The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (12 page)

These were her thoughts as she reached the track leading to Bythorn Rise. She was so caught up in them that she nearly missed the figure sitting on the gate. It was Lucio Onorati, still dusty, chaff in his hair, the back of his neck tanned and grimy to his shirt collar. As she came up behind him, he stayed slouched over, engrossed in some activity. She saw the journal balanced on his knee, the pages battered and curling from being rolled too often. One arm lay loose across them, abandoned as a sleeping child's, but the hand with the pencil worked away, precise in its grip, compulsive in its strokes. The same hand that had struck the cat, she thought. It altered him in a way that both fascinated and repelled her. She wanted to know why he had done it, but was frightened there wouldn't be any reason. She thought she might back away and climb the rise by a different route, but he had heard her now, thrusting his journal in his back pocket as he got down to open the gate.

‘You look better.' It was the first thing that came to her. She touched her own eyebrow to show she meant his cuts, the yellowing bruises. He didn't speak. She stepped towards her bike, propped in the hedgerow. Lying in the tall grass of the verge was a dead hare, gutted and bound about its feet. Its orange eye bulged, its fur made glossy by the low light.

‘He's a beauty,' she said, with a brightness that she didn't feel. ‘Are your traps near here?'

He nodded towards the copse of trees by the brook in the east.

‘Why down there? Why don't you set them on the farm? Mr Repton would be pleased.'

He adjusted his weight on his feet. ‘We give those to Mr Rose. They belong to the farm.'

‘What?' She nearly laughed. Mr Repton had never begrudged anyone a rabbit on his land if they could catch it. Even before rationing, it had been the boon of the farmhands and anyone who helped with the bringing in. The Reptons had certainly never been forced to have rabbit on their table, even during the war, not with over two hundred head of pig in Mr Repton's barns at Great Siding and an army meat contract in his pocket. ‘Does Mr Repton ask for them back?'

He dug his hands in his pockets and glanced over his shoulder. She couldn't tell if he was hesitant or impatient. ‘Not him … my father.'

‘Your father makes you give the rabbits back?'

‘We don't take anything from Mr Repton.' She saw him chew on the inside of his mouth.

‘So you set your traps down there because it's common land?'

He waited, as if to obtain her permission. ‘Mr Fossett gives me one tanner for six skins,' he said.

‘A
tanner
?' she burst out.

He lowered his face and frowned. ‘I said it wrong.'

‘No, no. A tanner, a sixpence. You said it right. But Fossett should be giving you sixpence a skin. That's what everyone else gets, even the lane kids. You know, he sells them on to the factory in Benford for twice that?'

He lifted her bike from the verge and set it on the road for her. But she didn't take it, wanting him to tell her more. She noticed his fists, the dried blood on his knuckles and under his broad fingernails. He might have sensed her inspecting him, for he nudged the bike towards her again, backing to the gate when she had hold of it, and removing his hands to the small of his back to tuck in his shirt. He seemed flighty, like he might disappear again into the hedgerow or sail over the spinney. And she had so many questions. She wanted to pin him down.

‘Why did you kill that cat?'

He stood before her in the dimming light, shifting his boots and glancing about him like a creature cornered.

‘It was Mrs Repton's. Did you know?'

His lips opened slightly and there was something pained about him.

‘It's alright,' she said, unnerved by his reaction. She couldn't imagine any of the villagers responding in such a way: the lane kids learned early in life that an accusation was always to be met with a corresponding attack, especially if guilty. She had never fully mastered this Leyton habit herself, even after all her years with Aunty Bea, the queen of accusations. ‘You can tell me.'

He tugged on his rolled shirtsleeves, leaving them unbuttoned and flapping at the cuff. ‘It's a mistake,' was all he said. She waited. ‘Mr Rose, he makes me put the poison for the rats. I tell Mrs Cartwright to keep the cat in the house, but only the other woman was there. I knock on the window, but she …' He lifted his hand and shooed Connie away with it, and immediately, in that single action, she recognised Aunty Bea.

‘She sent you away.' Connie leaned the saddle to her hip and squeezed her hand on the back of her neck.

‘I look for the cat,' he continued. ‘But Mr Rose is getting angry, so I put the poison in the barns. The next day, I find it here. It's sick. Very sick.' He pointed to the spinney by the brook.

‘You buried it?' she said. He nodded. ‘You haven't told anyone else, have you?'

He seemed stilled by the confession. She studied the cut healing under his eyebrow, the nick in his lip. ‘Your father … it wouldn't be good if he found out, would it?'

He shrugged. ‘It doesn't matter about him.'

She began to push the bike up the rise, glancing back at him to show he should walk with her. ‘It won't be the first cat poisoned from rat bait in these parts. If you hadn't found her, no one would be any the wiser. She might have got into a fight with a badger or a fox.' She stopped walking. ‘Let's leave it at that, alright?' But as she said it, she thought of Aunty Bea:
she
would never leave it at that.

He took the handles back from her, and she saw again his fingers and knuckles, smeared with dried blood from handling the hare. He tried to wipe a fist against his hip.

‘It's just blood,' she said. ‘We're used to it round here.' She wasn't sure whether she said it for his benefit or hers. ‘Hunting, cubbing, culling — it goes with the county.
Hunting
donshire?' She waited to see if he understood. ‘You'll see. Even Mr Repton gets his hands bloody come November.' The lack of sentiment rang false in her, and she suspected, from the glance he gave her, that he saw straight through it. She tried to explain. ‘Mr Repton's the master of ceremonies at the Hammerton and Thurning hunts. He carries the horn and bloods the new riders — if they catch anything, that is.' She was prattling on about a tradition that was impossible to explain to a foreigner, something so English, so formal and regulated, yet absurdly barbaric, she realised, seeing it from the outside. She tried to laugh but her voice stalled.

By the time they reached the top of the rise, the night had settled, still and moonless. She switched on her lamp and caught him in its beam.

‘Remember what I said about Fossett. A tanner for each skin. More for foxes. And if you get a stoat, talk to me first … you know what a stoat is?'

He shook his head, the harvest dust still gathered on his lashes and eyebrows. She remembered Uncle Jack smoothing his thumbs over her own when she was little, holding her chin, his thumbprint in the soft hollow of her eye, grubby from the fields, or sometimes wet with tears.

Not knowing what else to say, she blurted out: ‘Bonna see-ra.' The Italian words sounded misshapen in her mouth, like a child's Double Dutch. She let out an awkward laugh. His face showed no reaction. He hadn't understood. She felt hot and climbed onto the bike, about to push off, but something made her hesitate. When she glanced up he was smiling. A gap between his white teeth opened to her for the first time, like an intimacy.

‘Buona
notte
,' he corrected her. The grin fell away as quickly as it had appeared, and after it his gaze was fathomless as the black sky. He took up a position again on the fence at the top of the rise, soundless, shadowy, all-seeing. And she shivered as she cycled away, imagining him watching over his expectant traps hidden in the coverts.

Montelupini
1939

‘Porca puttana!' his brother shouted at the top of his voice. ‘I-am-going-to-die-of-boredom!' He was standing on the lip of Rocca Re, venting his opinions to no one in particular — to the haze that hung over the valley, to Montelupini dozing in the folds of the hills. Vittorio let out another bestial cry, wordless with frustration. It silenced the scratch of the crickets and made a pair of quail beat out their indignation from the scrub below. The limestone crag had many names, but since he was first able to reach it, Vittorio had called it Rocca Re, the King's Rock, as though the very purpose of its prehistoric formation had been for him to stand upon it and declare himself to the world. Lucio sat and listened, running his hand over the stone that jutted out beneath them. He liked to imagine the rock was a wave, rolling and crashing through the millennia at infinitesimal speed, too slow for human eyes. It comforted him to think that Rocca Re would still be inching its course over the valley, still alive and changing, long after everything they knew had turned to dust.

They always stopped at the rock on the way to Padre Ruggiero's summer house. His villa was halfway up Collelungo, built for clerical holidays in the cooler air and set among some of the best orchards in the ranges. The priest lived there for most of the year, preferring the estate over the more convenient but humbler presbytery behind San Pietro's. The Don, Nonno Raimondi told Lucio, wasn't the type of priest who took religion literally, who rolled up his cassock sleeves to bless the passata or thresh the wheat, as Christ himself might have done. And yet, the less accessible Padre Ruggiero made himself, the more the Montelupinese looked up to him — literally. Like Santa Lucia in her grotto, he was held in a kind of reverential awe, part spiritual, part feudal, and the villagers were always grateful for every small condescension he deigned to give from on high. Such as taking the trouble to ride his horse three miles down the mountain every day to give Mass.

Vittorio aimed his foot at the basket of grapes on the rock before him. ‘How can you bear it?' he said. ‘Being stuck here in Montelupini delivering fruit while everything exciting is happening miles away?' He let an arm fall in the vague direction of Rome. Lucio knew his brother had seen older boys in the Avanguardisti swaggering about, making similar complaints. He didn't tell him he should have been pointing south, to the ocean beyond the ridge of the mountains, south to Africa. ‘Fagiolo reckons we'll be at war soon. That'd be typical. By the time we're anywhere near old enough, it'll all be over and we'll be stuck here like donkeys for the rest of our lives carrying fruit to Padre Ruggiero!' He snatched a bunch of grapes and began to eat them mindlessly.

‘What?' Vittorio snapped. ‘Lighten up, Gufo. Papa and Padre Ruggiero won't know unless you tell.' He snatched another bunch and threw it over. ‘Go on. Be a devil.' Lucio caught them, but didn't eat.

‘Nonno Pisspot's right, in a way,' his brother mused, through a mouthful of pulp. ‘We sweated over them, we should at least be able to eat them.' He crammed more grapes into his mouth and fired the pips over the ledge like bullets. When Vittorio reached for another bunch from the basket, Lucio heard his hand strike something hard wedged underneath. His brother pulled out the bottle of Raimondi Gold and gave a knowing grunt. ‘Bet Nonno didn't realise this was stuck in there. No wonder Papa let him have the last word.' He weighed the bottle in his hand before squeaking out the cork and taking a swig. Lucio watched him pull in his chin and snatch his breath, turning away to blink back tears.

Vittorio stopped up the bottle and tossed it to Lucio, who caught it just before it met the rock beneath them. ‘Go on then, big brother. Better get a taste for it since you're the heir to the Gold!'

Lucio hated it when Vittorio started on this. His age was the one thing he had over Primo — eleven months, which he would have gladly handed over if he could, along with the dubious right to the secrets of Raimondi Gold. The grappa, which was popular as an elixir, fetched a decent price at markets all through the Lepini, and their mother relied on trading it to supplement their table, especially when the harvest yields were poor. Vittorio knew very well that Lucio sweated under the responsibility of learning their grandfather's methods, the pressure of knowing that everyone in the village thought Primo was the one who deserved the privilege, not him. But Nonno Raimondi refused to be swayed. ‘I know what you're thinking,' he had told Lucio, ‘but it's a Raimondi secret. There's too much Onorati in that boy. He only has to fart and everyone thinks they smell biscotti fresh from the oven. Primo will spin straw into Gold without any help of mine.' To Lucio this seemed the very reason Vittorio should be the one to make the grappa.

‘Relax, Guf, I'm teasing. Don't look so worried,' his brother said, flicking a grape at him. ‘How hard can it be? Nonno Pisspot manages to make the stuff and he's barely conscious half the time.' He threw two more grapes into the air one by one, jerking his head to catch them in his mouth. ‘You need to make sure he runs you through exactly what he puts in it a couple of times — the temperature of the still, how he knows when the head of the flemma has passed, stuff like that,' Vittorio added casually. ‘He
has
shown you where he stashes his still, hasn't he?' Lucio didn't answer. ‘Santa Lucia, Gufo. You need to pin him down, start asking questions. He's not getting any younger. Papa says the old soak could fall off the perch any day now.'