The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (41 page)

Lucio took Fabrizia's elbow in his hand, felt her weight shift.

‘Evidence again, is it not, of Montelupini's singular blessings?' Padre Ruggiero held two fingers up towards Montemezzo and Santa Lucia's grotto, running his other hand over the crucifix on his chest. ‘Not one of our women touched, thanks to the saint.'

‘Not one, Padre,' Fabrizia repeated. But when Lucio led her away, he saw her eyes were opaque and flat, unblinking, as he had seen sometimes in animals resigned to the snare, the life in them all but extinguished.

Fagiolo was right. His father was stockier, stronger, like some of the men Lucio had seen return from working factories in the north before the war. At the osteria, they joked that being a prisoner suited him, but not everyone laughed. His father remained quiet. Lucio understood why when he saw what else he had brought home.

In their kitchen the next morning, his father reached into the pockets of his jacket and brought out a gold watch and a gold chain. He laid them on the kitchen table.

‘How did you get them?' Vittorio asked, picking up the watch and examining it.

‘Farm wages … cutting hedges, weaving bulrushes,' their father muttered.

Vittorio whistled. ‘Ma-donna.' He weighed the chain and crucifix in his hand. ‘So you're saying the English are smart enough to invent machines for the harvest, for drilling seed and threshing, but they'll pay good money for someone to weave them a basket?' He pulled in his chin sceptically, but Lucio could see he was hanging on every meagre word their father dropped about life in England.

When the Cori gruppo had disbanded, Vittorio, like so many of his comrades who had had their fingers in the flow of supplies and requisitions, took to profiting from the burgeoning black market. His brother was a natural, always scouting for the next deal, for anything American or English, making connections as far afield as Montemezzo, Valmontone, even Rome. Lucio continued to work their land without complaint, knowing his brother could put more food on the table with one carton of Chesterfields, one shabby and oversized Montgomery, than he was able to after months of labour in the fields. For Vittorio, everything about the war's victors was superior: their cigarettes, their alcohol, their food, their clothes. He could tell now how desperately Vittorio wanted to hear more of that land of industrialisation, of opportunity, the place where he believed the future lay. Lucio wanted to hear it himself, to believe it too, but if it was so, then why had their father come back? Why hadn't he simply sent for them?

Vittorio let the chain fall to the table, and it rattled like rain on the corrugated roof of the stable. ‘Gold is good. It will hold its value,' he said. ‘You might as well light a fire with the lira, but we can do a lot with this.'

‘Can we?' their father said. His voice was a monotone, but his eyes were restless as spring flies. ‘But what
I'm
going to do is go to Monteferro.'

‘What for?' Vittorio asked.

‘I want to trade them.'

‘Already? What do you need?' His brother was clearly disappointed that this first taste of finery was to disappear as quickly as it arrived. But Lucio also saw Vittorio's eagerness to show their father what he had become. ‘I can get things for you, you know. I've got connections now, Papa. I know a lot of people.'

‘Really? You can get things?' Lucio remembered the way his father had of making people question themselves. The war hadn't changed him that much. Lucio's disappointment felt suddenly heavy in his stomach.

‘Well … I can get cigarettes, some liquor, coffee,' Vittorio persisted. ‘Tell me what you need.'

‘What I need? What I need is a headstone. You think they sell those on the black market?'

They were silent. Their father looked up, but it wasn't Vittorio he had in his sights. Lucio felt the weight of his gaze fall upon him now, perhaps for the first time since he'd returned.

Through the window above the sink, where his mother had liked to stand, he could see the old spinster, Ardemira, beating a threadbare rug over her balcony. Her hands were almost blue about the broom handle, and as the dust rose up the alley, he felt each blow in his bones like a release. When she stopped beating, the absence of it was like a great void growing in his chest.

He pictured the polished squares of marble in the cemetery, the sepia photographs of the dead strangely alike, rows and rows of them under the cypresses, and the seal of raw cement behind which his mother lay. After the funeral, he had seen the attendant scratching her name in slow, laborious cursive with a stub of chalk:
Onorati, L
. Rain had started to fall. Nothing more than a brief summer cloudburst that unsettled the dust and made a smell like iron filings.
Onorati, L
, the attendant wrote again, so there were two strokes over some of the letters, like the memory of another name. Letia Raimondi, Letia Onorati, Rondinella, Leti. So many names after all, he thought, but did anyone really know her? He thought of the baby, the sister he had held in the morning light outside the cave, her milky stare. Nameless and unknown. Did it make any difference?

‘I won't have the family name chalked on the cement like some pauper's,' his father said, his lips barely moving as if his mouth was seized with disgust. ‘We'll do that for her, at least.' He fought to keep the accusation from his voice, but Lucio saw it in his face every time his father looked at him. He watched him run the chain into his cupped palm and close his fist over it. ‘Whatever's left, we'll use towards replacing the saint's crown.'

Lucio knew then that he had heard the rumours. But how many of them his father believed, he could only guess.

‘Do you mean you're going to use all this to buy a crown for some statue?' Vittorio asked.

Their father was already making his way towards the door, his back to them, a sign that the conversation had ended. He reached for his hat. Vittorio had removed the watch and was dangling it on two fingers, shaking his head. ‘You don't understand,' he said. ‘You can't until you see how much we've lost, how much we could recoup with this.'

Their father stood with the door handle in his fist. Lucio studied his back, straight and stiff, the muscles of his neck that ran in two proud cords, so rigid he seemed unable to turn his head to them. He remembered his mother's back at the window as Padre Ruggiero took the last bottles of Raimondi Gold from the kitchen table. Lucio understood what his father was trying to do, the desperate, flawed reasoning of it, his own form of penance. But did he truly believe it would buy back their honour, atone for what his mother had done, silence all the rumours — Otto, the money and supplies, the saint's crown — sins to which Lucio had also been a party? He wanted to show him his mistake, laugh in his father's face as Nonno Raimondi would have done, or shout out the whole brutal reality of what had been. But he didn't. The truth of it only floated in his head and drifted away, settling again somewhere deep and silent within him, like the silty sediment in the lake.

Each night, he sat on the battlement walls, witnessing his father knock on doors and shutters, collecting what paltry treasures he could from the villagers to trade and sell, making up the shortfall for the crown. He came back with religious medallions and broken communion necklaces, long-hoarded crochet work and linen raided from wedding chests, cosseted medals from the last war — all the hidden things that even the Nazis, the gruppi, the Allies wouldn't have wanted had they found them. He made a mendicant of himself until he had enough. Enough for Padre Ruggiero to commission a goldsmith in Rome, enough for the Bishop of Segni to come for the consecration on the saint's day that winter.

But even then it wasn't enough for his father. Perhaps it was just Lucio who noticed it. His father prayed to the effigy in San Pietro's that December night, expecting to find some sense of atonement, some resolution there. But all Lucio saw in the candlelight was the shadow of his father's cheeks, hollow and angular once more, the uncertainty of his open mouth. He watched his eyes casting about the altar, hard and restive, and saw there was no peace in them, only regret and yearning.

He'd once overheard someone at the osteria saying his mother had made Aldo Onorati a lost man. He hadn't understood at the time what they meant, but now he thought he did, and he knew they were wrong. Seeing his father there in the church, Lucio sensed that without her, he was more adrift than ever before. Replacing the crown had been a distraction and, now it was done, Lucio realised that even the saint couldn't help his father stop loving his mother, bitterly and in spite of himself. And he knew that, like the rest of the village, his father needed someone to blame. When those dark eyes settled on him, Lucio felt every inadequacy, every failing and disappointment of his life, as if he was living each one all over again.

Leyton
1950

All day at Cleat's, Connie found she was revisiting old images of herself, as though the painting at St Margaret's had flicked a switch in her, flooding light along a dim and dusty corridor that showed the approach of someone she'd thought had gone for good. After work she cycled home slowly, preoccupied, and when she got back to the house in Grimthorpe Lane, she nearly tripped over something left sitting in the hallway. She put on the lamp and saw it was a suitcase. She'd never seen it before and was surprised her aunt had call for such a thing, when she hardly ever stepped foot beyond Leyton. She went into the kitchen and found Aunty Bea sitting at the table.

‘Whose case is that in the hall?' Connie asked, leaning against the sink to rub her shin. But the instant the words had left her mouth she knew the answer. Her aunt wouldn't look up, only poured the tea into a single cup and returned her hand to an envelope lying next to the milk jug. She tapped its edge along the table, business-like, aligning the contents. She'd been waiting.

‘Sit down.'

Behind her, on the dresser, Connie saw the urn.

‘Mrs Livesey brought it back,' her aunt said with manufactured calm. ‘Found it lying on the green.' Her face flushed as if beyond her control, and then she hissed, ‘Janet Livesey … of all people!' Her words were barely a whisper. She almost seemed frightened of her own rage, wrangling it like some unwieldy, amorphous burden that bulged and seeped out in unexpected places.

‘Is that what you care about?' Connie said. ‘Not what I did, but what people might
think
?' She refused her aunt even the compliance of sitting. ‘Well, I don't regret it. I'd do it again if I had to.'

Strangely, Aunty Bea began to nod. She turned to Connie at last, and her smile was thin and forced. ‘I used to say things like that at your age. But, you see, you
do
regret — that's the very nature of getting older. That's what you're left with.'

Not me
, Connie wanted to throw at her.
You, perhaps, but not me
. But all of a sudden she was full of doubt; she couldn't be sure. They were silent. The faucet let out a dribble of water that made Connie shiver. Half of her wanted to bury her face in her aunt's neck; the other half wanted to take it in her hands and squeeze as hard as she could.

‘You'll take this with you — down to Luton. Use it to get yourself set up.' Aunty Bea slid the envelope across the table like she was dealing Connie a hand of cards. She could see it contained money. ‘He left it to you … in his will.' Her aunt waved her hand in the direction of the sitting room. ‘And them books by the wireless. You can take those, too.'

Connie sat down, the shock of it settling in her limbs. ‘So you know about Luton?'

Her aunt stood abruptly, the tea things rattling on the tabletop. ‘D'you think so little of me?'

‘I could have thought so much more, if only you'd let me.'

The clock on the mantel took up where the soft clink of the cups ended. Connie thought she saw a genuine sadness creeping into her aunt's face.

‘That's where we're different, then,' Aunty Bea said. ‘Because I always thought so much of you, regardless.'

Connie reached for her aunt's hand. ‘Aunty Bea …'

But she turned to the door and shook her head, her hair the colour of autumn leaves against a winter dusk. ‘Just go.'

Fossett found her at the bottom of the rise. He'd pulled up at the gate in the farm's truck after feeding the birds in the spinney. She'd struggled down the hill in the half-light, balancing the case on the handles of her bike, all her plans teetering as precariously now, her mind swimming with regret and doubt. When she reached Lucio's gate she couldn't help but sit there until the dark came, watching the copse by the brook, scanning the ridge and across towards the Big House, until she'd given up and the tears had come.

‘Now then, what's this?' Fossett asked, ducking his head to catch her eye. ‘Off somewhere? And so late? You waiting for someone?'

When she didn't answer he helped her down from the fence and opened the passenger door of the truck. ‘Well, come on now, lovely. En't no one coming down here this late.'

She sat in the lumpy seat and listened to him lifting her bike and the suitcase onto the bed of the truck. She pressed the heels of her hands into her face before he got behind the wheel and started the engine.