The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (38 page)

The self-satisfied expression on her aunt's face shone with something akin to zeal. ‘What do you mean he would have liked it?' Connie said. ‘He wouldn't have given a damn! He never wanted anything to do with that church. It's what
you'd
like, not him.'

Aunty Bea spun around from the mantel. ‘And what would you suggest? Scattering him in the potato or spinach beds? Or better still, we might sprinkle him in the shed.' Her true voice was coming back to her, and Connie was almost glad. Her aunt's sarcasm was at least familiar, a lifeline of continuity in this terrible flux, and she clutched at it.

‘Only you could belittle everything that was important to him,' she said. ‘Even now you're still talking over him, making him small.'

‘Oh, that's right, I forgot,' Aunty Bea threw back. ‘You know so much more about him than I do. I was just his wife, after all.'

‘I know enough to understand this isn't about him. It's about you. He gave you everything you asked for. But it was never enough, was it? He was never enough. But you didn't have the guts to go after what you really wanted.'

Aunty Bea blew a sharp burst of air through her teeth. ‘You don't know what you're talking about, girl.'

‘I'm talking about Bill,' she said.

Her aunt's mouth slackened. She stared at Connie, and then glanced at the urn with an unmistakeable look of betrayal. She gathered up her lips again, as tightly as if they were on a drawstring, and pulled her bedjacket about her.

‘Yes,' she said, as if certain of her mind now. ‘I'll go and see Reverend Stanton tomorrow.' And she reached down for the poker and broke up the embers in the grate, replacing the guard and turning her back on the room.

Montelupini
1944

Lucio didn't go back to the cave for three nights. He was haunted by the memory of the boar and the raw helplessness of his sister's gaze, milky as the stars lost in the lake. He wouldn't go back empty-handed to his mother. Instead he took Viviana further south, deeper into the scrubs and forests where he saw no other tracks or traps, where he might have imagined himself the last hunter alive were it not for the earthy rumble of mortar, the dull cough of the mountain beneath him, the engines' drone mingling with the night wind in the beech canopy.

On the fourth day, he was descending through a glade of chestnuts, their new leaves flapping like flags above him, when the breeze brought him the scent of a fire. He heard voices in the dell below and he caught Viviana's collar, squatting next to her to listen. They were men's voices, guttural, strangely swallowed, their cadence even more alien to him than when he had first heard German spoken.

He backed Viviana up the incline, getting a safer view of the camp from above. There were twelve soldiers in the clearing, mostly sitting on their haunches or lying about the fire, where they were roasting the carcasses of what looked like squirrel and rabbit. Ammunition pouches criss-crossed their chests, and their striped coats were long and rough as blankets. They wore turbans about their heads, and grubby cowls hung behind their necks or were used to shade their faces while they dozed. Alongside the assortment of rifles and knives strung across them or lying by the fire, they resembled the warrior monks of some heathen sect, like Saracens stepped from the battlefields of the Crusades. Those whose features he could see wore wiry beards, and he thought he had never seen such dark faces, even on Sicilians. There was nothing about them that caught the light, not even their dented helmets painted with crescents like the new moon. They seemed of the elements, the bare toes in their sandals tough and brown as bark, their cheeks and noses pocked like volcanic stone. They might have blown in on a sirocco wind, the desert dust still upon them. Only their eyes were bright, glinting like damp pebbles within the wells of their sockets.

There was one pale-skinned man in their company. He sat at their edge, leaning against the trunk of a Turkey oak. His face was the only one shaven under the tall cylinder of his grubby white cap. Lucio watched him pick at a hole in the sole of his boot. He gave a command to the soldier next to him, in a different language again, the sound of the words this time familiar to Lucio from the radio at the osteria — French, Fagiolo had told him. But these were not the Allied troops anyone had been expecting. As the turbaned soldier stood to obey, Lucio caught a metallic flash at his earlobe, where several large silver hoops were threaded, weighted with leathery pendants, like shrivelled pieces of cured meat. The whites of the man's eyes, scanning the trees, were tinged yellow, a goatish quality about them, which made Lucio back away as if he had chanced upon something devilish deep within the cover of the woods.

He became panicked. He thought of his mother alone in the cave and started back along his route without stopping. But he had to break the trek when Viviana rooted out a doe and then its kits, not more than a week old, squirming in their warren. He strung the rabbits up, the mother and each tiny baby, recompense for the boar he had passed over: even that pitiful game was better than an empty bag.

Near dark, when he reached the camp, he saw the fire dying under the overhang, the cooking pot empty. All was silent, save for the forest settling into its night-time sounds. He called his mother, but Viviana answered instead with a creaking growl as she took off towards the bushes before the lake. He followed her and found two figures rising from their hiding place in the scrub. One shouted at the dog to hush; the other hurried towards him. His mother threw her arm about his neck, the bundle of the baby slung at her chest.

‘Where were you?' she whispered, her voice tight with worry. ‘See, Lucio? It's Fabrizia. She's come.'

The butcher's wife looked him over. ‘Madonna,' she said, her lips hardly moving. ‘The state of you.' He became conscious of his muddy clothes, the dirt and blood ingrained in his hands, his matted hair. ‘What have you been doing, running with the wolves?' She came to him and stood over the carcasses he had let fall to his feet. The mound of fur parted under the nudge of her toe, revealing the gutted rabbit, its six babies strung by their hind legs.

‘It was all I could find.' His apology seemed lost somewhere in his throat.

‘Good enough.' Fabrizia nodded. ‘We'll be fine,' she breathed, as if to herself. She picked up the game and headed for the fire. ‘We'll be fine. The Allies will be here soon.'

They sat on logs and Fabrizia built up the flames. The baby began to cry. He watched his mother loosening the swaddling, opening her clothes to feed, her face softer than he could remember in a long time.

‘The Germans have left the village,' Fabrizia told him. ‘They went towards Artena, but they say some got cut off by road and took to the mountains. I came to tell you. When we heard someone coming we hid.' She thrust her chin towards the scrub by the lake where Viviana had found them. ‘They destroyed half the town hall.
Centini's heartbroken. Loaded whatever stores they could take with them and torched the rest.' She slit the skins of the kits and tugged them from the flesh like she was pulling gloves from children's fingers.

‘The Allies will come any day now, you'll see. Any day. They say there's already nothing left of Cisterna, half of Cori bombed. The roads are jammed with American jeeps and tanks. It's all anyone is talking about:
when the Americans come
,
when they bring the food
,
when they clear the roads and fix the wires and reconnect the water
…
Ha!' She brought down her knife upon the legs of the doe. ‘What do they think? The Allies bomb us for months and then they're going work miracles overnight? A few bars of chocolate, some cigarettes thrown through the streets of Cori, and even La Mula believes their shit won't stink!' Underneath her bluster, Lucio could see she was as full of hope as the rest of them. ‘You know, Pettegola told Centini some of those Americans are as big and black as the devil himself! Others even speak Italian. They have family here.'

‘My brother?' Lucio interrupted her. ‘Have you heard anything of him?'

Fabrizia darted a look at his mother, who was preoccupied with the baby, and shook her head. ‘I wouldn't worry about Primo. If he's with that Cori gruppo, he's probably one of the few round here with a full stomach. They've become as bad as the crucchi, taking everything they can get their hands on.'

He saw his mother shift. She glanced away into the dark beyond the fire, but whether it was at the mention of the Germans or of Vittorio and the self-styled partisans, he couldn't tell. They weren't the only ones with torn loyalties, he knew. There were plenty of families in the villages whose fathers still wore the Fascist uniform while their sons hid in the hills, wearing the red scarf.

Fabrizia palmed the raw meat. ‘Still, we've survived, haven't we?' she said, her tone brightening. She began to bone the rabbits. Her fingers were strong and sure, as business-like as if she was back behind her chopping block in the shop. Lucio was lulled into such comfort watching her that, for an instant, all the questions and uncertainty pushing in on him were held at bay. He felt exhausted, so relieved by her presence that he would do whatever she told him.

‘Now fetch that pot so we can get this into your mother,' she said, nudging him with her elbow. ‘She can't feed that baby on love alone.'

Leyton
1950

Connie sat under the lychgate at St Margaret's, feeling the night getting colder, smelling the frost in the air that would settle before dawn. Her fingers and toes were numb, but it was nothing compared to the stony chill of the house in Grimthorpe Lane, petrified by Aunty Bea's very breath, her unrelenting righteousness. Unable to sleep, Connie had ended up at the church. It was nothing but habit, she told herself. She sat under the lych for a long time, believing that simply being close by would give her the clarity of mind to think over what she needed to do. But when she heard the south door rattle, the key in the lock, she stood up quickly. She knew Lucio's walk even in the dark, and her relief at the sound of his step made her finally admit she'd been waiting for him all along.

The beam of his torch along the path picked her out. He stopped and switched it off, standing opposite her. She couldn't see his face, only discerned the clearing of his throat. ‘I'm very sorry,' he said. ‘About your uncle.'

Hearing the words from him, more than from anyone else, nearly broke her. She had to reach for her bike, for something to hold on to. He asked if she was alright. She nodded but kept her mouth shut.

When she thought she could control her voice, she said, ‘Will you come with me? Will you help me to do something? Right now?' She rushed her words, frightened she might regret them or, worse, pour out all her frustrations and fears in a confused mess before him. He didn't answer. Without even asking her the details, he reached to switch on her bike lamp and take the handlebars from her.

They were quiet as they walked across the freezing commons. She led him all the way to the centre of the village green, the hardened grass cracking under their feet, the bicycle wheels drawing a line between their footprints. The bowling crease had its winter growth, but she could still make out where Uncle Jack had pressed it in the summer, the exact places he had sunk the stumps. She reached into the basket of her bike and unwrapped the towel she had wound around the urn.

Lucio turned to her uneasily, perhaps sensing she wasn't sure. But before she could change her mind, she had thrown out her arm and shaken the ashes across the crease. They fell lumpy and graceless, an ugly pile of dust dulling the grass of its glint. She held her breath and felt a rush of confused emotions: remorse, vindication, the terrible ordinariness of it all, the finality of her loss. She ran to the clubhouse and sank onto its step, trying to catch the special smell of the place, of Uncle Jack through the locked door. But all felt frozen now in the metallic air of winter.

After a while, Lucio followed her, and the way he stayed beside her, so still and patient, without judgement, made her cry even more — hard sobs of grief, of doubt and confusion, until he pulled her to him and put his arms around her. Everything felt infinitely better then. Infinitely better and so much worse. Her mind was full of Uncle Jack: his habits, his expressions, his jokes — and his death, his ashes there on the green. Was that it? Was that the sum total of him, of a life quietly lived in Leyton? She forced herself to push away from Lucio, and she didn't want to see if it hurt him as much as it hurt her. She picked up her bike and cycled across the green without looking back.

Montelupini
1944

They didn't return to the village straight away. Fabrizia told him she was still frightened of the strafing, which had plagued everyone's movements in the valley for weeks, making them jump and cover their heads at every banging shutter, at every broom handle clattering on the cobbles. But Lucio knew she was thinking not about gunfire but of the fallout that would rain upon his mother — and her baby — the moment she returned to Montelupini.

They stayed in the cave, and he continued to go out early each morning with Viviana to hunt, not returning until the afternoon or evening, when he had checked and reset all his traps. As the weather warmed, he would stop by the lake to swim, sometimes finding his mother and Fabrizia there, washing clothes or the rags they wrapped about the baby.