The Venice Sketchbook(73)

And he had replied, seriously, “How else would you find them if you needed one?”

We had laughed.





CHAPTER 28


Juliet, Venice, September 12, 1939

I stood alone in the deep shadow, not knowing where to go next. Not knowing what to do. I couldn’t tell Leo. But I had to tell Leo. He had a right to know, didn’t he? And then the dreadful, final realization: I couldn’t go home. I thought of my mother—pillar of the church, head of the ladies’ altar guild, in our little village where gossip was a major sport. The shame would kill her. And what about me? What would I do? I certainly couldn’t go back to teaching young ladies when a major boast of the school was a moral Christian upbringing. How would we live without my job? I knew Aunt Hortensia still had a small income, but would that be enough? I could picture Aunt Hortensia’s face—that haughty, horsey, perpetually surprised expression.

“I always knew the girl would come to a bad end,” she’d say. “Too much interest in the opposite sex even when she was young. And no judgement at all.”

Wouldn’t she be surprised to know that the one man she had warned me against was the creator of my ruin? Thoughts were whirling around in my brain, and I felt for a moment that I might faint. I put my hand against the cold stone wall of the nearest building, hoping to steady myself.

“All right,” I said. “Think, Juliet.”

I had stipend money until next summer. And the child would be born when? Nine months, wasn’t it? How little I knew about pregnancy and birth. But I remember when one of the farm girls in our village was expecting. All the talk. All the speculation about who the father was and why he wasn’t marrying her. And I remembered gossips going back nine months to try and work out who Lil had been seeing at that time. I did a rapid calculation in my head: end of April, beginning of May. I felt a glimmer of hope. Nine months. I could stay here, continue to take my classes if they’d let me. Then I’d have the baby, give it up for adoption and go home with nobody any the wiser. I’d write and tell my mother that everyone had reassured me that Venice would be perfectly safe and it made more sense for me to stay put and finish my course, rather than risk the journey home at this moment. Besides, with any luck, the war would be over by next summer. I knew she’d be angry about this, but it seemed like the only solution.

I rather surprised myself how dispassionately I was handling this. I suppose I was desperately trying to keep fear at bay—fear and despair. I was no longer that emotional girl who burst into tears easily. I had learned to shut off my emotions long ago. I hadn’t cried when I was told I had to leave art college, because I saw how terrified my mother was, and my father so ill. I hadn’t even cried when he died, because my mother was hysterical enough for both of us. So I thought I had forgotten how to feel—until Leo had made me feel alive again and I had experienced love. I couldn’t even begin to think how I’d tell him about this. What if he denied it was his? Cut me dead? I couldn’t make any decisions right now. If only I had someone I could tell, someone close I could talk to at this moment. But there was nobody.

So I went back to the accademia. I attended my classes. I found if I carried a bottle of fizzy water and some dry crackers that I could avert much of the sickness. The trick was to keep something in my stomach at all times, and then eat nothing too spicy or rich. I started having a clear vegetable soup with croutons for lunch at the local trattoria. It was based with chicken stock and quite nourishing. I also found some biscuits like little sponge cakes that seemed to agree with my stomach.

September 21

I have got through the next couple of weeks of classes and life. I am still completely undecided about whether to tell Leo. He would know eventually if he ran into me in the street. I wonder how soon it would show. I wondered if I could alter my clothes or if I could find a dressmaker to make me inexpensive voluminous ones. I wondered what people would say. Venice was a Catholic city. Sin was real and punishable here. I toyed again with going home to England but maybe living in London, getting a job until I couldn’t work any longer, and not letting my mother know I was back home. But that seemed like such a horrible thing to do, for her as well as for me, even if I could find anyone who would hire a pregnant, unmarried woman. And I would be alone in a great city, a city that might well be in the midst of a war, and it seemed like the worst thing I could imagine. I put that thought aside. I’d risk the scorn of the Venetians.

Of the war we heard very little. Hitler’s army had rolled into Poland. The Poles were putting up a valiant fight, but it was only a matter of time before Poland was lost. And the Allies? Britain and France and their commonwealth countries? The only encounters had been at sea. A ship from Canada to England had been sunk by a German submarine, and British aeroplanes had attacked a German naval base at Kiel. But men were being called up to fight in England, and my mother wrote that she had been instructed to build an air raid shelter in her back lawn.

How ridiculous, she wrote. Can you see Aunt H. and me scrambling across the rose garden in our nightclothes and then going down into a dark, damp hole in the ground? Aunt H. says she’d rather risk being bombed, but she doesn’t believe the Germans will dare attack us. Hitler has a fondness for the British, she says. We are of the same Aryan stock. She is absolutely convinced that we will have peace.

In Venice one would not know that there was a war on. There was plenty to eat, the markets were full of fresh produce from the Veneto, on the other side of the causeway, and the fishermen still came in each morning with boats full of fish. There was still music and laughter. Our classes progressed at the academy. The only change was that Gaston had gone home, bravely declaring that it was his duty to join the French army to stop Hitler from invading his country.