A Bold and Dangerous Family by Caroline Moorehead

Author:Caroline Moorehead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Nello and his second daughter, Paola

Maria with Paola and Silvia

Though Marion had dreaded the moment when she would have to abandon Carlo, they had always known that, given her heart problems, she and Mirtillino would leave the great heat of the Lipari summer and visit her parents in England. A letter requesting a passport on the grounds of ill-health went off to the Ministry of the Interior in Rome. The note in her file is revealing. ‘A very brave and hysterical woman,’ it says, ‘to be considered as dangerous as her husband or perhaps even more so. Capable of committing desperate acts. Vigilance.’

The passport was granted. But now it was Mirtillino who needed to get away. Though he had thrived during his months on Lipari, and was walking and chattering like a little bird, he had come down with suspected amoebic dysentery. Marion set out immediately for London and Mirtillino went into Great Ormond Street Hospital, where doctors feared typhus. Without news for days on end, Carlo fretted miserably. But Mirtillino recovered and Marion took him for a couple of weeks to a nursing home and then to stay with her sister in West Kirby. Marion missed Carlo so much that she had a constant knot in her stomach. Before returning to Italy, she bought Mirtillino a red coat with a velvet collar and a little suit with leggings, and herself gloves and a leather jacket.

Back in Italy, their train stopped in Turin, where Nello was waiting with a bottle of fresh milk and some cooked apples. The crossing from Milazzo to Lipari was extremely rough and getting on shore from the pitching boat was terrifying. Marion was pleased to be back in this ‘dear intimate life’. Carlo found Mirtillino much changed,28 ‘interesting, amusing’. He and Marion got used to eating pigeons, but decided that goat, one of the few reliable sources of meat on the island, was too strong. One day they found a large wild turkey strutting around their sitting room; they ate it for supper with the Parris.

The autumn of 1928 was hot and sunny. Carlo worked in the mornings, swam in the midday warmth, collected the post at 4 o’clock, and went early to bed. He was rereading The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace, noting with pleasure that ‘great minds’ write fundamental things. He had got into the habit of continually taking the temperature of his own moods and thoughts and transcribing them in long letters to his mother. The need to pin down, to describe, to analyse and understand, begun in their early childhood, had grown stronger with the years: there was no event, no person, no encounter, no idea that Carlo did not feel the need to communicate. ‘In truth, I regret nothing,’ he wrote one day. Though he would be ‘asphyxiated’ by a life of academia, his earlier university work had been a useful experiment, and he had chosen every subsequent step in full consciousness, never hesitating and never doubting. He was

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