The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (17 page)

Connie pulled away from her.

‘What? Don't you think so?'

‘What do you think's on offer to
me
, exactly?' she said, fighting to keep the irritation from her voice. ‘Managing the shop for Mrs Cleat on Thursdays as well as Tuesdays, maybe? Or being allowed to use the meat slicer or sign for stock?'

Mrs Repton thumbed the end of her cigarette. Ash broke from it and fell between them. ‘The world doesn't stop at Leyton, Connie.'

‘Not for some people, perhaps.' Her eyes followed the cut of Mrs Repton's fine dress, the high white heels splayed on the grass.

‘You're right, of course. For me it goes much further — all the way to Kimbolton and Hammerton. Aren't I lucky?' Mrs Repton walked a few restless steps, her skirt sighing about her. ‘You've still got the chance, Connie …' she began, but she trailed off, her lips quivering, once more the scolded child. They avoided each other's gaze.

‘I think I'll go to the car. Lie down for a minute.' Mrs Repton backed away, still unsteady on her feet.

‘I'll walk you,' Connie said, putting out a hand to her.

‘No. I'm fine, really.' She brushed her fingertips over her forehead. Across the green, the reedy sound of Bobby Keyes's clarinet could be heard above the villagers' chatter. ‘Perhaps you could get me some water?'

Connie nodded. ‘Sit down here and I'll run to the hall.'

As she headed for the buildings, she had the sense of something unravelling: she felt a strange responsibility, like being asked, as a child, to fetch Aunty Bea's knitting, only to watch helplessly as the needles fell and the stitches ran away. She had always seen a sadness in Mrs Repton, something that weighted her expressions at unexpected moments or gave an edge to comments she made in the library. But this had made her all the more beautiful, more complex and mysterious to Connie, who assumed it was particular to all well-educated and cultured older women. She had never thought that a life of ease and luxury, of opportunities, could ever make anyone truly unhappy. For Connie, Mrs Repton's sadness was like the ebony comb she sometimes wore when she dressed for dinner: a bland old thing transformed into something elegant, serving to highlight the gold of her hair. She could not accept the suggestion that Mrs Repton was in any way like herself — trapped by circumstance. She refused to allow it.

By the time she had avoided Aunty Bea's questions in the kitchenette, filled a cup with water and carried it back, Mrs Repton was gone. Connie realised she had expected it, and was even relieved. Still, she paced the spot for a while, as if Mrs Repton might return.

The moon had risen and the shadows were cooler, damper. A few feet away, she caught the glow of something in the rough before the trees. When she got closer, she remembered Mrs Repton's discarded shoes. She studied the pointed toes, the delicate heels clumped with turf, the very whiteness of the leather, like she had come across a pair of rare nocturnal creatures foraging in the spinney. She shook off her sandals and nudged her toes gingerly into a shoe. As she wobbled on one leg and reached for the other heel, she heard a voice. She swung around to see someone squatting against an oak trunk.

‘God!' she said. ‘How long have you been there?'

Vittorio nodded towards the shoes. ‘Be careful. They might bite.'

She heard the amusement in his voice and flicked off the heels a little too quickly, stepping back into her sandals. ‘They do bite. I don't know how women can wear them. That's obviously why they take them off whenever they can.' She turned away, embarrassed, but had to press back a smile despite herself. He'd come looking for her.

‘Didn't you like the fire?' she said. He shrugged and smirked at her, as if he knew very well what she was really asking. They heard Bobby starting a new song on his clarinet.

‘
Far Away Places
,' she said. ‘Do you know it? From the radio?' He shook his head. ‘Bobby's in the Benford Marching Band, but he wants to get a jazz group together. He's good enough to.'

It was nervous chatter, from being there alone with him in the dark. He must have sensed it, for he got up. ‘We can walk.'

‘Where to?'

‘Anywhere.' He pointed two fingers along the trees. ‘Just to walk.'

They strolled to the accompaniment of unseen creatures beyond the oaks, woodpigeons snug in the branches overhead. She became aware of the cold, and the nutty smell of the mellowing hedgerows.

‘Will you ever go back, d'you think? To Italy?'

He dug his hands in his pockets. ‘Not now. Maybe one day. When I'm rich.' He flicked a coin and caught it with his other hand.

‘Planning on making a fortune, are you?'

‘Yes.'

She was surprised how serious he was, how certain, like it was already mapped out and would be happening soon. ‘You moving on from hoeing sugar beet, then?'

He didn't answer at first, and she regretted her tone: he became restless, irritated. ‘My father says we must wait seven years. Mr Repton can help us apply for English passports after that. Then I get a better job.'

‘Seven years! It can't be that long, surely? Why can't you get another job now?'

‘Mr Repton sponsors us. My father says we can't change. If we don't have papers they send us back to Italy. And then —' He stopped and pushed a foot against a tree trunk. His breath was short and angry. ‘Then Lucio and I will be called by the Italian army — for service. My father doesn't want it. He wants nothing to do with the army, with Italy now. Not anymore.' His face in the shadows made his mood all the blacker.

‘Don't you miss home at all?'

He hesitated before nodding, almost guiltily.

‘What? What do you miss?'

‘The sun.'

She laughed. ‘Obviously.'

‘The water.'

‘The water? What, for swimming?'

‘For drinking.'

‘How can you miss water? Doesn't water taste the same wherever you are?'

He shook his head. ‘In our village, high up, there's a spring that comes from a split in the mountain. It's cold in the cave where the water comes, and quiet. Like walking inside the rock. And when you drink, you taste the earth and the stone.'

She imagined the chill of it, the metallic water on her tongue. ‘So what does our water taste like?'

‘Here, it tastes different.'

‘Like what?'

He started to walk again. ‘Here, it tastes like sweat.'

They had come back to where they began, to where the white shoes lay discarded in the grass. He reached down to pick them up. ‘But here, you can make money from sweat. Here, there are lots of chances for someone like me. Then, when I'm rich, I pay someone else to sweat for me. Same as Mr Repton.' He grinned and took hold of her hand, hooking the straps of the shoes over her fingers. And as he held her wrist, she had to look away so he didn't see the pleasure it gave her. Or the fear, like being too close to a flare — bright and dazzling but beyond her control, eventually leaving her with nothing but smoke.

She backed away from him, towards the spot along the path where she had propped her bike. ‘When can I see you?' he called.

‘You know where I work,' she said. ‘It's not like I'm going anywhere either.'

She followed the track and found her bike. When she switched on the lamp and sat back in the saddle, she thought she saw the flash of a face, one she had caught before in her beam. ‘Lucio?' But the face disappeared, the undergrowth stirring softly, a bird beating up to its roost, swallowed in the black boughs.

Montelupini
1943

The afternoon was damp and claustrophobic. Lucio felt grubby vapours hanging like phantoms over the hills. A lacing of drizzle had begun to collect on his jacket and on the donkey's coat, visible as frost, and the trees dripped despondently. Ahead of him, Vittorio was as sullen as the weather. It was the first time their mother had allowed them to make the trading trip to Cori without her. The walk across the mountains took the best part of a day, and they had to stay in the town overnight, at a cousin's house. After the market, which had begun at dawn, their return journey seemed all the longer, not helped by the fact that their trade had been shamefully poor. Even Viviana hadn't managed to sniff out something for their supper to redeem them. She disappeared from time to time, only to re-emerge from the undergrowth, uninspired, her coat slick and darkened from the wet.

The buckle on her nail-studded collar jangled intermittently. It was the same one Valeriana had worn. Lucio had needed to pierce an extra hole in the leather to accommodate her smaller neck. She hadn't grown as big as her mother, but it still amazed him to see the beast she had become, to watch her keen muscular form as she hunted, a far cry from the runt that had once curled in his palms. She'd clung to life as a puppy, stubbornly, the way those who have death close upon their heels sometimes do, surprising everyone. And for that he had called her Viviana, the force of life. Now the name seemed doubly fitting: their past two harvests had been so blighted, their livestock so depleted, that Viviana did not eat the scraps from their table — they had become the guests at hers.

A scuffle in the scrub made the dog roll off a growl. She froze, then darted away. Vittorio scanned the wilting meadow, clicking his tongue and calling her name, ‘Ia. Iana!' Within minutes the dog sprang from the shuddering grasses, throwing a spray of dirt into the air ahead of her. They caught an arc of fur, the flash of a white underside, and then Viviana was on top of her quarry, panting and whining, impatient for her orders. It was a rabbit, small and fat, pregnant perhaps. It seemed almost knowing in its stunned compliance. Vittorio pulled out Urso's bone-handled knife, and Lucio started to fuss at the straps on the donkey's load, trying not to hear the tug of the blade, the release of innards across the chalk path, the noise of Viviana as she choked them back.

‘Better than nothing, I suppose.' Vittorio grunted and held up the carcass. From the corner of his eye Lucio saw his brother wiping the knife on the grass. Despite everything, he had still not managed to steel his stomach to hunting. It was not in his nature any more than it was in Vittorio's to pick up a pencil and trace the line of Viviana's ribcage, or catch the angle of her spine as she leaned into the breeze, her tail as straight as a whip. It was Vittorio who had trained her for the chase, and it was Vittorio who had stolen milk to keep her alive as a puppy. Lucio had stood by while his brother ducked into Berto Udine's goat pen to draw milk from two or three nannies in quick succession, had followed his leisurely walk down the Viale Roma with the corked bottle warm inside his jacket, and had listened in silence as he called good morning to the women at the washhouse.

‘Here, let me help you with that basket,' Vittorio would say to Signora Udine, Berto's own mother, lifting the load of washing onto her head and turning his grin on the women at their washboards.

‘Get on with you, Primo,' some of them would say, tittering, while others fixed him in their sights and called to each other, ‘Santa Lucia, what I wouldn't give to be fifteen years younger …'

Lucio could hardly believe it was the same boy who set traps in the barn at Collelungo and casually mutilated rats and mice, just enough to slow them so the young Viviana could get a sense of the chase, a taste for blood. Or the same boy who could, without thinking, slit the neck of the dog's first live quarry — a badger, Lucio remembered. In the light of the lantern, the animal's blood had sprayed across his brother's cheek, and he had thought about their own blood, running in their veins: how different it was, how different things might have been had his father chosen Primo for that last hunt.

As they tacked down to join the path at Collelungo, a light flickered in the meadow by the Fontana Nuova.

‘It'll be Corbellino,' Vittorio muttered. ‘Coming to check his father's traps, no doubt.' The poor harvests and general shortage of meat had made anyone who could fashion a snare into a hunter these days. Corbellino was two years older than Lucio, a handsome, popular boy who had been elected leader of the Avanguardisti,
an honour for which Vittorio was unable to forgive him.