The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (30 page)

She stood up and wiped her mouth, looking at him for a while, her face waxy. She didn't tell him. She knew she didn't need to. But, more importantly, Lucio saw that she hadn't told Otto. He could see it in the angle of her chin, the way she pressed her lips together and dragged the black ribbon from her hair. He saw all her reasons in that look: what point would it have served, what would it have changed? She pulled on his hand to steady herself as she got up. Her fingers were cold in his, bluish and fragile as birds' eggs. He warmed them between his own and they stood watching their breath form and disappear, form and disappear, as insubstantial as the thin smoke of the fire caught up by the wind and lost in the vast blank sky above their heads.

Leyton
1950

Connie slowed her bike at the top of the rise to survey the gamekeeper's cottage. Set against the glory of the summer evening, it seemed even more squat and lonely than usual. Beyond it, the windows of Leyton House shone rosy gold in the low sun.

Below her, Lucio's gate was closed, vacant. She didn't know why she always expected to see him sitting there when she rounded the corner. He would already be at St Margaret's, working through the night, even on a Saturday, she knew. Yet the gate felt somehow empty now, without him on it.

At the bend, she saw Vittorio's new Ford Anglia. He had pulled up alongside the verge, and was leaning against the front wing, a heel propped on one of its tyres. The smoke from his cigarette drifted over his head and out towards the hedgerow. She straightened the front wheel of her bike, lifted her bare feet to the frame and let herself freewheel down the hill. The air was still warm and dry, thick with insects. She dared herself not to squeeze the brakes until she'd skirted the big pothole right opposite the gate, and when she had, she juddered to a halt a few feet past the car, skidding dramatically. Vittorio threw down his cigarette and caught hold of the handlebars. She was laughing as she dismounted.

‘Why do you do that?' he asked. He pushed the bike petulantly into the verge, so it couldn't be seen from the road. ‘Look at you now.' She touched her hair, stiffened and tangled about her shoulders, saw her white blouse flecked with the yellow remains of gnats and midges.

‘What?' She shrugged. ‘If you wanted perfection, you should have picked up Agnes.'

He groaned and took her by the shoulders, and she let him kiss her, impatiently. He was tired of waiting, she could tell, and not entirely satisfied when she got there. He never was entirely satisfied, she felt. And not just with her.

‘Did you even bring shoes?' he asked.

She went to her bike and fished her sandals from the basket, waving them at him from a hooked finger. He opened the car door for her.

The Anglia still smelled new, and the vinyl seat always gave an indignant complaint whenever she got into it. As far as her interest in cars went, she'd always felt more comfortable in the Austin, with its slow, shabby grandeur, like a run-down stately home. But no sooner had Vittorio restored it than he accepted an offer from a sentimental customer at the bowser. Mr Edwards had been so impressed with his sales patter, he'd given him a loan towards his next car, a Hillman that was on the blocks, waiting for a driver who would never come home from the war, and whose widow was only too keen to be rid of the constant reminder. Vittorio fixed up the Hillman and sold it on for a Morris Eight and then the Anglia, until it seemed to Connie that whenever he picked her up at the bottom of the rise, out of sight of the twitching curtains of Grimthorpe Lane, his cars had transformed themselves overnight. He did take her out of Leyton, as he had promised that day in the winter fog. And at first she was thrilled by it. But as the months passed, she'd begun to realise that the places they went were not always the places she wanted to go.

The first time he had taken her to the Roxy in Wellsborough he'd made her dance, even though she'd warned him she didn't know how. The song was
In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening
. Her hand was clammy in his, her steps self-conscious in her worn sandals, and she felt anything but cool. Thankfully no one was looking at her. It was Vittorio everyone wanted to see, in his sharp new suit and shiny Logues, his olive skin rich against his white shirt, the slick of his hair impossibly black. He seemed even more exotic, more foreign than ever, and the attention of as many men as women followed him around the floor, though for a different reason, she understood. Vittorio didn't appear to mind making enemies as well as admirers.

They were regulars now at the Roxy on a Saturday night, but she couldn't say she enjoyed it any more than she had that first time.

‘Next Saturday, I take you to Huntingdon,' Vittorio said. He was thrumming the Anglia's steering wheel, and she knew something was coming.

‘What for?' she asked as they passed Leyton House.

‘For new shoes,' he said, as though it was obvious. ‘Some good shoes for dancing.'

She had tossed her sandals on the floor of the car. Like all her shoes, she'd had them since the war, and deep down she probably disliked them as much as he did. But the buckle had been hanging by a thread once, for a day or two, and when she'd fallen asleep at St Margaret's watching Lucio paint one night, she'd woken to find it sewn back on.

‘I don't need new shoes,' she said.

‘Yes, you do. These ugly things,' he gave a sidelong glance towards the footwell, ‘they make you look like —'

‘They're good enough.' She didn't give him the chance to finish. She didn't want to hear.

‘Madonna, it's not the war anymore, Connie. Let me buy you some shoes.' He was laughing at her.

She didn't know why she kept going to the Roxy with him or why he persisted in taking her. He could have had his pick of the girls there, and he danced with most of them all night anyway. She was used to the powder-room talk as she tried to spruce herself up behind the cubicle door, brushing away the inadequacy she always felt as soon as she walked into the hall with him.

‘My God, if I don't get a dance with him tonight I swear I'm going to die,' a voice agonised on the other side of the stall that evening.

‘With who? Mario Lanza?' someone else asked. She heard the lusty, honest laughter girls made when men were not around.

‘You'll die anyway, when you hear that accent,' another voice broke in. ‘He can talk about changing a gasket and make it sound like pillow talk!'

Connie, unlocking the door of her cubicle, wanted to laugh then, less at the girls preening in the mirror than at herself, remembering the effect he'd had on her the first time she'd met him. But, oddly, that was all she felt when she heard such talk — a kind of mild amusement. When he danced all night with other girls, when other eyes melted like butter at his grin, other waists twisted in his hands, she should have been jealous, she knew. But all she harboured was a kind of relief that she was spared the pressure, the terrible weight of expectation that came with his favour.

If she was honest with herself, the best part of Saturday nights at the Roxy wasn't the dancing but the intervals. Everyone left the floor to crowd the bar, and the band switched from their dutiful covers of dance-hall favourites to improvise a few jazz numbers. Bobby Keyes would signal the boys and, from the side of the stage, she'd follow the way they changed instruments, unbuttoned their collars; the way they freed themselves from the staid rhythms of the wireless hits, the expectations of the dancers, becoming conscious only of the music. In their focus and fervour she caught a glimpse into another, more colourful, more passionate world. It was the way she felt when she watched Lucio paint.

Sometimes she thought it was those brief intervals, more than being with Vittorio, more than the rest of the night put together, that made it all worthwhile. All the tiptoeing home in the early hours, contorting herself through the kitchen window, only to hear Aunty Bea's pert cough from the bedroom, the purposeful rattle of her bedside clock as she rehearsed her arguments, ready to shatter the deceptive peace of the morning. It seemed she and her aunt could barely get through the week these days without some petty squall of bickering and cold-shouldering that by Sunday morning had built to an ominous front of suppressed grievances. And the more they argued, the more Connie stormed from the house, skipping church and damning herself even more in her aunt's opinion.

Strangely, the one great accusation that Connie expected never came. The rumours in the village about Vittorio stringing along all the girls at the Wellsborough Roxy would have reached Aunty Bea's ears by now. And Connie had heard Agnes's name mentioned often enough alongside Vittorio's to know her own would easily stand in its place when she was out of earshot. But why her aunt had never thrown this at her in one of their spats, she couldn't fathom. She assumed it was being saved up for some final offensive of grand proportions.

Yet even that threat could not force her back to the sitting room in Grimthorpe Lane on Saturday nights. How could she go back to the stale sofa, bookended by Aunty Bea and Uncle Jack, intent on ignoring each other? How could she settle for Arthur Askey joking on and on until she wanted to dash the radio into the grate? She couldn't. Not now — now that she'd heard Bobby Keyes's band in the interval, now that she'd seen Lucio's paintings. Now that she'd peeked through the hedgerow and seen life in colour.

When the interval ended and Bobby announced the next set, couples began flooding back onto the dance floor. Connie pushed against the flow, retreating to the emptying bar. As she brushed past the file of dancers, she felt a hand tug at hers, pulling her towards the side tables.

‘Where were you? I wanted to buy you a drink,' Vittorio said. His voice was low and intimate, but his gaze darted about the hall like she was a secret he was keeping.

She lifted her glass to him. ‘I still have this one.'

He gave her that dissatisfied expression again. ‘Why are you always sneaking away to watch Bobby Keyes?' He drew out the name ridiculously. His eyes were glazed, dangerous in their lack of focus.

‘I like the music in the interval, that's all. You know that.' She removed her hand from his.

‘You don't listen to music with your eyes.'

She could tell he wanted a fight. He always became jealous when he'd been drinking, especially of Bobby or Tommy Pointon — any of the boys she used as an alibi for going out at the weekends. He resented having to meet her at the rise, not being able to pick her up from the house. Sometimes she suspected this was why he was attracted to her: the obstacles, the hurdles he needed to jump to make himself acceptable, to be accepted. Other times, she thought it was because he sensed her withdrawing from him, because she didn't fawn on him as other girls did. She only had to be a little quiet in the queue at the Orpheum on a Friday night, to nod vaguely when he repeated himself, or be the last out of the ladies in the intermission, to find him fidgeting in his seat, searching out her fingers, her knee in the dark when she sat down. It was a novelty for him, this lack of attention, and the less she gave it, the more he wanted it. At first she'd enjoyed the power of it over him, but now she wasn't so sure.

‘Connie, wait,' she heard him call as she threaded between the tables. ‘I need to —'

‘You need to ask me to dance, that's what you need to do.' Connie glanced over her shoulder to see Agnes cutting between them with a rustle of her skirts. In her white dress and good white shoes, she almost glowed, as though she was projected on a screen. She caught Vittorio's hand and led him towards the dance floor. Her eyelids flickered up at Connie as she reached across to leave her cigarette burning in an ashtray. Vittorio looked back, but his frown didn't last for long. Soon he was making a show of spinning Agnes among the couples, swinging her faster and tighter than anyone else, making her beam as she twisted into him. Underneath it all, though, Connie couldn't help feeling it was Agnes doing the reeling, winding him in like twine.

‘They reckon that Ford Anglia's his fourth car in less than a year.' It was the barman, leaning over the wet mats to Tommy Pointon, shouting over the music. ‘Where's he get the money, that's what I wanna know?'

‘Not bad-going for a bloody WOP.' Tommy had his elbows on the bar behind him, his gaze heavy-lidded, trailing Vittorio around the floor. ‘Fossett says he's well and truly wheedled his way in with Edwards at Spalewick. The old boy hasn't got any kids, see, and he's always been a bit of a do-gooder.'