Again Marta took her hands. ‘I would’ve liked it to be you.’

But.

Lucia’s hopes dissolved.

‘Teresa Sciotto has been with the company longer and has a fine voice, too.’

Lucia would have strangled the cow where she stood but was determined to be fair.

‘A very fine voice,’ she agreed, but playing the saint proved beyond her. She threw back her chestnut hair, while her eyes blazed blue fire. ‘Pity she can’t act.’

‘Lucia!’

Now disappointment was allied to a sense of betrayal. Fury, too, at her inability to prevent her tears. ‘You know I’d do it better than her!’

‘You’ll understudy her. Perhaps you’ll get your chance.’

Lucia remained sulky but Marta had made up her mind.

‘It’s the best I can do for you. Some would say it’s too much for someone as young as you are. And Teresa has her own supporters, as you know.’

It was true. On stage Teresa Sciotto was as wooden as a fence post but there would always be those who thought that purity of tone was more important than the ability to act. And purity she had, in voice if not in temperament. Curse her.

The chance to understudy the star role in a major production was certainly a step up in her own career. And, as Marta said, there was always the chance that Teresa might become ill.

Although Lucia doubted it. That one would drag herself on stage if she was dying. Out of spite. She’d be happy to give her poison herself, to prove it. Purely in the interests of science. But managed to shrug off her rage. Once again, as when she and Teresa had alternated in the role of Beatrice, she would accept the challenge. She would prove to the world, or at least to the officialdom of the Parma Opera House, that the understudy was a greater performer than her rival.

2

She went home to trouble.

A stone had been thrown through one of the cottage windows. Helena had been shouted at in the street.

‘Who was it?’

‘I couldn’t see who they were. They were standing in the shadow of the trees.’ Helena wept. ‘Why should they do such things to us?’

They both knew the answer. Eduardo was a Fascist. A month ago they’d been heroes, the leaders of the nation; now they were the enemy, with all who were their friends. Lucia herself was not exempt, as Helena, not wishing to be alone in her trouble, was quick to remind her. ‘They’ll be after you, too. You sang for Mussolini, after all.’

Lucia responded violently. ‘I didn’t sing for him! He was there, that was all!’

‘It’s enough.’

Helena was right. It frightened Lucia. It might endanger her chances in Tosca. With everything she had dreamed of at risk, even to understudy the part she had wanted for herself was now immensely desirable. But to her mother she said: ‘It wasn’t exactly like you and Eduardo, was it? I didn’t sleep with him!’

Helena’s slap rattled her teeth. ‘Don’t talk filth to me!’

Lucia, too, could be a spitfire when she wanted. ‘Maybe I could have done, if I’d wanted. You saw how he looked at me.’

Not caring if it were true or not, wanting only to wound the woman who had wounded her. It took days for them to get over it. Eventually it was Helena who found the right words.

‘If we fight each other, it means they’ve beaten us. We must stand together. That way we shall overcome them all.’

Yes! Yes!

They hugged each other, weeping, and were strong. Outside the door, the world was in chaos. No-one knew what was going to happen next. The shops and banks were shut. Helena and Lucia had kept to the house, afraid of what might be waiting for them outside. Now they went out arm in arm, laughing to spite the world. They walked down Montegallo’s main street, they exchanged pleasantries with the handful of passers-by. One or two gave them looks but there was no trouble.

Helena said: ‘It will take more than Montegallo to get the better of the Sforzas.’

Or of the Fishers, Lucia thought, feeling herself a real Aussie, defiant in the face of persecution. Contact with her father would have helped, too, but in a war that was impossible. If only she’d been home, and safe, in Australia! But that, too, was the stuff of dreams.

They went home. Safe inside the house once more, Helena’s courage evaporated. She threw herself face down on the bed. Her clenched fists pounded. ‘Where will it all end?’

Lucia knelt at her mother’s side. ‘We shall be brave. You said so yourself, remember? We’re Sforzas. We shan’t let them get the better of us.’

Helena was exhausted, her lover vanished, and could not be comforted. Eventually, when she had wept herself dry, she fell silent. She stood up, making a visible effort to gather herself together. Her eyes were shadowed, her black hair cloaked a face of tragedy.

‘I shall go to bed.’

‘I’ll bring you a hot drink.’

A wan smile. ‘Of what? Water?’

‘We can do better than that.’

Lucia had scrounged some herb tea from Marta Bianci; until now she’d kept quiet about it. Originally she had intended it as a surprise; later, after the fight with her mother, she had made up her mind to drink it herself. Now it could be used in a better cause. She managed to squeeze two cups out of the precious leaves. There was no milk but she sweetened the brew with a drop of honey and carried the cups through to the bedroom. Helena was sitting up in bed and looked curiously at the cups in Lucia’s hands.

‘What have you got there?’

Lucia told her everything but her intention of keeping the tea for herself. They wept together, more kindly, and drank the tea like old friends. It seemed so strange, after all that had happened.

The next day, shortly after dawn, they were wakened by the sound of a klaxon, the screech and rumble of tracks. They ran to the window in time to see a column of tanks moving down the road. Early morning sunlight played on the camouflaged turrets and lit up the lightning flash emblem of the SS.

Caught up in their own problems, Helena and Lucia had not listened to the wireless last night. They had missed Marshal Badoglio’s broadcast in which he announced that Italy would ask the Allies for an armistice. This, within a matter of hours, was the Germans’ response. Whatever the Marshal might say, the war was clearly a long way from over.

3

Now came the devil years. Not of frenzy or blood but of fear, heavy in every heart. It was the ever-present companion. It rode in the trams, it prowled with silent feet in every street and lane, it formed an invisible miasma over the land. It raised barriers before the eyes of passers-by. While the crunch of booted feet, rhythmic and deadly, the harsh echo of alien voices, curdled the air. We, the Occupiers. We, the Oppressed. Each fearing the other, despising the other, willing death upon the other. Life became fear and caution and weariness. While the struggle to breathe, to survive, to pretend to some illusion of normality, went on.

4

Lucia came home one evening to find two soldiers sitting in the parlour with her mother. For a moment she thought they’d been billeted with them but Helena explained they’d been searching for hidden food. They had found nothing. They were intruders but unembarrassed. Their outstretched legs, their black combat boots, proclaimed it. They were the masters, their eyes said. They were willing to be friendly, but could be otherwise. As and when they chose. One of the soldiers turned as Lucia came in and they recognised each other at once.

‘What d’you know? The girl on the bicycle!’

It was the soldier who’d stopped her when she’d been cycling back with the food from the farm. She’d thought of him often since that day, well aware how much she owed him. He was bound to have guessed what she was up to, yet still he had let her go. Fair hair pared prickle short, he gave her a friendly nod. ‘I told you I’d see you again, one of these days.’

He was a German, she reminded herself. But he was also a man, barely older than herself, smiling up at her with tunic unbuttoned. It was hard to be frightened of such a man. She nodded at him.

‘You won’t find any extra food here. More’s the pity.’

‘Perhaps I should check the pannier on your bicycle.’

Making a joke of it. She did not answer. A German, she reminded herself. They stood to leave. In the doorway, tunic once more tightly buttoned, he turned. His grey eyes appraised her. ‘No more tricks, eh?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yes, you do. But it’s the SS now. You don’t want to mess with them. Stick to opera singing.’

He thrust out his hand. After a moment’s hesitation she took it. He gave a half bow, a suspicion of a heel click.

‘Reinhardt Hoffmann.’

His hand was warm, softer than she would have expected for a soldier.

‘Lucia Visconti.’

‘I haven’t forgotten. Lucia.’

She closed the door on his grin and went back into the parlour. Her mother looked at her.

‘I didn’t know you were friendly with the Germans.’

‘Hardly friendly. He stopped me once to check my ID. Anything more than that I leave to you and Eduardo.’

Who was back in town again and as bumptious as ever, now that the SS were here.

‘I’ll wash your mouth out, you talk to me like that.’

But her mother’s voice was listless. Once she might have meant it but that slap, only the other day, had been the end of her fireworks. The way Eduardo had dumped her when Mussolini fell had taken something away from her. Now it was safe he was back again, taking it for granted she’d welcome him with open arms. She had, too. It meant a measure of protection, a bag of coffee now and then, a slice or two of ham, but it had done nothing for her self-esteem. Perhaps she hoped to regain some of it by taking it out on her daughter, but Lucia was twenty years old now. Whatever Helena might have to say on the subject, there’d be no washing anybody’s mouth out, and both of them knew it.

Lucia stared at her mother, seeing not the woman with whom she had shared her precious tea and confidences but the tyrant who had uprooted her from the only life she’d known and brought her to Italy, war and unceasing danger. Why had she done it? Lucia told herself she knew very well. Out of selfishness, because Helena had been homesick. Even worse, because she’d made up her mind she was too good for her husband and the country that to Lucia would always be home. She had told Lucia she wanted her to be not simply an opera singer but the greatest opera singer who’d ever lived. Ever since, she’d held that ambition over her, like a bludgeon. She would work her to death to achieve it, not for Lucia’s sake but because it would justify everything she’d done, restore the respect that she felt she deserved. And where had it led them? To this pokey little cottage in a town no-one had ever heard of, where a mongrel like Eduardo could use her mother when it suited him and where enemies broke their windows because the world knew that Helena was no more than a fascist whore. Lucia felt no compassion for the mother who was trying to ensure their survival by whatever means she could. Instead there was only rage that she, too, had been dragged into something that by rights had nothing to do with her at all. Who knew, it might even affect her chances at the opera. Helena had used Eduardo’s influence to get Lucia into the conservatorium and to keep her there. Between them they’d made a fool of Professor Menotti. He wouldn’t have forgotten. Perhaps making her Teresa Sciotto’s understudy was his way of getting back at her. Understudy, she thought contemptuously. And to Teresa Sciotto, of all people. She’d have to see what she could do about that.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

1

Lucia hoped Teresa Sciotto would fall ill, die, run away with a lover, but she did none of these things. She stayed and sang through every rehearsal, her voice as mellifluous as her fat body was inexpressive. Lucia hated it. What made things even worse, Teresa was so clearly loving every minute leading to what her admirers were already prophesying would be a triumph. She made sure Lucia knew all about it, too. Graciously she invited her to inspect the star dressing room that for the duration of the production was hers.

‘In case you never get to use it yourself.’

She listened to Lucia rehearsing and offered, with touching sweetness, to help her with some of the more awkward passages.

‘You seem to be having a bit of difficulty there. And there.’

She even suggested how Lucia might improve her acting.

Lucia bit her cheek until it bled. Perhaps, she thought, if the SS had reason to suspect Teresa of anti-German activities … It would need only a hint; with the war turning against them, the Nazis were growing more vicious by the day, but Lucia couldn’t think how she could arrange it without endangering herself. Not that she would have done it, of course, but it was nice to dream.

Her turn would come, she told herself. Yet the first night was only a week away and there was still no sign of the lightning bolt that each night she prayed, more or less seriously, might scorch Teresa Sciotto to a crisp.

Four days to go. Marta Bianci sent for her.

‘I’ve talked the theatre into putting on a special concert after Tosca’s finished. A dramatic presentation of opera highlights. It won’t be a full-scale opera, but…’ She shrugged.

Lucia, nerves worn to a frazzle by envy and frustration, was not in an accommodating mood. ‘And you want me to understudy Teresa, right?’

Marta stared at her reprovingly. ‘There’s temperament in all artists; they wouldn’t be artists without it. But you must learn to focus it on your art. Don’t waste it on people like Teresa Sciotto. I’ve told you already, she got the part of Tosca because she has a fine voice and has been at the opera house longer than you have. She deserves her chance; I’m sure she’ll give a good account of herself. You’ve the makings of a great artist and this concert I’m planning will be chiefly for your benefit. To make up, if you like, for not getting the lead in Tosca. If you don’t want it, I’m sure Teresa will be more than willing to take over from you.’ Which put her in her place and no mistake.

‘Oh please…’

Marta Bianci patted her hand. ‘Don’t worry. But don’t waste your energy on jealousy. You need it all for your art.’

It was good advice; following it was a lot more difficult and, in truth, she did not try very hard.

She attended the dress rehearsal in full make-up. It wasn’t the normal procedure but the producer, mindful of her inexperience, wanted her to do it as a training exercise. Even at this stage Lucia continued to hope but had few expectations. Had she been singing the part, nothing short of death would have caused her to pull out at this stage, and Teresa Sciotto was far from dead. She would never be able to act but she sang better than Lucia had ever heard her. She applauded with the rest, clenched teeth hidden behind her smile, while in her imagination she stuck pins in all Teresa’s most sensitive parts.

It was a successful rehearsal. Afterwards they were both gracious with each other.

Professor Menotti, standing with Marta Bianci, permitted his lubricious eyes to gloat upon the young women standing side by side in their identical costumes.

‘Such a pleasure to see they’re such good friends. Not a hint of rivalry in either of them.’

What a fool, Marta thought.

‘Of course not. Why should there be?’

2

On the evening of the première, Lucia arrived early at the theatre. There was no need for her to be there at all; she’d been told to be available in case she was needed, but no more was expected of her than that. She had decided to go, anyway, taking with her a single, late-flowering rose that she presented to Teresa when she arrived.

Teresa looked suspiciously at the offering but decided to accept it at its face value. ‘How delightful!’

‘I wanted you to be the first to know,’ Lucia said.

Renewed suspicion. ‘Know what?’

‘About the dramatic presentation next month.’

From her expression, Teresa had heard nothing of it. Mentally Lucia clapped gleeful hands and proceeded to tell her all about it.

‘A special presentation. A showcase for me.’

In the circumstances, Teresa Sciotto gave a good account of herself, as Marta had said she would. Undeniably, however, she had slipped a little from her performance at the dress rehearsal and the applause, no more than courteous, reflected that fact. Rivalry became hatred and there might have been a stand-up fight after the performance had not outside events overtaken them.

That night, the Germans launched a house-to-house search through the city for Jews and other undesirables, while for the first time the Allies dropped bombs on Italy, at Bianconese, not far from Montegallo. No-one knew when the next raid would come but the city seemed a likely target, so the after-show dinner was cancelled and everybody went straight home.

The next day Marta Bianci sent for Lucia. ‘Did you speak to Teresa before the performance last night?’

‘I gave her a rose for good luck.’

‘Did you say anything about the dramatic concert I told you about?’

‘I may have mentioned it.’

Marta sighed. ‘Sit down.’

Face flushed, Lucia was willing to defy even her teacher, but not for long.

‘Sit down!’

She did so. Defiance seeped away to be replaced by terror as Marta spoke to her in a tone harsher than she had ever heard before.

‘I have already told you I shall not tolerate this kind of behaviour. Any more of it and you won’t appear in the concert at all. I’ll give all the parts to other singers.’

‘But I’m the best!’

‘You are not the best. You have the potential, yes. But potential by itself means nothing. To realise it you must have discipline. Discipline over yourself, above all. Without that you’ll never be an artist. Unless you give me your word, this minute, that you’ll behave yourself in future, I shall wash my hands of you.’

That would be a true catastrophe. Lucia’s remorseful tears were only too genuine. ‘I’m sorry …’

‘Say it to Teresa, not me. We shall go and see her together. Now.’

The opera house had long been the grail of Lucia’s life, the focus of all her hopes and desires. Now, as they crossed the street under the watchful eyes of a German patrol, it loomed like the entrance into purgatory.

Teresa, ensconced in the star dressing room — I’ll bet the cow sleeps here — was inclined to be haughty, milking the moment for all the drama she could get out of it. And I’d always thought she couldn’t act, Lucia thought.

However, in the instant of seeking forgiveness, it was Lucia who held the stage and she was determined to make the most of it.

‘I saw how upset you were when I mentioned the dramatic presentation that Signora Bianci and the opera have planned for later in the season. Please believe that the last thing I had in mind was to distract you in any way from your performance. I know that a true artist would never permit herself to be put off so easily and I’d thought to share with you my happiness that I, too, shall have the chance to play a small role, so much less significant than your own, in the opera’s new season …’ Lucia warmed to her role of the innocent woman falsely accused and misunderstood, while the air about Teresa’s pork-fed form shimmered with the rage that, under Marta Bianci’s eye, she dared not express.

Lucia continued: ‘I know that in your generosity you’re glad for me. I know the news had no effect on your performance. Which I thought went really quite well. First night nerves, after all, anyone could have them. And I’m sure —’

‘I think that’s enough,’ Marta intervened, scenting incipient slaughter.

Teresa was all teeth. ‘How kind of Signora Bianci to bring you to apologise. It was a foolish thing for you to have done, of course, but I can assure you it had absolutely no impact on my performance at all. Why, I’d forgotten all about it as soon as you’d left the dressing room. So there’s nothing to forgive.’

And she smiled like a howitzer, with bubbles of spit on her lips.

As an attempt to be gracious it was a pretty poor effort and Lucia felt reassured. The cow couldn’t act, after all.

They left, Lucia doing her best not to prance.

Marta Bianci gave her a sardonic look. ‘I’m surprised we didn’t have tears, to round things off.’

‘If you’d given me a few more minutes … But I did what you wanted. What we both wanted. I really did apologise to her, didn’t I? She understood my sincerity, surely?’ And endeavoured to seize her tutor’s hand, while Marta Bianci shook her head and tried not to laugh.

‘Don’t try your tricks on me.’

Later Lucia sang to herself the mad scene out of Lucia di Lammermoor, all glissandos and touching grief, and felt very pleased with herself.

While Teresa, rage like a dagger in her heart, made quite a mess of her second performance, too.

3

Perhaps to punish Lucia, or because of opera politics, Marta Bianci decided to include Teresa Sciotto in the dramatic presentation, after all. She expected Lucia to be furious but she was wrong. Lucia was delighted. It gave her the opportunity she’d wanted: a head-to-head confrontation, with an audience to watch.

It was planned as a gala performance and a full house was expected. The inhabitants of Parma had always been devoted to the opera and this gave them the chance to see a performance by the leading singers of the next generation. It served another purpose, too. Each day the war drew inexorably nearer. The gala performance gave everyone able to get a ticket the opportunity, if only for an evening, to escape the grim and uncertain realities of their lives.

The organisers went to a great deal of trouble over the programme, deciding to include a number of popular arias. In addition to the two sopranos, the evening would feature two tenors, a bass baritone and a mezzo.

Teresa was to conclude her appearance with an aria from Madama Butterfly. By contrast, Lucia’s finale would be not a solo appearance but a duet. With Alfredo Dante, the bass baritone, she would present the murder scene from Tosca, when the terrified Tosca stabs her tormentor to death. Marta had been dubious when Lucia had first suggested it, fearing it might seem too direct a challenge to Teresa Sciotto after her less than perfect appearance in the title role, but after she had heard the two young singers she was persuaded that the item must be included. As she confided to Professor Menotti, who had shared her doubts: ‘We’re supposed to be showcasing the best of our young talent and for those two artists it is the perfect vehicle.’

The day before the performance, German army headquarters informed the theatre that several senior officers would be present; seats would have to be found for them. It was a nuisance; the seating had to be reallocated to ensure that the officers had the best, but that was one of the hazards of present life and eventually everything was sorted out.

‘Let’s hope there aren’t any air raids.’

It was the one thing over which no-one had any control.

Helena came alone, which was a relief; Lucia had been afraid that Eduardo would take the opportunity to preen himself in his uniform as an officer in the Repubblichini, the officer training school of the newly reorganised Fascist Party. Fortunately he stayed away, the horrors of having to endure two hours of nonstop opera outweighing the pleasure of showing himself off before the most influential people in the city. Lucia thought that it might also be because he was growing tired of his mistress; she had seen him in the city in the company of a young woman with gaudy lips and a dress two sizes too small for her, all tits and bum, just Eduardo’s style. She hadn’t mentioned it to her mother and Eduardo still visited her regularly, but she thought that Helena must be aware — surely? — that everything was not right in their relationship.

In her place I would know, Lucia told herself, even though she had never slept with a man in her life. Yet her mother did not seem to be aware; Helena greeted her daughter cheerfully, without a shadow on her face.

‘Eduardo couldn’t make it?’ As though his absence were a great disappointment to her.

‘He’s on duty. He has great responsibilities. And of course he’s always been very conscientious.’

It made Lucia angry to see her mother so infatuated with a man like Eduardo. She felt protective of her, despite everything. She couldn’t bear to think of her being hurt but, one way or another, that was beginning to seem inevitable.

4

The auditorium was packed. The bombers stayed away. Orchestra and singers wove magic out of the darkness. For one evening there was no war, no allies or enemies. The darkness concealed the uniforms, black or grey. There remained only the music, and emotion.

Lucia did not watch any of the other performers. All of her attention was focused on herself: not on Lucia Visconti, who was utterly unimportant now, but on the dream of her own creation, the soul-torn woman coming through grief to the catharsis of rage, blood and ultimate redemption. This had become the true reality; it filled every fibre of her being with the tragedy from which she would rise, freed by music and the grandeur of her fate.

5

The darkness of the moment overwhelms her. She pleads before the man who moments before has attempted to rape her, whom she has rejected with all the loathing of her passionate heart.

Anguish forms a hard knot beneath her breast. She drinks from a wineglass and sees on the table a knife. She watches it as she drinks, its shape distorted by the glass. It is as though the knife calls to her. She knows that the man seated at the table is vile, cruel. She knows she cannot trust him, yet he has power over her; there is more than one manner of rape. The knife insinuates itself into her hand. She watches his gloating eyes, the air tainted by his lust, the unbearable thought of his triumph. He moves to gather her into his arms and her despair breaks forth. She stabs him. At the last, the exultation of vengeance achieved is replaced by her awareness of overwhelming catastrophe. She stares down at Scarpia’s corpse. E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma! To think that all Rome trembled before this man! She places candles around his body and leaves him to death and whatever fate awaits him.

6

Lucia was caught in the darkness of the moment, the ecstasy of death and her own passionate redemption. Applause beat cruelly upon her. It was intrusive; it broke into the trance that held her, fracturing the inner light of revelation and truth.

Alfredo Dante was laughing, his face bright with triumph as he lifted her hand in his own to acknowledge the audience’s applause. She came back, but only a little way. She smiled, she bowed, she accepted flowers and the praise of those who sought to embrace her behind the stage. Alfredo Dante hugged her, kissing her full on the lips. It was too much. ‘Don’t!’

She spoke so angrily that he recoiled.

Her blood retreated, hiding within the innermost depths of her being. She would have joined it, if she could, would have shut herself away from the clamour that engulfed her.

‘A triumph! Magnificent!’

Marta Bianci was hugging her. She recognised her: just. She wept on her shoulder as all her meticulously constructed defences gave way.

Later there was a man who had waited patiently to be introduced. This was unusual; Colonel Strasser was not a patient man. His axe-blade face looked down at her. He was tall and thin with close-set blue eyes, and power was strong in him.

‘A remarkable performance, Signorina. A privilege to be present.’

Lucia, recovered by now, hid alarm beneath the frank and open smile of one professional to another. ‘The art is in the music’

‘And in the performance, surely?’

‘It is kind of you to say so.’

That was all, but Lucia had the feeling it was not the end of it, and she was right.

CHAPTER TWENTY

1

The music critic of the Gazzetta di Parma could hardly have been more complimentary.

Not only did Visconti maintain the scene comfortably. In the brief extract from Puccini’s masterpiece that was all that the programme permitted, she conveyed the character’s anguish with such tenderness and fidelity that the audience was moved to tears.

About Teresa Sciotto’s solo from Madama Butterfly his comments were less kind: The part requires the singer to project both passion and fragility. Sciotto has a pleasing voice but her robust physique ensures that fragility remains an inaccessible dream to this artist, whose credibility was sorely tested in consequence.

‘Oh dear. Poor Teresa.’

Alfredo Dante was more forthright. ‘She looked more like a sumo wrestler on the hoof than a butterfly.’

Lucia was delighted and took care to make much of her rival when next they met. Comfort and sympathy … What else were friends for? With her tutor’s blessing, Lucia took a few days off and went home to Montegallo, and to drama that made Tosca’s plight seem insignificant.

2

‘I am abandoned!’

Alternating between tears and rage, Helena poured out her woes to Lucia. She had not set eyes on Eduardo since the night before the concert.

‘As soon as he said he couldn’t come with me, I knew. He has another woman, you know.’

‘You’re imagining it.’

‘Someone as sensitive as I can always tell.’

And was once again in floods of tears.

Lucia would have thought she’d be only too pleased to see the back of him, if she really believed Eduardo was being unfaithful to her, but it was not so. She swore she was going to tear his eyes out, she would stab him to the heart, but Lucia knew that, if Eduardo ever came back, Helena would have him in bed before he could catch his breath.

The extremes of her mother’s temperament had always embarrassed her. She blamed her Australian father; only a full-blooded Italian could be expected to take all the melodrama seriously. As it was, it exhausted her. As soon as she decently could, she pleaded tiredness and scurried off to bed, leaving her mother bewailing not only her faithless lover but her daughter with a heart of stone.

The next morning a scruffy urchin brought a note to the house. It was addressed to Lucia; she turned it in her hands, puzzled. ‘Who gave it to you?’

‘A man.’

Fat lot of help that was.

Inside the house her mother waited, impatient for enlightenment. ‘Who’s it from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Open it, then!’

She ran her eyes swiftly down the page. She looked up at Helena in astonishment. ‘It’s from that soldier …’

‘Which one?’

‘The German who came here. The one who stopped me on the road.’ What was his name? She checked his signature. Reinhardt Hoffmann, that was it. She remembered how he’d introduced himself with a bow and heel click, a flourish of trumpets the only thing lacking.

‘What does he want?’

‘To meet me.’

Helena, her own life hardly beyond reproach, was glad to make a meal out of such impertinence.

‘A German? Who does he think you are?’

It set Lucia’s teeth on edge. ‘Maybe he’s another Eduardo?’

This time Helena was equal to the challenge. ‘You were happy enough to let Eduardo help you when Professor Menotti tried to kick you out of the conservatorium! You’ve done all right out of him and don’t pretend you haven’t. At least he’s Italian!’

So he was, and would land them all in a heap of trouble if the Germans lost the war, which was looking increasingly likely. There was no point saying so; Helena had shut her mind to such considerations long ago.

‘You won’t see him, of course,’ Helena said.

‘I haven’t decided.’ She said it only to aggravate her mother. Of course she wouldn’t see him.

3

Passion in opera: the self-sacrifice of so many heroines, the righteous fury of Tosca. But in real life … At what age had Lucia first felt the drum beat of passion in her blood? She could not remember, only that it had existed before she joined the conservatorium. Just as well; lacking true experience, she had tried to draw parallels between the demands of art and what her body was telling her. Without such feelings, she would have been incapable of demonstrating passion.

She went out of the cottage and strolled pensively towards a fallen tree trunk that lay in the grass a hundred metres down the track. She sat on it and stared out at the rows of vines extending to the horizon. She remembered how it had been when she had felt the first stirrings of desire, that mixture of attraction and apprehension. The first time she’d been kissed — by one of the helpers at the conservatorium — she had trembled not only in her flesh but in her soul. The intensity of her response had confused her. She had wanted to flee, while at the same time being drawn onward. The mingling of heat and uncertainty had left her palpitant, desiring the next step, yet frightened of it.

She knew she had to concentrate on her artistic development. She had no wish for emotional distraction, yet the conflict between art and her body’s awareness of its own sexuality continued to trouble her.

She touched her lips with a fingertip. When Alfredo Dante had kissed her after the concert, she had recognised at once the sexuality implicit in the act. Again she had responded yet rejected it at the same time. She found it hard to admit that a man might find her desirable; it conveyed the threat of an involvement that she did not want.

There had been earlier episodes, of course, most of them so fleeting as to be almost imaginary: looks and glances, a whistle in the street, a hand caressing her momentarily in the tram. This was different. This time the approach had been made by someone she knew, and the experience remained as an unsettling memory. She looked at the note in her hand. When she had first met the German soldier, she had been conscious of her helplessness. She had been afraid, yet her sense of vulnerability had not been altogether unpleasant. She had thought him cruel, yet he had spared her. When she had met him at the cottage, she had liked him, had thought he liked her, too.

It was no longer impossible to visualise herself yielding to the right man.

She read the letter again. It gave no hint of why he wanted to see her. She felt a resurgence of heat. She decided she would meet him, after all. She told herself it was only to find out what he wanted.

4

The letter had suggested that it might be easier for Lucia if they met in the city. He wrote that there was a cafe near the Piazza Verdi, in a backstreet adjoining the cathedral; he would be there the following Tuesday, between four and half-past, if she was able to make it.

So Lucia’s first proper meeting with Reinhardt Hoffmann took place against a mellow peal of bells in a street of narrow houses, close shuttered and leaning towards each other, many of them looking as old as the cathedral itself. The atmosphere gave an air of fantasy to the meeting, making it easier for Lucia to deny the reality of what she was doing: meeting a man who, however friendly and charming, remained an enemy. Not that Reinhardt looked particularly dangerous, or even remarkable. Dressed in civilian clothes, with his jacket open and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he had the appearance of a student rather than a soldier. Lucia, by contrast, was as smartly dressed as circumstances permitted, her chestnut hair brushed until its red lights flickered like flame. She told herself she owed it to Italy not to appear too shabby before this member of the occupying forces.

Reinhardt was sitting facing the door at a table in the corner of the smoke-hazed cafe. When she went across to him, he gestured at the chair on the other side of the table. ‘Have a seat.’

‘I can’t stay long. Why did you want to see me?’

He blew a plume of smoke and grinned at her. ‘Sit down and I’ll tell you.’

She sat on the edge of the chair, eyeing him uneasily. He raised his hand to beckon to the woman behind the counter. While he waited for her to respond he said: ‘I thought it would be easier here, rather than in Montegallo.’

He was right but Lucia could not admit it without also admitting there was something wrong with their meeting at all. She said nothing. The woman brought two steaming cups, which she placed on the table between them. Without a word or smile, she turned her back and returned to her place behind the counter. Lucia frowned at the aroma rising from the cups. ‘Real coffee?’

‘They know me here.’ He spoke carelessly, as though the fact was unimportant. Lucia knew better than that; it had been over a year since she’d tasted real coffee. His Italian was really very good, she thought. She watched him light another cigarette from the first and drop the stub on the floor, grinding it out with his heel. ‘I can get you some, if you like.’

She did not acknowledge the offer, if that was what it was. ‘You still haven’t told me why you wanted to see me.’

He smiled at her, slit-eyed in the smoke. He lifted his cup and breathed in its aroma, while his eyes never left hers. ‘For the pleasure of your company, of course. What else?’

‘Make the most of it while you’ve got the chance. I can’t stay long.’ She sipped her own coffee delicately, as a bird sips, savouring each moment.

Reinhardt watched her with a knowing smile. ‘You’re an opera singer. You know Wagner?’

‘Of course.’

‘Now there’s a composer! A great German composer! He knows how to keep you waiting. I always thought he must’ve made a wonderful lover.’

Now his smile challenged her. She remembered their first meeting at the roadblock and how his smile had said he had her at his mercy. Well, she wasn’t at his mercy now.

‘No doubt Frau von Bülow would have agreed with you,’ she said, referring to the wife of Wagner’s conductor, supporter and friend, whom the composer had seduced. Now it was her turn to challenge. ‘I always thought that was despicable behaviour.’

‘Victory goes to the strong. And the woman.’

‘Not every woman.’

‘Perhaps.’

He smoked for a time, watching her silently, while Lucia tried to ignore him, concentrating on her enjoyment of the coffee. Again he dropped the stub on the floor.

‘That first time I met you …’

‘Remind me.’ She would not admit to remembering anything about it, or him.

He smiled tolerantly, willing to play the game she wanted. ‘You were cycling down the road, early in the morning.’

‘I’d gone for a ride, yes.’

‘So you said. You know what the SS are doing with food smugglers? They’re sticking them in concentration camps.’

‘That has nothing to do with me.’

‘I thought I’d warn you. Just in case.’

The bells of the cathedral clock struck five.

Lucia said, ‘I must go or I’ll miss my tram.’

They walked out of the cafe together.

‘Next time I’ll have some coffee for you.’

‘Will there be a next time?’

‘Of course. I’ve enjoyed our chat. Didn’t you?’

But Reinhardt walked away without waiting for a reply. Lucia watched his back. It was almost dark, evening settling early under the murky November skies. She saw him toss away his cigarette, the red sparks flying as the stub hit the ancient stones. Things hadn’t gone as she’d expected. His manner had been strange: friendly and knowing at the same time. He had said nothing, yet had been in control from the first. Nothing had happened, there had seemed no point to the meeting at all, yet he wanted to see her again. Perhaps he was one of those men who were awkward with women. Or perhaps, like Wagner, he liked to keep his audience waiting. Either way, she knew she had no real choice. He was a German soldier and could do what he liked. The thought displeased her, yet the idea of meeting him again seemed harmless enough. And the prospect of coffee was certainly an attraction.

One step at a time, she thought. The only way to go.

5

She got home, walking from the tram stop through the dark and rain-damp night, to find her mother all smiles.

‘What’s happened to you?’ Lucia asked.

She might have guessed; Eduardo was back. She looked around the room as though expecting to see him hiding under the table, but there was no sign of him.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘He had to go out again. Something to do with the war.’

Perhaps he’d tired of his latest, Lucia thought. Or maybe it wasn’t even that; perhaps he was only looking for a bed for the night and a woman to share it. Oh, mother, she grieved, why are you so blind? And again felt angry with her for letting herself be used in such a way. But Helena was not blind to everything. She took one look at Lucia and knew. Or thought she knew.

‘What have you been up to?’

Lucia would admit nothing. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t come the holy innocent with me! It’s a man, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know any men.’

Helena did not believe her. ‘Be careful, that’s all. You’ve your career to think about. You don’t have time for men.’

As if Lucia didn’t know. ‘What’s this war business Eduardo’s on?’ she asked.

‘He wouldn’t say.’ Yet Helena had a knowing look. Lucia suspected she knew more than she was telling. She would not give her mother the satisfaction of questioning her further. No doubt she would hear all about it very soon.

That night, climbing into bed, she found herself thinking once again about Reinhardt Hoffmann. Casual friends … Could that really be all there was to it? Or was he looking for something more? Her last thought before she slept was to wonder, uneasily, whether by seeing him again she might not be getting involved in something beyond her control. Not that it would stop her doing so, of course.

6

The next day Montegallo was sullen with hatred. The Germans, with Repubblichini support, had carried out a house-to-house search the previous night. An escaped American prisoner of war had been recaptured, several villagers arrested. One, an old man who lived alone and was never sober for more than an hour or two a day, had been killed. He had been slow to open his door to the stormtroopers, who had then kicked it in. He had come swaying towards them, bottle in hand, and they had shot him. To make matters worse, Eduardo had been with them. Lucia quickly discovered that the villagers’ hatred was not confined to the Germans. Signora Vertecchi, niece of the old soak who’d been killed, spat ostentatiously upon the cobblestones as Lucia passed. Lucia stopped in mid-stride and went back to her.

‘I was sorry to hear about your uncle.’

Signora Vertecchi stared at her. Her nostrils flared, her eyes were like spears, but she did not speak.

‘I hate all this as much as you do,’ Lucia added. ‘I’ve nothing to do with any of it.’

The eyes went on staring; she might have been talking to a stone.

‘Please …’

Signora Vertecchi turned and walked away. For the moment Lucia did not exist. After the war, of course, things would be different. After the war, the stiff shoulders said, there would be a reckoning.

Something to think about.

She went back to the cottage and had a blazing row with her mother.

‘Your Eduardo will get us killed before we’re through!’

Helena, desperate to hang on to whatever shreds of happiness she could find, was defiant. ‘Go back to the city, then, if you feel like that about it!’

‘Don’t think I won’t!’

And did so the next day. Lucia returned to the opera house where she discovered even more excitement.

Marta Bianci was full of it. ‘Colonel Strasser has been in touch with the administrator.’

In the world of the Parma Opera, Administrator Giorgio Valentino was god.

‘What about?’

‘He wants a special production of Fidelio.’

‘Fidelio?’ Lucia was flabbergasted.

‘It’s a German opera. Beethoven wrote it.’

‘I know that. But Fidelio is about freedom, the overthrow of tyranny. You say Colonel Strasser wants it? The SS? What kind of sick joke is that?’

‘Don’t laugh too hard. He wants you to sing Leonora.’

Which stopped her, sure enough. Leonora, the leading role in one of the greatest operas …

‘Do you think I’m ready for it?’

‘Yes. It’s not a difficult part. But I ask myself another question. Are you sure you want to sing for the SS?’

Lucia thought how Signora Vertecchi had looked at her. It was a difficulty, certainly, but she knew the answer without having to think about it.

‘I’ve no choice, have I?’

‘Of course you have a choice. You can say no.’

‘And end up in a concentration camp? I’m not interested in politics, anyway. None of that’s got anything to do with me.’

Marta remained uneasy. ‘I’m afraid politics affects us all, these days.’

‘Aren’t you pleased for me? To have had such an offer?’

‘I’d have preferred it to have come from another source.’

‘Well, it hasn’t. I’ll just have to make the most of it.’

‘Don’t decide now. Think about it overnight and let me know your decision in the morning.’

Lucia was leaving when Marta spoke to her again.

‘You know what it’ll mean, don’t you? It’ll remind people of something most of them have forgotten, that you were the girl who sang for Mussolini.’

‘I didn’t have any choice about that, either.’

‘I know. But I’m afraid the question of choice won’t come into it.’

7

There was no chance of anyone forgetting, with Teresa there to remind them.

In the dressing rooms that the cast shared, someone had scrawled a message in yellow chalk on the door of Lucia’s cupboard: TRAITOR!!!

Teresa came to her with a look of concern on her fat face. ‘Have you seen what someone’s written on your cupboard?’

‘I saw it.’

The full lips smiled; the dark eyes, sharp as pins, hoped to see pain, but Lucia would die before she gave her such satisfaction.

‘Are you going to wash it off?’

‘Let it stay. I don’t care what these fools say.’

All the same, that night Lucia’s nightmares reared like stallions against a blood-red sky.

I’m not interested in politics. What choice do I Traitor! have? Of course you have a choice. Traitor! She was the one who sang for Mussolini.

The pugnacious jaw, the booted feet and black shirt. The axe-blade head, blue eyes, the confidence as cold and unforgiving as ice. I’ll have some coffee for you, next time. Next time. Next … She was the one who sang for Mussolini.

Traitor, traitor, traitor …

In the morning she woke, head spinning but more determined than ever. She would not be terrorised, even by her dreams. She went to Marta Bianci and told her what she’d decided.

8

Colonel Strasser saw Lucia at the opera house. He said: ‘I’m glad you accepted. This performance will be very important, not only artistically but to boost morale. Some people seem to think Germany’s going to lose the war. There’s no chance of that, of course, but we need to make a statement to underline the truth of it. This opera — a German opera — will do that very well. It will reassure our friends and act as a gesture of defiance to our enemies. They think they’ve got the Reich on the run? This will make them think again.’

9

The prison forms a tower of darkness against the sky: dark stone walls, the darkness of despair. There is nothing dramatic here, no excitement or frenzied activity; true evil is monotonous, oppressive, even boring, and the prison and the blank faces of the guards reflect this. Yet, for some, familiarity has bred blindness. Marzelline, the jailor’s daughter, has fallen in love with Fidelio, her father’s assistant, and is oblivious to the prison and the suffering of the inmates. Oblivious in more ways than one, because Fidelio is in fact Leonora, wife of Florestan, the prison’s most important prisoner. Pizzaro, the prison’s governor, resolves to murder Florestan. When he attempts to do so, Leonora reveals her true identity and holds off Pizzaro with a pistol until help arrives. Florestan is freed and reunited with his heroic wife.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1

Fidelio breaks into a furious denunciation of the evil governor. Abscheulicher! Accursed monster!

The orchestra’s opening bass chords, etched by the mounting staccato of the strings that reflect Fidelio’s rage, are followed by the returning serenity of the woodwinds, signalling her unflinching resolve to free her husband and overcome evil …

Lucia broke off in mid-chord.

‘It’s not right! The contrast is still missing!’

They had been rehearsing all day and everyone was tired. The conductor, in particular, was sick of the endless search for perfection by this unknown singer.

‘I know I’m not Furtwängler but it sounds fine to me!’

She would not agree but in the end the conductor overruled her.

After the rehearsal Marta Bianci consoled her.

‘You’ll get it right in the morning.’

‘We’re not performing it the way it was written! We’re interpreters of the music, not composers. We have a responsibility!’

‘The conductor has the ultimate authority.’

‘How does that help if the dolt can’t read music? Or won’t?’

‘Not everyone’s the perfectionist you are.’

‘Am I supposed to be ashamed of that?’

‘Of course not. But we all must learn to be flexible with each other. With conductors, most of all!’

But Marta knew that flexibility was one skill her protégé would never possess.

Now Lucia appealed to her. ‘Won’t you go through it again with me?’

‘It’s late.’

‘I shan’t sleep if I don’t get it right.’

But the desired contrast between anger and serenity continued to elude her and eventually even Lucia was too tired to go on.

‘You’re right. We’ll have to sort it out in the morning.’

Despite her frustration, Lucia was cheerful as she walked home through streets already emptying ahead of the curfew. To be singing the lead in such a work … She laughed aloud and danced a few steps along the pavement, a golden leaf spun by the wind in the city’s winter streets.

Her mood evaporated as she turned into the street where she was staying. She had found the room when she’d been given the part; the intensity of the rehearsals made it impossible for her to get back to Montegallo in the evenings. She had hoped that Marta Bianci would offer to put her up as she had in the past but this time the tutor had had other ideas. ‘I’ve told you already. I’m not your mother! We must have a break from each other or we’ll go mad,’ she had said.

The room was in a rundown apartment block. It was close to the opera house and it was cheap; they were its only advantages. With the door locked behind her and the curfew siren echoing in the city’s stone canyons beyond the window, she looked with distaste at the meanly furnished room where she couldn’t even draw back the curtains because of the blackout. The only furniture was a bed, a chair whose springs threatened to impale her whenever she sat in it, a cupboard containing a solitary cup and plate, some cutlery and the remnants of a meat pie that was all she’d be having for supper. There was a lavatory down the corridor, a bathroom of sorts next to it. That was all.

If she’d gone to Colonel Strasser he would no doubt have arranged something better, yet from the first she had wanted no favours from a man who made her feel so uncomfortable. He’d attended one or two rehearsals, had never shown her anything but courtesy, yet there was an aura about him that would have frightened her, had she permitted it. She thought he was a man who would embrace both pain and punishment with an almost sexual fervour, closing his eyes to redemption, forgiveness or hope. She suspected it was how a good many of his colleagues thought. To them there was only sin, retribution and the holiness of an implacable justice.

Colonel Strasser was like Don Pizzaro, she thought. He wouldn’t think twice about killing a prisoner, if it suited him. And herself? she wondered. Was she Fidelio, bringing back justice to the earth? No, she was a singer, an artist. It was a fine destiny but hard enough to achieve without laying any more burdens on herself. She would leave freedom and righteousness to others.

The less she saw of Colonel Strasser, the better.

2

The next day was bright and sunny and from the first things went well. The dew-damp cobbles sparkled in the sun as Lucia walked to the opera house. She was always early, could not bear to stay away from it for a minute longer than she must. The streets were almost empty of traffic as she crossed the road to the stage door. Even the tank that she had once found so alarming had been withdrawn; no longer did she have to endure the mixed lechery and menace of the tank crew’s stares as she walked past them. In their absence there was an innocence in the light, the freshness of the morning, that she took with her into the rehearsal room, where she found Bruno Crespi, the conductor, poring over a copy of the score.

He looked up as Lucia came in.

‘That problem we had last night … I think I know the answer.’

They went to the piano together. He sat down and played a succession of chords.

‘Then we have the woodwinds and the colour of the phrasing changes. There. And there.’

He demonstrated what he meant, the right hand wringing an ethereal purity from the keys. He pushed back his stool, beaming up at her. ‘You see?’

Lucia was delighted. ‘Let me sing it to your accompaniment.’

She sang the notes one by one, sotto voce, while the piano led the way, both singer and conductor becoming more flexible as they grew confident that, yes, this was the fulfilment they had been seeking. They finished. Lucia threw her arms about him.

‘Maestro!’

She was humbled. She had called this man a dolt, incapable of reading the score, never mind interpreting it with the fidelity owing to its creator. Now this.

Crespi stood, pushed back the stool and took hold of Lucia’s hands. ‘It will be a great performance. I can feel it.’

After yesterday’s tantrums, now was the time to show a becoming humility.

‘Thanks to you, Maestro.’

Crespi, too, was capable of gallantry, when he was in the mood. ‘Thanks to both of us. Of course, it may sound different with the full orchestra.’

It did not. It sounded wonderful. It was a wonderful day, altogether. It continued until lunchtime.

Lucia took a sandwich out into the unseasonable sunshine. She sat on the steps outside the opera house, chewing away on bread more chaff than flour, while the notes of the music created a sublime pressure in her head. Not only the music; the character, too, was building as she sat there. She felt Leonora’s fear, her mounting rage and defiance, the willpower that drove her to accept the disguise, to overcome all obstacles and free the man she loved. It was melodrama, like so much of opera, but not only melodrama. Everything depended on how the character was presented.

There was one problem. At the end of the opera the libretto had Fernando, the Minister, praising her for her devotion as Florestan’s loyal wife and supporter.

Euch, edle Frau, allein, euch ziemt es, ganz ihn zu befrein.

Again and again she went over the words. They were not Leonora’s words yet seemed to her to contain an important clue to Leonora’s true character.

Only you, noble wife, should be permitted to remove his fetters.

Was that all she was? A noble wife? Was she to be defined only by reference to the man whose incarceration had caused her such grief? The man whose helplessness and impotence she had overcome unaided?

The Brotherhood of Man? Or the Unity of all Beings?

Leonora, surely, was a heroine in her own right, the representative of that freedom towards which all her strivings had been directed?

Yes, she thought. She would play her like that, demonstrate the militancy as well as the serenity of the warrior who, surely, Leonora was. In the portrayal of this woman, she, too, would be fulfilled.

There was a boy looking at her from the bottom of the steps.

‘Signora Visconti?’

‘Yes?’

‘I got a note for you.’

He came up the steps and showed it to her. She went to take it from him but he evaded her. ‘The man said you gotta give me five lire.’

‘Five lire? That’s too much!’

But he refused to hand over the note until she’d paid him. Reluctantly she took the money from her purse. He snatched it from her, threw the note at her feet and took off across the street. Even before she’d opened it she knew who had sent it to her.

Tomorrow afternoon, after rehearsal. Same place.

There was no need for a signature. He had even taken the trouble to find out what time the rehearsal ended.

3

The fine weather held and the sun’s rays were setting fire to the east window of the cathedral as Lucia walked past it on her way to the cafe.

Reinhardt was waiting for her. Once again he had his knowing look, as though he’d never doubted she would obey his summons. The cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth made him look like a gangster. She was angry with herself for coming here so meekly; it made her short with him.

‘I have to get back. What do you want?’

‘You don’t have to go anywhere. The rehearsal finished at four; I checked.’

‘We’re not factory workers! Some of us stay afterwards to go over one or two sections.’

‘Today’s one of the days you can’t make it, then. You’ve got something else on.’

‘I have nothing on.’ She spoke coldly and clearly, not caring who heard her.

He grinned, untroubled by her indignation. ‘That I’d like to see. You with nothing on.’

She began to turn away, impatiently, but he put up his hand. ‘Don’t go. I’ve something to tell you. Something important. But sit down, for heaven’s sake. You make me nervous, standing there.’ Cocky bastard. She was so close to walking out. He said: ‘Like I told you, it’s important. I remembered to bring your coffee, too.’

Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to hear him out. She sat down. ‘First things first.’

He beckoned to the woman behind the counter. As before, she knew without being told what he wanted. Once again she brought two cups of coffee and placed them on the table. Reinhardt waited until she’d gone, then took a small packet from his pocket and pushed it across the table towards her. ‘Put it somewhere safe.’

He had to want something from her; commonsense said he wouldn’t be doing this otherwise. Now was the moment to tell him that he’d got it wrong, that she didn’t need either him or his bribes. She looked uncertainly at the packet lying on the table between them.

He smiled encouragingly. ‘Go on. Take it.’

‘Why are you giving me this?’

‘Because I fancy you. You know that, don’t you?’

Lucia was pleased but took care to hide it. ‘Words are easy.’

‘Not only words. I covered for you, didn’t I? But, like I said, you don’t mess about with the SS. You need protection.’

She gave a sardonic smile. ‘And you’re the one to give it to me?’

‘Why not? We’re friends, aren’t we?’

Of course they weren’t friends; they hardly knew each other. ‘Why should I need protection?’

He leaned forward with his elbows on the table. He looked seriously at her. ‘Let’s not play games with each other. That time I stopped you … We both know you had something in your pannier.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

‘It wouldn’t matter that much, but there are other people involved, too. The people you bought it from … What happens if the SS take them in for questioning?’

‘Country people don’t talk.’

He laughed: a sour note. ‘They’d talk, all right. Nothing’s more certain than that. What happens to you then?’

‘If some farmers have been selling food — and I’m not saying that, mind you — I can’t do anything about it. No-one can.’

‘I think you’d be foolish to assume that.’ For a while he said no more, smoking and drinking his coffee, his grey eyes watching her thoughtfully. He’d had another haircut; areas of pale scalp showed through the close-cropped hair. Eventually he said: ‘I want you to do me a favour.’

She’d been right; he did want something. She’d never doubted it, yet was disappointed.

‘I don’t get the chance to see much of the country. And when I’m in uniform, you know, it’s never the same. I was wondering, if I can get hold of a couple of bicycles, whether you’d care to go for a ride with me? Show me around, like?’

She could never have imagined such an idea. The resistance fighters known as partisans weren’t active in the area so there should be no physical danger, but still she hesitated. She and her mother had enough problems already; the last thing she needed was for people to see her riding around the countryside with a German soldier.

She dredged up an excuse. ‘We’ve got rehearsals, most of the time.’

‘You must get some time off. I thought we might go and see those farmers of yours. What they’ve been up to in the past doesn’t bother me; I don’t see anyone asking questions about that. But if they’re still doing it now the SS is here, it could mean problems for them and the people they’re selling to.’

It was a lunatic idea. He was a German, an enemy soldier. There would be no end of trouble if they were seen together. ‘I can warn them myself. There’s no need for you to get involved.’

Reinhardt shook his head. ‘I know what farmers are like. I’m one myself. You tell them, they’ll quite possibly take no notice. But if I do they’re likely to take it more seriously.’

He was probably right. Yet still she hesitated.

‘Unless you don’t trust me, of course,’ he said.

‘It’s not that.’

Sensing his advantage, Reinhardt said: ‘So, shall we go riding together, then?’

Put like that, it was hard to refuse. It was still madness but perhaps that was what made up her mind for her; she’d never liked other people telling her what she should think or do. ‘When I’ve got some time off we can go for a ride, if that’s what you’d like.’

4

Three days later, on a misty afternoon, with the wreckage of fallen leaves silting the sides of the lanes, she met Reinhardt on the outskirts of the city and set off down the backroads with him into the country.

Crows hectored each other in the bare branches of elms; Lucia saw what might have been a fox slipping through the undergrowth on the far side of a stream that ran burbling and splashing beside the road, but of humans they saw no-one. The tyres hissed through a ford.

‘Let’s take a stroll,’ he said.

‘I thought we were going to see the farmers.’

‘Plenty of time for that.’

They left their bicycles beside the road and struck into the woods.

Lucia asked Reinhardt about his background. ‘You said you’re a farmer, too. Where from?’

‘The Black Forest. It’s my parents’ farm, really. It’s not much; a few fields and some cows.’

‘Will you go back there when the war’s over?’

He laughed. ‘No way. There’s no money in farming. I want to get rich.’

They climbed between the leafless chestnut-coloured trees, and came out on a patch of open turf.

‘Mushrooms!’

They gathered all they could carry and made their way back down the hill to their bicycles.

Lucia’s machine, like the one she had at home, had a basket on the back; they put the mushrooms into it and rode on down the road.

‘Now let’s go and see these farmers,’ Reinhardt said.

The air was cool and moist beneath the trees. Eventually they came to the farm where Lucia had bought the food all those weeks ago. The woman remembered her, greeting her and smiling happily. She didn’t smile for long as Reinhardt, speaking earnestly, told her how important it was that she let no-one know about the food she’d been selling.

Nostrils flared, the woman looked them up and down. Guiltily, Lucia remembered promising she would tell no-one about it; now here she was, with a German soldier, and she read contempt in the woman’s face. She said: ‘We’ve come to warn you, that’s all. I thought it was important.’

So she tried to justify herself, while the woman’s black eyes scalded her. Sunlight slanted through the branches of the trees but away to the north rain was falling across the valley. The rain looked like pillars of grey smoke rising from the ground. Lucia watched it, wishing she was anywhere but where she was, while Reinhardt said: ‘More important still, be sure you don’t sell any more, not for the time being. If the SS find out, they’ll shoot you.’

The woman answered only with her eyes, which remained cold and hard and contemptuous. She stared at them in turn, then turned her back, went into the house and closed the door. After her initial greeting, she had not spoken a word.

Lucia was devastated. ‘I can’t leave her like this. I must try to make her understand.’

Reinhardt stopped her. ‘There’s no point.’

She tried to argue, half-heartedly, but he was right. The woman would not listen to her now, no matter what she said. They got on their bicycles. By now the best of the day was over and they headed back to the city through a misty dusk that rose out of the woods on either side of the road. The episode had spoiled the outing and she felt angry with him, and herself, for letting things turn out the way they had. ‘I doubt she’ll welcome me another time.’

‘I hope for her sake she doesn’t welcome anybody.’

The uncomfortable moment passed and before they were back in town they were once again easy together, riding side by side through the fading light as though there were no such things as Germans or Italians or war.

They parted where they had met, on the outskirts of the city. She asked him about the mushrooms.

‘Keep them; we get more food than you do. Besides, you wouldn’t feel right, cycling back from the country without some food in your basket.’

They laughed. They might have been old friends who understood each other. He touched her hand. ‘I’ll be in contact.’

‘Good.’

And she meant it.

5

They had seen no-one, yet somehow Teresa Sciotto found out; the next day Marta said: ‘She’s telling everyone you’re out riding with a German soldier.’

‘You don’t want to take any notice of that; she’d say anything.’

Marta had come to know her pupil too well to be put off so easily. ‘Is she right?’

‘Would you mind if she was?’

‘I believe I would.’

‘And if I said it was none of your business?’

‘You’d be wrong. You’re my pupil; you have a huge talent. I feel responsible both for you and your talent. It’s a duty, not only to you and me, but to the world. You mustn’t do anything to endanger it. As for your German friend, you know as well as I do that some people won’t like it. It could even be dangerous, if the wrong people got to hear about it. You should be more careful.’

Music was one thing; when it came to her private life, Lucia would not be told. ‘I’m already singing for them, for heaven’s sake! What’s the difference?’

‘All the difference in the world, and you know it.’

‘We picked mushrooms. I suppose that’s a crime!’

‘Don’t be stupid! Whether you like it or not, there’s a war on. It won’t last for ever and already people are saying the Germans will lose. If they do, life could be difficult for anyone seen to be on their side.’

‘I’m not on anybody’s side! I’m not interested in the war or in politics at all!’

‘The war exists, whether you like it or not. And some people have long memories.’

As far as Lucia was concerned, people could think what they liked. She said: ‘Would you like some mushrooms? Or will that make you a collaborator, too?’

But Marta was not so easily mollified. ‘You have a great career ahead of you. Don’t ruin it.’

Defiant to the last, Lucia gave her a hard smile. ‘Maybe you should say that to Colonel Strasser.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

1

The rehearsals came together, the disparate elements of sound and characterisation forming a seamless whole. There were costume fittings, chorus rehearsals, orchestral rehearsals, rehearsals for the male principals. Lucia attended all of them, sitting silently in the auditorium, soaking herself in the music, feeling it permeate every part of her consciousness so that she became one with the notes.

Colonel Strasser continued to pay occasional visits to the theatre. It was not in his nature to be jovial but he unbent to the point of smiling from time to time; within the limits of a personality that matched his axe-blade face, he was even, or almost, friendly. Yet Lucia knew there was something in him of ice and the frozen wastes of the eastern front where, it seemed, he had spent much of his service before coming to Parma, and she sensed how much he despised the softness of this southern land and the people who lived here.

It was completely in character for him to have chosen this opera because it was German, oblivious to the irony of such a choice. Yet he had claimed to Lucia that music had always been his passion. She could not understand him, and for that reason he frightened her.

Not that fear affected her performance. On stage the world itself fell away. There remained only the drama living within her, the character and her varying passions expressed not only in each movement of her body but in every note and utterance that passed her lips.

It was hard to come back from such intense communion, to leave the world of spiritual reality and return to the mundane world that no longer seemed quite real. Somehow she managed it; on her afternoons off she continued to go riding with Reinhardt Hoffmann and, if Marta Bianci knew, she said no more about it.

2

Reinhardt never came on to her. Lucia had been wary of advances that she had anticipated would be both inevitable and distasteful; perversely, when nothing happened, she began to wonder if there might be something wrong with him, or herself.

One day, cycling along a deserted road where the overhanging branches of trees cloaked even the sky in secrecy, he said: ‘The SS have been asking questions.’

She was two weeks away from playing the lead in an opera ordered by the SS. She could not believe what Reinhardt was telling her.

‘About me?’

‘Not yet. But they’re going round the farms they think may have been selling to the black market. It could be awkward for us both.’

‘Why should it affect you?’

‘Because I knew about it and said nothing. Because I let you go.’

‘All that time ago?’

It was too far-fetched; she couldn’t believe it.

‘It happened to a friend of mine. Heini Hausser. He got killed in France but later some high-up decided he’d been smuggling stuff home. God knows how; the campaign had hardly started. It made no difference. There were his parents, three sisters. They took them all in for questioning. I never heard what happened to them. Sent to a camp, most likely. These people are serious, Lucia. You don’t mess with them. I warned you, remember?’

Somehow, despite her disbelief, he had succeeded in frightening her.

‘I haven’t been doing anything.’

‘Not now, perhaps. But you did.’

‘What can I do about it?’

‘I think I can help you. If anyone says anything, I’ll say you’re helping us with information. But I’ll have to have something to prove it.’

She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘I don’t have any information to give you.’

‘It doesn’t have to be hard information. Gossip’ll do fine.’

He smiled at her; oh yes, he could be full of charm, when it suited him. It seemed harmless enough, so she told him about Bruno Crespi, the conductor she had once, so foolishly, thought a dolt; about Marta Bianci, to whom she believed — and was happy to say — she owed everything in her career.

‘You say you’re singing in an opera. Which one is it?’

‘Fidelio.’

‘That’s a German opera, by Beethoven.’

‘Of course. What would you expect? Colonel Strasser chose it.’

‘Colonel Strasser?’ The grey eyes were suddenly still. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘He’s always dropping in to rehearsals. He chose me for the part.’

‘The Standartenführer? Well, you’re a quiet one, aren’t you?’ He looked sceptical; he obviously found the idea of her knowing the local commandant hard to believe. But was prepared to be indulgent of what might be an exaggeration. ‘And what part did he choose you for?’

‘Leonora. The lead.’

‘The lead?’ He stared. ‘You?’

She was indignant. ‘Why shouldn’t it be me?’

She saw he didn’t know what to do with someone he had thought he knew but now discovered he didn’t know at all. Reinhardt clearly disliked surprises; they upset his image of the world and of himself. ‘Tell me about the other people you sing with,’ he said.

She mentioned a few names — Alfredo Dante who had partnered her in the dramatic presentation, one or two others — but there wasn’t much she could say about them.

‘I don’t know them that well. We only meet at work. I probably know more about you!’

‘No other women?’

She made a face. ‘There’s one. Teresa Sciotto. We don’t get along.’

‘Tell me about her.’

‘She’s jealous. Her voice isn’t bad but she can’t act at all. Absolutely hopeless. She’s been down on me since the first time we met.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘I was picked to sing at Redipuglia and she wasn’t. Mussolini was there, you see. He spoke to me. She was furious when she heard about it.’

‘Fan of his, is she?’

She laughed. ‘Hardly. She can’t stand him.’ Why was he asking these questions? A warning bell chimed in her head but it was too late; the words were out.

3

Day after day, the tension mounted. A week to the performance, with everything going well. Four days and all thoughts came into needle focus in Lucia’s head. Panic shrugged itself awake. It grew; it was out of control. Three days to go and all was chaos. She was blind to reason or hope. This was wrong, and that. A day later and nothing was right at all. The orchestra was incompetent; Bruno Crespi — once again — was a mindless dolt. The theatre was hopeless. The singers couldn’t sing. No-one — herself, most of all — could act. She was losing her voice. The Allies would bomb the city, the theatre. The SS would find out about the food she’d bought. She would be arrested, deported to a labour camp. She would be tortured; she would be shot.

The worst nightmare of all: she would stand on the stage before a jeering audience, struck dumb, with every word and note blown out of existence. There was one day to go when Reinhardt arrived at the theatre, demanding that the doorkeeper fetch her at once. She came out to him, incoherent with rage.

‘How dare you trouble me at a time like this!’

He was in uniform, and in a panic. ‘I had no choice.’ He told her the SS had been carrying out raids all over the countryside. They’d taken in dozens of people for questioning. One of them was the farmer’s wife who’d sold Lucia the food. ‘If she tells them about us …’

By rights she should have been alarmed, yet was not. The opera’s reality — freedom against tyranny, herself against the monstrous Pizzaro — protected her against what Reinhardt was telling her. She knew how serious his news was, yet for the moment could not take it in. She stared at him as though barely understanding why he was there at all, or what he’d been telling her.

‘I must go.’

His eyes were popping in his head.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say? You must know someone who’s been talking against the government. Even if you don’t … Give me a name. I’ve got to have a name.’

His agitation beat ineffectually against her. Her mental processes as well as her voice were paralysed; she could neither speak nor think.

Reinhardt bared his teeth. ‘We both saw that woman. We knew what she was doing. I’ve got to have something in case they start asking why I didn’t report her.’

‘I don’t have any names.’

Which made him even more frantic. ‘I’m not going down because of you.’

Lucia made her decision. The distance she had created between herself and the real world also protected her from the temptation to give this man the names he was demanding. Do that and she would never be free of him. She would have delivered herself to him for ever. ‘I have no names for you.’

‘What about that woman you said didn’t like you? Give me her name and you’ll be rid of her.’

She remembered Teresa’s comments, as sharp as knives, the word TRAITOR scrawled in yellow chalk upon her cupboard. She hated how Teresa conspired constantly against her.

She did not hesitate. ‘I don’t know who you mean.’

A beast glared out of his eyes. At that moment he would gladly have killed her. ‘You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you? You’re not going to help me. Well, don’t blame me when things start getting difficult. Because they will. I guarantee it.’

His shoulders squared menacingly. He turned and hurried away down the steps and across the piazza. Darkness clung so closely about him that Lucia could almost see it. He had stalked her step by step over the months, never hurrying or alarming her. Now she had rejected him and the furies were loose. For the first time she understood what she should have known all along, that Reinhardt Hoffmann had never been a friend. With the SS asking questions and fearful for his own survival, he might point the finger at her. She had to stop him. Desire filled her: no longer desire for the man — only now could she admit it — but for the security she needed to develop her art. Nothing else mattered. Leonora’s defiance rang like a peal of bells.

Töt’ erst sein Weib! You’ll have to kill me first. Reinhardt had threatened her. Now she would defend herself. Yet even that had to wait. The opera demanded her total concentration. Afterwards, she would see.

She went back into the theatre.

4

The echoes — of Reinhardt Hoffmann and Rocco the jailer, Colonel Strasser and Don Pizzaro — became one with the music and the knowledge that the imprisonment of Florestan and all the captives called for a release that she alone, through her courage and will, could bring about. She alone.

Lucia knew that she was crying out, not only to the audience or the characters whom Leonora dominated by the unfailing strength of her purpose, but to all the peoples of the earth, offering them the truth that, by love and determination, they could make themselves free.

The lights came up. The audience was standing. There was applause, cheering. None of it had anything to do with her; Leonora had gone into the shadows yet remained, displacing the woman of blood and bone who was no more than the vessel of the glory and the pain, who no longer knew even who she was.

First she saw the black uniform and silver facings. She looked up and saw Colonel Strasser smiling at her. Still she had not fully returned to the world of flesh and laughter, but she heard him say in his harshly accented Italian: ‘We are in your debt.’

She smiled. Teresa Sciotto was not in the crowd that packed the dressing room but everywhere she turned she saw her rival’s face amid the crush of bodies, the chink of glass and blue fumes of cigars.

To stand by and do nothing in the face of evil …

What if Reinhardt Hoffmann remembered Teresa’s name?

Yet to seek the aid of this SS officer, this German, to complain to him about another German soldier …

Madness.

We are in your debt …

It wouldn’t stop him destroying her, if he chose.

‘This performance will have proved very useful to us. Everyone who’s here tonight will understand how serious we are in our determination to win this war.’

‘And the rest? The ones who aren’t here?’

‘They will hear about it.’

He beckoned to an aide standing a few paces behind him. The man handed him something that, hidden behind Strasser’s lean body, Lucia could not see. People began to applaud. The colonel turned back to her. His heels clicked punctiliously: a true representative of the master race, with lightning flashes on his collar and the death’s head emblem on his cap.

Lucia’s sense of unreality was compounded. He was offering her a display of roses, disciplined as guardsmen, red as blood. A message was attached to them, the printing large enough to be visible to everyone in the room.

From the officers and personnel of the SS Division Adolf Hitler. With appreciation and thanks.

At the bottom, in letters larger than the rest: HEIL HITLER! Ramrod-stiff, Strasser offered her the roses. He smiled as he repeated the words written on the card.

‘Heil Hitler!’

She stared back at him. The bird and the snake. He was waiting. She could see no way out. She answered him dutifully. She was too proud to mumble; instead spoke out clearly and defiantly.

‘Heil Hitler!’ She accepted the roses from his outstretched hands. She held them as though they were a nest of vipers, while Leonora wept.

She thought of Reinhardt laying charges against her; impulse moved her.

‘Colonel Strasser, a word please.’ She spoke softly, so that he had to lean forward to hear her. ‘Colonel, I appeal to your chivalry. Something has happened, very serious and upsetting. I am sorry to tell you that it involves a German soldier. Now is not the time to discuss it but perhaps, if I could come to your headquarters tomorrow …?’

He frowned, watching her closely, then consulted briefly with his aide before turning back to her. ‘I shall be free tomorrow morning at ten, if that suits you. And you may rest assured, Signorina Visconti, I shall assist you in any way I can.’

She felt relief, terror, resignation. Foolishly or not, she had spoken out. From now on, events would take their course.

Her performance had been a wonderful triumph, everyone assured her of that. The world outside the theatre might be starving but here there was lots to eat and drink; all the guests were laughing and talking at the tops of their voices. As for the war … What war was that?

Marta Bianci found her. She wept that a pupil of hers should have performed so gloriously, but Lucia remained dry-eyed, conscious of a void between herself and the celebrations going on around her. She had obtained her appointment with Colonel Strasser. It was her best chance to protect both Teresa and herself from any accusations that Reinhardt, desperate to exonerate himself, might make against them. To that extent it was good, but the prospect of the morning’s meeting did not encourage a party mood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1

Colonel Strasser stared at her. ‘Let me be sure I understand you. You are telling me that a member of this garrison has been making advances to you? Unwelcome advances?’

The office was shuttered from the light, austere, almost monastic, a room suited to confession. There was the desk, three straight-backed chairs, a framed portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall behind the desk, a large-scale map of the district on another wall, otherwise the room was empty. There was no space for vanity here: no ornamentation, nothing personal of any kind. No softness. There was only duty, the steely echo of an inflexible will.

It was hard not to be intimidated by the room and the pale eyes that watched her so intently across the desk. She fought them with flamboyance.

‘Why should I lie to you? You saw me last night, singing a German opera at your command! What is the opera about? I shall tell you: it’s about chivalry. German chivalry! That is why I asked to see you. That is why I’m appealing to you now. I implore you to show me the chivalry of Fidelio, of Beethoven!’

Strasser’s eyes did not waver; it seemed he was impervious to histrionics. ‘It is a serious accusation.’

‘Which I don’t make lightly.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

She explained how the soldier, accompanied by another man, had come to her mother’s house to requisition food.

‘Was that your first meeting?’

‘No. He’d stopped me once before at a roadblock, when I’d been for a bicycle ride in the country. On that occasion he’d wanted to know if I’d been buying food from any of the local farms.’

‘And had you?’

‘No.’

‘Did he search you?’

‘He looked in the pannier of my bicycle.’

‘But you, personally?’

‘No.’

‘After he’d looked in the pannier he let you go?’

‘Yes.’

‘His conduct was correct?’

‘Perfectly correct. I’d forgotten all about him until I saw him at my mother’s house.’

‘Did anything happen on that occasion?’

‘No. But later he sent me a note, asking me to meet him at a cafe near the cathedral.’

‘And you went?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

She hesitated. ‘I thought he might be lonely, so far from home.’

‘You were sorry for him?’

‘Loneliness is hard to bear.’

‘You didn’t wonder why he should send you a note rather than come to see you himself?’

‘I thought perhaps his orders prohibited it.’

‘But you went anyway?’

‘Yes.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. We talked. He said he’d like to go for a bicycle ride with me.’

‘And you went? Alone?’

Lucia felt her cheeks grow hot. ‘It isn’t easy to refuse a request from a German soldier. Besides, I thought of him as a friend, someone I could trust.’

‘And what happened?’

‘We rode out into the country. Then we left the bicycles and went for a walk under the trees.’ She paused, shaking her head in mounting distress, her eyes seeking the corners of the monk-like and silent room. ‘This is very difficult for me!’

Colonel Strasser showed neither sympathy nor impatience but sat, expressionless, while he waited for her to continue.

‘Then he tried to … put his hands on me.’

‘You attempted to stop him?’

‘Of course!’

‘But he persisted?’

‘He took hold of me. He ran his hands over my body. He tried to kiss me.’

‘Did you welcome these advances?’

A look of outrage. ‘I certainly did not!’

‘Was there any reason why he should have thought you had encouraged him?’

‘No!’

‘So what did you do?’

‘I tried to fight him off. I cried out. I appealed to him.’

Tears pricked her eyes; so overwhelmed was she by the picture she had created of herself as the maiden in distress that for a moment she forgot that none of it had happened.

‘And did he stop?’

‘Not at once. He tried to tear open my dress.’

‘But you continued to resist him?’

‘I fought him. I screamed, I hit him with my fists —’

‘And then?’

‘Then he stopped.’

‘He didn’t rape you or hit you back? He showed you no violence?’

‘He put his hands on me! He tried to kiss me. What’s that, if it isn’t violence?’

‘But no more than that?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’ Now her rage was genuine. Had the events she’d described taken place, this man’s icy indifference to her humiliation would have been the same. She forgot who he was, or the power he had. She forgot the menace of the silent room. She was a woman, speaking for all the women of the world who at one time or another had been violated, not by a man’s superior strength but by his indifference. ‘And this is German honour?’

That came close enough for him to try to justify himself and the soldier whom, without even realising it, he was defending not because he was a German and comrade in arms but because he was a man.

‘You agreed to go with him, alone. You walked into the forest with him. You thought he was lonely, which was why you agreed to meet him in the first place —’

‘I didn’t agree to let him attack me!’

‘There was no violation —’

‘He put his hands on me. Isn’t that violation enough?’

‘Signorina Visconti, in our society, Italian as well as German, it is the man and not the woman who is expected to make the first advances. How is he to know a woman’s feelings if he doesn’t make the first approach?’

‘I told him to stop! I begged him!’

‘Signorina, we both know that a woman does not always mean what she says in such circumstances.’

Lucia stood. With all the scorn she could muster she said: ‘I came looking for chivalry and understanding. I see I shall find neither here.’

‘But what are you asking me to do about it?’

‘I hoped you would transfer him to another unit.’

‘For that I would need to carry out a full investigation. Almost certainly the man would deny that he assaulted you. He might even suggest — forgive me! — that you encouraged him. There is no proof, you see. As one of your most fervent admirers, I naturally believe everything you have told me, but as a German officer I have to tell you that without evidence I can do nothing.’

Lucia was furious. ‘In other words, if I’d let him rape me, you could act?’

Strasser’s eyes grew icier than ever. ‘It is a serious accusation, as I said. And I have to point out that, had you permitted his advances, there could have been no question of rape.’

He summoned a trooper to escort her from the building. He made no move to accompany her but she felt his eyes on her back as she went out of his office. Now she had time to be terrified by what she’d done. By attempting to pre-empt any accusations that Reinhardt Hoffmann might make against her, she had put herself in danger. It didn’t matter whether Colonel Strasser believed her or not; by making the complaint, she had drawn herself to his attention, not as a singer but in his official capacity. From now on, the eyes of the SS would be on her.

2

Day by day the war tightened its fist about them.

Passengers from Brescia were arrested at the Parma railway station for being involved in the black market. Farmers were compelled to declare details of their produce to the authorities, which made it next to impossible to buy food from them. Reinhardt had told her that the farmer’s wife she’d dealt with had been arrested; if she’d escaped the firing squad she would still have been sent to a camp. Either way, it was a death sentence. Lucia lived in terror of arrest but nothing happened. Then one day she saw the woman in Montegallo. Relief as bright as sunlight, she ran to greet her. ‘They let you go!’

The woman stared at her suspiciously. ‘Let me go?’

‘Weren’t you arrested?’

‘Your friend came back and helped himself to some of my homemade sausage, said he’d make trouble for me otherwise, but I was never arrested. No thanks to you, though.’

Lucia wept. ‘Please! I knew nothing about any of it. Please believe me!’

She tried to clutch the woman, to force her to believe in her innocence, but she, more affronted than ever, shook herself free from this mad woman who might also be a traitor. Through a blur of tears Lucia watched the black-clothed back moving away from her along the street.

So Reinhardt had lied to her about that, too. Why?

Instinct gave the answer. Because he had hoped to frighten her, to give him greater power over her. To force her to give him information that he could use, as he had used her.

Damn him to hell for the liar he was.

3

By the spring of 1944, food supplies had almost run out. Until the previous autumn, farmers had occasionally been able to sell meat from stalls in the market. Without refrigeration it all had to be eaten at once but at least it had been there. Now it was not. Hunger, even more than before, had become a daily reality. It affected everyone but the old suffered most. Those who had survived the harsh winter now faced starvation; many died.

Yet still the war, and the world, went on.

The authorities decided to change the name of the theatre from the Teatro Regio to the Teatro Nazionale Verdi: in order, so Eduardo said, to distance both it and the city from the king who, by his support for Marshal Badoglio, had disgraced himself.

More and more, Eduardo reminded Lucia of a rat in a cage: all teeth and savagery, while the slowly advancing Allies drew the noose ever tighter around his neck.

The Germans carried out raids in the city and the surrounding countryside. Whole families were arrested and dragged off for interrogation. Few came back and those who did were reluctant to talk about their ordeal.

Meaningless things happened, seemingly at random; a grenade was thrown at the church: by whom, or for what reason, no-one knew. It cracked a tombstone but did no other damage. In Parma, a German stooge was gunned down in broad daylight. The assassin escaped, but the SS arrested ten people in retaliation. The youngest was a girl of fifteen, the oldest a man of ninety-four so senile that his neighbours said he didn’t even know there was a war on. Rumour said they’d been shot; certainly none of them came home again.

The British and Americans were reported to be bogged down south of Rome but in some ways they had already arrived. Milan was bombed; a month later Montegallo followed suit. Another month and Parma itself was raided and the Ducal Palace extensively damaged. It was occupied by the National Guard so no-one minded much, but a little later the Piazza Garibaldi, Farnese Palace and Teatro Regio (as people continued to call it) were badly damaged and the medieval Teatro Farnese, one of the wonders of Europe and no more a military target than the man in the moon, was destroyed by American planes.

The American pilots seemed to prefer civilian targets to military ones; there were several reports of town squares crowded with civilians being machine-gunned by American aircraft. In April it was Lucia’s turn.

4

With the theatre out of action, Lucia went back to Montegallo for a few days. She took with her the scores of several operas — Aïda, Turandot, Walküre, Tristan und Isolde — and spent her time studying them. It was a useful way of enduring the idleness forced upon her by the bombing. It also helped her shut her ears to rumour, and the countryside was alive with rumour. The Allies were coming, or were not; the SS were planning to pack the whole population into cattle trucks and send them to labour camps in Germany; the partisans, increasingly active in the countryside, would attack the garrison, bringing retribution on the whole district.

One day, feeling in need of a break, Lucia had ridden into the village on her bicycle. She was halfway home when an aircraft with American markings dived on her, spraying the road with machine gun fire. She threw herself into the ditch while the bullets ripped the earth not five metres from where she lay. The plane came back again and again, the pilot seemingly determined to kill her. Eventually he gave up and flew away, no doubt to attack an old age home or similar military target. He left Lucia weeping and trembling and wondering whether, on this showing, the Americans, when they arrived, would prove any better than the Germans.

The next evening, under cover of darkness, Guido came home, appearing alone and unannounced, heralded by no more than a soft rap on the door. Helena was astounded to see him; apprehensive, too, perhaps.

‘What brings you here?’

Guido looked a lot older than when Lucia had seen him last, his hair streaked with grey, his face more lined. There was another and more profound change; he, whom Lucia remembered as a gentle man, had grown hard and dangerous.

‘Why aren’t you in Bologna?’ Helena again nervously touching the wings of hair on either side of her face as she questioned him.

‘The school was bombed. At night, fortunately, so there were no casualties, but the building was a write-off.’

Helena wrung anguished hands. ‘What is going to happen to us all?’

‘That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about. Where’s Eduardo?’

Helena had grown used to avoiding questions about Eduardo and said nothing. Lucia answered for him.

‘In Parma, with the Repubblichini. He still visits here, but not as often as he did.’

Helena had told her she hadn’t seen her lover for weeks, but she was still willing to defend him. ‘He gets back whenever he can. His duties —’

‘Let me know the next time you see him,’ Guido interrupted.

Lucia stared. ‘Won’t you be staying here?’

‘No. But I’ll be in the district.’

Helena’s fingers clutched her throat. ‘What do you want him for?’

‘Don’t you know what the Repubblichini have been doing? The people they’ve killed, tortured, handed over to the Germans? Some day soon there’ll be a reckoning. Eduardo, along with the rest. Now’s the time for people to make up their mind whose side they’re on.’

Helena stared, wild-eyed, at a future in ruins. ‘What will they do to him?’

‘What they have to do. If you try to protect him, you’ll be in trouble, too. You must tell me, if you know where he is. For your own sake.’

To Helena, attack had always been the surest defence. ‘We don’t set eyes on you for a year, then you come here and start threatening us? I know Eduardo better than anybody! These things people say he’s done … He’s not like that. He’s done nothing.’

The electricity had been off for days and the lamp was turned low in order to conserve fuel. In its flickering light Lucia saw the two cousins as though in a tableau, a dimly lit image of conspiracy, accusation and fear. It was a vision that encapsulated all the anguish and futility of war: the shadowed faces staring at each other with a mixture of ferocity and alarm, eyes gleaming, shoulders hunched against the terrors of a world waiting beyond the circle of the light.

Guido said: ‘He’s done them, all right. The only question is what you’re going to do about it.’

Lucia intervened to break the spell that for a moment had bound the cousins together. ‘If you can tell us how to get hold of you …’

He did not answer her directly. ‘Walk outside with me.’

Lucia went with him into the darkness. Overhead the stars sparkled; there was a warmth in the air, the first hint of spring. Lucia said: ‘What will they do to him?’

‘Kill him. It’s too late to stop it now.’

‘And my mother?’

‘They’ll kill her, too, if she sticks by him.’

‘It would be a brave thing for her to do.’

‘It would be a very stupid thing for her to do. She can’t save him, whatever she does. Why get herself killed for nothing?’

‘I’ll speak to her.’

‘Try to make her see sense, if you can. I was fond of her once but I tell you frankly I don’t recognise her now. Her years in Australia changed her.’

Lucia was willing to defend both her country and mother from this cousin who had also changed beyond recognition. To say nothing of her father, cut off by the war, who by his absence represented all that had been good in her past life and that she couldn’t wait to renew.

‘It wasn’t Australia, it was the life she was forced to lead there. The hardship, the lack of love. She needs love, like most women. My father did love her, I think, but he wasn’t much good at saying so. He hardly spoke at all; times were hard for him, too. Eduardo is always telling her how much he loves and admires her, especially when he wants something. That’s why she’s fallen for him.’

‘Eduardo’s a liar.’

‘I know that. But she doesn’t. Or won’t admit it.’

Guido stared at her. ‘You’re in danger as well. People have been talking about you, too.’

‘I’m an opera singer. I’m not interested in politics.’

‘You’re up to your ears in politics. You sang for the SS, didn’t you? People see you being friendly with Colonel Strasser, accepting flowers from him. They hear you saying Heil Hitler. What are they supposed to think?’

‘I had no choice about any of that!’

‘And the German soldier you’ve been cycling with? I suppose you had no choice with him, either? There are even some who claim you’ve been giving the Germans information.’

‘That’s nonsense! I don’t have any information.’

‘You’re in real danger, all the same. You say you’ve been trying to ignore the war? That’s impossible. The more you sit in the middle, the more you get shot at. The Germans are our enemies. Being friendly with them makes you an enemy, too!’

‘What can I do about it?’

Lucia could see his face only as a black shape against the stars that kindled flickers of silver light in his eyes. He ran the back of his hand gently down her cheek.

‘I was in the audience that night you sang Fidelio.’

‘Why didn’t you come backstage afterwards?’

‘And meet your friend Colonel Strasser? I don’t think so. But it was wonderful, so wonderful. I’ve never known anything like it. Such emotion! You’re a truly great artist, perhaps the finest singer of all time. I could kill you now, there’s plenty would say I should, but I can’t. I’ve got to trust you. But I warn you; betray me and your voice won’t save you. You know Arturo Nelli, in the village?’

‘The tobacconist? Of course.’

‘You can leave messages with him. He’ll make sure I get them.’

‘What sort of messages?’

‘Let me know when Eduardo comes home.’

‘And my mother?’

‘I can’t promise anything, but give me Eduardo and I’ll see what I can do.’

5

Indecision was like a wound in her heart.

Eduardo, her mother’s worthless lover, was sure to pitch up eventually. Knowing him, Lucia could well believe he’d been involved in the atrocities of the Repubblichini, yet Helena cared for him, despite all. She couldn’t betray him without betraying her mother, yet to protect him would sentence Helena to death. Herself, too, perhaps.

She remembered Guido’s warning. She hadn’t asked him — it wasn’t a question you asked anybody — but he was obviously with the partisans. He’d been right; trying to ignore the war was futile. By refusing to take sides, she’d ended up mistrusted by everybody. She had to choose; her life could depend on it. She thought of the aura of terror that Colonel Strasser carried with him wherever he went, how Reinhardt had pretended friendship only to use her later. Despite the murderous antics of the cowboy Americans, there was no doubt what her choice would be.

6

Eduardo arrived a week later. He was tired and dirty; while Helena ran to fetch hot water, clean clothes and food, Lucia studied him and the air of feral defiance that he wore like a skin about him.

A cornered rat …

She had to let Guido know, yet it was hard to betray even a man like this to his death. She looked at his face and saw her own. Her mother wouldn’t die because of it — only in opera did that happen — but she would be sentencing her to a lifetime of loneliness and grief.

She had no choice, yet still she dithered. Then Eduardo made the decision easy for her. He saw her watching him, and his temper, never the most placid, flared at once.

‘What d’you think you’re staring at?’

Words came too quickly for thought. ‘Not much, I’d say.’

He was across the room before she could move. He slapped her hard enough to make her ears ring.

‘Want me to tie a knot in your tongue?’

Helena, deaf to all she did not wish to hear, came back into the room with a bowl of hot water and a towel. Lucia, cheeks flaring crimson, snatched up her coat, threw open the front door and ran out into the night.

It was dismal, starless, the rain damping endlessly out of an invisible sky. She picked her way down the track, trying to avoid the puddles that seemed to draw into their pewter-coloured surfaces whatever light there was. Some small creature scuttled in the undergrowth. Vegetation dripped. Away to the north, the sky was lit by flares of red and golden light and she could hear the distant rumble of exploding bombs; Milan was catching it again. The first time it had happened all the people of Montegallo had defied the curfew, coming out into the streets to watch the bombardment, but now the village was silent; even bombing raids became unremarkable, in time.

The dark shapes of the houses drew close about her.

She walked as quietly as she could, yet thought how the whole village must be listening to the sound of her heels on the cobblestones. She reached the tobacconist’s. The shop was dark, with no sense of life or movement behind its closed shutters. She rounded the corner of the building and knocked softly on the side door. For a minute nothing happened. She raised her hand to knock again and the catch clicked as the door opened a crack. She could see no-one in the darkness but knew that someone had to be standing on the other side of the door.

She spoke in a whisper. ‘I’ve a message for Guido.’

No answer; she might have been talking to the air.

‘Tell him that the man he mentioned is at the cottage now.’

Again she waited. This time a voice answered her.

‘Alone?’

‘My mother’s with him. No-one else.’

Silence; the door began to close. Quickly Lucia said: ‘She’ll be safe, won’t she? Guido said she’d be safe.’

The door continued to close. It moved so gently that she barely heard the click as the lock slipped home. She was left facing the closed door, her question hanging unanswered in the air before her.

What was she supposed to do now?

Go back and she might walk straight into trouble. Stay away, and her mother would know for sure who was to blame for whatever happened. Assuming anything did. She made up her mind. She would go back, and wait. She and her mother would have to live with the consequences, and each other.

7

She had hoped they’d be tucked up in bed by the time she got back, the door of the room closed tight, the only sound her mother’s sighs through the thin walls. Unfortunately they were not.

Eduardo looked at her suspiciously. ‘Where’ve you been?’

‘For a walk.’

‘In the rain?’

Boldly, she returned his stare. ‘It’s almost stopped. Besides, I thought you’d be glad of the privacy.’

‘Since when have you thought of anyone but yourself?’

A little of this mongrel went a very long way. She said: ‘I was thinking of myself. I’d been looking forward to an evening alone.’

Eduardo drew back his lips over his teeth. He tapped the butt of the pistol in his belt. ‘Don’t try your smart-arse games with me.’

He turned to Helena, who was watching them both anxiously. ‘You wanted to wait up for her. Well, here she is, as sweet-tempered as ever. Now let’s go to bed.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

1

They came shortly before dawn, and it was terrifying.

There were three of them, carrying machine pistols and with balaclavas covering their faces, but what was truly frightening was not their appearance but their speed and purpose, the air of implacable violence that for the moment was controlled but would plainly erupt at once if there was even the slightest sign of resistance.

Lucia, knowing what the night might bring, had lain awake for a long time but the hours had passed, nothing had happened and eventually she had fallen asleep. Now she awoke to find the men in the room with her.

One of them menaced her with his gun; she thought she was about to die and shut her eyes, rigid with shock and fear, but nothing happened.

The other men paused at the closed door behind which Helena and Eduardo were sleeping. With sudden violence they threw it open and burst into the room beyond. They made no attempt to move quietly; noise, too, must have been part of their intention, quelling all possibility of resistance.

Lucia, cowering beneath her bedding, expected to hear the sound of firing, but there was not. There was a scream of protest from Helena, the sounds of a brief struggle and the two men emerged from the room, dragging Eduardo between them. That was what Lucia would always remember: the speed and remorselessness of the operation, Eduardo’s gaping mouth uttering not a sound as he was dragged out into the night.

The third man jerked the barrel of his gun at Lucia as though warning her to do nothing, then he, too, was gone, the open door swinging listlessly on its hinges.

Once she was sure that the men had gone, Lucia leapt out of bed and ran into her mother’s room.

2

Now all was still.

The violated air hung motionless. The room — the desecrated bed, the faded wallpaper, the mirror’s tarnished blink — had seen, and the memory was engrained within its surfaces. Only Helena’s mind raced, finding nothing to which it could take hold.

Eduardo had been ripped from beneath the tumbled sheets, the abduction like the collapse of a house in an earthquake, one instant standing and the next in ruins.

Her life, too, was in ruins. She did not know why they had not taken her, too. When they had burst into the room, that was what she had feared most: not that they would take him but that she, too, was about to die. Betrayal in its many forms. She had not died. Now she wondered whether that might not be the greater punishment, to live victim to the priest, the crow-clad, vengeful women. Lucia came running but Helena would not acknowledge her, knowing who must have betrayed him.

3

Her mother’s clenched hands clutched the bedding, her face was buried in her pillow. Her nightdress was dragged up. From the waist down she was naked but she made no attempt to cover herself. Body rigid, eyes wide with shock, she wept, the sound muffled by the bedding.

Lucia placed her hand on her shoulder.

‘Mother …’

Her touch unleashed a tigress who turned and screamed, lashing with her fingernails at the daughter leaning over her.

‘Don’t touch me!’

Shock compounded shock. Lucia stepped back. Helena made no attempt to follow but assailed her with a banshee howl of fury, terror and hatred, until Lucia’s control snapped. She reached into the gale of sound and slapped her mother hard on both cheeks.

‘Be quiet!’

The silence that followed was almost harder to bear than the screams. Helena threw herself back on the bed, voice keening endlessly on a single note, face shiny with the tears that poured from her staring eyes. Lucia pulled the nightdress decently over her mother’s legs; she took her unresisting hand in her own and sat with her until the first greyness of approaching dawn showed around the edges of the blackout curtain that masked the window.

Exhausted by the traumas of the night, Helena fell asleep at last. Trying not to disturb her, Lucia worked her fingers free. She went into the parlour and put some water on to boil. While she waited she went back into the bedroom and sat down once again beside her mother’s bed. In the morning light her sleeping face looked unguarded and vulnerable. It was a long time since Lucia had examined her features so searchingly; she saw the first threads of grey in her hair, the lines radiating from the corners of eyes and mouth, the residue of all the years of anxiety and privation that had made up her mother’s life. Helena was forty-five and they had not been easy years. She had told Lucia how her parents had died in that earlier war, all the things that had happened afterwards. She had seen the place where Helena had been brought up; she understood something of the remorseless struggle that her mother had faced in Australia. She herself had fond memories of her childhood in the mallee; she still thought of it, far more than Italy, as her place, to which, when it was possible, she would return. For her mother it had been different, a place of exile from her true life. In the end, her sense of deprivation and loneliness had been too much. In defiance of the traditions of her upbringing, she had abandoned both husband and marriage vows, had come back to the country she had left, only to discover that it, too, had changed and that nothing of what she had deemed most precious remained. Without a place she could truly call her own she had become lost. That was why she had become infatuated with a man like Eduardo, because he seemed to offer the prospect of love and belonging that she had sought unavailingly for so long. With a dawning perception Lucia saw that Helena’s true tragedy was that of a woman of sensitivity and intelligence who, knowing from the first what manner of creature Eduardo was, had been helpless to resist him, for the sake of the love that everyone but herself had known was as big a sham as Eduardo himself.

Her poor mother, so desperate for love, whose temperament made the giving and receiving of it so hard.

Lucia sat by her until she heard the water start to boil. In her sleep Helena also heard the sound. She stirred and began to waken. Lucia made coffee with the last of the precious supply that Reinhardt had given her and brought a cup back into the bedroom. Helena lay on her back, eyes staring at bereavement and horror.

‘Drink this.’

She turned to look at her daughter and at the brimming cup. ‘What is it?’

‘The last of the coffee.’

‘Something to celebrate, have we?’

‘It’ll do you good.’

Helena sat up and took the cup. The familiar expression — tight mouth, guarded eyes — was back on her face. She showed nothing of her true feelings, yet Lucia, who had seen her asleep, recognised the woman, so vulnerable beneath the cold exterior. The woman whom, in trying to save, she had at the same time destroyed. Helena knew it, too.

She finished the coffee. She put the mug on the chair beside the bed. She said: ‘I shall never forgive you.’

Lucia could have denied all knowledge but did not. ‘I had no choice.’ Remembering what Marta Bianci had told her, that there is always a choice. ‘If I hadn’t let them know he was here, they would have killed you, too.’

‘Them. They. Who are they?’

Lucia was silent.

‘It was Guido, wasn’t it? The pair of you conspired to kill him, because he was precious to me. You betrayed him to punish me. Guido, because he was jealous; you, because you’ve never forgiven me for taking you away from Australia, for bringing you to Italy. The most civilised country in the world and you hate me for it! I haven’t forgotten how you wouldn’t speak to me on the boat. All I ever wanted was to advance your career, and this is how you thank me.’

All the resentments, real and imagined, gushing in the wake of Eduardo’s loss, and Lucia, who minutes before had felt such tenderness for her mother, found, once again, that she was incapable of receiving abuse without hitting back.

‘You came back for your own benefit! The only reason you’ve taken any interest in my career is because you hoped it might turn you into someone important!’

Now it was Helena’s turn to deny nothing. ‘Do you blame me? Don’t you think I’ve had enough to put up with in my life?’ Then her honesty was submerged by the image that appealed to her most: the long-suffering mother, unselfishly sacrificing life and domestic happiness for her daughter’s success. ‘All I wanted was to see you obtain the recognition your talent deserves. It’s cruel of you to suggest anything else!’

Accusations and recriminations grew more bitter by the moment. The terrible events of the night might have united them but had driven them further apart. Reconciliation, for both of them, had become an impossible dream.

4

The mechanism of Lucia’s life was broken. She had resented Helena, told herself a hundred times that she hated her, yet now she realised that her mother had been the centre of the orbit that made up her days. However long she had spent in Parma, however engrossed in her studies, it had always been in the knowledge that her mother was there, in Montegallo. When she boarded the tram in the evenings it was, in a very real sense, to come home. Even Eduardo and their increasingly acrimonious quarrels had been unable to alter that. Now all had changed. It was not Eduardo’s death — that might even have brought mother and daughter closer together — but the fact of Lucia’s betrayal that had created an unbridgeable gulf between them. She had damaged, perhaps irreparably, the relationship that was the cornerstone of her existence. She lay with shut eyes on her bed and watched the days winding back through the time of her adolescence to the shadowed mysteries of infancy. Always her mother had been there. Even when they had fought, the act of fighting had brought life to her existence. Without that relationship, what remained was a void that she feared even music would not fill.

5

Eduardo’s body was found in a ravine a little way outside the village. No-one had seen anything.

The German response was savage. Eduardo might have been only an Italian but he had been an ally and his death had to be avenged.

Suddenly troops were everywhere. Uniforms, grey and black, poured into the village. Roadblocks were set up. Every house was searched, some more than once. Their own cottage was one of them. The soldiers found nothing; there was nothing to be found. Helena’s relationship with the dead man was well known but Lucia’s role was more ambiguous.

Colonel Strasser, passing her in a staff car, instructed his driver to stop. He wound down the window while Lucia stood with feet rooted to the ground, wondering what was going to happen to her. Speaking carelessly, or perhaps for the benefit of listening ears, he said: ‘I have carried out enquiries about the matter you raised with me. The soldier in question denied everything.’

Lucia was as conscious as he of those who might be listening. ‘He would deny it, wouldn’t he? Attempted rape? Who’s going to admit that?’

‘Precisely. So the question I ask myself is why you made the complaint. If you knew he would deny it? Was it to obtain justice, as you claimed, or to cause trouble?’

‘You must believe what you want.’

‘You have a wonderful talent. I would be saddened to see it go to waste. I have to warn you, all the same. Be careful. Give me any more reason to question your motives and your voice won’t save you. I hear they are not interested in opera at Auschwitz.’

The car window closed. The car drove on, leaving Lucia shaking so badly she could scarcely stand.

6

For Helena, the emptiness was unbearable. She had told Lucia she would never forgive her, yet now found she had no choice, because without her daughter she had nobody. Even now she could not bring herself to speak of it openly. Instead she took to sitting with Lucia, on the evenings she was home, waiting wistfully for her daughter to say something, anything, to fill the silence.

While Lucia, unable to work out what her mother wanted from her or what to do for the best, felt increasingly guilty without knowing why, and angry for feeling so, and at the last said nothing.

7

Lucia later realised that Colonel Strasser’s remarks, however much they’d frightened her at the time, might have saved her life. Other villagers weren’t so lucky.

Once again the dreaded word ‘reprisals’ was heard in Montegallo. The Germans took five villagers, seemingly at random, and shot them against the wall of the church. The whole population was forced to watch; squads of troops scoured the village to make sure the order was obeyed.

Lucia stood with her mother and, although no-one spoke to them, she had no sense that they were hated for what was happening. Colonel Strasser’s remarks might have helped, or perhaps Guido had said something; whatever the reason, people seemed to have come belatedly to believe that the Viscontis, like everyone else, were victims of circumstances over which they had no control.

The situation was hard enough to bear without the burden of hatred. The five hostages, two women, three men, were marched out under guard. One of the women was in tears; the other glared defiantly at the line of soldiers and showed no fear at all.

The priest had tried to go to them but the soldiers had prevented him. Now he stood behind the firing squad, holding up a cross so that all could see it; this, the military permitted.

The corporal in charge of the execution barked an order. There was a rattle of bolts as the rifles were cocked. There should have been rain bleeding from a grey sky; instead the indifferent sunlight shone upon both victims and executioners.

Again the corporal shouted. The rifles took aim.

The defiant woman shouted: ‘Long live Italy! Death to Mussolini!’

The gunfire drowned her last syllables. The impact of the bullets flung the five hostages down. No-one was permitted to touch the bodies. One soldier remained to guard them; the rest marched away. The villagers dispersed.

The following day Eduardo’s funeral took place with full military honours. It was attended by a guard from the Repubblichini, pretty as damsels, who strutted in a click and clatter of boots and fired a volley over the grave. Colonel Strasser sent a junior officer to represent him. Of the villagers, Helena was the only mourner, with Lucia in attendance to support her. After the funeral they walked home together into a future bleak beyond reckoning.

For two days they remained together in the cottage. No-one bothered them. Lucia returned to her operatic scores, although her concentration was not as she would have wished. Helena stared at the wall or through it, at memories of the past or prospects of an undefined and menacing future. They did not eat or exchange a word.

On the third day, by mutual if unspoken agreement, they finished off the scraps of food that were all that remained in the house. They sat in the parlour room and looked at each other and slowly the truth took form between them.

For years they had been drifting apart; now, when they needed each other most, Eduardo’s death might have saved their lives but had also destroyed any prospect of renewed love.

Lucia the murderer.

Helena the traitor.

All they had wanted was to love each other but Lucia saw from the expression in her eyes that her mother would indeed never forgive her, not because she did not wish to do so but because the task was beyond her. From now on their only emotional contact would be through the progress of Lucia’s career.

8

There were times when the ache in Helena’s heart became well-nigh intolerable, when she wanted as much as life itself to go to her child and hold her, to rekindle the candleflame of togetherness that they needed to guide them through the darkness, but each time she reached the point of doing so, there came a succession of other images: her room door flung open, the purposeful men, the haste with which they dragged Eduardo from her side. He with the seal of death already upon his eyes; the oily blackness of the guns; herself drawn tight-knotted and cringing into the middle of the bed; the world a silent scream of shock, disbelief and terror that this could be happening, that this, that this …

She remembered it all so clearly. The images paralysed her and she could do nothing. Again and again the moment to speak to Lucia passed. With every failure estrangement grew. It became a gulf that even voices could not bridge.

Helena had seen the scorn in women’s eyes, had dug a hole within herself in which to hide. She clasped her justification like a lover. She persuaded herself that all she had done had been for Lucia’s sake, to promote her in her career. Knowing Eduardo for what he was, she had nevertheless taken him to her bed, not for herself but for Lucia, and the world that would be enriched by her art. The world that should have been grateful but was not. The daughter who should have been grateful and was not. Who had rewarded her by betraying the man who at the time of their greatest need had protected them. There were days when she could neither speak nor move. She lay still, while the world’s concerns touched her no more than the fall of feathers.

9

There was talk of the anticipated reappearance of the miraculous Virgin of Fatima, last seen seventeen years before. Others claimed that the sun had reversed its course across the sky. Despite all the portents, the war ground on. The Germans and their Italian accomplices became more brutal than ever in their treatment of the civilian population. Even the air seemed to have gone mad; along the forest-clad streams the leaves of the trees carried rumours. People were arrested; they were tortured or killed without charge or reason. Searches were carried out at any time of the day or night. Mostly it was part of a campaign of general harassment but sometimes the searchers came up with an escaped prisoner of war or a wanted man. Which meant more reprisals, more deaths. The partisans became increasingly active. It was not only the Germans who died. In the winter of 1944 Guido was shot dead when he and two other men tried to crash their truck loaded with guns and ammunition through a military roadblock.

Helena, who had shown some signs of recovering from Eduardo’s death, was once again thrown into shocked silence. Lucia tried to help, offering her a bed in her apartment in Parma. Helena said she would come but did not. Lucia braved the increasingly slow and tedious journey to Montegallo to see if everything was all right.

‘What happened to you?’

Helena’s eyes wandered vaguely. ‘It wasn’t convenient.’

‘Convenient for what?’

Helena smiled helplessly and did not answer.

‘I’ll get home as often as I can but you know the service isn’t all that reliable at the moment.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do your best.’

Once again Lucia had the feeling she was being forgiven for something she hadn’t done. The journey could take up to two hours these days, but she did what she could. When she managed to get home she spent what remained of her evenings holding her mother’s hand, trying with little success to make conversation and wondering whether there was any purpose in any of it.

Beyond the circle of their private grief, the war went on. Atrocities caused more atrocities. Despite the efforts of the occupying troops, the partisans now controlled the countryside. Even on the main roads, German convoys were regularly shot up; individual patrols were ambushed and soldiers killed. One of the most notorious of the Repubblichini thugs was kidnapped. The next day his tortured body was found propped against the church wall in the exact place where what were now called the Martyred Five had been shot.

The Germans, on the edge of retreat, threatened to destroy the cities of Parma, Bologna, Reggio Emilia and Piacenza if they were attacked. The partisans refused to deal with them but the cities, mercifully, remained intact.

On 18 April 1945 the German garrisons fled from both Montegallo and Parma. Seven days later the American forces, gum-chewing and taciturn, arrived. Young women bombarded them with flowers but it had been a long campaign and the soldiers were tired. They showed little interest in the flowers or, more surprisingly, the young women. Heroes they might be but romance, at least for the moment, was off the menu and the disappointed flower throwers were compelled to seek consolation in the mundane arms of boys they had known all their lives.

Not that Lucia had time to worry about that. Three days after the Americans’ arrival she was summoned, with the rest of the Teatro Regio cast, to sing Verdi’s Requiem Mass in the Parma cathedral, to celebrate in both secular and religious terms their newfound freedom from opppression. For months Teresa Sciotto had been whispering to anyone who would listen that Lucia and her mother were collaborators. It was to be expected she would make trouble now over Lucia’s selection but fortunately it never came to that; as soon as the Germans had left, Teresa had gone to stay with her aunt in Verona and had not yet returned. Lucia sang the soprano part without a voice being raised against her. The Gazzetta di Parma praised her to the skies. She gloried in the praise but knew that her vendetta with Teresa Sciotto had only been deferred; down the track there was bound to be more trouble. There was one additional problem: Alfredo Dante, the bass baritone who had kissed her so passionately after the Tosca duet, had fallen in love with her. Since that episode he had said nothing of his feelings, but now, with the war over at last, he tried to woo her.

She would have no part of it. She told him: ‘Music is the only thing in my life at the moment. It’s like a force of nature to me; there’s no way I can control it. Besides, I’ve something I have to do first, and I have to do it alone.’

She spoke to her mother about it. Helena was outraged but it made no difference; Lucia had made up her mind.

Her early longing for Australia had become sublimated in her passion for music, yet only in part. Music had become her home but she had never forgotten the land she had lost. She had discovered a quotation from the South American poet Pablo Neruda: I carry our nation wherever I go. Now that the war was over, she was determined to go back but did not know how to reconcile doing so with her career. Once again she blamed her mother for her selfishness in bringing her to a land that would never be her own. Her dreams of childhood returned. Helena had told her nostalgia was useless but she had never believed her, not if it kept her in touch with the land to which she intended, one day, to return.

‘Why do you want to go there?’

‘Italy’s your place, not mine. Australia is my country. I carry memories of it, always. Can’t you see that by reclaiming your own roots you’ve denied me my own?’

‘Are you mad? That country is a desert. Your head’s stuffed with romantic nonsense about it, but let me tell you, I lived there for sixteen years and I know what I’m talking about!’

‘I remember it, too. I was thirteen when we left, don’t forget, not three.’

‘There’s nothing there for you. If you want to succeed as an artist, Europe is the only place. By bringing you here —’

‘Against my will!’

‘Perhaps. But I gave you a chance you would never have had if you’d stayed there. Let me tell you, one day you’ll thank me for it.’

‘That’s how the priests talk, isn’t it? One day … Well, I remember it always. I even dream about it. And I’ve made up my mind. Now I can do something about it, I’m going back.’

‘And do what? Teach singing in the mallee?’

‘If I have to, yes!’

Helena was hurt as well as angry. ‘Sometimes you make me feel I’ve never done anything right in my life.’

Lucia did not answer. Instead she went and told Marta Bianci, who for once in her life agreed with Helena.

‘It’s criminal!’

Perhaps, but Lucia — Lucy! — was no longer listening. In 1946, after finishing an eight-performance season of La Traviata, she travelled to Genoa, where she boarded a ship for Australia.

Part Three

THE DIVA

1946–1980

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

1

All the way to Australia, Lucy Fisher had plenty of time to think about what she’d done. She’d turned her back on the traumas of war-torn Italy to return to the land that had acquired almost mythic proportions in her mind. Her land, her father, her life renewed. Yet doubts remained. Australia might be the romantic land of her desires but was far from being the logical place to begin a career as an internationally famous opera singer.

As Marta Bianci, seeing her off at Genoa, said: ‘It’s madness. What’s there?’

Lucia, quivering on the edge of becoming Lucy again, would not argue about it.

‘You don’t understand.’

In truth, neither did she; her mother’s prediction that she would end up as a teacher in the mallee had a discomforting ring of truth about it, yet the distant land drew her back and she had to go. As to what would happen afterwards …

‘I’ll be back.’

‘Don’t waste too much time about it. You think Teresa Sciotto will wait for you? Let her get ahead of you in Milan or New York, you’ll never be rid of her.’

‘Why should I want to? There’s room for both of us.’

‘Not if you want to be recognised as the best.’

2

And so, at last, to Sydney, with little money and no-one to meet her. Her father apart, she didn’t know anyone in the whole continent. After ten years he might not even recognise her. Always assuming he had not moved, in which case she would not be able to find him at all.

She took the Adelaide train, sat up all night — no cash to spare for a sleeper — and hopped off at Pinnaroo. In a raw dawn the country greeted her like the skeleton of her forgotten past: the dust, the mallee, laconic men with shirts buttoned to their throats, faces shaded by the brims of battered hats.

She felt as much at home as a hen in a billabong, yet she hadn’t come all this way to give up now. She asked directions from a man at the railway station. Yairs, he knew Ted Fisher, right enough. And who might be asking?

‘His daughter.’

That opened his eyes. ‘I recall you as a nipper. What’s brought you back?’

‘To see him. What else?’

Which earned her a guarded look. ‘You might find things a tad different from when you was here before.’

She got a lift in a truck heading that way. The driver dropped her at the turning; she looked about her as he drove away in a boiling of dust. She recognised nothing. Where she remembered wilderness, houses had sprung like weeds. She could taste the presence of people in what had once been solitude. She took the track she was sure went to the house but somehow her memory had tricked her. Eventually some woman, eyes bulging with unasked questions, put her right.

‘Up to the end. Then left and left again. Oright?’

She walked on, case in hand, and there it was. At least the house hadn’t changed much; a bit more weathered, maybe, patched here and there like an old coat, but for the first time Lucy felt she was home. She walked up to the door and knocked. There was no reply. Not surprising; most likely he’d be out in the paddocks some place; afraid he might tell her to stay away, she hadn’t warned him she was coming. She was turning away, wondering what to do now, when a woman came from behind the chook shed.

‘Help you?’

Lucy’s feet felt as though they’d been nailed to the ground.

‘Mr Fisher?’

‘Gone into town. Who’s askin’?’

‘I’m his daughter.’

The woman gave her a look as guarded as the Royal Mint. ‘You’d best come in.’

Her name was Edma. She looked about thirty, short and dark-haired, with plump red cheeks. Big breasts, big backside under a faded check shirt and jeans. Her brown eyes examined Lucy suspiciously.

‘We bin together seven years,’ she said.

Lucy hadn’t thought about her father shacking up with anyone. It made sense but Edma was as prickly as a bramble bush.

‘What’ve you come for?’

‘To see how he is.’

‘It’s taken you long enough.’

Lucy was indignant. ‘There’s been a war on. Or maybe you hadn’t heard.’

‘I heard, oright. My brother was killed, fighting you lot.’

‘I was seventeen when the war started. It didn’t have much to do with me, did it?’

‘I reckon all you people are sayin’ that, now we’ve licked you.’

A mongrel of a start, all in all. But things improved. Before long they were mending fences over a cup of tea.

‘I never wanted to go to Europe at all. But I made the best of it. You do, don’t you?’

‘You’re the one who’s the singer?’

‘How d’you know that?’

For the first time Lucy discovered that, ever since the end of the war, Helena had been writing to her husband.

‘Never told us you was comin’ over, though.’

‘She didn’t want me to but I wanted to see Dad. He never said much but I always felt he cared. I felt close to him. The country, too. I was born here, after all.’

Edma shook her head doubtfully. ‘Not much opera in the mallee.’

Ted said the same when he got back shortly before dark.

He was a shock.

What hair remained was grey; his hands were like lemon graters, his face a network of lines. He could have been the father of the man she remembered; she’d have walked past him in the street.

He didn’t know what to do with her.

‘Good to see you.’

But.

‘Got anywhere to stay?’

‘I thought here.’

She’d come twelve thousand miles; the least he could do was find her a bed. Edma decided to be gracious about it. ‘I’m sure we can fit you in somewhere.’

It was ridiculous. All she’d wanted was to get back to her roots. She’d thought of catching up with her father, re-establishing the closeness, unspoken but real, they’d had once. Now she felt she’d stuck her foot in a dingo trap. She didn’t want to change her father’s life or interfere in any way, yet how, without insulting them, could she say they had nothing to fear from her? She decided to settle for what she could get. She smiled as she accepted Edma’s offer. ‘That’ll be good.’

At least their welcome extended to supper. Over chops Ted said: ‘You don’ sound like an Eyetie.’

Which might have been an overture of friendship, although it seemed Edma still had doubts. That night, wrapped in blankets in a corner of the living room, Lucy heard her carrying on behind the closed bedroom door. It reminded her of her mother and Eduardo, in the old days. The next day she decided to cut her losses.

‘I’ll be off, then.’

Ted looked uneasy. ‘We haven’t had the chance to talk much.’

Not that they ever had. While Edma kept a conspicuous silence.

‘I’ve got to make a living,’ Lucy said. Out of his depth, Ted scratched his head. ‘Maybe Sydney. That’s the place for opera singers.’

‘I’ll give it a go.’

Twenty-four hours after she’d arrived and with her plans for a joyous reunion in tatters, Lucy was on the train back east.

3

She found a job as an invoice typist, and a one-room roost in Kings Cross. She survived, that was the best she could say. She’d had this romantic notion of her father; now there was nothing at all. More and more she wondered what she was doing here. She wrote to her mother, who didn’t reply, and to Marta Bianci, who did. Marta told her that Teresa Sciotto was making a name for herself; there was talk that La Scala might find a place for her in a season or two. I wish you would come home, Marta told her. The longer you leave it, the harder it will be. At least make sure you keep up with your studies.

Fat chance. There was a pit before her, bottomless, in which lurked despair. She was in no mood for study. She bought half a dozen cream buns to console herself.

Music lovers were thin on the ground in Oz; when she heard of John and Aïda Dickens, who had a name in Australian music, she found out their address and turned up on their doorstep. With little faith in her chances, she bent their ears about her career in Italy during the war, how she’d been Marta Bianci’s pupil and sung the title role in Fidelio at the Parma Opera. John gave her a thoughtful look. Two days later he contacted her at work and invited her to audition. The woman in charge of the typing pool ticked her off.

‘No personal calls in office hours, if you please.’

The old bat could take a jump, as far as Lucy was concerned. She hadn’t sung a note for weeks. Over the next two days she spent every spare moment vocalising in a desperate attempt to catch up. When she arrived for the audition, John Dickens handed her the music of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppaea.

‘Know it, do you?’

She shook her head.

‘Give it a shot. See how you go.’

He heard her through.

‘We’re putting on a performance of Purcell’s Dido. Would you be interested?’

After it was over she wrote to Marta Bianci to tell her about her star billing and how successful the performance had been. Marta was pleased for her but cautious.

Very few people here even know where Sydney is. This is where you should be, and the sooner the better.

Through Aïda Dickens she met a man called Anwar Bendurian who claimed to be an impressario. He offered to find her roles in Europe and America. He was a showman or at least a show-off, with two-tone shoes and a tie bright enough to light the way home from the pub, but he seemed to know what he was on about.

‘Your friend’s right. You’ve gotta go to Europe, the States. I got contacts in every capital city in the western world. Voice like yours, they’ll be queueing to sign you. But hearsay won’t get you far. You gotta be there so they can hear you.’

She asked Aïda about this Anwar Bendurian who talked so blue a streak.

‘He claims he’s got contacts,’ Aïda said. ‘Does he think he can do anything for you?’

‘He says so.’ He’d shown her letterheads from Rome, Paris, Chicago, all of them eager to audition singers of the top rank, had said, ‘That’s you, baby. But they won’t sign up anyone they don’t know from ten thousand miles away.’

Aïda agreed, and asked, ‘Why did you come back to Australia, anyway?’

‘To find my roots. But I’m beginning to think my roots may be in Europe, after all.’

‘Go back, then, as soon as you can raise the fare.’

She thought about it, went to see Anwar at his pint-sized office.

‘I’m taking your advice. I’m going back.’

He clapped his hands. ‘I’ll get things moving straightaway. I got an agreement here for your signature.’

She looked at it; it was one of those legal documents tight with clauses and subclauses, couched in phraseology incomprehensible to all but lawyers and quite probably to them, too. What the hell, she thought. And signed it. She went back to Europe.

4

As soon as she arrived in Italy she went to see Marta Bianci, who greeted her with open arms but little else. Operatic roles were hard to find and what she’d done in Sydney interested no-one. Anxiety had fuelled Lucia’s appetite. All the way over on the boat she’d stuffed herself; waddling down the gangway at Genoa she had been twice the woman who had left Australia. With no employment in sight and beset by fears that she had once again done the wrong thing, she went on feeding her face: pasta, cream, butter, cheese.

Marta Bianci protested but it made no difference. Lucia Visconti had become fat and, as the weeks passed with no engagement in sight, as she heard more and more of Teresa Sciotto’s successes in Italy and South America, she became fatter still.

Fortunately it didn’t affect her voice. She worked on it every day, developing and polishing it assiduously. It was a wonder to all who heard it, but Anwar Bendurian’s promised help had failed to materialise and what use was a voice, however wonderful, without an audience?

She went to see her mother. They spent an awkward evening together. The ghost of Eduardo and of the future that Helena believed she would have had with him stood between them still. More and more Lucia was convinced it always would. Her mother cloaked herself in grievances to protect herself from loneliness, complaining constantly about a world that had denied her the place to which she believed herself entitled. All the world was in conspiracy against her and she was determined to make the most of her role as self-appointed victim. Lucia suspected Helena was as anxious to see her go as she was. They kissed the air beside each other’s cheeks and it was over.

Lucia retreated to Parma where she was once again forced to work in a typing pool. Unspoken lamentations soured the air; her career was over before it had begun.

5

A cold, wet January day, its bleakness an apt reminder of a coming year that, like its predecessor, held little promise.

Lucia had an appointment with Marta Bianci at the conservatorium. As she braved the dismal streets, the air with a hint of sleet, she wondered why she was bothering. Art had proved a delusion. She would be better off to forget all about it and get on with her life.

She went into Marta’s room. Marta Bianci was seventy years old now, hard to believe but true. Her hair was grey but she seemed as energetic and decisive as ever. Lucia saw from her expression that something had happened, the teacher so excited she could hardly get the words out of her mouth.

‘Zenatello is in town!’

Giovanni Zenatello was as old as the hills — he’d been the original Pinkerton in Madama Butterfly, for heaven’s sake — and his presence in Parma was hardly news to turn winter into summer. However, Marta hadn’t finished.

‘He’s artistic director of the Verona Festival. He wants to open with Gioconda. He’s been in New York looking for a soprano. He auditioned Zinka Milanov but she wasn’t right, and Herva Nelli was too expensive. So he’s still looking. I’ve spoken to him and he’s agreed to give you an audition this afternoon.’

Dear heavens. Lucia thought she was about to faint.

Marta said: ‘I’ve got the score here. Let’s get to work.’

It was what Lucia had wanted, more than life, yet now she was scared to death. It was all she could do not to refuse the opportunity. The possible opportunity. The impossible opportunity. That was the problem. She studied herself in the mirror, the rolls and layers of fat, the porcine creature she had allowed herself to become. Marta’s own words, spoken so long ago, tormented her: you must be elegant. Now look at her. She was not destined for success; to audition would be to face the certainty of rejection. She could not bear to think of it.

Marta, somehow, understood. That was the miracle of this woman; always she understood. She came and held Lucia, rocking her gently. After a minute she stood back, hands still on Lucia’s shoulders, and smiled at her.

‘Come.’

And Lucia went.

They practised all morning. When she went to the audition, she was so frightened she barely knew where she was. Before going into the room she brought all her willpower into play. She focused on what was waiting on the far side of the door. She was neither Lucia Visconti nor Lucy Fisher. She was not in wintry Parma but in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. She was the ballad singer Gioconda, her lover lost to her, her mother vanished, who in her despair was thinking of killing herself.

She could certainly relate to that.

She steadied herself. She forced herself to breathe deeply. Calmness replaced terror. It was Gioconda who opened the door and went to meet her fate.

6

‘Four performances! Conducted by Serafin!’ She danced, giddily swinging both Marta and herself.

Laughing and protesting, Marta said: ‘How much?’

‘Peanuts!’

And again she laughed, while triumph spilled with every breath. What did money matter?

7

August, and the start of the Verona Festival. The arena was bright with the thousands of flickering candles that, by tradition, were lit during the overture to any operatic performance.

Lucia waited. She had gone to another place, deep within herself, far from the world of candleflame and audiences. She was apart, poised, ready to receive and convey the moment of revelation. It was a sacrament in a world where music was breath.

The overture ended. The candles went out.

A masterly performance — Il Gazzettino

Fine musicianship coupled with a magnificent sense of drama — Corriere del Teatro

Vast molten and lyrical sounds … Masterly inflexion … Ethereal beauty contrasted with stark fatalism … A revelation — Corriere della Sera

8

Serafin shook his head fiercely. ‘I strongly advise against it.’

The Festival was over. The only offer Lucia had received was to sing Gioconda again at a small and unimportant theatre near Milan.

‘I must do something. What other offers have I got?’

‘They’ll come. For an artist as talented as yourself, they will come.’

Easily said. Nevertheless, frightened of offending the great conductor, she refused the offer from Milan and went back to the typing pool, bashing out invoices until she was almost cross-eyed and half dead with boredom, waiting for Serafin to be proved right, for offers to flow like miracles from an indifferent world.

Days passed, then weeks. The world, it seemed, had run out of miracles. Then Marta showed up at her workplace.

Indignation like the furious quacking of ducks as the grey-haired woman thrust herself purposefully between the typists at their clattering machines. The manageress threatened to fetch the police.

‘The police, Signora! You hear me? This is the place of business of a famous and respected company! You have no right to come bursting in here.’

Marta turned on her, a termagent in stilt-heeled shoes.

‘This office will be famous, Signora, because of the woman you employ here.’ She gesticulated in Lucia’s direction. ‘This young woman, Madame, is the most talented soprano in Italy! And soon she will be the most famous!’

Marta blew away both manageress and typing pool with her contempt. She turned to Lucia, sitting wide-eyed and motionless at her machine.

‘Catozzo is looking for someone to sing Isolde in Tristan at La Fenice in December. Serafin wants you to audition for the role.’

‘I don’t know it.’

‘Then you must learn. Serafin is expecting you this afternoon. You’ll have to sight-read the score. Once he’s satisfied, they’ll give you a proper contract.’

She sang; Serafin recommended her. She would go to Rome where he would coach her himself. She would sing, she would sing …

The miracles had been late in coming but now, it seemed, they had begun at last.

9

On its home turf, Venice’s Il Gazzettino was as supportive as ever. This living miracle …

After Isolde, Catozzo offered her the role of Turandot, which she sang in January of 1949.

In April she sang the same role in Rome, and it was there, at a dinner in her honour, that she met a man who briefly swept her off her feet.

Harry Lassiter was at least twenty years older than she was, tanned and spare, with dark eyes and a mane of grey hair. He was, he informed her cheerfully, recently divorced.

‘I’m sorry …’ She did not know what to say.

He shrugged. ‘It happens.’

‘You sound as though you’re used to it.’

‘Clarice was number three.’

He chuckled as though it was a joke to have married and failed three times in — what? — thirty years. It would normally have put her right off him but for some reason did not. He was a man confident both in himself and the world in which he moved. Confident with her, too. She was growing used to men who were intimidated by the up-and-coming diva; Harry was not like that at all, and it was a refreshing change. She liked him. He was charming, he made her laugh, he showed her a good time. The three failed marriages no longer seemed important. She thought it would be easy to fall in love with such a man. She realised later that she had been lonely, her identity lost behind the voice that more and more was becoming the centre and focus of her existence. It made her an easy target for Harry’s practised skills.

After their first night together, she felt she had been operated on by an expert. After each performance she could not wait to get back to the hotel where she knew he would be waiting in her suite. She was getting out of her clothes before the door was shut behind her. He transported her, again and again, into a writhing ecstasy. And yet …

Perhaps it was his technique, bringing her so effortlessly to climax, that left her unsatisfied. Because technique was all it was. It was fun, but there was nothing more. She had thought she would discover his hidden depths but there were no hidden depths to discover.

They were together a month, then she moved on to Genoa. He gave her a valuable miniature, they parted friends; she thought of him kindly, but the relationship held no future for either of them. She thought how lucky she was to have found out in time. Now it was back to her career, and the real world.

She was a great hit in Genoa. Then, in September, she went on to Udine.

Her mother’s country. Lucia paid Helena duty visits from time to time; now her finances were improving she was able to send her a little money but they were not truly reconciled. Now she asked her whether she would come to Udine to see her first appearance in La Forza del Destino. To her surprise, her mother accepted.

They had dinner together after the performance. Helena was only fifty, yet disappointment had drawn deep furrows in her cheeks and she looked ten years older than her years. She said: ‘Things are going well for you?’

‘I’ve been getting a reputation. More and more people are beginning to hear about me.’

‘When are you going to appear at La Scala or any of the other major theatres? Paris, London, New York?’

‘When they invite me.’

‘Don’t let them keep you waiting too long.’

Lucia was exasperated, not because Helena was saying these things but because she was right. La Fenice apart, no major opera house had shown any interest in her at all, whereas Teresa Sciotto, or so the papers said, had just enjoyed an epic triumph in San Francisco.

‘I’ll write and tick them off.’

Some of her irritation must have shown in her voice; Helena looked at her with an expression at once combative and sardonic, proud and contemptuous.

‘You need to do something.’

Once again, she was right. Udine had been another triumph, yet Lucia returned to Parma out of sorts with herself and the world, with no new engagements in sight.

Once again she was missing her father, not the stranger she had met after the war but the father she would have had if she’d stayed in the mallee, the man whose silent but kindly presence peopled her earliest memories. She would have liked him to be proud of her; only success, absolute and unqualified, would compensate for losing him. She told Marta Bianci she was getting nowhere.

‘Maybe I should’ve stayed in Australia, after all.’

Marta had a way of dealing with such nonsense.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’

She spoke to Serafin, Serafin to Siciliani, director of the Teatro Comunale in Florence, and Lucia was once again summoned to an audition.

Siciliani was planning to put on a performance of Madama Butterfly but Lucia was too fat. She had never forgotten the comments about Sciotto. Even if the role were offered to her, she would not accept it; no-one was going to call her a sumo wrestler. Instead she sang excerpts from Tristan‚ Gioconda and Turandot.

Siciliani listened courteously but she sensed she had not won him. Instinctively she turned to the mad scene from I Puritani.

She saw his expression change and knew she had done it.

When she had finished, the director grabbed a phone, rang Florence and began to shout excitedly into the mouthpiece.

‘Forget Butterfly! You hear me? I have found the most amazing soprano and we shall open the season with Norma.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

1

High priestess Norma, her virginity sacred to the gods, leads the Gauls in their resistance to Rome.

Unbeknown to the clan, however, Norma has fallen in love with Pollione, the Roman commander, by whom she has had two children.

Adalgisa, Norma’s young assistant, confesses she has fallen in love with a man. Norma, mindful of her own guilt, is willing to forgive the sacrilege but, when she discovers that Adalgisa’s lover is Pollione, her attitude changes.

Pollione is captured by the Gauls. Norma makes him an offer: renounce Adalgisa and she will let him go.

He refuses and she declares war against Rome. She reminds Pollione that the fate of both himself and Adalgisa is in her hands. However, when she comes to make the accusation against the young priestess who has betrayed her vows, her guilt overwhelms her and she names herself instead. The tribe demands vengeance for her betrayal: death by fire. Her own father denounces her but she persuades him to take pity on her children. She and Pollione mount the funeral pyre together, hoping to find in the flames expiation for their sacrilege.

2

There was a challenge here. The role of Norma required a dramatic soprano of prodigious agility, able to sing unsupported far above the stave and with enough power and technique to convey in both musical and dramatic terms the essence of the character. Yet even this was not enough. The role of Norma — the priestess guilt-ridden by her own sacrilege, the betrayed woman, the wronged and vengeful mother — was so central to the action that it was upon the quality of its interpretation that the success or failure of the entire opera depended.

Lucia knew it would be the greatest challenge she had faced. Triumph, and the world of opera would be hers. Fail, and she might as well retire.

She was not ready to retire.

She decided to gamble. It was a role where sweetness of tone had traditionally taken preference over dramatic impact; she made up her mind she was going to change that. Drama would come first; the harshness of her furious denunciations of the man who had betrayed her would take the place of the saccharine sweetness that might be traditional but made neither impact nor sense. Norma was a woman in love; she was victim, mother, friend and, at the last, the priestess who could not escape the implacable demands of her faith. To turn such a character into a simpering concert performance of dulcet notes was unthinkable.

No; Lucia would be a dramatic, singing actress or she would be nothing.

Which it would be, the public would have to decide.

3

The ever-loyal Gazzettino blared triumph.

A performance beyond parallel brought to last night’s audience a level of dramatic interpretation seldom before seen on this or any stage.

The critic of La Nazione was less certain.

Although Visconti has a powerful and secure voice, particularly in the upper register, her phrasing and vocal colour are unusual and will not appeal to all.

Il Mondo also had its doubts about what it called a disturbing reading of the part.

The critics were all very well but it was the public’s verdict that mattered. Sick with apprehension, Lucia waited; there had been applause but she had sensed the audience’s uncertainty at being confronted by something new and unexpected. Her interpretation had challenged them. The traditionally inclined would not have liked it, that was certain, but she would not allow herself to be discouraged. The future — her own as well as art’s — lay with those willing to think, to embrace the new.

As always at times of crisis, she fled to Parma and the consoling arms of Marta Bianci. Only here would she permit her inner doubts to surface.

‘What shall I do if they didn’t like it?’

Marta did what she could to comfort her. ‘Of course they liked it. You read what they said in Il Gazzettino, didn’t you?’

She told herself that Marta was right; she would be brave. She put as good a face on it as she could. She went to smart restaurants, she caught up with friends, she smiled, radiant with confidence, at those who seemed to recognise her, as well as those who did not. For three days she heard nothing. Everything hung in the balance. Then the dam burst in a flurry of offers.

Brünnhilde in Walküre; Kundry in Parsifal; Leonora in Trovatore. Aïda, Nabucco, Macbeth. And Norma, Norma, Norma …

Lucia, to the sound of trumpets and clashing cymbals, had arrived.

4

For weeks, as she tried to come to terms with her new situation, Lucia felt she was walking through the world on charmed feet. Sunlight warmed her; even the air had a golden aura. Despair had become a thing of the past. She told herself that from now on tranquillity and purpose would be the measure of her days. She would rehearse, meticulously. She would work with the other singers, with directors, conductors and designers to produce before a succession of delighted audiences works of art eclipsing anything they had known before. Each performance would be a triumph. Her vision, clear and free of doubt, was of a path running towards a future as clear and serenely beautiful as a lake. Things didn’t work out like that. Afterwards, she told herself she was a fool for ever having imagined they might.

5

In 1951 she was under contract to sing Walküre in Venice. She had been working on it for several weeks. One morning she had an appointment with Serafin at his apartment but when she got there the conductor was out. It was unlike him to miss an appointment and his wife apologised, explaining that he was at his wit’s end with anxiety. He was scheduled to conduct a performance of I Puritani the following week and his lead singer had gone down with acute laryngitis.

‘There must be someone else‚’ Lucia said.

‘To sing the role of Elvira?’

It was true that the part, with its demands far beyond the scope of most coloratura sopranos, was one of the hardest in opera. ‘Tullio says there isn’t anybody.’

Lucia looked thoughtful. ‘Is that so?’

She prowled, each step taking her closer to the piano that stood in the corner of the large drawing room.

‘Perhaps …’

Closer still.

‘… he hasn’t been looking …’

Now, as though by chance, her hand was resting on the piano.

‘… in the right place?’

She lifted the lid. Idly, she struck one or two notes, seemingly at random. Chords formed, became a melody. Softly, Lucia sang.

‘O rendetemi la speme, o lasciatemi morir …’

Oh give me back my faith or let me die … Her voice touched the last word delicately, the sound drifting in the air like the gift or promise of beauty.

Lucia smiled. ‘Forgive me for this. I must go. Please tell the Maestro I called.’

Lucia was asleep. The phone woke her. She stared groggily at the time. Seven o’clock? She thought of letting it ring but the incessant jangle jarred her nerves and she snatched the receiver, prepared to blast the caller to hell.

‘Yes?’

‘Serafin …’

At once her mood, and her voice, moderated. ‘Maestro? Is something wrong?’

‘Are you dressed?’

‘I’m in bed.’

‘Put some clothes on and come around here right away.’

‘I’m not ready. I —’

‘Never mind prettying yourself up! You’re pretty enough already. It’s your voice I want.’

Crash went the phone. She scrubbed her face with a flannel, brushed teeth and hair, rushed lipstick, slung on clothes. She was out of there in ten minutes, calling for a taxi, telling him to hurry, roaring through the empty streets. All the way she sang, notes and trills, crescendos and rallentandos, increasing both the range and volume until, voice thoroughly warmed up, she was letting fly with everything she had as the taxi swerved around the final bend, almost clipping the pavement, the driver watching her in part amazement, part awe, in the mirror.

He screeched to a standstill. He kissed his fingers. ‘Beautiful! Magnificent!’

‘Wish me luck!’

She thrust notes into his hand, giving him her most brilliant smile. She ran stumbling across the street and rang the bell. She turned; the taxi was still waiting. She waved to the driver who again kissed his fingers to her. Behind her the door opened.

‘Come in!’

There were three people in the drawing room: Serafin and his wife and Dominico Allesandro, the opera impressario who was responsible for staging I Puritani and who stood to lose most if the performances had to be cancelled.

Serafin wasted no time. ‘My wife tells me I should listen to your Elvira.’

‘Oh. I don’t know. I’m not sure …’

Signora Serafin said: ‘Sing him what you sang yesterday.’

‘But that was just playing around … A few notes …’

‘Do it!’

The piano stood open. Serafin marched across and sat down. He struck a hammer blow of chords; energy crackled like flame.

‘Sing!’

And she sang; firstly the brief segment she had sung the previous evening, then she switched to another section before concluding with the ecstatic climax.

The piano died, the chords faded. Silence, while Lucia stood like a post and three sets of eyes stared at each other.

Signora Serafin had herself been a noted singer. She said: ‘You’ve found her.’

Serafin swivelled on the piano stool to look up at Lucia. ‘Are you familiar with the part?’

So much depended on her answer. It was too important to lie, but she lied anyway. ‘I know it, yes.’

Allesandro grunted. ‘Even if she doesn’t, she’s the one we want.’

Talking about her as though she were not in the room. Lucia decided to push her luck.

‘My voice is too dark for Elvira, too heavy. Besides, there’s Walküre.’

‘She’ll have to do them both,’ said Allesandro.

Serafin was watching her.

‘The voice is fine. To me, there’s only one question: can you be ready in time?’

‘How long have I got?’

‘One week.’

It was crazy; impossible. Never mind what she’d told them; she’d never studied the score at all. What she’d sung here today was all she knew. She said: ‘Of course I’ll be ready.’

‘I’ll speak to your manager,’ Allesandro said. ‘Agree terms, that sort of thing. You’ve got work to do.’

Indeed. A whirlwind of work engulfed her. She hardly slept. She studied the score, she worked for hours every day with the conductor, she slept, dreamed and ate the part. She was Elvira in the bath, walking in the street, sitting in the taxis that she could not afford but that she took anyway to save time. With Elvira, she teetered upon the borderline dividing sanity and madness. She would have lived the part in every waking and sleeping moment but could not, because the demands of Walküre intervened.

In that frenzied week she sang the role of Brünnhilde twice, each time to wild applause. Now her dreams were invaded by a double image: of herself with spear and helmet amid a mountain landscape, riding out to defend Siegmund in his battle with Hunding; of herself balanced precariously between reason and insanity, fantasy and reality, demonstrating through a dramatic coloratura the fragility that carried her first to one side of the line, then the other.

The full dress rehearsal of I Puritani took place on the same day as her last appearance as Brünnhilde, by which time she felt that she was about to join Elvira in the wilderness of madness.

Tension wound ever tighter. It reached the point of fracture. She rounded furiously on the conductor.

‘You demand the impossible!’

Serafin smiled. ‘I know. No-one else could do it. But you can. And you will.’

It was the best thing he could have said, challenge and encouragement combined. She went home to her hotel, repeating his words again and again to herself.

You can do it. And you will. You will.

Three days after Walküre closed, Lucia Visconti opened as Elvira in Bellini’s I Puritani.

Visconti’s portrayal of Elvira is nothing short of a miracle. The warmth and expressiveness of her interpretation cannot be found in any other Elvira and places her in the highest class of classical actresses. Her limpid tone and impeccable high notes were a revelation made all the more astonishing by the knowledge that this same performer was only three days earlier giving us an entirely convincing portrayal of the great Wagnerian role of Brünnhilde in Die Walküre. Such versatility is nothing short of phenomenal — Il Gazzettino

Two years later, in a review of Visconti’s emergent career and her recently acquired status as an operatic superstar, the New York critic Harold Sondheim wrote:

Coupled with her concurrent interpretation of Brünnhilde, it was the Pirandello-like reading of Elvira’s fluctuations between madness and sanity combined with the sheer beauty and inventiveness of her rich melodic line that set Visconti upon the path to her present well-deserved dominance of the operatic stage in the mid-twentieth century.

A triumph, indeed. Yet the nature of operatic triumph was that it never gave the performer the chance to sit back and enjoy her glory. Within days, with offers coming in by every post, Lucia was on her way, first to Turin, then to Palermo and finally across the Atlantic to South America.

She had arrived, or thought she had arrived.

Once again, she was wrong. With every step forward, the objective moved further away from her. Fame, glory, above all artistic integrity became elusive targets that she could never capture. The greater her success, the more they evaded her. Slowly she came to realise that the artistic temperament could never, by its nature, be satisfied. Always there would be another hill to climb, beyond that another hill. Beyond what she had believed would be perfection lay the quest for something more. There was no ultimate summit. Like all artists, she was committed to an endless search for the unattainable.

6

She sang Elsa in a production of Lohengrin in Vienna, under the conductor von Karajan. After the first rehearsal, she asked to see him privately.

He agreed, then kept her waiting an hour. When she finally got to see him, he was abrupt to the point of rudeness.

‘I’m in a hurry. What is it?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about a scene in the second act.’ She laid the open score in front of him. He stared at it, then at her.

‘What about it?’

She would not have come to see him had she not been convinced she was right; nevertheless he was a world-famous conductor, far above her in the musical world, so she deliberately turned her complaint into a question.

‘I wonder whether we aren’t perhaps taking it a little too slowly? From the score, it seems to me that Wagner wanted —’

‘That is not your province. That is for the conductor to decide. You are there to sing. Only that.’

She quaked to her boots but would not give way. Instead she changed her approach; no longer would she speak apologetically when she saw no reason to do so. ‘If you will allow me to explain …’

‘Never justify, never explain! You will find it a good rule.’

He smiled superciliously; he thought he had been too much for her. But she was not beaten yet.

‘If we take it so slowly, it drags. It’s impossible to get maximum feeling out of it like that. Everyone in the cast feels the same.’

‘So you’re telling me you’re incapable of singing it the way I want, the way I expect? Very well, I shall have to find a better cast.’

If he’d thought to browbeat her he had another think coming; the conductor, never mind how famous he was, did not have a monopoly on arrogance. ‘But, Maestro, we are the best.’

He stared at her, eyes like the Arctic, mouth a thin line. He said: ‘Another thing. I do not wish you to go on attending orchestral rehearsals. It is not the custom and it unsettles the players.’

Again she stood up to this man who seemed determined to put her in a place that she did not regard as her own. She gave him a look as cold as his. ‘Maestro, aren’t the singers expected to be the first instruments in the orchestra?’

He would not give a millimetre. ‘That decision is also mine.’

There they might have left it, had he not raised the issue again at the next rehearsal.

She was halfway through Elsa’s impassioned appeal for Lohengrin’s protection against Ortrud, when he rapped the podium with his baton, bringing matters to a halt. With extravagant courtesy he asked her:

‘Is the tempo right for you?’

‘It’s fine, Maestro.’

‘You’re sure you can manage it? You don’t find it impossible?’

She took a deep breath. ‘As I said, it’s fine.’

He smiled waggishly at the orchestra. ‘You can’t imagine what a relief that is to me. Madame Visconti has told me she has problems with my reading of the score.’

Fury. ‘I said what everyone else is thinking …’

Again the staccato crack of the baton. ‘Continue! From the top of the page!’

The orchestra, schooled in his icy tantrums, obeyed. Lucia suspected he was hoping she would not come in but she did, on key and at the right place. She was not stupid enough to give him the chance of putting her in the wrong.

Even now the fight was not over. That night she saw him in the famous Apfelgarten restaurant in the middle of the city. He was with a young woman she did not recognise. As a matter of courtesy, she stopped at his table on her way out to say goodnight. He neither looked up nor acknowledged her greeting. Instead he smiled unpleasantly as he spoke confidingly to his companion. ‘Madame Visconti is a singer of the second rank with ambitions to be a conductor. She believes her duties include teaching me how to interpret Richard Wagner.’

Lucia said, ‘My pleasure, Maestro. I was pleased to note that you were following my suggestion.’

And swept out, nose in the rafters. Second rate, indeed! She’d show him.

7

Overnight she had become in demand. She could have filled her diary with engagements, but only at the less important opera houses. The major centres — Milan, London, New York — remained closed to her. Until she had conquered them she had no effective answer to Karajan’s gibe. She did what she could. She besieged them endlessly, enrolling support from other singers, conductors, anyone she could find who might be willing to help her. Nothing worked. The word had got out about her run-in with Karajan. Somehow, in the retelling of the incident, it was she and not the conductor who had been blamed for the incident. People were saying she was unreasonable, difficult, impossible. Karajan was questioned about it; his suave answer did not attribute blame, neither did it exonerate her. The story was that the great houses, who could be as choosy as they liked, were wary of a woman who some people said might be more trouble than she was worth.

Then came another incident. Teresa Sciotto, back from the United States and sensing a challenge from her old enemy, took steps to stir up more trouble.

Interviewed on Italian radio about her tour of the Americas, she confided that she had been relieved that her itinerary had not included more South American engagements.

‘To sing in some of those countries whose systems of government remind me so much of our own past would have made me acutely uncomfortable. Anyone who suffered during the fascist years, as so many of us did, would have felt the same. I think someone like Lucia Visconti would be better suited than I to performing under those sorts of regimes. And — who knows? — it might give her a chance to catch up with her old friend — what was his name? — Colonel Strasser, of the SS.’ She laughed deliciously, agreed to sing a brief aria for the benefit of the listeners, and that might have been the end of it.

It was not.

‘I’ll kill the bitch!’ Lucia vowed.

Who could blame her? But how to do it without ruining herself? As Marta Bianci had warned, Teresa had taken full advantage of Lucia’s absence in Australia. She was flavour of the month with the top opera houses; an attack on her might be construed, most dangerously, as an attack on them.

It was a puzzle and for the moment she did nothing.

Then Teresa repeated her accusations, or something like them, on Turin radio, and two weeks later, singing Amina in La Sonnambula at the Catania Opera, Lucia was booed for the first time.

She didn’t know what to do. To go on ignoring the allegation wouldn’t serve; emboldened, thinking Lucia afraid, Teresa’s attacks would only become worse. A simple denial wouldn’t serve, either. That wouldn’t stop Teresa, and the extra publicity caused by the denial might give greater credibility to the original accusation. All her instincts demanded she fight, but how? She could not think what to do for the best so, for the moment, she sat tight and hoped the scandal would pass.

It did not. The aptly named Il Letamaio — The Dung Heap — was a rag that had built a huge circulation on the basis of sleaze and outright lies. Now it decided to get in on the act. It sent what it called an investigative journalist to Montegallo to dig out what he could. A month later his findings were blazed all over its front page.

VISCONTI’S FASCIST LINKS REVEALED!

It included an interview with Signora Vertecchi, the woman whose uncle had been killed during one of the Repubblichini’s raids

— wouldn’t have hurt a fly, and that bitch was in the village the very next day to gloat, it’s a miracle to me the partisans never got around to sorting her out, we should’ve done something about it ourselves but what could we do with all our men either dead or deported by the Germans?

They had dug out eyewitness accounts of how Lucia had sung at the dedication of the war memorial at Redipuglia

— standing right there at Mussolini’s side, mind you, bold as brass, I saw her myself, of course everyone knew her mother was having it off with him, why not, she was screwing everyone else, what about that fascist bastard our boys executed at the end of the war, they had to drag him out of her bed, for God’s sake, they should have shaved her head, and what about that SS gangster, Strasser his name was, they were pretty close, why she even sang for the SS in Parma …

All in all it made a satisfying story for those who enjoyed believing the worst of everyone.

While Teresa denied all knowledge. She refused an interview with Il Letamaio. To the Corriere della Sera she said: ‘My reference to Colonel Strasser was because it was common knowledge that Visconti had been close to him, and a lot of senior SS officers did end up in South America, after all. As for the rest … I would prefer not to comment. I think we should all try to turn our backs on those terrible times.’

Having lit the fire, Teresa was content to stand back and watch it burn.

8

Marta — true, loyal Marta — did what she could. On Lucia’s behalf she wrote to all the leading papers to deny the accusations. She contacted her friends throughout the opera business, she laid the blame squarely on Teresa Sciotto’s shoulders for having started what she called a deliberate, malicious campaign to discredit a singer and rival of whom she had every reason to be afraid.

When she met Teresa in public she cut her dead, as dramatically as possible.

It helped, to some degree, but Il Letamaio was read by thousands, and people believed what they wanted to believe. Then Il Gazzettino published an interview with Arturo Nelli, the tobacconist who had been a partisan leader in the Montegallo district.

All this talk of Lucia Visconti helping the Fascists is rubbish. She was responsible, at considerable danger to herself, for giving us the tip-off that resulted in the execution of the Repubblichini guards officer Eduardo Grandini. Lucia Visconti is a true patriot and anyone who says anything else is a liar.

Suddenly Teresa was back-pedalling for all she was worth. Cornered by the media, she said: ‘I never believed for a moment that Visconti betrayed her country.’

Of course that sort of retraction never makes as good a headline as the original accusation but it helped, especially among those who understood the ways of the world and of opera singers. While Il Letamaio, no longer interested, had discovered more promising sewers to investigate.

Teresa Sciotto and Lucia met publicly for the first time since the furore began and, for the benefit of the cameras, made a demonstration of their undying devotion.

They hugged and hugged, beaming ecstatically, as such friends should.

‘Bitch!’ whispered Lucia, slowly grinding her sharp nails into the soft flesh of Teresa’s shoulders.

‘Slut!’ said Teresa, smiling so much that Lucia hoped she might dislocate her jaw.

Such touching sincerity! Such close and genuine friends! Slowly the affair died. For the present.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

1

Lucia met Jacques Mazetta in July 1953 at a party in a mansion on the outskirts of Paris. The owner of the mansion was a financier whose contributions had made him a figure of importance in the world of opera, which was the only reason Lucia was there at all. It was the type of party she hated. She hated the over-furnished rooms and the obsessive concern with which the twittering mob of guests treated her, as though she were a hand grenade primed to go off at any moment; most of all she hated being a celebrity because of the burden of graciousness it placed upon her. Everywhere was the shriek of what passed for conversation, most of it inane. From the first it had been a disaster. On arrival she’d been cornered by a man with a face and beard like a moth-eaten goat, an academic who cast lascivious glances at her cleavage while assailing her with opinions gleaned from the latest trendy magazine.

‘Loulou Chantemps was saying that opera’s no more than the exhalations of a doomed and privileged society.’

He beamed at her, inviting her to join him in his orgy of self-admiration.

She smiled and smiled, and said: ‘I’ve never met anyone who mocks that kind of pretentious nonsense as effectively as you do. And with a straight face, too. Irony is such a wonderful gift; I can’t tell you how much I admire you for it.’

And slid away while he was still trying to work out whether she’d insulted him or not.

There were little dishes of this and that. Finger foods were all the rage but Lucia had never learned how to balance a plate in one hand, a glass of warm wine in the other, keep a firm grip on both handbag and temper and carry on snippets of mindless conversation with complete strangers. She slopped her glass and swore, not quite beneath her breath.

‘It’s not enough to be an opera singer. You’ve got to be a juggler to survive this,’ someone said behind her.

She turned. A man was smiling at her. He carried neither plate nor glass nor even handbag, which made a change from some she’d seen here this evening. Indeed, he didn’t seem the sort of person who frequented parties of this kind at all. He was tall, lean and hard, with a deeply tanned face and close-cropped dark hair. He was wearing faded blue jeans, a blue woollen open-necked shirt with long sleeves and buttoned cuffs. In this company of Dior gowns and paunchy millionaires, he looked like an eagle in a pigeon loft. Lucia noticed all this in the second it took her to answer him.

‘It goes with the territory.’

‘Don’t you ever get sick of it?’

‘When things get too much I find a bolt hole somewhere. A week or two of peace and quiet soon sorts me out.’

‘Where do you go? Italy?’

‘Usually. It’s convenient and I like it.’

‘And you’re Italian, after all.’

‘Only on my mother’s side.’

He raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘Lucia Visconti?’

‘That’s my trade name, the name the world knows. My real name is different but only my closest friends use it.’

‘Another bolt hole.’

It was not a question and she did not answer it. Instead she had a question of her own.

‘Do you have any connection with the theatre?’

‘I’m a journalist with Le Travailleur.’ It was a Paris paper, well known for its left-wing views, but his accent was not Parisian.

‘Where are you from?’

‘The desert south of Algiers. I’m a French Algerian. What they call a pied noir.’

‘You’re like me, then, with two countries. Do you ever get back?’

‘Sometimes. My father’s a country schoolmaster. Now there’s a bolt hole, if you like. Nothing but the desert, and the mountains far away.’

‘What brings you here tonight?’

‘You. I’ve lots of your records. And our host is a director of the paper I work for. I wanted to meet you, so I asked him.’

Lucia was used to people wanting to meet her but she already sensed this man was not like other men.

‘Why did you want to meet me?’

‘I’ve a million things to ask you.’

She saw that his eyes were the same colour as his shirt. He gestured at the room about them and said: ‘I hate these things. Any chance of slipping away?’

‘Not for me, I’m afraid. I’m the guest of honour. I’m amazed they’ve left us alone as long as they have.’

She saw their host powering his way towards them, a supertanker through a fleet of dinghies. ‘I think we’re out of time. I don’t even know your name.’

‘Jacques Mazetta. Are you staying in Paris?’

‘At the Grand Charles.’

‘May I phone you?’

She hesitated, then smiled. ‘Why not?’

2

Jacques didn’t phone; he turned up at the hotel at eleven o’clock the following morning, while she was in the bath. She left him to cool his heels in reception while she finished getting ready, then phoned to invite him up to the suite. Her maid let him in. Lucia sat, half swallowed by the softly cushioned settee, and studied him in silence. He stared back at her, accepting and returning her scrutiny. Today he was wearing navy blue trousers and a white shirt, very smart, but still with no tie. She said: ‘I thought we agreed you would phone me.’

‘This way was easier.’

She raised an eyebrow. He corrected himself. ‘More enjoyable. I can watch and listen at the same time.’

He seemed remarkably self-possessed, yet not offensively so. She seldom met a man who was neither over-assertive nor deferential; the novelty pleased her. Maria, the maid, brought them coffee. Lucia stirred her cup and looked at him across the low table that separated them.

‘You said you had a million things to ask me. What are they?’

He lifted his cup and drank, taking his time about it. He grinned. ‘All of a sudden I can’t think of a single one.’

‘Then you’ve lost your chance. I’m due at the recording studios in an hour.’

‘Ever get time off?’

‘Occasionally. Why do you ask?’

‘If I could remember all the questions I wanted to ask you, maybe we could spend some time together.’

‘I don’t think that excuse will work twice.’

‘You could come anyway.’

‘Why should I do that?’

‘I’d like you to. And I think we might be good for each other.’

Maria had brought croissants with the coffee. Lucia spread one with cherry jam and ate it slowly while he looked at her. When she had finished, she wiped her fingers and mouth carefully with her napkin. She knew how foolish it would be to agree. She said: ‘I would like that.’

3

They took a riverboat down the Seine. Lucia had never made the trip before but it was not the novelty alone that excited her. To be surrounded by ordinary people who didn’t know or care who she was gave her a sense of freedom that she had forgotten existed. Time, no longer an enemy, became something of infinite grace. There was time to look at the buildings on either bank, to go ashore at a wooden jetty, drink an aperitif and laugh; time to regain her sense of communion with a world from which she had been too long apart. Time, later, to go back to the hotel with him and be tempted and resist temptation, if only for the present. Time, finally, to play mind games, imagining days and nights with this man who had sprung so extraordinarily out of nowhere.

‘What’s your real name?’ he asked.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because you are the person I’m interested in, not the famous singer.’

‘Is the singer not real?’

‘Fame distorts everything. It’s impossible to see past it to the real person.’

‘Even for me?’

‘For you most of all.’

He waited, smiling faintly, head on one side.

‘Lucy,’ she said eventually. ‘Lucy Fisher.’

‘Lucy …’ He tasted the sound of the name on his tongue. ‘I like it. I’ll call you that in future. If I may.’

‘In future? You believe in a future?’

‘Of course.’

He was very confident; she hoped he was right but had her doubts.

4

She sang Norma at Covent Garden, five performances in eight days. Each night the tumultuous crowd besieged her with its love. She went back to the hotel prostrate with exhaustion. She was ready to weep, tear strips off the world. Why do I do it? Why?

And answered her own question, sweeping with brilliant smile through the hotel lobby in the theatrical entrance that had become as much a part of her legend as the performances themselves.

I have no choice.

Because this was her life: the meticulous preparation, the step-by-step entry into the character, the rehearsals and performance, artifice concealed by technique, the emotional giving of herself, even the exhaustion. She had come to believe this was all there was. No more; she marvelled she could have been so deluded. The performances anguished her as much as ever but now all was well. In place of the emptiness she had known in the past, the sense of being left alone in a high, cold place, there was peace and security and warmth. Because Jacques, on a London assignment for his paper, was there. Jacques as friend and consolation. Her strong arm. Her rock.

Not yet her lover.

She told herself, and him, that it was too soon, that she was not ready. It caused strain between them. Within herself, too. Her body demanded what her emotions were unready to give. She could not do it.

‘Why?’

She understood his frustration but could do nothing about it. She shook her head, unable to explain even to herself. She needed a holiday. An image came of tranquillity and rest. From London she was flying to Paris, where she was contracted to sing Elvira in I Puritani, then on to Verona for a performance of Aïda in the vast open-air amphitheatre. She said: ‘I shall take a break after Verona.’

Three blessed weeks of peace. She’d find somewhere quiet in Tuscany, Siena perhaps. She would have the chance to escape into green forests, to ride on horseback beneath the spreading latticework of trees. She would read, swim, sleep. She would become one again.

Jacques said: ‘I’ve some leave owing to me. I’d thought I might take some time off, too.’

Her raised eyebrow spoke volumes. ‘In Italy?’

‘Where else? I thought, if I managed to find a quiet villa, then perhaps …’

‘Yes?’

‘I wondered if you’d come with me.’

She felt a slow unclenching of her heart and breath. She said: ‘Don’t you feel that might be a foolish thing to do? For both of us? Given the nature of our careers?’

‘Very foolish. But I would like it. I would like it very much.’

Silence.

He asked: ‘Will you come?’

Breath stood still in her lungs. ‘Yes,’ she said.

She flew to Paris, telling herself she was counting the days.

5

Through the window of her apartment, Elvira sees the courtyard of the castle, the battlements enclosing what has been her home but is now her prison, because her father has prohibited her marriage to Arturo, whom she loves. Her uncle releases her from her anguish by bringing her the news that her father has relented and will now permit the marriage to go ahead. Elvira breaks out in a passionate cry of delight: Ah, quest’alma al duolo avezza, è si vinta dal gioia.

In her head Lucia translated the words into French, German, English. Because joy, surely, should be universal.

My grieving spirit is overcome by happiness.

Elvira’s cry painted bright pictures across the walls of Lucia’s imagination. For so long she had been alone, at war with her art and the world, taught by her mother’s example to trust no-one. The lost land of her childhood. The friends she had been denied. Eduardo, dragged to his death. Her mother’s voice saying, I shall never forgive you. For so long joy had been a stranger to her. Now, perhaps, that would change.

6

She had no idea where in Italy Jacques was taking her. She imagined them exploring little villages together, sipping aperitifs outside tiny restaurants, strolling the sun-drenched cobbled streets where the villagers lived their lives. They would lean their backs against the stone of ancient walls. Their eyes would touch, and their fingers. They would smile, talk softly, be silent. They would be. That most of all. The cool splash of fountains soothed her dreams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

1

Jacques would tell her nothing except that it was a villa, not far from the sea, at a place called Gentile, near the town of Sorrento on the Amalfi coast of southern Italy. ‘You’ll have to wait until you see it.’

She laughed, going along with his games. ‘What if I hate it?’

‘You won’t.’

They flew into Sorrento and rented a small Fiat. The road led uphill through a succession of villages sleeping in sunlight. They passed silver-grey olive groves and small farms. Mules trod in patient circles around crushing stones, while chickens flew from beneath their wheels in a cacophony of clucking terror. At every corner they saw, beyond tree-clad slopes, the blue glint of the sea.

Jacques rubbed his cheek with a tanned hand, frowning at the hand-held map. ‘It’s easier to navigate the Atlas Mountains.’

Eventually they found the turning. They entered a bumpy track that meandered through the shadowed coolness of overhanging trees. After a hundred metres the branches opened to reveal the sky; they had reached their destination. ‘Close your eyes!’

She protested, laughing. ‘You’ve never seen it, either.’

‘I’ve seen the photographs.’

Once again she went along. Jacques guided her out of the car and across the roughness of open ground. She felt a cool breeze on her face. The roughness gave way to what she thought was brick paving. There was the smell of sun-dried vegetation, of rocks and parched earth. Insects sang in the heat. Somewhere a bird called somnolently, drugged by the sun.

He stopped her, arms about her.

‘Open your eyes.’

She did so, squinting a little in the sudden brightness.

‘Oh, my dear …’

They were standing on a brick-paved terrace beside a house. There was a wooden table with four chairs positioned to take in the view. A wall, less than a metre high, ran around the perimeter of the terrace. Beyond it the ground fell steeply through rough scrub to a valley, patterned with lines of olive trees, that ran between softly contoured hills to the sea. On the far side of a wide bay smoke wreathed the summit of a cone-shaped mountain. ‘Vesuvius …’

Hydrangeas grew in one corner of the terrace. Behind them another wall was broken by half a dozen stone steps that led to the house, its square-cut walls softened by the red and white flowers of bougainvillea, with the turquoise glint of a small swimming pool beyond. Jacques turned to her, as proud as though he’d built it himself.

‘So?’

She hugged him. ‘It’s wonderful. I can’t wait to see what it’s like inside.’

He had the key; they went indoors into coolness. The house was a rabbit warren. The living room had an open fireplace, its bricks blackened by soot. Doors opened to a second terrace, enclosed by iron railings, running around the front of the house. Two steps led down to a dining room, large and dark, with an archway to the kitchen. Upstairs were three bedrooms and two bathrooms. The largest room had a big double bed and polished wooden floors, and its windows looked down the valley to the sea. Lucia threw them wide, setting the gaily coloured curtains stirring in the breeze. She smiled at Jacques. ‘It’s so big! Are we expecting guests?’

‘Certainly not. But I like space to move, don’t you? There’s another room beyond the dining room. You missed that.’

They went down to inspect it. It was the biggest room in the house, with low ceilings and windows that also faced the sea. There were settees, deeply cushioned, a record player and shelves full of books. There was a piano.

She stared, then turned to him. ‘How did you manage the piano?’

‘We’re here for three weeks. You’ll need to practise. I told the agents I wouldn’t take the house without it, so they arranged it for me. I couldn’t get a Steinway but at least it’s tuned.’ He smiled into her eyes, very close. ‘Lucy,’ he said.

Oh God, the use of her name removed any lingering doubts. She put her arms around him, not speaking, while tears pricked her eyes. He guided her; he, too, without words. There were the stairs in front of them, the bedroom with its windows open to the breeze. There was a fluttering of nerves, her heartbeat so loud that she thought he must hear it. There was a meeting of eyes, of flesh. There was a mounting urgency, the faraway sound of her own voice crying out. Finally, seeming the most natural of things, there was a new beginning and a new fulfilment.

Afterwards she slipped on a white towelling robe, Jacques a pair of shorts. They went through the house again. All the rooms were painted white, the flagged floors brightened by rugs rich with patterns of red and blue. There were deep chairs with lights beside them for reading, occasional tables. Copper utensils hung in rows along the kitchen walls. The mouths of glass jars were closed by wooden tops. Lucia prised one open and the smell of fresh thyme came up to her. Everywhere was simple comfort and space. Everywhere was delight.

She went out to the brick-paved terrace and sat in one of the chairs facing the sea. The bricks were rough beneath her bare feet. The breeze blew cool on her face, the bird was still making its solitary call, across the bay Vesuvius slept beneath its cap of smoke. She said: ‘It’s more wonderful than I could ever have imagined.’

She was delighted by the house, the view, the prospect of spending weeks here together; even the tender bruising of her flesh seemed to accentuate her feelings of tranquillity and delight. Above all she was filled by her awareness of the man who had introduced her to joy, made all things perfect and whom now she valued beyond treasure.

Earlier Jacques had put a bottle of wine to cool in the fridge. Now they had a glass each, sitting side by side and looking out at the view.

‘Shall I make us some lunch?’ she said.

For him she was eager to practise what domestic skills she had but he shook his head. ‘That’s all organised.’

A little later there was the sound of a car engine and presently a taxi appeared down the track. Lucia frowned, company the last thing she wanted. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘He’s bringing our lunch.’

Jacques had organised it with one of the restaurants in Sorrento.

There was a smoked chicken, pasta, a salad of tomatoes, baby courgettes and olive oil. Jacques signed a docket and tipped the driver. The taxi went away. He said: ‘All we have to do is cook the pasta. I’ll deal with it. You sit here and enjoy the view.’

But Lucia was restless, perhaps because everything was so wonderful. Glass in hand, she walked to the end of the terrace. There was a lemon tree growing in a terracotta pot. The scent of the blossom was sharp and pleasant in the hot sunlight. The breeze had died. She stood, listening to the sounds that somehow accentuated the silence: a woman’s voice calling down the valley, the chime of a distant bell. A bird flew swiftly overhead. She thought: this is peace.

There would be food to cook, a house to keep tidy, dishes to wash. There would be routine, because to live without order for three weeks would mean chaos and she thought that neither of them wanted that. They would come to know themselves as individuals and as a couple. It was an odd feeling to have committed herself to spending this time with a man she barely knew, yet whose preferences and idiosyncrasies would be as important as her own. More important, perhaps. It was something she had never tried before and she wondered whether she would be able to manage it.

The woman in the valley called again, answered this time by another voice. In the undergrowth a grasshopper chirruped. A few days before, she’d been immersed in the stresses of an opera singer’s life: the constant awareness of her voice and throat, the breathing exercises and vocalising, the endless rehearsal of the movements and sounds that must seem to the audience to flow naturally out of the drama, the striving for the perfection that would always escape her … In this peaceful place it was hard to believe in any of it. I could stay here, she thought. I could live here with this man, I could combine it with that other life of singing and stagecraft. To know when I was away that a place like this was waiting would provide the extra dimension my life needs. I could stay here.

She laughed. What nonsense! It was wonderful, yes, but it was a holiday, no more than that. Jacques had a career, too. Why should she think he wanted any more? Take what you’ve got and be thankful, she counselled herself. She drank the last of her wine, the bird gave another bell-like call and Jacques came down the steps with a tray in his hands. He put it on the table and gave her an elaborate bow. ‘Luncheon is served.’

They ate on the terrace, had another glass of wine and afterwards went for a stroll through the woods. A stand of pines scented the air with its resin. A stream gushed white between boulders; from the bushes came a constant accompaniment of birdsong. They reached the edge of a small village. They looked at the whitewashed cottages and the cobbled path running between them but ventured no further, preferring to keep this first magic day to themselves. The sun was setting when they went back to the house. I could stay here …

One day at a time, she told herself. That’s the way to do it. Take things as they come.

It was much cooler with the coming of twilight. They stripped off and swam naked in the pool. Afterwards, lying together on the cool grass, she stopped thinking about the future or anything at all. Jacques ran his fingertips gently over her, she felt renewed desire take fire in her body. She reached up and held him tight and wondered whether it was possible to die of happiness.

Later that evening, after a bath, she put on a dress of cream silk, very simple and expensive, that she had bought in Paris. She thought about jewellery, decided against it. While Jacques bathed, she poked around to see what she could find. There were some magazines, old enough for a museum, a battered collection of paperbacks in various languages, the record player with a dozen or so records. She found one of herself singing extracts from Tristan, Norma and I Puritani.

‘All the old favourites …’

Nevertheless she put it on. It was dusty and scratched. The technical quality of the recording wasn’t the best, either, but the voice wasn’t bad.

Jacques came downstairs. He was wearing a tan woollen shirt, fawn trousers and well-polished brown shoes.

He stopped in the doorway, listening to the recording. ‘Who’s that?’

‘Some cow who thought she could sing.’

‘Kidding herself, wasn’t she?’

‘Managed to kid one or two others, too. Fortunately for her.’

They listened in silence until the record was finished. He said: ‘I still can’t believe it.’

‘What?’

‘That I am here with the owner of that voice.’

‘Never mind the voice. You’re here with the woman, and don’t you forget it.’

She was prepared to be very fierce about it, but he smiled.

‘Thank God for that. Otherwise the voice might expect me to join in.’

‘There’s a lot I would do for love. But there’s a limit.’

He took her in his arms. ‘And do you? Do you love me?’

She looked up at him, feeling the warmth and security of his enclosing arms. ‘With all my heart.’

Later, after more food and wine, after the slow climb up the staircase, the closing of the bedroom door upon the world, after he had held her and touched her while she stirred and sighed and clung and cried out, she said it again.

‘I love you, Jacqui! I love you!’

She looked up at him as he cupped her face in his strong hands. He smiled and kissed her again, gentle after the passion.

‘I love you, too. Lucy.’

Pray God he does, she thought. Pray God.

2

The next morning she woke early. She could see the sun shining outside the open window, hear the birdsong. She turned her head and looked at Jacques lying asleep beside her. There was an innocence about the sleeping face that was completely at odds with how he’d been during the night. He had given her such pleasure …

No doubt he thought she’d had dozens of lovers. People tended to assume that an opera singer had a new man in her bed every night. Perhaps some did but she wasn’t one of them. She wondered what Jacques would say if he knew that he was only the second man she’d slept with in her life.

She thought back to Harry Lassiter. Dear Harry. She hadn’t thought of him for years. He’d been sufficiently rich and caring to give her the Bihzad miniature and she’d cared enough to accept it. It had travelled with her ever since, not because he’d given it to her but because she liked it and thought it brought her luck. The last she’d heard, Harry had been living in New York with his — could you believe it? — fifth wife. She hoped he’d found happiness at last but doubted it; happy marriage and Harry Lassiter weren’t destined to belong together. Her thoughts returned to Jacques and the gap in her life that was crying to be filled.

She did not know enough about him. The here and now, the touch and sound and smell of him: that, she knew. But of his past, the tens of thousands of moments and experiences that had made him what he now was, she knew nothing. She wanted to fill in the gaps, to know if he had ever fallen out of a tree, caught a fish, watched an ant, built proud castles of mud or sand, skimmed stones across the surface of water, or thrown a ball for a dog. What poems had he written, what dreams had inscribed themselves across his mind? What had he hoped to be? She knew none of these things.

She watched him for a while, then, little by little, nudged him awake.

‘Good morning!’ He surfaced with a rush. He turned to her, drawing her to him. Things progessed and before long she wasn’t thinking of anything, but afterwards the thoughts came back.

‘I know nothing about you.’

He caressed her, smiling. ‘You know some things.’

‘About that, yes. But nothing about what’s made you the man you are.’ She ran her fingernails across his chest, feeling the good, hard flesh beneath the skin. ‘Tell me about that man.’

‘Where to start?’

He told her certain things. He described the snow on the Atlas Mountains in winter, the purple blaze of sunrise and sunset in the desert, the villages that seemed to grow out of the rock, the minarets uplifted against a sky the colour of gentians, the ragged, hard men of the unforgiving land. He told her he’d been to a lycée in Algiers, that he hated the colonial system but thought of Algeria as his home. Of himself, past or present, he said nothing. She saw that for the moment she would have to be content with that. It did not trouble her. I shall squeeze it out of him in time, she thought.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

1

Lucia had been swimming and now sat on the terrace in her swimsuit, a towel wrapped about her, drinking coffee and looking at the view. In a few minutes she would go into the kitchen to start making the lunch. It was late — already mid-afternoon — but that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at all.

She took her cup into the kitchen. The previous day they’d gone into Sorrento for supplies. They had bought cheese and salads and bread and two plump trout that she planned to prepare for lunch, with fresh herbs and a tomato salad.

She coated the fish with butter, added a sprinkling of wine and herbs and put them in the oven. While she waited, she thought how here, in this isolated house, with this man, she had started to learn the art of life. She was sleeping well. They made love every day but even that experience had begun to differ from how it had been at the beginning. She still responded to Jacques with enormous pleasure and a passion that grew daily more intense, yet, where previously her feelings had been like hunger, now they were concerned as much with giving as receiving, and the change compounded the pleasure.

She would have said she was eating as much as ever but perhaps her diet had improved. Whatever the reason, when she stood before the mirror that evening and looked at herself, she was prepared to swear that she was losing weight at last. Her ribs still had more flesh over them than she’d have liked but it was a start. She was tanned dark by the sun, her eyes were bright, her hair shone. The previous day they’d stopped off in Sorrento for a drink before driving back. They had sat on the terrace of a cafe overlooking the sea and she had been conscious of the men watching her. This was Italy, where women-watching was a national pastime, but it had been no less pleasing for that. At thirty she was no longer a young woman, but she hadn’t imagined the admiring glances.

Now she studied herself carefully and for the first time in her life decided she might even be looking beautiful.

Jacques had noticed it, too.

‘I think playing housewife suits you!’

Perhaps it did.

2

The days passed, slow and idle under the Italian sun. Lucia had brought a number of scores with her. Missing the discipline of her normal life, she went over them, playing sections on the piano, working her voice into the music until it was impossible to tell where composer ended and artist began.

Jacques sat with her while she practised and she found that singing for them both gave her a good feeling, as though she were offering him the gift of herself. A second week passed. At the end of it they went back to the same restaurant, this time at night. They ate fish and watched the moon rising over the sea. Across the water the sleeping mountain cast rosy reflections upon the cloud of smoke about its summit.

As they were leaving the restaurant, Lucia saw a rack containing newspapers. On a whim she bought one to read later.

‘Might as well see what the world’s been up to.’

While Jacques made them a nightcap, she glanced through the paper. There was a general strike in France, an earthquake in Greece, political trouble of some sort in Iran. Jacques came in with the drinks.

‘Anything in the news?’

‘Same old thing. Trouble everywhere.’

She turned the page to the arts section. She saw a headline and took a sharp breath. Jacques glanced at her.

‘What’s the matter?’

She went to hand him the paper, remembered that he couldn’t understand Italian, then read aloud, translating as she went.

‘Teresa Sciotto, who has recently achieved considerable success in the United States, is to appear in Milan for the 1954 season, Opera Administrator Antonio Ghiringhelli announced here today …’ Her eyes raced down the column. ‘Traviata, Aïda, La Bohème …’

She sat, biting her lip and staring into space. ‘Damn, damn …’

Jacques tried to console her. ‘There are plenty of other opera houses.’

‘But only one La Scala!’

Ghiringhelli had always had a problem with her. Subservience had never been her greatest skill and the La Scala boss, like von Karajan, believed that opera singers should be kept in their place. She told herself she could have expected nothing else, but the prestige of the Milan Opera was like none other. What made it worse was that her agent, Monty Cardozo, had been putting out feelers and had told her they were in with a chance. Now Sciotto had got the job and Lucia was nowhere.

She was furious with herself. While she’d been fooling around here, Sciotto had been stealing a march. It was nonsense, of course; it was Monty’s job to arrange these things and three weeks’ holiday, the first for over a year, was hardly fooling around, yet telling herself so made her feel no better. She’d missed out, and to Teresa Sciotto, of all people. They went to bed. For the first time she rejected Jacques when he tried to make love to her, which made her feel mean and madder with herself than ever. She slept badly and the next day was no better.

She sat on the terrace and told herself she was a spoiled brat. It didn’t help. She looked down the valley at the distant curve of the light-filled bay. Everything was gold and blue, the golden flare of the sun, the blue resonance of the light. That didn’t help, either; for the moment the view did nothing but exasperate her. In the first wondrous days after their arrival the absence of a telephone had been a major attraction. They had been like castaways on a desert island. Now the charm had worn off. She had to phone Monty Cardozo in London, today. She must find out what was going on.

She went looking for Jacques, found him by the pool, nose buried in one of the few French language books in the house.

‘I’m going into town.’

He looked up at her. ‘Right.’

‘As soon as my back’s turned things go wrong. I need to find out what they’ve been up to.’ It was paranoia, pure and simple. Jacques had gone back to his book. She felt the need to shake him. ‘Okay?’

He glanced up briefly. ‘Will you be back for lunch?’

She could have screamed at him. Instead she took the keys and stamped off to the car. Behind her, Jacques’ voice only heightened her fury. ‘Drive carefully.’

Somehow she reached town in one piece. She went into a hotel, introduced herself to the manager — fame had its uses — and asked if she could borrow a phone. At once he was bowing and scraping.

‘A pleasure, Signorina Visconti. An honour, I assure you.’

He offered her the phone in his private office. She accepted graciously, caressing him with her trademark smile.

The things we do …

Monty Cardozo answered the phone.

‘What’s this about Sciotto and La Scala?’ she asked him.

Monty’s voice, cigar-rough, nevertheless soothed her. One of Monty’s most important skills was his ability to ride out the storms of her temperament.

‘Ghiringhelli hates your guts, you know that. But he’ll give in eventually; he’s got no choice. You just got to be patient, that’s all. And of course Teresa’s got a nice-sounding voice.’

She hadn’t phoned from Italy to discuss Teresa Sciotto’s voice.

‘What have you got for me?’

‘Something a lot better than La Scala. Walküre in Vienna, under — can you believe it? — von Karajan. Never say I’m not a magician, eh? From there to the States. Dallas, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia …’

‘The Met?’

New York’s Metropolitan was the New World equivalent of La Scala.

‘You think I’d forget New York? Do me a favour …’

The Metropolitan was offering her Turandot, Tosca and a choice of Aïda or an English language Magic Flute.

It wasn’t La Scala but it was the next best thing. Indeed, in financial terms a tour of the United States was a good deal more profitable than a four-opera season in Milan.

‘I drove them, mind you. Know what they said? This woman wants more pay than the President of the United States!’

Lucia thought she deserved every cent he could get for her. ‘They think Dwight Eisenhower’s so great, let him sing for them.’ Monty’s news made her feel much better. She bought a bottle of good wine as a peace offering and drove back a lot more moderately than she’d come. When she reached the villa she wound contrite arms about Jacques’ neck. He extricated himself, laughing.

‘I gather you’ve sorted it out, then.’

‘Everything’s fine!’

For an hour or two it was; later she found she was as much on edge as ever. The desert island had become a prison. She had been so happy here; now she couldn’t wait to get away.

Jacques had always been sensitive to her moods. He said: ‘This business of Teresa Sciotto’s unsettled you.’

‘It’s not that. But the American tour’s important. Music drives me mad, yet without it I’m incomplete.’

He held her hands tight; she was afraid she was going to cry. He said: ‘I love you. You know that?’

Now she really did cry, holding him close, feeling the life pulsing through his body. Gently he broke free. He looked down at her. ‘When do you want to leave?’

‘I think tomorrow, if I can get a flight.’ She looked up at him, seeing his face blurred by her tears. ‘When we first got here I thought I’d want to stay for ever.’

He managed a sort-of smile. ‘The trouble with rental properties, you always have to leave. Will you write?’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll have to send you my address later. Before I left Paris the paper was thinking of sending me to Indochina. The war against the Viet Minh is hotting up. There’s even talk that France may be forced to pull out altogether.’

His news might have made her feel even worse but did not. She had been filled with such guilt; now she remembered that Jacques, too, had a life to lead. Her dreams of permanence had been no more than fairy palaces built on the quicksands of desire. Now reality was back.

3

The next morning they tidied the cottage, closed the shutters, switched off the power, did all the things that spelt an end to what they’d had, so briefly, together. They drove down the track on the first stage of their return to the realities of their separate lives, she to London, Jacques to Paris. Lucy told herself that this morning, once again blue and gold with sunlight reflecting off the waters of the bay, marked not an end but the beginning of an interlude in what had become their true lives. It must be so, she told herself. It was too important to accept any alternative, although how it would come about she didn’t know. She repeated what had become her mantra. One day at a time …

She made two calls from the airport. She left messages for Monty Cardozo and the recording studio, telling them she’d be back a week earlier than she’d expected. Her flight was delayed for several hours so Jacques left before she did, which was a painful business.

‘Send me your address. Don’t forget.’ The mixture of optimism and despair stayed with her all the way to her hotel in rainy London. As always, there were messages for her: the general manager of Covent Garden, one from Monty that was marked urgent. Lucia stared out at the grey expanse of London’s river and dialled his number.

Even over the phone she could imagine the reek of the cigar that, at least in his own office, lived like a permanent attachment to his lower lip.

‘Thank Christ! Your message said you were coming in this morning. Where the hell have you been?’

Monty Cardozo was not a man to defer to his clients, however famous they might be. It was one of the reasons so many used him; in a world of slime he pulled no punches, which was a comfort. Not that Lucia, back in fighting mode, was about to become a doormat for Monty Cardozo or anyone else.

‘The flight was delayed. If it’s any of your business.’

‘Then stay put for five minutes, okay? I’m on my way. We got problems.’ And he slammed down the phone.

True to his word, he was at the door before she’d had time to unpack. No-one could access the suites of this hotel without an authorisation. That was an iron-clad rule but Monty respected only those rules that suited him.

He stamped in — a fat man in a camel hair coat, the reek of cigar smoke and business — and accepted the glass of malt whisky that had become a ritual of their meetings.

He peeled off his coat and threw it over a chair. He was wearing an expensive mohair suit and looked sleek, as he always did. Then he sat down in an easy chair, stuck his highly polished shoes on a low table and pulled a piece of paper from his briefcase. ‘Read that.’

She did so. ‘Oh.’

He gulped his whisky. ‘Oh, she says. Oh. Who in hell is Anwar Bendurian?’

‘Someone I knew in Sydney. I’d forgotten all about him. I haven’t heard from him for years.’

‘You’ve heard from him now. I’ve spoken to Pixie Prentiss about it. She says, is it true?’

Pixie Prentiss, diamond-bright legal adviser to the stars, an inter-galactic traveller in the high-flying world of international law.

‘It’s true I signed an agreement with him before I left Australia. I thought I’d cancelled it.’

‘You thought? Don’t you know?’

Lucia, who had no idea, sparked. ‘That’s your job.’

‘How in hell am I supposed to do anything about it if I don’t know the bastard exists?’

He grabbed the letter again, scoured its contents with a bloodshot and angry eye.

‘Ten percent? Jesus Christ! We’re talking millions here!’ He bounced to his feet, waddled to the window and glared out at the river as though he’d like to strangle it. The Thames had no answers; he turned away in disgust, went to the side table and replenished his drink. ‘I’ve fixed up a meeting with Pixie tomorrow morning.’

Lucia thought of her arrangements with the studios. ‘I can’t manage it.’

‘You’ll have to manage it. Pixie’s leaving for Singapore in the afternoon; I had to kiss her backside to get her to fit you in at all.’ Pixie Prentiss was another who could afford to stand no nonsense from her clients. Monty drummed stubby fingers on the chair arm. ‘What’s the story about this Bendurian?’

‘I agreed to make him my agent before I left Australia. But he never did a thing for me. He sent me copies of letters he said he’d written to various managements, but that was all.’

‘Had he written them?’

‘Nothing came of them if he did.’

‘And for this he wants ten percent of your earnings? Ten percent of the gross? He’s got no chance.’

Pixie Prentiss, when they saw her the next day, was not so sure.

‘The letter from his lawyers is explicit.’ She scrutinised it through horn-rimmed glasses that had no doubt intimidated many in their time. She said with distaste: ‘Milton Embury don’t waste their time on lost causes. They must think they’ve got a case.’ She read out loud from the letter. ‘From the date of the agreement — that’s 1947 — their client is entitled to ten percent of all Madame Visconti’s gross earnings from operatic and concert performances and related activities, whether the engagements were negotiated by their client or not. That’s what is alleged.’

She raised her formidable eyebrows at Lucia, questioningly. ‘Is the allegation true? Did the agreement contain this clause or not?’

‘I didn’t read it.’

‘But you signed an agreement with this man?’

‘I believe I did.’

‘And never cancelled it?’

‘I thought I had but I suppose I might be mistaken.’

‘In which case it would still be valid.’

The lawyer transferred her attention to Monty Cardozo. ‘Assuming the agreement exists, they may have a case.’

Monty was stricken. ‘Ten percent? For what?’

‘I think we can forget ten percent. No doubt they’re looking for a negotiated settlement. But there may be grounds for some sort of claim. I’ll send them a letter to keep them quiet — we are reviewing the situation, the claim will be vigorously defended, that sort of thing — and we can arrange to get together when I’m back in London. Ask Griselda to slip you into the diary sometime in the next two or three weeks.’

When they were out the door, Lucia turned to Monty.

‘That man never did anything for me. I won’t pay him a cent.’

‘You may have to.’

4

Philadelphia, Dallas, San Francisco …

Triumph all the way. Then Chicago, and disaster.

She hadn’t heard any more from Monty Cardozo about Anwar Bendurian, had forgotten all about him, in fact. In Chicago he came back to life with a vengeance.

The Chicago season comprised two performances each of two very different operas. Norma, the passionate high priestess triumphant in death; Traviata, the tragic Violetta betrayed and in the end destroyed by love.

To sing either role demanded a great deal from the principal singer; to sing each twice within a fortnight bordered on the impossible. She did it. The rave reviews for her Norma were exceeded only by the same critics’ praise for her Violetta. Triumph or not, the wear and tear on Lucia’s nerves was enormous. She found it so difficult to come down from the heights after each performance that it was all she could do to reach her dressing room unaided. The critics praised her but what did the critics know? The endless search for perfection, for the ultimate expression of truth, continued unavailingly.

When the final curtain came down, there was cheering, smiles, a blizzard of flowers. There was a reeling blackness, an exhaustion that was almost palpable. She blundered, seeking the way to the dressing room that she knew so well. There was a man waiting, hat pulled low over his eyes. She did not recognise him; the state she was in, she barely registered his presence. She went to pass him and he thrust a paper into her hand. She stared at it, and at him. She was startled, uncomprehending.

‘County sheriff, lady. That there’s a summons.’

After all the trauma of the last two weeks, the emotional strain of the two contrasting operas, it was too much. She lost control of her tattered nerves. ‘How dare you?’

A battery of flash bulbs exploded. She had been ambushed not only by the sheriff but the press, too. The next day her face, contorted with fury, was on the front page of every newspaper.

Her performance was given rave notices once again but the critics’ praise was overwhelmed by the publicity of the backstage confrontation. VISCONTI THE TIGRESS, screamed the headlines.

In her hotel suite Lucia wept, a mingling of rage and despair. She would speak to no-one.

‘How could they? How could they?’

The claim was for half a million dollars. In London, Monty Cardozo laughed.

‘A nice round sum. The question is, what will he accept?’

‘Accept? I told you! Not a cent!’

‘It might be easier to pay him off.’

‘He’s never lifted a finger for me!’

‘You know that; I know it. But Joe Public doesn’t, and you can’t prove it. Joe Public knows there’s an agreement because Bendurian’s already leaked it to the media. What they see is a rich bitch trying to cheat a man who’s down on his luck. You sure you want that kind of publicity?’

‘It’s blackmail!’

‘Sure it is. The question I’m asking is, what’s it worth to you to shut him up?’

‘Not half a million.’

‘Of course not half a million. I was thinking more like five grand, maybe ten. The way your records keep selling, you make that sort of dough every couple of days.’

‘Will it truly get him off my back?’

‘Sure it will.’

‘Make certain it does.’

They settled for eight thousand dollars. Lucia was as mad as a cut snake about it but Monty said it was cheap at the price.

CHAPTER THIRTY

1

Lucia would never have believed she could miss Jacques so much, yet the emptiness of the air at her side, the absence of his being, was with her always. The nights were the worst. She stroked her own body and tried to pretend that it was his hands caressing her, but it was no use. Each morning she woke to a desolate world. She mooched through the first hours. She had a bath, got dressed. She picked at breakfast. She was sorry for herself. She did nothing.

After three days she said: ‘No!’

She would no longer tolerate in herself what she would have found contemptible in anyone else. She had no choice, in any case. Life, with Jacqui or without him, still had its demands. Her diary was full far into the future and she would not disappoint her public.

Rain or fine, she walked briskly for an hour through the London streets. She worked through a series of increasingly severe exercises. She watched each mouthful she ate. The kilos began to melt away. She willed herself to be strong. She needed to be. She was recording Madama Butterfly; when that was out of the way she was due in New York where she was scheduled to sing Tristan at the Met, followed by a guest television appearance on the CBS station.

She made herself do it and it worked.

At the Metropolitan Opera she had one of the greatest triumphs of her career: twenty-seven curtain calls while flowers fell like hail and the normally stony-faced New York audience skinned hands and throats with the frenzy of their applause. Monty was besieged by offers from Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco. She spent Christmas in New York with the conductor Fausto Cleva and his family. It was a glittering affair with warmth and laughter and snow drifting out of a dark sky. On Boxing Day they went out with sleds; the air crackled with frost and it was like being a child again. On New Year’s Eve she flew back to London. She had two more weeks’ recording, then was due back in Italy. She’d still heard nothing from Milan, where Sciotto was reported to be having a huge success, but Verona, Venice and Rome were on the itinerary, as well as a radio concert in Turin. She’d read somewhere that the medieval English king Henry II had never slept two nights running in the same bed; Lucia knew how he must have felt. Next stop, Rome.

2

Lucia was getting ready to leave for the opera house when Jacqui phoned her.

She was delighted; then she stood by the picture window of her suite overlooking the Spanish Steps, the city lights beginning to gleam out of the darkness, and listened as he told her he was about to vanish out of her life.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They’re sending me to Indochina. I told you, remember?’

When he had first mentioned it she’d been pleased because it had eased her guilt over her concerns for her own career, but now she was hungry for him again.

‘Why does it have to be you?’

‘I’ve got good credentials. I’m a colonial who hates colonialism.’

‘When will you be back?’

‘Depends what I find when I get there. Could be anything up to a year, I suppose.’

‘But that’s terrible!’ What made it even worse, he seemed a lot less concerned about it than she did.

‘Hey, don’t sound like that! You should be pleased. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me. This could be a defining moment in Asian history and I shall be there to see it.’

But what about us?

Somehow she managed not to say it. Instead she said: ‘So you want the French to lose? Your own people?’

The idea didn’t seem to trouble him. ‘Of course I want them to lose. Plenty of people will say I’m a traitor but I can’t help that. History will show I’m right.’

Jacques inhabited a different world from her, a world of judgements and certainties so absolute they frightened her. How could he be so sure of everything when she felt sure about nothing?

‘I’d been hoping you’d be able to fly down to join me for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking of buying a house.’

‘In Rome?’

‘Outside Siena. There’s a farmhouse there.’ She would have liked to say how she wanted his opinion because she was buying it for both of them. She dared not, fearing he might accuse her of trying to capture him.

He laughed; she guessed he thought the idea ridiculous, or at least eccentric. ‘When on earth will you have the time to live there?’

‘Whenever I can.’

‘I can’t make it, anyway. I’m leaving tomorrow.’

She had wanted to tell him how she had felt in Gentile, how a secure base in her gypsy-like world would give her such comfort. Put off by his excitement at the prospect of a new world waiting only for him, she decided to say nothing. Not that there would have been time to talk of such things, in any case.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.

She reminded herself that he had phoned her; that was something.

‘Make sure you let me have your address.’ She would have liked to tell him how she loved him and would miss him, would look every day for his safe return, but she sensed how anxious he was to get to grips with what he had called the defining moment in Asian history. Asking for his address wasn’t much but it was the most she was willing to offer in the face of his evident distraction; she, too, had her pride. Afterwards, seated in the car taking her to the opera house, she thought again about all the things she had not told him. Pride had come into it, certainly, but there had been something more potent than pride. She had been afraid that telling him her feelings would have turned loss to pain.

3

She was determined to come to terms with Jacques’ absence.

In a gesture of defiance at the fate that separated them, she went ahead and inspected the farmhouse in the hills outside Siena. The hills were densely forested and, when the wind was in the right direction, the scent of the pine trees blew coolly from the plantation on the other side of the valley. The house and outbuildings were constructed of local stone, as warm and brown as honey. Against one wall a scramble of orange bougainvillea spread an exotic brightness. It reminded her very much of the villa at Gentile and she fell in love with it at once. She thought how delighted Jacques would be when she showed it to him. The thought that one day he would be back excited her, not that there seemed the slightest prospect of that happening yet. The house was called, most appropriately, La Fattoria Tranquilla, the Farmhouse of Tranquillity. She made an offer, it was accepted and the next weeks became a riot of builders, gardeners, interior decorators, the fattoria far from tranquilla during the renovations.

There were other ways to occupy her spare time. She, who had never had any interest in politics or French colonialism, took to reading Le Travailleur, Jacques’ paper, because it made her feel closer to him. The paper was well known for its communist sympathies; on Stalin’s death, a year ago, every page had carried a black border, and now Jacques’ reports, appearing under his own byline, were extremely critical, not only of the conduct of the war, but of the French presence in Indochina. A month earlier, like other French newspapers, it had been full of reports of the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the French stronghold in Vietnam. There were prophecies of imminent French defeat; it began to look as though the comments Jacques had made in Gentile had been right. His own contributions in Le Travailleur were particularly scathing.

General Navarre, commander-in-chief of the French forces, is on record as doubting the possibility of France finally winning what from the first has been a war of liberation. The General’s political judgement is clearly superior to his negligible military skills. With the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the last desperate hopes of a military victory are indeed lost. All that remains is for France to withdraw, quickly and finally, from a territory in which it has no business to remain.

4

Jacqui sent her his address. Lucia wrote to him regularly about her appearances in this and that opera, and the house in the Siena hills that she hoped would be ready for him by the time he returned. In reply she received one or two aerograms, hastily scrawled, then nothing. She told herself he was in the middle of a war but anxiety gave her no peace. The situation in Vietnam was clearly falling apart; there were reports of mounting casualties among civilians as well as soldiers. Jacques’ byline still appeared regularly but they could fake that, couldn’t they, if they wanted to hide his death? She took to reading his reports with extra care, looking for changes in style that might indicate he had not written the article at all. Eventually she could stand it no longer and phoned his newspaper in Paris. Their bland assurances did nothing to soothe her fears.

‘May I ask who’s calling?’

She would not say. She knew only too well what would be the outcome if she did.

OPERA STAR SEEKS MISSING LOVER

That, she didn’t need. She was filled with the same deadly mixture of optimism and doubt she had known before. After all the things that had happened in her youth she had no belief in permanence, yet she longed for it. She was frightened of losing happiness, which was why she would not allow herself to think about it. She would carry on with her life. Jacques would return and they would find a way of resolving the demands of their two careers. She was like a blindfolded acrobat walking a tightrope high above the earth. She had to trust each step she took because the alternative was death.

5

Lucia stepped onto the farmhouse terrace and looked out across the green tranquillity of the Siena hills before walking down the steps to the pool. She swam vigorously for half an hour, finishing off with the daily workout that kept her body trim. Now that she had finally got rid of the fat that had plagued her, she was determined there would be no backsliding. It was a clear day in midsummer with a promise of heat later. She had three weeks of blessed freedom before her and later that morning would be driving to the airport to meet the man who was coming to spend time with her in the peaceful beauty of the Siena hills.

6

It had been a horrible time.

The Vietnamese peace conference had begun the previous July; when North Vietnam had achieved its independence in November, she had allowed herself to hope that Jacques would now come home.

He had not. At least he’d written to her at last, yet the tone of his letter, which she had expected to be triumphant at colonialism’s defeat, had been sour and disillusioned. She knew better than most how war did strange things to people; she had found herself wondering what could have happened to change him from the confident man he had been before. More and more she had felt out of touch with him; Saigon was no more than thirty hours away, yet seemed much further. Even in the early days he had told her next to nothing of his experiences; he’d said he’d been a front-line observer in a number of actions but had provided no details. Even with the war over he had still said nothing of what he was doing or his plans for the future. She had continued to buy Le Travailleur but seldom saw his byline or, indeed, anything about the newly independent country at all. Then, late in May, he had written to say that the paper was bringing him back to Paris. What happened after that would be up to his editor but it looked as though his Far Eastern tour might be over at last.

Thank God!

She could have danced, yet had been too exhausted to dance. Jacques was safe; that was all that mattered.

Three weeks later he had phoned her in Rome. She had clutched the phone and instructed herself not to weep.

‘Where are you? Paris?’

Already she’d been making plans to fly up and see him. Just to hold him … Yet it had seemed he wasn’t in Paris at all.

‘Algiers? What are you doing there?’

‘I stopped off to see my father. Algeria’s going to be the next flashpoint, you know.’

‘When will you be home?’

‘This is my home.’

It had surprised her how much that hurt. He must have sensed he’d said the wrong thing; he had tried to make amends.

‘Ever buy that house you were after?’

Which had only made things worse.

‘I told you all about it in my letters!’

‘Did you? I’m sorry. I had a lot on my mind in those days.’

No doubt that was true, yet his casual words had chilled her.

‘Come and see it. I bought it for both of us, after all.’

And she had waited anxiously for his reply.

‘Sounds good. When?’

‘When suits you?’

‘Any time. I’ve a stack of leave owing.’

‘The beginning of August, then. Stay as long as you can. Stay for ever!’

7

A month to go. Three weeks.

She was in Geneva, at dinner after the first performance of I Puritani. There Was the usual party: director Dubois and his wife, the general manager of the opera, the Cambodian conductor Khieu Pen, the tenor Corelli, one or two friends.

The waiter came, bowing.

‘Telephone, Madame …’

She took the proffered receiver.

‘Lucy?’

It was Jacques.

She smiled with her whole face, not caring who saw her. ‘Where are you?’

‘Paris.’

‘It’s wonderful to hear from you.’

Three weeks, she thought. Finish up here, go to Verona, then Siena. Her expectations were golden; the thought of being with him again at last made the breath catch in her throat. Then something in his voice stilled her joy.

‘What is it, Jacqui?’

‘This trip to Siena … I won’t be able to make it.’

Her voice hardened despite her efforts. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Something’s come up.’

He was saying something about Algeria, his father … She knew already from the papers that the insurrection there was out of control; before they knew it the whole country might be at war.

‘I have to be there!’

It was what he had told her about Indochina.

‘The paper’s sending me over. It’s the chance of a lifetime. I can’t afford to miss it.’

She was listening, yet not listening, his voice running like a motor behind the sharpening realisation that once again her dreams were dust because of this man. She had told herself they would have to find a way of reconciling their two careers. It would mean compromise but it seemed he was not interested in that. The chance of a lifetime …

He clearly regarded his career as more important than their future together.

‘Lucy?’

Rage flared. She did not speak. She put down the phone on his excuses.

8

After Arturo’s betrayal, the abandoned Elvira flings her despair furiously into the face of the fate that has so cruelly used her.

O rendetemi la speme, o lasciatemi morir!

Again the English words cried in Lucia’s head: Oh, give me back my faith or let me die!

Lost in a world of fantasy and pathos, she was no longer able to distinguish between Elvira and Lucia. They were one in the wrong that had been done them. She heard her voice, her sorrow flowing like blood.

Vien diletto, è in ciel la luna …

Come beneath the sky and moon: the notes falling, now ecstatic, now with an echo of returning joy, finally with the drum beat of ultimate abandonment.

9

For the benefit of her table companions and for her own pride, she smiled her way through the rest of the meal. Once or twice she even laughed, while her heart bled. After supper she returned to the hotel, found her suite, her feet beginning to blunder as they sought the bed.

She lay down fully clothed. She gazed at the ceiling. At nothing. She remembered a poem she had read long ago. The words ran over and over in her head.

You promised you’d write: no letter.

You promised you’d call: no phone.

You promised you’d stay true and faithful

And each time I turned round you were gone.

You went for a walk with your lover,

You told me you had to be free,

And the flame that you lit when you did it

Left just ashes of you and of me.

After a while she got up. Meticulously she undressed. She hung up her dress, rolled down her tights while the tears rolled down her face. Again she lay down. She did not sleep. Eventually, through the window of the hotel room, came the first grey desolation of the dawn.

10

The farmhouse was ready. She squeezed a visit between performances. She phoned her mother to invite her to stay for a week. She returned to Geneva, she scoured the shops for things she did not need, she accepted invitations to parties that at other times she would not have dreamt of attending. Anything to keep herself from thinking, from feeling.

Two weeks later she had lunch with Khieu Pen, who had expressed interest in having her sing in Lyons. When they had finished their business, they talked about other things.

‘The season’s nearly over. Will you be going back to Cambodia for a holiday?’

‘No. There are still things I have to do in Lyons.’

His voice carried an eastern chime that gave individuality to his fluent French. Lucia found it charming, as she did the conductor himself, who had far exceeded all their expectations. Khieu Pen was lithe, slender, with pale bronze skin, black hair swept back and twinkling eyes. He was dressed like a million dollars, yet stylishly, without ostentation.

During the days since Jacqui’s phone call she had watched him closely, as she had watched everyone else about her, not with desire or even particular interest, but because of her unspoken hope that meticulous attention to the present might protect her from memories of what had passed, what had been her expectations for the future.

Jacqui had phoned from Algiers; she had refused to speak to him. He had written; she had held the letter, turning it in her hands, before putting it away in her suitcase. She would not read it, nor would she return it. Let him wonder, she thought. Let him never know.

There was pain in wounding others, particularly this man whom she had come to love. Let her embrace the pain of inflicting pain. It was that, far more than the pain of loss, that continued in unguarded moments to bring tears to her eyes. Let her surrender herself to it; she deserved no better, because she had permitted hope to carry her away.

Again she smiled at Khieu Pen.

‘Are you saying you’re taking no holiday at all?’

‘A week or two, perhaps. I have no plans.’

Impulse took hold. She heard herself say: ‘I have a farmhouse in the Siena hills. It’s quite large, plenty of space for guests. My mother will be there but if you can bear our company for, say, a week, I should be very happy if you would come and stay with us.’

There was no question of desire, that was certain. He was different, he was interesting and, above all, he was a means of distracting herself from all the might-have-beens that would otherwise have plagued her, turning her holiday into the ashes of lost dreams. You promised you’d write: no letter … Except that he had written and she had not read it.

Khieu Pen looked startled, as well he might. ‘If you are sure I shall be no imposition

So that was settled. Two days later she flew to Verona.

11

In the Verona arena last night, Lucia Visconti scored an undoubted triumph in her performance of the title role in Verdi’s Aïda. God has chosen to lavish great gifts upon this artist. She is a woman of wonderful beauty and artistic composure; she has the dramatic presence of a great classical actress; her voice possesses unparalleled strength, range and agility. Above all, she has tire skill to convey to the audience the passion and nobility of the slave girl who has sacrificed life itself for love — Corriere della Sera

12

She met the plane, as arranged. She drove him back to the farmhouse. On the way she pointed out vistas that she thought of particular charm or beauty: the tender line of the hills, the way the woods cloaked the precipitous slopes, the riding trails disappearing like a succession of promises into the forest.

She stopped a kilometre from the house at a point where it could be seen clearly on the other side of the valley, settled deep into the rock as though part of the mountain.

‘There it is.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘It is. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.’

Again the treacherous word, meaning so much or so little.

‘I wonder you can bear to leave it.’

She laughed. ‘I’ve a job to do. The same as you, the same as everybody. After all, if it wasn’t for the job, I couldn’t afford the house. But I love knowing it’s always here, waiting for me to come back.’

And again that word, as though it held her in its teeth and would not let her go. She wondered, not for the first time, what she was doing here with this man whom she had invited to enter into her peace.

He said: ‘You make it sound like a refuge.’

‘So it is. A refuge from the tribulations of past and present. And a dream for the future.’

They drove on until they reached the house. Carlo the gardener carried his bags upstairs to the room she had given him on the other side of the house from her own. They walked through the house to the terrace. She said: ‘There’s a pool. Swim whenever you like.’

He turned to her, his face bright. ‘This is truly a wonderful place.’

‘I’m glad you think so. But there’s one thing I need to tell you.’

‘And that is?’

She looked at him. His complexion was more lined than she remembered and sallow now rather than brown. Even his hair had lost something of its lustre. He was no longer a young man.

‘We shan’t have the place to ourselves the whole time. Jacqui, I’ve invited my mother and my friend Khieu Pen, the man who conducted me in Geneva, to join us in two weeks’ time.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

1

She had been so determined to cut him out of her life, as she would anyone who had let her down as Jacques had. And now look at her! Thirty-two and behaving like a lovesick child!

She must have known she would open his letter sometime. She had waited until she was at the farmhouse. The applause from the Verona audience had still been echoing, not so much in her ears as her blood. Aïda had never been her favourite opera. Like much of Verdi, it was too grandiose, with little scope for subtlety, yet for that reason it was ideally suited to Verona’s vast arena. Her triumph had been wonderful. She needed the reassurance of the audience’s love, doubted she could live without it, but also understood its danger. Adulation fed her ego, which was the enemy of art. It was one reason why she had been so glad to come home to the peace of La Tranquilla. Except this time it had been like coming home to a desert. The hills were as green as before, in the forests sunlight still played on the silver turmoil of plunging cataracts, but her heart was as dry as stone. She thought of the empty days stretching before her and wondered how she would survive.

She had sat for half an hour with Jacques’ letter in her hand before she could bring herself to open it.

I am more sorry than I can say that I upset you. I had been looking forward so much to the two of us spending time together at your farmhouse in the Siena hills. There is a war coming in Algeria that I have to cover, not only because it is my job but because it is my country, too, and its pain is my pain. But that is not why I have to go now. As I tried to tell you, my father was shot dead two days ago and I have to leave at once for the funeral. By the time you get this letter I should be back in Paris, at least for a while. It would still be possible for me to come to visit you for a week or two, but I shall naturally understand if this doesn’t suit you.

On the phone she had given him no time to explain. She had heard the word Algeria and thought he’d been cancelling their arrangement out of selfishness, when all the time … My father was shot dead.

For this she had banished him. Was it too late to put things right? If she went back to him now, she would be handing him an edge to use against her later, if he chose. She was not a believer in handing anyone an edge.

She went out into the kitchen where her house servant Gianna was preparing lunch at the wooden table that was probably as old as the house, its surface. scarred with the knife cuts of centuries. She felt the need for the older woman’s company, yet had nothing to say to her. She paced and paced. She went to the window, stared out, turned and paced again.

‘You want coffee?’ Gianna asked.

Lucia knew that coffee had nothing to do with it. Gianna’s voice gave not the slightest hint of her true question — What’s the trouble? — but Lucia heard it, all the same. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

She went into the living room. Sunlight shone through the windows and lay warmly on the flagged floor. In one corner was the piano. She sat down at it. She lifted the lid and began to play, not paying much attention to what she was doing but taking refuge, as always, in the music.

Gianna brought in a tray of coffee and placed it on a side table. ‘For when you make up your mind.’

‘Thanks.’

If she phoned him she would be admitting she’d been stupid. Worse, that she still wanted him enough to acknowledge she’d been wrong.

If she did not …

The days would stretch away, full of pride. And aridity.

She struck a decisive chord. She got up. She went to the phone. Le Travailleur would know if he was back or not.

Yes, the operator said, he was in Paris but not in the office; whether he was in his apartment, she couldn’t say. Lucia broke the connection and redialled. If for any reason he didn’t answer, it would be an omen. If he did …

That would be an omen, too.

She waited while, a country away, the phone rang.

2

Their first day together was quiet, while Lucia thanked God she’d had the courage to phone, that he’d been there to answer, that he had agreed to come. She sat, at peace with the world, a book lying disregarded in her lap, thinking how wonderful it was that they were together again at last.

Gianna brought them lunch on the terrace. At the airport Lucia had commiserated with Jacques over his father. She had told him he had a lot of talking to do, without spelling out what he should tell her. She wanted to hear about Indochina and what had happened to age him twenty years since she’d seen him last. She wanted him to share with her his childhood and the father he had now lost, to offer himself to her unasked. All these things she wanted but she would not plead. It was for him to tell her when he was ready. In the meantime she would wait. He told her nothing. They chatted about inconsequential things, feeling their way. Perhaps that was how it would have to be; perhaps only the passage of time would enable them to rediscover that place in which they had found each other before. Jacques was tired and went to bed before midnight. Lucia, her body’s clock still set to an opera singer’s hours, sat alone. From the terrace, she could see the lights of scattered farmhouses shining in the darkness. There was no moon and the hills were a velvety shadow under the star-bright sky. Of the forest she could see nothing, but the scent of the pines, fresh and clean, came to her on the breeze.

While she had been waiting for Jacques at the airport, there had been time for her to question her sanity in inviting him here. Now she had no such doubts. In ten days’ time Khieu and her mother would arrive. Until then the two of them would be alone. That, surely, would be time enough for them to work out where, if anywhere, they were going. Eventually she, too, went to bed. She had expected to lie awake for a long time, conscious of Jacques’ presence on the other side of the house, but did not. She turned over and was at once asleep.

3

In the morning she was as far from a solution as ever. There were times when her world of performance and applause wearied her almost beyond bearing, yet she knew she could not turn her back on it. She was thirty-two years old; to walk away from opera would be to walk away from life. Yet Jacques, too, had a life to lead. He would not sacrifice it to her, nor would she respect him if he did. Both of them had to go on with their separate careers. Many couples did, yet she had not known one that had made a success of a shared life that was never truly shared at all. At one time she would have said she would share either everything or nothing with a man, that half-measures were impossible. Now she found herself yearning for a compromise acceptable to them both. Ten days to find a solution. Harvest was in full swing and across the fields moved the distant figures of men and wagons, horse-drawn, working in timeless rhythm. La Tranquilla …

They rode, they picnicked in deep woods where ancient trees overhung gushing streams and the air was bathed in emerald light. They visited the city of Siena on its three hills and explored the elegant buildings rising like picturesque memorials to a still-remembered past. One by one, the days passed. For the first time since Jacques’ arrival, Lucia became aware of shadows. There were occasions when he seemed to go away from her into a place where she could not follow, surrounding himself with a silence that filled her with apprehension.

‘What’s the matter?’

His eyes held the flicker of flame. ‘Nothing’s the matter. Why should there be?’ But there was and she knew it. She thought he might be grieving for his father. She would have comforted him or at least shared his pain, but he told her that, although he had admired his father, they had never been close.

‘He was a Christian, a colonial and proud of it. I’m a Communist. We were always fighting.’

Every night he went to his room and left her to sleep undisturbed in hers.

One by one, the days passed.

4

The sixth evening after his arrival, Lucia saw Jacques descend into what she afterwards thought was madness. It was a time of confusion, incomprehensible and terrifying, lightning striking from a clear sky.

They’d had supper and he had gone out onto the terrace. She had been reading, the light from the lamp a golden pool about her feet, when she heard the sound of his heels striking the stone terrace in increasing tempo, his voice arguing in mounting frenzy with the night. It sounded wrong, scary. She put down her book and went outside. She saw Jacques, silhouette dark amid the moon-patched blackness, gesticulating at the stars while his voice ran on. He was speaking so fast she could hear only a jumble of sounds through which individual words stuck out like teeth: Why? and How? and When? Repeated again and again, the French words lamenting like tears endlessly falling. Without thought she ran to him, taking him in her arms. For an instant he fought against her. She thought he was going to fling her from him and clung tighter still, using all her strength to quieten him, telling him all was well. Suddenly he slumped so that she was bearing his full weight. They staggered and nearly fell but at the last she managed to regain her balance. His body was burning with fever. He was shaking, his eyes a brilliant glare, blind to her, conscious only of whatever demons were raging inside his head.

Somehow she got him indoors. He was docile now. She fetched him a drink, the whisky an amber flame within the glass. His teeth rattled on the rim. He gulped it without stopping and collapsed gasping into a chair, eyes full of tears.

‘My God, I needed that.’ He closed his eyes and leaned back, seeming to melt into the cushions. Slowly his breath grew soft. She watched him, her hand resting on his arm. For a few moments he lay still, then opened his eyes. Confusion was a dark shadow within them. ‘Was I shouting?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t remember.’ And again he closed his eyes.

Later he told her: ‘Something happened while I was away. I can’t talk about it.’ He said no more. He got himself to bed, walking like an old man, and the next day it was as though none of it had happened.

5

The next evening, prompted by Jacques, she accompanied herself as she sang. Songs by Schumann and Sibelius, the fountain song from Lucia di Lammermoor that she told him had special significance for her, and Isolde’s death song.

She had sung Isolde a dozen times in opera houses across the world. It had been one of the greatest triumphs of her recent American tour. She sang it now, looking through the open windows at the hills submerged in darkness. Lights gleamed from the distant farms, the stars shone and the slopes below the house were a blaze of fireflies.

The ecstatic music took shape amid the ethereal light. Now, surely, Jacques would turn to her, wanting to re-establish the relationship they’d had in the past. Yet still he did not. She went to her room and lay waiting, ears straining to hear the fall of footsteps in the corridor. She heard nothing. Something had to be wrong but she had no idea what it was. Again she felt tears upon her face. Whatever had happened to him in Indochina, the traumatic events of which he could not bring himself to speak had damaged him in ways beyond her understanding.

The next afternoon she came out of the house onto the terrace. Jacques was lying by the pool. She went to join him but his eyes were shut and she thought he was asleep. She slipped into the water and swam two lengths before looking at him again. He was watching her and she called to him.

‘Come and join me.’

Though his face had aged, his body was as lean and hard as ever. She felt a quiver in her belly as she watched him. He swam away from her to the end of the pool, stroking powerfully, then turned and came back. He reached her and put his arms around her and she felt her bones dissolve. Perhaps now …

He kissed her eyelids, the side of her throat and finally her lips. His hands cupped her shoulders, and her breasts ached with longing. She raised her feet and hooked them around the back of his knees. He released her shoulders and she sank, to come up again spluttering and laughing.

‘Are you trying to drown me?’

Jacques did not laugh but stared soberly at her. ‘That might solve all our problems.’ He dashed the water from his eyes and stared out at the hills before turning to her again. ‘What are we going to do, Lucy?’

His renewed use of her Australian name pierced her. For so much of her life she had been Lucia Visconti, yet there were times when it seemed a sham. Who was Lucia Visconti? She was Lucy Fisher, as she had always been. All else was a mask concealing the truth. Yet the singer standing before the audiences of the world was also real, as was the arch of emotion joining her to those who watched. Truth was the purpose and soul of art. The artist’s business, therefore, was with truth and only truth. And the truth was …

‘I know, when you’re ready, you’ll tell me what happened. I can wait. I’m not saying it’s not important but it doesn’t affect how I feel about you. I love you. That’s what matters. We are together now. And that is what matters. What happened to you in the past I don’t know. What is going to happen when we leave here I don’t know. But I know this: if we deny what we both feel because of what has happened or out of fear for the future, we shall be denying what is true and valuable and I’m not going to do it. From the moment I saw you at the airport I knew I wanted you as much as ever. I want you in my body as you are already in my heart. That is all I know. And, for the moment, that is all I care.’

She watched him, knowing that her words, spoken with such difficulty, had placed her in the hands of this man who might treasure or destroy her.

Drops of water gleamed on his face as he studied her sombrely. Once again his eyes were aflame, fierce and blue. She sensed he was poised upon the lip of surrender, yet still he did not move.

‘Please …’

It was not a word with which she was overly familiar, yet she was determined to seize his courage and raise it to match her own. She took his hands and raised them to her breasts, pressed them hard against her. ‘Please …’

6

Afterwards, every nerve and tendon was at peace. The future was as uncertain as ever, yet for the moment she did not care. For her there was neither past nor future nor prospect of despair. She had waited for this so long. There had been times since his return when she had feared they would never find each other again and her grief had wounded her. Now that was past, nor would she think of future traumas that might never arise. Now was all.

She slept, feeling even in her dreams his hands upon her, his body inside her own, the flame of fulfilment and release incandescent in her spirit and her flesh.

They still had over a week; they had for ever. Peace pulled her down.

7

It was a magic time. She said it repeatedly, not caring how trite a phrase it was. The magic of love and desire was as real as the woods that enfolded them, the days that spun their golden threads to entwine them gloriously. Lucy and Jacques … They were cupped by wholeness. The universe existed only as an echo of their own being. Their world was new and the knowledge that millions of people had felt the same did not make it less true. The world was new, they were new, love itself was new.

After a night when little time had been spent in sleep, she awoke full of energy and delight. Every particle of her being sang. Jacques was asleep. She was tempted to wake him but at the last moment took pity on him. She slipped out of bed. She stood on the balcony, looking out at the hills. The sky was flushed with predawn light. The air was cool enough to dimple her naked flesh, yet seemed delightful to her. The whole world was delightful. She watched the light brighten, changing from blue to apricot, while behind the distant hills the invisible sun turned the crests to gold.

She went back into the bedroom, where Jacques slept on. Out of respect for Carlo, who might be pottering in the garden even at this time of the morning, she put on her swimsuit, took a towel and went out and down the stairs.

The pool felt icy. She swam up and down, quietly at first, then thrashing the water, using all the force at her command to drive herself on. Many people had told her she must have oxygen tanks in her legs to hang on to her notes the way she did, but eventually she ran out of breath. She climbed out of the pool, dried herself with the towel, rubbing herself vigorously until her body glowed, and went into the kitchen to make herself some coffee.

There Jacques, stealing soundlessly on bare feet, found her.

‘Stop it!’

He did not stop. Nor did she wish him to.

‘Not here, for heaven’s sake!’

So up the stairs they went again, her body flaming beneath the cool smoothness of her skin.

Gianna could bring them coffee later.

8

Five days, three …

Jacques said: ‘We can’t just finish. What shall we do?’

Brave in her confidence in them both and the emotions that bound them, she laughed at him and his anxiety. ‘We shall go on loving each other. We shall speak to each other every day. We shall see each other whenever we can.’

Still he looked doubtful, yet her courage was too strong for doubt. She reached out her hand. She smiled wickedly. She took hold of him. She drew him close. She whispered: ‘You think for a moment I’ll be willing to forego this?’

9

Rather than lose any of the precious time that remained to them, Lucy had arranged a hire car to bring Helena from Parma. She arrived, very dignified, eyes everywhere.

‘A journalist?’ And she sniffed, making it plain her famous daughter could have done much better. Yet Jacques set out, wickedly, to charm her, and Lucy saw that her mother was soon won over. The day after Helena’s arrival she drove to the airport to meet Khieu Pen off his flight from Lyons. She had wondered how Jacques would take this new man, but he was untroubled.

‘From Cambodia, did you say? That’s great. There are some questions I’d like to ask him about Cambodia.’

It seemed that his interest exceeded the conductor’s. When, after supper, Jacques tried to question him, Khieu Pen put him off.

‘I left there when I was twenty-two years old.’

‘How often do you go back?’

‘I’ve never been back.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘What’s there?’

‘Your family.’

‘I bring them over to France once a year. All except my grandmother. She’s too old to make the journey. Besides, she isn’t interested in seeing new places. She’s reached the stage in life when she spends all her time praying.’

‘Don’t you miss it?’

‘Not really. Perhaps the temple bells. You can’t step outside the door without hearing them. And sometimes a trick of the light … I have a statuette in my house in Lyons, it’s an apsara: a temple figure of a dancing nymph. I look at it sometimes to remind myself of my origins. But my life is here. There are times when you have to choose, and I have made my choice.’

Choice, Lucy thought. That was what it always came to, the choice between one thing and another. Or perhaps a third possibility: a fusion that kept both options alive.

I shall make it so, she thought.

She said: ‘Jacques spent time in Indochina, reporting the war.’

‘Did you get to Cambodia?’

‘No.’

‘If you ever go back, you must call on my family in Phnom Penh. My sister Somaly speaks fluent French.’

10

She sat on the terrace, knowing that each second was slipping like sand between her fingers, that the present that she held close to her heart was fading. By rights she should have been sad, yet was filled only with a sense of life and joy. A tuft of grass was pushing up bravely between the bricks of the terrace. She knelt to inspect it, examining each blade, life fighting for survival amid the arid stones.

She heard a footstep on the terrace; looked up as Jacques came over with two glasses of wine. The wine had captured the colour of the sunlight; the hot afternoon had beaded the glasses with moisture.

‘I knew you would come to me.’ Although she had not believed it at the time. She took the glass, smiling.

Jacques smiled back at her, his eyes empty of shadows. ‘How did you know?’

‘I sat here alone and thought, he will come because he is the man he is.’

‘And because you are the woman you are. Do you know Montaigne?’

‘Only the name.’

He thought for a moment, took a sip of wine, then said: ‘Si tu me presses de dire pourquoi je t’aime, je résponds, parce que c’est toi, parce que c’est moi. Not word for word, but that’s the sense of it.’

She sat tasting the words, as she had earlier tasted the wine. In her head she translated them into English.

If you press me to explain why I love you, I can reply only that it is because you are you and I am I.

Perhaps that was the truth; perhaps that was all it was. No explanations or reasons. No mysteries. Just you and I.

What else could it be? she asked herself. That was all anyone needed, and it was glorious.

She looked up at him and caught him staring at her, his face sombre. She said: ‘What is it?’

‘I feel I’ve let you down, these last few days.’

‘Let me down?’

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

‘The way I’ve been. The fact that I haven’t been able to explain. I want you to know everything about me, to share it all with you. Yet somehow, when I come to the point of telling, I can’t do it. Can you understand that?’

‘I knew that something happened to you. But I don’t ask for explanations. You’ll tell me one of these days, when you’re ready. Or perhaps not; either way, it doesn’t matter.’

She threw the Montaigne quotation back at him: ‘Je t’aime parce que c’est toi, parce que c’est moi.’ You and I: that’s enough.

11

There was one day more, one final night when passion warred with the prospect of loneliness. In the morning, Jacques’ face was haggard, the lines in his cheeks like razor cuts. She suspected she looked no better.

Carlo put the bags in the boot. Jacques tried to joke.

‘By rights you should have a chauffeur. I’m sure a real prima donna wouldn’t drive herself.’

She laughed at him. ‘And you a Communist? The whole point of this place is to get away from being a prima donna.’

The car trailed dust all the way to the highway and there was no more laughter. For the first time she dared speak of the future.

‘Algeria again?’

‘Looks like it. At first.’

‘And then?’

‘I’m not sure. But I’m more and more convinced we haven’t heard the last song sung in Vietnam.’ Even the name had a fatal resonance. She remembered what in truth had never left her mind since the moment it had happened: the frenzied gestures upon the terrace, Jacques’ voice crying to the stars.

Why? How? What?

He had never explained. Perhaps now, in the moment of parting … But, glancing at him as she drove down the highway, she saw once again the flicker of flame in his eyes and knew that this was still not the time. It would be so hard to say goodbye. There was only one way she could handle it. She turned onto the access road while she explained to him what they were going to do. He listened, nodding, saying not a word. She dropped him outside the departure entrance. She did not speak or look at him. He got out, fetched his bag from the boot. She drove away at once, without looking back. Only when she had turned onto the main road was she safe. She glanced in the mirror but by then Jacques, the other passengers, the airport building itself, were all out of sight.

She wondered when she would see him again. She would permit no question of if. She drove back through the warm day towards her farm, her mother, her friend Khieu Pen and a future as unknowable as the furthest stars.

Why? How? What?

Jacques’ face kept her company through all the kilometres, as it did through the months and years ahead.

12

‘I heard the car. Has he gone?’

‘Yes, Mama.’

‘He never said goodbye.’

‘That was the way we wanted it. No goodbyes. No endings.’

‘No goodbyes to you, either?’

‘I dropped him at the airport and drove off without looking back. It was how we’d planned it.’

‘He’s not Italian, which is a pity. But he was good company, very polite. A good man, I would say. Good for you, too, I think.’

‘I love him.’

‘Of course. I may be getting on; I’m not blind. You’ll miss him.’

She was doing so already, most terribly.

‘Is he coming back?’

‘Not for a while.’

‘Where’s he going?’

‘To Algeria. Then, perhaps, back to the Far East.’

‘Always to war.’

‘It’s what he does. He writes about war.’

‘Then I fear he will never be out of a job. All my life … It never ends. Even in the mallee, it was war of sorts. That never ended, either.’ The hooded eyes watched her. ‘You hated me for bringing you here.’ It was not a time for lies.

‘I did.’

‘And now?’

‘Now we are both much older.’

Which was an answer of sorts.

‘And you?’ Lucia asked. ‘Have you forgiven me for Eduardo?’

Her mother’s lips, much thinner than they had been once, twitched in what might have been a wry smile. ‘Now we are both much older.’

13

Jacques had gone. Lucia got on with her life; what else was there to do? With Khieu Pen she strolled in the woods through a gold and green dappling of sunlight and shade. Inevitably, they talked of music but not only of that. Lucia made sure that Indochina also came into their conversation because to talk about this place she had never seen made her feel closer to Jacques.

Again Khieu Pen spoke of his sister. ‘When we were children we were very close. We still write to each other every month. She was very impressed when I told her I was spending a week in the house of the famous diva Lucia Visconti. I explained your mother would be here, also; I think that disappointed her a little.’

They laughed together. There was a good feeling between them; the warmth of what both knew was the burgeoning of friendship.

‘Perhaps I’ll get to your part of the world, one of these days.’

‘To Lyons? I hope so.’

‘I meant Cambodia.’

‘Ah. Well, why not? As I said to Jacques, you must be sure to look up my sister if you do.’

And Jacqui, she thought. If he’s there.

14

She returned to the endless peregrinations of the opera singer’s existence. Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Dallas, Palermo: the word globetrotter might have been coined to describe her life. Then, at last, a drum roll of triumph with Monty Cardozo’s rasping voice exulting in her ear. A season of four operas at La Scala. The citadel had finally fallen.

She heard from Jacques from time to time, brief notes scribbled on aerograms or bits of scrap paper. The war in Algeria was getting worse, each side trying to outdo the other in terror. French settlers were hacked to pieces, French soldiers ambushed, whole villages and their inhabitants destroyed by units of the Foreign Legion, who were seemingly determined to carry flame into every corner of the province.

Jacques wrote: They’ve already lost the support of the people. Now they’re losing the settlers. Yet they refuse to understand that, by bringing terror to the general population, they are losing the moral right to be here at all.

She took to reading Le Travailleur again. She read Jacques’ reports and found it strange to think of her relationship with this man who was plagued by unexplained shadows, and who wrote with such passion of the world’s wrongs.

One article in particular remained with her, about the children who were victims of war across the globe, and what he described as the scarlet sword of retribution hanging over the future.

In killing and maiming the children, in depriving them of security and love and life itself, we wrong not only them but ourselves. We destroy the future of a species for which the future is the only hope, for we have already destroyed the present. The blood of the innocents stains the earth, yet we heed it not; their cries fill our ears, yet we hear them not.

In his earlier letters, he had always spoken of coming back to her, of longing to be with her, but after a time he said no more about that. There came months of silence. She knew from his bylines that he had left Algeria. Now his reports came from Cyprus, Hungary, Africa: all the trouble spots. Finally a letter arrived, the envelope bearing Jacques’ well-remembered scrawl. It had been a month coming, having been posted in Prague and sent to her Rome apartment, then forwarded to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she was appearing. When she saw the writing on the envelope, she felt a moment’s delight, then she picked it up and her excitement passed. She held it, turning it in her hands.

It was a cold March day. They’d had a foot of snow the previous week but the temperature had risen over the weekend and now rain was lashing the windows of the building.

Somehow she knew. It was impossible, yet she did. The room became still. The world … Even the noise of the rain ceased. For an instant she could not move, the letter clutched in fingers as stiff and cold as stone, while she waited for feeling and life to come back. The gears engaged; once again time began to pass.

Her thumbnail split the envelope. She took out the letter that Jacques had sent her and began to read. Halfway through, she groped her way to a chair and sat, fearful that if she did not she might fall.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

1

You told me that it was not important for you to know what had happened when I was in Indochina but it matters to me because that is the only way you will ever understand and in time, perhaps, bring yourself to forgive me. All my life I have supported the peasant, the worker. As a Communist I’ve fought against colonialism and the excesses of the capitalist class. Always I thought I’d be happy to sacrifice my own life to the cause. I know differently, now.

I was with a platoon on its way to relieve a fortified village that the Viet Minh had attacked in the night. There were four armoured vehicles, six men in each, everyone crushed together with a mortar, rifles, a couple of stens and a bren gun. It was early in the morning. On either side of the highway the rice paddy was as green as emerald, every shoot distinct in the gathering light. I felt contemptuous of the soldiers with whom I was riding. I had it both ways. I wasn’t on their side in this colonial war, yet I knew they would protect me if the need arose. I could enjoy the luxury of moral superiority while at the same time knowing I was quite safe. We nearly made it. Then the lead vehicle hit a mine. The blast blew the soldiers to jelly. All but one. The lieutenant was unlucky; he merely had his legs smashed. I was in the second car. We came under heavy machine gun fire. We swerved off the road and overturned. When we scrambled out, the machine guns found us, there were anti-personnel mines exploding along the sides of the road and soon I could hear nothing from any of the men who had been with me. The only sounds were the lieutenant screaming and the rasp of cicadas in the paddy. At the time I did not know what had happened to the other two vehicles. Later I discovered they had escaped by retreating as fast as they could for a kilometre down the road, where they stopped and radioed for back-up.

For a while nothing happened. I expected the Viet Minh to find me any minute. I was on their side politically but I knew that wouldn’t help me. I didn’t dare call for help. Up to my shoulders in water, I waded deeper into the paddy. I found another member of the platoon. He was dead, still clutching his sten gun. I examined it. There was a lever that could be set either to single shot or automatic. It was on automatic and I left it where it was. I doubted I’d be much good with it but automatic would give me a better chance of hitting something. I saw the paddy jerk, then figures came splashing towards me. I caught a glimpse of dark hair and slant eyes. I opened fire at once. The morning was full of the clatter of the gun, the stink of cordite, the flash of cartridge cases cascading golden in the sunlight. The rush ceased, the attack was not pressed home. Later a French column advanced along the road. By this time the Viet Minh had withdrawn. I was rescued: shaking, covered in mud and leeches, but alive. Only then did I discover the identity of the enemy I had mown down so courageously.

Two women and three small children, all unarmed, who, having escaped from the Viet Minh, had sought safety with the French soldiers.

A few days later it began. Fits of recurrent madness, of despair and disbelief punctuated by the outcrying of questions that would never be answered.

I went back to France. I stayed with you in Siena. If anyone could help me recover, I knew it would be you. I was determined. I wanted you and I wanted so much to be well. I thought I could force myself to be healed. For a time I even imagined I had succeeded; after the outburst on your terrace, there had been nothing. I was cured. Then I went to Algeria, to more horror, and the madness returned. I killed an Arab who had been trying to surrender. I stabbed him to death, deliberately, with the bayonet I had taken to carrying. There have been other episodes. I have thought to go to the doctors but dare not, fearing that they will lock me away from the light.

I must live with it but not with the thought that one day I might turn on you, too. There is only one way to ensure this cannot happen. I could not leave you in ignorance. I had to explain, so that you will know why I cannot see you again.

2

The damn fool! The damn, damn fool! I cannot see you again … Did he think she cared about that? Didn’t he know that she would understand, care for him? That this was the purpose for which she’d been placed upon the earth? That art itself was a form of love, that love forgave all?

Had he been there, she would have shredded him with her fury; even, perhaps, with her indignant nails. He was not there. There was a distance between them far greater than that separating New York from Prague. For whatever reason, he had rejected her and any future they might have had. For all the talk of ambushes and trauma, rejection was at the heart of his letter. I cannot see you again. What could she do? She could pursue him, phone Le Travailleur and demand, his address. Which they might give her, or not. Even if they did, would he agree to see her? She might be risking even greater humiliation.

She needed to think, while life, perforce, went on. Every day she drove to the Met. There were rehearsals of principals, chorus, orchestra. As always, she attended all of them. There were performances, dinners, interviews, smiles for the cameras. There were business discussions, telephone calls, sessions with the hairdresser, fittings for this costume or that. The world became a hammerbeat of busyness; its preoccupations protected her from the reality that threatened, always, to break in.

3

She gets up. Lead in her feet, her lungs and heart, and in the eyes that look back from the mirror, from the darkness that lies within the glass. She walks to the lavatory. She empties herself. She comes back into the room. She puts clothes on her back because she must; she hides herself behind the shield of garments, from the shuttered eyes that stare at her from the mirror. That burn her back as she walks away.

That’s how she would have been, had she permitted it. She would not. She would laugh brightly, she would sing, she would take each minute by its scrawny neck and wring it to a croak.

She imagined the world’s spiteful comments, if it knew what had happened to her. Her lover had abandoned her. How well she had taken it. What courage. What an example to us all. What a joke.

In the echoing emptiness, anguish howled. Nevertheless …

She would let him go. Because she must. Because his lack of faith in her as well as himself had destroyed them both.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

1

‘You’ve been on at me to fix you up with some concerts in Australia and New Zealand.’ On the phone from London, Monty Cardozo sounded close to dancing, which would have been a sight to see.

‘Yes?’

‘They’re holding the Olympic Games in Melbourne in November. They want you to sing at the opening.’

Now it was Lucia’s turn to dance but Monty hadn’t finished.

‘The Duke of Edinburgh’s opening it, so you’ll be hobnobbing with royalty. And I’ve organised you a couple of recitals in Japan and one in Auckland.’

‘I’ll need to fit in a visit to my father while I’m over there.’

Which set him growling, as she had known it would.

‘You don’t want much, do you?’

But he was the master of blending dates and obligations; she knew he would oblige her, somehow, and was unrepentant. So he should, she told herself. He made enough out of her.

2

She flew to Japan, she gave the recitals as arranged. Tokyo. Extracts from Forza, Trovatore, Lucia and Tristan amid a city of jostling crowds, lights, blaring traffic. Osaka, by train. Semiramide, Manon, Nabucco, Bohème. Flew out to Sydney, reeling, under a haphazard blaze of stars.

Traviata, with Raimondi and Bastianini as her supporting stars, Giulini conducting. She was harrassed by executives from the newly opened television channel, requesting, pleading and finally demanding that she broadcast for them.

‘An international debut! A homecoming to remember!’

She could not do it because of the terms of her contract with the Olympic authorities. They flounced off, as temperamental as any prima donna.

On to Melbourne, more disoriented than ever, and an opening to remember, with the Duke as promised and lesser dignitaries by the score, including a cabinet minister who, at a dinner party, fingered her thigh beneath the table and smiled hopefully, looking for what else he could get. Which was nothing. A day’s break, followed by a gala performance of Norma, with mezzo-soprano Stignani. Fireworks; features in the papers, one of which described her as music’s Don Bradman. The following day she caught a plane to Adelaide, where a rented car and driver were waiting. It was very different from her last visit. After ten years and what seemed several lifetimes, she came back to the mallee.

3

This time she had not made the mistake of turning up unannounced, so she had known they’d be waiting for her. What she had not expected was the spread laid out for her in the hall that she could clearly remember being built, the big men shouting and hauling, the air hot with oaths and the smell of cement, the same hall where she had first been told she had a remarkable voice.

There were flags and cheers; they asked her to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’ with the children — quite a gang of them, now, in a big school that no-one could have imagined in her day — and she did so, trying and failing to bridge the gap between those she had come to visit and the big deal she had no wish to be.

This time, at least, her father attempted conversation. Ten years ago he had looked much older than she’d expected, but since then he didn’t seem to have changed at all: a dried-up string bean of a man with lined neck and faded eyes, knuckles protruding like pebbles from hands broken by a lifetime of work. He was cautious of this unknown woman, this celebrity so improbably claiming kinship; it was like being told he was related to a goddess, or the moon.

‘Mother okay, is she?’ he asked.

‘She’s good.’

Strange how the idiom, as well as the accent, came back after only a few days in the country.

‘See much of her?’

‘When I can. She spends a week with me every summer.’

‘I hear you got a beaut place there. Siena, is it?’

‘It’s nice. But Australia’s my home, too.’

‘Not much doing round here for an opera singer.’

It was what they’d told her last time.

He added: ‘You did good at the Olympics. Watched it on the telly.’

‘Have you got a set?’

‘No signal round here. Adelaide’s the nearest place.’

‘You went all that way?’ She could have wept. She put her hand on his arm. ‘I so wish —’

He cut her off: ‘Give me an excuse to watch the Olympics, didn’ it?’ As in the old days, the mallee was no place for emotion. It was sad, yet there was consolation in knowing that after all these years, with hardly any communication, he still cared.

Edma was with him. Dumpy, short of breath, she was not as wary as she’d been the last time. She said: ‘He keeps a scrapbook with cuttings of your concerts.’

‘Where does he get them?’

‘Best ask him.’

‘Dad?’

‘Your mother sends them.’

Her eyes pricked; she swallowed. You think you know people and then find you know nothing.

‘Were you thinking of staying over?’ Edma asked.

It was impossible; even Monty Cardozo’s magic only extended so far, and she was due in Auckland in two days’ time.

‘I would love to but I can’t. It’s one of the hazards of my life. There’s never time to stand still.’

‘You chose it, I s’pose.’

Dead right. But at least she’d made contact again, and it felt a lot better than it had last time.

She went to Auckland, stopped off in Sydney on the way back to Europe, decided one of these days she’d buy herself an apartment. She left instructions with an agent, telling him there was no hurry. It was a decision in principle; not something to do now but for the future, when something special came on the market. Ever since the war she’d been reminding the world she was an Aussie; maybe the time had come to do something about it.

4

She appeared in Tosca at the Paris Opera, with Nicola Rescigno on the rostrum and the tenor Luc Tomas trying unsuccessfully to get into her bed. If that wasn’t enough, there was tension, wire tight, in the city. A month earlier President de Gaulle had dismissed General Massu for criticising his policy of self-determination for Algeria, and feelings were running so high that there was talk of civil war. The audience was affected by it. The tension spilled over onto the singers and the performance was disappointing.

Lucia was disgusted, feeling that she and the rest of the cast had let down both themselves and their public. She was so upset that she came close to cancelling her appearance at the dinner the following night. Only rumours that the President might be there made her change her mind, not because she had affection for de Gaulle but because her absence might be given a political twist.

It was very grand and stuffy. The President did not come but there were endless speeches from po-faced men, with Lucia wishing she had the courage to walk out in the middle of them. At last it was over. She made for the door and found herself face to face with Jacques Mazetta.

The blood stood still in her veins.

‘Lucy …’

She dragged a smile from somewhere. ‘Paris seems to do this to us, doesn’t it?’

‘Not like Gentile.’

The memory came to her at once: of the pair of them lying naked in the sun beside the pool, the happiness that she had hoped would last for ever.

‘Not at all like Gentile.’

They stared at each other while the guests surged this way and that about them.

She said: ‘You came here …’

‘To see you, yes.’

‘Like the first time. Why?’

‘I’m always reading about you in the paper. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘And your illness?’

‘Better.’

Both of them were growing desperate at all they were not saying. In a strangled voice Jacques said: ‘Let’s get out of here.’

And that, too, was what he’d said the first time they met. Then she’d said no; now she did not. She’d been sitting with Nicola Rescigno. She found him and told him she was leaving. She returned to Jacques. They went out into the freezing February night and caught a taxi to her hotel.

She led the way down the corridor to her suite, thinking, I cannot and I must not, but knowing exactly what she was doing and what was about to happen.

Yet for a moment it did not. With the door shut tight between them and the world, they looked at each other.

My love. My true love.

She knew it would resolve nothing. They had been together before and had separated for ever. Now this. Afterwards …

She would not think of afterwards.

This was real. This was now.

She went to him, touched him.

Now.

5

Afterwards they lay side by side on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, and talked.

‘And now?’ she said. There was no answer. Things were as they had always been. As they would continue to be for as long as they pursued their separate careers. ‘Algeria?’

‘I’m going back tomorrow. I’m only here because of this Massu business.’

‘What’s going to happen?’

‘People are talking war.’

It was a terrible thought, yet for the moment neither of them was interested in what might be about to happen to France. That would come later, but for the moment … What’s going to happen to us?

They had come together, been one and happy. Now they would part. Once again, nothing had changed. It was hopeless, an endless rending with no change in sight.

The following year, at La Tranquilla, Lucia received a letter. It was postmarked Algiers. The harvest was over for the year and once again the stubbled fields were empty of grain beneath a warm and autumnal sun.

She recognised the writing and her heart began to thump. She stood on the terrace and turned the envelope in her hands before slitting it open with her thumbnail.

It is only a matter of time, now. As you will know from the news reports, in North Africa, as in Asia, the French are beat and freedom has won a great victory …

And then: You will see from the enclosed announcement that I have got married. It was not an easy decision but I think it will prove best for both of us.

After she had finished the letter she read it again carefully, as though she had difficulty in understanding the message, short and simple though it was. Then she folded it and held it tightly in her hand and went down to the pool. The flowers were blooming in the beds. Delicate, scented things. Carlo had mown the lawn and trimmed the edges. He was a good man, as Gianna his wife was a good woman. Beyond the grounds of La Tranquilla the harvested fields folded into each other until they merged with the line of purple hills. In North Africa, as in Asia, the French were beat and freedom had won a great victory. The only building in sight was the white-walled chapel at the head of the densely wooded valley down which they had ridden. Down which they had ridden. There was no wind and the trees were at peace. High overhead an eagle inscribed circles against a cloudless sky. There was no sound anywhere. The French were beat and freedom had won a great victory.

The scene blurred and she put her hands over her face while tears ran through her fingers. She tried to quieten herself and could not. She cried noisily, like a hurt child. The pain was in every part of her body. The world was pain. There was no strength in her legs and she sank to the grass, shoulders hunched, while the tears continued to flow. The French were beat …

In time she became quiet, more composed, although the tears continued to seep from her eyes. She dashed her face with water from the pool and stood up. She walked slowly back up the stone steps to the house. Gianna was nowhere to be seen. Lucia went into the living room. Sunlight was golden on the furniture, the shelves of books lining the walls. There was a vase of flowers on the mahogany table, an antique she had picked up in Genoa. The scent of the flowers filled her nostrils. She went across to the piano, stood by the keyboard and picked out a succession of chords.

It helped. Music was nourishment for her soul. In time, very soon, it would take over again. Art would replace pain. Art, too, was love. Of the spirit rather than the flesh. It would abide. It would overcome loss. Very soon.

But oh, the ashes of hope. The chords were harsher, now. There was anger in them, a determination to fight the pain. To overcome. Music was her solace and her peace. Her throat was sore with tears. For the moment she could not sing but in her head she could hear herself, hear the crescendo of her voice rising. Rising.

A phone was ringing in the house. The sound stopped as Gianna picked it up. Lucia’s fingers rested on the piano keys. Gianna opened the door.

‘Mr Cardozo,’ she said. ‘From London.’

She couldn’t take it. Couldn’t. Monty’s exuberance, even long distance, would be too much to bear. Nevertheless she walked to the extension phone on the table and picked it up.

‘Hello?’

‘Baby …’ Monty’s glee hammered nails into her head. ‘Have I got a deal for you!’

She passed a hand over her eyes and swallowed in an effort to clear her throat.

‘Tell me about it.’

6

So went the road down the years, marked by adulation, praise and headlines stark as tombstones.

Visconti gloriosa! — Corriere della Sera

Italy’s finest dramatic-lyric soprano — Musical America

One of the experiences of a lifetime — Opera Magazine

Outstanding, breathtaking, magnificent — La Prenza

A performance beyond criticism or praise — Frankfurter Zeitung

Visconti brings the house down — New York Daily News

A performance of incomparable flair and dramatic impact — The Times

1958. Race riots in London. French nationalists rebel in Algeria.

1959. Tibetan freedom fighters crushed by Chinese military. Death camps in Kenya: UK authorities silent.

1960. Civil war fear in Algeria. Police open fire: fifty-six die in South African massacre.

1961. Settlers and nuns butchered in Congo. Bay of Pigs; US backs invasion of Cuba. First American soldier slain in Vietnam. Newcomer Ryan impresses in Australian Federal election. Opera star found dead.

7

Lucia had been shocked when Toscanini had died, back in January 1957. He had been the greatest conductor of his day, the man who, with his fiery temperament and endless seeking for perfection, had been music for so many. To wake to the news of his death was like being told that the dome of St Peters had collapsed overnight, yet to Lucia the shock was nothing in comparison with her feelings when Valentino Alba, recently retired administrator of the Parma Opera, phoned to tell her that Marta Bianci had died in her sleep.

‘She suffered nothing. Her face was so peaceful. It was a blessing.’

A blessing? Marta Bianci dead? Was he mad?

Her hand clutching the phone, her senses swirling, she barely took in what he was saying.

‘A requiem mass. Verdi. We would be honoured if you would …’

‘Where? When?’

‘In Parma. At the cathedral. Next Friday.’

She had been due in Edinburgh; she cancelled it. She flew to Parma. She came down the steps from the aircraft. Flash bulbs exploded in her face, a clatter of media voices drove shards into her head, and she could have killed the lot of them. There were dignitaries, as there always were; there was no peace in her life, no Space even to mourn the loss of her friend. A hundred sober faces, a hundred concerns, battered her as much as the banks of cameras through which she had just passed. It was terrible, terrible. She turned to the nearest face, fighting the desire to scream, to use her nails to rip holes in the world, to compel it to silence and reverence and respect.

‘Get me to the hotel.’

Because Marta Bianci was dead and the world, so graced by her life, was ashes.

She sang, as she had been asked. Looking out at the congregation, she saw the faces of conductors, producers, singers, and thought that the world of opera must have come to a halt for the occasion.

At the reception she met Teresa Sciotto for the first time in years. They knew the predatory cameras were on them, but Teresa, whom the years had not made wise, fired off a salvo anyway.

‘Are you well?’

‘Very well.’

‘But you’ve lost so much weight.’

Teresa’s eyes said skinny, thin, haggard, which wasn’t much of a worry. Vogue had published some glam pics of Lucia recently, had called her svelte. Lucia smiled.

‘My trouble is, I think too much. How I envy you not having that problem.’

They smiled and hugged, black thoughts inside the black dresses. Teresa would have preferred to escape but Lucia held her tight, posing for the cameras. Why not? Teresa was fatter than ever, a waddle with a voice. Beside such generous flesh, how could Lucia look anything but great?

There was Professor Menotti, too. He came hobbling, a scarecrow out of a nightmare. He was decrepit, an ivory cane clutched in his vulture’s claw, but as lecherous as ever. He fawned like the creature he was, purple lips shining. His smile rubbed against her insinuatingly; he was disgusting. Lucia remembered his hand groping her; she turned her back on him, saying nothing, and her silence razored him to the bone. The media could make what it liked out of that.

It made a lot. The media had discovered there was money in portraying the most celebrated of all singers as a hellcat, and photographs of her turning her back on the famous professor, who the captions claimed had wished only to honour her, appeared around the world. It was true that she had never been a docile soul. Now, more and more, Lucia was willing to oblige them. She did all the things a prima donna was not supposed to do.

8

The mysteries of her art were claimed to be both sacred and secret. She thought, and said, that was crap. She gave interviews, talking openly about her approach to what she called her trade.

‘Always I have to reinvent myself! Always! There is no rest. It would be easy to trot out the same thing, over and over. Easy for me, for the producers, the orchestra, conductor … Go down better with the public, too. They’re not comfortable with constant changes. But I have to do it. I have to dig ever deeper into the blood of the characters. My own blood. Nothing less is tolerable. But, oh, it tires me. Some mornings I can hardly drag myself into battle. It becomes unbearable. But there’s no alternative. I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror, otherwise. I couldn’t live with myself.’

More controversially still, she wrote an outspoken literary piece in which she described prowling the docks at night, claiming that it was the duty of the artist — or tradesperson — to seek truth wherever she could find it.

Ships and docks and cranes. Gangsters sailors stevedores politicians gamblers. Lights gaudy guttering yellow daubs of come-on light painted in flash streaks across cobbles reflective and shining with silver rain. The rods of rain falling endlessly on wharves and patrols, surly shouldered guards, the pugnacious peaks of caps, hands curled tight about the hafts of clubs, the straining slaver of shepherd dogs, white-fanged red-tongued tight-leashed. Razor wire in coils bares its teeth at the sky. Life seething under the multitudinous blows of the rain, between the wharves and crimping houses, the warehouses dark amid the darkness, the mumble grumbling voice of the city sidling always under the rain-arrowed night.

‘Come on, sailor. Show you a good time, sailor.’ Under the rain-arrowed night …

An enterprising publisher offered her a deal, which she refused. Others didn’t know what to make of it at all.

‘It’s almost as though …’

Precisely; but nobody knew for sure whether the famous diva had moonlighted as a hooker or not.

She sang with the Beatles in their first Melbourne concert; she seemed determined to outrage the establishment, while the world loved her. She became a publicist’s dream.

VISCONTI SUES

TEMPER TANTRUMS IN ROME

LA SCALA SAYS ENOUGH

VISCONTI IN LOVE!

At times it was hard to know where fact ended and fiction began. She remembered what an agent had told her years ago: ‘Good publicity’s good, bad publicity’s better, no publicity’s the kiss of death.’

Kissed or not, Lucia was not planning to die yet.

9

The war in Vietnam blew red-hot, if it had ever cooled at all. Every time she read about it in the papers or heard commentary on the news, she thought: Jacques.

From time to time she came across items he’d written, reports from Saigon, Vinh Long, Da Nang. She’d heard nothing from him since the letter telling her of his marriage. Once, she had thought about him every day; now, months went by when she did not think of him at all. She told herself she was over him. She had been out to dinner with half a dozen men over the years but nothing had come of any of them. She shut away her memories of her days and nights with Jacques; she had no interest in sex or even romance.

I am self-sufficient, she told herself.

10

Lucia stood on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. She looked out at the stalls, the four banked tiers forming a semi-circle behind them. Everywhere applause, shouts, flowers. As always, one part of her mind had been conscious of the audience throughout the performance: this alien being staring from darkness at the real world upon the stage, the massive sarsen stones of the temple of Irminsul, the priestess inciting the Gauls to rebellion against Rome.

She had stood, screaming in electrifying fury, summoning them to destruction.

Guerra! Strage! Sterminio!

Now she stood, Norma no longer but Lucia Visconti, acknowledging the applause of the New York audience, thinking of the letter she had received two days before from her friend Khieu Pen in Lyons.

It is not generally known in the west, but I have heard from my sister in Phnom Penh that the Americans have started bombing Cambodia. Can’t they understand that such an escalation of the war plays into the hands of their enemies? In particular there is a group, not widely known in the west, who call themselves the Khmer Rouge, and their reputation is fearsome.

She bowed, she smiled, she lifted graceful arms in acknowledgement of their love, while her heart reverberated once again with Norma’s summons to her Gallic warriors.

Guerra! Strage! Sterminio!

War! Pillage! Death!

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

1

Back in 1959 Lucia had bought Helena a comfortable apartment in a new block not far from the cathedral in Parma. Helena had not wanted to move but Lucia had refused to listen to her mother’s objections.

‘It makes sense. You’ll be near the shops. There’s a doctor round the corner. And what’s in Montegallo, for heaven’s sake?’

Helena was not one to give in without an argument.

‘Why should I care where the doctor is? I’ve still got my health. And what about my friends?’

As far as her health went, she was right. Friends were another story; some in Montegallo still crossed the road to avoid Grandini’s woman. So into Parma Helena went and seemed well settled there, for all her forebodings. Whenever Lucia found time to visit, her mother always complained for her daughter’s benefit but had made friends with two or three other women in the same block. Now, six years later, Lucia suspected a tractor could not have dragged her back to the country. From something her mother had said, Lucia suspected she’d even started going to Mass. Why not, if it gave her satisfaction? Prayers and incense meant nothing to Lucia, yet there were times when she remembered the village priest holding up the cross before the victims of the SS and wondered whether she might be missing something from her life. Faith was not something you could order over the counter, or even in a cathedral, but perhaps in time it would come. For the moment it was enough to concentrate on her career and live, as far as she could, on the right side of the line.

The fact that Helena was settled in Parma didn’t mean that she should never get away. Each year, when Lucia headed to La Tranquilla for her summer break, she continued to make sure that her mother came for a week as well. Made her: that was what it took. Every year Helena refused, but Lucia had not built her place in the world by listening to others.

‘I’m coming to collect you. Make up your mind to that. And be ready. I don’t want to hang around like I did last time.’

Bullying could breathe life into a relationship that might otherwise grow stale. She brought her down, established her in the guest bedroom, generally made much of her. It took a while for them to come to terms with each other — Helena regarded being crotchety as one of the privileges of advancing age — but she got on well with Carlo and Gianna, and in time was prepared to be civil even to her daughter.

This year, after Carlo had carried Helena’s cases to her room, they sat in the living room and eyed each other. The air was cautious between them. Helena was heavily lined now, her hair almost white, and had increasing difficulty in walking. She was only — what? — sixty-six, yet Lucia saw that her mother had aged a lot in the last twelve months.

It had been a long road to get to this point in their lives. Perhaps age brought, if not greater understanding, greater tranquillity. By consent, mutual if unspoken, they no longer mentioned Eduardo or the closing stages of the war. For years that episode had divided them, as unforgiving as razor wire. Now they had learned to ignore it. The past could not be undone, Eduardo was dead, deservedly or not, and time really did dull pain and resentment.

They had learned to be selective of all their memories. In their conversations they revisited Tolmino; each year Lucia heard, once again, the stories of her mother’s childhood: the climb up Razor Mountain, the big kitchen warm and copper-shining while the burja screamed outside the window and the world was sheathed in ice. She heard about the flight from war through the empty countryside. Finally, she heard about her father.

‘Do you still write to him?’

Lucia had never spoken of the woman Edma, did not know if her mother knew of her existence.

‘We stay in touch,’ Helena said. Which meant he must write to her, too. Lucia felt a twinge of jealousy. The only communications she’d ever had from him were a card at Christmas and on her birthday. Not that she could complain; she wasn’t much of a correspondent herself.

‘He always asks after you,’ Helena added.

‘He could ask me himself.’

‘He was never one for letter-writing.’

He writes to you, though. And you were the one who walked out on him. Somehow she kept the thought to herself.

Helena said: ‘He always says he doesn’t want to bother you. She’s too busy to waste time on an old man: he said that once. And it’s true: who knows that better than I do?’

Her mother had always known how to put the knife in. Lucia knew she should have written more often but time was the great enemy and some things seemed destined never to get done.

Into the silence, Helena said: ‘That woman he had living with him … He told me she died, a year ago.’

So she had known, after all. Caught on the hop, her sense of guilt compounded by the revelation of the secret that had turned out not to be secret at all, Lucia said nothing.

‘You met her, I think?’ Helena added.

‘Twice. She didn’t like me much. The second time was better than the first but she was still scared of me, I think.’

‘You never mentioned her.’

‘I didn’t know what to do for the best. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. You did all right.’

Helena patted her hand; it was the closest they’d been for a long time.

They said no more that night. Both of them were burdened by the weight of confidences and shared feelings that had overtaken them after so many years of politeness and distance. No doubt Helena was also tired from the journey. She went to bed.

The next day the walls separating them were back in place. It was three days before the time for renewed confidences returned.

‘What happened to that Frenchman you were friendly with?’

‘Jacques Mazetta? He went back to the Far East.’

‘Didn’t you say he’d been there to cover the war against the Viet Minh? Surely that’s been over for years.’

Lucia knew how long it had been, almost to the hour.

‘It’s never been over at all. Look at the mess it’s in now. Even Australia’s got itself involved. I remember Jacques saying the last song hadn’t been sung there. He was right.’

‘You ever see him now?’

Lucia squeezed a laugh. ‘I’m too old for things like that.’

‘At forty-two? Don’t be ridiculous.’

But it was true; she had lived so long without a man that she had almost forgotten what desire was. Love, of course, was a different matter.

2

Lucia phoned Monty Cardozo.

‘See if you can fix me up with something in Sydney.’

He laughed, coughing. She could imagine the hooded eyes wreathed in cigar smoke.

‘Still trying to reinvent your childhood?’

‘Could be.’

‘We’ll see what we can do.’

He organised a recital tour: Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney. The first thing she did when she arrived was hold a press conference. ‘I intend to spend more time here. This is my country, after all. Where else should I go?’

At last, after years of delay, she bought the penthouse she had promised herself in a new block overlooking the harbour, to demonstrate her good intentions. There were new developments everywhere; someone was making a packet. She was invited to dinner with the Governor-General, where she met an army of forgettable faces: the Prime Minister, Brendan Hicks, that silver-haired slob of a Canberra politician; a property speculator and newspaper proprietor called Hector Godolphin; and a troop of others with the culture and musical knowledge of a merino ram. Culture didn’t rate but the sunburnt country had a weakness for millionaires.

Not that millionaires made up the whole population; her father, for one, had never seen a million dollars in his life. She flew to Adelaide; she fixed him up with a ticket to her recital, in case he was interested. Music had never been his bag — she had never forgotten his expression when her mother had suggested singing lessons for their talented daughter — but he came, anyway, which delighted her. After the recital she took him out to dinner, and they had a good chat; it was like the old times they’d never had. Not that he was a man who would ever be fluent with words.

‘I’m sorry about Edma,’ she said.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘You must miss her.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘You plan to stay on at the farm?’

No answer at all but a look that said: Where else would I go? Which was answer enough.

At the end of the evening, with the old man bug-eyed and yawning, not used to an opera singer’s hours, she said: ‘Maybe you and Mama should think about getting together again. You’ve stayed in touch all these years and you’re both short of company, now. Maybe you could make a go of it.’

‘And maybe we couldn’t. She gave it a try once, couldn’t stand the place. And I wouldn’t live anywhere else.’

‘You could talk …’

‘Nuthin’ to talk about.’ Ted’s voice turned the lock on further discussion.

So there was a bit of feeling between them when they parted, Lucy telling herself she’d been a fool to stick her beak in.

The next day she went to the museum, looked at the Aboriginal exhibits, the photographs of this place and that. The faces in the photographs had a harsh, sandy quality, like the land from which they were sprung. She thought: I say this is my country but I don’t know anything about it at all.

3

Another dinner, this time with the director of the Adelaide Festival. There was a man there talking about Aboriginal culture. He seemed to know what he was on about. After the meal she had a chat with him.

He said: ‘I know someone in the Alice. I can have a word with him. He’ll show you around, if that’s what you want.’

‘Not just the tourist stuff.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

She phoned Monty in London. ‘What have we got on the calendar?’

‘Nothing for a couple of weeks.’

‘In that case ‘I’ll change my flights, take an extra week.’

‘Decided to go sightseeing, have you?’

‘Something like that.’

4

The town was like a maths diagram, a grid of dusty streets running between houses whose concrete cubes fought the land, ruler flat, on which they stood.

Her companion said: ‘The kids sniff petrol and glue. If they could get coke, they’d stick that up their noses, too. They cut each other up over anything or nothing. Half the women get beaten up by their blokes, like every other day. As soon as they’re old enough, sometimes before, the young girls get screwed by the elders. It’s a bloody disaster.’

‘Why don’t they run away?’

‘And go where? They get to the cities, they’re no better off. Boys or girls, there’s only one commodity they got to sell. And they do, my word they do. We would, too, in their place.’

‘The politicians, the officials?’

‘Most of them don’t give a stuff.’

‘So nobody does anything? It’s a disgrace.’

‘Tell me about it. Back in the nineteeth century, someone said the problem of the labouring classes was easily solved. Kill ’em off, there’d be no problem. Same thing here. But we’re smarter. We let ’em do it to themselves.’

‘One day I shall do something.’

‘Sure.’

Meaning, he’d heard that one before.

He took her to Ayers Rock, and the Olgas.

‘Not that those are their real names.’

‘Which are?’

‘Uluru, which doesn’t mean anything, and Kata Tjuta, which means Many Heads. They’re both sacred sites, the source of many of the mysteries of the Anangu people.’

‘Mysteries?’

‘Because they’re known only to initiates. The problem is that a lot of the younger generation don’t want to know, so in many cases the secrets aren’t being handed down.’

‘But why?’

‘You’ve got to understand the problem. Before the whites came these people had lived in their own way for tens of thousands of years. They got by. Their system of beliefs might seem strange to us but it tethered them to the land. They knew who they were. Now? We came in and broke everything they had. Put nothing in its place. Never gave them the chance to work things out for themselves, either, or even to adapt to the brave new world we’d stuck them with. Too many of them live between handout and grog shop. Substance abuse is one whitefella phrase that everyone out here knows, believe me.’

‘If the secrets aren’t passed on, what happens to them?’

‘They die. It may not come to that, but it might.’

‘That’s terrible. How will they know who they are?’

‘You think they know now?’

She walked alone, pondering what he had told her, while the walls of Uluru rose in pleated majesty and a light breeze blew from the many heads of red stone that towered in the distance like half-buried giants above the scrubland. Eventually, still tangled in thought, she went back to the hotel.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

1

By the end of 1968, Lucia, along with many other people, felt the world was coming to an end. She had never been interested in politics, yet now it was impossible to ignore. How, dear God Almighty, was it possible to ignore the dead and maimed and dying and betrayed, the sold and bombed with napalm and steel and the hundred thousand lies of ad men, con men, salesmen, policemen, clergymen, statesmen …

Catastrophe and even danger seemed to haunt her footsteps like a malevolent shadow. In April she was flying between Dallas and New York when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. A month later she was singing at the Paris Opera when the city exploded into days of rioting, students and factory workers combining to put the French capital and its occupants under a state of siege. Later that year she was in Vienna when the Russian tanks invaded Prague. A week after that, she arrived in Chicago as students protesting against the Vietnam War were attacked by police with a brutality reminiscent of the war itself, which went on, ever more ferociously, ever more hopelessly.

After the Chicago atrocities she was interviewed on television. This was normal — she’d lost count of the television interviews she’d given around the world — but the nature of the questions was not.

Following the usual enquiries about her voice and the operas she would be singing, the interviewer turned to the demonstrations and the behaviour of the police. Some people had accused the police of overreaction. What did Madame Visconti think?

Lucia was too experienced to be trapped into criticism of a country that was no stranger to xenophobia.

‘I didn’t see what happened, so I can’t comment.’

‘The demonstrators were expressing their opposition to the war in Vietnam. Perhaps you’d care to comment on that?’

It was like easing your way across a bridge of ice, with crevasses on either side. One slip would bring disaster. Pondering each word, she said: ‘As you may know, I’m half-Australian. My country is also involved in the Vietnam War. There’s opposition to the war in Australia, too. I’m not a politician but there are times when I wonder what we hope to gain by fighting in a country so far away when there is so much opposition at home and in Vietnam itself. In my youth I lived through the Second World War. Every day I knew fear and hunger, as did everyone in my situation. Many people died. This year we’ve seen the deaths of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy. There have been riots in Paris and Chicago, Soviet tanks have invaded Prague. In all these places, people have died. More and more I believe that war and killing solve nothing.’

‘So you think the war in Vietnam should end?’

‘Surely everyone thinks that?’

She was asked to appear on a student radio programme. Again she endured the loaded questions.

Would she be willing to take part in a concert against the war? Would she go to Hanoi, if invited, to sing against the war?

Would she be willing …?

The interviewer was getting more and more excited. She interrupted him. She would do none of these things. She was a singer, not a politician. And people must remember that Australian soldiers were fighting in Vietnam. She would say or do nothing that might imply criticism of her countrymen.

The interviewer had been effusive. Now his expression said she was dirt.

‘You weren’t so picky in the past, were you? I hear you sang in a concert organised by the SS.’

Lucia decided it was time to lose her temper with this presumptuous young man.

‘It was an opera, not a concert. And I sang because I had no choice. They’d have put me in a camp, if I’d refused.’

There was some fallout, all the same. The huge auditorium of the Chicage Opera tended to overwhelm some of the more subtle nuances of Lucia’s dramatic technique but did not conceal a small group of noisy demonstrators who chanted ‘Nazi, Nazi’ before they were thrown out.

She flew back to Europe, thankful it was behind her. It was not. The story refused to die. In Hamburg it surfaced again.

‘You refuse to sing against the Vietnam War. Does that mean you support the war?’

‘I don’t support any war.’

‘Is it because of Australian involvement in Vietnam that you have refused to sing?’

‘There are peace talks under way. I hope we’ll see an end to the fighting without any interference from me.’ Trying to make a joke of it.

For a time it looked as though she might be right. President Johnson ordered an end to bombing a week before Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States. Troop withdrawals, both American and Australian, began. The candleflame of optimism flickered once more, but not for long. Withdrawals ceased. More and more she wanted to speak out, yet as long as Australian troops were there she would not.

2

Years after she had made her promise to Khieu Pen, she sang under his baton in Lyons. She had supper with him afterwards. He asked about Jacques.

‘Do you ever hear from him?’

To hear his name, out of nowhere, gave her a jolt.

‘He married, you know.’

‘I heard. But he’s in Indochina again.’

‘That’s where the action is.’

‘My sister Somaly has met him. He went to see her in Phnom Penh, as I suggested.’

Do not ask, she told herself. He is out of your life. Show no interest. But could not do it.

‘Was he well?’

‘It seems so. He is being transferred to Paris, she says. As foreign editor.’

‘So he’ll have to settle down at last. I wonder how he’ll like it.’

Domestic bliss in Paris, with his wife and new job.

‘Did she say if he had any children?’

‘She never mentioned it.’

3

The war dragged on, spilling into Laos and Cambodia with no end in sight. More and more Lucia found herself remembering the tanks and terror of her youth, Reinhardt Hoffmann’s lies, the abduction of Eduardo Grandini, the cold voice of Colonel Strasser warning her of Auschwitz. Most of all she remembered Jacques Mazetta, lost to her for so many years, yet still loved, and how the war in Indochina had ruined all their hopes. Five months after the last Australian troops pulled out of Vietnam and there had seemed hope, at last, of an end to the killing, President Nixon announced he was stepping up the bombing of Hanoi.

In Lucia’s head, images warred with each other. The cheering audiences of Dallas, Chicago and New York, the warm-hearted hospitality and decent people that she had found everywhere in the United States. The Martyred Five, gunned down before the church by an SS firing squad. The courageous priest, cross uplifted. The dark silence into which she had whispered the words that brought Eduardo Grandini to his death. The folly and vindictiveness of governments, the brutality of the Vietnam conflict. Khieu Pen’s letter, telling her of the bombing of Cambodia: Can’t they understand that such an escalation of the war only plays into the hands of their enemies?

It seemed not.

Yet could she make a difference? She wasn’t stupid; she knew how much she stood to lose if she came out publicly against the war. Her record sales in the United States would collapse, the opera houses might close their doors to her. If speaking out would shorten the fighting by a single day, she would do it and to hell with the consequences, but would it? To suffer pain and achieve nothing …

It was too much to ask.

She quartered the world: Japan, the United States, South America, Europe. She gave master classes and recitals. Her records sold in their millions. She became rich beyond avarice. Success imprisoned her. More and more she wondered what the point of it all was.

In August 1973 she had another letter from Khieu Pen.

I have decided to go back to Cambodia. I know I can do nothing, that my presence will not stop the B52s, but neither can I stay here. Music has been my life but now I ask what purpose music can serve.

One month later Chile’s elected President Allende was murdered in a coup engineered by the American CIA. In a world controlled by evil men, she thought that silence was no longer possible.

4

Monty was furious.

‘You could kill your career stone dead. Don’t you know how much of your income comes from the States? Don’t you care?’

‘I’ve gone beyond the point of asking myself if it’ll help, of setting off costs and benefits. There comes a time when you can’t ignore things any longer. If you feel I’m putting your business at risk, I shall understand if you want to make a break.’

There was a long silence. Eventually Monty said: ‘I think you’re misguided. Brave, but misguided. I don’t believe it’ll do any good at all. But if you feel you’ve got to pin a target on yourself … We’ve travelled a long way together. I guess I’ll stick around a while yet.’

It was strange, the things that could make her cry.

She spoke to a friend, who contacted another friend in Paris who knew someone in the Vietnamese consulate …

Approaches were made; discussions held. Finally, at the beginning of 1974, a decision was reached.

5

Lucia looked out of the window of the car, seeing a vision of another Paris that had repudiated the original. The graceful columns of Hanoi’s Nha Het Lon Opera House, colonial relic of an alien culture, faced a boulevard scarred with poverty, the only traffic a scattering of trishaws. The car drew up outside the opera house entrance. She was escorted inside. The interior of the building also echoed the past, a Paris transported to the east. It, too, was dilapidated; there was no money to renovate buildings or for anything but the war that must be won, that little by little was being won, but at a cost in hardship and moral exhaustion that cast ominous shadows across an uncertain future.

She hated it, remembering only too well the atmosphere of a country at war, but that was why she was here, to affirm her faith in survival by renouncing the atrocities of past and present.

She and the tenor Grosjean had flown in together from Bangkok. They had been met at the airport, had been made much of. It was to be expected; it was a coup for the North Vietnamese to have such eminent and willing captives.

At a reception, a slender, smiling man in military uniform had invited her to broadcast to the world her reasons for being here. She had refused.

‘Why? If you are willing to sing for us?’

‘It is not for you, or politics. It is for humanity.’

Listening to herself, she had thought how pretentious that sounded, yet it was the truth. No political system had drawn her here; she had come to defy the evils that politics had let loose upon the world. Her questioner had sucked delicately on a cigarette.

‘Whatever your reasons, we are glad to see you. What will you be singing?’

‘You’ll have to wait and see.’

He had smiled indulgently, a civilised-seeming man in a world in which civilisation trembled. She heard later that he was a member of the politburo, a hardliner who had been opposed to her visit, to any contacts with what he dismissed as a decadent and hostile west.

There were two days of rehearsals. It was nowhere near enough, and even these were interrupted by rumours of renewed air raids now that the 1973 peace agreement seemed to be collapsing, but there was no help for it. Each time there was a warning everybody was escorted out of the opera house to an underground shelter, although whether it was deep enough and strong enough to withstand a direct hit from a B52 bomb seemed improbable. The two singers had been assigned an escort, a buck-toothed young soldier who wore glasses and assured them again and again that the Americans would never deliberately target the opera house. Hopefully he was right. Theoretically the war was over, yet the Americans had made furious noises about the concert, threatening retribution against the singers who, according to one congressman, were committing an act of war against the United States by coming here. No American media would cover the concert or report that it was taking place, but Washington had been unsuccessful in persuading foreign journalists to stay away, and the Vietnamese officials told them that camera crews and reporters were flying in from around the world.

Presumably this meant that, however much they might wish to, the United States was unlikely to risk the public relations mistake of deliberately targeting the opera house. Lucia thought they would be safe enough.

She was right; there were no raids and, after each all-clear, they went back to work. With its eyes on the audience beyond its borders, the Vietnamese government had decreed that the emphasis would be on music coming, like the singers, from the west, yet there would be Vietnamese music, too. It was an interesting experience, rehearsing a concert that would feature both western and eastern music. Again she was asked to broadcast her opinions; again she refused. She knew that she was making a political statement by being here at all, yet she persisted in her belief that to sing was altogether different from mouthing propaganda into a microphone. Jane Fonda had done it, two years before, but Lucia would give neither interviews nor speeches. She would do what she had come here to do. She would sing and that was all. As to what she would sing …

A mixed bag: a Schumann lied, arias from Norma and Aïda, Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’, and an Italian song from her youth. Finally, the showpiece, ‘Abscheulicher’, that great denunciation of tyranny, and, with Jean Grosjean, the rapturous duet ‘O namenlose Freude’ from Fidelio.

At the end of the concert she stood staring out at the packed auditorium, weeping for all that might have been in the world and was not.

And this is the world we are leaving to our children, she thought. The children who are the future of the world, yet who are so easy to kill.

Later the member of the politburo again directed his enigmatic smile towards her.

‘It seems you do not like strong government.’

She corrected him. ‘I do not like tyranny.’

‘Even in a good cause?’

‘There is no such thing as good tyranny.’

While the escort who had been assigned to protect her rattled his buck teeth and seemed about to die of fright.

6

There was indeed fallout. Dallas and New York cancelled contracts for forthcoming performances. Lucia had expected it but was furious.

‘Can’t we sue them?’

Monty stared, as at a gibbering maniac.

‘In an American court?’

He was right; there was nothing to be done about the contracts or the hate mail that began to arrive with every post.

Bitch …

Fucking bitch …

Like the outfall from a sewer.

One letter provided a measure of consolation. It was one of many waiting for her when she got back to Europe. It was marked personal and Otto, her secretary, had not opened it. She broke the seal. She read it. As on a previous occasion, she groped for a chair.

It is a wonderful and courageous thing that you have done. I shall admire and respect you always.

Jacqui.

7

There was trouble in Australia, too. The previous year she had sung at the opening of the new opera house. Now, on her first visit since that date, violence erupted during a performance of Traviata. Faces and fists were everywhere, eyes staring, mouths screeching about traitor and cow and various aspects of feminine physiognomy.

She tried to talk to them, knowing that it was impossible but making the effort, nonetheless. It was no use and there was half an hour’s delay before the police managed to clear out the rowdies. Then the opera went on.

At the end the applause was tumultuous, the entire audience standing and calling for all the principals and Lucia in particular, because everyone knew at whom the demonstrations had been directed.

Eventually Lucia advanced to the front of the stage and waited for the audience to fall silent. When they had done so, she spoke.

‘A famous conductor once told me never to justify, never explain. I am neither justifying nor explaining now. As you all know, I went to Vietnam to do what I could to stop the war. I had been asked to go before but had refused as long as a single Australian serviceman was there. Even then I went only because there seemed no sign of an end to a war that had to end, that had damaged this country and — far more — the United States so severely. I went, not out of politics, but to share with the world my belief that the killing must stop. That is all. If that makes me a traitor, so be it.’

It seemed for a time as though the applause would never end.

She left the opera house to more trouble, more foul words flying like gravel, but there was a police escort and neither the demonstrators nor their words harmed her.

The next day she flew out, not — as some papers claimed — because she hadn’t the guts to face the mob, but because she was due in Rome. It was a good thing; by the time she came back again, two years later, everyone but herself had forgotten all about it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

1

Hector Godolphin had named his yacht Poseidon. No-one knew whether it was because he liked the name or because he fancied himself as the god of the sea; despite his first name and an interest in a fleet of tankers, there had never been a hint of anything Greek in his background.

The yacht was moored at Circular Quay, and was filled with celebrities, who Hector collected as greedily as money. Lucia Visconti was performing at the Sydney Opera so he’d decided it would be a good move to hold a party for her. She came aboard and the party stopped. All eyes turned to the figure poised at the top of the gangway. For a second, conversation ceased, then a splatter of applause spread quickly to every part of the deck.

Hector was there at once, smiling to crack his face. Cameras flashed as he welcomed her aboard.

He shepherded her towards the Prime Minister. Brendan Hicks was wearing a dark and statesman-like suit, a silver tie to set off his hair. He was miffed on two counts. He had intended to be the last person aboard and to be upstaged by this Italian singer was a mortifying experience. They had applauded her, too, whereas he had slipped aboard almost unnoticed. He might have been a waiter.

He was prepared to be curt with her, as with all upstarts, but had no chance; no sooner had he met her than she looked him over, obviously unimpressed by what she saw, and was gone on what more and more resembled a royal progress. Morosely he sipped his drink and found it warm; no consolation there.

Lucia was introduced to a succession of faces. She met so many people; she had learned long ago to smile at each as though at a close friend or even lover, but to register even a fraction of them was an impossibility.

Sometimes there was an exception. The Minister for Trade: she saw a tall man, had an impression of black hair, slightly curly, big shoulders, blue eyes. A long way from good-looking but with strength in his face. A real man, then, which was a commodity that in her experience was in increasingly short supply.

She stopped, resisting the pressure of Hector’s hand under her elbow.

‘I’m sorry. I missed your name.’

‘Denzil Ryan.’

Irish, then. Black Irish. She took a good look at him: fame had its privileges. He smiled back equably. Unlike that sack of conceit they called the Prime Minister, Denzil Ryan didn’t seem in the least put out or threatened by her. These days that, too, was a rare thing.

She dared to hope he might be interesting, and that came as something of a shock. She had not looked at a man in such a way for so long, but had not forgotten the feeling. She said: ‘Perhaps there’ll be a chance to have a chat later.’

And moved on.

It wasn’t easy, of course. She was too famous for private chats to be the relaxed affairs they should have been; the prowling cameramen saw to that, as well as the celebrity-hunters who proliferated even in a crowd like this, where everyone was a celebrity of sorts. In Lucia’s experience, it was a common phenomenon; for people on the fringes there was always someone more famous, more successful, more newsworthy, and they seemed to believe that, by clinging close, by laughing and being photographed with them, some of the glamour might rub off on themselves.

A sad business.

So Lucia and Denzil didn’t have the chance to chat but before they left …

‘I’d like to see you again,’ he murmured. ‘If that’s possible?’

She smiled at him. ‘That’s very possible. I’ll give you a number where you can reach me.’

2

So it began; dinner with friends after an operatic performance. Later, suppers for two. Later still …

‘I’m an old lady. Nearly fifty-five. You sure you want to risk it?’

Although in the right light she looked closer to forty, and knew it.

‘I’m not that far behind you.’

‘You’re a man and that makes all the difference.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I’m not much for men, personally.’

‘Thank the Lord for that.’

3

He was a satisfying lover, his vigour verging almost on the brutal, but Lucia didn’t mind. She’d grown tired of her goddess persona; it was a relief to be treated as a woman by a man who saw no reason to apologise for his masculinity.

From the first they had decided it would be impossible to avoid the media, so they never tried. Photographs of them appeared in the society pages of the papers that went in for such things. One of Hector’s sleaze buckets intended to run a feature entitled ‘My Life and Loves’, a full-page interview with Lucia that had never taken place. Lucia was tipped off by a friend at the magazine. She was indignant.

‘I never even spoke to him.’

Denzil had a word with Hector, who declared, hand on heart, that he never interfered with editorial policy. ‘My hands are tied, I’m afraid.’

Perhaps they were, but the article was pulled, all the same.

‘Not that it would have mattered if they had published it,’ Denzil told Lucia when they met for dinner.

‘It would have been a pack of lies. I hate that, don’t you?’ she said.

He shrugged; politicians were used to lies. ‘It’s how the world is.’

After so many years’ experience she still couldn’t come to terms with it, yet knew that Denzil was right. ‘All these stories by people who’ve never met me … It makes me feel dirty.’

Denzil couldn’t have cared less. ‘Neither of us has any attachments. The publicity can’t harm your career.’

‘What about yours?’

‘Being seen in public with a famous personality? Got to be a plus.’

Lucia found the notion ludicrous. ‘Personality? Is that what I am?’

She hoped she was more than that. The kids barely out of high school who starred briefly in the television soaps and posed vacant-eyed on the covers of adolescent magazines were personalities; she was the most famous operatic soprano in the world. Unchallenged, too, because Teresa Sciotto had retired.

‘I’ll bet you were glad to see the back of her,’ Denzil said.

‘Why should I care?’

‘Everyone knows you hated each other.’

‘It was more our fans than us.’

They’d both had trouble from supporters in the other camp. On one occasion in Venezuela, Teresa had been pelted with eggs during a performance of La Bohème. ‘They say she threw a fit of hysterics and flew out on the next plane. Poor Teresa. It must have been terrifying.’

Fake sympathy; she was delighted, even in retrospect.

‘Did you ever have any experiences like that?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been booed once or twice. Some people in Chicago called me a Nazi and of course there was the riot after my Hanoi broadcast. Only one other time was there any violence. In Palermo someone threw a cabbage at me. It missed.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I flung it straight back.’

‘Did you hit him?’

‘How should I know? It was dark. I hit someone, though.’

Denzil laughed in delight. ‘You’re quite a terror, aren’t you?’

‘You’d better believe it.’

As the waiter brought coffee and the bill, Lucia said: ‘They say Teresa’s writing her memoirs. I’ll bet she doesn’t mention being pelted with eggs in Caracas. It’s news to me she knows how to write at all.’

‘Isn’t she young to retire?’

‘She’s older than I am. And her voice was packing up; she had no choice, because her voice was all she had. She never knew how to act.’

She smiled triumphantly. Teresa’s retirement didn’t mean hostilities had ended. Oh, she was so glad she’d finally come out on top. Above all, that she was still singing and would go on doing so for a year or two yet.

‘It’s a strange job,’ she continued. ‘It leaves you with no real passion to spare for real life. I enjoy it, I suppose, but once my voice starts to go I’ll clear out. I want to leave at the top.’

‘And do what?’

‘That’s a problem. I don’t know.’

Although, looking at this attractive, virile man who had appeared so unexpectedly in her life, she had begun to get ideas. She thought of Jacques Mazetta, whom she had loved. Whom she still loved. But Jacques was history. The evening was warm, the sky full of stars. They drove to Lucia’s apartment block. The lift whirled them skywards. She unlocked the penthouse door and they went in. No-one was about; these days her maid Benedetta had strict instructions not to be around when Lucia came home.

‘Drink?’

‘I had something else in mind.’

There was the silken feel of a dress falling disregarded, the discarding of garments that left her body free and glorious. She thrust herself at him. Here. And again here. While with shut eyes she felt his fingers tracing their seductive map upon her body.

Later he looked down at her. He smiled teasingly. ‘No real passion to spare for real life?’

‘None at all.’ And she gasped as, once again, he touched her. Her eyes closed. Forming the words with difficulty, she said: ‘Perhaps you’re teaching me to change.’

She woke in the middle of the night. Her body was sore; a bite on the inside of her thigh throbbed, yet she felt not misused but delighted by the intensity of her feelings. The bite reaffirmed what sometimes she had doubted, that she was real, alive and — could it be possible, at this stage in her life? — still desirable.

Early the next morning she said: ‘It’s like music …’

‘What is?’

‘Making love with you. When everything goes right in an opera, when the conductor, singers and orchestra get it together as the composer intended, you feel your soul floating in light, a sense of joy and fulfilment that lifts you out of yourself and the world around you.’ She ran her fingers over his back, thinking how at the start she had been frightened of loving this man, fearing the peril of commitment. Now it had become her reality. ‘That’s how I feel when we make love.’

He laughed, too earthy to enter into such romantic fantasies. ‘Never know your luck. Maybe you’ll get the chance to feel it again, in a minute.’

She shared his laughter. All her life she had despised subservience, both in herself and others. Now she welcomed it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

1

‘The PM thinks the world of you,’ Denzil said.

Hector Godolphin, ponderous with flesh and power, passed Denzil a glass of single malt.

Denzil had seen the label on the bottle and been suitably impressed. He sampled it appreciatively.

‘He told me you were true mates.’

Hector doubted it. In their world true mates were an unknown breed. However, he was willing to pretend. ‘We go back a long way.’

It was late; Hector’s staff had left for home long ago. In his vast office, dimmed lights shone softly upon the table and chairs of the conversation area; elsewhere in the room, the shadows lay thick. Hector took his glass and walked to the plate glass wall that overlooked the harbour.

‘You can see it from here.’

Denzil joined him. The city was a galaxy of lights against the darkness. Hector pointed.

‘The area around Darling Harbour. That’s where it is.’

He turned and walked briskly back to the table, Denzil, doing his good dog act, at his heels. Hector’s thick finger skewered the plans spread out for them to study.

‘See? A series of office complexes. And there, on the point, we’ll have three blocks of residential apartments, all top of the range, all with harbour views.’

‘What’s there at the moment?’

‘Factories, wharves … It’s a crap area but we’ll soon sort that out. It’ll be the focal point of the whole city by the time we’ve done with it. The PM’s very keen.’

Denzil sniffed the breeze; he knew he wasn’t here just for a chat. ‘What do you want from me?’

Hector replenished Denzil’s glass. ‘It’ll cost us two hundred million. We need off-shore finance for it. The Middle East, I hear that’s the place to raise this sort of funding. You’re the Trade Minister, I thought you could maybe put in a word for us.’

Denzil’s brain was a swarm of bees. It was the chance of a lifetime but if it came out it would be the end of him. Lust and terror … He took a deep breath, commanding himself to be calm.

‘There’d be a price tag.’

Hector eyed him shrewdly. ‘Them or you?’

‘We can worry about what they want later.’

Hector laughed, slapping him on the shoulder. ‘Don’t mess about, do you? How does ten percent grab you?’

Not at all; it wasn’t nearly enough, but there was always room to negotiate.

‘The shares would have to be in a nominee name.’

Again the harsh laugh. ‘I may be ugly, son, but that don’t make me stupid. Of course in a nominee name! You reckon you can fix it up?’

‘I know a bloke.’

‘Can you trust him?’

Denzil’s turn to laugh. ‘Of course I don’t trust him! But he’ll keep his lip buttoned.’

‘You better be sure.’

‘Last thing he’ll want is anyone yapping about it. He stands to make a quid, too, don’t forget.’

Hector pondered. The light reflected from his glasses, concealing his eyes. ‘Okay, then. Go for it.’

‘And the PM’s in favour?’

‘Damn right. Not a word to him, though. Strictly hush hush.’

‘Of course.’

2

‘There’s a private dinner party. Very private. Business, you know. I wondered if you could make it?’

Lucia was delighted. It was the first time he’d involved her in business. Yet something in his voice put her on guard.

‘What’s it in aid of?’

‘A deal I’m putting together. Not a word to anyone, okay?’

She was indignant. ‘If you don’t trust me, don’t ask me. Who’s the dinner for, anyway?’

‘Someone who may be able to arrange some overseas finance for me. I have to impress him and you’re the most impressive person I know.’

Lucy knew garbage when she heard it. ‘As long as it’s only dinner he’s expecting.’

Warning bells clanged as soon as she saw him. Denzil was making the introductions. Lucia interrupted, smiling like a razor at the man she’d hoped never to see again in her life.

‘No need for that. We’ve met before.’

Anwar Bendurian.

3

The dinner party was over; Lucia was in a state.

‘Of all the people on earth!’

‘How was I to know you’d met him?’

‘He couldn’t lie straight in bed! He cheated me; how can you do business with a man like that?’

‘He’s got contacts in the Middle East. Important contacts.’

‘Make sure he doesn’t con you, that’s all.’

He decided he’d better apply some oil. ‘We can’t always pick who we have to do business with, you know. I don’t like it any more than you do.’

Clearly bullshit. If Denzil was doing deals with a man like Anwar Bendurian, what price his own honesty? When he got her back to her place he had no luck, either; after a shock like that she wouldn’t let him lay a finger on her.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

1

Lucia was in London when Teresa Sciotto’s memoirs came out. The first thing she knew about them was when she got back after an arduous recording session to find the forecourt of the hotel swarming with reporters. She stared through the car window as it turned off the Strand.

‘What’s going on?’

She soon found out. Microphones were thrust, flash bulbs blazed like artillery. She got out of the car, questions hammering the air.

‘Madame Visconti, what do you have to say …’

‘Madame Visconti

‘Madame Visconti, have you read …’

She could have screamed at the lot of them. Instead she took a deep breath, mustering every gram of her theatrical presence. She faced them, smiling, and raised her right hand above her head. The gesture and her personality commanded their silence. The bellows ceased. In the silence, Lucia could hear the roar of traffic along the Strand. ‘I’m sure the hotel management can organise a room for us where we can do this properly.’

Representatives of the management, nervous-eyed at the excitement, agreed that a room would be no problem.

‘Wonderful! Give me five minutes.’

Her smile broadened as she leaned forward, taking the media pack into her confidence. ‘I’m dying to go to the bathroom.’

Some liked that but not all; a woman’s voice bayoneted the laughter. ‘How does it feel to be accused —’

Lucia interrupted her firmly: ‘Five minutes.’

She reached her suite without further drama. With the door closed behind her, she rounded on Otto.

‘What’s going on?’

He had no idea, either.

‘Find out!’

In the end he got Monty on the phone, and he told them.

‘Sciotto’s memoirs claim you collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.’

Lucia threw up her hands. ‘Not that again!’

‘I’ll tell the press you’re not well,’ Otto said.

She was well enough to turn on him for making such a suggestion. ‘And have them crucify me? Tell the world I wasn’t willing to face the cameras?’

That would be the day. She went down the corridor like a fury. At the entrance to the room where the media was doing its caged-lion act, she stopped, took a deep breath, rehearsed her most beaming smile, then walked in.

Questions flew like hail. Again she raised her hand; again she silenced them. She looked around the faces, striving for eye contact, smiling at each individual.

‘Is this to do with Teresa Sciotto’s memoirs? Then I have to tell you I haven’t read them. Would one of you like to tell me what she said?’

Again the voices, beating at each other and at her.

‘One at a time. Otherwise I can’t hear you.’ She might have been a schoolteacher with a bunch of unruly kids.

Finally the bayonet voice prevailed: ‘She says both you and your mother were well-known Nazi sympathisers during the war. Specifically, she claims you sang for Mussolini, that you appeared in a German opera organised by the SS. What do you have to say about these allegations?’

‘We lived in constant fear of being arrested, of being deported to a labour or concentration camp. The SS ordered me to sing in Fidelio, so I sang. So would anyone. When they told you to do something, you did it, but I never collaborated in any way. So far as Mussolini was concerned, I was picked to sing at the dedication of a war cemetery when he was present. It happened before the war, when I was a child. That was the only time I met him.’

‘You say you had to do what you were told. Did Teresa Sciotto sing for the Germans?’

‘You’ll have to ask her.’

‘She claims they asked her several times but she always refused.’

‘Then she’s the only one who did. As far as I know, she didn’t help the partisans, either. I did.’

2

Next day, fearful of what the papers might contain, she got Benedetta to read them to her. On the whole they weren’t as bad as she’d feared. All carried the story but most were non-committal in their comments. One noted the long-standing rivalry between the singers and suggested this should be taken into account in assessing the truth of the story. Lucia was pleased.

‘Quite right!’

Then came the report in The Star, undisputed monarch of London sleaze, and her mood changed.

VISCONTI’S TEARFUL CONFESSION: I SANG FOR THE SS!

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

1

She was scheduled to sing Medea at the Athens Festival.

It was as hot as Hades when she arrived and a turbulent wind filled the air with dust. It was the worst possible weather for an opera singer’s throat.

She was still in shock over the scandal of the Sciotto memoirs. London had been bad enough but when she had phoned Australia the news had been even worse. The papers were full of it, Denzil furious.

‘Just what I don’t need, let me tell you.’

Subservience had its limits.

‘You think I like it?’

‘I’ve even had some reporters phoning me about it! I thought we had something special. Now I don’t know. We’ll need to talk seriously when you get back.’

Whatever that might mean.

It was hardly the best preparation for an opera that required not only musical brilliance but acting skills capable of projecting contrasting qualities of scorn, vengeance and tenderness.

2

Lucia stood on the semi-circular stage of the Herodes Atticus amphitheatre. Above, on the summit of the Acropolis, the Parthenon raised its floodlit columns to the sky.

The stone walls of Creon’s palace are silvered by moonlight as Medea enters. A barbarian princess from Cochis, she has been brought to Corinth by Creon’s son, Jason. Medea is the mother of Jason’s two children yet for political reasons Jason has resolved to put her aside and marry Glauce, a local princess. Medea is to be sent away, deprived even of her children whom Jason loves and is determined to keep with him. Medea, abandoned, resolves to wreak vengeance on the man who has betrayed her.

Overcome with anguish, she murders her children and thus deprives Jason of his most precious possessions. At the end of the drama she pours out the icy vindication of a woman cursed both by fate and those who had made up her entire world. She has destroyed Jason, her children and herself. She speeds away in a serpent-entwined chariot. ‘I go now to hell, where I shall meet with you again.’

Out there, the audience. Here, the fragile silence neither of the present nor two thousand years ago but of eternity. Shadows hovered: pain and supplication, fury, tenderness and heartbreak within the inexorable unfolding of the destiny in whose coils all humanity was bound.

Medea steps forward, slipping back her cloak to reveal herself to the sentry at the palace gate. Lucia felt herself uplifted by the gods, her feet barely grazing the ancient stones on which she stood.

She poured all her ferocity into the opening chords.

— I am Medea …

I am fate. I am the cry for justice. I am death.

3

After it was over, engulfed in applause, she could barely stand. History and the present, Medea and Pericles, Colonel Strasser and Reinhardt Hoffmann, Jacques Mazetta and the peasants killed on the Hanoi road … The burden was so great that, standing in the ancient ruins that were the living presence of the past, she thought it had reached the point of destroying her.

I cannot go on.

Yet somehow she finished the tour. No-one would ever be able to say she had betrayed her public but the strain of all that had happened affected her voice. In Rome, appearing as Lady Macbeth, she missed the D flat, while in Verona the critics described her performance in Un Ballo in Maschera as lacklustre.

So it was, on the back of a rare failure, that Lucia flew back to Sydney and to catastrophe.

4

‘You’d better send him in, I suppose.’

Not very gracious, but Brendan Hicks hated dealing with the Director of ASIO; the security chief always made him feel he didn’t know what was going on in his own backyard.

In this case he certainly hadn’t known; the pampered hair nearly stood on end.

‘You’re telling me one of my own ministers has been negotiating a private loan with a Saudi sheik? For how much?’

‘The figure we heard was three hundred million.’

‘Oh my God.’ But perhaps there was a let-out. ‘Through an intermediary, you say? Any chance the sheik doesn’t know who he’s dealing with?’

The imbecility of some questions made them impossible to answer diplomatically. The Director looked at him. The Prime Minister coughed.

‘No. Of course not.’ His momentary embarrassment made him more ferocious than ever. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll sort him out.’

Which, with an election coming, was a guarantee. But the bad news was not finished.

‘That opera singer mate of his …’ the Director said.

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me she’s got a husband and three kids hidden away somewhere.’

‘Worse than that. A book just out claims she’s a Nazi.’

The door was barely closed behind the Director before Brendan Hicks was screaming for his assistant.

‘Get hold of that fool Ryan! Now!’

5

‘Are you out of your mind? Getting involved with a deal like that? With a Saudi? Have you never heard of blackmail?’

‘I understood it had your blessing.’

A dangerous silence.

‘Why should you imagine that?’

‘Hector Godolphin said —’

‘I knew nothing about it.’ The PM cut him off very clearly and emphatically. ‘Nothing. You understand me?’

‘I must have misunderstood.’ Denzil was trying desperately to cover his tail.

‘Damn right you misunderstood! Three hundred million dollars? You know what the media will do if they get hold of this?’

‘It was two hundred.’

‘Not according to ASIO. Perhaps your man was hoping to get something for himself?’

He might have done, at that.

‘I’ll crucify the bastard!’

‘You’ll do nothing! You won’t contact Hector or this — what’s he called? — Anwar Benwhatsit. I’ll deal with them. You’ll keep your head down and pray this doesn’t come out. Because if it does, and I am speaking very seriously now, you’re finished. And another thing: get rid of that singer you’ve been screwing.’

‘What’s she got to do with anything?’

‘ASIO says she’s a Nazi. You think the government needs that kind of publicity?’

‘She isn’t a Nazi. She’s not political at all.’

Argument enraged the PM who, no more than the media, was not in the business of being fair or truthful.

‘It’s how the world sees her that matters. And they see her — what did that damn rag say? — as an accomplice of the SS. Your mate! Get shot of her! Or I’ll get shot of you!’

6

She had known her arrival would be frenetic but it was far worse than she could have imagined. Journalists, seemingly in their hundreds, were at the airport to ambush her. It was a torrid time. The tone of their questions, demanding explanations for the Nazi sympathies they took for granted she possessed, was an echo of the fascist reporting of her childhood.

Always she had been able to hold her own with the ratbag media, trade them blow for blow and win. She had even enjoyed it. Not today. Exhausted by the flight and the dramas of the last month, she let fly at them.

‘I’m not going to justify myself. I’ve nothing to justify. There’s no point, anyway. You’re not interested in the truth.’ In tears, with Otto helping her and Denzil Ryan conspicuously absent, she fought her way through the scrimmage. The car drove away with flash bulbs exploding like landmines about it.

Next morning the coverage was vindictive. One paper demanded action against this accomplice of the SS during World War II.

She phoned Denzil in Canberra, using the direct line he had given her in happier days. There was no answer. When she spoke to his office she was told he was unavailable.

She phoned her Sydney lawyer, who rearranged his schedule to see her.

‘I shall sue the pants off them!’

‘What for?’

‘For libel, of course.’

‘They say you were an accomplice of the SS; so you were. You sang in an opera that the SS arranged. And they will argue that it’s in the public interest to reveal it.’

‘I had no choice!’

‘No-one’s said you did. It would be the worst publicity for you to fight it. It’ll drag on for years, they’ll bring witnesses from Italy, they’ll build a campaign of character assassination against you …’

‘You’re saying there’s nothing I can do?’

‘I am saying, Madame Visconti, you’d be wiser to let it lie.’

‘It isn’t fair! It isn’t true!’

‘Since when has the media cared about that?’

She hated him for saying it but knew when she was licked. Very well, she would forget it, or at least remain silent. Denzil was another matter. He was busy, no doubt, but had always found time to phone her before. She refused to accept that he was avoiding her, yet she knew.

She went to Canberra.

7

He tried to freeze her out. He neither took nor returned her calls. It saddened him; he had enjoyed being with her, being seen with her, her beauty and most of all her fame a constant lift to his ego. But there was no help for it. He had no intention of letting his career go down the gurgler because of her. At the same time he knew he’d have to handle her carefully; Lucia Visconti could make a dangerous enemy. As it happened, things sorted themselves out without his help. Amanda, his office assistant, stuck her face around his door.

‘Security says Madame Visconti’s in the lobby.’

He thought quickly.

‘Tell them you’re coming down to fetch her.’

‘You’ve a meeting with Mr Dann in ten minutes.’

‘This won’t take long.’

Not that it mattered. Harry Dann was looking for favours, not dispensing them. He’d wait.

Within minutes Amanda was back.

‘Madame Visconti

Denzil was on his feet. As soon as the door was closed he came and put his arms around her.

8

She was wearing a light scarf over her hair to protect it from the drizzle falling outside. She stood stiffly within his embrace. He held her at arm’s length, looking down at her. She pulled the scarf from her hair, and said: ‘Remember me?’

I am Medea. The coils of fate that she had sensed in the amphitheatre of Herodes Atticus drew ever tighter about them both.

He tried to laugh. ‘Of course I remember you.’

‘I wondered. I don’t seem to have heard from you recently.’

She recognised the inevitability of what was to come. Even so, she, who had never asked a favour of him, had to plead now.

‘You said we had something special together. Surely we can work something out?’

Medea’s plea: For pity’s sake, grant me asylum and the peace of lying in your arms.

Denzil gave what he hoped was a statesman-like cough. ‘I think we’ll have to take it easy for a bit. Just for the time being, you understand.’

‘Why should we? Just because that woman told a pack of lies about me?’

‘That’s not the issue. The PM …’

His words, the very air, had lost their reality. None of this could be happening. If she denied the nightmare she would wake.

‘Who cares what he thinks?’

She battered and battered at the absurdity of what he was telling her, that a human relationship could be obliterated because of one old man, clinging to the authority that he desecrated.

‘He is Prime Minister, after all.’

Who mattered more than she did. Bitterness and humiliation soured her breath. While Denzil tried to jolly her.

‘You can’t blame him. They’re calling you a Nazi-lover. And with an election coming!’

‘But it’s not true!’

Although she was coming to understand that, in politics as in art, perception and not reality was what mattered. Freshly falling snow was black, if enough people said it was.

‘But it looks bad. We don’t need it.’

Anger spiked her voice. ‘And that’s it? For the sake of politics?’ The notion was too vile for understanding or grief, yet Denzil Ryan was neither chastened nor apologetic. He was sullen, determined to have his way.

‘It’s a question of the national interest.’

Lies. She saw from his expression that she had always been expendable. While politics, his career, were his life.

There was nothing more to say. She could hate him now for spurning her. She turned away. She walked out of the room and through the outer office. Anger was growing. Its fever shook her. Amanda came scurrying after her; she turned to face her. What can this woman want?

‘Visitors have to be escorted inside the building. Regulations …’

Because Lucy did not exist. She was a potential terrorist, an entry on a form, a name in metre-high letters upon the facade of an opera house. She was a hundred women living within the halls of the world’s imagination. She was Gilda and Leonora and Amelia and Violetta and Tosca and …

Medea. Armed with vengeance as, two or three or four thousand years ago, the wronged woman who exemplifies all wronged women stood within her snake-entwined chariot and invoked ruin.

Lucia smiled at the anxious girl. Regulations were the only reality. Theseus existed in a signature, a name upon a form permitting entry to the labyrinth.

‘We must obey the regulations, must we not?’

She left the building. The drizzle had ceased. The wind ripped blue openings in the clouds. She found her way to the lake.

Her heart wept. Denzil was a fool to sacrifice substance for the shadow. Or she was a fool to have committed herself to a man who was no more than shadow.

She could have bruised herself with clenched fists for her stupidity. She did so, striking her thigh once with all her force. The pain defined the flesh and bone that otherwise would have been unreal.

She walked, welcoming the lingering ache. Anger overwhelmed sorrow, despair. Medea knelt upon the palace steps, within the shadow of the walls of carved stone that supported not only roof but universe. Lucia raised the clenched fist that moments earlier had bruised her thigh. Denzil Ryan had sacrificed her to his true and only love. Himself. God of love, hasten my vengeance. She sat upon a bench. The sky, the trees, the clean wind pressed upon her. Gods of the inferno, aid me now.

She remembered Anwar Bendurian, breathing scotch and a spurious charm over the dinner table, and Denzil’s reluctant explanations: he’s got important contacts in the Middle East. Denzil was Trade Minister; he too was bound to have contacts in any number of places. Yet the way the two men had behaved made it obvious they were not concerned with government business. Anwar was a creature for the back alleys of commerce, not for ministries. Gods of the inferno …

The Prime Minister wouldn’t want to see her but would, nonetheless. As Denzil had said, there was an election coming. Imagine what the media, no friends of the government, would make of such a story, if she went public.

Lucia got up. A flight of ducks landed, churning the surface of the lake. She walked purposefully towards the Prime Minister’s offices.

I go now to hell, where I shall meet with you again.

9

Anger lingered. It did not help that Denzil Ryan had resigned from the government. That was justice but she remained furious at being spurned by a man who had proved so unworthy.

For the first time in her life Lucia felt old.

As always, emotion affected the quality of her voice. She went on tour. She sang well below her best. She blamed herself for allowing herself to be distracted. It made no difference to the audience’s response and the critics remained kind. Only she was unhappy, but that was what mattered.

At the end of the tour, she gave a concert in Marseilles. It was a disaster, her top register like broken glass. Now it was not only she who was unhappy. The next day a review of the concert was dismissive, brutal. She is past her best, the author said. Her voice is not what it was. At fifty-six? Is it to be wondered at? That, she might have accepted, but the author had not stopped there. It was a right-wing paper; now it had the chance to put its boot into the woman who five years ago had dared sing for the Hanoi terrorists. Her looks, he said. That once-regal beauty … The beauty of her youth: ravaged. Laid waste. The fact that it was a political judgement did not console her. These people knew nothing of her, her music, her youth. Nothing. There had been little beauty in her childhood, yet from it had come everything that was good and bad in her life. She had been born with talent but talent alone was nothing. It was what you did with it that counted. At whatever cost, because to compel your talent, force it to the ultimate and beyond, was to break bones. Your own, and the bones of others.

Now all they could say was that she had lost her looks with her voice.

She was angry with herself for being wounded by such stupidity. She decided that the time had come for her to think seriously about her future. But what would it be?

Still she did not know and the unknown frightened her.

In her hotel suite, she stared at her reflection in the mirror. She knew some older women who could not bring themselves to do so, but her mirror had always been her co-conspirator, giving her the confidence to face a world that she feared, always, might one day cease to love her.

The phone rang.

‘Hello?’

‘I read the review. It was disgusting.’

She had not heard his voice for so long, yet she recognised it at once. ‘It was right.’

Jacques corrected her sharply. ‘No, it was wrong. Your voice wasn’t at its best but the other remarks … Unforgivable.’

‘How would you know? After all this time?’

‘I was there.’

His answer shocked her. That he should have attended one of her recitals, after so many years … That he had been there and she had not known, her instincts dormant … She didn’t know what to say to him. After Denzil she had told herself she was through with men. She still thought so, but perhaps with less conviction.

He said: ‘I know a place where you can get genuine bouillabaisse.’

They had been there, done that.

‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea.’

‘Just for lunch. No strings, no commitments.’

‘It would be asking for trouble.’

‘Don’t you trust me?’

‘It’s not you I’m worried about.’

But she knew already she would go.

10

It was what she had heard called a greasy spoon restaurant, in an area near the docks where walking alone at night would probably spell trouble. The proprietor didn’t bother with orders but brought them two plates of the steaming fish stew, chunks of coarse bread on the side. He served a rough red in tumblers. He obviously knew Jacques well, slapping his shoulder and laughing with him before disappearing into the kitchen.

Jacques cracked the shell of a langoustine between his teeth.

‘I ate here regularly once. I was investigating an international company that was exploiting the local workforce.’

Lucia had been determined to mention Jacques’ wife as soon as possible; now she could.

‘How does your wife like you being away so much?’

‘Ex-wife. We divorced three years ago. We were only happy apart. With me stuck in Paris, life became impossible.’

She could think of nothing to say. The closeness of their past made things difficult; it would have been easier to exchange confidences with a complete stranger. She said: ‘I’m thinking of retiring. The sooner the better, the way I sang last night.’

‘That was an exception.’

‘Perhaps. But I always said I’d get out at the top.’

‘And do what?’

‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know. It frightens me.’

‘Directing?’

‘I don’t think so. I feel I should try something outside music, but what? I don’t know anything else. Do I wrap myself in a shawl and wither away? Read improving books? I’ll die if I do that. I know I’ve got something to contribute but I don’t know what it is. I wake in the middle of the night, thinking about it. Sometimes I’m so scared I find myself saying, if only Marta were alive.’

‘I’m here, for what that’s worth. If you want me. You can always talk to me, rely on me for support. I’ve drawn such courage from your kindness. Perhaps it’s my turn, now.’

Outside, a freighter blew its whistle, the sound booming between the warehouses as it edged its way towards the sea. She thought of all those she had lacerated when they had provoked her through obtuseness or envy.

‘Kindness? Is that how you think of me? As a kind person?’

He looked at her. His hair was grey but his features still retained some of the bony hardness of his youth.

‘To me, you will always be the woman closest to my heart.’

She reached out and took his hand in hers. ‘Frère Jacques, we are too old for passion.’

‘Of the flesh, perhaps, although even there I doubt it. But of the spirit? Never, while life lasts.’

11

She went to see her mother in Parma. They sat up late and she told Helena she had decided to retire from the stage.

Helena approved. ‘You’re nearly fifty-seven, after all.’

‘It’s hard to believe. After all these years …’ She stretched out her hand to her mother, like the little girl she thought sometimes she had never been. ‘I’m frightened of what lies behind that final curtain. Where shall I turn, then, for fulfilment?’

Helena, eighty years old now, might have grown frail in body but her mind was still alert. Her eyes, sharp as a hawk’s talons, impaled Lucia.

‘You’ve been one of the most noteworthy women of your generation. Even people who have no interest in opera know your name.’

‘Is that the point of it all? To make money? To be known?’

‘You’ve done much more than that. You’ve painted the name of woman upon the sky so that others, looking up at what you’ve achieved, take pride from knowing that they, too, are women. You’ve shown there are no limits to what’s possible.’

Lucia was moved, yet dismissive. ‘Words …’

‘No. You have held out a light to others. Men, as well as women, know the impossible is within reach, because one woman has done it. I know you better than you do yourself and I tell you there is no limit to what you can do, or will do when you find what you’re looking for.’

Lucia was deeply moved now. ‘Thanks to you.’

‘I? What have I done?’

‘You said I’d be an opera singer and made sure I was.’

‘I said you’d be the greatest opera singer in the world and you’re that, too, but through your efforts, not mine.’

‘I worked, certainly. I’ve never stopped working! But if you hadn’t driven me at the beginning, it wouldn’t have happened. The success I’ve had — the records, memories, even my name and reputation — is your success, too. I’m going to sing my final opera in Sydney. I want you to be there when the curtain comes down.’

Helena pondered, said: ‘No.’

Lucia was hurt. Her father had died the previous year; she had flown to Australia to attend the funeral. Now, if her mother didn’t come, she would have no-one of her family there at all. ‘Please! I’ll charter a private plane, if you like. I’ll fly over to get you. We’ll arrive together.’

But Helena had made up her mind. ‘It’s not the journey, and I don’t care about the curtain falling. It’s what happens afterwards that matters.’

‘I don’t know what will happen afterwards. That’s the trouble. It terrifies me!’

‘Fear is natural. Whenever we want to cross new boundaries or do something we haven’t tried before, we fear failure, sometimes even success. When I pushed you into becoming an opera singer, I was afraid of what it would mean if you failed. But I knew, if you succeeded, I’d lose you.’

Lucia remembered her mother sleeping, exhausted by terror and grief, after the partisans had dragged Eduardo from her bed. She had looked so vulnerable …

‘You never lost me. Even in the worst days …’

At last it was possible to say it, and mean it.

‘I thank God for it.’

‘And I can’t persuade you to come to Sydney?’

‘I’ll be there the day you start your new venture, whatever it is. New beginnings are what we should celebrate, not endings.’

‘Even if it’s in Australia?’

‘Even if it’s on Mars.’

Part Four

BEYOND THE CURTAIN

1980

CHAPTER FORTY

1

Lucia awoke to sunlight.

She lay still, conscious that everything in her life had changed. ‘Free at last!’

The trouble was it didn’t feel like freedom.

Memories came jostling: a thousand nights and one night, an Arabian feast of triumphs and glory, of mornings spent with coffee and the newspapers, reading the reviews of critics euphoric or spiteful, of a lifetime spent in the endless battle to project art through the medium of her voice.

She opened her eyes — those famous sapphire eyes, their intensity a little faded now — and stared up at the light from the harbour shifting on the ceiling. She wondered: ‘Freedom?’

Neither the ceiling nor the light replied but the sound of her voice must have carried because, moments later, there was a soft knock on the bedroom door.

‘Madame, are you awake?’

Lucia squinted at the clock on the bedside table. Ten o’clock. In a world of late nights it had always been her normal time for waking up. She raised her voice in reply. ‘Come, Benedetta.’

The door opened. Benedetta brought in a stack of newspapers.

‘You’re all over the front pages.’

‘Let me see.’

She spread the papers across the bed. Benedetta had been right; the front pages were plastered with pictures and inch-high headlines.

SEE YA, MATE

EMOTIONAL SCENES AS VISCONTI FAREWELLS SYDNEY

VISCONTI’S PARTING TRIUMPH

It was like reading about a stranger. She leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes.

‘You want coffee now? Or your bath?’ Benedetta asked.

She’d had a bath before going to bed but perhaps the steam would help ease the kinks from mind as well as body.

‘A bath, I think. You can bring me a cup of coffee while I’m having it and read me what the papers have to say about me.’

Benedetta disappeared into the bathroom; there was the sound of jetting water. In seconds she was back. ‘Ready.’

Lucia swung her long legs out of bed and walked into the bathroom’s scented steam. She examined her reflection. The chestnut hair had grey in it now, the red lights tarnished by the years to copper. She had never tried to hide it; age was graciousness and inevitable. She stripped off, lay naked on the tiled floor and began the exercises without which, retired or not, her morning would have felt incomplete. Ten minutes later she screwed her hair into a knot, slipped into the bath and lay back with the warm water lapping just beneath her chin. She examined her body with care. Once she’d been as fat as a hog but she’d beaten that, as she had beaten so many problems in her life. People had said she’d swallowed a tapeworm to aid her dieting. The idea was disgusting but she had learned that the public would believe whatever nonsense it liked, so she’d never bothered to deny it. For those who made their living from public performance, legends were always useful.

No need for tapeworms now. She could let herself go, say to hell with the diet she had followed so religiously for so long. She could indulge in a blizzard of chocolate cakes if she wanted. She laughed; her life had changed, indeed, but some things were best left as they were. For a woman of fifty-seven she still stuck out in the right places. It was more than most singers of her age could claim. Some a good deal younger, come to that. Only the other day she’d seen the portrait of an up-and-coming soprano — the poor girl had been out to here all over. A fine Butterfly she would make. What had Alfredo Dante said about Teresa Sciotto, all those years ago? Like a sumo wrestler on the hoof. No, you needed more than a voice. You needed a body and will to match. You needed an instinctive awareness of drama and of art. Above all, you needed passion.

Where would she direct her passion, now she could no longer sing?

Benedetta brought in a tray: coffee in a silver pot, milk, even croissants. She would save those until later; crumbs in the bath she did not need.

While she drank her coffee, Benedetta read her the reports of last night’s performance.

‘Never mind all that nonsense about the farewells. What do they say about Traviata?’

There were two reviews. Complimentary, in the main, although one had been unable to resist commenting, yet again, on what the critic described as the harshness of Visconti’s upper register.

‘If they’d wanted a nightingale they’d have hired one!’

‘He also says you’re the greatest diva Sydney has ever seen.’

‘Did he, really? Show me.’

Benedetta proffered the page, finger pointing to the paragraph.

She was right. Perhaps he wasn’t so bad, after all.

She really had to grow up, she scolded herself. At fifty-seven it was time, heaven knew. Yet she had little hope she would. Dressed in cotton slacks and white T-shirt, trademark hair pinned back, Lucia sat with the phone beside her and went through the messages that, Benedetta said, had been pouring in all morning.

Painstakingly she worked her way down the list. Most of the messages were from admirers, wishing her well, thanking her for bringing beauty to their lives. She marked these with an asterisk; later Otto would prepare brief letters of thanks for her signature.

There’d been a call from Charmaine Gold, her Australian agent, to discuss a new recording deal from EMI. Even on a Sunday Charmaine never stopped. That one she would handle herself. Tomorrow.

There was a message from the French Ambassador. Presumably about the Paris trip, but she’d better check. She dialled the embassy and was put through at once.

‘Permit me to congratulate you on last night’s performance, Madame. And of course on the whole of your illustrious career. You will be flying to Paris, as we agreed?’

‘On Tuesday, yes. It’s all arranged.’

‘Air France?’

‘Of course.’

‘I am sure they will look after you very well.’

They’d better, she thought. First-class seats weren’t cheap.

‘Our President is looking forward very much to meeting you again.’

‘I am honoured.’

‘May I ask where you will be staying?’

Both the Italian and Australian embassies had offered but Lucia had always valued her freedom of movement.

‘The George V.’

‘Ah. Very suitable. The Elysee Palace will contact you there, then.’

‘I look forward to it.’

She sighed as she put down the phone; she found the courtesies involved in talking to ambassadors and heads of state more wearying than the performances themselves. She remembered one United States president; she’d thought she’d have to fight him off with a hatchet. Walküre would have been a doddle, by comparison. Of course, that had been long ago. Superstar or not, no United States president would be likely to acknowledge her existence now.

She reached the last name on the list; another one for Otto. She ate a croissant — so much for chocolate cake — and drank a final cup of coffee. With time on her hands, she went out, took a taxi to the art gallery. She wandered through rooms dedicated to Nolan, Olsen, Drysdale, Aboriginal art. Pigments shone like flames within the shaded rooms. Lucia looked with no more than half an eye and mind. The void still surrounded her. It was as bad as being on holiday, inventing ways to pass the time. All her life, leisure had been a bad taste in her mouth. Now she would have to come to terms with it. The challenge of freedom, she thought. What an extraordinary idea.

Back at the apartment she made a brief call to Georg Solti, who was flying out that night.

‘Give my love to Rome.’

‘I believe you’re heading for Europe yourself within a day or two?’

‘The day after tomorrow. To Paris.’

‘I heard. My congratulations. And afterwards?’ She did not know. ‘I daresay you’ll think of something. You always have.’

She knew Georg meant well but she recognised a new detachment in his voice, confirmation that she had passed out of the living world of opera into legend. Diva to has-been in twelve hours, she thought. No wonder it was hard to come to terms with it.

2

After she’d put the phone down she checked with Otto to make sure he’d collected their flight tickets for Paris; he had, as she had known he would. The French Embassy had already sent her a screed on protocol; she would read that on the plane. The replies to well-wishers were ready for her signature. It took her half an hour to deal with everything. Chores done, she walked onto the balcony and stared past the shimmering leaves of the palm tree growing on the other side of the parapet. Inside the apartment the phone began to ring. She heard the faint murmur of Benedetta’s voice. A moment later she put her head around the door. ‘Telephone, Madame.’

‘Say I’m not available.’

‘Her name’s Ruth Ballard. She says she met you last night.’

Lucia remembered; she was the writer she’d met on Hector Godolphin’s yacht. ‘What does she want?’

Benedetta threw open her hands. ‘To speak to you.’

Lucia was intrigued. It was strange how you were more comfortable with people of fame when you were famous yourself. She walked inside and picked up the receiver.

‘Madame Visconti …’

‘We met last night —’

‘I remember.’

‘I enjoyed the performance very much. It was most moving.’

‘Because of Violetta’s story? Or because of the occasion?’

Lucia heard her own voice. It was dagger-sharp but she could not help it; she would accept sympathy from no-one, least of all from this unknown woman.

‘Both, perhaps. It’s always ennobling to be in the presence of great art. Especially when you know it’s the last chance you’ll get.’ She spoke in a matter-of-fact voice: simply two women together, or two artists, perhaps. Either way, she’d managed to find exactly the right words.

Then Ruth Ballard said. ‘I wondered if you’d be free to have supper with me tonight.’

Whatever Lucia had been expecting, it was not that.

‘Why?’ Not very gracious, but Ruth Ballard didn’t seem to notice.

‘Because I’ve always admired your work. Because we met last night and I thought I’d like to know you better. Because I thought it might be fun.’

Lucia decided to refuse the invitation. ‘I’m a little tired.’

‘I can believe it, after last night, but you don’t want to be alone.’

‘You think I dislike my own company so much?’

‘It’s too soon. After last night, after all the nights of your life, you’re bound to be feeling some let-down.’

Lucia was unsure whether to be amused or angry. ‘You’re telling me how I feel?’

Ruth answered with another question. ‘Are you saying you don’t feel any emptiness? After all the wonderful things you’ve done in your career?’

Suspicion of motives came with the territory.

‘And I suppose you’ve got suggestions as to what I should do to fill this emptiness you say I’ve got?’

‘Not at all. I’ve made the offer; it’s up to you if you come or not. If you do, there’ll be just the two of us. Nothing exciting, nothing like the grand occasions you’re used to, but I thought we might enjoy it.’

‘No photographers? No reporters?’

‘Definitely not. I don’t know how you put up with them.’

Lucia thought: She’s right. I don’t want to be alone. ‘What do I wear?’

‘Clothes. People might talk, otherwise. Anything casual; it’s not a party.’

3

It was a nice house, unpretentious, with a lawn and flowerbeds running down to the water. From the terrace the harbour was a panorama of light: boats and ferries, the errant glimmer of the moon. Across the water the opera house, fragile-seeming at this distance, was no more than a tourist destination. It was hard to believe that last night, or any of the other nights of her life, had really happened. It gave her an uneasy feeling, as though she had stepped out of her previous existence and into an unknown place. Ruth put a glass of cool wine into her hand. Lucia stared at her as though she had never seen her before. Ruth touched her arm.

‘It’ll be fine. You’ll see.’

Panic ebbed as Lucia wondered about this woman who seemed to read her innermost feelings.

Even this, Ruth seemed to understand. She smiled. ‘Come and sit down.’

Music played softly in the background. Corelli; Lucia was used to people deferring to her over their choice of music and was glad that Ruth had not.

With her hostess in linen slacks and a simple blouse, her own dress from one of Italy’s leading fashion houses was too formal but it didn’t matter. Everything was easy here. The conversation, like the music, was light but never inconsequential.

Ruth said: ‘I’ve read one of your biographies. You were in the war, too.’

‘In Italy, yes. And you?’

‘Burma was the worst of it. And the best.’

‘How could it be both?’

‘Because I nearly died. And because it was there I met my husband.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He was killed two years ago. In a car accident.’

Killed … So simple, so portentous a word. Lucia had also known death. Yet Ruth was smiling, seemingly at peace. What a remarkable woman she was. So remarkable that Lucia, whose hackles rose more quickly than most, was quite untroubled when Ruth said: ‘What do you plan to do with your life now?’

‘I wish I knew. It’s been troubling me for months. It’s been suggested I might like to direct. But I thought I’d prefer something outside music.’

‘Such as?’

Lucia was turning over stones in her mind to see what might lie underneath.

‘I went to Vietnam in 1974 …’

‘I know you did.’

‘I sometimes think the whole world knows. When I was there I saw a hospital crammed with children, victims of American bombing.’

‘Propaganda?’

‘No doubt. But the children were real. It was terrible.’ She lifted another stone. ‘Here, in this country, I’ve seen kids on the street. I went into the outback, once. The stories I heard … I have a journalist friend who wrote that when we harm children we destroy the future, and ourselves. I believe that. Governments don’t seem to care. I think I’d like to do something about it, if I could. A foundation, perhaps, something to get people thinking. To save some of the children, at least … Ourselves, too, if they really are the future.’

‘They certainly are. But even to scratch the surface would be an enormous task.’

‘Is that a reason for doing nothing?’

‘Not at all. If you save one child …’ Ruth prowled to the sliding doors leading to the yard. She looked across the harbour at the city’s lights. ‘I’m thinking of selling up here. Moving to the coast somewhere.’

She came back, looked searchingly into Lucia’s face. ‘When you’ve thought out what you want to do, let me know. I’d like to help, if I can.’

‘Would you? Would you really?’

‘I try to do everything I can through my writing,’ said Ruth. ‘But sometimes, like now, it doesn’t seem enough. There are times when I would like to do things, not just write about them. God knows there’s enough that needs to be done.’

‘I feel the same. Injustice and indifference … They are so powerful, so frightening, yet no-one seems to care. I feel I have to do something about it, however small. If you’re able to help, and willing …’ She seized Ruth’s hands. ‘Join me in this and I know we’ll make a difference.’

‘Even one child …’ Ruth kissed her cheek.

For a moment uncertainty returned. ‘It’ll need a miracle,’ Lucia said doubtfully. ‘A series of miracles.’

‘So we’ll make our own miracles.’ Ruth smiled. ‘Stay in touch.’

For a moment, standing there together in the warm darkness, with the lights of the city shining on the other side of the harbour, all, even miracles, seemed possible.

Two days later, with Otto and Benedetta, Lucia flew to Paris.

4

The salon was heavy with grandeur. There were a number of dignitaries, men and women as solemn as funerals. The gilt-framed portraits weren’t too cheerful, either: the Prince of this, the Count of that, the jewelled stars on their puffed-out breasts more lively by far than the doughy faces above them.

Lucia thought it was lucky they couldn’t read her thoughts. They’d guillotine her, if they could. Opera singers were more dependent on the princes of the world than they liked to admit but Lucia, for all her Italian blood, would always be too much of an Aussie to be comfortable with titles or grandeur. Except her own, of course.

There was the pregnant hush that was, as always, attendant upon glory. Any minute now, Lucia thought. It came not in the crying of trumpets but in the be-sashed and lounge-suited figure of a man, elegant, narrow-faced and smiling, who emerged through a massive wooden doorway flanked by flamboyantly uniformed guards. He walked forward and stood, hand on breast, upon a shallow dais. From an invisible source came the softly played notes of the ‘Marseillaise’. Not even royalty could have been more royal.

Lucia had been through as many performances as any king, yet this occasion, like all the rest, had a majesty of its own. She became caught up in its momentum, and afterwards would be able to remember few details of what had happened.

A man, Hubert something-or-other, spoke on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. He went on and on while Lucia focused her attention on the portraits. ‘Services to art … The unparalleled majesty of her presence … A voice beyond parallel in the annals of opera …’

So this was what it came down to, she thought. Forty-four years of endeavour, since Seta Cehovin of Monfalcone first set about training her voice; now here she stood, garlanded by words, with the best of her life behind her. Unless she decided differently.

Hubert whoever-he-was stopped speaking. The skirt of her gown brushing silkily against her legs, she walked forward, prompted by protocol and her own innate sense of theatre, to accept with suitable humility the honour that had been bestowed upon her by a grateful French nation.

Chevalier des artes et lettres …

Afterwards, in an adjoining room, the luncheon was honoured by candleflame, the heaviness of solid silver tableware, the smiling attentions of the President of France. At last it was over. The President withdrew. With her new decoration secure in its mahogany box, Lucia enjoyed the feeling of royal progress between the ranks of smiling courtiers. A limousine returned her to the real world, if that was the right description of an existence shared between the George V hotel, the most opulent in Paris, and the glittering shops of the Champs Elysées and Place Vendôme.

5

‘Any messages?’

There were several. She flipped through them. The Australian Embassy. The Italian Embassy. A reporter from Le Figaro. Another from Paris Soir. The BBC. Maude Arkwright, from EMI. Lucia paused, frowning.

‘Tho Chi Dong?’

Benedetta shrugged. Don’t ask me.

She decided to phone this one first, found it was the Vietnamese Embassy.

‘Mr Tho Chi Dong.’ She pronounced the name carefully, hoping the operator would understand her accent. She need not have worried; within seconds she was speaking to the man she wanted. A cultural attaché, or so he said. She found herself remembering Hanoi, her visit there six years before and the dramas it had created for her afterwards.

‘Thank you for returning my call. I would like to make an appointment to see you, if I may.’

Lucia was dubious. ‘I’ve a very heavy schedule.’

‘Please. I would not ask if it was not important.’

‘Would you be able to come to the hotel?’

‘Of course. Now, if you wish.’

‘Can you tell me what it’s about?’

‘Better I explain when I meet you.’

She laughed, amused and exasperated by the games diplomats play. ‘You make it sound very mysterious.’

‘Not at all. It is very simple.’

Within ten minutes he was at the door. He was short but stockily built, wearing a well-cut suit. About thirty-five, she thought, although with other races it was never easy to tell. ‘May I offer you a drink?’

‘Thank you. Perhaps a glass of water.’

Benedetta brought him a glass. He sipped while Lucia waited. From past experience she knew that Vietnamese never liked to come straight to the point but it seemed that this man was the exception. He put the half-empty glass on the table beside him. ‘The Khmer Rouge have done terrible things in Cambodia. Hundreds of thousands of the people of that country — even more, perhaps — are dead.’

This was too close to home for comfort.

‘I know all about the Khmer Rouge. I had a friend who went back to Cambodia. I never heard from him again —’

‘Forgive me. You are wrong. We are aware of your friendship with the conductor Khieu Pen. We share your grief at his disappearance. Of course you didn’t hear from him. The Khmer Rouge cut off all contact with the outside world. He could not have contacted you, even if he’d wanted to. Believe me, you do not know all about the Khmer Rouge. None of us knew. When we began to find out what they were like, we knew they were not to be tolerated. That was why they had to go.’

‘Why your army invaded Cambodia, you mean?’

‘To rid the world of an intolerable tyranny, yes.’

‘That isn’t how many people see it. Nor do I see what business it is of mine.’

‘Some would say it is everybody’s business to rid the world of evil.’

Lucia was not prepared to get into an argument about abstractions. ‘The Cambodians and Vietnamese have long been enemies, have they not?’

‘Long ago, yes. No more. The world becomes smaller every day. We cannot afford enemies.’

‘What has this to do with me?’

‘There was a time when you were a friend to our people.’

‘I hope I still am.’

‘The Americans killed many Cambodian people through their bombing. The Khmer Rouge killed many more. Between them, over a million dead. A million and a half, perhaps. The country is in ruins. By getting rid of the Khmer Rouge, we have restored hope to the people of Cambodia. But we need help.’

‘Why should you care about Cambodia?’

‘Not only for Cambodia! For ourselves, too! We are a poor country. We need development aid, technical assistance. It will not happen so long as the rest of the world believes us to be the butchers the Americans say we are. We need someone to speak on our side.’

At last she understood the direction this conversation was going. Her eyebrows questioned him. ‘To speak on your side?’

‘Or sing. A concert to celebrate the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge. The rebirth of hope in Cambodia. To draw attention to their need for aid. And our own.’

‘I am retired. An old lady. No-one will care.’

Gently he corrected her. ‘You are one of the greatest opera singers in the world. Many would say the greatest. Your support would mean much to us.’

‘Do you have any idea how much trouble I got into last time? I still can’t perform in the States, or visit there. Even in Australia there was trouble.’

Tho leaned forward, face earnest, hands clasped between his knees. He said: ‘If you had the opportunity to change what you did, knowing what you know now, would you do it?’

It was a serious question, deserving a considered answer. ‘It was worse than I’d expected. I hadn’t foreseen the hatred. But the war was wrong. I thought so and I said so. So no, Mr Tho, if the situation arose I would change nothing. I would sing in Hanoi.’

‘Then sing for us again.’

She was six years older and some of the apostolic fire had died. Yet she remembered what she had told Ruth Ballard about the children she had seen in Hanoi. If her words had meant anything at all …

‘I will do it, but subject to one condition. I must make a phone call. I shall let you know my answer tomorrow.’

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

1

With the creak of aluminium and the popping of rivets, the antiquated DC8 took off from Hanoi and headed south. Lucia sat in the window seat with the Vietnamese official beside her and Otto and Benedetta in the row behind. She said: ‘You’re sure the others have gone ahead?’

Tran Chong was quick to reassure her. ‘Oh yes. As our people in Hanoi told you.’

‘You’d better be sure about it. I’m not going to perform by myself.’

‘You will meet them in Phnom Penh. At the hotel.’

‘And Khieu Pen’s family?’

‘We have been making enquiries. We shall know more about that when we arrive.’

Lucia stared at the jungle flowing beneath the wings. The plane was flying so low that there were times when its belly seemed almost to brush the topmost branches.

‘Do your planes normally fly as low as this?’ Although she was fascinated rather than frightened by the sensation.

Tran laughed. ‘In Asia we learn to live dangerously.’

She didn’t need to be told that; she’d taken quite a risk in coming here, as EMI’s Maude Arkwright had been quick to point out when she’d heard Lucia’s plans. ‘Phnom Penh? To give a concert?’ As though she were planning to dance naked at the Folies Bergères.

Retired or not, Lucia was no more tolerant of criticism than she’d ever been. ‘The whole world should be celebrating!’ she’d replied.

‘Have you forgotten what happened to your American sales when you sang in Hanoi? They’ve just started to pick up again. Now we’ll be back to square one.’

Lucia wasn’t interested in Maude’s arguments.

‘Pol Pot and his gangsters murdered hundreds of thousands of their own people, simply because they could read and write. They were the Nazis all over again. They turned the whole country into a death camp. Hanging’s too good. The world should be glad to see the back of them.’

‘It’s not the way Washington sees it. Or London.’

‘Washington and London can take a jump.’

‘For someone who claims to be non-political, you get more involved in politics than anyone I know. The wrong kind of politics, what’s more!’

‘To celebrate the downfall of evil? That’s bad?’

‘It’ll be bad for sales, I promise you that,’ Maude had warned.

No doubt Maude would prove right but Lucia could live with that. Wealth gave a measure of independence or it meant nothing. It was a philosophy that would give Monty the horrors, no doubt, but she wasn’t about to ask his permission.

The aircraft changed direction to follow the Mekong River, its brown surface reflecting the sunlight as it wound in a succession of giant loops towards the Cambodian border.

Tran pointed at a small settlement on the bank. Patches of paddy fields shone as green as emerald beside wooden houses steeply roofed in attap. A water buffalo wallowed; peasants lifted eyes shaded by conical hats to stare at the plane as it swooped overhead. The sudden sighting of another and unknowable life was like the illumination of a camera flash: momentary clarity obliterated almost at once by the return of the trees. In the second before the village and its inhabitants were gulped down by the forest, a child waved. Lucia’s hand lifted in response before she realised that the child could not see her. She said: ‘Things don’t seem too bad down there.’

‘That village is in Vietnam. You’ll see the difference when we cross into Cambodia.’

Within a few minutes she had discovered how right he was. Brown ruins rose like rotted teeth out of a landscape where no rice or other crops grew. There were no people, no animals, only slowly waving forests of wild grass. These and the flicker of the plane’s shadow were all that remained of movement or life.

A second village. A fleeting impression of fire-charred timber. She said: ‘At least the grass shows the land is still fertile.’

Tran looked at her. ‘It has been well fertilised. You see how the grass grows thickest on the outskirts of the villages? That’s where the people are buried.’

Lucia was aghast. ‘There are kilometres of it —’

‘This whole land is a graveyard.’

‘Why did they do it?’

‘Evil needs no reason.’

She stared at him with frightened eyes, imagining the horrors that must be waiting for her on the ground. ‘It’s terrible. Unbelievable.’

‘It is hard to believe but things are much better than they were a year ago. You cannot imagine how bad things were then. When I flew into Phnom Penh there were children living in boxes, or in nothing at all. You couldn’t get close to them. If you tried they ran away.’

‘How did they survive?’

‘Thousands didn’t. We had driven out the murderers but their legacy remained. The thing I remember most was the sound.’

Lucia did not understand. ‘Sound?’

‘It went on day and night. A soft, lilting sound. It was the noise the starving children made as they came closer and closer to death. So many. And the stench … We could not have invited you to come here then.’

‘Did nobody help?’

‘Eventually, after several months, the Red Cross sent a hundred tons of supplies. For a population of five million. Apart from that, nothing.’

The note of the plane’s engines changed. The nose dipped. They checked their seat belts. Minutes later they landed at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport.

2

Inside the airport building the stagnant heat, sharp with the fumes of cigarettes, was intense; someone was explaining in broken English that the airconditioning had broken down. A covey of journalists came running, thrusting microphones into her face, all shouting at once.

‘Madame Visconti, why are you here?’

‘Madame Visconti, has the United Nations sent you?’

‘Will you be building a new opera house?’

She looked around at them, holding her ground in the face of their hammering voices. She waited until they were quiet, then said: ‘You have to be patient with me these days. I’m an old woman, remember?’

Somewhere from the crush a voice answered: ‘You look pretty good to me.’

An Australian voice. Laughter and applause. She wagged her finger at them. ‘Perhaps I should sing to you. Maybe that’ll shut you up.’

Again they laughed, as she had intended, and she laughed with them; she’d always been good at this sort of thing. Then she sobered: abruptly, deliberately, effectively.

‘You ask why I’m here. It is not for a new opera house or for the United Nations. I am here to sing. Only that. Not to make speeches. Not to be political. Not to blame this country or that for the past but to say that we should all work for the future. If by singing here I can bring that message to the world, then my journey will have been worthwhile.’

She held them by the weight of her words. A moment to let them sink in, then she freed them, again deliberately, from the seriousness of her message.

‘I know you’ll let me go now. I’m hot, tired. I need a bath. I am rehearsing tomorrow, performing the next day. I must make sure I get enough rest or my singing will be a catastrophe, and this country’s seen enough catastrophe without my making things worse.’

It was risky to joke about something that was beyond laughter or even tears but she judged it was what they wanted from her, and was right. They laughed, once again applauding her, and she knew that, whatever else might happen during the course of her visit, she had once again got the media on her side.

Tran said: ‘There is a car waiting. If you would like to go to the hotel…?’

3

It wasn’t the George V but it was comfortable enough. In the street beyond the window things were very different from what she’d expected. There was a constant tinkle of bells as pony traps carried people to and fro. Somewhere a jazz band was playing, a cheerful thread of sound alongside the raucous sunlight. Trees flowered; a bus passed in a stink of blue smoke; the traders at a nearby market sent up a ceaseless clamour. Tran watched her taking in all the activity. This was no graveyard; perhaps he thought she was wondering what all the fuss had been about. Almost apologetically, he repeated: ‘It was very different a year ago.’

She watched a group of Vietnamese soldiers on a street corner. They were looking about them, doing nothing, but there was no mistaking how their olive-green uniforms and Ho Chi Minh sandals created a pool of silence about them. Cambodian civilians scurried past with averted eyes. She said: ‘Someone in Paris told me you’ll never leave now you’ve conquered the place.’

‘That is wrong. The Khmer Rouge were destabilising the whole region. We had to get rid of them, since no-one else would. But we’ve no interest in staying longer than we must. We have enough problems at home.’

Lucia said: ‘And I have problems here. You told me the others would be at the hotel. Where are they?’

Tran picked up the phone, held it to his ear for a moment and then replaced it on its stand.

‘The line is dead. I shall ask at the desk.’

Within a minute he was back.

‘Rooms seventy-three and four.’

Lucia walked down the corridor. It was clean, at least you could say that for it, but plain, the carpet threadbare, and the whole building stank of cigarette smoke. At once she reproved herself. If she’d been looking for luxury she should have stayed in Paris. Given the country’s so-recent past, it was a miracle that so much had been resurrected from the ruins in so short a time. She reached the door she’d been seeking. She knocked. The hotel waited silently about her, yet somewhere a window must have been left open because again she caught the joyous thread of sound from the jazz band she had heard earlier. The sound reminded her of something from Baudelaire that she had read only a few weeks earlier. A soul floating in light, an ecstasy compounded of joy and insight, hovering far above and removed from the natural world …

There was no sound from the room. She tried next door, with the same result. She went down to the reception desk, where a young woman told her that the two other guests had gone for a walk. Cross with disappointment, she went back upstairs to her room and had a bath. When she had finished she stood at the window, looking down at the street.

Down there the black-clad figures had come running, banging on doors, yelling orders, terror flowing like a river into the hearts and lungs of men as the population of the entire city was herded like cattle into the streets. She stood transfixed while the ranks of people, jostling, helpless and resigned, passed on either side of her, all of them exiled in a realm beyond despair or even death, driven by yells and rifle butts, jammed so tightly together upon the sole remaining bridge across the Mekong River that it took them five hours to cross it. The silt-laden water reflected the sun’s fire, the flowers in the trees were like flickering flames, and in her hotel room Lucia felt herself walking forward, step by slow step, her dust-covered feet and body one with the herded multitudes of the dead.

The grass-covered graves of the murdered millions, the newspaper images of water-filled craters from the B52 bombings, the fragments of flesh hanging from trees after a landmine explosion, all merged into this: the crowded street, the tinkle of pony bells, the harsh cries of the market traders.

She dressed herself in blouse and slacks and once again walked down the corridor to the rooms she had visited before. This time she had better luck. The door opened.

‘Lucia!’

Alfredo Dante hugged her. He’d put on a lot of weight over the years. They had sung together many times since they had first performed in Parma at the beginning of their careers, yet until now she had never noticed how much he had aged. She had, too, of course, but throughout their careers they had both remained eternally young because they had always, played characters who once had been their own age, then five years younger, then ten, finally young enough to be their own children. Always the aging of the flesh had been denied by the continuing youthfulness of the voice and the artifice of their acting skills, because Alfredo, too, had been actor as well as singer. Now she observed the fleshy face, the lines sagging at the corners of eyes and mouth, and knew that he, too, was at the end of his career. It made her realise how privileged they were to have this opportunity to celebrate, once again, the joy and indestructibility of life.

She thought about the programme they had planned to sing together. They had appeared in recitals before and had always sung the scene between Tosca and Scarpia that had marked their first important triumph. The pre-concert arrangements had provided for their doing so again but she wondered whether it might be possible to include something else as well: a celebration of life reclaimed.

‘When was the last time you sang Wolfram?’ They had both appeared at Wagner Festivals at Bayreuth, although never together, and Tannhäuser had been in both their repertoires.

‘Three years ago.’

‘You think we could manage it now?’

‘Do you have the music?’

‘Do we need it? If you sing the song to the evening star, and I Elizabeth’s miracle song from Act II … We don’t need music for that, surely?’

‘Why do you want to do it?’

‘Because we aren’t here simply to sing about the downfall of tyranny. That’s why they invited us but there’s something much more important than that, isn’t there? Think about it! How does Wolfram’s song go? “I lift my eyes to that distant heavenly star …” Or Elizabeth’s aria: “I praise this miracle from the bottom of my heart …” That is the point. The celebration of life renewed.’

She went next door. Again she knocked. The door opened.

‘Lucia!’ Ruth Ballard put her arms around her. ‘Wonderful to see you! Come in.’

They had met only twice in their lives, yet were at once comfortable together. There seemed no end to the things to talk about, from Cambodia to art, books, clothes, hotels and travel, more art and back to Cambodia again.

Ruth held Lucia’s hands tight.

‘I’m so glad you talked them into inviting me!’

‘It was as I told you on the phone. I said I’d sing only if you were here, too. They were happy enough about it. Why not? A writer as famous as you was something for them to dream about. The only danger was you might not have agreed.’

‘You couldn’t have kept me away. But why was it so important to you that I should be here?’

‘We’re here to celebrate the rebirth of hope and the future, not the downfall of the Khmer Rouge. That book you wrote, Out of the Depths … I read it on the flight to Paris. When they invited me, I knew you had to be involved as well.’

‘Because of a book about World War II?’

‘You know it’s about a lot more than that: life, resurrection, love. That’s the point of this concert. To celebrate all those things.’

‘There was pain in it, too.’

‘Of course. Without pain, there’s nothing to celebrate. What will you be reading?’

‘We think alike. I’ll give them something from Out of the Depths. Then a poem I wrote after my husband’s death. “I have seen death’s fires die, consumed by life’s abundant resurrection …” It seemed appropriate. Then perhaps something from Mahler —’

The composer’s name triggered excitement.

‘Which work?’

‘Some of the words to his Second Symphony.’

It was as though Lucia had known Ruth’s answer before she gave it. Her thoughts coalesced. ‘Resurrection again! The Resurrection symphony! I’ve sung it lots of times. Do you have a copy of the words?’

Together they studied the German text, then Lucia said: ‘I’ve an even better idea.’

4

Later that evening they were all driven to the concert hall that in its day had been a centre of culture, an interrogation centre for Lon Nol’s secret police and a killing ground for the Khmer Rouge. Now it was once again a place of culture which, in two days’ time, would witness a combination of voices, western and eastern, proclaiming the vision of a future free from the torments of the past. Lucia stood on the stage, looking out at the shadowed auditorium, and felt the presence of the ghosts that thronged about her. This had been a citadel of death; it was appropriate that there should be ghosts in such a place, yet there was no sense of malignancy or fear, rather the peaceful coming together, in forgiveness and hope, of all those who had suffered here in the past.

She spoke aloud to the shadows, not caring who heard her.

‘That’s why we’re here. So that you and we may be at peace together.’

It was a worthwhile hope and, surrounded by the throng of benevolent spirits, one that did not seem beyond the possibility of achievement.

5

The next morning Lucia was having breakfast with Ruth in the hotel dining room when a waiter came to tell her that a woman was waiting in reception to see her. ‘Who is she and what does she want?’

The waiter was self-important. ‘I shall send her away, if you prefer.’

‘No. I’ll come.’

She got up and walked out into the lobby. The woman was sitting near the door. She was oval-faced, probably in her early thirties. Her skin was the colour of amber in the shadows, her hair lying black and straight over her shoulders. She stood up as Lucia walked towards her. Lucia spoke to her in French, the language that at one time had been spoken by all educated Cambodians. ‘Can I help you?’

The woman replied in the same language: ‘My name is Somaly. I am the sister of Khieu Pen. I have been told you would like to know what happened to him.’

Lucia was delighted. ‘Of course. Come in. Would you like breakfast?’

It wasn’t possible; Somaly was on her way to the clinic where she worked, and had stopped at the hotel to arrange a time when she could come again.

‘Come at nine o’clock tonight. We’ll eat somewhere and have a good talk.’

She went back to the dining room. Between sips of coffee she explained to Ruth about her visitor.

‘Khieu Pen? I don’t know the name,’ Ruth said.

‘He wasn’t famous like Solti or Karajan but he was well regarded. When I met him, he was living in France. He came back to Cambodia during the American bombing. I’m not sure why; I don’t think he knew, himself.’

‘Coming home?’

‘He always said France was his home.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He disappeared during the Pol Pot years.’

The waiter came to tell them that the car was waiting to take them to the theatre. They went out and climbed in. Along the street the pony traps were passing to and fro in a silvery chime of bells. The morning sunlight lay golden on the roof of a pagoda and the air was heavy with the smell of cooking oil from the stalls along the pavements. They passed a shrine, its roof ridge ornamented with the fantastic silhouettes of dragons. A bell was ringing inside the building and Lucia remembered Khieu saying that in Phnom Penh you were never far from the sound of bells.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

1

Somaly was punctual to the minute, and they went to a restaurant that she knew. The proprietor bowed, smiling all over his face as he led them to a table. In the middle of the room a wedding party was having a good time, the men laughing and drinking toasts while the women sat quietly and did not speak. Somaly smiled ruefully. ‘Is it too noisy for you?’

‘Not at all. Let them enjoy themselves. They deserve it, after everything they’ve been through.’

Somaly ordered for both of them. While they waited to be served, she said: ‘Khieu used to dine here often after he came back from France. He used to say that the tiger, the fish and the lobster had brought him back.’

Lucia didn’t understand. ‘Is that some kind of food?’

Somaly laughed, her hand covering her mouth. ‘It’s a gambling game, a street game, really, but they play it here sometimes. Khieu was very fond of it, he was a great gambler. He always said it would make him rich.’

‘And did it?’

‘Of course not. The only one who makes money out of that game is the dealer.’

‘You’re right about being a gambler. He took a gamble coming back, didn’t he? And lost.’

Somaly shook her head. ‘He died, certainly, but he would not have agreed that he lost. This was his country. While he was in Europe I think he forgot that, but as soon as things started going wrong here, he came back. He knew it was not right for him to stay away. He accepted that the Khmer Rouge were going to win and that they would probably kill him, but this was his place, especially as our father was dead. That is very important, isn’t it? To know your own place in the world and be there when it’s necessary?’

A fragment of verse came to Lucia’s mind.

‘Aimer … loisir

Aimer et mourir

Au pays qui te ressemble,’ she quoted.

‘To love and to be free

To love and to die

In the land which is yours …

‘Do you know Baudelaire?’

‘Of course,’ Somaly said. ‘But not that one. It is very true, isn’t it?’

A bowl of what smelt like chicken soup arrived. While they ate, Lucia said: ‘Tell me what happened when the Khmer Rouge came.’

2

‘When the fighting stopped, everything was still. No people in the streets, no radios, no voices. Nothing. People were tearing up strips of white cloth and hanging them on poles out of windows. Each street was a mass of white. Then the Khmer Rouge arrived. They were very young, hardly more than children, with filthy clothes and sunburned faces, but they were all armed to the teeth. They were riding in jeeps with machine guns on the bonnets. Little kids were running alongside them. Everyone was laughing and waving; it was more like a holiday than anything else.

‘Later more soldiers arrived. They said they were looking for government soldiers and traitors. Khieu told them there weren’t any. They went away but later others came and told us we had to leave the city at once. Everyone was being evacuated, they said, because the Americans were going to bomb it and we would all be killed if we stayed.’

3

They had finished the soup. The bowls were taken away and replaced by a dish on which lay a steamed fish in a clear sauce, with bamboo shoots around it.

‘What fish is this?’

‘I’m not sure of its western name. Pomfret, I think, something like that. I hope you like it.’

Somaly broke off some of the flesh with her chopsticks and placed it in Lucia’s bowl before helping herself.

‘And did you leave the city?’ Lucia asked.

‘What else could we do? They had guns and we didn’t. Besides, the Americans had done so much bombing, it was easy to believe they might bomb the city next. Even the patients from the hospital had to leave. People were pushing hospital beds down the road. There were four of us: Khieu and myself, my mother and grandmother. Everywhere children were crying. No-one knew where we were going. We passed piles of bodies, each with a notice saying they’d been killed because they’d refused to obey the orders to leave Phnom Penh. All the time we could hear gunfire. They were shooting people all over the city, some right by us. There was a woman with twin babies. They were only a few days old. She was in tears because she didn’t know where her husband was. She was all alone with the babies. After a time she couldn’t go any further. Two Khmer Rouge came and shouted at her but it was no use, so they shot her. One of the soldiers was going to kill the babies, too, but the other told him to leave them. Don’t waste your bullets, he said. They’ll die soon enough. And he was right. No-one had any strength to look after two strange babies. I expect the ants got them.

‘That first evening they came around asking if there were any doctors. One man put up his hand. He thought they wanted him to help with the sick people but they took him behind a nearby ridge. We heard shots and that was the end of him.

‘There were people in cars, on bicycles, in trishaws. Most were on foot. Every so often we came to a roadblock. Each time we were searched. They were looking for radios, pens, watches and, of course, weapons, but after the first check nobody had anything. They searched us, all the same.

‘That first evening pedlars came round selling pork but at such high prices that hardly anyone could afford it. People were selling ice and cigarettes, too. The next day we went on again.

‘I went to get water from a pond but it was full of bodies. I didn’t know what to do. The idea of drinking such water … I thought it might kill us, yet we had to drink. I decided to look further away. I had good luck. I found another pond with clean water, so I filled my bucket and went back.

‘We reached Pochentong on the second evening. We were all made to register. We sat in rows on the ground and the Khmer Rouge came and questioned us.

“‘Name? Occupation? Place of birth?”

‘Khieu gave them his correct name. He told them he’d been born in Phnom Penh. He didn’t tell them he was a conductor of western music; he said he was a farmer. They seemed satisfied and went on to the next person. Then one of them stopped as though he’d thought of something and came back.

“‘Show me your hands, comrade.” He ran his thumb over them. “Soft hands for a farmer, comrade.”

‘He called another soldier, who also checked Khieu’s hands. There was no need to say anything; with hands like that, he couldn’t possibly have been a farmer. They took him away and I never saw him again. I don’t think they knew who he was, or cared. They could see he was an educated man and that was enough. They were killing all the people with education. Later my mother and grandmother also died. The only reason I survived was that I pretended to be mad. I worked on a rice cooperative and never spoke. I was afraid they would rape me, but they didn’t. They were afraid, you see. They thought that if they touched me they might catch my madness. Every night, after I lay down in the corner of the hut, I recited a poem by François Villon. I said it in my head, afraid that otherwise someone would hear me. I’d memorised it at school and for some reason it had stayed in my mind. I suppose you could say it was appropriate.

Frères humains, qui après nous vivez,

N’ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis …

Human brothers, who will live on after us,

Do not harden your hearts against us …

4

Tears were running down Lucia’s cheeks.

‘I should never have asked you to tell me about it. It was too much for you.’

Somaly was dry-eyed. ‘After everything the Khmer Rouge did, there is no such thing as too much. As for tears … I ran out of them long ago.’

There were cheers and yells from the wedding party. Two of the men were on their feet, red-faced and swaying, daring each other to a drinking contest. Somaly smiled.

‘That is why people make so much noise now. They are happy because they find it hard to believe they are still alive.’

They were silent for a while, then Somaly said: ‘This concert? What is it for?’

‘To celebrate the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge.’

‘And after it is over?’

‘We shall go home.’

Lucia saw in Somaly’s face an expression of pain, a helplessness not of body but of soul.

Somaly said: ‘We are grateful to you for coming. But I ask myself what happens afterwards. We have suffered so much, you see. Most of the adults will survive, but for the children it is different. There are thousands upon thousands of them without parents or shelter. Hundreds of thousands, maybe; nobody knows. Most have no hope of even the most basic education. They are crippled by starvation and neglect, blown apart by landmines. Did you know the hospitals do seven hundred amputations a month because of landmines? Plus all the ones who die without getting to hospital at all. Even the ones who survive … Who wants a crippled wife or husband? Male amputees aren’t even allowed to become monks. What can they do? I’ll tell you. They become criminals, or beggars. Those children are this country’s future. I tremble to think what that future will be if nothing is done. The problem will continue for years after you have gone. What will happen to us then? And who will care?’

Australian children of the streets and outback. The lilting sound of death. The detonation of endless mines.

Lucia said: ‘There’s something I’ve been thinking about, that I want to discuss with you.’

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

1

The concert was successful beyond their dreams.

Ruth read extracts from Out of the Depths, followed by the poem expressing not only grief at her husband’s death but triumph in the knowledge that she would never be parted from him. Alfredo sang Wolfram’s ode to the morning star, as Lucia had suggested, with its expression of faith in the future and, at the last, triumph: Da blick ich auf zu einem nur der Sterne …

In her head Lucia translated the words as he sang them: I lift my eyes to that distant heavenly star …

Then came her own contribution, Elizabeth’s miracle song, followed by the Mahler. The Resurrection symphony. First, Lucia sang her own arrangement, solo voice substituting for the chorus. Aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n wirst du …

And then the words, recited in English by Ruth Ballard: Rise, yes, you will rise …

Again Lucia’s thoughts and memory ran on. You will live again. Nothing is lost. And, at the last:

In the struggle for life

Shall I fly

To the light no eye can pierce!

EMI had flown out sound engineers to record the concert. Maude Arkwright was ecstatic. ‘A million sales! I guarantee it!’

Lucia was also delighted. With her plans, she was going to need all the money she could get.

2

‘What you have done, what you plan to do, will be very good for this country, and for its children,’ said Somaly.

‘I hope so. It will be very hard but I shall try.’

Somaly smiled. ‘And succeed. I have faith, something I thought I would never have again. There is to be a ceremony for my brother. I shall be honoured if you and your friend will come.’

The flowers spread outwards across the waters of the Tonle Sap, the mysterious waterway that at certain seasons of the year reversed its flow. Lucia watched as the blossoms took the shape of another flower extending across the dark waters like a farewell, or tears, or even perhaps a celebration. She was moved, weeping for loss, the bereaved, the power misused by wicked men. It gave her a new perspective of the worth of the man whose death she had come here to lament. She had known him and admired him as an artist, yet now, seeing and feeling the people standing here beside her — Somaly, Ruth Ballard, all those others unfamiliar to her — she realised she had not known him at all, that anyone whose life was capable of evoking such gentle mourning must have been special indeed and that she by the failure of her awareness had slighted him.

Life was transient: that was the message of the flowers. Yet death was a facet of renewal. The wheel of birth and rebirth, of twilight and sunrise, going on for ever.

Later, back at the hotel, she stood on the balcony of her room and looked out at the market with its kerosene lanterns flaring in the darkness, the noise and bustle of the city. Perhaps because of the feelings evoked by that afternoon’s ceremony, she was intensely aware of the world beyond the lights, the starshine representing unknown realms of space and time. Out there were galaxies so far away that they were utterly unknowable. Aeons after this earth had ceased to exist, after the sun and its neighbouring stars had been consumed in a vast conflagration that would present itself to the universe as no more than a blink of light upon the blackness, the fires of those distant galaxies would continue to illuminate what by then would be no more than cosmic dust. That, ultimately, was the future. Yet the flowers gave another message: that eternity existed beyond the material and that the spirit, in some form or manner, would survive.

3

Lucia sat with Ruth Ballard, thinking of all she had seen and heard. Jacques’ article, written so long ago, in which he had spoken of the killing of children, likening it to a scarlet sword of retribution. The man who had introduced her to a tiny section of the Australian outback, bitterly quoting what someone had said about the workers in the nineteenth century. Kill ’em off, you get rid of the problem. We’re smarter. We let ’em do it to themselves. Somaly saying, there are seven hundred amputations a month. The soft, lilting sound that Tran had heard as the dying children drew closer to death. Yet another image: a young woman leading a child across the landscape of a country at war. Her mother with the child whose life she had saved.

On and on.

She said: ‘I feel the need to do something with what’s left of my life. I’m famous. That should be good for something. But I’m frightened of tackling something that’s beyond me, beyond anyone. There’s something else, too. I’m afraid I might be doing it for the wrong reasons, out of pity for the victims and not because it’s the right thing to do.’

‘It’s more than pity,’ Ruth told her. She watched the slow trudge of a bullock cart. ‘I love the ponderous way those things move. They show how foolish we are to rush around so aimlessly. You can be sure it’ll still be trundling along, linking past and future, long after we and all our frenetic activities are in the grave. It displaces time.’ She smiled. ‘I went in one once, during the war. I was hiding under a load of rice straw, trying to escape some Japanese soldiers.’

Lucia did not understand. ‘What’s that to do with helping children?’

Ruth seemed astonished by the question. ‘It has everything to do with it. In our world, the truth is seen as unimportant, even an irritant. From tycoons to media, integrity is a joke. The result is that people don’t believe in anything any more. Yet, even though they don’t realise it, they miss it. The good is stronger than people think. The bullock cart brings back a sense of reality. Your plan to set up a worldwide fund for destitute children does the same thing. It restores people’s faith in themselves and the future. These days people are always yapping about what they call the wrongs of the past. They use buzz words like “reconciliation” as an excuse for doing nothing. It’s no good. We have to be aware of the past but must never become its prisoner. People wring their hands, telling themselves how terrible it all is. What you’re planning to do is to say, yes, things are terrible, so what must we do to put them right? You are daring to look forward instead of back. And with your backing and prestige … I think it’s wonderful.’

Lucia asked: ‘Would you be willing to help?’

‘Try keeping me out of it!’

4

Somaly saw them off at Pochentong Airport.

Lucia hugged her. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘Please do. We are all waiting to do what we can. You have given us hope.’

It was joy, and a great and terrifying burden.

She flew with Ruth to Australia.

In Sydney she gave a press conference to announce to the world what she planned to do.

‘Is this only for Australia?’ she was asked. Like: why us?

‘Not at all. I’ll be saying the same thing in Europe. I’d go to the States, too, but unfortunately they’re still out of bounds to me.’

‘Will you be looking for government funding?’

‘Yes. The problem is far too great for one individual. There are hundreds of thousands of children. Millions. In Tibet, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Africa and, God forgive us, in Australia. Everywhere. You would need a billion dollars, ten billion, and a hundred lifetimes, to sort it out completely. That’s the danger. The problem is so vast that people do nothing. I shall have to select. I don’t know how.’

One of the journalists — power suit and sceptical eyes — put up her hand.

‘Some are going to say all this is mere tokenism, a way to keep your name in the headlines now you’ve retired. What do you have to say to that?’

Lucia smiled at her, thinking: Cow. She said: ‘In a sense they’ll be right. I hope that the foundation will become a token of what can be done. I want to shame governments into doing something. It’ll make a change from chucking bombs at each other, from claiming there’s no money to alleviate suffering.’

‘How will you go about it?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. I shall need advice on everything. There may be trouble from some governments, political groups, religious maniacs of all types. Well, I thrive on challenge. It keeps me young. So let ’em all come, the fanatics who murder in the name of God, the lying politicians, the lawyers who cash in on suffering, the banks that ruin the world. I am here, in a small way, to reawaken my own conscience, but I hope that by my actions I shall affect how others think, too. I have been greatly blessed by God or fate, or whatever terminology you prefer. I intend to pay something back. Perhaps it is no more than a token, given the size of the problem, but it’s a start. And remember this: if we can help one child in Cambodia or Australia — the victims, the deprived — we raise a shield of protection over all victims, whether from the Holocaust or Tibet or Palestine. Because it is my hope that we can teach people, once again, to care. To save one child — one! — will have made my life worthwhile. As for those who look for ulterior motives that don’t exist … As I said before, let ’em all come!’

5

As she had hoped, the media made much of what she’d said. She received hundreds of phone calls, letters, telegrams.

Otto protested. ‘I’ll need help!’

‘So find yourself an assistant.’

She attended meetings with lawyers, accountants, authorities and experts of various kinds. She made it plain that she intended to take an active role, which displeased some. She told them she was going to Europe; when all the preliminary work had been done, she would be back. A week later she flew out to London, Paris, Rome. She used her name and reputation to gain access to the powerful. She talked and talked, she appeared on radio and television, she made as much noise as she could. She got offers of help from volunteers by the thousand; she set them to lobbying politicians, industry, all those who could have helped years ago and had not. And who might be shamed into doing something constructive at last.

It worked; by the time she drew breath, it was hard to believe there was anyone on the planet who hadn’t heard of Lucia Visconti and her new crusade. She took a break and went to Siena.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

A week after her arrival Lucia walked onto the terrace of her villa and sat down in an easy chair. She had spent the day on the telephone, first to Australia, then Cambodia, finally to Milan. She had spoken to more lawyers, accountants, politicians, to Ruth Ballard and Somaly. She had argued, pleaded, screamed and performed. She had made progress.

She had been so afraid that life after opera would hold no purpose. Now, weary at the day’s end, she knew that was the least of her worries. The flame of her ambition burned brighter than ever: that the children of the world should be neglected no longer, that governments should be compelled by the force of adverse publicity to discharge the duty of care they had neglected so long. As she had expected, some governments had taken the criticism personally, making it a matter of national pride to deny the existence of what everyone knew was a worldwide problem. She had been warned to mind her own business. It was so foolish, because it was her business. Italy and Australia owned her blood, yet did not define the limits of her being. She was truly international in the same way that music transcended boundaries and nations. The children sleeping on streets and under bridges, sold, starved, wounded by landmines and the abuses sanctioned by unacceptable custom, were her children. She would do everything she could to ensure that those who had never heard her name or voice would be brought out of darkness.

Only the other day she had heard a German politician, slavering for votes, promise that never again would a child be in want or terror. Scenting a new concern among the voters, he had been willing to use both children and terror as stepping stones to the power that was his true desire. Yet children were children, terror remained terrible and words unbacked by deeds availed nothing.

She watched the upwelling darkness. Now she could see the stars, the distant clusters of farmhouse lights. Music welled in her, not of her voice but of silence. It spread across the landscape. It inundated the invisible hills, it rose to the stars. It brought peace.

She had a million things to do but knew that in a day or two she would find the time to pay another visit to her mother. True to her promise, Helena had said she would be in Paris for the foundation’s official launch. Ruth was already there, getting things organised. Ruth, who had become the true friend she had sought so long. As for her mother, time had buried their differences. She pictured Helena fleeing across the landscape of an earlier war, fearful for her own life, yet mustering the will and energy to save the life of a child whom it would have been so much easier to abandon. It was a fine, courageous thing to have done, more truly representative of her mother’s indomitable spirit than her tawdry and catastrophic affair with Eduardo Grandini. Yet that, too, had been done to save not only herself but Lucia.

What were the words in one of Bach’s Passions? The abyss swallows us completely. What terrible words. The abyss swallows us … Not if she could help it. She had given the world something of the spirit, of joy and fulfilment. She had been called a legend, yet music, important though it was, would never be enough. She would add to it, not to create another legend but as a practical bequest to complement the joy. There was movement in the house behind her. She turned her head, smiling. Jacques came to join her. He had flown in today. For the first time in twenty-five years he sat beside her on the terrace of La Tranquilla.

He was sixty and had just retired from his job at the newspaper. He could have stayed on but had chosen not to; it allowed him more time to visit her, to stay for a week or a month or for ever, however things worked out. It gave him the chance to help with the campaign. At the airport she had told him: ‘This is a wonderful, very brave thing you have done.’

Because he had confessed that his pension was not the best.

‘I said you’d give me courage. So you have.’

She dismissed his nonsense. ‘The places you’ve been, the dangers you’ve faced … What courage do you possibly need from me?’

‘The courage to live and dream. Even better, to put the dreams into practice. This business with the children … Even to attempt it took such courage. And you will succeed. I know it.’

She stretched out her hand to him.

‘Then we shall have succeeded together. We shall bring light into darkness. We, who have never had children of our own, shall do what we have to do to save all children.’

Gently he smoothed her fingers.

‘And in doing so,’ he said, ‘perhaps we shall save ourselves.’

She stood. Slowly she walked indoors. About her the house breathed quietly. It, too, was at peace. She switched on the lights and went to the record cabinet. She selected the LP she wanted and loaded it into the machine. She turned off the light again, went and put her arms around Jacques. The soprano voice, rich and glorious, filled the darkness. It was not herself but Teresa Sciotto. She could not visit her — Teresa had died a year ago — but, living or dead, it was time for that enmity, too, to be laid to rest. So much jealousy and misunderstanding. So much pain.

in dem wogenden Schwall

in dem tönenden Schall

in des Welt-Atems

wehendem all —

in the heaving swell,

in the resounding echoes

in the universal stream

of the world — breath —

Isolde’s death song filled the house. It spread across the firefly-lit hills, reaching outwards and upwards until earth and sky seemed to resonate with its serenity. At peace in her house nestled in the Siena countryside, Lucia Visconti stood with her head on the shoulder of her true love, her being cradled by memories of the past, the manifold promises of the future, while tears of both fulfilment and hope shone upon her cheeks.

About JH Fletcher

JH Fletcher is the author of eight romantic historical novels, published to both critical and popular acclaim. The author's plays for radio and television have been produced by the BBC and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and many of this author's stories have been published in Australia and throughout the world.

JH Fletcher was educated in the UK and travelled and worked in France, Asia and Africa before emigrating to Australia in 1991. Home is now a house within sound of the sea in a small town on the South Australian coast.

Also by JH Fletcher

View from the Beach

Keepers of the House

Wings of the Storm

Fire in Summer

Sun in Splendour

The Cloud Forest

Eagle on the Hill

First published by HarperCollins Publishers Pty Ltd in 2005

This edition published in 2013 by Momentum

Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

Copyright © JH Fletcher 2005

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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A CIP record for this book is available at the National Library of Australia

Voice of Destiny

EPUB format: 9781743342428

Mobi format: 9781743342435

Cover design by XOU Creative

Proofread by Sam Cooney

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