by John Harris
‘Stop, stop!’ she was shouting. As he halted the car and started forward towards her, she recognised his lean shape in the light of the headlamps and began to stumble towards him, her heels clicking on the macadamed surface of the road. He caught her as she fell into his arms.
‘Cecilia, you must have been mad! You should be going the other way!’
There was another explosion from above them and she huddled terrified in the circle of his arms, her face buried in his chest, so that he could feel her body shaking through the thin dress she wore.
The cascades of spark were obscured from them by trees which were flung into stark silhouette, every leaf and twig distinct with the glow of the lava flows behind it. Then, as the glare died, the roaring stopped and the whistling sigh that seemed to prelude each new evil started out of the sudden silence and they caught the smell of sulphur, and felt first dusty cinders brushing against their faces on the wind.
‘Cecilia–’ Patch stared round him, ‘–we’ve got to get under cover. It’s ash!’
He pointed to the beam of the headlights where they could see it sifting down, dropping gently and silently to the road in a slow but deadly cloud, the bigger cinders bouncing on the surface and into the ditch.
‘Tom, my grandfather! We must find him. We can’t leave him outside.’
He began to move back to the car, pulling her after him. ‘Take it easy,’ he said, and already he could feel the dust grinding between his teeth. ‘He probably knows more about the mountain than we do. He knows how dangerous this ash is. He’ll find somewhere to shelter. Come on, Cecelia. We can’t stay here.’
‘Tom!’ Cecilia’s voice was broken with weariness. ‘I can’t go any further.’
As she drooped against him, he swung her up into his arms and stood with his legs braced, wondering what to do. Then he bundled her roughly into the car and, dropping into the driver’s seat, put the vehicle into gear and began to cruise onward.
Eventually, through the thickening cloud of cinders that bounced off the bonnet and obscured the windscreen, he saw what he was looking for, a group of little villas – their doors gaping wide and empty. Stopping the car outside the first of them, he dragged Cecilia from the seat and swung her into his arms again.
There was a thud and a puff of dust and something fell alongside him as he stumbled up the flower-decked stone steps from the road, half-blinded by the flying grit that got into his hair and eyes and ears and mouth, his feet crunching on the growing layer of ash. Kicking open the front door, he stumbled inside and stood panting, his mouth dry with a chlorine-tasting thirst that scraped his throat like emery paper, but conscious immediately of the relief, the incredible, blessed relief, at being out of that ghastly choking cloud.
‘All right now, Cecilia,’ he croaked, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. ‘I know this place.’
Groping in the darkness, he saw a slit of light alongside him which he realised was a partly opened door with the glare of Amarea behind it. Kicking it open, he saw the mountain framed in a window opposite him and, from the direction of the golden streaks spilling down the slopes, he knew they were safe.
By the far wall, there was a wide divan bed and he laid Cecilia gently on it and turned back to the hall. He managed to find a switch by the entrance and, as he flooded the place with light, he saw through the open outer door the cinders falling on to the step outside, catching the light as they drifted down, a few of the bigger ones bouncing into the hall.
As he reached out to shut the door, he felt the grit on his face and even inside the air was thick with the smell of ash and sulphur. The sound of the door slamming echoed through the empty house, and he could hear the cinders brushing against the panes as he hurried from room to room shutting the windows. His jacket was spotted and scarred by tiny scorch marks, and he took it off and dropped it on the floor as he ran.
He was sweating when he returned to the room where he had left Cecilia and he brought with him a couple of glasses and a bottle in a straw sheath which he had found in the pantry. Back in the bedroom, he glanced at the photograph by the bed, the wedding group of a man and woman in neat white drill, the ground underneath them striped with the tattered shadows of palm leaves. He stared briefly at the image of Mrs Hayward, thinking cynically of the irony of his presence there with Cecilia.
She was lying with her head sideways on the pillow, her dark hair tumbled against the roundness of her cheek, the winged eyebrows making curves above the smoky eyelashes.
He stood for a long time, looking down at her, with the drifting grey-curtain of ash outside, and for a moment in some way he couldn’t explain, Cecilia seemed set apart from him by her very youth and he felt desperately alone.
The thought brought a lump to his throat. Envy for her youth that swept over him, for the very freshness which lay over her like a cloak as she slept, envy too for the simplicity and credulity he knew to be part of her and which seemed to have slipped past him years ago, totally unseen, lost in egoism and cynicism and jeers. For a while he thought how much he’d like to be as young as she was once more, to believe in truth again, and honesty and courage, as she believed in them; then he thought of what lay ahead of her, of the failures and disappointments, and of how much she had already been wounded by the treachery of human beings, and he realised he was the luckier of the two with his hard shell of disbelief and his period of discontent behind him.
He sat on the bed beside her with his glass and lit a cigarette, his hands trembling. Overcome by tiredness, he sagged back beside her, the wine spilling in a dark pool to the floor as the glass tilted in his hand. The cigarette burning his fingers awakened him long enough only for him to grind it out in the ashtray beside the bed, then his eyelids began to droop again.
There seemed to be some slackening in the noise from Amarea when Cecilia opened her eyes. She had slept with the exhaustion of weariness and fear and as she came to her senses, not knowing where she was, she experienced a cold feeling of terror as she remembered only the desolation of the empty road, the abandoned houses, and the glare from the mountain and the din that racketed through her head.
She sat up abruptly and in the faint glow of the bedside light she became aware for the first time of the figure alongside her. Startled, she stared at it for a while, then with relief she recognised the paint-spotted shirt that was scorched here and there by falling cinders.
She bent over Patch and saw his face, all the deep lines smoothed out by sleep, the strength strangely gone from him so that he looked young and hopeless, and she suddenly wanted to cry.
Silently she slipped down again beside him, taking care not to wake him. But he stirred and his eyes opened. He smiled faintly and winked, and the crooked grin she loved so much spread across his mouth so that his whole face became strong and virile and confident again immediately. He reached out to her and, putting his arm about her, drew her close to him and, as her cheek touched his, she knew he was whispering what was echoed in her own heart.
‘Thank God, Cecilia!’ he was saying. ‘Thank God I found you!’
Forty-one
When Patch finally awoke, the first light of the day was pushing through the windows of the room.
He lay on his back for a while, staring at the ceiling, aware of Cecilia beside him, her head against the hollow of his neck, her hand still in his. He could feel her body warm against him and her hair soft against his cheek. As he turned his head, he saw the ash had stopped and the tremendous relief he felt was because of a selfish thankfulness that he had survived and Cecilia had survived. In spite of the disaster, they still had their lives before them, and his own was suddenly full of meaning.
He lifted himself slowly and kissed her gently on the cheek. All the frustration, all the anger that had been in him the previous night had gone in this new and tender experience which had left him cleansed of unhappiness and with only a great faith in himself and Cecilia, and a desire to get on with living. None of his previous cheerful promiscuity had gi
ven him much to remember, but this thing which had swept away the old laughing, angry Tom Patch had had a simplicity, a lack of self-consciousness and a beauty which had left him filled with an extraordinary sense of exhilarating elation.
He swung his legs to the floor, feeling the room was smaller and shabbier than he had ever noticed before, and he had a sudden feeling of pity for Mrs Hayward in her ambitious groping for glamour. Outside the door, a cupboard was open that he hadn’t noticed the previous night, and Hayward’s clothes spilled out of it across the oak-blocked floor, dull, English and honest-to-God, and he felt another wave of pity for his unhappy, frustrated wife to whom all of these things meant nothing.
He crossed to the window and stared out. As far as he could see, the mountainside was a waste of smoke and grey ash, all the colour gone from everything, a sombre volcanic world of grey, dark blue and brown, fading to black. It gave him an odd dead feeling to see the roads and the fields, the sparkle of flowers, the mud-plastered houses, all dulled to a uniform grey beneath the rolling, bubbling column of hydrangea-coloured smoke that poured out of the mountain like a hideous cauliflower and rose five miles into the sky, varying constantly at its source to rich reds, viridians and gaudy greens as though someone were up there unloading chemicals on to the flames.
Then he saw that the vapours clinging to the mountainside came from a hundred-yard-wide stream of grey-black lava creeping slowly downwards as though from a suppurating sore, following the valleys and the clefts of rock, scorching trees and withering plants as it went, but curiously not so terrifying with its glow turned to the colour of cinders by the daylight.
Across the little valley that separated him, he could see the ruins of San Giorgio. The lava appeared to have followed the road and, like the mud before it, had passed clean through the middle of the village. The houses, the untidy farms and the church, everything had been swept aside. The church tower was still visible, the campanile sticking sturdily out of the grey sea which moved without any apparent sign of movement, but as he watched, a wide fissure appeared up its side and lengthened until the whole structure began to disintegrate. A piece of masonry fell off and the great cracked bell he had heard on the night of Marco Givanno’s death beneath the mud pealed madly for a few seconds as the tower rocked, then the whole lot crashed down in a shower of dust and sparks and smoke.
Unaware that Cecilia had awakened too and had crossed towards him, he watched as men on the lower side of the village hastily slashed down apple trees, oaks and chestnut in the fields. Others were trying to dig up a few of the precious vines from the fertile soil that the catastrophic river was about to cover up for ever. Even the children tore at the nearby grass until the heat of the moving grey wall drove them back, trying to save some scraps of hay for the donkeys and the cattle.
On the slopes to the east and west of them, people whose property had already been engulfed stood silently, watching with dulled eyes as the monster from the mountain swallowed the years of work, the few bare stalks of corn that withered where they stood like doomed armies, the dying trees and the fading bushes.
‘Tom!’ Cecilia’s voice close behind him made Patch turn, and he swung an arm round her and pulled her to him in an instinctive movement. ‘We must find my grandfather.’
She indicated the window at the other side of the room and through it he could see the castellated towers of the Villa Forla, surrounded by the groves of cypresses that marched up the slopes with the precision of squadrons of soldiers.
He nodded without speaking and they ran down the garden path, their feet crunching in the grey desert of ash and clinker, small puffs of dust flying as they sank ankle-deep in the stuff. The car was covered in a grey swathe, and they moved round it, knocking it from the pitted windscreen.
Behind them down the hill there was an overturned cart, its bunchs of tomatoes and garlic spilled into the ditch, and even from these the ash had taken away the shape, rounding the angles, flattening the curves and dulling the colour. A candle still guttered in the lamp that was jammed into a bracket on the empty shafts.
They climbed into the car and set off with a jerk, the wheels spinning in the ash, and slithered forward, throwing the cinders aside in two unbroken tracks as they headed upwards.
Beyond San Giorgio, among the drying mud, the lava was piling up near to the road, the vegetation crackling and smoking already, a few trees in the distance blazing like torches. Groups of people were limping past towards the Porto, one or two of them with burned hands, one or two with faces wrapped in scraps of linen, trudging unspeakingly downwards with what they could carry, here and there passing a house with its occupants up on the roof shovelling off the heaped cinders before the beams collapsed under the weight.
Patch parked the car well below the Villa Forla and at the top of the hill so they could get away quickly if necessary, and they ran through the gates hand-in-hand. Two or three people in the courtyard piling up linen and other things they were obviously looting from the abandoned palace stared curiously at them, and as they halted, doubtful as to their directions, they heard a sound like someone rattling the clinker in a firegrate. Beyond the low wall that surrounded the house, a group of trees started to move agitatedly, the foliage withering before their eyes. On the branches were shreds of what looked like dried grey dough where lava bombs had fallen and cooled immediately to rocky hardness.
The gardens and the cypress grove the Forla family had planted round their home through three or four generations came to a dead stop in a hideous pile of moving slag as high as a three-storey house. The heat was intense and from the hot grumbling wall small onrushes of pebbles and stone rolled towards them with a noise like breaking crockery. The fine rain that dripped from the trees vaporised as it came into contact with it and the atmosphere was as humid and as full of steam as a Turkish bath.
‘We’ve got to hurry, Cecilia,’ Patch said. ‘He must be here somewhere. Perhaps he’s upstairs with his camera. He couldn’t be higher up the mountain.’
Even as he turned away, he saw a great spar of rock thrust upwards from the lava pile, rising with a fascinating slowness that held them in their tracks, until it stood on end, a dark menacing outline against the purple sky behind it. Slowly it began to tilt over, its gloomy base sapped away here and there by the trickling of red-hot sand. Then there was a flash and a narrow fissure ran from top to bottom of it and the whole mass split apart and collapsed in a blinding avalanche that sent red-hot boulders rolling across the ground, leaving scorch marks on the grass even as they cooled and turned to black. Almost at once, a new spar of rock began to be forced upwards.
The Villa Forla was silent inside and they stopped dead in the vast hall, awed by the magnificence of it. All that was beautiful in Italy and on Anapoli had been gathered in this vast soundless museum now covered with a film of ash that had sifted through the windows. The walls were white, with doors of black wrought-iron, and the furniture was of heavy old oak, so that the whole room was splendid with colour and grandeur from the thick silent carpets that centred the floors to the marble statues that had been dug out at Colonna del Greco, and the crystal chandeliers that graced the frescoed ceilings. Four generations of Forlas had built this magnificent palace, and now it was ended.
At first they were unable to take their eyes off the splendour, then they ran forward, shouting old Leonardi’s name along the echoing corridors, their teeth gritting on the dust in the air. The atmosphere seemed more stifling now and through the windows they saw the bank of lava piling higher against the walls of the house, the edges crumbling and clattering like dumped heaps of coke into the garden.
Then one of the men from the courtyard appeared behind them. ‘Signore,’ he shouted. ‘Hurry! the north wall is cracking!’
Outside again, they heard a crash of falling masonry behind them and saw the dust spurt like an explosion through the windows, and knew that the lava was now trudging through the house and over the carpets, pushing the oak furniture before it int
o heaps, charring the tables and chairs until it finally swallowed them up in a blazing pyre.
More people had arrived in the courtyard by this time and were running about like a lot of ants, laden with looted clothing and linen. One of them, a carpet under his arm, halted in front of Patch, as though he guessed what he was seeking.
‘On the mountain,’ he said. ‘I saw him out there. But don’t waste time, signore, or you’ll be cut off! It’s reached the road already!’
They ran through the courtyard, across the panic litter of clothes, their throats parched with the heat and the acrid fumes. As they reached the gate, they heard casks of wine exploding in the cellar and saw the surrounding wall crash down. The flowing, slow tide began to eat it up, bricks, mortar, everything, then the garage alongside began to crack as the lava flowed round it and a split like a vein ran up the brickwork.
As the lava reached the petrol tank, there was a tremendous explosion that bulged the walls and lifted the roof in flying tiles that arced across the sky in twisting fragments.
While the pieces were still clattering down around them, someone shouted from the roadway and they saw mules looming out of the smoke and steam, coming on at a trot, men pulling at their bridles and encouraging them with shouts.
The last of them came unsteadily, no one leading it, and they saw at once its rider was old Leonardi, his white hair hanging about his grimy face as he clutched to the torn alpaca jacket he wore the tripod of a broken camera.
They ran forward to meet him and, thrusting through the steaming mules, Patch reached the old man’s side just as he swayed in the saddle. As he rolled into Patch’s arms, the tripod cracked him at the side of the head and fell over his shoulder to the ground.
‘He was caught in a pocket of gas,’ one of the mule-riders said, swinging off alongside Patch. ‘He was taking photographs and he wouldn’t come away. We pushed him on to the mule but I think we were already too late.’
