Where My Heart Used to Beat

by Sebastian Faulks

  There was silence in the study. I pushed my mind back to that shell-holed winter landscape. I didn’t remember being shot from behind, but neither did I not remember … There was nothing to rule the story out. Shenton was hard and quick thinking; this kind of thing would not have been beyond him.

  “Of course there were many different ways of going bomb-happy,” said Varian. “It usually took the form of people refusing to go on, like Warren, or just blabbering, not knowing where they were. But I knew about excessive aggression too. ‘Running amok’ is what they called it in Malaya. I want you to know, Robert, that it didn’t lessen my regard for you in any way.”

  “It stopped you giving me a company.”

  “Yes, it did. I wanted to be sure in my own mind that you were fully recovered.”

  “You could have handed me over to the medical people.”

  “I know. But I was short of good officers. You’d been with us since the beginning, and I’d become attached to the Five Just Men. It was a superstition, I suppose. I was worried a full medical board, if it knew all the facts, might send you home. Also I wasn’t sure what Bill’s position would be. I thought it was something we could manage ourselves. In the family, as it were.” He looked down for a moment. “And I think you were pleased to stay on with the battalion?”

  “Certainly. I would have hated to go home.”

  “Do you mind that I’ve told you? After all these years?”

  “No.”

  “And it seems long enough ago now.”

  I looked round the study at all the books on their shelves. Some of them—a couple of verse anthologies, some Maupassant stories—were among those I had first seen on his portable bookshelf in Lille.

  * * *

  THE VISITORS THAT evening ruled out any further personal reminiscence. I left after breakfast the next day with many promises of future visits and keeping in touch. And that was the last time I saw my old commanding officer. I thought that in the fortnight or so between issuing his invitation and my arrival in Northumberland he must have thought quite hard about what to tell me. He hadn’t needed to, but perhaps on seeing me he had sensed that I was on a mission or needed things to be, in Pereira’s word, resolved. I didn’t resent Richard’s decision; it seemed characteristic of a man who was both disciplined and humane.

  On the way back to London on the train the next day, I drank a half bottle of the surprisingly good British Rail white wine and found my eyelids heavy. The weak autumn sun was soporific; the nap of the upholstered seat and the faint smell of diesel were carrying me away whether I chose to go back or not … back to that summer of 1944, the seaside, on leave with Donald …

  EIGHT

  Lily Greenslade was a disappointment as far as Donald was concerned. I suppose the fact that she chose a hymn to sing on the drive home that first night was a bad sign. Donald told me he had made a mild suggestion to her as they walked down the beach and had been rebuffed. She allowed herself to link her arm through his, but that was all.

  I wondered what had made a handsome woman of only forty, full of life and wit despite her snobbery, so unwilling to let go. The Bay of Naples and the coast for a hundred miles on either side were as close as most of us would come to a suspension of the rules. To go no further than hand-holding was like a denial of life in the face of destruction, especially when the man on offer was as kind and discreet as Donald. What lay behind Lily’s self-control? Religion? A setback in love? Some insecurity: an unwillingness to risk her privacy … Or perhaps she had concluded that a path to heaven and to earthly happiness lay not in rolling the dice on romance but in filling the day with profitable and selfless action. She seemed wise enough to think so.

  Lily not only ran the Red Cross with devotion to the book of rules, she also had taken it on herself to supervise the morals of those who worked there. She was reluctant to let Luisa out in the evening, though I don’t know by what right she constrained her when the working day was over. Luisa may have been girlish in her manner, but she was twenty-six years old—only two years younger than I, who had commanded an infantry company.

  In the course of one lunchtime on the wall, with Luisa’s prompting, I began talking about my childhood. She seemed fascinated by the idea of a boy growing up without a father, but I told her there was not much to say: an absence is not a story. She was incredulous when I told her about my life in Mr. Liddell’s garret, and laughed when I described my Scottish college, the dissecting rooms and the beery evenings—some of which I might have exaggerated for her benefit. Pushed further, I spoke a little of girls, lovers, regrets, and disappointments; and at some stage in the recitation of these everyday events, I saw something shift in her. A pained and hungry look came into her eye as though there was something that she wanted to possess, an essence of me that was becoming vital to her as well.

  And I think it must have been on this day that I first kissed her. I was anxious as I did so, about how it might alter the balance between us; that she might from then on think of me not as a man in whom she’d found something of herself miraculously distilled but as a venal soldier like the rest.

  Her lips were swollen with the reflex of desire. Blood had filled them. Her tongue tasted of her; it tasted of me. It was life, and it was heavenly. I was lost, I was found.

  * * *

  “ROBERT,” LILY SAID to me one lunchtime, “I need your help; we can’t get any penicillin. There are men with infections, with bad wounds; men who’ve been sent here from Cassino, some of who are going to die when they could be saved.”

  “Aren’t there shipments coming into Naples?”

  “Yes, I believe so, but none of it seems to reach us here.”

  “You should speak to someone in the Allied Military Government.”

  “My director has already done that. He was passed on to a different office. And so on. They were not helpful. You could almost say they were evasive.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Show some initiative. For the time being, until proper supplies get going again, we just need a small amount. Enough to treat twenty men for two weeks each.”

  I laughed. “Lily, do you think I’m the kind of man who can go into the backstreets of Naples and winkle out a box of penicillin? My Italian’s no good. I might end up with a stiletto in my back.”

  “You could take an interpreter.”

  “All right. I’ll take Luisa. And I’ll need a car too. Donald’s taken ours to Bari.”

  “I think I can arrange a car. But Luisa has—”

  “Without her it’s no deal. I’ll look after her.”

  Lily looked at me in a strange way, as though weighing up some awful choice. She went to speak, then stopped.

  “Luisa…” She began and once more tailed off again.

  “What is it?”

  She held my gaze. I imagined she was wondering whether the lives of some wounded soldiers were worth the risk of a young woman’s virtue. There were terrible stories of French Moroccan troops raping and sodomizing the inhabitants of entire Campanian villages: women, girls, even old men. The Canadians and Americans propositioned every female they set eyes on. Would the Allied wounded behave any better once they were fit again? Were they worth the trouble? I thought Lily had already concluded that I was a bad man and that Luisa would succumb to me. Her dilemma was whether the wounded would be better left to die, especially if Luisa’s preserved purity might redeem their souls.

  “Lily?” I said. “Is that a deal?”

  “All right,” she said. “Saturday is her day off. I’ll make sure the car’s free.”

  I collected Luisa from her lodging early in the morning. The Red Cross car was a commandeered roadster with sloppy steering but a pleasantly growling engine. I put my foot down as we left the outskirts of the town and found the open road. Luisa, her face taut with what I hoped was joy, sat beside me on the front seat. She put her hand shyly on my knee, and I turned to look at her. A tear trembled in the corner of her eye.
r />   Many of the fields we drove past were obscured by rows of fruit trees in which vines had been braided to make a screen. The open ones were full of harvesters—or gleaners, scavengers, people pulling up small green plants and shoots, testing them between their teeth.

  “They come at dawn from the city,” said Luisa. “They hope something has grown in the night. Dandelions, maybe.”

  Much of the countryside seemed untouched: there was a limit to what even two bombing campaigns could do. It was different as we entered the suburbs of Naples. Here, many of the tenements were blasted, though people were still living in buildings that looked to be on the verge of collapse. Washing was strung between windowless lintels and leaning doors. In the side streets there was sometimes rubble and masonry to a height of twenty feet. On the main roads there were gaps where entire buildings had fallen; the carmine-red plaster on the palazzos was holed or missing, leaving brick and timbers gaping. There were hardly any motor vehicles, though horses were attached not just to tradesmen’s carts but to fancy carriages that must have been hauled out of back garages or even museums: phaetons, barouches, or some such things. In the wreckage, people went about their business wearing clothes made from materials intended for curtains or blankets. I saw an old woman dressed in seat covers sewn into a dress, a man in a jacket made from a flag. It gave them an air of desperate grandeur, like guests at an asylum ball.

  We pressed on into the middle of the city, down to the Piazza Vittoria at the end of the seafront, and left the car outside British military intelligence headquarters, where the doorman told me that for a sum he could make sure it would still be there when we came back. Then we walked to a bar in the Galleria, in which I had arranged to meet my friend, Master Sergeant Stark. The Galleria was a glass-roofed colonnade with grand intentions unfulfilled; it was now the last resort of drunks and chancers. Its seediness appealed to me, though I felt Luisa tighten her grip on my arm as we walked between the dim, indistinguishable bars; she was a brisk walker at the best of times, and I struggled to keep up. The place chosen by Stark was not much favored by servicemen; its clientele consisted of Neapolitans fallen on hard times. Their threadbare clothes suggested they had once been professional men, but their faces were gaunt, and they made one drink last a long time.

  Stark was waiting at a corner table. I introduced Luisa and saw the baffled look on his plain midwestern face; such women could not be easily bought.

  “What’s it this time? Candy for your lady friend? Don’t you guys ever get supplies of your own?”

  “You know what happens to them.”

  “Sure.” Stark had a guileless grin that showed even teeth. “They say the wops are taking one in three crates from all Allied shipments.”

  “I don’t know why we can’t police it better.”

  Stark shrugged. “Tried everything. They set off the air-raid sirens when they want to do a big heist. So what can I do for you?”

  I placed a bottle of officers’ whisky on the table. It was the only thing I could lay my hands on that the Americans could not. “Penicillin,” I said. “Not for me. It’s for the Red Cross. I need a whole box.”

  “They’re not getting any at all?”

  “Not for weeks. Men could die.”

  Stark began to laugh. “It’s the pox. Excuse me, ma’am. All the girls are on the game; all the men are getting it. Soldiers, locals—it’s an epidemic. The pharmacists can’t get enough of it. Lines of people around the block.”

  “Do you know how to get hold of some?” I said.

  Stark picked up a glass of vermouth. “Officially?”

  “Anyhow,” I said.

  “Well, I could give you a description of Gennaro.”

  “Who?”

  “He hangs out in Café Savoia in Piazza Dante, up that way. He knows most things. He could maybe find out where the local pharmacist gets his supply. Give you a name. But I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “Why?”

  Stark raised his eyebrows. “It’s one thing swapping goods with me, but once you get into the black-market supply chain, you’re in the Mafia.”

  “You mean the Allied Military Government is—”

  “Ssh. Not so loud. Is run by mobsters? Yes. Back home they thought it would be a good idea to send Italian speakers over here. Oil the wheels a little. They didn’t think they’d end up with a family organization like in New York.”

  I took a pull of my drink, trying not to look shocked. It was clear why Lily Greenslade’s director had had so little luck in trying to get hold of more penicillin.

  “It’s not just medical supplies,” said Stark. “They steal guns, bayonets, grenades. They say on the Via Roma you can buy a goddamn tank.”

  Luisa waved her hand in despair. “This would not happen in Genoa. Here is the Mezzogiorno.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, lady. When people are starving they’ll do anything. Our commanding officer lost his car one night. They climbed into the compound and took it out bit by bit over the wall. So what do you want in return for your whisky?”

  I looked at Luisa. “Well?”

  “There is something. You have stockings? For me? And one pair for my sister.”

  Stark laughed. “I thought you were going to drive a hard bargain. I got some right here in my pack. If there’re other things you want I’d recommend you go to the Via Forcella. It’s quite a hike from here, but it’s a fine day for a walk.”

  We said goodbye, and Luisa took my arm as we left the Galleria. Her friendly manner seemed unaffected but also innocent; I couldn’t tell what more, if anything, it foretold. We walked at her pace down the throbbing streets. The hem of her cotton dress swirled about her knees. I had first been struck by her vulnerability, but now I was not so sure. In her swinging step and the touch of her hand on my arm, there was confidence as well. I wanted to know from where it had come but was wary of asking too much.

  Clearly her family had some money, as the uncle with the villa in Capri suggested. She later told me they had a printing business outside La Spezia. As well as Magda, there were two brothers, who were now near Montepulciano fighting with the partisans. Luisa’s manner was that of a girl who had known her share of new dresses and parties but took nothing for granted. And her attitude towards me was—how can I deny it—flattering. She hadn’t come south to find a husband or a lover; she’d come to work: her family would have plans for her, and there would be a husband after the war. Then, suddenly, one afternoon on a floating wooden platform out at sea … what moved me was that she seemed to value what had passed between us as much as I did; it wasn’t something she was going to disavow as wartime folly the moment real life intruded.

  That’s what the light pressure of her hand told me as we walked down the Via Forcella, where the stalls displayed all the glories of the black market, although in what sense it could be termed black when it traded so openly, I wasn’t sure. There were even guarantees of satisfaction that cited the country of origin: Australia, Canada, United States.

  Luisa was charmed by it all, insisting she buy me some Lucky Strike cigarettes.

  “I know you love this one, Robert. So do I.” She haggled with the dark-eyed widow, but I don’t think she got much of a bargain.

  It was time for lunch, and by no coincidence there was a well-known black-market restaurant nearby. I had been able to draw a pocketful of back pay, and I wanted Luisa to have something she would remember more than our usual lunches. Pasquale, the owner, showed us to a table, literally rubbing his hands in anticipation. Without being asked, he brought two glasses of vermouth; unusually, they had both cubes of ice and a shaving of lemon peel. He told us what was on offer, scribbling the prices with a pencil on the paper cloth. There was even lobster, though Luisa protested at the price. She and Pasquale entered into a passionate negotiation of which I understood little, though it was clear that he viewed her as some exotic northern princess, and she saw him as no more than an obliging crook.

  “What do you want to eat, Rober
t, spaghetti with vongole? Or there is some fish, I don’t know how you say spigola, vitello with marsala, and many types of antipasto.”

  After further intense bargaining, Pasquale left us with the same delighted look on his face and shouted his orders to the kitchen. His restaurant was filling rapidly, and before long we had to raise our voices to be heard. Some of the clients were Allied servicemen, but most were Neapolitans who somehow still had money: traders, middlemen and their girlfriends, pimps, and shopkeepers.

  “After lunch,” I said, “I want to take you to Lake Avernus. It’s one of the great waters of the underworld in classical mythology.”

  “Of course. But first I must buy a reggicalze. I don’t know the word in English. For the stockings, so they don’t fall down.”

  The doors opened suddenly, and a dozen women dressed in a gray uniform of what looked like sailcloth were herded through the door by a little bald man with a moustache and a bow tie. The women gave the impression of concentrating fiercely, though not necessarily on the same things as the rest of us. The man with the moustache gave a short speech.

  “He says they are from the … manicomio,” Luisa told me.

  “Asylum?”

  “Yes. Things are very hard there.”

  The diners continued talking while the man made his plea, but when the women moved between the tables they were given pieces of bread, ham, and olives. These were silently accepted. One man put half his spaghetti on a side plate and handed it over, with a fork; a grandmother gave a claw from her lobster. When the women were fed, Pasquale pushed them out quickly, and I watched them vanish into the Via Forcella, these visitors from another world, the bald doctor trotting behind.