Under the Rose (36 page)

With a yelp and a scutter of pebbles, Pat appeared at the mouth of the cave; he stumbled on the scum, picked himself up, collected his clumsy body for a last rush and threw himself on Bernie, hugging her knees and gobbling.

She stroked his large, cropped head. ‘Whatsa matter, Pat? It’s OK now. It’s all OK!’

There was a man behind him. Madge stared at him and he stopped to stare back. He had a muddled aghast look. His mouth was like a hole burnt in cloth: unformed, struggling as she had often seen Pat’s. Indeed he had a look of Pat: clumsy, bulbous-faced and as if, when he made a noise, it too might be a meaningless gobble. One hand held up his trousers while the other groped inside them to tuck in the tail of his shirt. He was making a poor fist of it and was not, it occurred to Madge to notice, the milkman. At last he managed to bring out some words: ‘Tan his arse for him!’ he shouted in an English accent. A tripper. ‘Little Peeping Tom….’ But he looked uncertainly around.

‘He’s afraid’, Madge guessed, ‘that we’ve got grown-ups with us!’ She was enraged by the man’s language and appearance. Her throat was knotted with anger and it was some seconds before she managed to yell: ‘Mister, you leave that kid alone! He’s not right! He gets fits!’

‘Shsh! Madge!’ Bernie begged.

‘I’ll say he’s not right!’ the man muttered. ‘My God!’ He began to button his pants and glanced at Pat whose face was buried in Bernie’s lap. ‘You don’t know what he was doing …’

‘And what were
you
doing, Mister? We could get the guards after you!’

‘Dickie!’ a woman’s voice called from the cave. Another
English voice. Not Bridie’s. ‘They’re only kids. No need to get your dander up.’

‘Oh hell!’ The man turned back. ‘Delights of Nature!’ He was muttering as he went into the cave. ‘Have to run into the blooming village idiot….’

‘Dickie!’ the woman’s voice called.

‘The guards!’ Madge yelled after him. ‘Cheek!’ She was boiling with disgust and fury. ‘Chasing Pat like that! Who does he think …’

‘Shut up, will you!’ Bernie whispered. ‘
I’m
going! Come on, Pat, I’ll give you a piggyback!’

Madge followed them. Half-way up the hill she took Pat from Bernie. He was heavy. ‘Gee,’ she gasped. ‘That fellow was worried!’

Bernie pondered. ‘I wonder what Pat saw? Sights I’ll bet! The English are terrible dirty!’

When they reached the end of the grassy slope, Madge eased Pat off her back and flopped down between two bushes. ‘Got to rest!’ she groaned. ‘I’m puffed!’ She found another bull’s-eye and gave it to Pat. He sat sucking it, his round face further distent by its bulge, his eyes inflamed. The girls looked at him with interest. The afternoon had been a washout. They felt cheated.

‘Think he saw
everything
?’

‘Must have!’

‘Well, there’s no getting it out of
him
!’ Madge spoke with a mixture of relief and regret.

Bernie began to giggle. ‘I dunno about that! He might
do
it for us!’

Madge stood up. ‘
Now
you’re talking!’ She began to unbuckle Pat’s belt. ‘Pat,’ she soothed, ‘show the game the man was playing! Show us, Pat!’ She gurgled encouragingly. ‘Let’s play, Pat!’ She peeled down the stiff, stained short trousers until she was confronted by his little boy’s body: yellowish, smelling of pee, with bits of fluff tucked under the loose skin.

‘
Madge!
He’ll tell! My Ma understands him! Madge!’

Madge ignored her. ‘Whose idea was it anyway? Spoilsport!’ She whispered to Pat: ‘Come on! Show us! What were they doing? Show!’

Bernie smirked. ‘OK then.
I
’ll show you something!’ She began tickling the loose flesh between the little boy’s legs.

The child let out a wail, pushed her violently from him and began to shiver again.

‘OK,’ his sister told him. ‘OK! So you don’t want to today! Hold your hair on!’

But Pat was down on his back now kicking with frenzy. Bernie stared at him with wet eye orbs. ‘Oh Madge! He’s having a fit!’ She began to cry. ‘He’ll tell, Madge!’ she moaned. ‘My Ma understands what he says and my Da’ll crease me! It’s all your fault. It’s a mortal sin.’

Madge was indignant. ‘It’s
not
my fault!’

‘It is so!’

‘Oh for Pete’s sake! There’s a
pair
of you!’ Madge tried to seize Pat who was writhing. Maybe it
was
a fit? His face was crab-red and there was spittle on his lips. ‘Pat,’ she begged. ‘Can’t you
do
anything?’ she shouted to Bernie. ‘At least shut up crying yourself! You’re only encouraging him!’

But Bernie just wept. ‘He’ll go off his head for good!’ she sobbed. ‘The doctor told Ma. If he’s excited. And it’ll be your fault, Madge Heron! All your fault! And what’ll me mother do? Uuughhuu!’ She joined her high shrill wail to Pat’s.

‘S
HUT UP
!’ Madge was distracted. ‘Both of you! Pat!’ His mouth was more than ever like a black hole burnt in his face. He was slobbering but had stopped howling. She picked him up. ‘Quiet,’ she told him. He peed on her. He must have felt it happening for he began to wail once more. She put him down. ‘Oh God, the filthy thing….’ She felt like crying herself. ‘W
ILL YOU AT LEAST QUIT CRYING
!’ she roared. ‘If anyone comes they’ll think we’re killing the little beast! S
TOP
!’ He wouldn’t. She smacked his face. For a moment he did stop
and stared at her, wall-eyed, too much white showing. Then he began to yell worse than ever. She picked up his belt – a proper man’s leather one cut down – and gave him a lash across the legs with it. ‘Now will you stop? Will you, will you?’ She was staring in horror at the pink welt on his poor pale idiot’s body before Bernie got to her. ‘What a beast I am,’ she thought. ‘All beasts!’ Bernie was upon her.

‘You stop that, Madge Heron, you …’

She gave Bernie a shove with her knee that caught her in the stomach and sent her rolling. ‘Beast,’ she thought, ‘but I won’t stop for her! I am a beast, I …’ and again she raised the belt but the child had crawled away and Bernie was on her again.

‘You’re out of your mind, Madge Heron!’ She tore the belt from Madge’s hand and, pulling one of Madge’s feet from under her, sent her flat on her face on the grass. Madge lay where she had fallen, not listening to Bernie’s shouting, not listening to the child who was now quieted and snuffling gently to itself a few yards off. ‘I can’t,’ she thought but couldn’t think what it was she couldn’t do. ‘Grass,’ she thought and buried her face in it. ‘Blot it out. Grow over it, let me forget it. Grass, nothing but grass….’

When her husband was reported missing on the Russian front, Nino's mother bore up and went to work to keep shoes on Nino's feet and bread in his mouth: two things which his father must have needed sorely at the end. Cardboard boots, if you could believe what you heard now, were what had been issued to Italian troops. Boots of smartly blackened cardboard or, at best, stiffened felt which melted to nothing in the snow. Thin coats. Inadequate rations. Nino imagined his dying father losing his toes and gnawing thirstily at an icicle. The gnawing face was the one in the photo-portrait on his mother's dressing table because, without it, Nino could not be absolutely sure of how his father used to look.

For a while he had confused him with Jesus who, in
his
portrait, was suffering from severe blood-loss. Nino's grandmother begged Jesus to bring Nino's father home, but Nino reasoned that a man so afflicted could not be of much assistance – and was proven right when a letter came confirming his father's death.

His mother cried then, and so did Nino, though his father was by now a mere smudge in his mind, fading along with Jesus who, said Gianni the cobbler, had been promoted by priests and Fascists to make us toe their line. ‘“Blessed are the poor in spirit,”' sneered Gianni and added bits of mock-Latin, ‘“for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven!” Thanks Lord, but we'd sooner have the Kingdom of Here.
Gratias agamus
tibi!
' Maybe it was real Latin? Gianni had been to school to priests, though he was now a Communist and had heard Russian comrades confirm the story of the cardboard boots.
The sign swinging over his shop was a golden boot and that too seemed like a confirmation. Nino ran messages for him, picking up worn shoes and delivering mended ones to customers who sometimes gave him a tip. Being a widow's boy had rewards.

It had drawbacks too though, and Nino wondered how their life might have been if his mother, instead of losing a husband, had lost a leg or been disfigured just enough for there to be no need to worry about her honour. As it was, she was the prettiest widow around – which was not the advantage you might think. Widows were fair game. Jokes about them made fellows dig each other dreamily in the ribs while lurking in the school bog, taking deep drags at forbidden cigarettes. Girls, it seemed, were different. They were shy and if you went too far with one you had to marry her. But widows wanted it – whatever ‘it' was. Sad addicts, they longed for what they'd once enjoyed, and when Nino's father was freezing his arse in the Russian snows, his young wife had surely been suffering the fiery frustrations of passion in her lonely bed.

When the other kids talked this way their words had such a zing that Nino was ready to join in their secretive snigger and let himself dream of sinking into soft, embracing snow. Glittering, he thought. Gaudy. Like rainbows on ice. Then he remembered his mother looking tired in her cotton pinny and grew confused. He looked at the shoes which she had polished for him last night, after working a ten-hour day. Snow and fire were hazardous, and so, it seemed, was the ‘it' that everyone wanted. Well, let them find it in some other family, decided Nino, who should have put a stop to all this before.

‘Alone, all alone in her mournful bed!' repeated his best mate, Pippo, who lived in the same
palazzo
and walked to and from school with him every day. ‘That's if it
was
lonely and not occupied by some randy draft-dodger.'

And though he knew that Nino's mother lived a hard and blameless life, Pippo let blue cigarette smoke snake
insinuatingly from his nostrils. He loved romancing, and his older brothers had given him a taste for smut.

‘Shut your face, moron!' Nino had to say then, though he knew Pippo would enjoy giving him a bloody nose which, sure enough, he did, for he was big for his age and his brothers had trained him to box. The worst of it was that, from then on, Nino's friends grinned whenever the word ‘widow' was pronounced. Sometimes it was only the ghost of a grin – or maybe, as they claimed, Nino was imagining things, having grown suspicious and nervy like a scalded cat? What was undeniable was that the word ‘widow' cropped up everywhere. In church the priest talked of the widow's mite, and at night in the piazza there was a drunk who sometimes started yelling that Italy had been widowed by the death of Mussolini and whose friends had regularly to make him pipe down. Then a poster for an operetta called
The Merry Widow
was put up all over town, and it was months before the last copies were overlaid by electoral notices – ‘Vote for La Pirra and De Gasperi!' – and by ads for films featuring Fabrizio, Toto and the alluring but worn-looking Anna Magnani. Maybe the reason she was so popular in those years was that she looked as if, like so many others, she had seen bad days but managed, pluckily, to survive.
She
looked like someone's widow – oh, why did he have to keep thinking of widows?

And why did he have to have a widowed mother? She was a good one in every other way: neat, sensible and not too strict, and her pasta was never mushy or underdone. Somehow, though, her niceness, like her prettiness, could be turned against her –
them
. As if it were bait.

‘A nice Mamma you've got there!'

You could sift that for smutty meanings and, even if you didn't, the words twisted in your mind. ‘Nice' how? In what way?

The most embarrassing thing happened in, of all places, the English-language class which the school had introduced because the British Institute was lending it a teacher with a
prepaid salary. He was Mr Williams, a lanky, long-haired man who read English poems aloud from a book. One was about a boy who worried about his mother. Mr Williams threw back his long hair and recited slowly so that the boys could study his accent.

The class fidgeted. The poem struck them as odd. Or silly? No: odd.

Finding that his audience wasn't with him, Mr Williams switched to a funny, fluting voice:

Baffled, the class heard him out as he explained about the English sense of humour. ‘Come on,' he pleaded jovially. ‘Laugh, chaps! This is a funny poem.' And read:

As it dawned on them that the joke was about concern for a mother's good name, the boys grew indignant. Good names were a sore subject and had been so ever since the Fascists said we had tarnished ours by betraying our German allies – only to be told that Fascism was what had tarnished it. Either way, hard feelings were hard to shake off, and of all people the English – who had egged on the betrayal – should be treating us with kid gloves. Instead, here was Mr Williams trampling on sacred values like motherhood and committing
oltraggio alia patria
. An insult to the nation, a major offence! The class looked ready to riot.

Then Pippo created a diversion. He explained why, for us, the poem wasn't funny. ‘Here,' he told the Englishman, ‘if there's no father, the son takes his place and if the boy is a widow's son like Nino here, then …'

Pippo meant no harm. Intent on enlightening Mr Williams, he forgot his earlier teasing of Nino – who, however, did not. The poem had caught him on the raw and Pippo's words pricked and prodded at his mortification.

‘If Nino's mother brought men to the house,' elaborated Pippo, ‘or if she wore a golden gown and went …'

It was pedagogic. Pippo was enjoying teaching the teacher and Mr Williams enjoying being taught. He smiled encouragingly at Pippo whose response – a raised eyebrow, the ghost of a grin? – caught the tormented Nino's eye and precipitated his attack. Hurling himself at his friend, Nino hammered his face with his fists. Pippo, after a stunned pause, drew back his own large fist and punched Nino – who was spindly with match-stick legs and wrists – so hard that he fell backwards into a desk. Pippo then leaped on him, blacked one of his eyes and began pulling the noose of his tie so tight that he might have strangled him if Mr Williams had not pulled him off.

‘You see,' Pippo taunted instructively. ‘Widows' sons end up crazy. They have the worst of all bargains. They're like cuckolds who don't even enjoy what's on offer themselves!'

Again the maddened Nino lunged, and again Pippo punched him. The
bidello
or school porter, a big, muscular fellow, had meanwhile been attracted by the noise and in two ticks cleared the room. Pippo was sent to the headmaster and, while the rest of the class went home, Mr Williams loosened Nino's tie, took him to the bathroom, washed his face and examined him to make sure he wasn't badly injured. Then he gave him a lift in his car to the nearest chemist's shop where the chemist, a friendly man, was just pulling down his shutters. He drew the two in, patched Nino up and produced brandy, which Nino took for medicinal reasons and Mr Williams from good fellowship, and the upshot was that the two men took Nino home to his mother who, in gratitude for their concern, invited them to join herself and Nino for a plate of pasta.

Afterwards Nino, packed off to bed and muzzy from the brandy, heard them singing as the chemist picked out a tune on Nino's father's old squeeze-box. Both he and Mr Williams liked opera and were soon talking of coming back on another evening with a guitar. Nino groaned from fear of scandal and of what the neighbours must think. Here was the widow entertaining not one man but two, while her guardian and chaperone – himself – was out of commission. This no one must ever know.

English class, after this, became a purgatory. Mr Williams' marked friendliness towards himself was, Nino felt, compromising, but an outright coldness between them could, on the other hand, arouse worse gossip, since it was known – everything was – that Mr Williams and the chemist had been back twice to the house, and that the two had taken Nino and his mother rowing on the Arno, followed by dinner at a trattoria.

He tried talking to his mother about the dubious propriety of this but she laughed, saying that there was safety in numbers and that the two men were lonely, living as they did
in noisy boarding houses where they enjoyed no privacy and were fobbed off with coffee made from toasted barley and sauce made from offal. It was only Christian, she insisted, to make them welcome in her large, pleasant flat in these tough times. Besides, they kicked in something to pay for the food. Then she pinched Nino's ear playfully and kissed the top of his head. She didn't take him – or life – seriously at all.

Some time after this she started travelling around Tuscany, selling cosmetics and doing demonstrations in small towns where ladies came to learn how to apply and remove make-up and to have massages and facials. She did this in
profumerie
and in the sort of small chemist's establishment which sold cosmetics as well as drugs. Maybe her friend the chemist had helped her get the job? She would, she explained, sometimes have to be away overnight and so Nino was going to have to stay with his grandmother. Yes, Nino, no arguments please. This was a promotion and we needed the money.

‘I don't want to hear any more of your nonsense and I sincerely hope you'll give up fighting and settle down to your studies.'

Nino's grandmother lived a train-ride outside the city and it would have cost too much for him to travel back and forth to his old school, but luckily it was now the summer vacation and who knew what the autumn would bring? His mother hoped to get a job back in town before long.

Being with his grandmother wasn't all bad. It got him away from the treacherous Pippo, into whom he would otherwise have bumped every day in the lift and on their shared stairway. He spent the first weeks of his holiday reading, and his mother came by every Sunday.

Then he and his grandmother had a tiff. She was stricter than his mother – more old-fashioned – and wouldn't let him go to the race track with some boys he had met. Nino decided to ask his mother for permission and, as his grandmother had no telephone, went out to ring from a café. There was no
answer at first, but as it was still very early in the morning – he had got up specially – and his mother might still be asleep, he let the phone ring and ring. Finally someone picked it up. A man's voice spoke. It was Mr Williams'. ‘Hullo,' it said, ‘hullo.
Pronto
.'

Nino hung up and left the café. Without thinking, he headed for the station, took the first train which was full of commuters, dodged the ticket collector, and reached the city just about the time his mother usually left for work. When he reached her flat, though, his key didn't work. Someone inside had drawn the bolt and when he knocked they didn't open.

Walking like a sleep-walker – there was, he knew, no sense to what he was doing but he did it anyway as if he was a wind-up toy which someone had set in motion – he went downstairs and round to the back of the house, where he began to shin up the drainpipe which, three floors above, ran past the balcony of their flat. It was a mad thing to do. Useless. What did he want? A scandal? Or to show her that he couldn't be fooled? Just to show her. Just … No, it was crazy. Foolish! He was on the point of giving up when someone hailed him from the second-floor balcony. It was Pippo.

‘Hullo. What are you doing?'

‘I forgot my key,' Nino lied.

It was months since their fight and Nino found that he wasn't angry with Pippo any more. He was angry with
her
! Let Pippo see her, he thought furiously. Let everyone! Maybe that would teach her!