I have got through the next couple of weeks of classes and life. I am still completely undecided about whether to tell Leo. He would know eventually if he ran into me in the street. I wonder how soon it would show. I wondered if I could alter my clothes or if I could find a dressmaker to make me inexpensive voluminous ones. I wondered what people would say. Venice was a Catholic city. Sin was real and punishable here. I toyed again with going home to England but maybe living in London, getting a job until I couldn’t work any longer, and not letting my mother know I was back home. But that seemed like such a horrible thing to do, for her as well as for me, even if I could find anyone who would hire a pregnant, unmarried woman. And I would be alone in a great city, a city that might well be in the midst of a war, and it seemed like the worst thing I could imagine. I put that thought aside. I’d risk the scorn of the Venetians.

Of the war we heard very little. Hitler’s army had rolled into Poland. The Poles were putting up a valiant fight, but it was only a matter of time before Poland was lost. And the Allies? Britain and France and their commonwealth countries? The only encounters had been at sea. A ship from Canada to England had been sunk by a German submarine, and British aeroplanes had attacked a German naval base at Kiel. But men were being called up to fight in England, and my mother wrote that she had been instructed to build an air raid shelter in her back lawn.

How ridiculous, she wrote. Can you see Aunt H. and me scrambling across the rose garden in our nightclothes and then going down into a dark, damp hole in the ground? Aunt H. says she’d rather risk being bombed, but she doesn’t believe the Germans will dare attack us. Hitler has a fondness for the British, she says. We are of the same Aryan stock. She is absolutely convinced that we will have peace.

In Venice one would not know that there was a war on. There was plenty to eat, the markets were full of fresh produce from the Veneto, on the other side of the causeway, and the fishermen still came in each morning with boats full of fish. There was still music and laughter. Our classes progressed at the academy. The only change was that Gaston had gone home, bravely declaring that it was his duty to join the French army to stop Hitler from invading his country.