The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (6 page)

‘— throw them out. Yes, Mrs Cleat, I remember,' Connie said in a grave voice. She had never once seen a gypsy shopping for groceries in the high street, or a forged coupon for that matter, and it amused her that the coupling of both rarities was the height of criminal masterminding in Mrs Cleat's head. The shopkeeper appraised her for a moment, her nose cocked upwards as if irony was something that could be smelled, like milk on the turn. Finally her attention flicked to the clock, and with a start she gathered herself together and hurried off to meet Aunty Bea in the memorial hall.

Connie let out a deep breath. These afternoons of independence had become like oases in the desert of her days. She could silence the bell and have the door wide open to the insects and the pollen-filled afternoon; she could hang up her white coat and serve at the counter with a tea towel tied about her waist and her hair free of its net; she could chat to the old Misses Penny, secretly slipping in whole biscuits and newly opened leaf tea among the barrel remnants and sack dust that Mrs Cleat offloaded to them
on special
.
These short hours she felt as though she was breathing air into the corners of herself, that her existence might not be as paper thin as she had grown to believe. Inevitably there were consequences to pay on Mrs Cleat's return, but even they were worth the brief time she spent alone, exerting the addictive pleasure of her own will.

She was not the only person to enjoy the Christian Ladies' mural meetings. Mr Gilbert now collected his groceries in the hour between the school bell and Mrs Cleat's return. Connie dealt with the after-school flurry of children with hot pennies and coupons from their mothers, and in the lull that followed began to pre-empt Mr Gilbert's needs, navigating her way around his tastes and his ration book.

‘New Government Cheddar in today. I've kept you the first cut. You might have it for your tea,' she called to him from her ladder behind the counter, having heard his greeting at the door. ‘I've got your Branston, too, and some flour and tea.' She had her back to him and an arm reaching into the dim recesses of an upper shelf. ‘And shoe polish … there, light brown.' With some effort she freed the tin from above the cartons and packets, and waved it triumphantly over her shoulder. ‘Should match your Logues. I knew we had that colour somewhere.'

‘Do you see,' she heard Mr Gilbert say, ‘how she looks after me? And what attention to detail! Had you even noticed my shoes were tan … and rather worse for wear?'

He laughed and she turned her head, aware that they were not alone. One of the Italians was with him: the shorter, leaner of the two brothers. He stood behind the counter, his hands in his trouser pockets — almost brazenly, she thought, like he had been coming into Cleat's all his life. She saw his gaze travelling up her legs on the ladder, resting on the run in her stocking that she had stopped with nail varnish and tried to position under the hem of her skirt. She hurried down and felt the need to put on her white coat. When she had finished busying herself with its buttons, the Italian was still scrutinising her, without apology. He seemed mildly amused. She noticed his skin was golden and glossy as a nut.

Mr Gilbert waved a hand between them. ‘Vittorio, this is —'

‘The girl with the bicicletta … on the hill.' He brought a hand from his pocket and clenched it around an imaginary handlebar, whistling through his teeth.

‘And you're the whistler,' Connie said. She started to dust off the scale, before feeling like Mrs Cleat and stopping herself.

‘Oh good, you've met already,' Mr Gilbert said matter-of-factly, and he clapped the boy on the back, grinning. ‘Splendid.'

The Italian tilted his head to the side. ‘Victor Onorati,' he said. ‘My name is Vic.'

‘Oh, that's right. No Italian. He wants no Italian.
Everyting Inglish
,
Inglish
,' Mr Gilbert mimicked. His hand lingered on the boy's shoulder as they laughed, and their complicity caused a pang in Connie's stomach, like hunger, but for what she did not know.

‘Vittorio here has come bearing gifts. We thought you might like to share them with us. Come for tea at the schoolhouse?'

‘Me?' she said, and felt immediately stupid for it.

‘Why not you? Vittorio keeps saying he deserves someone prettier than me to practise his English on, isn't that right,
Vic
?' The boy seemed unashamed at the comment, whether it was true or not. ‘Come on, Connie. It will do you good,' Mr Gilbert said.

She sensed her neck and cheeks becoming hot. It wasn't just the compliment or the unexpected invitation. It was the Italian's composure, as if he already knew the outcome of this meeting and was interested simply in the manner in which it would unfold. She thought of the few village boys his age who came into the shop, often in pairs, their chummy bravado as they made a show of ignoring her while browsing the shelves, before buying what they always bought: five Woodbines or a tube of shaving soap. It felt seductive to be looked at so directly, to be examined quite patently as something desirable and worthy of attention. Before she had even thought through what would happen if she got home late without telling Aunty Bea, she found herself nodding.

‘Excellent, then,' Mr Gilbert said, and began to collect the bags from the counter, thrusting them one after the other into his student's chest. ‘Come along, Vittorio. If you seriously intend to become a Vic you're going to have to stop all that staring. It won't do around here, old boy — making the girls blush to their bobby pins.' He squeezed Vittorio behind the neck and she watched them leaving, waiting for Mr Gilbert to lift his hat at her through the bay window. But he passed distractedly, steering the boy by his shoulder, and Connie noticed an ease, a physical affability that she had never seen between two men walking on the streets of Leyton until then. A liveliness had settled in Mr Gilbert's manner, a brightness in his face that had not been there before, and for the first time she could see the man he might have been fifteen or twenty years ago, the man he might have been at her own age. She found herself curious about this change the Italian boy had effected in him, but she now understood the rankling in her stomach was not jealousy. It was apprehension. Staring through the bull's-eye pane in the shop window, she sensed something shift, some tiny fracture — as if she was at the centre of a kaleidoscope, and everything about her was on the cusp of something new.

Even without the invitation to tea at the schoolhouse, the hour between Mrs Cleat's return and closing time on a Tuesday was always the longest of the week for Connie. Mrs Cleat atoned for her sin of leaving the shop by having Connie perform penance on her behalf. This took the form of camphor-sprinkling, chalkboard-blacking, potato-sorting, and any other creative shop maintenance Mrs Cleat could devise to keep Connie busy, while giving her a blow-by-blow account of the battle for high art fought over teacups in the church hall.

When Mrs Cleat finally released her, wearing half the dirt of that morning's potato delivery, she felt she was tumbling into the schoolhouse like one of the grubby-mouthed lane kids. She stood on Mr Gilbert's doorstep, feeling ordinary, regretting her timid knock but too afraid to leave for fear she'd already been spotted through the half-open door. She heard voices, an air of tension from deep inside. Something slammed. She backed down from the threshold, but as she hesitated, the door swung wide in the breeze and she saw straight down the corridor to the kitchen, where Mr Gilbert was hovering over a figure seated at his table. At first she thought it was Vittorio, until she saw the broader set of the shoulders, the coarser hair of the brother she had met in the rain at Repton's gate.

His head was thrown back, and a tea towel across his shoulder appeared to be stained with blood. Mr Gilbert glanced down the hallway as she was turning to leave. He hurried towards her, but instead of offering a greeting, he reached around and shut the front door. His jovial mood of that afternoon was gone and his face was pale.

‘Should I go?' she asked.

‘No,' he said. ‘No, don't, Connie. I think it would be better if you stayed.'

In the kitchen, Connie saw Vittorio leaning against a dresser. He had a paring knife balanced in his hand, and he straightened and put it down as she came in. Across from him on the Aga range, something was frying, its fragrant steam tangible in the golden light of late afternoon. It might have thrilled her to discover Mr Gilbert's walled garden beyond the back door, which was open to the summer evening, or to find both Italians in the same room, among the unfamiliar aromas of the food. But the boy sitting at the table had his back to her, and as she came alongside him he stood so quickly that the chair fell behind him. Without picking it up, he strode away into the garden. Vittorio called to him in Italian, but his brother was silent, pacing the walls of espaliered fruit trees.

‘Connie, sit down,' Mr Gilbert said. ‘Talk to Vittorio for a minute.' He rummaged inside a kitchen cupboard and drew out an old Air Raid Precautions tin before grabbing a clean tea towel and stepping outside.

Vittorio had picked up the chair and was bending to clean something from the floor: it was a pool of broken eggs.

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘My brother …' He scooped the eggs and their shells into a cloth and juggled them, dripping, into the sink.

‘What happened to him?' she asked.

He avoided her eye. His mood was so altered from their encounter in the shop that he was like another person. He took the frying pan from the Aga and lowered the lid back onto the plate. She waited.

‘Nothing,' he said at last.

‘It doesn't seem like nothing.'

He gave an empty laugh. ‘Nothing. My brother does nothing and thinks too much. Me?' He muttered something in Italian under his breath. ‘Me, maybe the other way round.'

Mr Gilbert's voice drifted in from the garden. ‘… stitches, yes … why ever not? … no, no … sit down …' She saw him bring the boy around on the grass, making him sit in a wicker chair arranged on the patio. His eyelid was nearly swollen shut, and there was dried blood around his nose, a split above his eyebrow and one in his lower lip, which he explored with the tip of his tongue. She looked back at Vittorio, but he was busy shuffling a wooden spatula into the contents of the pan.

‘It's a waste, this eggs,' was all he said. ‘Now it's too thin, the frittata. No good.' His lips came back to rest together, full as a girl's. He tilted the pan to show her. At the stove he began to slice through what appeared to be an omelette, but smelled like something else entirely. Around the kitchen counter were stalks of herbs and the skins of garlic, which she had seen listed in French recipes in
The Lady
but had never actually tasted. Next to the board lay the chopped remains of baby marrows, still firm and glossy green, and she wondered why they had been picked so soon. She couldn't remember the last time she had seen so many eggs in one pan. Aunty Bea wouldn't keep chickens because of her phobia about rats, and so they were stuck with their ration and the odd gift from neighbours, which was usually stretched into a batter or various bland and pasty puddings. She watched Vittorio at work in the kitchen, his hands quick and skilful in the orange light. She had never seen a man cooking before, and he seemed to her like some magical, slightly fractured version of his sex: the flawed character of a fairytale, fascinating but cryptic; or one of the Romanies she had once seen through the door of a vardo, scouring a pot, as she cycled past Penton Gorse.

‘Who did that to your brother?' she asked.

‘Lucio?' He spoke the name quietly, with a soft
sh
in the middle, as if he wanted to silence her.

‘I'm sorry. It's really not any of my business,' she said.

He snorted. ‘Of course your business. You want this bloody man at the table?' She wanted to smile, to explain the joke, but it didn't seem right when outside she could hear the low, fraught voice of Mr Gilbert as he tended to the boy's wounds.

‘I don't think your brother expected me to be here, did he?' she asked.

‘Lucio,' he shushed her again with the name. ‘Always he's in the bad place, the bad time.'

He didn't offer anything more, so she edged towards the patio doors, intending to see if Mr Gilbert needed her help.

‘He got in the way,' Vittorio said.

‘Of what?'

He began getting plates down from the dresser. ‘I wanted to give Mr Gilbert something, you understand? He never takes the money.'

‘For your English lessons?'

He nodded. ‘He say,
You cook for me. You cook me some Italian food, Vic
.
Is enough
. So I take some of the cracked eggs from Repton's barns. Hundreds of eggs we pack into the truck every day. Cracked ones, we send to the Big House. We never take and they never give.'

Connie had often seen the damaged eggs piled up in the stoneware bowl in Mrs Cartwright's kitchen at Leyton House. She also knew that those eggs didn't always end up in Mr Repton's afternoon teacake. Aunty Bea liked to say that Edi Cartwright would filch the Eucharist wine for the black market if she ever thought to go into a church.

‘We feed the chickens,' Vittorio continued, ‘we clean the barns, we kill the rats, we pick the eggs. Even I see sometimes this Repton watching us — but never one single cracked egg he give to us. To him, my father is still prisoner.' His shoulders fell. ‘In Italy, we had eggs … in England only this … this
dust
.' He motioned to the packet of powdered eggs on the counter.