The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (3 page)

At Aunty Bea's stern little terrace in Grimthorpe Lane, she would sit waiting for her mother on the stone wall that ran along the front of the workers' cottages.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary
, the lane kids chanted, wringing the colour from her name and chalking it into the village playground.
Where did your mother go?
And in her head she would sing,
With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty shoes all for show
. But the shoes, once they had gone, never came back. Aunty Bea kitted her out with a sturdy pair of Church's boots, combed her hair for nits, and scrubbed her with carbolic soap until she was as shiny as a new penny in the collection plate on Sunday. And she renamed her Constance. That was what they needed in their lives, Aunty Bea said. In Bythorn, where the mud from the fields coated everyone's steps, life had no room for red shoes.

For several months Connie saw the Italians at a distance: a bent spine among the sprouting sugar beet west of Leyton House, the back of a head juddering along the ridge in a tractor, or a shadow in the lit window of the cottage at dusk. But she had learned to tell them apart, even from afar: the broader shoulders, the thicker, blacker hair of one brother; the more confident, graceful energy of the other. She had hoped their paths might cross as she cycled home from work and they walked to the schoolhouse for their lessons with Mr Gilbert, but she only ever saw them on the bridle paths between the fields. She guessed this shortcut must have saved them two of the four miles of road between Bythorn Rise and the schoolhouse, but they still reached Leyton in the dark and left in the dark. And the less they were physically seen in the village, the more their presence seemed to intrude, fuelling ridiculous anecdotes and hushed speculation over pints in the Green Man, in the same way that Axis spies had done during the war. The shop never failed to provide her with daily titbits of misinformation and wild rumour, which she did her best to disregard but which piqued her curiosity even more.

‘No, not one letter,' she heard Agnes Armer, the postal assistant, telling Mrs Cleat one afternoon in late spring. The smell of keck and hawthorn carried in from the hedgerows through the open door of the shop.

‘Not a single letter from the
Continent,' Agnes continued, clicking the word neatly on her tongue. Connie was rearranging tins of Carnation along the back wall and took a while to tune in to the conversation.

‘After all these months, not a word from anyone in their own country?' Mrs Cleat asked, her eyes busily scanning Agnes's for evidence of a chink in their glacial blue.

‘Mm.' Agnes rolled a blonde curl around her forefinger, as if she had already lost interest in the topic. She had been two years above Connie at school, a girl conscious of her own prettiness, and its power when combined with an air of languid self-assurance. Even in the playground, Connie had seen first-hand how one crack in that temple of bone china wielded the same force as any broad-fisted, pimple-faced bully.

Connie had applied for the postal assistant's job. Aunty Bea had huffed that she could hardly see how tearing off stamps was any different from tearing off rations coupons. But Connie had thought it was the closest she might get to leaving Leyton, handling mail that was at least going somewhere else. Agnes, however, had returned from London with a secretarial diploma and some French mascara, and Mr Tonkiss, the postmaster, was a lost man. For Agnes, the job was apparently a
fill-in
until she decided what she wanted to do with her life
back in Town.
Two years on she was still in Leyton.

‘Not one letter. Don't you think it strange, Agnes?' Mrs Cleat prompted again.

‘Well,' Agnes replied. ‘I really don't like to comment.'

‘All I can say is,' Mrs Cleat continued, heedless, ‘Henry Repton must be giving them Eye-talians all they need because they haven't as much as stepped foot inside this shop.'

‘Have they not?' Agnes glanced at Connie and let out a closed-lipped laugh that might have passed for a cough. ‘Perhaps you need to start stocking Chappie, Mrs Cleat,' she said.

‘Chappie? You mean the dog meat? In the tins?'

‘Mm,' Agnes murmured. Connie could not tell whether she was more amused at the information she knew or how badly Mrs Cleat wanted it.

‘And?' Mrs Cleat urged.

‘Mm … I'm not sure I should say.'

‘Well, Aggie Armer, spit it out or don't.' Mrs Cleat stood erect and indignant, tired of being played. ‘What's dog meat got to do with the price of eggs?'

Connie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She knew that Mrs Cleat could still remember Agnes Armer holding up her sticky hand for mint humbugs before the war. It was unlikely she would let herself be reeled in by Agnes's adult artifice just yet.

‘Mr Watt over in Clopton told me the older boy bought two cans of Chappie from him last week.'

‘
And?
'

‘Well, I've never seen a dog on the farm, have you? Mr Repton keeps all his hounds over at Hamerton ever since Mrs Repton got bitten by that bitch of Fossett's before the war. Not likely Mr Repton would let the Italians
have a dog then, is it?' Agnes paused to let Mrs Cleat catch up, then added with a change of tone, ‘Supposed to be very resourceful cooks, the Continentals. They say the WOPs at the camp in Sawtry could make a meal out of anything.'

Agnes stood before the counter and smoothed her hands down the front of her flannel skirt, with the assuredness of a woman ten years older. She blinked at Connie as unnaturally as a doll. Mrs Cleat was still confused. Connie became aware of her pulse beating in the dip of her throat, a heat spreading through her chest.
Stop it
, she wanted to say.
Don't
— but the words didn't seem to make any noise in the space between herself and the untouchable Agnes.

Agnes raised her eyebrows into thin arches and left the shop with her packet of tea, the smart clack of her patent shoes a counterpoint to the lazy tick of the afternoon. Mrs Cleat gazed after her, buffing the counter distractedly. When she spoke, it was not to Connie, but to rehearse the news as she now understood it. ‘I see. Well … dog meat … from a tin. Even in the war we didn't stoop to that.
Really
, it makes your stomach turn … almost savages. How can Repton let them live like it?'

Connie listened, feeling weak. She would have to hear the story pieced together and regurgitated by Mrs Cleat to half of Leyton, to witness her embellishments and emphases, finely tuned to the tastes and opinions of each customer. It might not have occurred to Mrs Cleat, as it had to Connie, that if indeed the story was true, the Onorati boy couldn't understand the label on the tin and had bought the meat by mistake, on the basis of price alone. But such an explanation would not concern Mrs Cleat, who knew that it was sensation, not sympathy, that kept half her customers coming into her shop.

By the time spring was nearly done and the light lingered up on Bythorn Rise, Connie had become familiar with those parts of the farm where the Onorati brothers could most often be seen. She began to suspect that the taller of the two boys also looked out for her, so often did she find him at some occupation — or none at all, as if waiting there in the late afternoons.

One protractedly grey day after work, she rounded the corner of Repton's as the sun finally broke the blank sky. The light had that renewed quality of dawn about it, and as she got off her bike, she held up her face, enjoying its meagre heat on her skin, the goosebumps it raised on her forearms. When she opened her eyes again, he was standing two steps away, on the other side of her bicycle. She flinched, and the shudder of the handlebars made the bell ting, a lingering, artificial sound among the hum and purr of insects in the grass before the hedgerow. She tried to arrange the expression on her face, not wanting to appear shocked, but he had already backed away from her.

‘It's alright,' she said. Then, not knowing what else to say, she blurted a stiff ‘Hello.' He didn't answer, and she was wondering whether she should get back on her bike when he nodded and reached to open the gate. From over his shoulder, he motioned to her: a downward scooping gesture, almost the opposite of beckoning, but clearly intending her to follow.

She wasn't sure. She wasn't sure about him or what he might want with her, so she hesitated. He stood patiently at the gate, and in his face she saw no flirtation or playfulness, no assumption or judgement in the making, just a child-like invitation to see what he had to show.

She let her bike fall into the verge and walked towards him. He looked down at her shoes, her ugly practical lace-ups, and as she grabbed the gate from him he pointed at a pair of wellies sitting behind the post. Had he planned it all then, this meeting? She didn't know whether to feel flattered or alarmed. Such a strange thing to do: to think about her shoes in the mud of the bridle path. His own boots were caked with fresh clods layered upon the dried. She couldn't imagine any of the village boys thinking of such a thing. Everyone had muddy shoes in Leyton, except perhaps Agnes. She left her lace-ups in the grass and followed him, slipping around at first, until she got her feel for the oversized boots. He led her along the emerald wheat, up around the rise to a field left fallow. They were closer now to the outbuildings of Repton's farm: the two chicken barns to their right and the gamekeeper's cottage backing onto the spinney to their left, before it the gentle rise of another paddock, where Repton's horse grazed lazily.

Halfway along the hedgerow, the boy dropped to his haunches. Instinctively she copied him, like they were playing a game, and as she did he reached out towards the maythorn laden with blossoms and nudged back a jagged branch with the cuff of his shirt. The petals released a faint cherry scent as they fell like snow across their feet.

Deep inside the hollow of the hedge was a nest, neat and tight, with four brown eggs. A fifth, in the centre, was broken, the wet blue chick recently emerged. She couldn't help catching her breath even though she had run wild in the spinneys and hedgerows, had prodded and plundered a hundred nests growing up. But this act of discovery was so simple, so long forgotten, that it took her by surprise. With a dirty wrist, the boy pushed back his hair. It inched again to the bridge of his nose, so luxurious in its sheen that she felt the urge to touch it, as she had the eggs in their nests as a child. She watched the way he drank everything in: the spectacle of the newly hatched chick; the precision of the nest; the twitching female on her stump, sending out her creaking alarm; the dull, self-contained eggs. There didn't seem any need to speak, to disturb something already perfect. So they stayed quiet, until the bird gathered the courage to hop in increments back to the nest and dance on its edge, ruffling her wings.

He let the branches fall back and they stood facing each other in the hedgebank. As she tried to think of what she might say to him, something he might understand, she felt rain on her face, and saw the grey that had re-formed across the evening sky. He led her back to her bike, both of them slipping in their haste as the rain became heavier and the mud of the bridle path got wetter. She reached the gate, where her shoes should have been, but she could not find them in the drooping grass. The downpour became a pelting mist as she searched, and it was only when she felt something cover her back that she realised he had gone to her bike and retrieved her mac. She pulled it over her head and finally threw the hateful shoes into her basket.

On the road, she stood in her muddy stockinged feet, her bike against her hip, the hood of the mac dripping before her. ‘Thank you,' she pointed back towards the bridle path, ‘for showing me the thrush's nest.' She articulated the words. He held his soaked hair back against his head and, despite the rain, considered her slowly. The skin of his forehead shone.

‘It's a nightingale,' he said.

She opened her mouth to speak, but he continued, ‘It will go soon.' He squinted at the dull sky, like he was searching for something. ‘To the sun … to Africa.'

She felt ridiculous standing shoeless in the rain before him, understanding now that his silence all along had been from choice, not necessity. She hurried onto her bike, but hesitated, giving him the opportunity to speak again. When he didn't, she pedalled off without saying goodbye.

At the top of Bythorn Rise she stopped and glanced back. He was sitting on the gate, following her progress up the hill, still unconcerned about the rain. He might have always been sitting there, like some owl on the barn gable at dusk, unnoticed and all-seeing, shifting to the measure of his own, instinctive clock. She thought about his careful English, accented but not laboured, and her naive assumptions. She had equated his silence, his foreignness, with a kind of stupidity, as Mrs Cleat or Aunty Bea would have done. Of course the bird was a nightingale. He must think her dim, not knowing the common birds of the hedgerow that bounded her in on every side. She vaguely remembered a lesson where Mr Gilbert had traced their migratory patterns on the world map. ‘From Leyton to London fifteen times over,' he had told them, and she had been filled with awe imagining a bird's-eye view of a vast London, not even able to picture a world that lay fifteen times beyond that.

She cycled over the crest of the hill but dismounted, bringing her bike around. She wanted to see if he was still there. She felt petty and ungrateful now and thought she should wave to him. But when she got back to the top of the rise, the gate was empty and he was nowhere to be seen, as if, with the calling crows, he had taken flight over the brooding spinney. She hadn't even asked his name.