“How would you like to do some really important work for us?” cried Mrs. Unwin.
Mr. Unwin would come out and look at his wife and go in the house again. He spoke gently to Carmela and the twins, but not often. There were now only two or three things he would eat — Carmela’s vegetable soup, Carmela’s rice and cheese, and French bread. Mrs. Unwin no longer spoke of the Marchesa as “Frances” and the chauffeur had given up coming round to the kitchen door. There was bad feeling over the lawsuit, which, as a civil case, could easily drag on for the next ten years. Then one day the digging ceased. The villa was boarded over. The Marchesa had taken her dogs to America, leaving everything, even the chauffeur, behind. Soon after Christmas, the garden began to bloom in waves of narcissi, anemones, irises, daffodils; then came the great white daisies and the mimosa; and then all the geraniums that had not been uprooted with the rosebushes flowered at once — white, salmon-pink, scarlet, peppermint-striped. The tide of color continued to run as long as the rains lasted. After that the flowers died off and the garden became a desert.
Mrs. Unwin said the Marchesa had bolted like a frightened hare. She, though untitled, though poor, would now show confidence in Mussolini and his wish for peace by having a stone wall built round her property. Lucio was employed. Mrs. Unwin called him “a dear old rogue.” She was on tiptoe between headaches. The climate was right for her just now: no pollen. Darkness. Not too much sun. Long cold evenings. For a time she blossomed like the next-door garden, until she made a discovery that felled her again.
She and Mr. Unwin together summoned Carmela; together they pointed to a fair-haired boy carrying stones. Mr. Unwin said, “Who is he?”
“He is my brother,” Carmela said.
“I have seen him before,” said Mr. Unwin.
“He once visited me.”
“But Carmela,” said Mr. Unwin, as always softly. “You knew that we were looking about for a stonemason. Your own brother was apprenticed to Lucio. You never said a word. Why, Carmela? It is the same thing as lying.”
Mrs. Unwin’s voice had a different pitch: “You admit he is your brother?”
“Yes.”
“You heard me saying I needed someone for the walls?”
“Yes.”
“It means you don’t trust me.” All the joyous fever had left her. She was soon back in her brown kimono coat out on the terrace, ready to insult strangers again. There was only Lucio. No longer her “dear old rogue,” he spat in her direction and shook his fist and called her a name for which Carmela did not have the English.
The Italians began to expel foreign-born Jews. The Unwins were astonished to learn who some of them were: they had realized about the Blums and the Wiesels, for that was evident, but it was a shock to have to see Mrs. Teodoris and the Delaroses in another light, or to think of dear Dr. Chaffee as someone in trouble. The Unwins were proud that this had not taken place in their country — at least not since the Middle Ages — but it might not be desirable if all these good people were to go to England now. Miss Barnes had also said she hoped some other solution could be found. They were all of them certainly scrambling after visas, but were not likely to obtain any by marriage; the English sons and daughters had left for home.
Carmela still went over to France every Friday. The frontier was open; there were buses and trains, though Dr. Chaffee and the others were prevented from using them. Sometimes little groups of foreign-born Jews were rounded up and sent across to France, where the French sent them back again, like the Marchesa’s shuttlecocks. Jews waiting to be expelled from France to Italy were kept in the grounds of the technical school for boys; they sat there on their luggage, and people came to look at them through the fence. Carmela saw a straggling cluster of refugees — a new word — being marched at gunpoint up the winding street to the frontier on the French side. Among them, wearing his dark suit, was Dr. Chaffee. She remembered how she had not taken the pills he had given her — had not so much as unscrewed the metal cap of the bottle. Wondering if he knew, she looked at him with shame and apology before turning her head away. As though he had seen on her face an expression he wanted, he halted, smiled, shook his head. He was saying “No” to something. Terrified, she peeped again, and this time he lifted his hand, palm outward, in a curious greeting that was not a salute. He was pushed on. She never saw him again.
“What is all this talk?” said Mrs. Unwin. “Miss Lewis is full of it. Have you seen anything around the frontier, Carmela?”
“No, never,” she said.
“I’m sure it is the Padre’s doing,” said Mrs. Unwin. “He preached about tolerance once too often. It worked the Italians up.” She repeated to her husband Miss Barnes’s opinion, which was that Mussolini did not know what was going on.
In March the wind blew as it had in the autumn. The east wind seemed to have a dark color to it. Twice on the same March night, Carmela was wakened by the beating of waves. At the market, people seemed to be picking their feet out of something grey and adhesive — their own shadows. The Italians began to change; even the clerks in the post office were cheeky with foreigners now. Mrs. Unwin believed the Padre was to blame. She went to listen to his Lenten sermons, and of course caught him out. He preached five Lenten messages, and with each the season advanced and the sea became light, then deep blue, and the Marchesa’s garden brighter and sweeter-smelling. As he had in the autumn, the Padre started off carefully, choosing as his subjects patience, abstinence, and kindness. So far so good, said Mrs. Unwin. But the fourth sermon was on courage, the fifth on tyranny, on Palm Sunday he spoke about justice, and on Good Friday he took his text from Job: “Behold I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment.” On Easter Sunday he mentioned Hitler by name.
Mrs. Unwin looked up the Good Friday text and found at the top of the page “Job complaineth of his friends’ cruelty.” She read it out to her husband, adding, “That was meant for me.”
“Why you?”
“Because I have hit, and where I hit I hit hard,” she cried.
“What have you been up to?” His voice rose as much as ever it could or would. He noticed Carmela and fell silent.
Late in May, Mrs. Unwin won her case against the Marchesa. There was no precedent for the speed of the decision. Mr. Unwin thought the courts were bored with the case, but his wife took it to mean compensation for the Unwins’ having not run away. All the datura branches overhanging the Unwins’ garden were to be lopped off, and if Mrs. Unwin’s headaches persisted the tree was to be cut down. The Unwins hired a man to do the pruning, but it was a small triumph, for the Marchesa was not there to watch.
The night before the man arrived to prune the tree, a warship sent playful searchlights over the hills and the town. The shore was lit as if with strings of yellow lanterns. The scent of the datura rose in the air like a bonfire. Mrs. Unwin suddenly said, “Oh, what does it matter now?” Perhaps it was not the datura that was responsible after all. But in the morning, when the man came with an axe and a saw, he would not be dismissed. He said, “You sent for me and I am here.” Carmela had never seen him before. He told her she had no business to be working for foreigners and that soon there would be none left. He hacked a hole through the hedge and began to saw at the base of the datura.
“That’s not our property!” Mrs. Unwin cried.