The Italian Romance (12 page)

Lilian had arrived at the prison camp squashed in the back seat of Councillor McGrath's Ford. It was a stinking hot day. They'd opened all the windows and her hair had tangled badly in the breeze, but to their occasional enquiries she'd politely replied, ‘No, I like it.' Her right arm had reddened in the sun, perched as it was on the car window. The men had asked her permission to remove their jackets and she had given it, not that they had waited, and they all sat in their shirt-sleeves and braces. The Anglican minister was in a paroxysm as he attempted to remove his black-clad thigh as far as possible from the young Mrs Malone's slender form. She also was painfully aware of the proximity. The door handle stuck into her hip, but she wriggled even further towards it. The journey out from town was very long.

They climbed out. Her legs were stiff. She smiled falsely at the Reverend Forster. ‘Oh, dear,' she said, and lifted her knee.

‘Me, too,' he said, and he lifted his to give it a rub. ‘You needn't worry. Your young bones.' He blushed and attempted to move quickly away. He walked into the raised boot. Lilian turned immediately to view the barbed wire fence. He'd escaped by the time she heard her name called and had turned back. Councillor
McGrath waved his hat in front of his face. He was saying, ‘And this is the young lady reporter, Mrs Bernie Malone.'

Lilian's hand clutched at the side of her dress as she said, ‘How do you do, sir?'

‘Always happy to meet the press, Mrs Malone. I'm the c.o., citizen military reservist, and we have the 7th P.O.W. guard here. I hope you can get a good story out of us,' Mr Finch said. ‘Can we get you out of this sun?'

‘Thank you,' she said.

He put his hand on her back to guide her, as a father would. ‘Gentlemen,' he said. ‘How about some morning tea before we begin?'

There were two car-loads of them, officials and dignitaries, jackets slung over their arms, hats on their heads. Mr Finch led them to a long building, wooden, recently painted a pale green, with a corrugated iron roof. To hide her nervousness as much as anything, she unclasped her handbag and dug inside it for her reporter's notebook and pencil. As she walked, feeling his eyes on her, respectful perhaps, she flipped over the cover with the back of her hand, practised, casual. She scrawled, ‘corrugated iron roof'.

She had to step up from the brown grass to the wooden floor. ‘This is the mess, Mrs Malone, where they eat. Our offices are down the end there.'

The mayor of the town stepped up after her. ‘Oh, this is nice, Mr Finch, very nice indeed. You've done a good job here, sir.'

‘Thank you, Mr Mayor. The prisoners built it themselves. Good builders, the Eyeties, in my experience.'

‘Marvellous,' the Mayor said. He pulled his large, white handkerchief from his trousers' pocket and wiped his forehead.

The heavy footsteps of the men rang in the empty hall. The room was run with long tables, each with a seating bench on either side. The guests all seemed quietened as they came through the doorway, a little uncertain of their individual roles. The
Anglican minister cleared his throat twice before he said, ‘What time do they eat, sir?'

Mr Finch held his wrist up, as if his watch would tell him the answer. ‘Next meal at thirteen hundred hours, Reverend.'

‘Ah,' the Reverend said.

Lilian wrote down, ‘lunch=3 (1 o'clock)'.

‘Thirteen hundred hours,' she heard someone behind her tell another. The men seemed to shake themselves into a bigger world, where time was kept, where the will joined a wider will, meandering creeks into an ocean of solid meaning. The men, one by one, took off their hats. Mr Finch walked down the aisle between two rows of tables. He walked like a military man. He had been in the Great War. The others straightened. Their steps had more the rhythm of a march, now, on the ringing boards.

Mr Finch lifted one leg over the bench, and then the other. He put out his hand to Lilian, as if to help her. ‘Can you get in?' he said.

‘Oh, yes,' she said. She held the skirt of her summer dress down on her knee, and lightly stepped over, too. She was glad she hadn't worn the pencil-line gaberdine skirt her mother had made for her.

He waited for her to sit before he sat himself, and he said, ‘Gentlemen.'

The ten or so men took a few moments to settle. The benches squealed on the wooden floor. They laid their hats on the table.

And like magic, two men pushed through the kitchen doors wheeling a trolley. Lilian, when she realised they were prisoners, felt suddenly shy of them; she pretended to take great interest in her notebook as the trolley was wheeled up the length of the hall.

One of the men said, in accented English, ‘Good morning, sir, Signori. A very good cup of tea for you.'

‘Thank you, Lieutenant, yes, we could all do with a cuppa,' Mr Finch said.

The Mayor picked his hat up by the crown and waved it at his face. ‘In this heat,' he said. ‘Whoo. Too right.'

The official from Canberra, seated beside him, said, ‘Nothing cools you down like a good cup of tea.'

The men agreed, each in their different ways, and as they were salving their discomfort at being served by an Italian officer, prisoner-of-war, he himself was busy pouring out individual cups, the handle of the giant pot in one brown, sturdy hand and the metal grip above the spout in the other. His assistant, whose rank they could not determine from the civilian shirt he was wearing over his army trousers and boots, held up one cup, then the next. Hot, stewed tea poured from the spout.

The assistant placed the first cup and saucer in front of Lilian. She lifted the notebook for him, placed it on her lap and murmured, ‘Thank you.'

‘Prego,' she heard him say, quietly.

She peeled her gloves off under the shield of the table.

The cups and saucers and the clatter they made, the teaspoon tinkle, dissipated tension. The men began to talk. The Italian lieutenant said, ‘And milk, for the tea,' as he placed a jug of frothed milk down. ‘Also sugar,' he said. Almost before he'd deposited it, teaspoons, some already wet, dipped into the bowl. The Mayor plied his tea with three spoonsful. Lilian attempted to find an avenue in, but as each man jabbed at it, and shimmering, white granules began to drop across the table, she hesitated. The lieutenant appeared at her shoulder. ‘For you, Signorina,' he said. His hand enveloped the rim of a second sugar bowl. ‘Ah,' he said. ‘Excuse. Signora.' He had been looking at her left hand. She half-turned, uncertain, said, ‘Thanks very much,' and grabbed at the notebook which began to slide from her lap.

‘And now,' the lieutenant said, ‘with permission, sir, may I present the cake.'

Mr Finch said, ‘Ohh!', approvingly, as the Italian placed a large plate on the table and, magician-like, lifted the muslin fly-guard. The cake was three-tiered, a light sponge from the airy look of it, and oozing with fat cream which glistened at them. Across the top
layer, planted in cream like a garden, was a bed of strawberries snowed over with icing sugar.

‘Oh, my goodness,' said the Canberra man, and the clergyman half-stood at his bench and said, ‘Well, we have to thank you gentlemen, indeed.'

‘Please,' the lieutenant said, himself pleased, ‘enjoy your little snack. Here are the plates, thank you.' And he fired an Italian phrase at his compatriot, who bent down to the lower shelf of the trolley and rattled the bread plates into his hands.

Mr Finch said, ‘Very good, Lieutenant. We'll be out of your hair in about fifteen minutes.'

‘Yes, sir.' The Italian nodded to the other, directed a glance at the kitchen, and the trolley moved off. When they pushed through the kitchen doors, Mr Finch said to his gathering, in a low voice, ‘They do a lot of work here themselves. Better to keep them busy.'

‘Oh, yes,' the Mayor said.

Lilian, who had been sipping at the strong tea, put her cup down, picked up her pencil and wrote in the notebook balanced on her knee, ‘Itals do most work'.

‘But you'll find we're a very organised outfit,' Mr Finch said. ‘We run a tight ship.' He looked down the table at the cake, which was already half its original size. ‘Here, my dear, help yourself to some cake,' he said to Lilian. He picked up his own plate, eager.

‘Can I get you a slice, Mr Finch?' she said.

He handed her his plate before she'd finished speaking. ‘Thank you, my dear. Before it's all gone.' He laughed as if he were not serious.

‘Well now, Mr Finch,' the Mayor said. ‘Where are these jokers from?'

Mr Finch's eye was on his slice of cake, which Lilian now handed to him. He relaxed as he put it down in front of him. ‘Picked up in the Western desert, for the most part. North Africa. Got a few civilians, too, Germans some of them.'

Lilian pinched a strawberry from the cream and put it quietly in her mouth. It was slightly tart. With the fingers of her other hand, she smoothed the page of her notebook hidden on her lap.

‘How's the cake?' Mr Finch leaned towards her and said.

‘Very nice,' she said, her mouth full. She tried to smile.

‘Good girl,' he said.

The party left the mess hall by a back door. The sun was glaringly bright. Lilian pushed her straw hat forward on her head, but it was too late. She'd caught a bounce of light and her eyes began to water. She shielded them with her hand as she stepped down on to the white-pebbled path. Her elbow touched Mr Finch's arm. She was blinded. She walked along in the stream of men, their bigness, the exuberant smell of their sweat, surrounding her, seeing nothing as it was, only jaggedly, diamond-shaped.

Music started up, abruptly. The brassy, off-note blare of a trumpet made her shoulders jump.

‘Oh, yes,' Mr Finch was saying. He halted, and she had to pull herself up short before she bumped into him. She rubbed her eyes gently, almost casually, so that none of the men would notice her distress. ‘The camp band,' he said. ‘They've got up a few tunes for you, gentlemen. And lady, of course.'

‘Very nice,' Lilian said. She found her handkerchief in her bag, and blew her nose quietly. She patted at the ducts of her eyes. Through the blur, she could make out half a dozen men, dressed in blue-grey uniforms, three of them with their pants tucked into long, shining boots. The others, two trumpeters and a trombonist, had lost their shiny boots somewhere, or hadn't warranted them in the first place. And facing them was the conductor, who didn't have boots, either. He waved his small stick at his band like a clockwork man, up, down, left, right. He was, at the same time, smiling broadly at the gang of visitors who were clustered like sheep in a pen. The band tuned itself up as the first piece progressed. It was unrecognisable, and short. The audience clapped.

‘Oh, lovely,' Lilian heard the Mayor say, and the clergyman, at her shoulder, swallowed very loudly near her ear and said, ‘Bravo.'

The conductor half-bowed at the waist, and turned back, serious this time, to wave his stick at the band. They started up again. This time, the listeners knew the tune. They were excited by their knowledge and laughed and told each other what it was, and a smattering of hand-clapping broke out. And then, one by one, they joined in, even, very reluctantly, Lilian. Only one or two knew more than the first couple of lines and these brave souls carried on. The others followed, a bar behind, as best they could till the whole performance fizzled out and the band was left to finish it up. But the applause was warm and behind it, on the cusp of consciousness, a rush to ford the boundaries between the two groups which stood in the physical sense only twelve feet apart.

Lilian looked down at her pad. She wrote the word ‘band' and, feeling like a fool among fools, began to wish herself away. She drew five heavy lines under the word. The pressure of her pencil on the paper relieved her somewhat.

Mr Finch perhaps also had become impatient. He said, ‘Thank you, thank you,' loudly and strode forward on to the grass. The band played on for them as the troupe marched by. Lilian had to hurry to keep up with the commander. He paraded them on to another dirt pathway, which led to a similar, long building. She saw four men, straight-backed, appear from around the side. They barely noticed the inspection tour, their attention caught by another man who came towards them from the direction of an outflung shed. The four halted and raised their right arms. He, smaller than all of them, stopped briefly, took the salute, nodded to them, and walked on. He glanced at Lilian's party. He did not care for them, she thought.

Mr Finch, she presumed from his demeanour, had not noticed the man. He opened the door and gestured her inside, though he barely looked at her. But as she stepped up, and the sun's glare
was replaced, inconsistently, with silence, she heard him say to someone behind her, ‘Fascists. Some of them are, here.'

Light streamed in and fell on the scrubbed floor and, between the large windows, beds were headed up against the walls. She stood still while the party entered, their eyes widening as they looked down the ward, overhead at the high, arched ceiling, at the white-coated medic who walked as quiet as a monk up the aisle towards them. Mr Finch saluted him. ‘Doctor,' he said, ‘may we trouble you with our inspection.'

The doctor, equally polite, replied, ‘Certainly, sir. Please allow me to accompany you.' His dark eyes ran only fleetingly over the Australians. He looked down at Lilian's feet, and she felt embarrassed.

Mr Finch moved forward to walk beside the Italian. The two of them took slow, steady steps, church steps. The Australian's voice dropped low. And so, around her, the other men also moved slowly, lowering their voices reverently. They walked behind the other two like the body of an armadillo. Lilian felt the wash of their discomfort. The men near her seemed too hot, too red-faced, too out of place, as they slow-marched past bed after bed of wounded or ill prisoners-of-war. Some of them took their hats off, others put theirs on, or swung them from their too big hands.