The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (7 page)

They heard Mr Gilbert's voice again outside. ‘I said sit down. Stay still.' Vittorio shook his head.

Connie tried to piece his story to the scene around her. ‘Mr Repton didn't do that to your brother?' She was horrified at the thought.

‘Repton?' Vittorio gave a short, disgusted laugh. ‘Non ha i coglioni.'

She frowned. ‘My father,' he went on. ‘He see the eggs on our table. He think Lucio take them.
We must do everything right
, he says.
Everything right. No asking, no taking, just working …
working for this Repton until maybe we break our backs and drop in the mud.' His face had become closed as a fist. He turned to wash out the dishcloth in the sink.

Connie didn't know what to say and he kept his back to her, suggesting the conversation was over. She stepped outside uncertainly. ‘Can I help, Mr Gilbert?' At once, the Italian jerked his head from the teacher's hands.

‘Connie,' Mr Gilbert said, bringing the boy's face back towards him. ‘I'm sorry about this mess.' She wasn't sure whether he meant the face or the ruined evening. ‘Sorry you should have to meet young Lucio here in such a state. He needs a stitch or two, but there's no getting through to him.' He was applying iodine and gauze to the boy's split eyebrow, and he indicated for her to replace his fingers with her own, while he searched for a dressing that would fix it in place. ‘Lucio, this is Connie Farrington. She works at Cleat's. I invited her over for a taste of Italy. This wasn't quite what I had in mind.'

They said no more while Mr Gilbert finished treating the cuts. She stood to Lucio's side, holding up the dressings and scissors, her arms obscuring his face. He still struggled with ragged breath, and his hands, spread wide over his thighs, were also cut and bloodied. The fine stubble of hair shorn at his neck was damp. She began to realise that even in circumstances other than these, he might not have acknowledged their meeting on Bythorn Rise. That afternoon now seemed contained and self-sufficient, completely unrelated to the shop or tea at the schoolhouse or seeing him sitting there on the patio, smelling of Dettol and sticking plaster. Even when Mr Gilbert was done, they looked away from each other, like they had a secret to guard.

Lucio stood up awkwardly, hovering about Mr Gilbert, and she felt compelled to return to the kitchen and give them some space. He spoke a few words to his teacher, but within minutes he was gone again, striding across the grass to a gate at the bottom of the garden. She saw him hesitate briefly on the threshold before slipping into the thickened light of the summer evening, which hung over the bridle path to Bythorn Rise. Behind him, the gate swung shut, and the handle clicked into its lock with a kind of inevitability that made her unaccountably sad.

Mr Gilbert seemed to sense it too, for Connie caught his troubled expression slackening with resignation. But by the time he had returned the ARP tin to the kitchen cupboard and washed his hands, he was jovially insisting on their planned dinner, fussing over napkins and glasses, avoiding any mention of what had occurred. He jabbered on about his time in Florence and Venice before the war, and Vittorio became more sullen and uncommunicative, retreating into his own thoughts the more Mr Gilbert talked. Connie imagined a different summer night from this, where she would have become heady on the fumes of the kitchen alone, set adrift between Mr Gilbert's stories and Vittorio's attentions. But that night had been eclipsed, and now all any of them wanted was for it to be over.

Finally Connie got up to leave. ‘I have to,' she explained to Mr Gilbert. ‘Aunty Bea —'

‘Oh yes, Aunty Bea.' He winced in mock terror.

‘No, really,' she said, laughing. ‘She might have recalled the Home Guard to come and find me by now.'

On the doorstep, the evening air seemed to clear Vittorio's mood. ‘Your bicicletta, it's at the shop?' he asked her. She nodded. ‘I get it for you.' And before she could stop him, he had set off down the high street.

Mr Gilbert touched her arm. ‘No. Let him go.' He had become serious, even unsure of himself. ‘Connie, can you keep what happened tonight — to Lucio — between us? Mrs Cleat, you know …'

She was offended. ‘You don't have to ask that.'

Mr Gilbert nodded his apology. ‘He does it to protect Vittorio, I think. I suspect it isn't the first time. But you should understand that things have been difficult … complicated for them … and their father. You know, Connie, I don't believe in bad people, only bad circumstances. Do you see?'

He rubbed at his chin with his thumb. She was about to ask what he meant when he straightened. ‘Ah,' he said, focusing beyond her in the direction of Cleat's.

Vittorio was riding her bicycle down the road, arms stiff and knees wide, teetering ridiculously, like a clown on a wire. As he gathered momentum, he began to make swooping curves, barely avoiding the wild verges on each side of the lane. At first she thought he was putting on a show. But when he reached the schoolhouse and she saw his frown, his bright cheeks, his open-mouthed concentration, she realised he was as serious, as determined, as any child.

‘His first time, evidently,' Mr Gilbert said as Vittorio sailed past. She was mulling over his comment about circumstances, bad circumstances, and her own mother, her father, what she could remember of them.

‘There's more to him than what you see, Connie.'

‘Isn't that true of all of us?'

He looked at her properly, perhaps for the first time that evening. ‘You really are an unusual young woman, you know. I'm not quite sure how you've managed to turn out that way, given —' He stopped. His eyes ran the length of the street. The deflected brilliance of the evening in the windows, the heightened chatter of birds in dusky gardens, did not quite mask the vague sense of curtains twitching. ‘Well,' was all he said.

Vittorio returned, breathless, locking the brakes and jerking to a stop by the kerb of the schoolhouse. ‘This bicicletta,' he called to them, lifting his leg over the bike frame and revealing the underside of his boot, a hole lined with newspaper at the toe. ‘This Ro-yal En-field,' he articulated the bike's golden letters, shaking one of the handlebars as he appraised the racing green paintwork. ‘How much you pay?'

Connie was torn between indignation and intrigue at his candour. It had taken her a year to save the four pounds and six shillings for the new bike. She'd had to squirrel away what was left of her wages after paying board to Aunty Bea, even keeping hold of her thruppences when the collection plate rattled past in church. And all the while, she would curse Uncle Jack's rusty old Raleigh, which slipped its chain and spat oil on her as she cycled to Cleat's, mortified by the wooden blocks he'd attached to the pedals because the seat was jammed at his height. She didn't know whether to feel sorry for the Italian or to laugh at the ease with which he thought he could come by such a bike. She wanted to impress upon him how long she had had to wait for this one token of freedom. But she only reached for the handlebar protectively.

He shrugged. ‘I think I get one.' She opened her mouth, but when she looked from his cracked boots to his unfaltering eyes, she closed it again. He had such little doubt in himself, such guileless confidence, she almost believed him.

Connie rounded the corner of the rise, still engrossed with the events of the evening. At the crest of the hill, though, habit made her stop to look out at the gamekeeper's cottage. The sun had sunk below the clouds, and the barley and wheat rolling before her shivered in the breeze like the skin of some vast animal. She felt the shudder of it in her own skin and was about to cycle away when she caught sight of a figure at the edge of the spinney.

At first she thought it was Fossett, off to the Green Man after his rounds checking the young pheasants. But soon she made out the broad shoulders of Lucio Onorati, bent over, examining something in the rough before the trees. When he stood up, she saw in his outstretched fist an animal held by the hind legs. Squinting, she made out the sleek skin, the distended belly of Mrs Repton's pregnant Siamese. It twitched, like one length of overworked muscle, and the wind over the ridge teased its fur, the colour of fine sand, its darker undercoat glimpsed like a secret. She watched him run his free hand slowly upwards from the neck to the tail, and the cat seemed to settle. She thought of the press of spine under fur, the stretched sinew of its body, the green eyes glazing as they would when she stroked it. For an instant, the shape of them seemed one and the same to her, camouflaged by the silence and the fading light.

The cuff of his hand was quick and blunt, strangely unsurprising when it came. She imagined the muted crack of bone, like a twig under leaf litter when she walked in the spinney. He descended the fallow towards the brook, the cat limp across his back, nothing more than quarry now in one practised blow of his hand. She gripped at the handlebars of her bike, feeling disconnected somehow, as if she was the foreigner in her own world, not him. But after a while he was nothing more than a shadow, swallowed up by the huddle of sombre trees at the brook's edge.

Montelupini
1939

His mother sat cross-legged on the battlement wall, watching the piazza below. Lucio loved it when she climbed up and sat beside him, cross-legged, her skirts pulled into her lap like a girl. He loved it even when her fingers worried at the fabric of her hems and her lips were chalky and dry, her skin like wax in the glow of the coloured lanterns strung across the fountain. She was supposed to be in bed, resting, not climbing the walls of the old town barefoot at night to see the festival. But he knew that was precisely why she had done it. She rarely did what she was told, and she refused to indulge her illness or become a martyr to it, as so many women in the village liked to do with their own ailments. When she emerged from a seizure, Lucio could sense the physical relief in her, like the quenching of a desperate thirst after being trapped somewhere, scrambling and clawing her way back towards the light. And afterwards, after those deathly sleeps, when he would hold his fingers to her mouth to feel her breath, she seemed to wake doubly alive, the force of her will thrumming inside her, like a plucked string. He wasn't going to be the one to silence that, to bully her back to bed.

Below them the village was celebrating the grape harvest. Padre Ruggiero had blessed the crop, and Professore Centini was judging the ciambelle al mosto, made with the harvest's grape must. ‘Poor Centini,' his mother said. ‘He looks like he can hardly squeeze one more mouthful into that cummerbund.' It was true. The mayor, in full Fascist uniform, was puffing along the sampling table from one identical cake to the next, rubbing the waistband that held his gut as fast as a bilge hoop on a barrel. It didn't help that most of the bland cakes were destined to be scattered to the chickens: even the children in the village ran away when they were offered one. But the same recipe had been made at harvest time for centuries, and for the Montelupinese, tradition was more important than taste. Behind the mayor Fagiolo was playing his bagpipes, their strangled, reedy melody seeming to aggravate Professore Centini's discomfort.

‘He should let Padre Ruggiero judge the ciambelle — he's got more room for expansion in that cassock.' Lucio felt his mother's toes flex against his leg as she laughed. It entertained him more than anything on the stage below.

Sometimes he thought his father wanted her to stay at home not to rest, but to be hidden away. Her seizures, when they came, had something animal about them, so debasing that they shocked the villagers, no matter how many times they had witnessed them before. The one that morning had been particularly bad. Padre Ruggiero was giving communion to the departing soldiers when her foot had begun knocking at the pew, the wood trembling with such force that someone shouted, ‘Earthquake!' Her eyes became lost in her head and Lucio had laced his hands about her as she thrashed, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. When it was done, he laid her down in the nave, and they were both pale and wracked and wet from the urine that had soaked through her skirt. His father's face had stared back at him from the line of soldiers at the altar — a blank, vacant expression, as if he barely knew who they were.

The scientific in Montelupini took his mother's fits to be one step removed from lunacy. The women twisted a finger to their temples if she walked away from a good price at the market, or when she avoided the washhouse, preferring to beat her clothes alone in the stream at Collelungo. Others were more superstitious, protecting themselves with the two-fingered cornuto raised to her back and muttering about witchcraft
.
But the worst by far were the men at the osteria. Those same men who invoked every orifice of each other's wives and sisters and mothers-in-law as they damned their scopa hands found their mouths dry and empty when Letia Onorati walked past. They would fidget behind their cards, casting lingering looks from under their brows, and Lucio had learned to see in their eyes the reflection of his mother's mouth, her hair blacker than the lake on a moonless night, the curve of her neck as she balanced a basket on her head. When she walked away down Via del Soccorso, their raffia chairs groaned underneath them. And what Lucio detected in their faces was a mix of regret and relief, like they had followed the song of a siren and she had thrown them back out to sea.

‘Santa Lucia,' his mother said, uncrossing her legs and sitting upright. ‘Not yet, surely?' Lucio's grandfather was climbing the stage, with Polvere, the baker, not far behind. Nonno Raimondi had dressed himself up as a woman, his lips smeared red, a shabby wig on his head. He staggered in a pair of stolen high heels. Even from the battlements, Lucio could tell he was flushed and sweaty, both from a day's drinking at the osteria and from struggling with two enormous breasts of water-filled pig's bladders, jostling for freedom at the neck of his dress. Meanwhile, the baker wore the Sunday clothes of a suitor and was attempting to seduce Nonno Raimondi with a ludicrous length of salami and a sampling of his chestnuts. Lucio wasn't really surprised: nearly every celebration in the village degenerated into drunken skits or tawdry songs at some stage of the evening, but this was early even by Montelupini's standards. The audience, on their upturned crates, cheered and heckled nonetheless.