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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
1955. Vivien Lowry's latest play, the only female-authored in London's West End that winter, opened to a rapturous reception from the audience. However, the critics' savage reviews have forced its closure and called into question her entire career. So, when then the opportunity arises for her to work as a script doctor on a film shooting in Rome's Cinecittà Studios, a world populated with the likes of Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren, she takes it. What Vivien doesn't count on is the greatest male bastion of them all: the Vatican. Caught between church and censors, as well as two very different men, Vivien must also face the long-buried truth of the recent World War and what really happened to her fiancé if she's to deal with her past and step into the future.
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EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE
NATALIE JENNER
4
5
For my parents,
who taught me goodness most of all
– and –
in memory of Janko Marjanovic,
the perfect kind of teacher and the kindest of men6
7Verum esse ipsum factum.
Philosopher Giambattista Vico8
CAST OF CHARACTERS
THE EXPATRIATES
THE ITALIANS
11
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
LA SCOLARETTA
THE GRAND HOTEL FLORA, ROME
13th November, 1943
The handbag is almost empty inside. Just her coin purse, compact mirror and lipstick, and a pistol in the false bottom.
She has caught the trolleybus painted seafoam green to get as close to the hotel as possible. At twenty, she still looks as young as a schoolgirl, sitting in the back row, handbag primly on lap. In fact, she could be any girl in occupied Rome, on her way home from a factory or shop job, trying to meet her boyfriend before the curfew is enforced.
She takes out the compact and applies the lipstick with a steady hand. She has become very good at managing the nerves in her fingers – even better at handling a gun. She learnt that summer in the countryside south of Naples, shooting at trees on her lover’s estate. Nino wanted her to be able to protect herself, but now she can hit a target, too. Armed and ready to kill, they have both joined the newly 14formed Gruppi di Azione Patriottica along with Nino’s old university professors. The GAP is committed to doing everything necessary to rid Italy of the Nazis; they all agree that nothing less than guerrilla warfare will work.
She and Nino first met at Cinecittà, the sprawling film studio now overrun by Germans and Fascist enablers. He made films – or had done, until Mussolini’s government banned his films – while she worked as a cutter in the editing room. She and her two older sisters had trained as seamstresses, helping their exhausted mother sew for the neighbourhood from the confines of their front parlour. One morning, the eldest, Grimilda, the beauty of the lot, dragged them to the studio to line up for better-paying work as extras. That was two years ago, before the Germans took over Cinecittà, using the teatri and their elaborate papier-mâché sets as living quarters – back when Italy was corrupt and dangerous all on its own. As expected, Grimilda was hired as an extra, while her sisters were offered work in the costume department instead. Then one day, just like in the films, they happened to be in the right place at the right time. An anxious assistant director ran into the workroom as the two girls sat there quietly sewing, looking for more women to cut up strips of film in the editing rooms and reassemble them in a new, prescribed order, down to the last frame.
She inspects herself in the compact mirror and dabs at the bright cherry lipstick, knowing it makes her look like every other young woman travelling along the Via Veneto, hoping to be seen, to be noticed. Sometimes even, in desperation, to be propositioned. This the Nazis do not mind and in fact encourage. This is what women are good for in war. The German men have already made that 15clear in just a matter of weeks. She is grateful to have been spared such attentions so far. She thinks of the cold smoothness of the Beretta pistol and how it will continue to spare her.
Staring out the window of the trolleybus, she notices everything with her editor’s eye: the black clouds of starlings flying in formation, the sunset behind St Peter’s Basilica casting Rome in a golden glow it does not deserve. Her heart is broken for her people. They have allowed themselves to be torn apart and become weak and floundering as a result, like strips of film that will only make sense once spliced back together. She wants to bring her people back together. It will require a rallying cry, a grand gesture, the kind that her lover and the GAP are so good at. The kind you cannot ignore.
And she wants to make Nino proud. When this is all over, she wants to make more films with him, too. The end has to be near, with the Allies’ boots on the ground and Mussolini’s wobbly throne of power confined to the north. It is a poor trade, however, because now the Germans are in charge of the rest of Italy, and Italians will have to work together to act against them. Her middle sister, Renata, has joined her as a staffetta, passing messages between the partisan resisters and the Allies. In recent weeks, the U.S. and British troops have broken through the Volturno and Barbara lines as they fight northwards to liberate Rome. Girls like her and her sister are as much a part of the resistance as the men, in a country where women can’t vote. No one suspects the pretty young things, hiding cryptic messages inside the seams of their skirts and the heels of their shoes. No one suspects a girl like her to carry a gun.
Her target tonight is SS Commander von Schulz, the 16man in charge of turning a nearby apartment building into a prison, next door to a school for boys. Partisans, anti-Fascists, trustworthy civilians including doctors, nuns, and clergy: there is an underground world scrambling to find ways to protect Jewish citizens and refugees, while the Germans want a place to torture and dispose of them. She will dispose of von Schulz instead.
The commander is due to leave the hotel at exactly 7.55 p.m. and step into his waiting car for dinner at Casina Valadier, the glamorous restaurant perched on top of the Pincian Hill. Von Schulz is known for his ruthless precision and the time will be exact. Via Veneto will be bustling at that hour with the Germans who have taken over Rome’s busiest street – she knows because she rehearsed everything a week ago. Her mission is simple. Kill the Nazi commander from inside Porta Pinciana across the street, a clear ten metres away, then slip through that ancient archway into the Borghese gardens. A bicycle lies hidden for her in the grove behind the Topolino, the little children’s cinema. She will ride the blue bike in the dark until she spots Nino in his lorry, ready to drive her across the Tiber and up the hill to the motherhouse of the Canossian Daughters of Charity.
The nuns do not know she is a killer – they willingly provide cover to all staffette en route between the city and the mountains, passing their coded messages to the church underground, never asking questions. The sisters have been chosen, in turn, because they will never tell – no matter what. From the convent she will head for the countryside, avoiding the German checkpoints, and walk all night until she reaches the safe house. She can never go home. She can never risk her mother’s life that way. 17
Eventually she will be given new orders, new ammunition, new messages to convey. She has no fear in her heart. There is no use for fear. Fear has led to the hell they are in. All she feels is anger, and all one can do with anger is act. Each action will spur another, then another one after that, until the day finally comes when all these acts merge stream-like into a thundering whole, the force of which will tip them over the side of victory. Her people must find a way to move forward together or the entire world will be lost forever. This is what they owe the dead.
The trolleybus is approaching the Grand Hotel Flora from the south. Through the open window she can see the Germans on the length of patio along Via Veneto, lounging about in their pressed uniforms and polished jackboots, loud and confident and obnoxious, gorging on beer and cigars in a starving city. The occasional young Roman woman stands amongst them, her hair kept wavy and shoulder-length, just the way these men like it. One wants to look pleasing to the Germans but not too much so. Just enough to coddle them along, to make them feel as if the world they have stolen is smoothly running and there for the taking, everything precisely as they want it. The Fascists are the same way, although they want different things, and so the two factions cannot coexist for long. Something has to break.
She discreetly checks her wristwatch before leaving her seat, then gets up and disappears in the crowd of passengers about to disembark. The trolley is reliably on time, in a city and country where few things are. She begins to count rhythmically in her head. She needs to be across the street just as the commander exits through the hotel’s revolving gold doors. 18
Un-o … du-e …
She is not scared. There is no place for fear.
Ot-to … no-ve …
She will see Nino soon. He will help her stay safe. He always has.
Do-di-ci, tre-di-ci, and …
… action.
CHAPTER ONE
ELEVEN YEARS LATER
THE SUNWISE TURN BOOKSHOP, LONDON
10th December, 1954
Opening night for Vivien had gone like a dream.
All the things that could have gone wrong, or had done in rehearsals, failed to transpire. The audience had laughed at the right places and cried at the end. There had been four curtain calls for the only female-authored play on the London stage that season, and extended cheering after the heavy red velvet curtain had fallen to the floor with a final, glorious thud.
Vivien could still hear the roar of the crowd as she stood on the second floor of Sunwise Turn, the Bloomsbury bookshop that helped finance her writing efforts. As a significant shareholder in the shop, she drew a nice little dividend each year and spent several afternoons a week behind the till. She preferred that time – the leisurely, not-even-sure-why-I-popped-in-here energy compared to the rattle of the morning customers who arrived armed with 20a bizarre array of requests. Tabitha Knight, their youngest employee, was more adept at fielding those, with her innocent face and subdued manner.
It was long past midnight, and the reviews of Empyrean, Vivien’s second play, would soon hit newsagent stands throughout the West End. Alec McDonough, her longtime editor, popped out during the after-party festivities to lug a pile of the morning newspapers back. Her first play had opened two years earlier and not been granted its fair share of attention from audiences or critics alike; the reception tonight, however, had been undeniably positive. Vivien felt inside that strange mix of anticipation and dread that was the artist’s lot. The entirety of years of work now rested in the ink-stained fingers of a handful of notoriously viperish critics.
As Vivien stood in a corner of the second-floor gallery, nervously sipping a crystal glass of brandy, Sir Alfred Jonathan Knox finally made his move.
‘Do you think you shall keep at your writing?’
Vivien turned to him in surprise at the familiarity of the question. They had only been introduced backstage that night, her friend Peggy Guggenheim extolling Sir Alfred’s philanthropic efforts as he stood fidgeting with embarrassment next to her.
‘I mean …’ He cleared his throat, and she noticed that his hands were jammed into the pockets of his black dinner jacket. ‘I only meant that, if you were to settle down …’
‘Oh, I’ll never settle down.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I might marry – most people do, after all – but it won’t be to settle.’
He looked so confused by her words that she felt almost 21sorry for him. ‘Perhaps settle is not the right term …’
Vivien had had her share of romantic disappointments over the years, but watching a man struggle to pin down a single word, relative to her own skill in that area, was particularly disheartening. Sir Alfred’s plain-but-pleasant-enough features shifted quickly from confusion to concern until he looked ready to take another tack. He’s going to bring up those children again, she thought to herself with a grimace, then felt sorry. He was, after all, a wonderful civic example, known throughout the nation for both industrial success and philanthropic effort.
‘The children come to Devon on the weekends, to ride and scout and take other lessons. For years we have done our best – my late wife and I, that is – to give them a home of sorts, a place of their own to, ah, settle.’
Vivien had to laugh inwardly at his use once again of that term. At the same time, she felt awful. She should consider a man like Sir Alfred, so generous and charitable and eager to please. Why did his goodness irritate her so? She was inclined to see it as a mask of some kind, a diversion from what he really wanted. Of course he wanted to help the refugee children in his care, but he also wanted people to think of this largesse when they thought of him: why else would he talk of it so? More than anything, he wanted to be thought of. He clearly needed another wife. But if Vivien were ever to marry a man like Sir Alfred, she would most certainly need to keep writing, given the limited conversation.
Alec’s footsteps could be heard coming back up the stairs. He reached the landing, and from across the room Vivien instantly recognised the look of disappointment and quiet panic on his face.
‘Oh God,’ she muttered while her mentor, Lady Browning, 22came over to grab the top news copy from Alec who stood frozen in the doorway.
All the women – for, as usual, they were mostly women up there, lounging about the bookshop’s second floor – watched as Lady Browning, with a practised hand, tore open the Daily Mail to the exact page, then silently mouthed the words as she read.
‘Insufferable prigs!’ She threw the paper down and pointed an accusatory finger at Alec, who helplessly shrugged as the male representative closest to her in proximity. The few other men present had already intuited the dangerous mood about to descend and would normally have plotted their retreat, but for being trapped by the late hour and the chivalry owed their dates.
‘I can’t look,’ Vivien muttered while Peggy Guggenheim stepped forward to pick the paper back up. A longtime patron of the shop, the famous art collector had arrived that afternoon from Venice in time for both Vivien’s opening night and the Christmas social season. ‘No, wait.’ Vivien looked down, letting her long, dark hair fall about her face like a curtain. ‘Read it to me.’
‘“Empyrean’s portrayal of a group of village women fending for themselves during the war, who fall into a utopian society they will stubbornly refuse to dismantle, shouts its political agenda with all the nuance of a harpy. Miss Lowry’s idea of a happy ending may leave much to be desired, yet unfortunately remains the only positive aspect of this often crude, simplistic sophomore effort premiering last night at the Aldwych.”’
‘It’s not supposed to be a happy ending.’ Looking back up at Peggy, Vivien rolled her eyes in irritation. ‘And it’s supposed to be abstract.’ 23
‘Crude my word,’ Guggenheim practically spat as her Calder-designed earrings swung violently about her head. ‘If you were a man, they’d call it progressive.’
‘What will Spencer say?’ Lady Browning, better known as author Daphne du Maurier, asked in reference to her and Vivien’s agent.
‘I believe his exact words this time were “do or die.”’ Vivien flopped down onto one of the large wingback chairs near the fireplace that warmed the gallery while Peggy Guggenheim took the matching chair next to hers. ‘And as you know, he’s not one to mince them.’
Tabitha Knight silently entered the room with a pot of tea on a silver tray and quickly looked about at the downcast faces. She had a watchful manner, an artistic eye, and little enthusiasm for books. Tabitha’s adoptive mother, despairing over her daughter’s lack of interest in anything except art, had suggested the sales assistant position at Sunwise Turn to get her ‘out of her head.’ Tabitha, however, was happiest alone in the second floor’s gallery and event space, where several invaluable pieces from Peggy Guggenheim’s personal art collection were on display. For most of that night, Tabitha had been contemplating Guggenheim’s latest loan to the shop, Boy Smoking by Lucian Freud. Vivien had overheard the young woman commenting on the portrait’s effectiveness due to its lack of context, and Guggenheim responding that part of Freud’s emerging genius was how he severed the body from the soul. Vivien had listened curiously because when she looked at the painting, all she saw was a floating head.
‘Come to Italy,’ Guggenheim was now saying to Vivien at her side, tracing circles in the air with the length of her cigarette holder. ‘My friend Douglas Curtis is on his way 24there, trying to evade those idiotic McCarthy hearings. He’s got a two-picture deal to direct and an unfinished script.’
‘They’ll just accuse me of trying to escape.’ This was how Vivien always referred to the London drama critics, the ubiquitous they that her mentor, du Maurier, and other writers had warned her about.
‘One doesn’t go to Italy to escape the past, but to acquire one,’ Peggy replied with an outsized wink. Guggenheim did everything on an ambitious scale, from her Carnival parties and huge abstract earrings to her lifelong enmity towards those who crossed her. Maybe the secret to living a large life, thought Vivien in despair, was to go out and do exactly that.
‘I shall write to Douglas,’ Guggenheim continued. ‘Imagine filming anything without an ending in sight. It would be like trying to paint a peach from a bowl of pears.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Vivien could see Tabitha Knight quietly eavesdropping on their conversation as she fiddled with the tea serving.
‘She wants to see my collection,’ Peggy whispered with a nod towards the girl. ‘Eighteen’s the perfect age to visit Italy: old enough to appreciate the history, but not at all ancient-looking oneself.’
Vivien detected the wistfulness in Peggy’s voice at growing older. They all were – Vivien herself was thirty-five and well past the spinster threshold. ‘Tabby’s already been there,’ she replied, also lowering her voice. ‘During the war.’
Peggy turned to Vivien, earrings clinking, with a look of confusion. ‘I thought they found her and her brother in Cyprus?’
Vivien shook her head. ‘That was the displaced persons camp. They were in a children’s concentration camp in 25Yugoslavia first, then somehow escaped over the Alps to Italy, where the padre hid them.’
‘She told you that?’
‘No, her mother, Frances, did. Tabby never speaks of it.’ Vivien lowered her voice again. ‘After the liberation, the children were on a refugee ship sailing from Italy to Palestine when the British attacked outside of Haifa. The young men on board tried to fend them off and they were all deported to Cyprus for their efforts. That was when the Red Cross brought Tabitha and her brother here.’ Vivien paused thoughtfully. ‘Imagine ending up living in the country of one’s attackers. It would make quite the plot for a film.’
‘See?’ Guggenheim said, putting her hand knowingly on Vivien’s forearm. ‘You’re already halfway there.’
After the party, Vivien went to bed late and stayed there, eager to avoid the harsh light of day and even harsher reviews. She had a low tolerance for criticism, especially the mean-spirited kind. Du Maurier and others always urged retreat in the face of it, but even at this early stage of Vivien’s career, she felt like she was running out of places to go.
The telephone rang and Vivien, eyes still closed, reached out to lift the brass receiver off its marble base. The rotary phone had been a present one Christmas from Peggy, who refused anything ugly in a home to the point of having recently turned her Venetian palazzo into a part-time museum.
‘Vivien?’ a young, breathless female voice asked over the phone.
‘Mm-hmm.’ Vivien yawned. ‘Yes, hullo, who’s this?’
‘Avery.’ A pause. ‘St Vincent.’
Sitting up, Vivien pressed at her right temple with her 26free hand. ‘Avery? Is that really you?’
There was another pause, during which Vivien could hear the nervous clicking of fingernails on one of the far-off, highly varnished antique surfaces that she recalled too well. Thirteen years ago, Vivien had become engaged to Avery’s brother, David, heir to the earldom of St Vincent, as they anxiously awaited his military orders. In early 1942, his infantry had been sent to the desert of Africa to fight the German and Italian coalition. Caught up in the ill-fated Battle of Gazala, David had been pronounced missing and presumed dead, and his titled family had never been heard from again. Until now.
‘Mummy and Papa don’t know I’m calling.’
Mummy and Papa. How very Avery. Vivien quickly did the maths and realised the girl must be in her mid-twenties by now.
‘I wanted to write to you but wasn’t sure where. Then I saw the advert for your play. The stage manager gave me this number.’
Vivien recalled Avery St Vincent’s girlhood penchant for detective work, the stacks of Agatha Christie novels strewn under her lit à la duchesse canopy bed, but said nothing.
‘I imagine you’re quite angry with us still.’
Vivien’s head started to pound. Having just been eviscerated by the top London theatre critics, she was in no mood for a call from her late fiancé’s little sister. ‘Then you didn’t forget me after all.’
There was silence, then more nervous fingernail tapping. Vivien was surprised that she hadn’t scared Avery off by now. She wondered what kind of young woman Avery had grown into – and how much she might resemble her beloved brother. 27
‘It’s just that we had a letter, you see. After the war.’
Vivien’s left hand started to hurt from its grip on the shapely brass handle of the receiver. ‘A letter?’
‘Yes. David was on a list of missing prisoners of war.’ Another pause. ‘There’s no grave, no other information, I’m afraid.’
‘He didn’t die in Gazala?’
‘It seems some in the battalion were captured and shipped to the south of Italy, after Tobruk fell. One of them mentioned David in an interrogation report after the war.’ Vivien heard a sharp intake of breath. ‘We should have told you ages ago. We didn’t know where you were.’
‘Through your own fault.’
‘Yes, of course. Oh Vivien, I know it’s very little—’
‘No, it’s not. It’s only the little I could have been left with. And that is rather large to me.’
Avery burst into tears, and Vivien felt all the stress of the weeks leading up to the play – all that work, all for nought – dissipate in the face of her past.
‘I kept thinking time would help,’ the younger woman said between sobs.
‘How could anything help?’ Vivien put one hand on her stomach, feeling winded by the truth of her own words.
‘Papa kept at the War Office for years, trying to learn more.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful for that.’
Another awkward pause. ‘Can you forgive us?’
‘Oh Avery, if you remember anything of me at all …’
After the call, Vivien stayed in bed. There was no further ringing of the telephone – everyone who knew Vivien, even a little, knew to leave her alone after such a public thrashing 28of her work. She kept thinking about the coincidence of Peggy’s words from the previous night: One doesn’t go to Italy to escape the past, but to acquire one. How bitterly ironic, to think of David himself having been there, alive, waiting for her – for anyone – to find him.
Vivien rarely cried, a blessing in such a tough profession as hers, but to her surprise long-pent-up tears now flowed freely. The St Vincents might have failed her as a family, but she had doubly failed herself: she hadn’t questioned the official, now baseless, explanation of David’s death during the war and sought the truth, and she had not truly moved on with her life ever since. That was quite the feat. The truth had found her instead, making the past even more painful – something Vivien would not have thought possible until now. She would have done something very differently, if only she had known.
A decade had passed since the war, and everyone who could move on had done so – much more fully than Vivien. The other bookshop women were all forging purposefully ahead in the wake of widowhood, marriage, and divorce. More children were on the way, too, something that Vivien remained ambivalent about. Why not embrace the present, if you couldn’t fix the past?
Of course, Vivien had not done either, leaving her life half-measured at best. Instead, she kept at her writing in the fermented cruelty of the London theatre world, so full of unwritten rules and grey skies and ham salad for tea. She kept her heart safe from the many admirers – she kept further pain at bay. But none of this did justice to the memory of David. He had not been given the chance to avoid pain. He had not been given the chance to embrace life again, either.
Vivien might never learn what had happened to David, 29but she knew one thing for certain: he would have fought for her to the very end. After so many lost years, Avery’s sudden news was giving her the chance to do the same for him.
One never knows when to expect the unexpected in life, but even the author in Vivien could never have imagined this.
CHAPTER TWO
CINECITTÀ STUDIOS, ROME
1st February, 1955
Stepping off the plane at Ciampino Airport, Vivien immediately felt overdressed, and not just because of the spring-like weather. Peggy Guggenheim had telephoned from Venice with wardrobe suggestions for the move to Rome, but clothes for Peggy were a form of artistic expression: loud patterns, whimsical jewellery, and a loose, comfortable fit masked by dramatic lines. Surrounded by men at work, Vivien used form-fitting fashion to convey confidence and feel more in control. Judging by the crowded airport terminal, self-command was nowhere near as important to the young and fashionable of Italy. There were bare shoulders and legs everywhere, and the first thing Vivien vowed to buy in Rome was a snug American-style T-shirt and shapely halter dress.
Emerging into the afternoon sunshine, Vivien spotted the old military Jeep that she had been told to watch out for. The driver, an affable-looking man with dark Mediterranean looks, gave a very American smile and rambunctious wave as he jumped down from the vehicle. 31
‘Hey – Vivien, right?’
She nodded and gladly let him take her two suitcases from her, heavy as they were with her favourite books.
‘I’m Levi Bassano. Hop in.’ Starting up the engine, Levi nodded at a cooler in the back. ‘Would you like a Coke?’
Vivien smiled. ‘Old habits die hard?’
He smiled back. ‘Especially for die-hard Americans like me.’
Vivien felt relief at his wordplay; he was, after all, to be her writing partner. Levi also displayed none of the outward bravado she often encountered with men, only later to discover how much of an act it really was. During her time in Italy, Vivien was determined to rectify her love life as well as Douglas Curtis’s script, but instantly she could tell with Levi – just as one can always tell otherwise – that there would be no romance.
‘Your name, Bassano – it’s Italian?’
‘And Jewish. My parents were born here.’
‘You can interpret for me, then.’
‘Something tells me you’ll get up to speed. My own Italian is così così, as they say. Is this your first time in Italy?’ he asked, letting a cigarette hang from his lips as he drove.
‘My first time away from England, actually. You?’
‘I was here during the war.’
‘Really? You look so young.’
He grinned. ‘I lied to enlist. I met Curtis on a cruiser bound for Salerno – my first time from home. He was the commander of our Field Photo unit. We took footage for newsreels and stuff, following far behind the troops – well, most of the time. Curtis has been looking out for me ever since.’ He gave her a quick glance. ‘That’s how I got this job. The lead writer was subpoenaed by HUAC – the House 32Un-American Activities Committee – before he could finish the script, and Curtis got word somehow that I was next. Pretty ironic to be safer here.’
‘And I was feeling sorry for myself because my play bombed.’
‘Curtis loved what he read. Empyrean. He says you’re an ace at dialogue and endings – and we’re desperately in search of one.’
‘Have you been in pre-production long?’
‘Since New Year. We don’t start filming until April, although our star, Miss Claudia Jones, is already here on another shoot. She’ll be glad to see a female face. The studio is short on them, except – go figure – in the editing rooms. They call them cutters.’
‘The editors?’
‘Mm-hmm. Also, you should know, everyone’s related to each other.’
‘One big happy family.’
He laughed. ‘I wouldn’t say that.’
The Cinecittà studios had been built in the 1930s by Fascist ruler Benito Mussolini using the slogan ‘Cinema is the most powerful weapon.’ Seventy-three buildings – studios, restaurants, offices, swimming pools – dominated a field of enormous umbrella pine trees a short drive south from central Rome.
Vivien was surprised by the barracks-like front gates as the Jeep was waved through. In fact, all the buildings were imposingly square in design (‘They call the architecture Rationalist,’ explained Levi. ‘Funny word for a Mussolini propaganda machine – or the film business.’). The originally pink plastered walls, faded by time to an undefinable colour, 33still showed their holes from bullets fired first by the Germans and then the Allies. In the decade since the war, Italy had become the second-largest producer of films in the world. Cinecittà was again at the centre of it all, churning out over a hundred films a year from its nine teatri and ninety-nine acres of outdoor sets.
Levi noticed the expression on Vivien’s face. ‘Not very palatial, I get it. They save that for the sets of ancient Rome out back.’ He glanced down at her high-heeled shoes. ‘There’s a lot of ground to cover here. The Jeep’s a loaner – we’ll try to dig you up a bike.’
He drove the Jeep down a narrow street lined by towering forty-foot-high studios. ‘Those are the teatri. We’re in number five. Our offices are up ahead. Curtis would have met you himself, but his wife showed up a day early.’
‘I hope I’m not disturbing anything?’
Levi grinned again. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
Douglas Curtis stood waiting for them at the end of a long hallway, holding a script in one hand and an unlit cigar in the other. He had a pleasantly lined, hangdog face beneath short-cropped grey hair and a hint of facial stubble. Curtis had recently entered a two-picture co-financing deal with Minotaur, the largest production company in Italy, which would grant him significant tax breaks as well as access to its famed Cinecittà film studio.
Peggy had explained to Vivien that Douglas was that rare beast in Hollywood: a director with his own production company. After the war he had let go of many things except for his devout Catholic wife, who refused to let go of him. Curtis himself could not instigate divorce proceedings in the state of California unless he had grounds to do so – something the pious Mary Kate would also never give him. This made 34Curtis an even greater anomaly in Hollywood: a rich and powerful man who could not get divorced.
‘He got you here in one piece.’ Curtis shook Vivien’s hand warmly.
‘It’s a start,’ she replied with a smile. Through the office’s long windowed wall, Vivien glimpsed a woman in her mid-fifties sitting alone at the centre table, a black rosary about her neck.
‘Come, meet Mary Kate.’ Curtis gestured for Vivien to go ahead, who felt awkward meeting her new boss’s family so soon. As Curtis introduced her, the woman stayed seated, assessing Vivien with a practised – and proprietary – eye.
‘They subpoenaed Harold Baumgartner late last night.’ Curtis threw the script down on the massive mahogany table and lit his cigar. ‘We got you out just in time, kid.’
Levi sighed. ‘That’s gotta be some dumb luck – lying about my age to enlist and getting called a traitor all the same.’
‘Or signing up the day after Pearl Harbour with four young kids.’ Curtis tapped the script next to him. ‘Throwing someone in the slammer for being themselves – isn’t that what the whole damn war was about?’
During their Jeep ride, Levi had been unusually forthcoming to Vivien about his political travails. He was currently under investigation by HUAC for his childhood stays at Camp Kinderland, a Yiddish summer camp affiliated with the International Workers Order. The U.S. government had just shut down and liquidated the IWO amidst charges of Communism; meanwhile, the House committee’s investigation into ‘red diaper babies’ had extended to include Kinderland campers with left-leaning parents such as Mr and Mrs Bassano. The move to Italy was Curtis’s attempt to keep their scriptwriter son safe.
Curtis asked Levi to drive Mary Kate to her appointment for 35confession at St Peter’s Basilica while he showed Vivien about the studio. Together they walked the busy makeshift streets, where crowds of extras gathered on every corner. Coming from the theatre, Vivien was used to seeing thick greasepaint on the actors between performances. But here people milled about in costume all day long, waiting for their big moment on-screen. The sight of gladiators, cowboys, and clowns chatting with dancehall girls, nuns, and slaves was as jarring as the studio’s presence in a deserted suburban field. When they first arrived at the front gates, Levi had pointed out to Vivien the long line of extras from which a teenaged Sophia Loren had been plucked for an uncredited role in Quo Vadis. On the backlot, Curtis now showed Vivien the sets still standing from that blockbuster film, as well as the mammoth Trojan horse being assembled for a new picture about Helen of Troy.
‘Deborah Kerr, Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Montgomery Clift – they’ve all shot here lately. It’s the largest studio in Europe.’
‘Levi suggested a bike to get around.’
Curtis nodded. ‘I’m sure we can rustle one up from props. So, take a few days to get settled and we’ll see you bright and early on Monday. Early here being ten or so,’ he instructed. ‘We’re in desperate need of help with the police station scenes. I love the way you write people squabbling at work. Very realistic – as if you’d lived it,’ he added with a wink. ‘I’ll have a script girl deliver you a copy later today – it changes by the hour.’
‘Levi says King Vidor’s having the same problems down the hall with War and Peace.’
Curtis sighed. ‘Our flick is no War and Peace.’
‘You ask something that is not so easy.’
Vivien stared back at the older Italian man behind the desk. There was a small national flag displayed on a stand, a Murano glass paperweight, and very little paperwork. She had made this appointment at the Ministero della Difesa almost two months ago, the very week she had received the long-overdue news that David had been deported from North Africa to Italy as a prisoner of war.
‘I appreciate that. And I do appreciate your seeing me. But surely you understand my desire to learn as much as I can about my fiancé and his time here?’
‘We have provided what we have to your government and the family.’
‘Years ago, though. Things might have changed since then.’
‘You are not the next of kin.’
‘We were to be married. The Italians have such respect for that.’
The government official smiled at her persistence. ‘We have respect for the state of marriage – sì – but what is not quite, is not …’ He made a gesture of futility with both hands, a gesture that Vivien had witnessed many times during her first few days in Rome. ‘You say he was captured in Africa—’
‘In Libya, near the port of Tobruk.’
‘Along with thirty thousand other men.’
‘The family was told he was deported on a cargo ship bound for Italy.’
He shrugged. ‘The British bombed those ships, too, as you know.’
Vivien saw it then – the possibility that he hated her country, still, despite everything. It was subtle, but it explained so much. When it came to enquiring in Rome 37about the war, Levi had warned Vivien that one could never tell who had been a Fascist, who had helped the Nazis, and who had resisted them both.
‘We shared any unseized records with your casualty branch after the war,’ the civil servant continued. ‘Seventy-five thousand prisoners, half of whom escaped.’
‘And another five thousand still unaccounted for.’
He turned his palms outwards in the air, as if physically blocking her request. Vivien did not understand his apathy – she had rather thought, based on experience, that the men here would jump to help her. ‘Fifty thousand of these men were sent to Germany. Perhaps you can try there.’
‘I don’t understand.’ But she did understand. He wanted the war never to be mentioned again, which was odd, considering his department was responsible for Italy’s defence. She could only wonder at what he might have suffered during the war, or allowed others to endure, that this was the biggest lesson he appeared to have taken from it.
CHAPTER THREE
THE FORUM, ROME
The Ides of March, 1955
Everything in life was a matter of pacing.
Lassiter had noticed the woman, or thought he had noticed her (could he be slipping?), a couple of times now. The first had been on a mild February day as he sneaked out of a private meeting at Cinecittà. She had rounded the corner of the studio on a peacock-blue bicycle, the front wicker basket holding a stack of paper weighted down by a pair of tangled high heels. Her bare feet were pedalling fast, and immediately he assumed she was one of the script girls. Or – better yet – an actress, with her wavy raven-black hair and stylish manner.
The second time had been at Peggy Guggenheim’s Carnival party on Mardi Gras a few weeks back. They were both in costume, which must have slowed him down – by the time he made the connection, she was gone.
He had not seen her at the studio since. He had certainly not expected to find her here, wandering the Via Sacra alone. He liked to cut through the Forum as he slipped home from Anita’s apartments, long before the photographers were 39up. At dawn, the cats had the run of the place and it made him feel positively feral. In his early fifties, he still showed the American athleticism of his lost youth, strolling the sampietrini of Rome’s battered postwar streets with the nimbleness of a man half his age.
When he saw her standing there in her white knotted men’s shirt and bright peasant skirt, pensively taking bites of a maritozzo still in its café wrapper, he wondered if now was the time to say something. In a film it would have been the perfect moment: minute nineteen out of ninety and the third encounter between the leads.
Then, as with so much in the film industry, it was taken out of his hands. She turned back to the blue bicycle leaning against a two-thousand-year-old cracked column, finally noticed him, and walked on past. If she recognised him, she gave no sign of it.
‘Mi scusi—’
She wheeled around at his words, wiped a bit of cream from the corner of her lips, and gave a smile that bordered on a smirk. ‘Don’t strain yourself. I’m a foreigner, too.’
Her words, spoken with an impeccable British accent, made the back of his neck tighten. ‘Actually, I live here.’
‘So do I.’
‘I mean I have done, for years.’
‘I don’t think that’s what makes someone Italian, do you?’
He saw that she was joking with him in that very contrarian, British manner that he always found tiring, even in a woman as beautiful as her. He also saw that she was not going to make this easy for him.
‘I believe we were both at Peggy’s Carnival bash.’
She pitched the now-empty pastry wrapper into the bicycle basket. ‘I don’t recall being introduced.’ 40
He extended his hand. ‘John. John Lassiter. Artemis Productions.’
The sun was slowly rising behind him and she shaded her eyes with her right hand to peer more closely at him.
‘The warrior goddess,’ was all she replied.
‘Among other things.’ He quickened his pace ahead of her to reach the bicycle and turn it around in his hands, then motioned for her to proceed as he gentlemanly walked the bike. Noticing the script in the basket next to the crumpled pastry wrap, he tried again. ‘You’re in Teatro 5, right? Starring in … ?’
‘Not in. On.’ She looked amused by his reaction. ‘I’m doctoring the script for When All Else Fails.’
‘I hear it’s in rough shape.’
‘It’s as crumpled as that wrapper.’ She laughed wryly. ‘I appreciate your directness, at least.’
The words at least did not escape him. He had only a few yards left of Via Sacra to make his pitch. ‘Do you walk through here often?’
She shook her head. ‘Only for inspiration – and the history, of course. Today is the Ides of March, as you know.’
He did not know. For all his morning-after walks through the Forum, Lassiter was unaware that he had found her standing where Julius Caesar had been cremated following his assassination on that famous date. The producer had huge gaps in his education that he had spent a lifetime hiding through almost any means short of actually opening a book.
‘Exactly,’ was all he said instead.
They exited onto the pavement alongside the screeching, careening cars of the Via dei Fori Imperiali. She reached for the bicycle handles and he released them slowly, allowing his taut, tanned arms to brush against hers, pleased when she did 41not step back as quickly as she could have.
‘See you at the studio, Mr Artemis.’
‘Lassiter,’ he was pained to have to correct her. But she only smiled, and he realised she was teasing him again. ‘And you are?’
‘Lowry. Vivien.’ She ascended the bicycle and sped off, but he noticed she looked back at the corner. He had paced it well enough in the end.
‘Vivien, per l’amor – for God’s sake – we cannot start the scene in the bedroom.’
Vivien threw her pencil down at Curtis’s words and pushed her chair back from the table in opposition. The production team was in emergency conference over the dire state of the script for When All Else Fails, a Douglas Sirk–style melodrama about an Italian police officer who falls in love with the famous American singer under his protection while on tour. Director Curtis preferred to work from his hotel, so at present the twelve members of his team – ‘the feuding apostles,’ he had joked as they all sat down – were arguing back and forth over a large white-clothed table in the dining room of the Grand Hotel Flora.
The hotel was located on Via Vittorio Veneto, the main artery of Roman excess that pulsated twenty-four hours a day, its left and right ‘banks’ full of cafés, restaurants, and cabarets. The street had held the pleasure villas of emperors Caesar and Catullus in ancient times and the occupation headquarters of German troops during the war. Today the area might play gracious host to the film crowd in town, but not that long ago director Luchino Visconti – nicknamed ‘the Red Count’ – had been imprisoned and beaten here three times a day. Selling off family heirlooms to fund resistance activities, 42he had narrowly escaped execution with the invasion of the Allies, who then tasked Visconti with filming the execution of the very man who had ordered his own torture and death.
This was the type of circular history, folding in on itself again and again, that Rome represented. Riches to rags to riches again. Anything that could happen had already happened here. What better reason to cast it all aside and focus on la dolce vita?
Declining the Sangiovese wine that poured freely amongst the men, Vivien was nursing her second caffè of the afternoon. It was doing nothing to improve her mood. There were so many constraints on her writing here, which she was not used to and had not been warned about. Vivien always appreciated a warning.
‘And,’ Douglas Curtis continued, ‘our leading man and lady most definitely cannot be shown on the bed together, even fully clothed.’
‘Who on earth would take offence to that?’ asked Vivien.
‘The American God-fearing public.’
‘But Three Coins in the Fountain released last spring with the exact same shot,’ Vivien persisted.
‘The camera cuts, though, before anything can happen,’ Curtis reminded her.
‘Much like your sex life,’ one of the assistant directors called out.
Always a good sport, Curtis playfully grimaced as the men about him laughed, then turned back to Vivien. ‘Vivi, you know as well as I do that it’ll never get by the church.’
Now it was Vivien’s turn to make a face. ‘Then they can stitch this thing back up.’ She pushed the script away as if in distaste.
‘Vivien, sweetheart, I’m serious.’ Curtis started to drum 43his right index finger next to his elaborate place setting for emphasis. ‘Cardinal Marchetti is already threatening to visit the teatro.’
The men at the studio often mentioned the cardinal as if he were as powerful as God. Vivien was not intimidated, but she was intrigued. The script girls had a nickname for Marchetti – bestiaccia, for ‘mean boyfriend.’ The Vatican sent the cardinal over when it caught word of any disreputable content from its spies. This was an informal network of men at all levels of the studio who had stubbornly retained their jobs through the fall of Fascism.
Vivien was learning that Italian men were stubborn in many ways. They were proving to be particularly formidable when it came to declining their attentions. Back in England, a simple cutting remark could forever put a man in his place. Not so in Italy. Here, the men practically thrived on rejection.
‘Let the cardinal come, then.’
Curtis threw his hands up in mild frustration and dismissed them all. As Vivien left the dining room, Levi Bassano rushed to her side. Together they passed the bar where Federico Fellini held so many meetings that the hotel staff called it his ufficio, then crossed through the main lobby, which was nearly deserted as an entire country napped.
‘We’ve been arguing this same point for days,’ she said with a sigh.
‘You’ve been arguing it,’ Levi teased.
‘Oh yes, I know – my temper.’
‘Curtis likes to put people through their paces, but deep down he knows you’re right.’
Vivien shot Levi a grateful look. They had been working closely together in the writers’ room at Cinecittà for two months now. During that time, Levi had never once made a 44pass at Vivien, generously befriending her instead. She found this both refreshing and surprising, given that Levi was only a handful of years younger than her and just as footloose and fancy-free.
Reaching the revolving gold doors to the famous grand hotel, Levi cocked his head in the direction of the Borghese gardens across the road.
‘Do you know about the scolaretta?’
‘Hmm?’ Vivien absentmindedly asked, noticing a familiar-looking man in dark glasses seated on a sofa in a corner of the lobby. A little girl stood compliantly in front of the man as he tidied her plait of hair.
‘That was her code name – the schoolgirl assassin. She shot an SS commander right outside these doors.’ Levi pointed through the glass. ‘On that very spot.’
Vivien finally placed the other man in her mind, then turned back to Levi in surprise.
‘This whole hotel was German High Command in the war,’ he continued. ‘Partisans were prosecuted on the third floor. They even pipe-bombed the lobby from their bikes.’ Levi stared at the pavement outside. ‘You would never know, would you?’
There was indeed no trace left of the Germans who had once lived here and held court, nor the many atrocities committed under their reign. Vivien wondered what it took – what it cost – the citizens of formerly occupied countries to actively not remember.
‘Actually, I see someone,’ she answered him. ‘Catch up tomorrow?’
Giving the OK sign, Levi passed through the revolving doors while Vivien turned in the direction of John Lassiter and the little girl. Vivien hadn’t thought of him since the meeting 45in the Forum. She recalled enjoying his obvious interest in her at the time but was not surprised to see that, like most men over a certain age in Italy, he had a family.
‘Miss Lowry, we meet again.’ He perched his sunglasses on his head, then stood up to tower over the little girl at his side. She had the fair hair and green eyes of the more northern regions of Italy and a hint of his own sandy colouring, which turned a deep copper in his close-shaved beard and moustache.
‘This is my daughter, Margarita Lassiter. Margarita Pacelli Lassiter.’
Vivien recognised the surname of one of Italian cinema’s most celebrated actresses and the star of the film being shot in the teatro next to hers. ‘Anita Pacelli?’
The girl looked back up at her father as if waiting for a cue, then stepped forward and gave a slight curtsey. Vivien couldn’t help but be charmed – still a child, Margarita already possessed the poise and otherworldly beauty of her famous parent.
‘I am a big fan of your mother’s films.’ Vivien gave a small smile and waited. She did not always feel natural around the very young. One of the aspects of Italian culture she was most having to adapt to was the indulgence of the child. The bambini were everywhere, dominating late-night dinners in the trattorie, screaming on ledges of fountains, racing about the Borghese gardens in little green carts.
The girl smiled back but still said nothing. She struck Vivien as shy to the point of fearful. Vivien often had that effect on children. It was as if they could sense her ambivalence. The effect their reaction had on her was to increase her lack of naturalness around them, which only made things worse. Vivien was used to winning people over when she tried. 46
At the girl’s silence, Lassiter pulled her closer to him. ‘It is our afternoon together, is it not, passerotta?’ He glanced back at Vivien to translate. ‘My little sparrow.’ Underneath his confident exterior, she detected a boyish and undeniably winning desire to please.
