The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (31 page)

‘Christ, makes you wish we'd lost the ruddy war. I might be in Germany now being adopted by a rich Kraut.'

Tommy snorted and drained his drink. ‘Cars. I tell you, there's bloody money to be made now petrol's off the book, and that WOP's onto it. He told me tonight, he's off down south. Edwards has a brother with two more garages near Luton. Wants him to manage one, he reckons.'

‘Well, that's fine and dandy, I s'pose … if you want to live under an engine. Still, I expect the WOPs don't mind a bit more
grease
, do they?' The barman sensed Connie listening and winked at her. Tommy didn't laugh.

‘Looks like Agnes Armer bloody well don't mind, neither,' he said, unable to drag his attention from the dance floor. ‘Money's money, mucky or clean.'

Connie dipped her finger in the top of her shandy and ran it absently around the rim of the glass. Sometimes, if it wasn't for Bobby's band, she felt like the Roxy was nothing but a younger, more energetic version of Cleat's Corner Store.

It was already past midnight when she got back on her bike at Bythorn Rise. Vittorio had given lifts to Agnes and Tommy, dropping them in the high street and then driving her very slowly towards the hill, trying to draw her into an argument about Agnes, baiting and goading her into some kind of reaction. She barely answered, and when he kissed her goodnight she kept her mouth closed. He tailed her up the hill, but she didn't turn back or bat her arm at his flashing headlights, as she might usually have done. He pulled alongside her as she pedalled, creeping ever closer to Grimthorpe Lane, flouting her rules. She stopped, irritated, and found he was watching her with that grin.

‘Don't be angry with me, Connie,' he said.

She shook her head tiredly. ‘I'm not angry. You'd like me to be, but I'm not. You're the one who's angry because I won't play your games.'

‘
My
games? You hide your bike in the hedge and you ask me to pick you up in secret, and
I'm
playing the games?'

She wouldn't look at him, but she guessed his grin was gone now. ‘You know very well why I have to do that.'

From the corner of her eye, she could see him nodding. ‘Yes, I know why. I'm not good enough for your aunt. Maybe I'm not good enough for you. I'm still a WOP, even to you, isn't that right?'

‘Don't say what you know isn't true.'

‘You don't understand, Connie. I'm going to be so much more. So much more than this.' He waved his hand towards the open fields, before gripping the steering wheel again. ‘Sometimes, I think I go crazy waiting for all the things I want.'

The sheer force of his will shamed her. Next to him she felt insipid and weak, indecisive, non-committal. But most of all she felt a coward. She leaned into the car window and kissed him, full on the mouth this time.

‘Will you come with me tomorrow?' he asked. His grin had broken across his face again, and she felt it wash over her, luxurious but somehow depleting, like a too-hot bath. ‘I want to take you somewhere. Really somewhere, this time … far away from here.'

What could she do but nod? What could she do but force from her mind the image of the church across the dark commons, the candle in the south window burning down to the sconce, the same as it did every night, so reliable, so unchanging? She nodded, and she made herself forget the paintings and cycle back to Grimthorpe Lane, thinking only of the road out of Leyton, its straight line heading south.

He wouldn't tell her where they were going. All he said was that it was a long way and he'd had to wait for petrol to come off the ration. She'd imagined it would be south, perhaps even to the garage Mr Edwards's brother owned in Luton. But instead they headed east, on and on, emerging from the fens into leafy lanes, which she knew must be Norfolk. With her head out the open window, she smelled brine and heard the gulls, and peered through the hedgerows for her first sight of the blue horizon. She was restless as a child as they drove along the road, forgetting to answer Vittorio's questions, holding her breath until she caught the slow, mulling body of the sea.

The picture of it wasn't what she'd imagined at all. She'd always thought of a drizzling first encounter in the mist, an umbrella flipping inside out at the whip of the wind. Instead they walked across bright flats towards the water, shimmering like mercury pressed between the sky and sand.

‘So, what do you do think?' Vittorio asked, but she didn't want to talk yet. She wanted more time to breathe it all in. He tugged on her skirt, and she stepped back as he slipped an arm about her waist. When she opened her mouth, the salty air felt like it would scoop out words against her will.

‘It's marvellous,' she said. ‘It goes on forever.' She pulled away from him towards a flock of gulls peppered across the sand.

‘Connie,' she heard him complain behind her. ‘Not this. I'm talking about Luton. The job in Luton. I have to take it, yes?' He grabbed her hand to slow her down.

‘Of course you should. You'd be stupid not to.' She stood with his chest against her back and gazed at the sand, so smooth and liquid that solitary figures and their dogs in the distance appeared to be walking on water. She could taste salt on her tongue, feel the crust of it in her hair. She let him kiss her neck for a while until the wind gusted again, and she ran across the sand, her feet slapping and spraying up clumps of it over her calves. She slowed when she came to the gulls, watching them rise one after the other as though on a string, their yellow legs hanging above her, their beaks screeching in time with her breath, like the sound was being ripped from her own chest.

She thought of Lucio — how she would have loved him to see it, to feel it. She wanted to sit next to him in the dunes, listening to the pulse of the waves, sensing the burrowing worms in the sand, submerging herself in this first picture of the sea. With him.

Lying on the pews of St Margaret's and watching him work, she felt soothed somehow, distracted from the frightening sense of how small her life was, how ordinary it was to be. She wasn't sure why she never went to the church with Vittorio, or why she didn't mention her visits to him, only that she wanted the world of Lucio's paintings all to herself. She had studied his progress for long enough now to see that his style had altered since the early murals, that some new element or feeling had entered it. Perhaps this came with the greater freedom Mr Swann had given him over the remaining scenes, or perhaps Lucio himself had changed as he painted them. But far from the sad, brooding picture of the hare that he had left for the harvest fair, there was now a quiet joy in his work — a love, even — sometimes in the tiniest object, the simplest gesture, that made her disproportionately hopeful, made her want to show him this view, this day.

She thought Mr Gilbert had been right after all when he had described Lucio's paintings as
transcendent
. The wooded settings, the intricate naturalism, the forms and faces of his new figures took Connie to some richer, finer place. Mortality, decay, the passage of time — she sensed them all still hovering in the background, but now they served to heighten the beauty of what he painted, the triumph of it. Not in a religious way: his pictures were more sacrilegious, if anything, in that place of worship. For when she viewed them she realised she loved life not because of God, but despite Him.

Yet Lucio had just two or three months of work left on the church. He had said so himself, avoiding her eye as he told her. She didn't want to think about what was left for either of them after that: his silence made it clear.

She heard Vittorio's breath behind her. ‘Connie, wait …' He was disappointed with her, impatient again.

‘You should have made him come,' she said, her voice barely audible over the cries of the gulls. ‘He'd have loved this.'

‘Who would?' he said, and then almost straight away, ‘Lucio? Why are we talking about Lucio?
I'm
trying
to talk to you.'

‘I think you should make him get out more, that's all. He is your brother.' She knew they rarely saw each other these days, and it bothered her that they could so easily dispense of one another when she would have given anything for that bond of family, of belonging to someone.

‘I've tried, Connie. You know that. Is it my fault he wants to waste months of his life painting pictures no one will ever look at?'

He
had
tried, in his own way, she knew. Through a customer at the garage, Vittorio had found a job for Lucio at the brickworks in Benford. It offered nearly triple the salary Repton was paying. He'd been furious when Lucio had refused it. She knew he wouldn't leave his paintings; she could see that, even if Vittorio couldn't. But what she couldn't comprehend was why Lucio wouldn't break with his father as Vittorio had done, especially as he had all the more reason to.

‘I still don't get it. Why is he so tethered to the farm … and to your father?' she asked.

Vittorio puffed out his lips and shrugged. ‘Gufo is … Gufo.' It wasn't the first time he had said it, and she wondered whether he was fobbing her off or whether he had never really made the effort to understand his brother.

‘Why do you always say that? What's it supposed to mean?'

He hesitated.

‘Just tell me for once,' she continued, with a force that made him frown. ‘I want to know.'

‘Lucio and my father, it's not easy to explain.' He looked tired. ‘He's never been what my father wanted him to be,' he managed. ‘Lucio's more like our mother — quiet, lonely … a bit wild even, people said … I don't know.' He squinted against the glare of the water. ‘Lucio reminds my father of her. Maybe that's the problem.'

‘Why? Why would that be a problem?' She felt intrusive but her desire to know was greater. ‘What happened to her?'

He crossed his arms and dug his toes into the sand. ‘She died. In the war. She was sick, you know — weak. I wasn't there, but Lucio was.' He considered this before adding quickly, ‘I think my father blames him for not taking care of her. He doesn't say it. But it comes out.'

‘You mean the fighting and physical stuff?'

He wouldn't look up from his feet in the sand, as if he felt ashamed. But the shame, in turn, made him angry. ‘Lucio's an idiot — he's still trying to please him, even now. If he wants to stay at Repton's, that's his problem. I can't live my life for him. We came here to move on, not live in the past, like he does.'

He bent down to squat on his haunches and shake sand between his fists. When he stood again, he brushed himself off, and the conversation with it. ‘I don't want to talk about Lucio and my father. I want to talk about us. About Luton.'

She understood what was coming, then. She didn't want him to spoil the glorious day with the weight of it, but she listened anyway, guilty that she had already pushed him so far. Even as she heard the words he wanted to ask her, she knew she wasn't enough for him. He needed the noise of people, their approval, the attention of more than her. She'd seen it in his face, flushed and eager on the dance floor of the Roxy. But more disturbing than that, she knew he wasn't enough for her. And yet she let him reach for her waist and pull her back. Because what was left to her without him? Aunty Bea nattering away over her teapot? The interminable tick of the clock on the mantel? The endless hours of gossip at Cleat's? Even the candle in the south window of St Margaret's would be gone soon, Lucio's paintings nothing more than a part of Leyton, closed up between four walls. Beyond them she saw her bike waiting in the muddy lane, his silhouette as he drilled seed on the ridge, his bloody hands on the gatepost, with only the fields and hedgerows of Leyton ahead of them. And the thought made her wretched.

She laid her palm along Vittorio's jaw, feeling the muscles flex under her fingers as he spoke. For a second there was something different about him, an uncertainty. She watched him negotiate it — a feeling so commonplace to her, to everyone else, but so unusual in him — and she found herself putting her arms about him. Over his shoulder, the sea shifted and glinted with such vast secrets, such promise. It was the furthest she had ever been from Leyton.

When she nodded at him, his chest swelled, and the tremor of doubt in his eye was gone. He grinned. All these months on, and she still couldn't believe she might be the cause of that grin. And she almost felt like she was doing the right thing.

Connie didn't even try to sleep. She sat fully clothed on her bed, waiting for the dimness of the summer night to overtake her room, for the bright day by the sea to be gone. On the way back in the car, she had smelled the fresh coastal air slipping away from them, overtaken first by the peaty rot of the fens, then the mud and manure of Leyton. And she felt herself filling with doubt, with conflicting, unfinished thoughts that rattled inside her, until all she wanted was the church and its peace, the escape that Lucio's paintings gave her, their conviction.

He had finished the view in the north transept, the centrepiece of the series behind the pulpit, and when she got there the scaffolding had already been moved to one side. He had spent the longest on this painting of any so far, for it depicted St Margaret herself, before her persecution and martyrdom, tending her sheep in the countryside under the watch of a nursemaid. Mr Swann had sketched in the scene and begun painting it some months earlier, returning to dabble about on it intermittently. But to Connie it was Lucio's in every detail. She stood in the shadows by the entrance and took in the mural, free of obstruction for the first time, as Lucio swung the stage lights about so she could see the full effect of St Margaret's figure flooded with colour in the dim church.