Certainly she was free, for the time being, of her family and, if not cured of, distracted from her broken heart. But even so, daily life was laced with anxiety. While she continued to attract admirers among the expat bureaucrats, she was not interested in romance. She wrote that she pursued, that year, “a collection of silly, pointless affaires,” including, it seems, a dalliance with the American journalist Harold H. Martin, who told her in a letter from early 1957, shortly after leaving Naples, of “memories that were burning more brightly than I could wish,” and wishing that he could “strike that perfect plateau of impersonality which you so happily reached in your first communication.” None of these “affaires” were sustaining or salutary. Shirley hoped “each time” to find “some final diversion of my affections”; however “being with such relentless people I too have learned to be hard, to be selfish.”

She was also despairing about her future. Her lack of national connection was not yet the imaginative boon it would become in later life, when she could pronounce that it was “a privilege to be at home in more than one place.” For now she was unsettled, the pragmatics of living in Italy looking as if they might prove too much for her despite the tangible life to which they gave access. Her insecurity was no doubt fed by her sense of her flimsy status at the UN:

Now it grows near the end of the year of my assignment, I know that I must try the FAO [the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN agency] in Rome, that my hopeless future—or lack of future—in NY cannot be re-accepted without an attempt elsewhere. Even loving Italy as I do, even so, I’m afraid: I’m afraid to live in a foreign non-Anglo-Saxon country always, to be cut off from my own background irrevocably and forever. But I have had so much need of solitary courage this past year that I believe I’m equal to anything, even to the more and more likely prospect of a barren, single life, working as a secretary or at most a clerk—well, I suppose that’s my fault and one should be glad to have had so much of the things that others covet.

Leone worked in an intelligence office, and Elena found a position first as a cook at a British government-run kitchen, then as a translator and interpreter at the BBC, and later as an artist at Harrods. On the tenth anniversary of her brother’s death, while at the BBC, she broadcast a memorial honouring his poetic act of protest:

So in the secrecy of the soul’s solitude, when one becomes the master of one’s own life, and then gives it up, one must surely draw great joy. They must be happy to know that from the misery of everyday life they could attain such a poor moment of liberty. They must be sustained by the lightness of spirit, similar to that which gladdened the hearts of the saints. My brother must have died with this supreme lightness of spirit. And he was more fortunate than his companions, who were backstabbed by the murderous fascists.

Elena’s words here draw audibly on the futurist-tinged heroics of Lauro de Bosis’s writing, and like his, they also strike a distinctive tone of public responsibility and perhaps provided models for the forceful tone of Shirley’s writings about the United Nations.

Here was the weight of momentous event and of individual self-realisation that had not, Shirley felt, been possible in the country or the family of her birth, nor in the independent adult life she had until then been able to fashion for herself. Elena embodied philosophical and aesthetic principles to which Shirley cleaved: “To have known her was to understand that the human ideal is not a striving for perfection but for wholeness: she was true, vital and entirely human, not a paragon but a criterion. She would have disliked such words, for she repudiated praise with real impatience, not weighing our human need to pay her tribute. More than thirty years after her death, her daughter-in-law Mirella said, of the years at Solaia, ‘We knew then that it was a miracle.’” On the thirtieth anniversary of Elena’s death, Shirley wrote in her diary that her greatest influence was “to make a principled life believable … She had lived it, she was it.”