The man had backed away and was behind him in the archway.
Fooks started towards him and stopped. Two other men had come silently out of the shadows. Fooks saw the gleam of steel and understood. He moved instinctively to place his back against a wall and took stock of his surroundings. The doors and windows facing on to the courtyard were all barred. The houses had shut their eyes against any plea for help; the blank slats of wood were like closed lids. The three men came warily into the yard; one of them in a well-cut grey suit and a broad-brimmed trilby, the jowls of his face fat and purple; a second, enormous and stooping, in ragged black trousers and a collarless shirt; the man in white lurking behind them. Far away, beyond the thick silence in the yard, Fooks could hear the murmur of the town.
The men came nearer. Fooks could feel the blood beating in his temples. He heard a child’s playful shriek in the distance; the sound of water being emptied; more faintly, from within a house, the tinkle of breaking glass and the laughter of men. He breathed deeply, and clenched his fists. There was more laughter. It was full and strong, English laughter.
He threw back his head and shouted, into the enveloping silence, ‘Hi-aye! Any British about?’
His shout died among the walls. The deep little bursts of laughter continued to come to him, girls’ voices, the sound of a piano. He could hear the men and the girls laughing and singing ‘Lili Marlene’.
He gathered his breath again and lifted up his head. He shouted, ‘Bundle!’ He drew the word out into long, echoing syllables. It was the battalion’s private rallying-cry in street fights and bar-room brawls.
The men were almost upon him. In despair he bellowed again, with all his force, ‘Bundoo-oo-oo-ooll!’
The big man lunged at him, a short upward jab. Fooks struck at the man’s knife hand. The great fist was as hard as wood against his blow; the shock jolted up his arm. Fooks jabbed with his left elbow to keep a second attacker at bay and drove his boot at the big man’s knee. They had recoiled, and he was able to draw a long shaking breath and raise his fists again. He shouted once more, his voice rising almost to a scream, ‘Bundoo-oo-ooll!’
His heart leaped up within him as he heard, from somewhere behind the walls on his left, the pounding of boots on a staircase. Only the steel studs of ammunition boots could make a clatter like that. He roared joyfully, ‘Come on, the infanteers!’ A door banged open and a khaki figure dived past him at the three men. He caught a confused glimpse of a wooden club swinging up and over, and from among the whirl of bodies he heard a sickening crack and a man’s scream. His rescuer was at his side. The three men rallied. The big man’s head was streaming with blood.
‘Get back, you bastards!’ The shock of surprise almost made Fooks spew; he knew the voice. He croaked, ‘’Arry!’
Jobling advanced from the wall. The club swung in his left hand. In his right he held a pistol. He drove the three men out of the courtyard. Fooks heard them scuttling away down the street. He whispered, as Jobling came back towards him, ‘Gor blind ol’ bleeding Riley!’
Jobling asked, ‘You all right?’
‘Fine. What about you? You been playin’ a fine old game, boy.’
‘I’m all right. Gave me a bit of a turn, it did, when I heard the old war cry.’ Jobling’s voice hardened. ‘What have they done with him?’
‘Who?’
‘You know who.’
‘Broom? ’E’s in the clink. Twenty-eight days’ field punishment. Look ’ere, ‘Arry, why don’t you…’
Jobling uttered the parody of a laugh. ‘Twenty-eight days!’
‘Why don’t you chuck it? You could still get off easy. You ’aven’t got a chance if you stay on the run.’
‘Twenty-eight days! You knew my kid!’
‘What good will it do? You’d swing for it. Your ol’ lady wouldn’ even get a pension for you. The bloody misery’d prob’ly kill ’er, anyway. First Geoff, then you!’
‘Save your breath, mate. And if you see that lump of dung, tell him I’ve got this all cleaned up ready for him.’ He displayed the pistol. ‘And if anyone else comes after me, they’ll get a taste of it, too.’
‘You’re barmy! You’re bloody bomb-’appy!’
‘I know what I’m doing. If you’re a mate of mine you won’t tell anyone you saw me. Not that they’ll find me, even if you do. I’ll be out the back door of this house before you can say “knife”.’
‘’Arry!’
Jobling was gone. The slam of the door died away. The houses looked blankly upon the silent courtyard, and from the distance Fooks heard again the sound of the piano and of singing.
§§§§
Nella took the money. She felt cold and numbed. The notes that she clutched in her hand had no meaning. Nothing moved in her; everything in her being was leaden and dead. The fat little soldier was still speaking. After the freezing shock of his first words, nothing else had reached her. His voice was a faraway gabble that came without sense to her ears.
Her mind was too immature, she was too inexperienced in calamity, to react to what she had heard. There was only a thick heaviness in her head. At moments one thought peeped out of the confusion: if only she could see him: but she was too overwhelmed to give utterance to it. Her fist was clenched round the notes in a rigor like that of death; no impulse of rejection flowed from the brain; her grip was so tight that it hurt. There was only paralysis, and a core of pain in her breast.
The red face was still grinning at her. The voice assailed her, its inflections successively inquiring, expectant, insistent, resigned. Words failed the little soldier; he hung about her, looking into her face with doubt and growing embarrassment. He turned on his heels and she saw him cross the courtyard and go back into the office.
She could not move. She leaned against the wall of the porch in a stupor, all sense of time fled from her. The shadows crept about her and the glare died out of the daylight. The sweat on her body chilled. An unfamiliar coldness crept through her veins and she shivered as if visited by malaria. There was a prickling at the back of her hot, dry eyes. Her intelligence began to stir; terrified little impulses invaded her, to make a scene, to rush in upon him, to do herself violence. The woman in her spoke, but the child in her did not dare. She waited, stupidly. Soldiers hurried by, glancing at her with curiosity. Men came streaming down the stairs out of the billet and went into the cookhouse. Through the doors she heard the clatter and the subdued hubbub of a meal. The meal was over; the men came out, washed their mess tins and dispersed to their rooms. Still she waited in the porch. She could not take her eyes from the office door. Perhaps he was in there. Every time the door opened there was a great wrench of childish hope in her; each time, it was not he who emerged, and the pain rushed back into her.
How long she had been there she did not know. She had lost all desire to wait for him any more: she would have liked to creep away, but she was too weak and dizzy, and her mind was still too stupefied to set her limbs in motion. The sentry said something to her. She took no notice. He spoke again, in a firm but kindly voice. He took her arm and pushed her gently out into the street. She could not feel the pavement beneath her as she moved. She was enveloped in a sensation of dream, and she was sick with terror.
Someone else was speaking to her. She swayed in front of him. It was Tiger. Her empty face did not return his smile. He looked at her uncomprehendingly, and tried to awaken her to his banter. He was asking her to come with him; he was insisting; she felt hostile and impatient. He laid a hand on her arm. His voice was cheerful but overlaid with urgency. His grip tightened, and he tugged at her.
A spasm of fury racked her. She was on fire with pain and loathing. She tore herself from his grasp, spat in his face and ran away like a terrified animal.
Chapter Sixteen
THE next day, when the men had returned from their training. Craddock went shopping with Graziella. She had suggested this in the hope that it would please him; he had always taken a delight in these expeditions that t
o her was inexplicable on the part of a man. She clung to his arm among the throngs of shoppers, reckless of appearances, rapt and triumphant at her nearness to him. Even in this crowd she was wholly concentrated upon him. All her being was fixed upon him. It was not only with her eyes and mind that she watched; every nerve in her body was awake to him. He was the oak upon which she grew and fed. All the rest of the human race was far away, a swarm of little creatures rushing about on the plains far below the heights on which he and she dwelt, to be regarded remotely with pity and contempt. With her eyes closed she could feel inside her body every impulse of sympathy or passion that he experienced; her fingertips, her arm clasped in his, her flank against his, communicated to her every hesitation, every moment of withdrawal, every flicker of impatience on his part. When he frowned she died for a second.
Today they were close together. They walked heavily against each other like lovers, and their fingers were entwined; yet she felt that she did not live inside him as he lived inside her. Perhaps he was tired after all that marching. Perhaps the two men, Honeycombe and the other man, with whom he had been talking while she waited for him in the street, had brought him bad news. He had parted from them unwillingly and he had said to her, ‘We must hurry. I have promised to come back and see them again.’ Whatever it was, she knew that his thoughts were not with her.
Beneath her happiness there beat a pulse of anxiety. She could not uncover it; it existed less in the mind than as a bodily uneasiness. In their own relations little had happened to interfere with her triumph; but from the depths of her there came warning signals that she could neither interpret nor ignore; and all about her, in the street, there stirred something that disturbed her against her will. Somehow the explosion had split the street in two. What had become one community was becoming two again. A restlessness was growing among the soldiers; each day they were becoming more immersed in their own concerns. There was a restlessness among the women, too. They did not understand, but they were like a herd in which the panic can be felt for seconds before the moment of stampede. Now, in Graziella, fear was acting like an acid upon her happiness. She strove to please him, to weave herself about him, to blind his eyes to the surrounding world, to fuse him by her ardour into one flesh with her own. The more she tried, the faster the warning signals came. She felt the alarm storing up in her like an explosive force.
They were walking in the shadow of a wall that protected them from the sun. They turned into a gloomy archway: the white glare, the uproar and the overpowering stench of fish hit them all at once as they emerged into the market place.
The market square rose on a slope before them, a sprawling huddle of stalls that jostled each other in a crazy variety of shape and size, tented booths rising beside open barrows, rickety skeletons of woodwork leaning up against painted peasant carts. The unpaved patch in the middle was crowded with fish vendors, who squatted on the sunbaked dirt beside their baskets. People flowed in dark tides on the pavements, in the cobbled roadway, in the spaces between the stalls and the baskets, a sea of bodies broken only by the ramshackle structures around which they swirled.
It was like a crowd scene with titanic arc lights bathing everything in a revealing radiance which showed up the dirty lava walls of the tumbledown shops, drew a white glare from the stretched tentcloth of the booths, and turned the contrasting displays of pots and pans, old clothes, dress materials and foodstuffs into a fluttering, bewildering pattern of bright colours. Against the background of a thousand conversations the screeching cries of the vendors rose in raucous and repetitive rhythms, each in a different monotone. Now in one quarter of the market, now in another, a sudden outburst of noise would prevail above the general din; the bellow of a cheapjack haranguing the crowd from a soapbox; the crack of a whip and the rattle of wheels as a cart breasted the crowd, its driver shouting angry warnings; falsetto snatches of altercation; and, soaking through every nook and cranny in this jungle of noise, the asthmatic braying of a gramophone on a music stall.
Graziella let Craddock tow her through this pandemonium, tugging his arm to stop every now and then while she poked in a basket among the squirming heaps of fish. There were baskets crammed high with sardines, baskets of slender fish that gleamed in streaks of beautiful blue and silver, baskets of fish whose golden scales dazzled in the sunlight, baskets of tentacled squid, of swordfish, of bristly seafruit. She picked and haggled and purchased, joyously deriding Craddock for his squeamishness when he grimaced at the sharp and violent smell which the heat drew off, thick as steam, from the fish.
They pushed on through the tumult of life. Small boys, touting for their sisters, darted among the throng in search of soldiers. An old man made water against a wall. A woman bawled her griefs to a crony, clawing at her breast with both hands while tears streamed down her cheeks. Two Highlanders bargained with a girl in a doorway. The flies swooped in buzzing swarms on to the butchers’ slabs. A carabiniere went from stall to stall collecting his bribes. Beggars whined. Crippled ex-soldiers crawled in the gutters, ignored by the sleek, succoured by the ragged and by the Tommies. And over all, the noise, the heat, the glare.
They paused at a haberdashery stall. Craddock rummaged, and selected half a dozen handkerchiefs. He asked the proprietor how much they cost. The man, dewlapped and sweating, told him that they were a hundred lire each; he could have the six for five hundred.
Graziella quivered with joy. This was a chance to help. She whispered to Craddock, ‘Do not pay, it is too much.’
Craddock grinned and continued to count out the money. She was dismayed; he could not have understood her. ‘He is taking advantage of you because you are a soldier,’ she said.
Craddock said, ‘Don’t you worry.’
She seized his hand before he could pass over the money. She was determined to save him from this foolishness. ‘Listen to me,’ she cried, ‘they are only worth twenty lire each. He is robbing you!’
Craddock flushed and pulled his hand away. He said sharply, ‘Mind your own business!’
A great heat of anger overwhelmed her, and she burst out, ‘How can you let him treat you like this? He is laughing at you! He despises you! He will boast, when you have gone, of how he swindled the Englishman!’
The obscene, bubbling voice of the vendor interrupted them, ‘Shut your mouth, woman! Who do you think you are, screaming at a man like that?’
She lost all control of herself. ‘You keep quiet, you dirty thief!’
‘Don’t you call me a thief!’ the man shouted, shaking his fist at her. ‘They have plenty of money, these English! You take care to get your share of it, I don’t doubt. You be content with what you earn in bed, and don’t try to steal the bread out of my mouth!’
A moment ago she would have been terrified at the fury in Craddock’s face, but now she was beside herself, and when he shouted, ‘For God’s sake, shut up!’ she answered frantically, ‘I will not let you waste your money!’
‘To hell with the money! What do you mean by showing me up like this?’
She screamed, ‘You great child! Where would you be without me to look after you?’ The stallholder intervened again with a torrent of abuse. She flung herself at him, and people crowded round, yelling in a babel of encouragement and imprecation. The man was panting, dribbling from the mouth, as he heaped foulnesses on her. Shrill and relentless, in her element, she leaned across the stall and screeched insult for insult. She was dumbfounded at the way Craddock had turned on her; she was obsessed with the determination to prove herself by saving his money for him; there was a strange sense of relief in her agony, as if she were vomiting emotionally, emptying upon this man all the anxieties that had gathered in her.
She felt a cruel grip on her arm, and she struggled, screaming, as Craddock dragged her away. The crowd closed in between her and the stall. Voices came at her from all sides; wherever she looked there were jeering faces. She wailed, ‘You are hurting me!’
Craddock took no notice. He continued to pu
sh through the crowds, dragging her after him.
‘You did not understand! He said filthy things to me!’
He did not even look over his shoulder. His pace did not slacken.
‘You coward!’ she screamed. ‘How could you let a man speak to me like that?’ She struggled, but she could not break his grip.
A calm of despair settled upon her. She felt betrayed, by him and by her own actions. She wanted to understand every fibre of him, and now it seemed to her that she would never understand. Everything that she did must turn against her. She followed him dumbly. Before, she had been borne on the human tide, buoyant with her own happiness. Now the crowds buffeted her as if to sweep her under. She had to run to keep up with Craddock. At every pace it seemed that elbows were deliberately being thrust out to jab her, feet protruded to hack her ankles and throw her off her balance. She stumbled after him, sobbing and trembling. At each blow a fresh pain jolted through her. She was tired. She wanted to fling herself down, among the rubbish, to be trampled. What had she done wrong? She tried, she goaded her brain to try to understand. For the first time the heat oppressed her, the light hurt her eyes. The air, heavy with grime and human breath and the smell of fish, stifled her. She would faint if she could not escape from here quickly. What had she done wrong? She clenched her teeth, aching with humiliation and bewilderment. What had she done wrong? What had she done wrong?
They walked home in sullen quiet. Once they were away from the market he slackened his pace. She slipped her arm through his, and he reached across and took the shopping bag from her. Neither of them spoke. He was relaxed, and the anger had gone from his face. When they came to a busy road he checked her, and said in a normal voice, ‘Wait, let the lorry go by, we have plenty of time.’ She felt her own confusion subside; she had been cowering inwardly at the fresh outburst of recrimination that she had feared might follow; each time he turned his face towards her she recoiled with dread, but the expected reproaches did not come. Perhaps, after all, he would not punish her. He was such an unpredictable man. Oh, she would never understand him! She leaned pleadingly on his arm, a prey to disappointment, perplexity and torturing hope.
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