The Sleeping Mountain

by John Harris

‘How long has the mountain been there?’ he asked, hardly troubling to hide the contempt in his voice. ‘Millions of years. How many times has it erupted? Within human knowledge about three or four. Why should it choose this particular moment? If you’re so afraid of Amarea,’ he concluded, ‘why not try Capri? It’s very beautiful there and I can assure you there are no volcanoes.’

  Patch bought a newspaper as they left, reading it in the trolley bus as they jolted down the hill.

  In the streets beyond the tram tracks there were still a lot of students shouting out of doorways at their opponents and waving banners from windows, while crowds of children like flies enjoyed the noise and the excitement.

  They found a little restaurant by the harbour overlooking the sea, where an elderly troubadour was trying to sing ‘Canto nella Valle’ to an American woman tourist, accompanying himself with refined gestures and sneaked glances at the verses on the card concealed in his left hand. Behind him, a stout business man swathed in a napkin studied the half-page-deep headlines announcing some new world crisis and linking it obscurely with the election. A loudspeaker at an outdoor meeting round the corner drowned with election slogans the café noises and the thin voice of the singer, but oddly, in spite of their failures and the racket about them, Cecilia seemed content. The city had a calming quality with its flowers and its trees and the glimpses of the bay that kept appearing through the houses as they moved about, which somehow each night had managed without fail to drive away the frustrations of the day.

  ‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said, her hand across the table in Patch’s.

  ‘Pity he’s flat.’ Patch commented, glancing at the singer.

  Cecilia drew her hand away quickly. Patch’s remark had broken into her happiness and she suddenly saw that the singer was old and his voice none too good, and that the café they were in was shabbier than she had thought under the gilt and the mirrors.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she asked bitterly. ‘I don’t mind him being flat. I don’t mind if he hasn’t learned the words. Or that he’s fifty and bald. I’m happy. I’m happy because it’s warm and pleasant and because I like the lights on the water, and I like the singing. Why must you spoil it all?’

  Patch smiled indulgently and secured her hand again. ‘Don’t take any notice of me, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘It’s a habit I’ll try to break.’

  But the mood was lost and even when he tried to tease her, she smiled at him a little abstractedly so that he knew her thoughts weren’t on what he was saying.

  ‘Tom,’ she asked at last. ‘Do you think there’s any hope? Of getting help, I mean.’

  He paused before replying, then he dragged from his pocket the newspaper he had bought earlier and laid it in front of her significantly. She looked up at him, her eyes questioning, and he pointed to a paragraph at the bottom of the page.

  In spite of their protests of disinterest, the newspaper had pursued their story about Amarea, and Cecilia found herself staring at what was a brief defence of Pelli. Apparently, he had reacted to Bosco’s goading by sending a couple of policemen up Mont’ Amarea to investigate. There had been nothing to see beyond a little dust and a little smoke. Even the lake at the side of the crater had looked quite normal, but the paragraph ended with a condemnation of Bosco and a claim that he had been trying to discredit the authorities who had merely taken this wise step to deprive him of his arguments. The breaking of the Ruffio dam and the flooding of Vicinamontana were mentioned – obviously as a parallel – and the whole story was a complete vindication of Pelli.

  ‘I didn’t mention this before, Cecilia,’ Patch said gently. ‘I didn’t want to spoil the evening. But Pelli’s swept the ground from under our feet. Nothing we can say to anyone will do much good now. They’ll all quote this back at us.’

  Cecilia looked downcast and he touched her hand across the table again. ‘You asked me, Cecilia,’ he said earnestly, wishing he could say something to take the disappointment out of her face. ‘I’m as anxious as you are. Once I didn’t care a damn, but you and Hannay seem to have an odd effect on me. You bring out the latent crusader in me.’ He shrugged. ‘Unfortunately, though, we’re crusaders without a crusade now. Pelli’s taken it away from us. We can’t move anyone with this in front of them screaming out loud that we’re a couple of crackpots with nothing to prove what we’re saying.’

  As they walked along the sea front, the lights of the city behind them sprinkled the hillside in blocks, and the neon signs on the dark bulk of the ancient castle by the harbour stood out sharply in a splash of colour against the night. Up against the sea wall the naphtha flare of a chestnut vendor spluttered noisily as the breeze caught it, and from a café a juke box blared out an Italian version of ‘Somebody Stole My Gal’.

  The Albergo del Bello Sole looked bleaker at night than during the day, with its solitary unshaded bulbs dragging the shadows out of the corners of the corridors. As the lift laboured upwards, Patch gently put an arm round Cecilia’s shoulders and pulled her to him, and she leaned against him, saying nothing.

  A wave of affection for him swept over her and she made no attempt to shut the door in his face as she had on previous nights. After a pause, he followed her inside the room.

  For a moment, he fiddled with the light switch, twisting it round in its socket until it made its faulty contact and the bulb, inevitably too small, filled the room with a grey dusty light that seemed only to make it shabbier.

  She watched him as he moved across from the door, a lean figure with curves of humour on his features. It was a face that had known joy and disappointment and triumph, a face that was capable, as she well knew, of tenderness as well as sarcasm. He was infuriating, unpredictable, at times intolerable, but extravagantly generous, and all the gentleness, all the warm comfort of shared troubles that she had in a world which sometimes in her youth seemed too big to be borne came in sporadic bursts from Patch in a way they never did from Piero. Piero demanded a one-way love that was armed with jealousy. Patch’s affection was mature and sometimes barbed, but when he wasn’t engrossed in painting, entirely unselfish.

  ‘I’m glad we’re going home,’ she said at last.

  It was hot and Patch took off his jacket and lowered himself to the edge of the hard bed. Cecilia sat down on the other side, her back to him, her earlier happiness dispersed completely.

  ‘Why can we get so little done?’ she said with a choked, furious anger. ‘Why do so many people talk and do nothing else? I thought it was only on Anapoli we could achieve so little.’

  ‘Cecilia, why should people do anything?’ Patch turned towards her, trying to calm her, trying to protect her a little from her own impatience. ‘The authorities aren’t complaining.’

  ‘But why not? Tom–’ she was pleading with him, trying to understand the evasions, the inertia, ‘–they ought to complain.’

  Patch felt a twinge of conscience. as though he had no right to shatter her illusions. ‘Cecilia, this world’s full of people who talk in half-truths. It’s full of ambitious people, and even people who’re so obsessed with doing good that they manage to do harm to achieve it. It’s a hard fact to face but it’s easier when you do face it. The ones at the top sometimes forget the ones at the bottom. They’re so engrossed with the big things they overlook the fact that there might be small things, too.’

  He reached across the bed and laid his fingers softly against her cheek. Her unlined face looked young in its baffled anger and Patch was touched with a feeling of tenderness towards her.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Remember what Marotta’s friend said? Why not go to Capri? There’s no danger there. There’s no one shouting bloody murder because he can’t run the world the way he wants it. I could get somewhere to paint. There are always rooms free at this time of the year in Anacapri.’

  ‘Are you going?’ She looked sharply at him. With the older civilisation that stood behind her and the blood of an older race that ran in her veins, she had always felt vaguely wiser
than Patch and strangely condescending towards him, in spite of her youth; but suddenly there was no condescension, no anger, only a small frightened feeling that he might be leaving.

  He was studying her features now as she turned and faced him. They were lost and afraid, and he desperately wanted to bring the smiles back to them.

  ‘I’ll have to go some time,’ he explained. ‘I am painted-out on Anapoli. Besides,’ he added, ‘Spring’s here. The flowers’ll be out. All the way up from Marina Grande. The sea’ll be bluer than we’ve seen it at Anapoli for a long time. You belong there. Not in that ugly great building in the Porto. We could sit on the wall on the way up to Anacapri and splash paint on canvas until we’re sickened with colour.’

  She smiled weakly back at him, then she put her hand over his where it rested on her cheek.

  ‘No, Tom,’ she said. ‘I can’t. You’re offering me nothing but a good holiday. Eventually I’d have to give it up. Piero’s offering me marriage.’

  Patch stood up and walked to the window. ‘That’s true,’ he said slowly. ‘And in spite of what I’ve said about Piero, I hope you’re happy, Cecilia.’

  He turned and looked at her, his lean face smiling, and in that moment she found the answer to all the questions that had been troubling her; the cause of all her guilt when she had found herself regarding Piero as a spoiled sullen boy who belonged to the past years of her life; the cause of all her pleasure when she met Patch every morning in the little café outside the hotel where they breakfasted; the cause of her anxiety at the thought that he might be late. All her rebellion against Piero’s possessiveness and the ready acceptance of the match by her grandfather and old Tornielli, all the times when she had found it hard to be civil to Patch, all the reason for her anger that lay hidden deep in jealousy for the other women he knew, were explained as it dawned on her she was in love with him and had been for some time.

  Patch was looking at his watch and she was surprised in her sudden nightmare of hope and misery and great joy that he could be unaware of how she had changed.

  ‘I must go,’ he said gently. ‘It’s getting late and I must leave you a reputation for Piero.’

  ‘I am not making you go, Tom,’ she said, surprised to realise she hadn’t thought of reputations – either her own or Patch’s. There had been a time once when Patch’s had shocked her, and later when she had regarded it with tolerance. Now, suddenly, she realised how unimportant it was, how unimportant her own was, for that matter, as she tried to tell him of her new love, of the heart sickness and the sudden pain she was feeling, the fear, the sense of emptiness and fruitlessness that was growing on her.

  Patch had glanced quickly over his shoulder at her from the door as she spoke. He could see her trembling and he knew it wasn’t because of any chilliness in the room. Then he remembered the look that Piero always gave him, and what they all thought of him among the proper little villas above Anapoli Porto. There was no reason why Cecilia, looking as young as she did now, should be saddled with his past and all his weary old love affairs.

  ‘Now you’re being grateful – or something,’ he said quietly, hardly daring to look at her.

  ‘I’m not, Tom! I’m not!’ She took his hand and hung on to it, pleading with her eyes, wondering why he didn’t see the love that she felt must be glowing and obvious in her face.

  He studied her for a while, all his instincts telling him not to turn his back on her.

  ‘Then I am,’ he said finally. ‘And I’m not going to take advantage of it.’

  He saw the unhappiness in her eyes and took her arms and, lifting her to her feet, kissed her hard on the mouth. Then, before she had time to respond, he released her and turned away.

  Closing the door behind him, he stood in the corridor with his hands in his pockets, staring at his feet.

  ‘God,’ he said aloud. ‘I must be getting old.’

  Twenty-four

  When the Città di Salerno reached the island again, the weather was gloomy, growing steadily worse as they recrossed the Tyrrhenian.

  Hannay was standing on the mole as the ship turned into the harbour. Behind him the houses, darkened with the rain of the last few days, rose in tiers like the icing of a battered cake, the windows with their sun-bleached shutters staring blankly across the water. Beyond them, the mountain emptied of habitation as it rose, except for a few small villas and the bulk of Forla’s magnificent palace, built in a fold of the slope to catch the sun all day, then the purple, grey and green sides rose steeply to the ash-coloured peak half-hidden in the clouds, arbitrary and murderous.

  Hannay watched the ship approach. He was frowning heavily for, in the last three days, Amarea had begun to manifest its activity with a new form of evil, a high-pitched whistle that had a curiously penetrating quality. It had started softly at first and he hadn’t realised where it came from, then it grew gradually louder until now it had a faint fine piercing note but oddly enough still no direction, so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

  It was audible in Hannay’s cabin and in the saloon of the Great Watling Street when he worked with his books and his loading charts spread across the table; in Emiliano’s when he walked there for his coffee or his evening drink; in the taxi when he went up to Orlesi’s office outside the Villa Forla to complain about the delayed loading of the sulphur. It was louder up there on the mountainside – but still no more than the thin pipe of a simmering pot. Orlesi had pretended not to hear it, even when Hannay had drawn his attention to it, but Hannay had known all along that he did hear it, because when its pitch had changed faintly – so faintly the difference in the note was almost indistinguishable – Orlesi had stopped in the middle of a long-winded excuse about the loading and his eyes had flickered towards the mountain. His pause had lasted only a fraction of a second then he had continued as though nothing had happened, but it was long enough for Hannay to notice it.

  Nothing more had occurred, however. The smoke had not increased and there had been no more ash dust on San Giorgio. And this high-pitched whistling had become so much a part of the everyday life of the town that even Hannay, as he worked over his books and telephoned his bitter complaints to Orlesi, had begun to accept it as normal.

  He watched the Città di Salerno, for a while, admiring her captain’s handling of her, then he turned and looked further down the mole.

  A big yacht which had arrived in the night was moored there, all gleaming brass and chrome, from the stall of the yacht-club flag on her bow to the plated name, Canzone del Mare, screwed to her stern. A big car was waiting alongside, and luggage was being handed ashore and pushed out of sight.

  A group of young men who had been standing watching, turned, stared at the approaching Città di Salerno, then almost like a company of soldiers, swung round and headed towards Hannay. In their lead, he realised, was Bruno Bosco, the Communist candidate.

  Hannay recognised him at once from the pictures that placarded the town, a sharp-featured man with sly eyes and strong lines of humour round his mouth. Behind him, the squad of young men all seemed to be dressed remarkably alike and were all notable for their stern, expressionless faces.

  Bosco appeared to recognise Hannay, too, for he stopped and addressed him gaily.

  ‘’n giorno, Signor Capitano,’ he said. ‘I see Forla’s with us at long last.’ He indicated the yacht alongside the mole and Hannay nodded, wondering why Bosco should trouble to be so friendly with him, an English sea-captain with no vote.

  ‘Still, we’re bringing up our big guns too,’ Bosco went on cheerfully. ‘We’ve a meeting tonight and we have Deputy Sporletti on the Città di Salerno.’

  Hannay still said nothing and Bosco grinned. ‘Not that Sporletti’s ever been a minister like Forla,’ he explained. ‘But a deputy’s a deputy anywhere – and we don’t see them often on Anapoli.’ He paused and Hannay could almost see the thoughts turning over in his mind. Then, with his next words, he knew why Bosco had singled him out to be the object of his
good cheer.

  ‘I hear Signor Patch went to the mainland to find a volcanologist,’ he said. ‘Was he successful?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Bosco’s smile had vanished as he turned away. ‘It doesn’t suit our policy to have volcanologists on the island,’ he said. ‘I told Signor Patch so. Not now. Perhaps next week it’ll be different.’

  The gangway of the Città di Salerno was touching the black basalt blocks of the mole by this time and Bosco and his henchmen formed up in a line at the end of it. The first of the passengers were brushed aside as a small man with a mean mouth and thick glasses stepped on to the gangplank. Accompanied by a flourishing of clenched fists from Besco and his followers, he received a bunch of flowers and was borne away in the centre of Bosco’s group up the Via Maddalena.

  Hannay watched them go. It was drizzling again and the wind was whipping at his trousers. Behind the town, the blue hazy outline of Amarea rose to the clouds which flattened the thin column of smoke in a plate-like shadow.

  The whistle was there still, lost somewhere in the clouds but quite distinct when the bustle along the mole quietened for a moment. Hannay listened to it for a while, picking it out from the cries of the people greeting relatives, his head cocked, almost wishing the mountain would manifest its internal activity with a few more histrionics. The whistle, in spite of its threat, after a time seemed no more dangerous than the singing of a kettle.

  A noisy little Lambretta drew up alongside him and Piero Tornielli dismounted.

  ‘Nearly missed her,’ Hannay commented.

  ‘I was delayed,’ Piero panted. ‘Has she disembarked yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Hannay stared up the gangplank. ‘You just made it.’

  ‘He went too, didn’t he?’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Tom Patch.’ Piero’s intense gaze was on the ship. ‘He thinks I don’t know. But I do. Everybody in the town knows he went with her.’

  Hannay glanced at the flushed furious face beside him, then he saw Patch and Cecilia at the top of the gangplank and began to move forward.