He made the statement without emotion. I remembered his daughter as a pretty woman in a gentle, English kind of way, quiet and rather slight, a little faded. Aries probably.
‘We are fortunate to be alive, General.’
He turned away his head, half shaking it as he did so. I told him about the child called Aimée, about the search for relatives in America. I hoped to involve him in the pathos of the child’s predicament and perhaps to make him realize that someone else had lost even more than he had. He did his best to respond, later even to smile. With military stoicism he appeared to be resigned to what had occurred, his vocation no doubt demanding that. A sense of melancholy did not come from him, only one of weariness. I left him soldiering on, precisely obeying the nurses’ strictures, marching with the aid of a metal stick, back and forth between his bed and a curtained balcony at the corridor’s end.
‘I’m sorry, Otmar,’ I commiserated, and in a soft whisper, speaking quite good English, the German boy accepted the sympathy: that it was offered because of the loss of his sweetheart or a limb was barely relevant. In the train he had been wearing a red and yellow lumberjack shirt and rather large glasses, which were shattered in the blast. He wore other spectacles now, wire-rimmed, and jeans and a plain grey shirt. His features were sallow, the eyes behind the magnifying lenses still terrified. Unlike the General, he did not attempt to smile. There was a cornered look about Otmar, as if the horror he had woken up to was too much for him.
‘We must hope, Otmar. What there is left to us is hope.’
Every time I returned to my own room, and to the ward when I was a little better, I endeavoured to proceed with my new work, but still I found it difficult to continue. This had never happened before: with reason, I had been confident on the train as soon as the girl appeared in my mind’s vision. Yet now it seemed as though a film had halted within seconds of its commencement. The fluttering of the girl’s dress was frozen, her carefree mood arrested in a random instant. Was there some companion of whom my broken cinematograph held the secret, some figure waiting to step from the garden’s shadows? Would the carefree mood become ecstatic? Would a gardenia nestle in the long fair hair? I did not know. I knew neither what joy nor sorrow there was; my girl was nameless, without detail in her life, vague as to parentage, born beneath a choice of all the stars. The title Ceaseless Tears appeared so naturally to belong to the suffering on the train that greater bewilderment, and blankness, was engendered. I was aware of a sensation that caused me to shiver in dismay, as though all that had been given to me had been snatched away. Then one day Quinty said:
‘They could stay a while in the house, you know.’
A week ago the General had murmured that he would find the return to England difficult, and wished he did not have to face it immediately. ‘The struggle back and forth,’ he said. ‘The bed, the corridor, the holy statue in the wall, the balcony. The faces of the patients, the smell of ether. You feel that’s where you belong.’
Quinty was clearly out to profit from misfortune, but even so I saw nothing to object to in his suggestion. ‘You would find it peaceful,’ I told the old man. ‘My house is high enough to be cool. Sometimes a breeze blows over the water of Lake Trasimeno.’
He nodded, and then he thanked me. When he sought me out two days later I explained that we were used to catering for strangers, that for many years we had taken in passing tourists when the hotels of the neighbourhood were full.
‘I would insist on paying,’ he gently laid down. ‘I told the man I would insist on paying whatever rates you normally charge.’
‘It is he who sees to all that.’
I’d known army officers of lower rank before; never a general. He had the look of one, sparely made, his hair the colour of iron, great firmness about the mouth, a grey moustache. He was a man of presence, but of course he was not young: touching seventy, I guessed.
‘A week or two,’ he agreed with unemphatic graciousness. ‘That would be nice. But are you certain, Mrs Delahunty? I don’t want to be a nuisance at a time like this.’
‘Indeed I’m certain.’
Otmar refused at first. Poor boy, with every day that passed he seemed more wretchedly unhappy and I sensed that, even more than the General, he did not know how to return to the world he was familiar with.
‘You are most good.’ His voice echoed the distortion in his eyes. Often, in speaking to him, I found myself obliged to turn my head away. ‘But it should not be. I have not money to pay this.’
Quinty cannot have known that, and I resolved, if necessary, to pay for Otmar’s stay myself. I said the money didn’t matter. Some time in the future, when everything had calmed for him, he could pay a little. ‘If you would care to, Otmar, the house is there.’
The doctor who looked after the American child was a Dr Innocenti, a small, brown-complexioned man with gold in his teeth. He was the English-speaking one among the doctors and the nurses, and had often acted as interpreter for the specialists who were more directly concerned with the General and Otmar and myself. When he heard that hospitality had been offered in my house he came to see me and to thank me.
‘It will do some good,’ he said. ‘I would prescribe it.’
He wore a pale brown suit and a silk tie, striped red and green. When I said the child also would be welcome in my house he doubtfully shook his head. The carabinieri would have to be consulted, he explained, since the child – being at present without a guardian – was in their charge. ‘In Italy we must always be patient,’ he said. ‘But truly I would wish the little girl removed from the hospital ambience.’
‘Is she recovering, doctor?’
In reply the little shoulders were raised within the well-cut suit. The hands gesticulated, the nut-brown head sloped this way and then that.
‘Slowly?’ I prompted.
Too slowly, a contortion of the neat features indicated: it was not easy. At present the prognosis was not good.
‘The child is more than welcome if you believe it would be a help.’
‘So Signor Quinty explain to me. There is nowhere else, you comprehend.’ He spoke gently. His jet-black eyes were as soft as a kitten’s. Piscean, I guessed. ‘I will speak with the officers of the carabinieri. Red tape may be cut, after all. To be surrounded by people whose language she understands will be advantageous for Aimée.’
Later I learnt he’d been successful in persuading the carabinieri to agree to his wishes. They would visit us two or three times a week to satisfy themselves that the child remained safely in our care, and report their satisfaction to the American authorities. Dr Innocenti himself would also visit us regularly; if there were signs of deterioration in the child she would be at once returned to the hospital. But he believed that the clinical surroundings were keeping the tragedy fresh in her mind and preventing her from coming to terms with it.
‘You are generous, signora. I have explained to Signor Quinty the expenses will be paid when the person they seek in America is found. My friends of the carabinieri have reason to believe that this is not a poor family.’
We were all discharged on the same afternoon and the first night in my house we sat around the tiled table on the terrace, the General on my right, Otmar on my other side. The child was already sleeping in her bed.
Rosa Crevelli brought us lasagne, and lamb with rosemary, and the Vino Nobile of Montepulciano, and peaches. A stranger would have been surprised to see us, with our bandages and plaster, the walking wounded at table. I was the only one who had not lost a loved one, having none to lose. As I dwelt upon that, the title that had come to me floated through my consciousness, golden letters on a stark black ground. I saw again a girl in white passing through a garden, and again the image froze.