The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (37 page)

It was Aunty Bea who came home that night. Connie watched her at the coat stand, reaching to take off the hat that wasn't on her head. She had never seen her aunt leave the house without a hat, or a headscarf at the least, and her tired pillbox was still hanging next to Uncle Jack's trilby on their hooks. Aunty Bea straightened, her lips parting, her hands falling back to her sides. She seemed shrunken, misplaced, standing there in the narrow hall, so childish that Connie could not help remembering herself hovering in that very spot, her coat half unbuttoned, her mother's cheap perfume lingering about the mirror while she'd swallowed hard to fight back the tears. She crossed the hall and put her arms about her aunt, but she was stiff as a china doll, her face as white and unyielding. She pulled away from Connie, clamping tight her mouth, as if terrified something might fall from her lips.

‘Aunty?' Connie asked, holding on to her wrist.

But Aunty Bea started to climb the stairs. ‘There's so much to do,' she muttered. ‘He's left me with so much to do.'

Montelupini
1943–1944

They did not go to the caves beyond Cori, to the places they had heard other families were hiding their boys, the places where refugees from Rome had settled in makeshift camps. Instead they preferred to keep to themselves, to stay in the grottos they knew around Montemezzo, the familiar hunting grounds Lucio had traversed with Otto and Viviana, where they could descend sometimes and look down on the village far below.

They arranged their camp inside a cavernous chamber, near a spring that dripped through a crack in the mountain. An overhang allowed them to keep a fire burning, sheltered from the rain and wind and snow. Lucio spent the first days foraging for dead wood, which he chopped and stacked against the walls of the cave, partially insulating them from the stony chill and providing a store of dry firewood. But at night they woke shivering when the embers had died, and huddled for warmth on either side of Viviana. He would gaze out at the black sky then — sharp as ice, the stars curdled against it — and listen to the endless gush of water, the bats chattering from somewhere deep within the network of caves, the lonely lament of a wolf high in the range.

When their food stores began to run out, he went further and further into the mountains to hunt with Viviana. Fabrizia had given him Urso's pikes, but he most often used them as walking sticks, never coming across prey big enough to justify their use. It still wrenched his stomach from time to time to pry the bloodied, shivering creatures from Viviana's paws. He strived to the beautiful accuracy, the calm kill that Otto had shown him, but hunting was an art, like the precision of his pencil: one bad stroke and the essence of a thing was changed, the whole turned ugly. And yet it sickened him less now than returning with nothing and seeing his mother's pale face, the hollow of her cheeks, her animal eyes as she scanned him for food. So he trekked further into the range, sometimes leaving her for days at a time, laying traps and following tracks, not able to bear the emptiness of her smile at his empty hands.

Sometimes, on clear nights, when the moon was full and bright as a coin in the pool of the sky, he descended towards the village, even as far as the stable at Collelungo. On occasion he discovered eggs or potatoes wrapped in a waxed cloth and left on the chicken roost — by Fabrizia or Fagiolo, he assumed. He replaced them with a spinosa quill or a pheasant feather, some useless, innocent token to show they were alive. That Fabrizia did not try to find them told him enough about the state of affairs in Montelupini: she was being watched. Everyone was watching everyone.

His mother's advancing pregnancy seemed to bring on her seizures more and more, visiting her both day and night. He would sense her waking up, catch her fingering the spittle encrusted around her mouth, unable to find the energy to lift her head even though she had slept the entire night. She said it was the baby, but he blamed himself for not finding her enough food, for not keeping her warm, for her worries about Vittorio, whom he had done nothing to dissuade from leaving. Each time he waited for her to come around, he would study her face, the colour of the chalk tracks that criss-crossed the mountains; the lines that, even in this forced sleep, cut into her forehead and around her mouth; the ridges of blue veins mapped along her hands. And it seemed that each time she opened her eyes, she came back to him a little less, as though, despite the life growing inside her, death was claiming her bit by bit.

He tried his best to distract her, to distract himself. He hummed the old brigands' tunes she used to sing, or recounted the tales of their exploits that she had told him as a small boy. Using charred sticks, he drew for her in the journal that Otto had given him, or on the walls of the cave. She would lie under her blankets then, her dry lips parted, and he'd feel her grow still, her hunger and fatigue overtaken for a time by concentration, the same way he lost himself in the task of creating the pictures: the body abandoned to the imagination.

But by the height of winter they were living mindlessly, alive to nothing but the need to eat and keep the blood from freezing in their veins. They spent days hunkered about the fire, while winds or snowstorms sucked and buffeted at the cave's entrance and Viviana howled. They ate stewed herbs and dandelions, and the boiled cracked bones of animals, hunted weeks earlier, some of which even Viviana had already discarded.

The sketches on the cave walls took on a life of their own. They seemed to Lucio to have been made by someone else, someone open to the minute form and shape of the world. He felt drained of that sensibility now, bled of it, as cold and calcified as the cave itself. The days passed, and it was like everything before had been sloughed like a skin, and he could believe they'd always lived there, there in that prehistoric time, before the war, before the village, when everything was reduced to the barest pulse of life.

After the storms had passed and he could go out to hunt again, he no longer saw the blood on the snow from the mice he gutted, the dun feathers he plucked from a trapped sparrow. He only saw his mother sleeping through the day, or her wide glassy eyes as she stared at night across the frosted valley, so clear she might throw a stone and shatter it like her own reflection on the thin ice of the lake. They barely spoke. There seemed nothing to say.

Spring arrived in slow increments. The gush of the mountain jangled in his dreams, the pale sun lingered above the lake where the first insects began to shiver, the forest's soft grind and crack seemed suddenly noisy to him. He started to grub for snails and slugs, sprouting arugula and chicory, eventually birds' eggs. Viviana unearthed warrens densely packed and warm, writhing with insistent life. Their bellies complained at being filled again. But in the evenings Lucio sat on the rock ledge and watched such spring storms as he had never seen before: the flares of light that changed night back into day, the delayed response of mortar that grumbled under the surface of the earth and jarred his bones, loose in his skin.

All through the winter, he had felt the cough of distant explosions in his chest, had seen the planes cutting the skies as effortlessly as migrating birds over the range. He'd heard the boom of jettisoned bombs, and in their wake the heightened peace that made him flinch at every sound — the quarrel of the birds in the trees, an ox lowing at plough, an axe starting up again in the valley. Afterwards it all felt so ordinary, so timeless, that the drone of the engines seemed destined for some other place, some other war, far away. But now this dull shelling that shook their nights without relief had become purposeful in its stealthy encroachment, as predictable as two dogs, pack hunting, inching in on their kill.

The baby came too soon and too fast, as if it sensed the urgency about them. Lucio was hunting to the south, but Viviana had had no luck the whole day and his traps were empty. Unable to face returning with nothing, he slept the night in a mossy basin under an overhang of boulders. His redemption came in the morning, when he found a patch of wild strawberries, tiny and perfumed like violets, ripened in the sunny lee of the rocks. He gathered them in his pockets, imagining their redness in his mother's hands. But when he called out to her at the mouth of the cave, she didn't answer. As he entered, he could hear her breath, gradually made out her prone form clutching at the slick of a baby, blue and waxy as a hatched chick, already bringing its wide mouth to her nipple. Next to her lay one of Urso's pikes, which she had used to cut away the cord. She was marble white, her hair clinging wet about her neck, her mouth slack with exhaustion. But her eyes, as he drew close, seemed too intense, alive and burning with determination in her face.

‘A girl,' she said. He squatted by her and she gave the baby to him, surrendering it like she had only been waiting for him to come. He took the shrivelled thing — hardly more than a handful of flesh — to the light outside so he could see her. Pink suffused the blue of her skin as she grimaced and mouthed her silent wonder. And he felt like he had woken from a night terror, or the place where his mother went when she had a seizure, the fearful strictures of his heart loosening and letting the blood pulse through once more.

Later he took the bloodied clothes and blanket and washed them in the lake. The afternoon light had already ripened between the trees, and the busy forms of insects were caught in it as if in syrup. The pollen of the chestnut catkins touched the surface of the lake and made it shudder like Viviana's skin. He wrung out the blanket, aware of the dog's tail in the undergrowth, twitching from time to time. He spread the washing across the bushes at the lake's edge where the next day's sun would catch them, and then he called to Viviana, clicking his tongue in the way Urso had always done. She didn't come, but over the incline away from the lake he heard her start up the baying that told him she had something in her sights.

He ran towards the sound, a chill flashing through him as he began to recognise, between the dog's barks, the unmistakeable grunts of a boar. Viviana was crouching on her haunches in the shade of a great chestnut, her paws spread, unmoving, monochrome in the dusk, as if she was rendered in ink or marble, caught in the scene of Urso's famous bookplate. He called her name and his hand went to the skinning knife at his belt. He remembered the neat stroke across the neck of the boar cradled at his father's chest; Valeriana's head lolling over Urso's shoulder; the curl of the snake's carcass, like a question mark in Otto's hand; the badger's blood anointing Vittorio's cheek in the light of a lantern. He gripped at the knife, but even now it felt cumbersome in his hand, too large as he kneaded his palm against its handle, trying to discover its groove, its fit. It still felt wrong, like using someone else's scythe at harvest. His failings smarted in him as if he had scored the knife along his own flesh. He snatched at Viviana's collar and yanked her back, calling her off. The boar shredded through the undergrowth, squealing out its taunt. Lucio stood panting, staring after it as the ferns thrashed between the whispering trees.

Leyton
1950

Uncle Jack's wake, like his life, was quiet and unremarkable, dogged only by the stubbornness of Aunty Bea. She refused to set foot in a public house, obliging the villagers to run up and down the high street in the bitter November wind, ferrying pint glasses and sherry between the memorial hall and the Green Man. As a result, most of the mourners went home more sober than when they'd started. Bobby gave a rather stiff and awkward rendition of
Abide with Me
on his clarinet, which left everyone dry-eyed and her aunt nodding approvingly. And even when Connie, escalating between helpless grief and carefully guarded rage, was spotted sitting in Vittorio's car at the edge of the green, no scene ensued. Instead a fraught calm settled between her and her aunt, exhausting them both with the weight of avoidance and the fermentation of things left unsaid.

Uncle Jack's ashes arrived, disappointing in their drab little urn, observing them from the mantel beside the ticking clock. And still they skirted around each other, their movements slowed, their voices muted, as if the house was submerged in water. Two weeks passed and they barely left Grimthorpe Lane, Mrs Cleat insisting that Connie stay at home to grieve and comfort her aunt, when all she wanted, in fact, was the paltry distraction the shop could provide. She felt like she might suffocate in the house, the days marked only by her aunt clearing and blackening the grate, then building and lighting the fire again. The flames did nothing to warm them, but Connie was grateful for a focal point at least, the hypnotic relief they provided from the grey that engulfed her.

‘What'll you do with the ashes?' she asked Aunty Bea eventually, when she could bear their silence no longer. The urn seemed to blush in the firelight, reflecting the embers as they both looked up at it. Connie curled her feet up into Uncle Jack's chair and leaned her head against the wing, smelling him in it.

‘Enough, now,' her aunt said, dismissing Connie's sobs as though she was still a child, snivelling over a grazed knee.

Connie felt anger rising over her grief. ‘Well, what are you going to do? Just sit and stare at that jar every night like he's still here?'

Aunty Bea stood and set the guard about the fire. She pulled back her shoulders. ‘He'll be put in the Farrington plot as soon as St Margaret's is re-opened.' Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, as though she was outlining a plan she'd been making for some time. ‘I'll see Reverend Stanton about a service. Jack's can be the first memorial in the newly dedicated church. He'd have liked that.'