The Italian Romance

By Joanne Carroll

Lillian has had to make the hardest decision a woman can make. In war-torn Australia in 1947, she is forced to choose between her baby daughter and the love of her life, an Italian prisoner-of-war. She flees to Italy to make a new life in an act of love that haunts her for fifty years.

An unexpected meeting in Rome, decades later, with her abandoned daughter Francesca sets in motion a new chapter in both their lives.

Set between rural New South Wales and Italy, The Italian Romance examines the choices we make and their unexpected consequences. In this moving novel about families and the different faces of love, Joanne Carroll reminds us what it is to be human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Queensland Press
• Release date: May 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9780702252020

Book preview

palms.

New South Wales, 1939

The sun began to rise. Even before, the kookaburras were already laughing. They woke first. The trees were still spectres. Light splayed out along the horizon, the tip of the sun’s head crowned and into the world came the huge, unavoidable presence. It was perfect, blood red, heavy. Other birds sensed it. One after another the calls came, a whip lashed, bells chimed in tiny throats. One bird shrieked high and clear and across the vastness of the bush, miles perhaps, another, waiting, shrieked back. The darkness bled away in the night-cooled clay; and beneath the storms of mist breathing among the trunks of trees, discarded strings of bark hung lank to the grass and nests of damp ferns hid.

The sun rose swiftly from the earth. It shrank as it ascended and became more brilliant, distant. The bush turned to its business.

The young husband left the house without disturbing his wife. She was waking as he quietly closed the screen door.

The clock on the sideboard tick-tocked. There were hours when she loved its sound. She reached for his pillow, hugged it against her. She lay awake, listening.

It was after two when she picked up the tin dish and opened the screen door with her hip. She stepped down from the verandah. The light brown earth had a red tinge to it. It was dry. Dust. When she tipped the water a few feet from the front door, it found no purchase, turned immediately to mud. Belatedly, she spotted the row of leggy geraniums growing by the verandah. ‘Oh,’ she said, and she walked across the dirt to the thirsty plants, upended the dish and shook it. A few drops caught themselves on leaves, weighed them down and dripped ineffectually to the cracked soil. ‘Bugger,’ she said.

It was as she trailed towards the cottage, the tin dish clutched against her breast, that her father-in-law’s black car, kicking up a dust trail, drove to the main house. Young Frankie rode on the running board, leaning his body out like a taut bow. She could make out his father’s hand as it banged on the outside of his door and she could hear him shouting at Frankie to straighten up and stop fooling around. Frank barely responded. As the car slid around to the front door, he jumped from the board and ran a few feet to slow himself down. He saw her on the cottage verandah, darkened by the shade of the corrugated iron roof. He waved his freckled hand and she waved back. She liked Frankie. He took off around the side of the house.

The two men climbed out from the front. The other was her own father. He opened the back door and her mother erupted from the dim insides. She wore a hip-length jacket over her dress and the white hat she’d worn to the wedding. She caught sight of her daughter. The girl waved at her and mouthed a garbled message about being up there in a minute after returning the washing-up dish to the kitchen and putting on her shoes. Her mother put a hand up to her ear. The girl shook her head.

Mae Malone had appeared. She came down the red stone steps, her hands raised as if she were amazed to see the Fergusons pouring out of her husband’s car, as if she hadn’t been baking since the day before.

The young wife opened the screen door. It creaked and as she let it fall back behind her, it shuddered. She walked dust across the wooden floor. Clear imprints of the pads of her feet followed her to the shaving mirror nailed on the wall. She picked up the damp tea towel and wiped her hot, reddened cheeks and forehead. She dabbed at the sides of her nose, at two clusters of tiny bubbles of sweat.

She was suddenly tired. She didn’t want to go up to the big house, to carry around plates of scones and lamingtons, and afterwards collect up the dirty cups and saucers and, with another tea towel in her fist, stand beside her mother-in-law who’d pass her the steaming hot, too slippery, too precious tea things from her water-boiled hands. And she’d wonder how Mae could bear that her hands were lobster-red.

She bunched the towel in her fist. The windowsill took her attention. She wrapped a corner of the cloth around her finger and poked at a tiny quarry of ingrained black dirt where a dead fly had ended its days. She swept the fly ungraciously to the floor and continued to scrape conscientiously with her nail. Outside the window, she could see the wooden tower of the water tank. And there was Rusty, the cur who compartmentalised his life between, on the one hand, running like a mad thing at the wheels of the car, joining in the gallop when the men rode out, darting about the legs of the horses, and on the other flopping in the shade, motionless, possibly dead, for hot hour upon hour till his visible ear woke up, twitched once more and he, astonishingly, tore off to some new event of the world’s making. He lay now at his leisure under the wooden struts. The early afternoon shadows were inexorably on the move. He would feel his dust-laden, tan rump heating up in the awful sun before long.

She heard the footsteps. She recognised them, the two-toned beat, the sturdy heel and wider sole, a blood rhythm. She picked up her husband’s comb from his shaving-gear shelf, took an appalled look at the scum which had gathered along the base of its teeth, and nevertheless made a few approaches to the front of her hair with it.

The footsteps stopped. Her mother was bent to peer through the wire screen; the bending seemed to assist in the seeing, though it was otherwise pointless. ‘Anybody home?’ she yodelled. And, without a pause, the hinges squealed. There she was, in the open doorway, dark against the almost unbearable light washing over the yard and the tree-less paddocks to the encroaching bush and the dazed horizon.

‘What are you doing?’ her mother said.

The girl scissored her fingers through her hair, busy establishing waves. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Why aren’t you up at the house helping Mae?’ Vivienne Ferguson walked into the room. Her face, too, was flushed, cheeks reddened in the heat. ‘Get me a glass of water, darling. It’s so hot. Phew.’ Viv enjoyed illustrating her point. She put her handbag on the table, pulled a white handkerchief from her sleeve and wagged it in front of her face, and said again, ‘Phew. Oh, darling, look at all the flies. Why don’t you shut the door