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  A richly textured and powerful novel of a family and a nation torn apart by war follows Kate Fenn, who marries a young left-wing Italian doctor and moves to Tuscany, where she becomes imprisoned within a Nazi-Fascist Europe with a brother and brother-in-law on opposing sides, a husband incarcerated due to his socialist ideas, and a young daughter to raise alone. Reprint. Kate CaterinaBy William Riviere Grove PressCopyright © 2003 William RiviereAll right reserved. ISBN: 0802139736
Chapter One
She had harvest-coloured hair and dark eyes, and her name was Kate Fenn, until she married Gabriele D'Alessandria and went to live in Italy, where her new family and her new friends called her Caterina. It was Mussolini's time, it was the time of jack-booted Black Shirts, and diversity of opinion was not encouraged in the country. Certainly most of the respectable citizens of Arezzo whom the bride came amongst did not expect a young lady to go in for unorthodox thinking or feeling of any kind. Of course, her husband's friends knew he was a covert Socialist — which was dangerous. As for her father-in-law, melancholic old Luigi D'Alessandria, who these days only had antipathies for all philosophies and factions, if donkeys' years ago he had harboured any mild political sympathies, almost nobody could remember what they had been. No one in Tuscan society suspected Caterina D'Alessandria of abstruse awarenesses, any more than her London friends had done when she had been Kate Fenn. They didn't suspect her of ambiguous loyalties either. People commented freely on how striking her colouring was — though her hair needed more ripple, young coquettes and ancient matriarchs agreed, having to find something amiss with such fairness. They commented on the straightness of her nose; on the rather too marked resolution in her mouth and chin; on the dark amber brilliance of her eyes when her enthusiasms caught fire — her too many, chaotic enthusiasms; on her figure. The newly arrived bride was strongly built, and she would have been voluptuous, polite opinion allowed, had there not been something lamentably tentative about the way she sat, or stood, or turned. English gaucheness, clearly. The poor girl had simply never been taught how to move, and didn't have it instinctively. (But one or two of the men were fascinated by how, even when she was immobile, she appeared to be wavering. It was something in her eyes, perhaps.) Anyhow, she would always be hopelessly outgunned by her sister-in-law Esmeralda, who was the recognised beauty of those circles in those years. Then, after not much more than a year of the marriage, Lisa was born. After that, discussion of Caterina D'Alessandria invariably commenced with how charming it was to see a young mother so joyfully devoted to her infant, before just as predictably passing to speculation about how long she would take to produce a male child. The eyes and hair which seemed to contradict each other, and the strange coexistence of resolute lips with a hesitant voluptuousness, quite lost currency in conversation. Kate, for twenty-two years; then Caterina, in her new life. Only that, right from her entrance onto her Italian stage, she began thinking of herself as Kate Caterina. Signing her name like that when, for example, she scribbled a note for her husband to say that she'd taken the baby out for a dawdle as far as the gardens by the cathedral but she'd be back in an hour — as if that self-translation were one name, her double name. Not that anyone ever called her Kate Caterina, except Gabriele sometimes when they were playing their erotic games; so the two words came to mean licence and concupiscence and being someone slightly other for a while. Kate Caterina. Almost as if she had already known of her deplorable capacity for self-dividedness — though not much had yet occurred to ram home to her consciousness the essential doubleness of who she had so blithely become. Not much ... Because in '36, which was the year she and Gabriele had got married, everyone was relieved that the war that had nearly broken out over Abyssinia between Italy and Britain had not broken out, the League of Nations being all yap and snarl but no bite. Not much ... Though the anti-English clamour in the newspapers and the anti-English clamour in the streets were hurtful to her, however hard she tried not to mind. Kate Caterina. As if she had already been growing that keen perception not only of her inner dividedness but of her multiplicity too. That talent or weakness she had for burgeoning with selves. For putting forth not only Lisa but shadowier souls too; other lives of hers; less apparent stories. Presences she conjured up, or she met and could never quite forget. Then came the Pact of Steel, the military alliance forged by Hitler and Mussolini. So Caterina D'Alessandria knew that her divided loyalties were going to split her in two, just as plainly as she knew, and sometimes said, that Italy was her country now. But today it was the end of summer, and she was driving to Arezzo station to meet her brother Giles, whom she hadn't seen since her wedding. And because Giles must be offered all things, her mind was fizzing with all the lives she was living. Apparent things that she would show him, and she was desperate for him to approve of and like. Awarenesses she'd tell him the stories of.
Chapter Two
‘My God, Kate, it's wonderful to see you again.’ Grinning irrepressibly, Giles Fenn sat twisted sideways in the clanking old Fiat. He saw Kate take her eyes off her driving to flash him her old tomboyish smile. ‘Watch out, those children haven't seen you. Thinking of which, how is my niece?’ 'Oh, she's in terrific fettle. Stumping here and there. Saying things. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Italian. With bits of her own baby language still mixed in.’ Her quiet, merry voice unchanged, Giles heard happily — unless it rang with a contentment, even a pride, which were new. He winced with sudden jealousy of all that her Italian life had given her, reminded himself firmly that he was delighted she was happy in her marriage to Gabriele D'Alessandria, glanced at the late August sun on the houses. No, honestly they were palaces, some of them. Kate had said Arezzo wasn't grand like Florence or Rome. But these façades with their stone gateways big enough to ride a horse through, with their handsomely carved balconies, their sculpted coats-of-arms and high windows and deep eaves ... Still, some of those skirmishing ragamuffins had been barefoot, he'd noted with a jolt. And the tiny black-swathed old women, selling a handful of eggs or a handful of herbs. The thin men pushing carts of firewood. What was she saying? ‘Three years, since you gave me away.’ She laughed. ‘Remember how we stopped the car a couple of hundred yards from the church because we were early, and you said, What about you not giving me to Gabriele to take to Italy, what about you hanging on to me like we'd been before? And I said — oh Lord, are they ...? No, it's all right, they're regular troops. I said I'd always fancied Samoa. Ever since I'd fallen in love with Robert Louis Stevenson when I was fifteen and particularly passionate, I'd longed to sail to Samoa in a schooner. But otherwise, if you preferred, we could just bolt back to Canonbury Square and barricade ourselves into the house, though in all that bridal get-up I wasn't really dressed for barricading. Oh Giles, Giles, I don't think I'd ever loved you as much as I did that day. Only perhaps today I love you pretty immoderately. Can't wait to show you Lisa.’ That day of Kate Fenn's wedding, their mother had been dead for three years and their father had been in a Flanders graveyard since 1918. So it had been that the bride and her younger brother had found themselves having to organise her nuptials largely on their own. With damn all money. With a bit of desultory help from an aunt or two, help that just came down to fussing and interference. So of course it had been the least swish wedding there ever was, but high spirits and a submerged desperation had carried them through. All her uncles had offered to give her away. But she'd said that if she couldn't walk up the aisle with her brother she wouldn't get married at all. Luckily, when the D'Alessandria contingent arrived in London they had turned out to be charm itself — well, all except Cosima, Giles recollected. Cosima was the elder sister and she'd married a Roman marquis. Not only that, but he was one of the potentates of the colonial service. So she was enormously grand, or she was revoltingly stuck-up, depending on your point of view. But Gabriele's mother had been nice, she'd helped Kate and him without seeming to be taking them over in their own house. Giles was looking forward to seeing Sonya D'Alessandria again. They were held up by a platoon of infantry marching along. ‘What do you mean, about it being all right, they're regular troops?’ He gazed at the unfamiliar uniforms, the soldiers' arms and legs swinging in unison, their glinting bayonets. So these were the men who quite likely, if the war that hadn't broken out last year over Czechoslovakia broke out this year over Poland or next year over somewhere else, one was going to have to get steamed up about enough to ... But perhaps you did it coldly. Yes, almost without doubt you did it coldly, Giles reflected. So these were the fellows who, if Italy was idiotic enough to come into the war, and on Germany's side, he might easily find himself fighting. And Edoardo? he wondered, remembering the younger D'Alessandria brother, who was about his own age and whom he'd liked, at the London wedding. ‘Not Fascist militia,’ his sister was saying. ‘Not Black Brigades. Oh, I don't mean I feel physically afraid every time I clap eyes on them — though the shadow crosses my mind. Remember the old saying about a goose walking over your grave? All the same ... Gabriele is nothing like as cautious as I'd wish him to be. Lord, that's another thing — I'm going to have to explain all the politics to you, or at least enough for you to get through the wedding party tomorrow without committing some frightful gaffe. If Esmeralda really does marry the man, that is.’ And her cheek dimpled in the way he remembered from old times when it had just been the two of them, really, in all the world. Harum-scarum childhood times. Then later, after their mother died, the running-their-own-show times. ‘Keeping you all guessing right up till the last minute, is she?’ he asked. Esmeralda was the dashing sister, the one Kate enthused about in her letters — they'd clearly struck up a great alliance. The car was jolting forward again. And although it was for Esmeralda's wedding that Giles had come all the way from London, and it simply hadn't occurred to him that it might be called off at the last minute (Kate and he had only been joking about a dash to Samoa for heaven's sake, or he'd been mainly joking), he truly didn't care about Esmeralda and her fiancé either way. Because here he was, still sitting turned so he could see his sister. She looked all right, he thought half with relief and half reluctantly. Kate in profile, concentrating on her driving for a change. Yes, she looked fine. Here he was, hearing her laughing voice, when she said: ‘Well, not all of us, Giles. I trust the bridegroom and his family haven't a clue about the dance she's leading us, or the show she's putting on, or whatever it is she's doing. But those of us who've got her in the house ... Mind you, I've never known her in better form, she's enjoying life all right. Now, we've arrived, just about. That's our church, the Santissima Annunziata. I mean, it's the church the family have always gone to, and where tomorrow we hope that ... Though possibly one or two subversive souls among us decline to hope very fervently. Sorry, didn't see that dog. Missed it though.’
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