by John Harris
Ten
Cecilia was waiting on the landing outside her door when Patch returned, curiously depressed by his meeting with Hannay down by the mole. It seemed that Anapoli had suddenly presented him with a problem that had to be faced, and with his easy-come-easy-go nature that enabled him to live in uproarious untidiness, so absorbed in painting that he forgot even to eat, he hated facing up to problems.
He smiled at her, glad to shove his troublesome thoughts to the back of his mind, then her voice took the smile off his face.
‘Mrs Hayward’s in your room,’ she said.
‘Oh, my God! I forgot all about her. What’s worrying her? Is it the mountain?’
Cecilia smiled at his uneasiness. ‘It can’t be you. Her husband’s with her,’ she said, and Patch was visibly relieved. ‘My grandfather’s entertaining them.’
Patch laughed unashamedly. ‘Come up and fetch your grandfather, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Come and have a drink. For God’s sake, come and stop her cornering me.’
‘Mrs Hayward doesn’t approve of me.’
‘I don’t give a good God-damn of her opinion. I don’t think I ever did really.’
He grabbed her hand before she could protest any further and pulled her up the stairs after him.
The Haywards were sitting among the fantastic untidiness of Patch’s rooms, trying not to notice the dirty glasses and the clothes he left lying around, and the damp stain under the window. By the wall, a couple of dachshunds they had brought with them sat licking themselves.
Old Leonardi was offering drinks and jabbering away in his own peculiar brand of English in an attempt to be friendly. With his loose false teeth, his white hair and sharp pointed face, he looked like a seedy Toscanini. His stiff white collar and clip-on bow tie and the black alpaca coat and spats he wore made him look as though he’d been too long on a shelf and taken off without being dusted.
Mrs Hayward’s full lips were tight with irritation but she smiled as Patch entered. Then the gesture died immediately as she saw Cecilia behind him. She was obviously dressed to impress and Patch knew it wasn’t for the florid, hearty man in the club tie who was trying to excuse himself from old Leonardi.
She nodded towards Cecilia who was producing clean glasses from a cupboard. ‘You might have dispensed with some of the company, Tom,’ she said softly. ‘You know the Porto’s not quite my cup of tea. I was expecting a quiet tête-à-tête!’
Patch smiled maliciously, rejecting her hints. He helped himself to a drink to give himself time to think, knowing he would have to answer cautiously or she’d have him back at that damn’ club they ran, all pink gins and bridge and whirring fans and silent bartenders – as though Hayward and his cronies were trying their best to reproduce the India they’d all been glad to get away from – a place where they all grew nostalgic for ‘home’ and spent their time complaining about the decadent Socialists who had lost the Empire.
‘You’re asking too much,’ he said. ‘You ought to know the Porto’s not the place for tête-à-têtes or even quiet.’
Mrs Hayward was sitting quietly, with poise and a self-assurance that hid the unhappiness and the desperation that lay under the surface. She was dressed in a pale blue frock that was clearly chosen to go with her eyes but which, with her blonde hair, only managed to look too youthful and wrong. She was staring across the room at Cecilia and Patch knew immediately she was jealous.
Her next words confirmed it.
‘She’s pretty,’ she said. ‘Do you sleep with her?’
‘Oddly enough, no. It’s something they taught me in the Boy Scouts, I think.’
She accepted the glass he offered her. ‘When are you coming to see us again?’ she asked. ‘Don’t you feel it would do you good to get away from this occasionally?’
‘I’ll get by. God will provide.’
She smiled, trying not to show her annoyance. ‘Don’t be difficult,’ she said. ‘You know what I mean.’
He grinned. ‘Too right I do. That’s why I haven’t been.’
‘Why didn’t you acknowledge my note?’ Mrs Hayward’s face became sulky and full of annoyance at the realisation that he was neglecting her, annoyance mixed with disbelief. ‘I left it with the caretaker.’
Patch began to move away hurriedly. ‘Tornielli’s a bastard with letters,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘He can’t be bothered to climb the stairs. He flushes ’em down the lavatory.’
Mrs Hayward clearly realised he was lying but she said nothing and, as he crossed the room, Hayward joined him. His manner was a little nervous. He was a big shuffling man who was easily intimidated and Patch had always seemed to him more noisily Italian than English with his black hair and hawk’s nose. Hayward had had a strong suspicion for a long time that something had been going on between Patch and his wife whenever he left the island, and he approached him now with an expression of diffidence on his podgy features. He hadn’t wanted to come at all and had only been encouraged to do so by his wife’s desire to see Patch again and the worry that was crowding in on him. The other worries that nagged him because he never had enough money and because his wife embarrassed him in front of his friends were small by comparison with this new one. Those were weekly worries, daily worries, hourly worries that he got used to, such as whether the rate of exchange would grow more favourable and the small pension he received from the British Government would buy him more than it did last year. His present worry was connected with Mont’ Amarea, for Hayward was afraid of it suddenly.
Someone had been burning rubbish in a garden below his own when he had left and the acrid smell of smoke, killing the scents of the oaks and the pines and the firs that came off the slopes, had made him curiously nervous.
‘Look, old boy,’ he said abruptly in the flat, uncertain voice which had thickened with the effects of too many brandies in India when the monsoons had been too trying. ‘Several of us have been a bit anxious for some time about the mountain–’
Leonardi tagged on to him quickly. ‘It’s dying,’ he said at once. ‘The experts say so.’
‘You’ve got some information?’ Hayward asked and Patch could see he was eager for reassurance. ‘From an expert?’
‘No.’ Leonardi shook his head vigorously so that his ill-fitting false teeth seemed to rattle in his mouth. ‘I have no dealing with experts.’ He made the word sound like an insult. ‘They are old-fashioned and mean-minded because I am now old and all I can do is arrange tours up the mountain for foreign schoolboys whose only wish is to throw stones into the crater to try to make it explode.’
He gave a gigantic shrug that seemed to rest his shoulders on his ears for a moment, then he twirled on his toes, pirouetting like a creaking ballet dancer, and pointed dramatically at Hayward.
‘But when they say it is dying, they are, of course, right.’ He jabbed his finger at Hayward who took a step backwards. ‘We all get nearer to death as we grow older. But’ – another jab – ‘there can be quivers even from a dead body.’
‘That last tremor made five in four weeks,’ Mrs Hayward said – indignantly, as though she blamed it on inefficiency.
Leonardi turned, champing his teeth, and jabbed at her. ‘There were fifteen in 1917. Fifteen in one year, increasing in speed and violence. I forecast disaster. The island is in a state of panic and rescue boats are evacuating. People beat their breast and pray to the Madonna. What happens?’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing. Nothing, Signor ‘Ayward. It simply stops.’
‘What do you think about it now then?’ Hayward said. ‘The mountain, I mean. All these queer happenings.’
‘I have issue my warnings.’ Leonardi stood on tiptoe and raised a thin finger to point at the ceiling, his jaws working, looking like some elderly oracle. ‘I have issue my prophecies. I have tell them the island is in danger once more. Only’ – the figure crumbled into a frail, foolish old man – ‘only they tell me that I issue my warnings also in 1917 and 1931. In 1924 and 1943. And 1918 and 1919 and 1920 and 1921 and every year u
ntil this year when I issue them again. They tell me I am mad. I am only an old lunatic who has made a mistress out of a mountain.’
He cackled suddenly, a dry laugh, like the rustle of old leaves in a gutter. ‘But, ask them yourselves,’ he said gaily. ‘Ask them to be certain. And even the experts will say the same as I do. No volcano is dead unless it does not erupt for ten thousand years. And even then it might surprise us.’
There was silence as he finished speaking. Hayward stared at his fingers for a moment, then he seemed to start back to reality. He waved his glass and addressed Patch.
‘There’s a considerable amount of uneasiness in the town all of a sudden,’ he said.
‘Where?’ Patch asked. ‘I’ve not seen any. Only a few crackpots like us. Everyone else’s behaving normally – going to work, sleeping, eating, fornicating.’
‘Well, perhaps not here, old boy. These people are Italianos. They’ve lived all their lives under the mountain. I meant among the English people. Lots of ’em are worrying. A lot of our crowd have been talking about it. We’ve been thinking someone ought to try to get some real advice. It’s always possible that the mountain is entering an active phase again.’
He sipped his drink as he finished speaking and began to wish that his interests had been wide enough to include the Porto where all the frightening rumours he had heard had started. At least, there he might have got at the truth. Besides, looking at Patch, he suspected that he might have had a much more noisily enjoyable time in the Porto than he did at his wife’s cocktail parties with the same old set and the occasional startling stranger like Patch she produced.
Mrs Hayward took up the conversation from where she sat on the arm of a settee, looking over her glass at Patch with a cat-like smoothness that infuriated Cecilia.
‘I think someone ought to ask the authorities to make tests,’ she said. ‘It’s silly for us to be sitting around wondering what the score is when they could find out so quickly.’
Patch jiggled his drink around in the bottom of his glass. ‘Surely to God in this day and age there’d be plenty of warning,’ he said. ‘They’ve got gravimeters and God knows what on the mainland and in Sicily.’
‘And none here,’ Leonardi ended significantly. ‘We are over a hundred miles from the mainland.’
Patch began to get angry. ‘Oh, hell, what if it does erupt? People lived right under Vesuvius in 1944. They came to no harm. They just got out of the way of the lava.’
He was beginning to find this obsession with the mountain irritating. He was content enough to let it rumble and smoke if it wished so long as it didn’t interrupt what he was doing. He had managed to paint through a series of riots over Algeria in Paris and he felt that no mountain could be more terrifying than a mob of angry Parisians. He was inclined to fling the lot of them through the door.
‘If those people under Vesuvius could get out of the way of an eruption,’ he said, ‘so can we.’
‘Perhaps we could. Perhaps we couldn’t.’
Patch swung round as he heard old Leonardi cackling quietly behind him.
‘Well, didn’t they?’ he demanded.
Leonardi chuckled and jigged from one foot to the other as he brought out a trump to kill Patch’s ace. ‘In Martinique in 1902,’ he said, ‘when Mont Pelée erupts, it wipes away thirty thousand people and a town in three or four seconds. It isn’t lava which kills them. It is burning gases. It sweeps them into the sea in one second. Two seconds later they are all dead, boil-alive. If they had been evacuate they would have lived.’
Mrs Hayward’s mouth went hard and Patch scowled. ‘But listen–’
Leonardi held up his hand again and gave one or two ruminative clicks.
‘Krakatoa, in the East Indies, shatters an island to pieces, also the people on it. Even our Lord Vesuvius destroys Pompeii in a few hours.’ `
The room became silent again except for the clicking noise as the old man’s jaws worked. In the background, Cecilia was standing quietly by the bottles and it suddenly occurred to Patch that he was the only person in the room who wasn’t afraid of the mountain.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘It seems damn’ silly to come to me with your worries. I’m no expert. Why don’t you just pack up and go and live on the mainland where it’s safer?’
‘I don’t think you realise,’ Hayward said stiffly – as though it hurt his pride to admit it. ‘We’re not wealthy. We can’t afford to give up everything and leave. We came to live here in the first place because it was cheap and we could live as we’d been used to living.’
Mrs Hayward was turning to Patch again, and he knew from her manner she was trying to indicate to Cecilia the subtle intimacy that comes from shared thoughts, shared secrets, shared passions, an intimacy that Patch no longer returned.
‘You know, Tom, of course,’ she said, ‘that nobody’s doing a damn thing. They’re only concerned with the election. They’re not worrying about us – any of us.’
‘Why should they worry about us?’ Patch asked. ‘Just at the moment they’re busy trying to stop the Communists getting hold of the islands. And when you consider how many unemployed there are and what a rotten deal they get from the big shots like Forla, who supported Fascism once upon a time until the British and the Americans took him up after the war, they’ve got a bit of a job on. That’s what makes elections so interesting here. One side wasn’t acceptable yesterday. The other side isn’t acceptable today. Let them sort that lot out and then they’ll worry about the mountain.’
‘If they don’t get the damned election over soon, everyone will leave Italy and serve ’em right. People like our crowd, I mean.’
‘I don’t suppose the Italians give a damn about that.’
‘Yes, but I mean – even the post has gone haywire. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘Nobody ever writes to me.’
Cecilia saw the look in Patch’s eyes and took away his glass but he recaptured it a moment later.
‘Look at that awful road up the hill,’ Mrs Hayward went on. ‘They started mending it and now they’ve just left it. We have an awful job getting the car out.’
‘Use the bus.’
‘It never runs on time.’
‘Come and live in the Porto.’
Mrs Hayward looked at him quickly, knowing she was beginning to annoy him but unable to stop. ‘I’m tired of their beastly slogans,’ she said shrilly, the anxiety and the desperation beginning to show through her coolness. ‘They think of nothing but their silly election.’
As she finished speaking, a motor-cycle roared down the narrow street outside, the echoes of its exhaust rattling up the crooked walls and slamming backwards and forwards from side to side. Everyone in the room was silent. Behind it, they heard a car moving along, its horn going to summon attention. Then, above the noise, the loudspeaker blared out. It was Pelli’s car, on the way from the Piazza del Mare to address an open-air meeting in the upper town.
‘We fight,’ it announced, ‘for the very soul of Italy. Remember Poland. Remember Hungary–’
‘There they go,’ Mrs Hayward said furiously and by now the façade had cracked and she was only a tired, angry, frustrated woman who was using this problem of the mountain and the election as a whipping boy for all her personal troubles. ‘Worrying about Communists and Socialists and Democrats and Catholics and Fascists and not giving two hoots about us. We could all be blown into the sea for all they care.’
‘That’ll be fine,’ Patch said with a grin. ‘All going to Heaven at once. I always thought how dreary it must be on your own. Like a new boy.’
‘Look’ – Hayward seemed embarrassed and a little humble, too – ‘you know a great many people here, old boy.’ He was obviously choosing his words with care. ‘Everybody knows you. You’ve got a lot of influence. More than you realise. We thought you might care to approach someone in authority here for us and get ’em to do something. I’ve tried but they say they’re too busy with the election.’
‘I
shall be busy, too,’ Patch said cheerfully, ‘directing the American tourists to the best spot to take their photographs.’
‘It’s no time for joking, Tom,’ Mrs Hayward snapped.
‘I’m not joking,’ Patch said. ‘Personally, I couldn’t care less what happens to the mountain. I’m sick of people complaining about it. It’s a lovely mountain. If anything does happen, which I still doubt in spite of everything, I’ll be there on the mole with the best of ’em, kicking and biting and scratching to get to the front. But for the moment, I’m going to go on enjoying myself. If you’re worried, go and arrange with the captain of the Great Watling Street. He’s got transport. I haven’t. You ought to have a lot in common. He’ll scare you silly with his talk of the mountain and you can scare him.’
Hayward glanced at Patch, defeated, then he touched his wife’s arm. ‘Maybe you’re right, old boy,’ he muttered unhappily. ‘Perhaps we’d better go and see this chap again. We’ll let you know what he says in case you want to take advantage of it yourself.’
He moved towards the door, collecting the dachshunds as he went.
Mrs Hayward halted in front of Patch, her face hard and angry. ‘You’ve not been very helpful,’ she said. ‘You’re getting soft. You should get out of the Porto once in a while. Visit people.’
He laughed. ‘Come and see you, for instance?’
Hayward was waiting outside the door now, staring backwards from the dark corridor, holding the dachshunds, tubby, patient and ineffectual.
Mrs Hayward’s eyes rested on Patch’s face for a fraction of a second before the door closed.
‘You could,’ she said.
Eleven
During the night Patch woke up unexpectedly, bathed in perspiration and aware of a sound filling the room like the noisy escape of gas. Then he became conscious of people in the street below and the chatter of voices.
He got out of bed and dressed quickly. The courtyard was full of human beings and from the street by the front door Mamma Meucci’s breathy shriek was very noticeable among the chattering, distinct even above the hissing sound that penetrated the confusion of alleys and courtyards and balconies where the tomato and basil plants occupied every inch of space among the washing.
