by John Harris
‘It’s not a bad idea,’ he said gruffly. ‘He might be better looked after.’
Devoto put his hands behind his back and stared at the ground, rocking on the balls of his feet.
‘It is a bad thing,’ he said weightily, ‘to put such ideas in a boy’s mind when they’re totally impossible.’
‘They’re not impossible,’ Hannay rapped. ‘He’s on my ship now. Covered with bruises. I thought I might even adopt him. I’ve come to see you about it.’
Devoto didn’t answer for a moment and Patch studied the bleak, shabby room with the inevitable picture of the Virgin, the great brass bedstead alongside a table littered with the remains of a meal, and the prie-dieu that was obviously never used. Devoto’s wife stood silently in a corner by a paraffin stove, the baby held awkwardly on her hip, not speaking, washed-out, beaten, and hopeless. Devoto’s bold greedy eyes had lit up but he made no move to indicate his thoughts.
‘There are many official documents to complete,’ he said cautiously.
‘They could be arranged.’ Hannay found he disliked Devoto even more than he thought he could.
‘He means a great deal to me.’ Devoto was speaking in a fine ringing voice he seemed to enjoy using. ‘He’s a comfort to my wife and a joy to my children.’
He glanced round towards his wife and Patch saw her eyes signal a message to him, an appeal to accept whatever was to be offered without delay.
Hannay in his anger, had not noticed the glance. ‘If he means so much,’ he said, ‘why don’t you look after him? Treat him better?’
Devoto shrugged in self-justification. ‘Sometimes he is very self-willed. All boys are. A man must discipline them. I promised my brother before he died. And how can a poor man do better for him than I do? I’ve many troubles.’ He smiled. ‘Two boys and a girl. One a baby. And another on the way. I’ve no work.’
There was a pause and Patch watched Devoto, trying to read the thoughts behind the handsome face. Beyond him, there was a pale patch of damp on the wall that looked curiously like a seedy halo behind his head.
‘I’ll take Cristoforo off your hands,’ Hannay was saying. ‘That’d make it easier for you, wouldn’t it?’
For a second, Patch thought he saw hope again in the hopelessness in the woman’s face, then she looked at her husband’s blank expression and the hopelessness returned.
Devoto had spread his hands. ‘Signore, Cristoforo means more than that to me. I wouldn’t like to be parted from him.’
The woman started to take a step forward, her mouth open as though to protest, then she stopped, and moved back to her corner, silent.
‘How much do you want for him?’ Hannay asked bluntly. He fished in his pocket and threw his wallet on the table.
Devoto glanced at it and smiled faintly. ‘Money becomes wine, signore. It’s soon gone. A job does not. That’s what I want.’
Hannay frowned, puzzled, and glanced at Patch for a lead. ‘I can’t give you a job,’ he said.
‘Then take me to England with you,’ Devoto said. ‘And help me to get a job. There are jobs in England. Unlike Italy, there are more jobs than people.’
‘What about your family, Devoto?’ Patch put in quietly from his position by the door.
Devoto turned and gave him a flashing smile. ‘They would be all right. I would send them money.’
‘We should never hear from you again!’ The words burst out of the woman’s lips almost as though she had no control over them. ‘Gesu mio, we get little enough when you work here!’
Devoto’s heavy face didn’t alter in its expression. ‘Many Italian men work abroad,’ he said, turning to Hannay again.
His wife became silent and slipped back into the corner, and Patch had the feeling that she would suffer the consequences of her interruption later.
Hannay had said nothing during the outburst. He seemed to be trying to weigh Devoto up, trying to get to the bottom of his refusal of the money and the demand for a job.
‘I can’t take you to England,’ he said slowly.
‘You’ve a ship, signore. Who’s to know I’m aboard, apart from you? If I’m not to accompany Cristoforo, who after all still needs the care of someone who understands him – his own flesh and blood – then, signore, Cristoforo can’t go. I couldn’t permit him such unhappiness.’
Hannay glowered at Devoto, dwarfed but undaunted. ‘Cristoforo’s happiness has got nothing to do with it,’ he snapped. ‘I’ll make it worth your while. Even if I took you to England, they’d never let you stay.’
‘Then that seems to end all the argument, signore.’
‘Angelo–’ The woman stepped forward again, her face desperate, but Devoto signed her to silence with a gesture.
‘Signore,’ he said. ‘In Naples, – the women borrow each other’s babies to beg with. Everything that holds out the smallest gleam of hope is clung to by the hopeless. Cristoforo appeals to people. Visitors give him money. People who won’t employ me get him to do jobs for them. I can’t let him go except in return for what I ask.’
Hannay stared straight ahead. ‘They’d never let you ashore,’ he said.
‘It’s easy to arrange these things.’
‘Not on my ship.’
‘Then I’d advise you to forget all the hopes you had of taking away Cristoforo.’
Devoto picked up the wallet and handed it back. Hannay swallowed, holding in his anger. ‘If I could smuggle you aboard,’ he said, ‘what’s to stop me doing the same with the boy?’
‘Me, signore.’ Devoto indicated the window through which they could see the flat sheet of the grey sea beyond the runnels of rain on the dirty glass. ‘My rooms overlook the mole. I can watch Cristoforo whenever he leaves the house. I’ve no work so I’m not otherwise engaged.’
‘It gets dark.’
‘I don’t think he’d defy me. And if I’m in any doubt, there are always the police to search your ship.’
He smiled and moved towards the door. ‘It grows dark now,’ he pointed out as he opened it for them. ‘I hope Cristoforo will not be late home.’
Standing in the crumbling archway that led to the courtyard, Patch and Hannay watched the rain for a while. It seemed to have a quality of blackness, a dreariness as dark as Hannay’s mood.
Through the open window above them, they could hear the sound of an angry argument.
Hannay seemed shocked. He had confidently expected success and seemed unable to accept the fact that Devoto could not be bought.
‘It would ‘ave been better if I’d clocked him one after all,’ he said heavily. ‘I never fancied adopting a kid till I knew how he was going to turn out, but I thought Cristoforo seemed to just about fit the bill.’
He stared at the rain for a little longer then he seemed to cheer up. ‘I’ll come again,’ he said briskly. ‘I think he’s holding out in the hope I’ll offer him more. He’ll give way when he sees I don’t intend to.’
‘I shouldn’t be too certain,’ Patch warned him.
‘Hell, I was half-way there.’ Hannay seemed suddenly to recover his optimism. ‘It only wants time. Why would he hang on to Cristoforo when they don’t want him? His wife would be only too glad to let him go now.’ He indicated the window above them and cocked his head to the sound of the two angry voices. ‘You can hear them now.’
Even as they listened, there was the sound of a blow and a cry of pain. Then they heard the crash of breaking glass and the wail of the baby, and the soft whimpering of a woman.
Hannay looked upwards, his expression again one of unhappiness and uncertainty.
‘I don’t think his wife has much say in the matter,’ Patch said soberly. ‘I think you’ll have to take him with you if you want Cristoforo.’
‘But why? He don’t want work. You can see that a mile off. And I’d pay him well.’
Patch shrugged. ‘His money wouldn’t last long here. He’s got relatives and they’d be on to him like a pack of ravening wolves. He wants to go to England because
he’s sick of his wife. Ask Emiliano. He’s a bit of a Casanova and he wants fun and games again. But the only way he can get fun and games is to live where he’s not known. In England, for instance. Even the mainland’s too near and they’d find him too quickly.’ He paused and stepped out of the shelter of the archway into the rain. ‘So you see,’ he concluded, turning to wait for Hannay, ‘he sets rather a lot of store by the Great Watling Street and you.’
Nineteen
The rain had increased as Hannay left Patch by the mole and headed for the Great Watling Street. Patch watched him stride away, then he hung about for a while, undecided what to do with himself. In the end he called in at Emiliano’s but the place seemed surprisingly different without Emiliano’s great paunch and waving hands behind the bar.
‘He’s gone to a meeting,’ the waiter said from his unaccustomed place behind the Espresso machine. ‘I don’t know where. Something about the mountain, I think.’
He brought Patch’s drink round the counter to him and set it on the end of a group of trunks stacked in a corner of the bar.
‘From one of the houses up on the slopes,’ he said, indicating the luggage. ‘The old American woman. There are some more behind the bar. They’re to be collected in the morning when the ferry comes in. She’s leaving. And she’s not the only one.’
Patch sipped his drink thoughtfully. The exodus from Anapoli was starting, in spite of Pelli and Bosco and Don Alessandro.
‘They say several of the yachts left this afternoon, too,’ the waiter went on. ‘Looking for better weather. And they say the Givannos are going to leave San Giorgio for good. They brought the children and the old lady down in the van this afternoon. They’ve moved in with relatives in the Via Garibaldi until after the funeral. All but one of them who’s staying to look after the farm. They won’t go back.’
When Patch reached home, Mamma Meucci was waiting for him, and as he put his umbrella aside, she brought him a meal of bread and cheese and wine.
Putting down the tray, she tried to assimilate his mood, and looked dolefully at him, her round face dropping.
‘Che tempo miserabile,’ she mourned, shaking her head until her cheeks wobbled. ‘What awful weather! We’ve had no spring this year and my sister in Naples writes what wonderful sunshine they’re having there. They’ve missed all our storms. They just sit on top of Amarea and never go. They say whole families are leaving San Giorgio.’
‘One family,’ Patch corrected her. ‘The Givannos. They moved into the Porto for the inquest on their father.’
‘It’s over.’ Mamma Meucci cheered up at the realisation that she knew something he didn’t know. ‘Today. Didn’t you hear? The doctor from the Piazza del Popolo said it wasn’t the dust that killed him. He’d had a chest complaint for years. They decided it was a natural death.’
She went out of the room, still muttering to herself, and Patch stood at the window, gazing at the puddles gathering in the roadway and the water bubbling in the gutters. The clouds were blotting out the peak of Amarea now, but as he stared a flash of lightning forked across the sky, coming, it seemed, from the very heart of the mountain. The clap of thunder that followed set the knife tinkling against the plate on the table.
The unease that had started with Cristoforo was spreading The grapevine was carrying it round the island and Patch found it had reached him now, and he turned away from the window, suddenly conscious of a desire to know more about volcanoes.
Placing a piece of cheese on a slice of bread, he went out of the room eating it and down the stairs to the Leonardis’ apartment.
He was startled by the number of people he found there and when he saw Emiliano he realised that this was the meeting the waiter had referred to. Old Tornielli was there, too, and the barber from the Piazza Martiri, and the rest of the Emiliano’s customers. As he closed the door, Cecilia came out of the kitchen carrying a bottle of wine. Her expression was mutinous but as she saw him the suffused anger immediately changed to pleasure.
‘Come in! Come in! Old Leonardi bounded forward in a succession of awkward leaps that set his knee joints cracking. ‘Come in!’ He clicked his teeth and flung a finger violently upwards to the ceiling. ‘We petrify ourselves with talk of Pompeii. We discuss which will be the better – to be trapped in a river of fire or to choke to death under a cloud of lapilli. There is another rumble today. That makes about four in a week, and when “swarms” of earthquakes appear an eruption is imminent. At Ilopango there are eight hundred in one month.’
‘I came to borrow some books.’ Patch swallowed the last of the bread and cheese, and Leonardi whirled energetically and swept the room with wide-open arms.
‘I have no books,’ he said. ‘I never read books. I’ve some albums of photographs, but they’re a little dusty and I doubt whether they’ll make you sleep. The only books I possess are my authorities on volcanoes.’
‘Those are the books I came for.’
Leonardi laughed a little hysterically and embraced him, pressing him against the food-spotted alpaca jacket so that he could smell the garlic on the old man’s breath and hear the champing of his teeth.
‘Welcome to the gathering. Come and join us at discussing dusty death. Now we have an Englishman, we might get somewhere. One Italian, twenty ideas. One Englishman, one idea – one good idea.’
The others looked up as Patch was pushed into the lounge – and to Patch, his senses alerted by the oddness of the atmosphere about him, the feeling of living at twice the normal speed, the gathering had an air of excitement about it, even of Leonardi’s hysteria verging on panic. He was reminded again of the defeated look in Don Dominico’s eyes and found he was desperately anxious to know the truth.
‘The rain comes down as mud on San Giorgio this afternoon,’ Dr Leonardi led off with a grisly cheerfulness. ‘The boy Cristoforo told Emiliano. I’m surprised the captain Hannay hasn’t come. We invited him. The dust the mountain throws up touches the clouds and the rain there turns it into mud. It’s a very curious phenomenon.’
‘San Giorgio’s dying,’ old Tornielli announced in a sepulchral voice. He had heard the chink of glasses and had entered pretending he had arrived to inspect the plumbing, and was now determined to enter the spirit of the thing and make a good job of his gloom. ‘Before long there’ll be no San Giorgio.’
Patch looked round, faintly irritated by the atmosphere in the room – as though they were all sitting round mourning a corpse – and he could see it had affected all the others too. Only Leonardi was cheerful, but it was the cheerfulness of nerves. He was the expert who had been waiting fifty years to predict just such an event as now seemed on top of them and yet hadn’t the skill and the reputation to make anyone listen to him.
Cecilia appeared beside Patch and offered him a glass.
‘They’re a lot of old grandmothers,’ she said angrily. ‘They’ve been sitting there an hour now – just talking.’
Patch stared after her as she turned away, startled by the vehemence in her voice.
‘We’ve been deciding that someone ought to go on the ferry tomorrow,’ Leonardi said, offering him a cigarette with a gesture. ‘It’s due in at daylight. If we can’t get the authorities to do anything here, then we must try the authorities on the mainland.’
‘You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?’ Patch said. ‘There’s an election on there, too.’
‘They’ll behave differently on the mainland,’ Leonardi pointed out confidently. ‘It’s their job to listen to complaints. And they haven’t a personal interest in Anapoli like Pelli has.’
He grinned at Patch with a sudden surprising malice. ‘Piero called in,’ he went on. ‘He told us Pelli wants to see you. It seems Bosco has produced some posters that Pelli objects to. For some reason, he blames you.’
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ Patch said dryly. ‘I’ll make a point of not being around. Maybe I’ll go with the committee to the mainland to see the experts. Who’s going? You?’
Leonardi’s eyes widened. ‘Ah! ‘He raised one finger like an exclamation mark. ‘That is where our problem starts,’ he said. ‘I can’t go. I’ve my business to look after. People come every day for photographs. There is suddenly a rush. Maria Gori’s expecting her seventh and Innocenzo dArpa’s getting married.’
You old liar, Patch thought. You’ve no business left to attend to. They wouldn’t come to you for photographs if you were the last photographer on God’s good earth.
Old Leonardi could expertise in cafés and bars but he knew his hit-or-miss prophecies would never stand up under the precision instruments of the experts, and he was afraid of being laughed at.
He glanced at Emiliano.
‘I’d go, Signor Tom’ – Emiliano thumped himself on the chest with a gesture – ‘only’ – his demeanour altered and he seemed to shrink – ‘only I have my bar to think of.’
Patch began to grin, beginning to feel better, beginning to feel that their behaviour brought reality to the fantasies they were imagining. He sipped the wine Cecilia had handed him. ‘And Tornielli’s got to mend the roof,’ he said. ‘And Meucci’s afraid of missing the fish. The trouble with the lot of you is that none of you wants to make a fool of himself. Well, neither do I. So, if you won’t go, and I won’t go, and nobody else will go, what do we do now?’
Cecilia put down the wine bottles on the table, but her hand was trembling and she knocked one of them over so that the red wine splashed on the floor like blood.
‘I shall go,’ she said.
Twenty
It was still raining the next morning when the passengers began to go on board the Città di Salerno, the white-painted ferry for the mainland that was lying alongside the mole.
The leaden sea was ruffled by the wind that seemed to be blowing in circles round Amarea and by the rain that pounded down on the taut awnings covering the fore and after decks, indications that when the ship had left its base the sun had been shining.
Patch wandered among the few people standing on the mole huddled against the rain; the youth with an armful of umbrellas he was trying to sell; Cristoforo, waiting in the hope of tips for running last-minute messages; an old man with a barrow who trundled luggage about the town; the Haywards, seeing off an old American woman from one of the villas on the slopes.
