The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (28 page)

‘Repton keeps me on an allowance, just as he does the Italians, Connie. Anything substantial I could get my hands on, he would immediately know was missing. Besides, if I ask him, do you think he's going to support losing another worker who owes him money? What did you expect — that I could simply write you out a cheque?'

The reproach in her voice made Connie blush. She had thought she would confide in Mrs Repton, adult to adult, but now felt nothing more than a child again. She wished she had gone to the bookshelves when she'd had the chance. ‘I … I didn't ask solely because of the art,' she said, as if casting for something to cling to in the wreckage of the conversation. ‘Lucio needs to get away from his father. You see that, don't you?'

Mrs Repton worried her lip with her teeth. ‘I don't think Aldo means it,' she said, but she sounded weak, unconvincing. ‘Harvey says there are things we don't know about them, difficult things we don't understand about their past.'

‘So you won't help him?'

‘I can't. Weren't you listening?'

‘No, you
won't
. There's a difference.' Connie's jumbled emotions until that point seemed distilled now to anger inside her. She found her fingers fidgeting noisily with something on the window seat. It was the paper bag containing the shoes. She pushed it aside and Mrs Repton glanced at the white heels peeping out. Connie thought her face no longer seemed pale in the light of the window — it was grey, and her eyes were less mysterious than simply lost.

She stooped to pick up her satchel. ‘I'm sorry.' She wasn't sure what she was apologising for: perhaps it was to herself, for her own naivety. She headed for the door, past the wall of books where she had spent so much time growing up.

‘Connie … Connie, wait,' she heard Mrs Repton call, but she had already closed the library door, shutting her in with the ashen smell of the spines, the leather of the cigar chairs, the sweet smoky staleness of the drinks cabinet. And she began to run towards the scullery, slipping out of her lace-ups and into her mud-caked boots on the back step, breathing in the damp air, the washed-out light of the winter afternoon.

‘Well, what
can
we do? Our hands are tied,' Mrs Cleat snapped at Mrs Armer over the sound of the bell as they hurried across the threshold of the shop. Connie shivered. Outside, the sky hung grubby and low, and particles of snow had begun to swirl about the street like blown ashes. Normally the advent of snow occupied conversations for an entire day in Leyton. But this afternoon an even greater event had occurred. Mrs Cleat and the Christian Ladies had met for a long-overdue viewing of the St Margaret's mural project. And by the look on Mrs Cleat's face as she tugged off her hat and gloves, it had not gone well.

‘Connie,' Mrs Cleat implored, her arm outstretched, her hand flapping as she returned to the servery. Connie rushed to pass her the counter cloth, which Mrs Cleat immediately applied to the Formica with vigorous, frantic buffs. From the other side of it, Mrs Armer took up where they had left off.

‘But Foreman Rose? As Saul? I ask you. That's surely taking the joke too far.'

‘You don't have to state the ruddy obvious, Edith. We all know the only blinding light Arthur Rose ever seen in his life is the sun shining on that blasted hipflask.' Mrs Cleat wrung her lips together, evidently even more furious that the meeting had reduced her to swearing.

There was a low chuckle. Mrs Livesey was standing in the door in her wellies. ‘Well, well. Mr Rose as Saul? Is that right?' she said, her rogue tooth glinting as she squelched to the counter. ‘Sounds like every regular at the Green Man might make it onto the walls of St Maggie's afore long. I can just picture it: Fossett as St Francis.' She waved a hand before her face in mock awe, then laughed loud and deep. The bounce of her bosom reminded Connie of two beagle puppies she had once seen fighting in a sack. ‘Very uplifting,' Mrs Livesey said.

Mrs Cleat and Mrs Armer stood transfixed. A reaction such as Mrs Livesey's was their greatest fear: that the grand mural project and, by association, the Christian Ladies' committee, would become a laughing stock. Connie could see Mrs Cleat searching wildly for a response.

‘Of course, not being privy to the works, Janet, you won't have seen how much true merit they have, how really …
transcendent
they are … not being on the committee and all.'

Mrs Armer kept her shoulder to Mrs Livesey, as if to stress they could never seriously discuss the murals with anyone who called the church
St Maggie's
. ‘Mr Swann's work is exceptional, never mind the models he chooses. They're saying it's his most ambitious project yet. People'll be visiting Leyton to see the murals at St Margaret's for years to come, you mark my words.'

‘Well, as long as we don't end up with summat akin to the circus. He makes most of his living painting music halls, don't he?'

‘Music halls?' Mrs Cleat cried. ‘He paints the sets at Covent Garden, I'll have you know!'

‘Gardens, fairgrounds. All I'm saying is it might not be the kind of thing we want at St Maggie's.'

Mrs Cleat touched her fingers to her temples, and her eyes flickered shut.

‘What can I get you today, Mrs Livesey?' Connie said brightly, and Mrs Cleat left for the back store, touching her arm as she passed and murmuring, ‘Bless you, Connie, love.'

Connie had seen the four completed murals and knew that, as far as Mr Swann's models were concerned, there was worse to come. She had been sneaking out to visit Lucio late at night, and he had shown her Mr Swann's sketches for the view of Martha and Mary, their bodies the slender, elegant forms of robed peasants, but their faces strikingly similar to those of Fran Carter, the barmaid from the Green Man
,
and Mrs Livesey, herself a regular at the pub. Their heads were inclined in conference and Mary had her hand up, shielding her mouth as they talked. And the cup that Martha held, though painted terracotta, was decidedly reminiscent of a tankard.

She also knew that, save for the figures and their identifying objects, the murals — the fine detail of the backdrop, the landscape and its atmosphere — were mainly Lucio's work. When she couldn't sleep at night, or when her day at Cleat's had been especially numbing, she couldn't help but be drawn to the other world he was creating in the church. As she cycled to St Margaret's she would look for the candle in the south window, which he used to show her Mr Swann was gone, and if it was lit she would scratch like a mouse on the great oak door. Inside, she settled herself on a pew, lying along it to watch as Lucio worked in the spotlights. She was mesmerised as much by the paintings as by the intensity of his concentration: the hours of fractional movements, the self-contained expressions of someone who was elsewhere, carried away by his imagination.

And he took her with him as he travelled through the wooded backdrops of chestnut and beech, white oak and sycamore, through the details of their bare, snow-frosted boughs or the luminous green of their springtime leaves, unfurling across the masonry like he was turning the walls inside out. She witnessed him hide within their branches the tight nests of cuckoos or sparrows, beehives or solitary bats; or at their bases, amid the leaf litter and tangled brambles, tiny blossomings of strawberries or mushrooms, a hedgehog's snout, a scuttling pinemarten or weasel. Even his subjects' clothes had something alive about them, a teasing veracity that sometimes made her look twice to check she had not been mistaken: a stain on St Peter's cowl, the raw linen of his tunic, frayed at one cuff; a leaf caught in the folds of Martha's headscarf, her sandals worn to a hole at one side, Mary's caked with mud; the grey cracks in the heels of Saul's bare feet. Sometimes she would fall asleep to the buzz of the stage lights in the hollow space and the images would come with her. And when she started awake again, there they were, spread before her, even more alive and colourful than when they spoke to her in dreams.

She did not really care that the faces of Fossett or Mr Gilbert or Mr Rose peopled this world. After all, the diocese had allowed the early Christian characters of the Middle East, the saints of faraway places, to be painted strolling through England's green and pleasant land. Why shouldn't they, then, take English faces too? But what did sadden her was that Mr Swann, a clearly inferior craftsman, would take the credit for Lucio's work and then, with a flippant artistic joke, cause enough local scandal and ridicule to divide the village and sap their enjoyment of it. It was as though he wanted the whole project to blow up in his face, like he couldn't countenance this raw unschooled talent, even if the free labour allowed him to pay his debts all the quicker.

‘How can Mr Swann live with himself?' she asked Mr Gilbert when she caught him on her way home one Saturday afternoon. ‘It's not that he doesn't pay Lucio, it's the recognition.'

‘I believe there has been a small amount of money changing hands of late — that is, if I can get to Swann before he gets to the Green Man.' Mr Gilbert gave her a sheepish smile. ‘But the recognition part is tricky, Connie. Lucio doesn't want it any more than we need more fuss surrounding these paintings. Why not allow him to get his pleasure from the work in the way that suits him?'

‘But what about the models? Mr Swann is having his joke at the expense of the whole village, and more importantly at the expense of Lucio's work.'

Mr Gilbert considered her. ‘I see Lucio's not the only one with the perceptive eye.'

She turned away, impatient with his deference to her these days. Deep down his veiled compliments pained her, reminding her too much of the disappointment she'd become, not just to him but also to herself.

‘You're right, of course,' he said. ‘You know, I think the committee members were rather more offended at being left
off
the walls than at the choice of faces on them.' He chuckled. ‘Swann was livid they'd presumed to dictate to him about his work, though. I had to practically carry him home from the Green Man afterwards, and now he's stormed back down to London to complete some theatre project.'

‘What about the rest of the paintings?'

‘He's given Lucio free rein over the final views. He told me the Leyton coat of arms and the insignia of the diocese would be his last paintings for the honourable sisterhood of ladies.'

‘Really? And that's what he called them?'

‘No. He said they were a mob of fishwives in hats and gloves.
But I'm not one as likes to tittle-tattle
,' he added in Mrs Cleat's voice.

‘Someone's bound to find out though, surely?' Connie said, ignoring the joke. ‘About Lucio, I mean. I'm amazed Mr Swann hasn't already let the cat out of the bag in one of his drinking sprees at the Green Man.'

‘Oh, even drunk, Swann's no fool. He's too worried about not getting paid. And the joke with the models is merely evident to the villagers. Any outsider, even the diocesan inspectors, would see nothing but the biblical characters. A work as good as this will raise Swann's profile and get him more-lucrative commissions. He won't let an opportunity like that slip through his fingers.'

She looked at him incredulously.
The joke is merely evident to the villagers
. He said it as though Leyton didn't matter, as though Lucio didn't matter, and the one thing at stake was Mr Swann's artistic career. Through his snobbery, she realised what her own had been.
It's too beautiful for Leyton
, she had told Lucio, like the village was unworthy of such a gift. But who was she or Mr Gilbert to say who could and couldn't appreciate art, as if one needed class or education to admire it? She began to understand what Lucio might be about, how much more important it was for him to paint his murals right here, for people such as them, people like him.

‘Don't write Leyton off like that,' she said.

‘Like what?'

‘Like we're all too uncouth and stupid for the grander business of art to really matter to us. Like it's all a bit of country amusement for Mr Swann, which happens to have turned out rather well for his career.'

She stopped to get on her bike. Mr Gilbert stood back to give her room, and she saw that he was smiling, almost like he was pleased. ‘Connie, that's not what I said. You're putting words in my mouth.'

His measured tone made her think he wasn't taking her seriously. ‘And what about Lucio? Doesn't he deserve more than the bargain you and Mr Swann have struck up between yourselves?' She found she was giving into her anger, feeling spurred on by it. ‘You're no better than Mr and Mrs Repton really, are you? Making it seem like you're helping, when in fact you're exploiting him for whatever you can get.'

‘Connie,' he said, shocked now. ‘Why would I be involved in such a
bargain
, as you call it? What exactly am
I
supposed to be getting out of all this?'

She paused, her foot on the pedal, breathing heavily. ‘Do you think I'm such a country bumpkin that I can't put two and two together? All those
special
friends you have that are always at the ready to do favours for you. Funny how they're never women, isn't it?' She laughed hollowly, and it was as though the sound came from someone else — Agnes or Mrs Livesey, leaning over the counter of Cleat's. ‘I've seen the way you look at them, the way you look at Vittorio and Lucio … yes, and even Mr Swann too.'