The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (40 page)

A distant barking started up over the ridge, and the men began to look towards the sound. Viviana, tired of being tethered, was calling him. The officer walked back towards the rise and listened, as if debating whether to retrace their steps and investigate. After a minute, he gave an order and the men continued to clear the camp. When Lucio turned back, the earringed soldier was gone. He searched the group, his chest tightening, until his vision began to blur and falter with panic. He heard the swish of undergrowth below, a loose scrabble of rocks. He lowered himself between the hunks of limestone, gripping with his bare feet like something wild. The top of a turban became visible as he peered between the boulders. He pressed himself against the stone, barely breathing, thinking he had been seen. But when he peered out again, the man had his robes hitched up like a woman's skirts, his baggy pantaloons pulled down, and he was squatting to shit in the seclusion of the rocks. Lucio saw the scratches of fingernails upon his neck and under his ear, still angry and raw. A cuckoo called smartly across the dell. The light fell in living shafts between the rocks. And he felt the moment crystallise into what Otto had once described to him as the hunter's gift: the perfect coincidence of prey at its most vulnerable, of hunter at his most focused, the beautiful inevitability of it.

The soldier's head nudged back on his neck with a compliance that shocked Lucio as he grabbed it, as if he was handling a child. He pulled him against his chest, heard the surprise lodge in the man's stretched throat. He felt him stiffen for the fight, but it never came: there was a soft rending hiss, like the piercing of overblown fruit, and then the slap of liquid on rock. And for the first time Lucio felt Urso's skinning knife become an extension of his hand, the contours of its handle in harmony with the muscles of his fingers and palm. He realised that it wasn't just his father's skill that had sliced the jugular of the boar so cleanly: the knife had become a part of him. He felt it now.

The soldier fell backwards, pinning him to the rocks. For a moment the body jerked against him in a strange syncopated rhythm of its own, until Lucio wrapped his arms about the man's chest and held him there, breathing in his ear until he quivered no more. And they were both as dead weights against the cold stone, the only sound the cuckoo, painfully alive in the new morning.

Leyton
1950

Connie's night was troubled and full of dreams half begun. She woke feeling confused and regretful, but not about what she'd done with Uncle Jack's ashes. Her conviction on that count felt so complete in the light of morning that it threw into relief all her other uncertainties, all the other doubts that loomed before her at every turn. She dressed while it was still dark, thinking she could cycle away her mood before the shop threatened to cement it into place, but her bike led her instinctively to St Margaret's, as it so often did.

The paintings were complete, the bulk of the scaffoldings removed now, so she knew there was little hope of finding Lucio there, losing sleep over them. But still she did, especially when, propping her bike against the lychgate, she saw that the oak door was unlocked and off its latch. She hesitated, not wanting to run into Mr Swann or, worse, Reverend Stanton, and have to explain herself. But it was too early for either of them. The grey clouds were still gilded by the first light, and she couldn't help going inside to see if Lucio might be asleep on a pew, as if nothing had changed.

She slipped in the door and crept into the nave, but her breath seemed the only life in the stony lung of the church. She stood for a while before the crossing: she had never seen the paintings in natural light, away from the stage spots, and they seemed to have matured now, the colours ripening with the cast of shadows, enhancing the mystery of the scenes to her, the secrets they held. The figures surprised her all over again as she scanned them: Joanna and Salome outside the tomb; John and Peter in Gethsemane; Lazarus's sisters, Martha and Mary; Saul; Moses. She watched how their expressions changed with the growing light that shafted down the chancel and crept into the nave. And she stopped her breath, feeling like even that tiny sound might disturb the perfect transfiguration of the moment. That was when she sensed it — another presence in the church.

She turned to see a head bowed low in a pew of the north transept, before the mural of St Margaret. ‘Lucio?' she called. The figure spun around, standing up as he did so, and she saw the angular features, the drawn cheeks of Aldo Onorati. Her first instinct was to leave, to run out of the church, but she held her ground, breathing through her mouth and not daring to move, as if she had just woken something dangerous, an old dog that might bite. She saw him clutch at the back of the pew but realised his grip was more for support, to steady himself on his feet. When she risked a look at his face, she saw his eyes were red and wet, his open lips setting tight, his initial surprise knotting once again into something closed and private.

He sat down heavily and bent his head, considering his hands spread across his knees. He seemed weary to her, as if he had been there all night.

‘I'm sorry,' she offered at last, feeling she should say something, anything. ‘I didn't mean to disturb you.'

‘You didn't,' he said. His voice was surprisingly soft.

‘I was looking for —'

‘He's gone.' He didn't glance around, and she thought she might back off then, take the chance to slip away, but she stayed — out of ingrained politeness, perhaps, but also curiosity. He wasn't what she'd expected at all: there was something a little broken that was at odds with what she knew of him, something that reminded her too much of Lucio.

‘Your son is very talented, isn't he?' she heard herself say. Her tone was pointed, a challenge in it. It sounded like the voice of someone older, a more collected, assured version of herself.

Aldo Onorati raised his head and considered the mural before him. She thought he was about to contradict her, but he began to nod. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes, he is.'

Connie was thrown off-kilter. She realised she'd been expecting an argument, had been preparing herself for one — even wanted it, perhaps. She tried to think of a response that might cover her surprise, but all she saw was St Margaret surveying them knowingly. ‘She's very beautiful,' she said. She came closer to the edge of his row, closer to the portrait. At his silence, she cleared her throat, the sound ringing awkwardly.

‘I'm sorry,' she said, too loudly. ‘I should have introduced myself. I'm —'

‘I know who you are.' His weight shifted in the pew with a crack of wood. ‘He told me.'

She nodded. ‘Vittorio.' His name always seemed a statement, never a question. But Aldo Onorati shook his head and stood up to leave the pew by the opposite end, where he indicated to her the niche within the north transept. He waited while she approached the mural, set in the alcove where she used to play as a child.

The painting of St Dorothea was the only one she hadn't seen finished. She remembered the night after her trip to the seaside, the maythorn Lucio had been troubling over. As she drew closer, she could see that the bush filled the entire foreground of the view, as if it was the subject. Its flowers weighted the branches, thick and luminous as newly settled snow. And just at eye level, through the thicket, Connie made out a nest, the eggs inside green as olives, the wide beak of the nightingale hen on her stump nearby. She could almost hear again its creaking alarm as Lucio pinned back the branches for her to see.

By the time she looked up to Dorothea's face, she already knew who she would find there. She didn't need to trace her thin calves, nearly hidden behind the foliage, the copper curls that twisted about each other down her back, their stark counterpoint against all that white. Heat rushed to her face, doused by an icy flash as she thought of the eyes of the village on her, upon the very feature that singled her out, announcing her like a beacon right there to the side of the pulpit where Reverend Stanton preached. But as she stared at herself captured there on the wall, she found she was most bothered not by what the village would think, but by the way he had conceived her: her hair so prominent because she was walking away, leaving, glancing back over her shoulder, as though at someone who had just called her name.

She heard Aldo Onorati stirring behind her, the scuff of his boots on the flagstones. He came and stood next to her in the recess, and she wiped her cheeks quickly with the heel of her hand.

‘He's talented, yes … but he's a fool,' he said.

She frowned, bracing herself for the argument that might yet come. She wanted to contradict him, to ask why he would say such a thing, how he could bother to understand his son so little. But all she managed was a feeble ‘Why?'

The reflected brilliance of the maythorn seemed to brighten his sallow skin, giving it an odd intensity. ‘He watches,' Aldo Onorati muttered, as if to himself, ‘but he doesn't act. He won't fight. He never has.'

‘Fight?' she asked. ‘Fight for what?'

‘For what he wants.'

She turned to him, but he was already backing away down the aisle, one hand clutched about his cap, the other deep inside his pocket. He stopped at the door and she caught him glance once more at the painting of St Margaret.

She listened to his footsteps on the gravel outside, each one driving something home to her. He was wrong. Aldo Onorati was wrong. She examined the study of St Dorothea again. Lucio had fought. He fought in the way he knew how, the way that was truest to himself: the painting showed her that. It was she who was the coward. She had never fought for what she'd wanted. She looked at her figure among the maythorn blossoms as Lucio saw her, the departing version of herself, so full of promise. And her heart felt as raw as the morning call of the crows among the gravestones — as raw, but as bold and as certain.

Montelupini
1946

The world had been at peace for more than ten months when his father walked back into the village. They had started to believe he wasn't coming home at all. Lucio spotted him making his way along Via del Soccorso with measured steps, past the missing shutters and falling plaster, the gaping roofs, the charred shell of the town hall. He crossed the piazzetta at the end of the day, as if he'd just returned from a trading trip to Cori. Fagiolo greeted him on the steps of the osteria, and they clasped hands and embraced.

‘Still here, Fagio?' his father said.

‘Still here, Capo. Still here.' But Lucio heard the innkeeper's voice crack and shift registers like a boy's. Fagiolo cleared his throat. ‘You're fatter!' he declared.

His father breathed an uncertain laugh and seemed to grip Fagiolo's arms a little harder, shaking him affectionately. But he didn't answer. He didn't speak of what Lucio knew he saw and felt — the innkeeper's gaunt frame, the hollow facades and buildings, the lessening of everything he had left behind. His boots shifted on the cobbles as he looked over his shoulder. His eyes traversed the piazzetta, the dark entrance to Vicolo Giotto and back up over the battlement walls, where Lucio sat.

‘Some things are still the same, though,' his father said. ‘Some things never change,' he lied.

And it was Fagiolo's turn not to answer.

Vittorio had written to tell their father of their mother's death. Once the war was over and the Cori gruppo disbanded, he had come back to live in the village. Lucio didn't need to read the letter: he knew it wasn't the truth. Only he and Fabrizia knew what that was, and he hadn't spoken since the day he'd found his mother by the lake — not a single word, not even to his brother. The version of their mother's death that Vittorio knew was of Fabrizia's making. When they came down the mountain with the body, Lucio let her do the talking for both of them: Letia Onorati had had a seizure and fallen down an escarpment, she told the village. She'd scrambled down the scree to reach her, she said, touching her own cuts and bruises. But Letia had never woken up.

It was almost too plain an ending, too uneventful a punishment for the thief of Santa Lucia's crown, the Nazi whore, the partisan spy. The women crossed themselves and muttered their prayers, but they could not hide their hard mouths, their secret disappointment that Letia Onorati should have come to such an end, after all the turmoil she had caused them. And he watched the men's expressions soften and glaze still as they remembered her swaying skirts, her graceful neck as she carried her baskets. ‘What a waste,' was all they said, as if this had not been true of the entire war. ‘What a terrible waste.'

If there were rumours about a baby, Lucio didn't hear them. Fabrizia had wrapped his sister tightly and hidden her inside his mother's funeral clothes, only letting her tears fall when the coffin was finally sealed on them both. Perhaps Padre Ruggiero suspected his mother's infidelity, but if he did, he gave no sign of it.

‘Better such an accident than what might have been,' he said to Fabrizia, on the steps of San Pietro's after the funeral service. She glanced at Lucio nervously. ‘I mean the reprisals of the Allies, of course. Against Nazi collaborators.' His last words were an ominous whisper and he made the sign of the cross, as if he had named Lucifer himself. ‘There were such reports of the forces who came up from the Aurunci — French colonials from Morocco and Africa — black faces and even blacker deeds, all manner of iniquities. Padre Tommaso tells me three women in Frosinone took their own lives rather than live with the shame of it.' The priest shook his head sadly, but his eye was hard upon them.