The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (29 page)

Her breath shuddered in her lungs. She had shaken herself more than she had him: Mr Gilbert stared at her blankly, his shoulders sunken and his hands loose by his side. She waited, wanting him to deny it, to call her mad or a fool, to be outraged at her accusations. But they were both locked in the moment, regarding each other with new eyes.

‘Connie,' he said faintly, but she didn't want to hear any more. She stood up on her pedals and raced towards Bythorn Rise.

By the time she got home, her anger had subsided into a crushing remorse. She had never meant for the conversation to become what it had, for her suspicions about Mr Gilbert ever to be aired. She felt ashamed that she had clutched at them and thrown them in his face, when really she wasn't angry with him about that: she was frustrated with herself and with Leyton and the way circumstances conspired to trap people there — perhaps even Mr Gilbert himself. That thought made her feel even worse.

Out in the open countryside, a fog had descended on the afternoon, directing her thoughts further inwards and increasing her sense of claustrophobic wretchedness. She propped up her bike and went to the shed in the back garden, where she knew she would find Uncle Jack.

‘Pea soup,' he mumbled to her from the doorjamb, as he contemplated his thin blue line of Woodbine smoke twisting into the thicker fog beyond.

‘Couldn't see five feet ahead of me coming up the rise. The bike lamp made it worse.' She stepped up beside him in the shed, its interior lit by a single bulb hanging from the centre of the roof. Her uncle had been halving seed potatoes on the bench and still had the knife in his hand. He took a puff of his cigarette and hummed quietly as he exhaled through his nose.

‘I remember a day like this, once. Took your aunt to Skegness. Before we was married.' She listened to the flatness of his voice against the fog, the dampened warble of an unseen bird in the garden, suddenly close and then far away. ‘We stood on the pier to look out at the boats, but all we could see was pea soup. Just like this.'

Connie folded her arms about her and tapped the lip of the threshold with her toe. ‘I've never seen the sea.'

‘Well, neither had we.' He nudged her shoulder with his elbow, and she half sighed, half laughed, taking the cigarette from him and holding it playfully to her lips. She fanned out her fingers and inclined her head on the doorframe with a dramatic, longing gaze.

‘
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky
,' she said in the plummy tones of a silver-screen starlet.

He chuckled and took the cigarette back from her. ‘Steady on now, Bette. Plenty of time for all that.'

Her uncle went back to his seed potatoes, and it seemed little more than a moment ago that she had stood there with him in that very spot, performing the same task on a rainy afternoon last year. Time seemed on a loop in Leyton, she sometimes thought. The months passed, the seasons ran into one another, but nothing changed. She seemed eternally stuck in the waiting room of youth, wondering when her life would begin, and she feared that one day she might wake up and find that it had passed her by without her even noticing. She swallowed back a sob that threatened to rise in her throat and laid a hand on the top of her head, flattening back the wild curls of her hair that had turned to frizz in the damp.

Her uncle was watching her. ‘So, you going to take me to the flicks, or what?' she said with strained buoyancy.

‘The flicks?' he replied. ‘Right enough the weather for it. If I can fight off that long line of young men you got queuing at the door.'

She laughed. ‘Pretty certain last time I checked it was just you and me, Uncle Jack.'

‘Is that right, Rusty?' he said. ‘Then how come I seen a young fella shifting about in the back lane, asking after someone called Connie. Know anyone by that name?'

She saw he was serious. ‘Who was it?' she asked. But she already knew. Only the Italians would avoid coming to the front door.

Uncle Jack nodded towards the old cart track that backed onto the garden. ‘Probably still there is my guess.' His watery eyes rested on her, with a glimmer that was almost impish, before he was lost again in a swathe of exhaled smoke.

Beyond the back gate she could barely see as far as the hedgerow on the other side of the track. She heard the amplified tick of it in the stillness of the fog, and then realised it wasn't the hedge but something mechanical, like an engine recently shut off. ‘Hello?' she called, and as she said it, headlights were illuminated and the swirling grey became yellow before her. She approached the car, stepping beyond the beam and making out the solid form of an old Austin. She heard her name and finally saw Vittorio's face grinning from the driver's window.

‘You like it?' he asked. His face seemed delighted at the expression on hers.

‘Whose is it?'

His smiled faltered. ‘
Whose is it
? What, you think I steal it?'

‘No, of course not —'

He frowned, and then laughed as if it wasn't the first time the idea had crossed his mind. ‘Get in.' She hesitated. ‘Don't worry. It's really mine!' He thumbed his chest. ‘Mr Edwards said I can fix, I can keep it. So I fix it. Come on.' He leaned across to the rusty passenger door, which stalled as he pushed it open. He shrugged at her. ‘It's good. The engine is good. Come on. I show you.' She paused, glancing over her shoulder at the house. ‘Connie, come on. I waited a long time to show you.'

She walked around to the passenger door and slipped in beside him. He grinned again, and she felt the shudder in the seat as he switched the ignition and the engine fired; the shudder under her skin, as if he had flooded her veins with life. He twisted towards her as he reversed the car back down the cart track, his cheeks shining, his eyes quick and determined. And she remembered the boy who had ridden her bike with the hole in his boot, his complete lack of doubt.

‘Where are we going?' she said as they approached the top of Bythorn Rise. ‘You can hardly see a thing.'

He pulled over at the top of the hill, where the fog was thinner, and they gazed out at it pooling in the dells below, shifting and changing shape as if the black fields were tossing in their sleep beneath it.

‘Doesn't matter where,' he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Some place. Any place. We go. That's what matters.'

Montelupini
1943

Lucio crept up the steps of the house in Vicolo Giotto and lifted the latch of the door as quietly as he could. It was well past midnight and, after his vigil on the freezing battlements, his skin tingled from the sudden warmth of the embers in the kitchen grate. He hadn't been able to sleep and had gone to watch for signs of his brother, imagining him returning up Via del Soccorso with the donkey that had, once again, gone missing. In his heart he knew he was wasting his time. Vittorio had already been absent three days, and Lucio understood he wasn't coming back. But the watching, the waiting, the hope seemed easier to bear than his regret at not having stopped him, not having gone with him.

The day before Vittorio left, they had checked the stable together, to see if the lost donkey might have found its way back. But the stable was cold and smelled of mildew instead of dung, empty as it was now of animals. A single prodigal chicken, which had stopped laying months ago, eyed them with an accusing look and pecked out an indignant complaint as they entered. Vittorio caught it quickly under his arm and it creaked, tired and worn as an old hinge.

‘She must have been up in the eaves. Otherwise the crucchi would have taken her when they stole the donkey.' Vittorio tugged the bird's feet to keep her still. ‘She's hardly worth the effort. But,' he took her neck in a fist and pulled, ‘better in our stomachs than those bastards'.' And Lucio watched him as he slung the carcass over his shoulder and rifled through the straw of the roosts in the vain hope he might find a long-forgotten egg.

‘Nothing,' he said. ‘And that's all there will be, if the only thing we do is stand around scratching our balls while the crucchi starve us to death.' He gave Lucio a look and thrust the limp bird into his chest.

‘Where are you going?' Lucio called, but Vittorio was already on the mule track winding down to the village. He only raised his hand without turning back. And Lucio became that small, mute boy again, watching his brother jump from Rocca Re, feeling the desperate lure of the flame, the fear of being burned.

He should have stopped him. He should have gone with him. Or at least told their mother his suspicions, Vittorio's endless talk of the partisans, the contacts he had already made with members of the gruppo on their trading trips to Cori. But instead he had gone home and told her that his brother was only away looking for the donkey. He could save her the pain, the worry for a day or two longer, if not himself. But as his mother nodded, he suspected that she already knew.

When he got in that night, she was waiting for him, standing in the dark at the window overlooking the alleyway. Viviana was stretched out in front of the grate. Even she had given up her vigil for Vittorio by the door. He bent to scratch her between the ears.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘What for?'

‘For always letting things happen … never doing anything.'

She drew her shawl about her and stepped away from the window. She looked tired and pale. ‘You really think you could have changed his mind?'

‘I could have tried.'

She came and squatted beside him in front of Viviana. ‘Vittorio was born bigger than his boots. He's always needed more than everyone else. It was just a question of time.' He looked at the worry set in her jaw, knitting her brow. She tried to smile, nudging him with her shoulder. ‘The war can't do much more, can it? We haven't got a lot left to take.'

But she was wrong. The next day, Otto came looking for them at the Vigna Alba. They knew something was wrong when the jeep and driver idled at the gate in full view of the washhouse, where the women craned and bobbed their heads like curious birds. He stood under the skeleton of the peach tree, turning his cap in his hand and waiting for them to approach from the rows of naked vines. Viviana jumped up at him in her excitement, but he barely looked at her, his attention fixed on his mother.

Lucio sensed her begin to shake her head at him, slowly, as if to hold back some terrible truth he was about to speak, and Otto looked so miserable, so guilty and hopeless that Lucio expected him to get back in the jeep and drive away. But he took his mother by the arm, moving her behind the meagre cover of the peach tree.

‘I have no choice,' Lucio heard him tell her. ‘I only found out this morning — the order of a few hours' notice.'

‘Where?' was all his mother managed.

‘Valmontone. Then back to Rome.' She twisted the sleeve of his jacket in her fist. Otto lowered his face to her hair and breathed deeply. Lucio backed away but his friend turned to him. ‘Wait. I want you to have this.' He opened Lucio's hand and thrust into it a roll of lire, bigger than any he had ever seen. ‘It's all I have now, but I'll try to send more, I promise. You're going to need whatever you can get.' Otto took hold of his mother's face again and his voice became urgent. ‘Listen to me. You need to use it to buy as much food as you can now. Go to Cori. Buy anything that will keep. Then hide it away, understand? Somewhere the soldiers and the villagers can't find it. I don't know how long —' She nodded to stop him, straightening herself and pulling her hands away. ‘We always knew there wouldn't be enough time, didn't we?' he said. ‘We knew it would come to this sooner or later … didn't we?' He glanced from her to Lucio again, seeming to clutch at some desperate hope that he, at least, might understand. Lucio nodded, but inside all he could say was,
Not now. Not this soon.

‘You're practising the snares I taught you, yes? … Good … And Viviana will always find something for you. You need to trust her. You should go further up into the ranges. Give her the chance …'

His mother ran her eyes over Otto, some calm finality settling within them, as if she had already prepared herself in a way that Lucio had not. His skin was flushed with panic, and all the words he wanted to say only hammered in his head and evaporated as breath from his mouth. He heard Otto say his name, but he turned away towards Prugni, stamped black against the paper sky. He remembered Urso raising his hand to the window in Vicolo Giotto, and he couldn't hold Otto's gaze, for fear of seeing in it that soft focus, that vision of a future without him in it. He knew they would never see each other again. They all knew it.

His mother took hold of his wrist as they listened to the sound of the jeep fading along the Viale Roma. Her nails kneaded into him and he was grateful for the pain of it, the physical insistence of her beside him. Later, as they watched the bonfire they had built catching alight, the heat of it distorting the clean air, the charred skeletons of leaves floating like birds released, his mother doubled over. He caught hold of her, thinking she was having a fit, but she pushed him away, bending over to vomit. There was little to bring up, but the noise she made was like she might turn her insides out on the hard soil. He had woken to the sound of her being sick all the week before, in the quiet of the still black mornings as he lay in bed. And he had noticed that she ate her breakfast later and later, or not at all, as if unwilling to waste the food.