her a sense of optimism. Once the bulletins were over, she would return to her room and write up her notes. But one evening she decided to present her father with a finished article.
Glancing through it, he looked up at her with surprise. ‘You write very well,’ he said eventually. ‘You have a confident style. I like it.’
‘You can change it, obviously,’ she said nervously. ‘The notes are all there. But I thought it might save time, if I just wrote it up as a finished piece.’
‘Well it saves me a lot of time,’ her father agreed, ‘and I think it’s excellent. You must carry on.’
Filled with enthusiasm for her new role, Livia’s only problem was concealing her activity from her mother who, her father insisted, must be kept in the dark about their activities.
‘She would become hysterical if she knew you were involved,’ he said. ‘You must promise me that we will keep it between us.’
This secrecy involved considerable subterfuge. In order to get upstairs to the attic in time for the bulletin at nine o’clock each evening, Livia had to go through an elaborate ritual. If her mother was in the sitting room or bedroom, it was simple enough: she would appear to leave the apartment, slamming the door, before escaping upstairs. But if her mother was in the kitchen, which overlooked the hall, she would have to actually leave the flat – sometimes even walking down the road if she felt her mother might be watching from the kitchen window – and return quickly and silently, slipping back into the apartment and up the staircase to the attic. In the winter months this worked well enough, as her mother rarely left the sitting room after dinner. But when summer came, Livia was concerned that it would be harder to conceal her clandestine activity.
She discussed the problem with her father one evening. ‘Even Mamma sometimes goes upstairs in the summer to hang up the washing, or look at the view.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ll deal with that problem when it arrives.’
One bitterly cold evening in early March, Livia came out of the house, going through her ritual of pretending to leave. Her mother was in the kitchen and as Livia glanced up, she noticed her in the window. She began to walk down the road, irritably checking her watch. The bulletin was due to start in ten minutes.
As she reached the corner, she noticed a tall man loping towards her using a pair of crutches. He wore a dark overcoat and a trilby hat pulled down over his eyes. Poor old man, she thought – and was about to hurry on when she heard him call out.
‘Livia…’
She turned round. ‘Cosimo! Cosimo – is it really you?’ She ran towards him; he stooped down, allowing her to wrap her arms around him. She kissed his face, his cheeks, his lips. ‘I thought I would never see you again,’ she murmured.
‘And I you. But here I am – only not quite as I was.’ He looked nervous, she realised, as if he was frightened, scared perhaps of rejection.
Suddenly all her fears of the previous few weeks evaporated. Nothing mattered except him being there in front of her. She took his face in her hands and kissed him again. ‘The point is, you’re here and that’s all I care about.’
Part Two
Forty-five Days
‘I had lived, grown up and, you might say, been born under Fascism. I did not know anything else. I thought everything was going to be fine.’
Maria Denis, the actress – writing in her memoir, Il Gioco della Verità, 1995
Eleven
Rome
July 1943
With La Bohème finally behind her, Isabella returned to Rome, where she had a part in a new film – a Roman epic starring a clutch of Cinecittà luminaries, including Doris Durante, the lover of the Fascist minister, Alessandro Pavolini.
Inevitably, given everyone’s uncertainty about the future of the war, the conversation among the cast and crew was all about politics. When the US and British forces landed in Sicily, the make-up room was abuzz.
‘They’ll be in Rome before you know it,’ the leading man said to Doris one morning. ‘I’m rather worried, if I’m honest. What’s going to happen to all of us?’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Doris drawled, ‘Alessandro has it all in hand.’
Isabella, who was having her hair arranged at the neighbouring mirror, listened anxiously to the conversation.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said the leading man. ‘Cinecittà is an arm of the State. I can’t see them keeping it going if