Pulse

convinced himself (and her), to the extent that on 3rd December 1859, as a later historian than Trevelyan worded it, ‘She put aside her doubts and enteredhis room. The deed was done!’ Like Anita, she was evidently dashing and brave; on 24th January 1860, they were married – in this instance, with the full dogma of the Catholic Church.
    Tennyson met Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight four years later. The poet greatly admired the liberator, but also noted that he had ‘the divine stupidity of a hero’. This second marriage – or rather, Garibaldi’s illusions about it – lasted (according to which authority you believe) either a few hours or a few days, the time it took for the bridegroom to receive a letter detailing his new wife’s past. Giuseppina, it turned out, had begun taking lovers at the age of eleven; she had married Garibaldi only at the insistence of her father; she had spent the night before her wedding with her most recent lover, by whom she was pregnant; and she had precipitated sexual events with her husband-to-be so that she could write to him on 1st January and claim to be carrying his child.
    Garibaldi demanded not just an immediate separation but an annulment. The romantic hero’s deeply unromantic reasoning was that since he had slept with Giuseppina only before the wedding and not after, the marriage had technically not been consummated. The law was unimpressed by such sophistry, and Garibaldi’s appeal to higher influences, including the king, also failed. The liberator found himself shackled to Giuseppina for the next twenty years.
    In the end, the law is only ever defeated by lawyers; in place of the romantic telescope, the legal microscope. The freeing argument, when it was eventually found, ran like this: since Garibaldi’s marriage had been solemnised in territory nominally under Austrian control, the law governing it might therefore be construed as the Austrian civil code, under which an annulment was (and perhaps always had been) possible. So the hero-lover was saved by the very nation against whose rule he had been fighting at the time. The distinguished lawyer who proposed this ingenious solution had, back in1860, prepared the legislative unification of Italy; now, he achieved the marital disunification of the nation’s unifier. Let us salute the name of Pasquale Stanislao Mancini.

Pulse
    MY PARENTS WERE walking down a farm track in Italy about three years ago. I often imagine myself watching them, always from behind. My mother, greying hair pulled back in a bunch, would be wearing a loose-cut patterned blouse over slacks and open-toed sandals; my father has a short-sleeved shirt, khaki trousers and polished brown shoes. His shirt is properly ironed, with twin buttoned pockets and turn-ups, if that’s the word, on the sleeves. He owns half a dozen shirts like this; they proclaim him a man on holiday. Nor do they give the least hint of athleticism; at best, they might look appropriate on a bowling green.
    The two of them could be holding hands; this was something they did unselfconsciously, whether I was behind them, watching, or not. They are walking down this track somewhere in Umbria because they are investigating a roughly chalked sign offering vino novello . And they are on foot because they have looked at the depth of the hard clay ruts and decided not to risk their hire car. I would have argued that this was the point of renting a car; but my parents were a cautious couple in many ways.
    The track runs between vineyards. As it makes a bend to the left, a rusting, hangar-like barn comes into view. In front of it is a concrete structure like an oversized compost bin: about six feet high and nine across, with no roof or front to it. When they are about thirty yards away, my mother turns to my father and pulls a face. She may even say, ‘Yuck’, or something similar. My father frowns and doesn’t reply. Thiswas the first time it happened; or rather, to be exact, the first time he noticed it.
    We live in what used to be a market town some thirty miles north-west of London. Mum works in hospital administration; Dad has been a solicitor in a local practice all his adult life. He says the work will see him out, but that his type of solicitor – not just a technician who understands documents, but a general giver of advice – won’t exist in the future. The doctor, the vicar, the lawyer, perhaps the schoolmaster – in the old days, these were figures everyone turned to