Reappraisal

I had set out to discover if there ever was a connection between my mother and MI5 but I never expected to gain so much knowledge that pertained to her past in a way that was disturbing though totally unrelated to espionage.

What I learnt was bewildering and made me see my parents in a new light. I never knew my father because he had disappeared before I was born and declared dead despite no direct proof of his death. His memory, as an heroic soldier and a compassionate man, had been kept alive by his brother Jeremy, my uncle.

To me, hearing that he had shown a 'benevolent forgiveness' towards my mother's lapse – for which she had shown deep contrition – didn't sound like the act of a compassionate man but a condescending attitude and pomposity.

As for my mother, how would society have judged her conduct? Naivety for having succumbed to the charms of a scoundrel or would she have been shamed for losing her virginity at too young an age and with someone she wasn't in love with?

Many adolescents see their first intercourse as a conscious, personal choice to assert their sexual autonomy and self-determination and I believe that was her motivation, in defiance of Justin's (the man she did eventually marry) puritanical views.

◊ ◊ ◊

It is a popular misconception that the camera never lies; the contradiction of some of the photographs of smiling people I had been looking at and their unhappy stories was proof of that fallacy.

I examined the whole album to see if I could detect further hidden clues of other scandals but they seemed all to be portraying innocuous events like weddings, baptisms and social gatherings. Every now and then there were empty gaps indicating that unwanted photo had been removed.

There were a few of my parents' wedding obviously snapped by amateurs and I assumed that the official ones would have been kept in a separate book. I made a mental note to find its whereabouts.

Mementos of the happy couple's honeymoon were depicted in scenic views of the small rural town of Alberobello characterised by trulli, dry stone huts with conical roofs.

Clearly the newly-weds had paid homage to granddad's princedom.

◊◊ ◊

I hadn't forgotten the letters I had found in the trunk in the loft. After a long heart-rending dithering I decided to read them. Most of them except one were addressed to my father and signed 'Francesca'.

I opened the oldest one dated 10^th September 1997, it started:

“Dear Justin,
this is to reassure you that I am not marrying you on the rebound but because I truly love you. I repudiate my folly once more and hope that we can put Ferenc's ghost behind us. I will understand if you wish to change your mind and withdraw your promise....”

The following missives were about arrangements for the marriage in 1998 which meant that all doubts had been put aside.   

© Luigi Pagano 2020

CreativeCommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Author Berthold Werner

New readers please note: if you wish to follow this story from the beginning the first three episodes are unnumbered, then the sequence continues from number 4 onwards until the current episode which is No.22        https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/incident-porttofino  
     https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/top-secret,
    https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/being-positive  4,  https://www.abctales.com/story/luigipagano/chalet-bottom-garden