The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (2 page)

It was several weeks after Mrs Livesey's news when Connie got off her bike at Bythorn Rise and saw a figure at the edge of the field. She recognised the taller, broader of the two Italians. He was staring at the hedgerow, standing very still. She made out a bundle of papers in his hands, a battered notebook perhaps, and saw that he was marking something in it. Unseen herself, she became lost in the act of watching him, until his head darted up, aware of her. Confronted with what she had been wanting all along, she felt exposed, somehow found-out, and she quickly got back on her bike and cycled up the rise. But when she reached the top of the hill, she couldn't help glancing back. He was standing in the same spot, unmoving, vigilant as a nocturnal bird waiting for night to settle.

The next evening after work, the sky dimmed early with rain. She had forgotten her mackintosh, and by the time she got to the gate of the farm, the downpour had begun and she was already wet to her skin. She stopped to switch on her bike lamp, and as she did so she caught sight of him again in the gloom of the hawthorn, oblivious to the rain dripping from his fingers, or from the slick of hair flattened against his forehead. They peered at each other, the space between them still, save the liquid tick of the hedgerow. She was about to raise her hand to him when he turned his back and began to stride up the hill towards the cottage, leaving her shivering in the leached light.

‘Teaching them, that's right.' Mr Gilbert nodded, reaching for the
Times
that Mrs Cleat held rolled like a baton on the counter. ‘I'm enjoying it immensely. Purely selfish motivations, you know. It's such an opportunity for me to practise my rickety Italian.' Despite his pleasantries, Connie could see in Mr Gilbert's restless stance his eagerness to be gone.

The other end of the newspaper was still pinned in Mrs Cleat's fingers. ‘So they have no English at all, the sons?' she asked.

‘Oh, they're doing admirably. Their father's been teaching them, but they need a greater vocabulary and instruction in grammar. That's where I've offered to help.'

Mrs Cleat gripped tighter. ‘And Repton gives them the gamekeeper's cottage in return for labour? He doesn't actually pay them, I hear?'

Mr Gilbert resigned his hand from his
Times
and exhaled. ‘I certainly hope that isn't the case, Mrs Cleat.' Connie recognised this sigh, the lowered tone. She had become familiar with it at school, the way he corralled his temper, allowing rebuke to merely glimmer at the edges of his voice. After a series of thunderous village teachers all trained in the same ear-twisting, chalk-hurling method for extracting terrified rote, Mr Gilbert's patience and enthusiasm, not yet beset with the jading of middle age, had been easy to idolise.

‘But I've been told on good authority they don't have any special skills,' Mrs Cleat persisted.

‘On the contrary. They were farmers themselves in Italy. No experience with machinery but, regardless,' Mr Gilbert smoothed a thumb and finger over his eyebrows, ‘I believe we outlawed slavery in 1772. Such an arrangement would be rather illegal, don't you think?' His eye caught Connie's and glinted conspiratorially.

Mrs Cleat straightened her shoulders, affronted. ‘Of course. Of course it would, Mr Gilbert. I'm merely repeating what others in the parish are saying.'

‘Then, with respect, perhaps it would be better not to?' The bell clattered as he opened the door sharply. ‘Loose lips, Mrs Cleat …'

‘The war is long over, Mr Gilbert,' she sang back to him, leaning over the counter.

‘… can still sink ships,' he called from the pavement beyond the bay window, lifting his hat and offering them his most charming smile, as he always did. Mrs Cleat ignored it, busy digesting his meaning. The fist of one hand was still around his
Times
, while the other wiped the counter absently. Connie hovered nearby.

‘Oh, now look! Connie, run this up the school,' she finally huffed. ‘
Loose lips
… I'm sure I don't know what he's implicating. These intellectuals … theorising and setting the world to rights, but they'd forget their own heads if they wasn't screwed on!'

Connie caught up with Mr Gilbert as he was entering the school gate. He half sighed, half laughed. ‘Am I to be interrogated about them every morning, Connie, before I'm allowed my newspaper, do you think?'

‘About the Italians?'

‘Si. La famiglia Onorati.' The foreign words rolled off his tongue fluently, luxuriously, and she felt for a second she had peeked through a door into another world.

‘So beautiful … the Italian … the sound of the words, I mean.' She became annoyed at the heat in her cheeks.

‘Oh yes.
The honoured ones
…' he said in a deep theatrical voice, raising his eyebrows at her. ‘It's what it means — their name. Rather ironic, don't you think, given what they must have seen, what they must have been through to settle for living in that bloody pigsty of Repton's?'

She didn't know what to say. Even now she still felt awkward when he invited her opinions, as one adult to another. Four years ago they had sat in his empty classroom, preparing scholarship papers for St Bernadette's College in Benford. Now, thanks to Aunty Bea, all she prepared was his grocery account.

‘Do you think … I mean, have they had it that hard — the Italians?' she asked, rather ashamed to show her ignorance to the one person who had seen her potential.

‘I suspect so. But it's behind them now, I suppose. Nobody wants to go back to that time.' He smiled at her. ‘War's about the future, not the past, isn't it?' Yet as he tapped the newspaper to his hat in farewell, she sensed that he had no faith at all in what he'd said. She nodded her assent, but it was no more than a habit, and she was angry with herself afterwards for not asking him more.

Had the war been about the future? She stood at the gate of the school, feeling like she had lived through those years half dreaming, unconcerned with the games of grown-ups, and was now slowly awakening. She had barely any idea of what was beyond Leyton. Once, she had gone as far as Benford on the bus, simply so she could imagine rumbling through the countryside while practising conjugations from a Latin primer, jumping off at the wrought-iron gates of the Victorian school, inclining her head and laughing under the red facade with those pale-haired, doe-legged girls.

‘St Bernadette's? That
Catholic
school all way over in Benford?' Aunty Bea had asked Mr Gilbert as if he had been proposing to send her to the fire and brimstone of hell itself. She hadn't changed out of her housedress, her cheeks ruddy from carpet-beating at the Big House, the plain silver crucifix winking on her flushed throat. In the corridor Connie had chewed at a quick until it throbbed, listening to the escalating symphony of their exchange.

‘The
uni-
ver-
sity, you say? And what kind of learning would she be doing at this
uni-
ver-
sity
of yourn, Mr Gilbert? Something for the war effort?' Her deliberate use of the article — as if there was only one university, like the Odeon, the grubby picture house in Wellsborough — her purposefully obtuse questions, her thick Leyton accent had made Connie grind her teeth in embarrassment.

At least Mr Gilbert hadn't played to Aunty Bea's fool. ‘She's full of potential, Mrs Farrington, and with young men still enlisting she has more chance of matriculating than ever before. You know as well as I do what that can open up to her. But the war won't last much longer.'

‘Won't it, now? They said that four years since, didn't they? Still, don't reckon it affects your life much, not here in the schoolroom.'

‘Christ, Beatrice!' It was the first time she had heard Mr Gilbert truly raise his voice. ‘Kids need an education even in wartime. Teaching
is
my war effort.' There was a pause, the clearing of a throat, the awkward scuff of shoes on the flagstones.

‘Thank you for your special attention to Connie, Mr Gilbert, but we Leyton folk has simple needs. You might be better off spending the time with one of your London kiddies.'

‘Beatrice.' Connie heard the sadness in his softened voice. ‘I might have come back from Town with the evacuees, but I was born here, as you well know. I think I have a good idea what Leyton people need.'

But it was Aunty Bea who had emerged from the schoolroom first, straightening her scarf, her expression flinty, as it always was when the Lord's name had been taken in vain. In one glance both Connie and Mr Gilbert understood: Connie would not be going to St Bernadette's. Aunty Bea couldn't fathom why anyone would want to leave Leyton, to leave the life God had given them, unless, of course, it was to enlist and defend that life. Mr Gilbert, in her mind, was doubly damned for leaving Leyton in the first place and then for running straight back from London as soon as the war allowed him. As for Connie's future, Aunty Bea had, in her parochial wisdom, secured it well before that interview. She started at Cleat's within the month. The sight of her in a white serving coat, snipping rations coupons, instead of milking cows or scrubbing other people's floors, sometimes caused Aunty Bea to bite down on her lip with suppressed pride when she came into the shop. Such was her satisfaction that she had done right by her sister's child.

Connie pulled on the low wooden gate of the schoolhouse, feeling its familiar grumble along her arm. Four years on and she felt even more of a child than she had at thirteen, more ignorant and blinkered, as if everything she knew about the world, about the war, about life, had been reduced to the shelves of Mrs Cleat's shop. At least Mr Gilbert had provided her with a view beyond the hedgerows of Leyton, even beyond England. He still lent her books and journals, but her favourites were the museum catalogues of the art he had studied in Paris, Florence and Rome when he was not much older than she was now. She followed the thumbed pages, the sculptures and frescoes, the naked warriors and gods in dramatic poses. She traced them by the light of her bedside lamp and felt guilty for thinking less about their mythical and biblical stories than about their breathtaking bodies. Once, she had found a photograph, slipped between the pages of a Baedeker: an olive-skinned man dressed all in white, standing on the steps of a fountain in some square of luminous marble. His face seemed to reflect that glow, lit with an expression that suggested to her the excitement of possibility, of the limitless future stretching out before him. On the reverse side was an inscription in fading cursive:

Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte
Dono infelice di bellezza, ond' hai
Funesta dote d'infiniti guai,
Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte

She had gone to sleep memorising the words night after night without understanding them. They came back to her now, an incantation conjuring that other world of youth and beauty and possibility, as she heard Mr Gilbert's voice:
La famiglia
…
La famiglia Onorati
.

As she neared Cleat's, the prospect of the dim counter, and the dimmer Mrs Cleat, slowed her pace. She felt like she could keep walking, past the shop, past the Leyton signpost in the lane snaking down the hill, south towards London, towards Dover, towards anywhere but Leyton. Leyton, where the low grey sky was a lid over the single file of the high street, unchanged for generations. The squat buildings of stone and brick seemed as naive as a toy village, she thought, living out the pretence, the replica of a life. She should keep walking. She
could
keep walking, in the same way her mother had done. But then where would she be?

She caught her reflection in the shop's bay window across the road: her thin skirt, dun cardigan buttoned to the neck, the flat leather lace-ups on pale legs, that cottony frizz of copper hair. She felt like she might be swept away on the faintest gust of wind or disappear under the vigorous buff of Mrs Cleat's counter cloth. In the passing chug of the morning post van, the smudge of her was gone, and she was left staring at the chipped lettering of the window:
Cleat's Corner Store
. The mere sight of it made her feel ordinary.

Her mother had christened her Marylyn — a name she had perhaps intended for billboard lights, a name that would go places, a name too grand for the rollcall of Leyton Village School. It was the only thing her mother did give her, a token gesture that Aunty Bea believed was better packed in the suitcase of her sister's other pretensions when she left Leyton on the number 11 bus.
Legs Eleven
. It was painfully fitting. Connie remembered the shabby glamour of her mother's silk stockings, her red shoes gaudy beneath her coat, a pheasant feather in her hat attempting finesse. The shoes, she recalled, had rounded toes embroidered with roses, and heels that clicked like a flamenco dancer's — too quick, too restless for the lanes of Bythorn. She had held her mother's hand at the door to Aunty Bea's, like they were popping in, dropping something off. But once inside, her mother had shaken her free and stood smoothing a thumb under her lips, examining her reflection in the hallway mirror. ‘It won't be forever,' she heard her tell Aunty Bea in the kitchen. ‘Your lives are … well, better suited to it. You've got this house. You've got Jack. Jesus, Bea, you've even got Christ!'

She had often wondered why her mother's life wasn't better suited to keeping her, but no one had ever offered a real explanation. She had heard the word
divorce
mouthed over the lips of teacups, or whispered above her head as if it was a disease and she was carrying it. But her father had already been gone so long that all she could remember was the uneventful click of the door, his trilby bobbing past the kitchen window, the scratch of his shoes on the pavement outside, while her mother militantly flicked through the pages of
Britannia and Eve
.