‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘Birth control pills,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Italy is a Roman Catholic country,’ he observed. ‘You can’t buy these pills here. But that doesn’t stop women wanting to avoid being in a constant state of baby production, does it? And the pills are marvellous for them, they can take them without the devoutest husbands knowing anything about it.’
‘Good God,’ I said.
‘My brother’s wife collects them at home from her friends and so on, and when she has a bottle full I bring it to Gabriella and she passes them on at this end. I know for a fact that at least four other pilots do the same, not to mention a whole fleet of air hostesses, and she admitted to me once that a day seldom goes by without some supplies flying in.’
‘Do you... well... sell... them to Gabriella?’
He was quite shocked, which pleased me. ‘Of course not. She doesn’t sell them, either. They are a gift, a service if you like, from the women of one country to the women of another. My sister-in-law and her friends are really keen on it, they don’t see why any woman in the world should have to risk having a child if she doesn’t want one.’
‘I’ve never thought about it,’ I said, fingering the bottle.
‘You’ve never had a sister who’s borne six children in six years and collapsed into a shattering nervous break-down when she started the seventh.’
‘Gabriella’s sister?’
He nodded. ‘That’s why she got some pills, in the first place. And the demand just grew and grew.’
I gave him back the bottle and he put it in his pocket. ‘Well?’ he said, with a hint of challenge.
‘She must be quite a girl,’ I said, ‘to do something like this.’
His curving mouth curved wider. ‘If she smuggled the Crown Jewels you’d forgive her. Confess it.’
‘Whatever she did,’ I said slowly.
The amusement died right out of his face and he looked at me soberly. ‘I’ve heard of this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘But I’ve never seen it happen before. And you didn’t even need to speak to each other. In fact, it’s just damn lucky you can speak to each other...’
Three times during the afternoon I made sure of that. She would get into trouble, she said, if she just talked to me when she should be working, so I bought presents, separately, for my father, mother and sister, taking a long time over each choice. Each time she spoke and looked at me in a kaleidoscopic mixture of excitement, caution and surprise, as if she too found falling helplessly in love with a complete stranger an overwhelming and almost frightening business.
‘I like that one.’
‘It costs six thousand lire.’
‘That is too dear.’
‘This one is cheaper.’
‘Show me some others.’
We began like that, like school-day text books, in careful stilted French, but by the end of the afternoon, when she locked the display cases and left with Patrick and me through the employees’ entrance, we could talk with some ease. I perhaps knew most French of the three of us, then Gabriella, then Patrick; but his Italian was excellent, so between us everything could in one language or another be understood.
We left the airport in a taxi, and as soon as we were on the move Patrick gave her the aspirin bottle. She thanked him with a flashing smile and asked him if they were all the same sort. He nodded, and explained they’d come from some R.A.F. wives whose husbands were away on a three months overseas course.
From her large shoulder-sling bag of black leather she produced some of the bright striped wrapping paper from her airport gift shop and a large packet of sweets. The sweets and the aspirin bottle were expertly whisked into a ball shaped parcel with four corners sticking up on top like leaves on a pineapple, and a scrap of sticky tape secured them.
The taxi stopped outside a dilapidated narrow terrace house in a poor looking street. Gabriella climbed out of the taxi, but Patrick waved me back into my seat.
‘She doesn’t live here,’ he said. ‘She’s just delivering the sweets.’
She was already talking to a tired looking young woman whose black dress accentuated the pallor of her skin, and whose varicose veins were the worst I had seen, like great dark blue knobbed worms networking just under the surface of her legs. Round her clung two small children with two or three more behind in the doorway, but she had a flat stomach in her skimpy dress and no baby in her arms. The look she gave Gabriella and her pretty present were all the reward that anyone would need. The children knew that there were sweets in the parcel. They were jumping up trying to reach it as their mother held it above their heads, and as we left she went indoors with them, and she was laughing.
‘Now,’ said Patrick, turning away from the window, ‘we had better show Henry Milan.’
It was getting dark and was still cold, but not for us. I wouldn’t have noticed if it had been raining ice. They began by marching me slowly around the Piazza del Duomo to see the great gothic cathedral and the Palazzo Reale, and along the high glass arcade into the Piazza della Scala to gaze at the opera house, which Gabriella solemnly told me was the second largest theatre in Europe, and could hold three thousand six hundred people.
‘Where is the largest?’ said Patrick.
‘In Naples,’ she said smiling. ‘It is ours too.’
‘I suppose Milan has the biggest cathedral, then,’ he teased her.
‘No,’ she laughed, showing an unsuspected dimple, ‘Rome.’
‘An extravagant nation, the Italians.’
‘We were ruling the world while you were still painting yourselves blue.’
‘Hey, hey,’ said Patrick.
‘Leonardo da Vinci lived in Milan,’ she said.
‘Italy is undoubtedly the most beautiful country in the world and Milan is its pearl.’
‘Patrick, you are a great idiot,’ she said affectionately. But she was proud indeed of her native city, and before dinner that evening I learned that nearly a million and a half people lived there and that there were dozens of museums, and music and art schools, and that it was the best manufacturing town in the country, and the richest, and its factories made textiles and paper and railway engines and cars. And, in fact, aeroplanes.
We ate in a quiet warmly lit little restaurant which looked disconcertingly like Italian restaurants in London but smelled quite different, spicy and fragrant. I hardly noticed what I ate: Gabriella chose some sort of veal for us all, and it tasted fine, like everything else that evening. We drank two bottles of red local wine which fizzed slightly on the tongue, and unending little gold cups of black coffee. I knew even then that it was because we were all speaking a language not our own that I felt liberated from my usual self. It was so much easier to be uninhibited away from everything which had planted the inhibitions: another sky, another culture, a time out of time. But that only made the way simpler, it didn’t make the object less real. It meant I didn’t have chains on my tongue; but what I had said wasn’t said loosely, it was still rooted in some unchanging inner core. On that one evening in Milan I learned what it was like to be gay deep into the spirit, and if for nothing else I would thank Gabriella for that all my life.
We talked for hours: not profoundly, I dare say, but companionably: at first about the things we had done and seen that day, then of ourselves, our childhood. Then of Fellini’s films, and a little about travel, and then, in ever widening ripples, of religion, and our own hopes, and the state the world was in. There wasn’t an ounce of natural reforming zeal among the three of us, as perhaps there ought to have been when so much needed reforming; but faith didn’t move mountains any more, it got bogged down by committees, Patrick said, and the saints of the past would be smeared as psychological misfits today.