‘No, if only it was that simple; my sight problems began during the war.’
‘Oh I see,’ he replied awkwardly. ‘In fact, it was the war I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘The war? But surely you’re too young to know anything about it.’
‘Yes, but my grandmother lived through it and she told me a great deal. It’s her that I would like to talk to you about.’
Livia thought back to those she had known in the war. To her friend Elena who had only died the previous year after a long and happy life running a vineyard in Puglia. To Sara, who had died just after the war giving birth to her third child. To have survived so much, and then die of something so innocent and life-affirming as having a child had been a real tragedy. Perhaps, she thought, this young man was related to Valentina, who had moved to America soon after the war, and become a politician.
She was intrigued. ‘Tell me, young man, who was your grandmother?’
‘Isabella Bellucci,’ he replied. ‘The actress.’
Livia paused, her cup held in mid-air. ‘I see.’
‘I noticed you were reading her obituary yesterday.’
‘Yes, although I never actually met her, but our paths… intersected. Our lives became intertwined for a while.’
‘I know,’ he said, as the waiter laid his espresso on the table. ‘She often talked of you, and of the others involved.’
‘The others?’ Livia asked.
‘Vicenzo, and Luciana – the whole Lucchese family, and of Koch of course.’
‘I see,’ Livia replied. ‘Well you must forgive me, my memory is hazy. I am a very old lady and I may not be able to supply the information you seek.’
‘I seek nothing,’ he said. ‘I merely come on an errand from my grandmother.’
‘An errand? But she is dead.’
‘Yes, but before she died, she made me promise something.’
‘Go on,’ Livia said.
‘She made me promise that I would come and find you and tell you how very sorry she was that she betrayed you.’
‘Oh,’ replied Livia. ‘I don’t consider she betrayed me, exactly.’
‘She had misunderstood something,’ he went on. ‘She was in love, you see – hopelessly in love with a man who couldn’t love her back. She was so desperate, she would do anything, anything at all to gain his love.’
‘It must have been awful,’ said Livia, ‘to be so in thrall to someone. I knew a little of her situation – I was a friend of the man she loved, you see. And I felt genuinely sorry for her.’
‘Did you? I wish she could hear you say that. She lived with this terrible guilt all her life.’
‘Dear boy,’ Livia reached across the table, and covered his hand with hers. ‘That’s all forgotten now, surely. It was all such a long time ago. And she suffered enough, I think, don’t you? The terrible lies that were told about her in the press. I covered her trial, you know, I worked as a journalist,’ she said, by way of explanation.
He nodded. ‘She read your stories and often spoke of you, of how fair you were. You were the only journalist to cover her trial in a dispassionate way.’
‘I’m glad she thought so. I thought much of the coverage was disgraceful, sensationalist. I know she was hounded for years. And then she seemed to just disappear.’
‘She struggled to get work after the war. The new wave of Italian cinema rejected her. Fortunately, by then she’d married my grandfather, Peter. He was an English officer who had been stationed here. I don’t know exactly how they met, but he was a blessing for her – a kind man, who accepted her complicated past. Their only child, my father, was very unwell as a boy. He had a heart defect, and I think it took all her courage and strength to bring him up. But he improved gradually, and eventually grew up, and married, and I was born.’
‘Was Isabella happy, at the end?’ Livia asked.
‘Happy enough. But it still hurt, I think, that people in the film industry believed such terrible things of her. She spoke at a film festival a few years ago in Bologna, but even then, the coverage was complicated and unfair. That slur, that she had collaborated, never left her. What really hurt was that Vicenzo Lucchese would never publicly acknowledge what she had done for him. She rationalised it later that a man like Vicenzo – noble, aristocratic and proud – was incapable of acknowledging the part that a mere woman,