The Sleeping Mountain

by John Harris

  As he passed, Mrs Hayward grabbed his arm and pulled him towards her. ‘Anybody would think you didn’t know us, Tom,’ she said.

  She laughed in a brittle way that was entirely mirthless, putting on an act for her husband’s sake, and Patch thought there was nothing quite so jarring as an affair gone sour, nothing so miserable as the performance that had to go on for everyone else’s benefit. Without taking her eyes off him, she spoke to her husband. ‘Edward, do me a favour. I’m right out of cigarettes.’

  Hayward fished in his pockets cheerfully, and she frowned. ‘No, I don’t want one now,’ she said shortly, and Hayward stopped fumbling. ‘I’ve none for later.’

  ‘Oh, right-o, old thing.’ Hayward sighed, knowing she wanted to speak to Patch alone, and shuffled off with the two dogs, patient, woolly and forgiving. She moved closer to Patch immediately.

  ‘Why haven’t you been to see me?’ she demanded as her husband disappeared. ‘You’ve had plenty of opportunity. Is it that little Italian piece?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘You’re always busy these days.’

  ‘I know.’ Patch tried hard to remain pleasant with her. ‘It’s amazing how tied up you get.’

  Her voice dropped. ‘Edward’s playing bridge tonight,’ she suggested.

  Patch glanced over his shoulder, looking for Hayward, and she mistook his discomfort for caution.

  ‘He’ll be ages yet,’ she said. ‘Shall I expect you?’

  Patch tried to meet her eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ll make it.’ he said. ‘You see’ – he grinned suddenly – ‘I’m catching the boat.’

  She looked surprised and disbelieving. He had no hat and wore no coat in spite of the rain. ‘Like that?’ she asked.

  He began to wish again that Hayward would come back from the little bar with the cigarettes and stop her questions. But he knew Hayward, with his patient, forgiving affection, would probably be taking as long as he could over the purchase, and he controlled the irritation rising in him again. Mrs Hayward, in her search for excitement, had always been trivial but now she seemed pitifully so. ‘It was urgent,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  He shrugged, giving up the struggle.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were going?’ she went on angrily. ‘I could have found an excuse to come, too. Anything to get away from all this damn’ nonsense about the mountain. We could have gone to Rome.’

  Patch looked round again, desperate for a means to escape.

  ‘I didn’t have time.’ He was beginning to hate himself for this sordid little melodrama in which he had become involved. ‘It was urgent.’

  There was something in her face that told him immediately that she didn’t believe him, in spite of the smile she kept there for everyone else to see. Her eyes had the desperate look he’d seen so often before.

  ‘I’ve never known you go like this.’ In her desperation, she was becoming shrill although she knew it was the one thing that irritated him most of all. ‘I’ve never known you move fast in your life.’

  ‘There’s always a first time.’

  He was still struggling to convince her when Hayward returned, clearing his throat noisily to warn them, calling to the dogs more forcefully than he need have done, and Patch managed to dodge away, thankful for his reprieve, her eyes following him all the way.

  As he reached the shore end of the mole, a group of people appeared out of a muddy alley alongside the harbour, heading in a line towards the Via Maddalena, a group of boys chanting Ave Marias, some of them in shabby rain-spotted cassocks, a huddle of nuns, and Don Gustavo, a pimply-faced young man who was Don Alessandro’s curate. Behind them, two men carried a colossal wreath of palm leaves and mountain flowers, obviously picked on the slopes of Amarea and home-made for cheapness; and after them two more men trundled a small hand-cart, gaily painted like an ice-cream barrow and bearing a rough coffin which was followed by a group of relatives telling their beads, the women moaning to themselves as they shuffled through the puddles. Among them were Giuseppe and Marco Givanno, and Patch suddenly realised he was witnessing the funeral of Amarea’s first victim.

  The little procession passed him as he stood in the rain, all of them, from the youngest to the oldest, indifferent to the weather, all of them in their Italian fashion preoccupied with death. Depressed by their poverty, he turned into the bar where all the ferry passengers crowded out of the weather, and found old Leonardi at the counter trying to choose a cheap bun for himself.

  The old man didn’t look at Patch. He knew he should have gone to the mainland himself instead of letting Cecilia go, but he hadn’t the courage any longer to argue with people who knew as much as he did and more. He was too old. He couldn’t face the effort. He couldn’t face the looks and the sidelong glances that indicated he was crazy. The frustration at not being proved right had changed with the years to a cosiness that came from not being proved wrong.

  As it happened, though, Patch ignored him and made his way towards Cecilia who was sitting at a table, her face pale and expressionless, a small suitcase by her feet. Piero Tornielli was with her, his coat draped across his shoulders like a cloak, holding one of her hands in both of his and talking in an undertone.

  His expression changing as Patch appeared, he stood up abruptly, scraping the chair as he moved. A great heat of fury was already mounting inside him. His father had told him the night before that Cecilia was going to the mainland and immediately he had assumed it to be a move on Patch’s part to take her away from him. He had not been able to sleep for the intensity of his hatred.

  He took a deep breath, going again through the hours when he had lain in bed, nursing his dislike of Patch, recalling all the times when he had listened to him talking on the landing above with Cecilia, while blood-red curtains of jealousy swirled in his mind. He had suffered through the night, dreaming up moments of triumph, glorying in pictures to which there was no substance but which nevertheless provided balm for the wounds that his hatred wrought on him.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, his voice harsh.

  ‘Just a chair,’ Patch smiled, sitting down.

  Piero remained standing, staring down at him, the muscles of his face moving as he gritted his teeth.

  ‘Why can’t you leave us alone?’ he demanded.

  Patch looked up, surprised, then responded with sarcasm as he always did to Piero’s aggressive jealousy. He waved his cigarette and turned his back on the boy. ‘Believe me,’ he said. ‘I won’t look.’

  ‘I was saying good-bye to Cecilia before she leaves.’

  ‘Odd.’ Patch spoke over his shoulder. ‘I’m most concerned with her departure, too.’

  Piero’s handsome face flushed and he shuddered with his hatred. ‘She shouldn’t be going on this wild-goose chase at all,’ he said wildly. ‘It’s undignified for an engaged woman.’

  ‘Piero,’ Cecilia said quickly, incensed by his melodramatic concern, his improbable anger. ‘Piero, we’ve already discussed all this, again and again and again.’

  The boy bent over her and spoke in an angry whisper: ‘If you must go, go with me. Wait until after the election.’

  ‘It might be no good then.’

  Piero seemed on the verge of tears with frustration. ‘Cecilia, tesoro, I wish I could persuade you not to board that ship.’

  ‘I’m going, Piero,’ Cecilia said calmly, indifferent to his anger.

  ‘Why? Why must you–?’

  Cecilia looked at him without smiling and laid a hand on his arm. ‘You’d better go, Piero,’ she said. ‘You’ll be late and you mustn’t offend Pelli.’

  Piero glared at Patch, thwarted and savage, as though the whole of his frustration and distrust were his fault and his alone. Then he kissed Cecilia’s hand and swept out of the little bar like a cyclone.

  ‘Dear me,’ Patch said mildly. ‘He’s not very sound on departures, Cecilia.’

  Cecilia sipped her coffee a
s though she hadn’t heard, and Patch knocked the ash from his cigarette and glanced towards her. She was sitting very straight, very small, the dark hair curling round her ears.

  ‘Cecilia!’ – he paused before he spoke, and all the banter had gone out of him – ‘they’ll never listen to you.’

  ‘I’ll make them.’

  Patch swung round in his chair to face her.

  ‘Cecilia, they’ll wonder why a man wasn’t sent, why Pelli himself didn’t come, or even your grandfather.’

  ‘They’d never listen to him,’ she said contemptuously. ‘His warnings have come too frequently. Besides, he’s afraid of being laughed at, like Emiliano and Meucci – and you.’

  He stared angrily at her. ‘Cecilia, I tried. What more must I do? Go down into the crater and come up with my ears full of boiling lava? There must be ways of doing this but obviously we haven’t used the right ones. We must wait for more definite signs of danger.’

  Cecilia’s blue eyes flashed. ‘There have been enough signs of danger already,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, God, how stubborn can you get?’ Patch lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the old one and paused before he spoke again. ‘Cecilia – I’m coming with you.’

  She looked up quickly, an expression of clear delight chasing the anger from her face for a fleeting second, then it had gone again and the happiness died out of her eyes in a glance of suspicion.

  ‘Why?’ she demanded.

  He laughed outright. ‘You know, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘For a moment, I thought you were pleased.’

  ‘For a moment I was,’ she said. ‘I believed you were coming for the good of Anapoli. Then I thought again and I knew you weren’t.’

  Patch grinned. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I’m coming to look after you. I think you need a man around.’

  ‘Some women do – like Mrs Hayward.’

  ‘Cecilia, I’ll just sit in the background and call you taxis and beat off anyone who tries to fetch a policeman.’

  She gave him a little smile, melted by his teasing. ‘You’ve no luggage,’ she pointed out.

  Patch fished in his pocket and gravely produced a toothbrush. ‘There. I’ve travelled much further with much less.’ It was her turn to laugh now, her eyes bright as she let him win her round. Patch’s ability to make her laugh was always a relief after Piero’s histrionic seriousness.

  As she smiled at him, the sullenness gone from her face, a car that had come down the hill into the piazza began to circle the wide stretch of wet porter-coloured cobbles close to the mole.

  ‘We must work for the socialism of the soil’ – the raucous cry made Cecilia jump – ‘we must destroy that capitalism that blinds a worker to slavery. We stand for a new dignity for the poor, for the destruction of the church dictatorship and the end of the leadership of the White House…’

  ‘I love elections,’ Patch said. ‘Pity it doesn’t mean that the people of Anapoli can take a vote on whether to cork up the mountain or not. Freedom congeals a bit when Pelli decides that even if they’re right to demand action, he’s righter to refuse it.’

  The siren of the Città di Salerno boomed. The little ferry boat looked clean alongside the black bulk of the Great Watling Street which was blurred and indistinct through the rain further down the mole.

  ‘Time to go,’ Patch said. He picked up Cecilia’s case and moved to the door. She followed him, her expression puzzled.

  ‘Why are you really coming?’ she asked, as he paused by the door.

  He frowned, finding it hard to tell her of the night he had spent poring over her grandfather’s books, to tell her even that he had discovered the truth in Hannay’s claim that no man could be an island. For years he had gone his way, cloaked in his own ego – but now he had found that her distress and Mamma Meucci’s worry and Don Dominico’s doubt in Fumarola, even Hannay’s anxiety over Cristoforo, had become personal, had linked him to the rest of them as surely as if he were bound by threads of flesh and tendon.

  And besides, he was oddly scared at the thought that he’d be lonely without her in the flat below, without the sound of her singing in the kitchen, without the rare moments of gentleness and affection over the coffee. It was an awareness that had come suddenly to him, for in his absorption with painting he’d never considered Cecilia much except as a free model.

  At first he’d thought the feeling sprang perhaps from the fact that she was pretty and there weren’t a great many pretty girls among the sturdy stock of Anapoli, then he realised he had always listened for her voice and watched her covertly as she came and went on the stairs, with a wistfulness he had never noticed until now.

  ‘I’m coming because I’m sick of myself,’ he said, dropping into his old mood, and immediately concern came into her expression. ‘Because it’s time I had a change. Because there may be something in what you say about Amarea. Because, if something is done, I want to collect a little of the glory and say “I told you so”. Because I’m sick of painting and I’m sick of drinking and I’m sick of the island. I’m sick of everything and I don’t know why.’ He chuckled suddenly, as a spark of devilry prompted his final remark. ‘And finally because Pelli’s after me.’

  Cecilia’s expression had become tender as she listened to him but at the mention of Pelli the anger mounted at once to her cheeks. Trying to keep her eyes away from his, she watched the mothers at the bar counter buying sticky sweets to occupy their children on the journey, the old women laden with bundles going to see married daughters on the mainland, the men with enormous suitcases of shoddy raffia goods they hoped to sell. But her glance found its way back to his face in the end, and she was unable to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

  ‘What does Pelli want with you?’ she asked.

  ‘My skin, I suspect. A question of some posters. He came round to see me. Personally. Mamma Meucci sent one of the kids to Emiliano’s to warn me. I bought this toothbrush ten minutes ago.’

  Cecilia was standing stiffly upright now. ‘Why not tell Pelli that what you said you believed?’

  Patch shrugged. ‘Because, little Cecilia, I’m not sure that I do. And I’m not the stuff that martyrs are made of. Pelli’s boys might get excited if they bumped into me one night in the Via Maddalena. Some of Bosco’s supporters tried to set their dogs on Don Alessandro last night, I heard. I’d rather wait until it’s all over and I can walk down the Via Maddalena in peace.

  He looked out at the rain, then down at Cecilia and stepped outside.

  ‘It happens also,’ he said with a grin, ‘that I know an American who might help. Man called Raphael. He’s a geologist in his spare time and he’s crazy about volcanoes.’

  Twenty-one

  The sun was shining when they reached the mainland the next morning. Piles of cumulus, in great continents, dappled the blue sea with yellow as they towered over the houses standing out in blocks of white paint and black shadow all the way down the hillside to the harbour. The palace of the old kings emerged from the mass of buildings in a yellow block of stone with the dome of the Cathedral gleaming alongside it.

  A loudspeaker van was standing just inside the parking area of the basin as they climbed ashore.

  ‘The beauties of this city are incompatible with the Marxian system,’ it was announcing. ‘The materialism of this creed does not – cannot fit into the culture of Italy –

  ‘Oh, God,’ Patch said. ‘Here, too!’

  As they headed for the jangling little trams that ran past the gate, a woman handed them a leaflet each, decorated with the hammer and sickle sign, and, across the road, three young men carried a banner on which was written: ‘Bread and Liberty. Vote Communist.’

  The hotel Cecilia took him to was a bleak little place near the station which went by the august name of the Albergo del Bello Sole. It was situated on the top floor of an ancient block of buildings and its rooms were as cheerless as the district that housed it.

  They were too late to attempt anything that day so Patch took
Cecilia to the opera, delighting her with one of the best seats near to the royal box, buying her flowers and enjoying her blushes as he handed them to her. She seemed quite different from the Cecilia he had got used to on Anapoli, alive suddenly and radiant, as though her moodiness had dropped away from her as they had crossed the Tyrrhenian, and he sat back, enjoying the vitality and the youth in her face as she applauded. Afterwards, he took her to a night club, bribing the attendant to let them in, and they danced until Patch became involved in a noisy argument with an American sailor and they found it wiser to leave.

  Still laughing, they hired a carriage to take them home, a ramshackle affair smelling of old leather and brass polish, and he sat with his arm round her while the ancient horse plodded through the steep streets, the driver dozing on his box.

  The night was milky warm and they could smell the sea, and they both had a feeling of freedom from the uneasy obsession with Amarea that existed in the Via Pescatori and Emiliano’s Bar. Cecilia’s happiness had not left her. Indeed it had grown, but the gaiety had subsided now and she was calm, as though all her old hostility towards Patch had never existed and they were back in the days when he’d first arrived on Anapoli and found her eager to help, to speak English with him, to show him around, to do all the little things that would make him feel at home.

  Patch paid off the carriage by the Albergo del Bello Sole and they ascended in the creaking lift. As they stopped outside Cecilia’s door, she slipped inside but half-closed it in front of him when he made to follow her.

  ‘I’m not Mrs Hayward,’ she said.

  He stared down at her for a moment, then he grinned, admitting defeat.

  ‘Thank God. She talked too much. Even in bed.’

  ‘Poor Mrs Hayward,’ Cecilia murmured. ‘Did you treat her very badly?’