The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (33 page)

‘Oh, here we go,' Connie said anyway. She crossed her arms and waited, but Aunty Bea was silent, unmoving. ‘I couldn't sleep. I went for a walk, that's all.' She took her aunt's sullenness to be a sign of the great storm about to break. ‘If the
talk
is over, I'd like to get ready for work.'

‘No, it is not over,' Aunty Bea said. She got up and moved to the sink, her breath laboured. Her eyes glittered at Connie as she turned, but their focus seemed strangely elsewhere. ‘I won't be doing at the Big House tomorrow. I want you to drop in to the kitchen and tell Mrs Cartwright on your way to Cleat's.'

‘What? Why can't you work?' But her aunt's expression, the tone of her request, seemed too weary to have any other agenda. ‘What's wrong with you?' She was genuinely concerned now.

‘One thing, I'm asking,' Aunty Bea said, with some of her old spark. ‘Just this one thing, after all I've done for you. Can you manage it, or not?'

Connie nodded, half expecting a renewal of hostilities, but her aunt only reached for a dishcloth and ran it about the sink. She watched her hang the cloth over the faucet, pull the latch on the window, check the knobs on the stove — all the small, obsessive habits of her domesticity. And she frowned as her aunt slipped through the door and shuffled up the stairs, as though Connie had not been there at all.

She sat down at the kitchen table, the house about her feeling somehow skewed, diminished, like it was Aunty Bea's anger, her strictures, that kept firm its joists. Without it there was suddenly less for Connie to throw herself against, no bars she could rattle to justify her frustrations. How could her aunt be sick? Aunty Bea didn't believe in illness any more than crying; she always said she never had time for such indulgences. But there had been those visits by Doctor Bland of late. Connie had seen him getting into his car as she cycled up the lane after work. Her aunt had flapped her hand when she'd asked about it, mumbling about
women's affairs,
as if Connie herself did not belong to that sex.

She heard the dry bark of Uncle Jack's morning cough and switched off the kitchen light. When she went into the narrow hall, she realised the sound was coming from the front room. She creaked the door ajar and put her head around it. Aunty Bea had meant it when she said no one had had any sleep that night: she guessed her aunt would have tossed and turned sufficiently to keep Uncle Jack up too.

He was sitting in his chair, his head propped against the wing. There was no light on, and she was surprised to find one or two embers glowing in the grate despite the summer night. A book had slipped from his lap, and she went in and kneeled before him on the hearthrug, reaching for it. He was awake: she smiled at him and set the book on the side table. He straightened his head, coughing again.

‘You need to get off the Woodys,' she said.

He cricked the corner of his mouth at her. ‘Too much fresh air and me lungs'd pack up from shock.'

She had the sudden desire to curl herself onto his lap and lean into his chest like she had as a child. He used to read to her then, Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson, while she brushed ash off the pages to see the pictures. Instead she settled on the floor, her head against the arm of the chair, and felt his hand on her hair. A bedroom door closed above them.

‘You shouldn't mind her so much, Lizzie,' he said.

She lifted her chin and looked up at him. ‘I don't. But she minds me, doesn't she? I wonder sometimes whether she even likes me very much.'

His breath whistled and his hand became heavy on her head. ‘You're wrong there. I think she likes you a lot more than she likes herself. She sees in you what she might've wanted to be.' His voice was so quiet that he could have been talking to himself.

‘What? She'd like to have been a shop assistant?' Connie couldn't help it, despite the rare confidence Uncle Jack was granting.

‘Maybe.'

She thought about it. As someone who'd spent her whole life doing other people's cleaning, Aunty Bea might see a certain glamour in working behind the counter at Cleat's. Still, it wasn't what Connie wanted to hear, and she leaned away from him to put the grate across the fire.

‘I think it's more she looks at you and she sees someone open to things …' He paused and ran his hand across his mouth. ‘Someone willing to take a risk, like. Passionate, even.'

It was a lot of words for Uncle Jack, surprising words that she wasn't used to hearing from him. They made her uncomfortable, and she fobbed them off by joking. ‘Steady on now, Mr Farrington! What kind of a girl do you take me for?' She cocked her head, expecting to see his smile, but there was only an edge of disappointment at his mouth.

‘Can you not see it in yourself, Connie?' he said gently.

She shrugged, taken aback at the sound of her name, the seriousness of it coming from him.

‘Them Eye-talians you're so keen spending time on, you suppose they only see the Hayworth hair and them skinny white spokes of legs?'

She'd wondered at this herself — what it was they did see in her, especially Vittorio, who could have had any girl he wanted. She could believe Lucio knew her: he always seemed to peel away the skin of everything with those eyes. But it didn't count for much: the night had proved that to her.

‘I don't know what they see,' she said sharply, uneasy with the conversation.

‘I do,' he persisted.

‘Well, you're biased.' And she tried to laugh him off again.

He reached for the book she'd set on the table and took out a card he'd been using as a bookmark. When he handed it to her, she saw it was a photograph. She held the image up to the glow of the coals in the grate. She could make out a pier at the seaside. A youthful Uncle Jack, barely her age, was leaning against the railing, his hair thick under the cap he'd pushed back on his head. He was looking at a girl sitting on a wrought-iron bench before him. One of her hands was blurred at her neck and her face was animated with laughter, her hair loose and windswept about her shoulders. Had it not been for Uncle Jack behind this figure, she might not have recognised Aunty Bea. In the foreground another man seemed to have just completed a cartwheel: his legs and arms were out of focus, but the fringe of his hair fanned across his face.

‘That's Bill,' Uncle Jack said. ‘Always clowning about at some such acrobatics.'

She peered at their faces, tipping the card closer to the firelight. ‘You're all so young and … happy.'

Uncle Jack's breath whistled through his nose again. ‘They were, I suppose. I were always tagging along, me. Chaperoning. That's what we did in them days.'

‘Do you mean Aunty Bea was with —'

‘Oh yeah, she were Bill's girl alright.' He tapped one heel on the toe of the other foot, as if to shift some grit from his slipper.

‘What happened?' she asked.

Uncle Jack gave a low grumble, like he was dragging the memory from the depths of him, reluctantly. ‘He always had his heart set on going overseas, Bill, even when he were young. America. Didn't have the class system holding a man back, he reckoned.' He drew his mouth into a pout. ‘Maybe so. Anyway, he up and did it. Well before the war, this was. Your aunt was supposed to join him once he were settled. But she never seemed to get round to it, even though he kept writing and asking. And somehow, in her mind, the fact that she didn't go turned into him leaving her, hankering after something more, as if he'd got beyond himself. That's the version she likes to tell, anyway.'

‘Did she love him?'

Uncle Jack lifted his chin in a faint acknowledgement.

‘So you think she was too scared to leave? You know, to take a chance on a better life?'

He paused, considering. ‘I think at first she hoped he'd come back with his tail between his legs. But after a while she gave up waiting … that's where I came in.' He shrugged but wouldn't hold her gaze. ‘Like I said, he ended up with the Yanks in Italy during the war and that's where he stayed. Maybe she thought she'd made the right decision, then. I don't know …' He tilted his head back against the chair again, his eyes closed. ‘Feeling justified only patches up a broken heart,' he said. ‘It don't mend it.'

She considered the photo again: Jack looking at Bea looking at Bill.

‘You know, I never could decide whether she married me to spite him or to spite herself,' he said, and he reached out his hand to take the photo back from her. She watched him slip it away inside his book. ‘She were a stubborn little thing, our Bea. Still is, I reckon.'

Connie made a soft huff of agreement as she mulled over it all.

‘Bea likes a fight, sure enough,' Uncle Jack said, ‘and most of all with herself.' She glanced up at him when he said it, his expression knowing in the firelight. ‘Not so unlike someone else I know.'

Her cheeks were burning as she got up, but the embers in the fire were nearly dead, and the air in the room smelled ashen and old, like the great atlas in the library of the Big House, something that was becoming nothing more than a memory of childhood.

Montelupini
1943

Under the pergola of the osteria, Fagiolo was roasting chestnuts in an oil drum. Their woody sweetness wafted through the night every time the innkeeper tossed them with his paddle, and Lucio, pacing the battlements above, felt his empty stomach creak louder than his boots on the freezing stones. Above the range, the sky was clean and brittle, the stars glinting sharp as grit. The procession to Montemezzo would be slow that night, the track icy and treacherous the higher they got. He jammed his hands under his armpits and breathed warm air into the upturned collar of his jacket.

Padre Ruggiero had named him a litter-bearer for Santa Lucia's effigy. He felt the responsibility of it, the silent resentment and reproaches of the village weighing heavy in his bones, like he was coming down with the flu. It made him miss his brother more than ever. Vittorio would have done it: borne the saint's litter as well as the talk of the village, dispatching both with the easy swagger of his walk, a single hook of his eyebrow. It was Primo they wanted to see, Primo who could silence them, not him. He blew on his numb fingers and remembered a joke Nonno Raimondi loved to tell on the saint's day. His grandfather would stand in the doorway of the osteria as the weary procession fogged through the piazzetta in the early hours of the morning, bringing the effigy back from the mountain to the church in the village. ‘Just imagine,' he would slur to the litter-bearers, ‘if you'd chosen a saint with a name day in July, you'd have peaches for balls instead of little frozen raisins.' Nonno Raimondi always said the midnight trek in the depths of winter was the greatest testament to Montelupini's stupidity. And yet his grandfather went along with everyone else to gaze at the saint as she was raised to her dais in San Pietro's.

The villagers were filling the piazzetta now, gathering with their lanterns and candles for the start of the march. But they kept close to the walls and huddled about each other, and Lucio knew it wasn't only from the cold. The Germans had lifted the curfew for the saint's feast, but the Montelupinese were awkward, already suspicious of a freedom they had so recently taken for granted. Maybe Vittorio was right: they were a village used to being told what to do. Perhaps it was in their nature, he thought. Perhaps it was in his.

He had done what Otto had told him to, without question. He had taken the money and scoured Cori to buy whatever supplies he could, while his mother tried the villagers for news of Vittorio. But neither food nor news was easy to come by these days, even if you had money. In a side alley off the town's piazza they had found an old woman who sold them a dry finger of pecorino. ‘Madosca!' his mother said as Lucio handed over a thousand lire. ‘What is it, gold?'

‘No, signora.' The woman's hands were as desiccated as the cheese itself, and her laugh rasped like a death rattle. ‘Have you tried eating gold?'

Lucio had taken the cheese and put it in his pocket carefully. The woman sucked on her toothless gums and shook her head. ‘Wouldn't keep it there, if I were you.'

‘Why not?' his mother asked.

‘Eat it now. Better in your stomachs than the gruppo's.' And she cracked phlegm into the back of her throat and spat it into the gutter. They ate the cheese while she grumbled to them about the thugs who hid in the woods and looted the villages and vineyards all around them. They wore the red scarf, she said, but their highest ideal was nothing more than filling their bellies until the war was over. Lucio and his mother listened in silence, asking no more questions. When they left, they didn't speak to each other about what she had told them. Neither of them wanted to consider that a little power, a gun and the semblance of a cause might be enough for Vittorio.

When they got home from Cori, it seemed like half the village was waiting for them in Vicolo Giotto — the scabby Carozzi twins asking to play with Viviana even though the curfew had sounded; Maria Ventuzzi, with her crusted eyes, who hovered silently below their window as her mother had told her to; and the ancient Ardemira Ippoliti, sweeping their steps. That was how the villagers manoeuvred around their pride: sending hungry children or old women to perform unnecessary favours in return for a mouthful from their table. Neither he nor his mother had the heart to send them away. He watched her bending to them at the door, her bones moving under her dress like the alley cat's did under its loose skin, and he had wondered that the baby could still cling inside her.