The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (16 page)

The journal roll in her hands was nothing more than a wad of over-thumbed papers stitched crudely and bound to a fold of pliant leather. She unwound the string that seemed to hold it all together and smoothed open the scroll of pages. Inside, she leafed through a patchwork of sketches, things that were familiar to her scribbled alongside the foreign. She recognised the birds of the Leyton hedgerow, their nests and eggs, a muntjac feeding, sticklebacks in a jar, a pinemarten in the spinney. There was Mr Rose drinking from his hipflask and Fossett with a brace of cony on his shoulder. There was even a study of Connie herself, holding the handlebars of her bike. She hurried over this, afraid he might notice her vain fascination, but more afraid to see herself as he did. Among these subjects, which felt like meeting old friends wearing new clothes, she found the unfamiliar: the flaking belltower of some other church, a line of wooded mountains and the cut of a valley, a wide winged bird of prey viewed from above, the loose hair of a woman, a dog suckling a litter. There, too, was the hare she had seen lying in the verge when she'd met him coming from his traps. It was studied from various angles, but the style was the same as the painted version. She knew to come straight to the point.

‘That painting you left in the memorial hall. They think it's Mr Swann's.' He opened his eyes but seemed in no way curious as to who Mr Swann was. Perhaps Mr Gilbert had already told him of the artist and the mural scheme during one of their lessons. ‘They're going to auction it at the fair this afternoon.' He didn't answer, but lifted his chin at her in a vague acknowledgement. ‘You should tell them it's yours. You should get the credit for it. Something as beautiful as that.'

He squinted at her. ‘Beautiful?'

She realised she'd touched a nerve, and she felt the small seduction of seeing her opinion matter to him. ‘I did think it was beautiful. But in a sad way. It made me think as much about death as it did about life.' He was studying her, and it seemed useless to lie, as if he already knew her thoughts anyway. ‘Isn't that what life studies are supposed to do?'

‘Maybe,' he said. He took up his boots from the gate and pulled them on, stamping the clods off in the road and then wiping the residual mud in the grass. The sight of him doing this — a habit that every villager in Leyton developed with no more thought than blinking or breathing — filled her with a strange despair.

‘Why?' she asked him. ‘Why are you hacking sugar beet and pawning rabbit skins when you can do this?' She jumped down from the fence to face him, the folio flopping in her hand as she held it up. ‘There are so many places this could take you. You should be going to an art college somewhere … Mr Gilbert could help you.'

He bent to tie his bootlaces.

‘Don't you see what a gift it is, how lucky you are to have it? Something that could … that could get you out of here?' She heard the quickening of her words, the panic in them, and it shocked her.

He took the journal from her hand and rolled it up again, jamming it back into his pocket. ‘Let them think Mr Swann made the painting.'

‘Why?' She didn't want him to go yet, but she didn't know how to stop him. ‘Why did you do it at all then? Why bother showing off if you're simply going to walk away and let someone else take the credit?' Her disappointment had become petty and she knew it. She wanted to grab his wrist and hold him there, but he already had his back to her, reaching for the gate handle. ‘It's dishonest. It's more or less … cowardly,' she threw out.

‘It's all I've got,' he said. ‘All I can give — for the harvest fair.' At once she heard the quiet injury in his voice, but also the regret, the closely held embarrassment, like a child spurned by older boys for not understanding the rules of their game.

Her throat tightened as she remembered an image from that morning in the memorial hall. It was of Mr Rose bringing in the corn dollies, woven for luck as always by the Misses Penny from the last sheaf of wheat cut at Repton's. Every year, their arrival drew a murmur of delight and relief from the volunteers, tradition and superstition mingling to put the dollies at the centre of the harvest display. But that morning, Mr Rose had brought them not in his usual wooden crate, but in a sturdy basket, woven expertly from bulrushes — a basket of the kind, she now realised, she'd only ever seen Tommy Pointon showing off as a trap for hedgerow birds when they were children. She understood now: Aldo Onorati had made that basket as a donation for the harvest fair, and it too was the one thing he was able to give.

The gate wrung out a groan as Lucio pushed it open, and she thought the sound might have come from her. She was mortified. She hadn't been able to see beyond his talent to the sheer simplicity of his intention. The more she learned of them, the more the Onorati seemed an enigma to her. She wondered again at their past, a past that could make them so hungry for the paltry offerings of Leyton, the mean-spirited acceptance of its inhabitants.

‘The fair,' she said by way of appeasing her guilt. ‘Will you at least come to the fair, then? They roast a pig tonight. On the green. And there's a bit of music.' She watched his wet hair nudging back to the bridge of his nose, glinting slick as a polished boot in the sun. ‘You could come with me.'

He didn't answer. She reached for her bike as an excuse to turn away and let the full weight of her embarrassment take over. When she glanced back, he was already making his way along the edge of the ploughed field in the direction of the cottage. She didn't know whether she was angrier with herself or with him. His journal wagged at her from his back pocket, but she wasn't thinking about art anymore.

‘I did expect Mrs Stanton to find another shilling and outbid me at the last minute, but there,' Mrs Cleat said, holding up the still life and tipping her chin with such pride, as if she might have painted it herself. Connie watched the group of Christian Ladies gathered around the tea urn catch their breath and marvel somewhat dutifully. She suspected the painting was in fact too graphic for their tastes, but the auction for it had been the highlight of the fair: a quick-fire attack of bold bids that drew out into a skirmish between Mrs Cleat and Mrs Stanton, determined to gain ground on each other in halfpennies and farthings. When the hammer fell in Mrs Cleat's favour, Connie hadn't seen her so flushed and speechless since dancing a foxtrot with Mr Gilbert at the royal-wedding street party. She still glowed even now, although her ability to speak had clearly returned.

‘The reverend's got paintings enough at the rectory for Mrs Stanton to admire, I'm sure,' Mrs Cleat said archly. ‘And I so wanted a little study of Mr Swann's for myself.' Mrs Armer nodded her approval, but Agnes, elegant as ever, stared languidly beyond her mother, towards the shouts and laughter that carried inside from the green.

The afternoon was fading on the harvest fair, stretching into a red, furrowed dusk. The children, with their race ribbons and bags of half-eaten fudge, were being dragged home. In the centre of the green, the men had gathered for skittles and quoits while the light lasted, but Splice the Mice, Leyton's favourite harvest game, always attracted the biggest group. Connie could make out Derek Livesey on a ladder, his hands in the twin lengths of piping, ready to release the leather ‘mice'. Behind the crowd, the beater would be waiting with a rounders bat to belt the mice as they fell through the pipes into the air below. She spotted Mr Gilbert exchanging coins in a huddle of men to one side.

Connie heard a hush descend across the spectators. Two smart thwacks rang out. Both mice had been hit, one after the other, fired in a clean line down the green. The villagers seemed to inhale as one. It was rare that anyone hit both mice consecutively, least of all this late in the harvest fair, when the vast majority of men had just emerged from an afternoon in the Green Man. The crowd opened up and the beater became visible, handing over the bat and rolling down his sleeves. She recognised Vittorio Onorati.

‘Cocksure of himself, isn't he?' Agnes said over Connie's shoulder on the steps of the hall. ‘He's certainly settled into Leyton without as much as a
n'er-you-mind
.' She was twisting a lick of newly cropped hair behind her ear. ‘God knows we could use a bit of foreign colour, though.'

Agnes's hairstyle, short as a boy's, had caused quite a stir over the counter at Cleat's. Connie saw now that, far from being artless, it served to heighten Agnes's very female and very sophisticated charms. Before she had time to reply, she found herself being propelled down the steps and onto the green, her arm pulled through Agnes's as if they were sisters meandering through the crowd. Vittorio caught sight of them as they drew near, and he grinned — but not solely at her, Connie noticed. Agnes shifted her weight to one hip and a laugh fluttered from her.

Connie was crushed at being played so easily. As much as she wanted to stay, she couldn't bear to talk to Vittorio in the shadow of Agnes, evidently searching for an introduction. Alongside her magazine hair and angled hips, Connie felt she was no more refined than one of the raw sugar beet that the Italians unearthed from the dirt of Leyton every day. And Agnes knew it.

Behind them, not far from the clubhouse, Mr Rose was overseeing the spit roast. As Agnes became distracted with the approach of Mr Gilbert and Vittorio, Connie withdrew her arm and crossed the grass, escaping to the glow of the brazier and the scent of roasted meat.

‘Smell it?' Mr Rose said to her as she drew up to the fire. ‘Not long now.' The sweet aroma of cooked pork had been wafting into the memorial hall for most of the afternoon, clinging to her clothes, so she could barely smell anything else. It was a tradition of the harvest fair that Mr Repton send down a pig and a keg of cider for the village. Later he would stop by the fire to personally thank the harvest workers, just as his father used to do. Connie knew that even Vittorio's champion effort at Splice the Mice would not hold the Leyton villagers from the prospect of free pork and cider for much longer, but she savoured the short reprieve from the crowd, listening to the hiss and crackle of fat on the embers.

On the other side of the brazier Fossett was tapping the cider keg. ‘How's our little shopkeeper then? All on your lonesome?' he called to Connie. Without waiting for an answer, he took several swift gulps from his tankard, then pulled in his chin in a struggle to suppress a belch, which he lost.

Connie offered Fossett a pinched smile. Her bones ached in her limbs with a kind of desperate weariness. She would rather remain invisible, overlooked by the village, than be thought of as nothing more than Mrs Cleat's successor. And an evening witnessing Agnes work her charms by firelight seemed even less enticing to her than a conversation with Fossett and Mr Rose. She slipped away from the spit, back towards the memorial hall. Inside, her aunt and the last of the Christian Ladies were washing up the tea things, their silhouettes criss-crossing the kitchenette, their muted voices talking over each other behind the closed hatch.

She was thinking she might as well cycle home when she saw a figure edging the green from the road. It was a woman, her grey dress sheer and full-skirted, shimmering in the low light and making her face and bare arms seem all the paler. Only Mrs Repton could afford the New Look in the village. She was barefoot, Connie noticed, her white shoes swinging in her hand, and she seemed almost transparent in that airy grey dress. Connie thought of a seed clock blown in from the fields: one puff of the breeze and she might fragment in the night air.

Just as Connie was about to make her way towards her, Mr Repton appeared. He was considerably older than his wife, which was accentuated further by his size and solemnity. He was a barrel-chested man who looked his best in hunting pinks and shooting tweeds. Standing there in a shirt and tie, his hands free of either reins or gun, he seemed purposeless, somehow diminished, and Connie guessed that he knew it. He bent stiffly towards his wife, squeezing her arm and mouthing terse words in her ear, like a parent threatening a troublesome child in public. He glanced at the shoes dangling from her hand and turned to join his employees at the fire, leaving his wife alone.

Mrs Repton blinked slowly, her focus soft and glazed. ‘Connie,' she said, ‘Connie,' this time with relief, her fingers trembling as she took her arm. When she pressed her lips together, warding off tears, Connie led her around the green, far away from the light of the fire and the hall. They stopped in the shadows cast by the oaks along the spinney. Mrs Repton stifled a noise that seemed half sob, half laugh, and let her shoes fall to the grass. She searched inside her evening bag, hanging from her wrist. ‘Odious. Odious events, you know,' she said, withdrawing a cigarette from a silver case. Connie helped her with the match.

‘A keg and porker with the villagers of Leyton? What more could you want?' she said.

Mrs Repton laughed. ‘Oh, not this. We've come from the De Veres' garden party at Kimbolton. Mind-numbing. Thankfully it's the last one of the summer. Then it'll be the endless round of autumn shoots and meets, I suppose. What joy!' Cigarette smoke curled over her lip and veiled her face in the night air. ‘I'm sorry. As you can see, I've had too much to drink.'

She saw Connie watching her every move and cast a rueful smile. ‘What I wouldn't give to be you, Connie. To have it all before me again. There's so much on offer now for young women, ever since the war. All you have to do is choose.'