by John Harris
‘It’s still falling on the slopes, Signor Tom. There’s dust all over the sea. It no longer shines.’ Her voice held a trace of surprise, as though sunshine on the sea were something to which she had awakened every day of her life, and to find it gone had destroyed the pleasure of coming to consciousness.
‘They say it’s worse in San Giorgio,’ she went on. ‘They say a man was killed.’
‘Two men,’ Patch corrected her. ‘And a woman and a child.’
Mamma Meucci stared up at his haggard face and crossed herself.
‘The holy Mother of Jesus have pity on them! It is the will of God.’
Among the hubbub, Hannay stood surrounded by members of his crew, his face and clothes also grimy, the deep lines in the peeling redness of his skin carved in with jetty black.
He had left Patch in San Giorgio and returned to the Porto with Emiliano when the police had arrived, deciding that his duty in the case of an evacuation lay with his ship. He had insisted, however, on taking Cristoforo down with him, too, and in the town, in spite of Devoto’s protests, had refused to let the boy out of his sight until he had reported the incident to the police. The harassed sergeant in charge, although promising to keep an eye on Cristoforo, had been swamped immediately afterwards by the flood of refugees from San Giorgio and Hannay was now uneasily aware that nothing had been gained.
He looked up as Patch arrived and he seemed to be bristling all over. The time for talking was past, it appeared, and he was reacting typically to a call for action.
‘’Annay threw open the stores,’ he said. ‘It’s an emergency.’ He indicated a couple of Lascar seamen with a steaming tureen. ‘That’s soup,’ he pointed out. ‘You can’t expect Eyetalians to keep a stiff upper lip on a cup of sergeant major’s.’
He was talking at the top of his voice and it was hard to tell whether the note in it was one of despair or triumph at being proved right.
‘They’re trying to get up a deputation to see Pelli again,’ he continued. ‘He’s in his office. They say he’s been there since dawn. What was it like up there?’
‘They found young Givanno,’ Patch said, unemotional with weariness. ‘It had come right over the house and through the windows. He was in there with the dog,’
‘Oh, Christ, not another Givanno?’
‘And the sacristan at the church. And a woman and a kid. They must have been bloody near cooked. They’re slithering and sliding about up there like pigs on a greasy pole.’
Leonardi appeared with Cecilia through the clouds of dust that put a yellow haze over the sun and enveloped the town in a dim kind of twilight. His thin legs were creaking as he ran, and under his arm, weighing him down, was the ancient portrait camera from his studio, complete with a tripod that trailed on the ground, making three little grooves through the dust.
‘Clearly there has been an eruption of lava into the lake in the crater,’ he shouted. ‘Now let me face Mayor Pelli. Now who’s the old crackpot who’s prophesied disaster so often and always been wrong? I am about to take photographs. They will sell to the magazines of the world. I shall be first there. They will laugh on the other side of their faces. You couldn’t perhaps lend me a few thousand lire for a taxi?’
Without waiting for a reply, he dashed off, the legs of the tripod clattering over the cobbles.
Cecilia stopped in front of Patch and stared up at him, her eyes wide and horrified.
‘Tom,’ she said. ‘What’s going to happen?’
As though in answer to her question, Cristoforo came running across the piazza, his dog at his heels, its muzzle swinging under its jaw, and Hannay scowled as he realised the police had had to let him take his chance in the chaos.
‘Signor Hannay,’ he shouted. ‘Sir Captain!’ He pushed fiercely between a bunch of women who were trying to dress children in the old clothes which were being offered to them. ‘Signor Hannay, the fishermen have gone to the Town Hall again. The Givanno family are there demanding help from the main land. They insist that the Mayor telephone at once.’
‘Come on,’ Hannay said to Patch. ‘Let’s go!’
Thirty-one
The crowd outside the Town Hall was already being whipped up from the background by Bruno Bosco, who was standing on his favourite pillar outside the Archivio, gesturing wildly. Beneath him stood his group of stern young men, and this time the police were too occupied to appear in force, so that only two nervous-looking men waited in the doorway of the Town Hall.
‘Demand your rights,’ Bosco was shouting. ‘Demand your rights from the Signori!’
Pelli appeared on the steps. He looked pale and shaken and there was no ready smile on his face this time. Old Leonardi, still with his camera on his shoulder and obviously unable to borrow any money for a taxi, was there shouting abuse and almost decapitating his neighbours with the tripod every time he swung round to gesture at the people behind him. The crowd hooted and someone began to throw vegetables from the basket of a fruit-seller, and a tomato made a red star on the pillar by the doorway. Pelli held up his hands for silence but the crowd was in an ugly mood and refused to be quiet.
‘Now who’s wrong?’ old Leonardi shrieked. ‘Now who’s an old fool?’
‘Answer that one, Pelli,’ Giuseppe Givanno shouted. ‘Answer that one!’
There was more abuse and Patch thought for a moment the crowd was going to take the Town Hall by storm, but Pelli managed to stand his ground. He was afraid now, though, and terribly aware of the mess he was in, and was trying hard to bluff his way out of it.
‘I’ll not talk to you,’ he shouted, just managing to make himself heard over the noise of the crowd and the racket of the mountain. ‘I’ll not talk to you until you’ve got rid of the opposition elements who’re trying to make this into a political meeting. I’ve done my duty and I’ll not have this disaster used for party ends.’
‘Nobody’s asking you what you want,’ he was told. ‘You’re being told what we want.’
Pelli waved his arms in a desperate appeal for order. ‘This is serious,’ he shouted, ‘and if you want to see me, come by all means, but come without my opponents.’
The crowd began to argue among themselves, shoving and gesturing. Pelli’s request seemed reasonable enough, and while they were still shouting, Hannay kept pushing forward until he and Patch were on the steps at the front with old Leonardi.
‘Take no notice of him,’ Bosco was yelling from his pillar at the back of the crowd. ‘He wants to put you off again.’
‘That’s right,’ yelled old Leonardi. ‘He’ll put you off as he put me off.’
‘I’ll talk to any of you,’ Pelli shouted, and Patch could see the perspiration standing out on his face as he waved his arms ‘As many of you as can get into my office. But this dreadful thing can’t be solved by election slogans.’
‘That’s right, be quiet, Bruno.’ The crowd started to yell against the opposition element who were trying to push Bosco forward. ‘Leave it to us this time.’
‘They’ll talk you out of it again,’ Bosco warned. ‘Don’t listen to them. Tear the place apart!’
‘Shut up,’ Meucci shouted at him. ‘We want no violence. Tearing the place apart won’t help anyone.’
At first Bosco refused to be silent and went on shouting slogans, then someone pushed him off the pillar into the arms of his followers and the whole bunch of them, some of them with torn shirts, were driven out from under the arcade.
As they went, there was another movement from the back of the crowd and it surged forward so that Pelli was bundled unceremoniously backwards into his office. At the front, Patch and Hannay found themselves swept into the room with the fishermen who had been leading the argument. Piero Tornielli was there, pressed against the wall, his handsome face distorted with fear.
There was a great deal of noise during which Pelli tried to make himself heard, then at last Meucci’s voice emerged and as he was the oldest and most respected of the fishermen, the others quietened down.
‘We can’t all talk at once,’ Pelli said, mopping his face, aware that events had suddenly got beyond his control, beyond reach of the elaborate plans he had made. ‘You must elect a spokesman.’
‘Meucci then! Meucci’ll speak for us,’ someone yelled from the back of the room.
‘Not me.’ Meucci shook his head. ‘I can shout but I’m no talker. Find somebody who’s been to school.’
Leonardi pushed forward, tripping people with the tripod and cracking them over the head with the camera.
‘I’ll speak,’ he shouted in his thin voice. ‘I’ll speak. Mamma mia, I’ve plenty to say!’
‘Not you, you old fool!’ He was bundled out of sight again immediately, the camera rattling significantly as though something were loose inside it.
‘Tomaso!’ Meucci pushed his partner forward. ‘How about Tomaso?’
‘Tomaso’s a Communist. Let’s have no politics.’
The hubbub started again, the room echoing the shouts like the inside of a drum. Patch saw Piero Tornielli against the wall, cowering from the gestures of an angry Tomaso, while Pelli sat in his chair with all the others towering above him, and Meucci, with one great hand splayed on his blotter as he tried to restore order, fought to make himself heard above the shouting and the frightful roaring from the mountain that seemed to echo and re-echo down the peeling corridors of the Town Hall.
‘Ask Signor Patch! He’s got no politics!’ Tomaso said unexpectedly. ‘He’s not even got a vote. Let him talk to the Mayor.’
Patch started to back away in alarm, but the crowd behind, having found a representative they could agree on, pushed him forward again so that he half-fell across Pelli’s desk. Meucci clapped a huge hand on his shoulder and dragged him upright.
Pelli began to gesture wildly, frankly scared now as he glanced up at Patch’s gaunt figure, his face grey with fatigue, his clothes and hands still daubed with mud. ‘Signor Patch’s not even one of us,’ he shouted, his face red. ‘It’s no concern of his!’
‘Don’t worry,’ Patch said. ‘I want no part in it.’
‘Then you’d better leave.’
‘Signor Patch can speak for us,’ Meucci said in his heavy determined way. ‘Signor Patch is one of us. He’s worked like one of us today. I can vouch for him. He lives in my home.’
‘Signor Patch doesn’t represent the rest of the island!’ Pelli lost his temper and banged the desk furiously so that the dust which had sifted in through the windows rose in little clouds. ‘Perhaps he represents you but he doesn’t represent the other residents – the shopkeepers, the property owners, the people from Colonna del Greco–’
‘For Christ’s sake, man,’ Patch said fiercely in English. ‘Stop dodging. Stop worrying about representatives. Listen to the mountain.’
The hollow rumbling seemed to shake the whole building as though it were a cart rolling on crooked wheels. The glass in the windows rattled sharply in the frames and Patch saw Piero Tornielli’s eyes swing fearfully towards them.
‘I’ve done my duty,’ Pelli said. It seemed to be the only thing he could think of to say.
‘Look at the sky,’ Patch shouted, pointing to the gloom outside. ‘It’s getting darker all the time. Telephone the mainland and have done with it. Or they’ll tear the place apart. If you don’t, I’ll tell them that no telephone call left the island the other night when they think it did. For the love of God, ring up before it’s too late and while they’re all here and can see.’
Pelli looked up at him, his eyes big and frightened, trying to collect his wits in the bedlam of noise. Then he stared round him at the circle of angry fishermen, and reached slowly for the telephone…
Thirty-two
The sky had become quite dark as the crowd moved slowly away from Mayor Pelli’s office, straggling in noisy groups across the square, their ears battered by the mechanical clacking noises that came from Amarea.
They had left Pelli slumped in his chair, his face grey and haggard, his mind obsessed with his own guilt and the thought of his downfall. All his plans for the island had disappeared in the darkness that had been thrown over them.
During the day the pall over the mountain grew bigger, a wild-looking column that towered thousands of feet into the sky, billowing and rolling, a hideous mixture of black smoke and white steam. Below it, the mist and dust and ash hung round the crater, hiding the sun and bringing increasing darkness to the island.
As the hours wore on, the rumbling became louder, and more terrifying in the growing gloom. From time to time, they heard explosions from inside the mountain, a kind of ghastly growling like the hollow sound of a jet aircraft streaking across the angry sky.
There seemed to be no breath of air left and the suffocating atmosphere was held close to the earth by the growing cloud of smoke. The election was forgotten and only Bruno Bosco tried to remind them of it with a loudspeaker van led by a motor-cycle outrider that beat its way up the crumbling alleys from the Piazza del Mare.
‘People of Anapoli,’ he was shouting. ‘Now you know what the authorities are made of. Now you know how they play with your safety for the sake of a few votes–’
But no one wanted to listen. The motor-cyclist ran into a cart that was pushed into his path and fell off, and a group of men and youths started pelting the car with vegetables. The loudspeaker stopped abruptly, then started to appeal for calm.
‘Go home, Bosco,’ the crowd shouted, still throwing. ‘This is no time for your lies. We’ve had enough of politics.’
The limping motor-cyclist picked up his machine hurriedly and began to push it away with a buckled front wheel. The car reversed in an alleyway and disappeared down the hill, its loudspeaker silent.
Then the word got about that rescue ships were beginning to arrive and torches started to flicker in the grey-green smoky streets. There were a few people arguing in the Via Pescatori then suddenly enormous numbers began to appear as the word of rescue got around. Doors crashed open and the crowd huddled together in groups, clotted and tight, from which odd individuals ran backwards and forwards as it edged towards the Piazza del Mare, so that the mass of people swelled and jerked in heaves like a huge snake in the steep little street.
The rumours were wrong, however, and the ships had not arrived, but the frightened crowd in the Piazza del Mare squatted down on the black basalt sea wall in the darkness and cowered in doorways out of the breeze and the drizzle that had started. Every minute more people joined them.
In the afternoon, there was a puff of smoke from the summit like an atomic explosion and several hundred mouths opened in a long-drawn-out ‘aaaah’. Women clutched their children more closely to them and men stood up and stared awe-stricken at the mountain.
A few seconds later, with the smoke emerging with the underbelly of the clouds, the colossal gasp from the mountain reached the town, like the sound of a tremendous belch.
Hannay watched it from the bridge of the Great Watling Street as he stared over the houses. Behind him in the semi-darkness the Haywards stood, gazing towards the mountain, their eyes frightened, their faces strained and tired. They had arrived ahead of most of the crowd, driving slowly through the streets in their car, which was now standing in the Piazza del Mare, abandoned.
Already jumpy with nerves, they were in a mood to be panicked, and the ordeal of having to pass through the frightened shoving people had been almost as terrifying as the noise of the mountain. They had seen a fist fight between two men who were arguing over the ownership of a dropped blanket, and had had to force their way through a gang of youths from Corti Marina who had tried to drown their fears with wine and were argumentative to the point of truculence.
Even Patch, whom they had bumped into as they had left their car, had seemed indifferent to their plight.
‘Tom!’ Mrs Hayward was still unconvinced that she had lost all control over him. ‘Tom Patch, for God’s sake, help us through this damned mob!’
She had shrieked through the st
ruggling crowd, her voice rising in panic as he failed to hear her. ‘Tom Patch! Damn you, what’s the matter with you?’
She had stared after his stooped heedless back as he trudged on, her expression a mixture of bitterness and fear.
‘It’s that Italian girl,’ she shouted at her husband above the din. ‘It’s that damned Italian girl he’s going back for.’
And she burst into a flood of bad language which, born of hysteria and nerves, told her husband all he had ever wanted to know about the affair he had suspected between her and Patch. For a moment the knowledge of her faithlessness shocked him, then he realised he hadn’t the strength of character to treat her as she deserved and would go on suffering from her indifference and faithlessness in all probability until he was too old to care, and he took her arm again and began to lead her down towards the harbour.
The battered old Great Watling Street, with its rust-streaked side, had seemed a haven from the chaos ashore and the only thing they required to complete their thankfulness at being on board was to hear her engines throbbing and feel her in motion away from Anapoli.
Anderson, the Mate, was staring over the heads of the Lascar firemen lining the rails. His girl friend huddled in the saloon, frightened as much by the strangeness of her surroundings as by the confusion and noise.
‘They say they’re coming into the town from Fumarola,’ he told Hannay. ‘They were coming down the side of the mountain on horses and donkeys when I left. There are still a few coming by cart and car round by Corti Marina.’
‘God ’elp ’em,’ Hannay said fervently. ‘God knows where they’ll sleep. The town must be as full as a last bus already.’
‘There’s not a soul in San Giorgio,’ Anderson went on. ‘And when I rang Orlesi from Emiliano’s about that loading sheet, I couldn’t get a reply. The taxi-driver told me they’re busy packing up at the Villa Forla.’
Hannay nodded. ‘I’ve seen ’em,’ he said. He indicated a car standing on the mole. ‘They’ve been loading all afternoon but they’ve had to stop now. They can’t get off the mole for that lot in the square. They’ve moved the yacht.’
