by Judy Nunn
It was Violet who broke the spell, snapping the ten shilling note she held between her fingers with all the expertise of a bank teller. ‘And ten bob makes one quid.’ She held it out to him and he took it.
‘Thank you,’ he said, flicking back his hair as he shoved the change into the pocket of his trench coat.
She smiled the smile he’d seen on many an occasion: bright, personable and efficient; she was popular with the customers, particularly the young men. She even flirted with them sometimes, so long as they weren’t rude. Just in fun, always proper, never letting things get out of hand. Then she said something, and Pietro wasn’t sure if he’d heard her correctly.
‘I knock off for lunch in half an hour.’ She said it under her breath, very quickly, and suddenly she was back behind the counter. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ she was saying to the next customer in line.
‘You’re Italian, aren’t you?’ They were her first words half an hour later when she stepped out into Sharp Street where he was waiting by the open shop doorway in uncertain anticipation, still wondering whether he might have misconstrued what she’d said.
‘Yes.’ They moved away from the doors to make way for the steady stream of customers going in and out. ‘My name is Pietro Toscanini,’ he said.
‘Violet Campbell.’ She’d taken to calling herself Violet lately, but it had little effect upon the locals who all knew her as Vi. She held out her hand and he shook it. Violet liked the way European women offered their hands – she thought it was sophisticated – and these days she always initiated a handshake, even though most Aussie blokes thought it too forward. But then Aussie blokes had a lot to learn about manners. ‘I’ve seen you in the shop,’ she said. ‘Lots of times.’
She had. He’d been coming into the shop once a fortnight for nearly two months now, and she couldn’t fail to notice him: he was very handsome. He’d leaf through the catalogues on the stand near the door, or he’d peruse the merchandise on display. Behind the counter, samples of every grocery and hardware item in stock were exhibited on the myriad shelves that stretched the length of the shop from floor to ceiling. Other goods were displayed on the counter itself: jars of lollies, ladies’ handcreams, boxes of soap and candles, bottled sauces and tins of cooking oil were all carefully arranged between machines and apparatuses that sliced and chopped and measured and weighed. The shop appeared to sell every item imaginable.
‘Can I help you?’ she’d asked him once as he’d examined the jars of chutneys and pickles stacked on the end of the counter near the windows, but he’d given a quick shake of his head and returned to the catalogue stand. Another time, when he’d had his face buried in a catalogue, she’d called, ‘Want to order something? Need any help?’ But once again he’d given a shake of his head, and a minute or so later he’d left the shop. She’d come to the conclusion that he couldn’t speak English and that he was shy. A lot of the foreigners were like that, she’d found.
Then one afternoon she’d caught him out. During a moment’s respite in an otherwise busy day, she’d been sitting on a stool by the windows listing the items that were in short supply while Trish and Mick, her fellow assistants, had been looking after the several customers at the other end of the counter. Leaning on her elbows, twirling her copper curls between her fingers and intermittently chewing on the end of her pencil, she’d looked up and caught his eye. He wasn’t perusing the shelves at all – he was looking at her. And, as he’d guiltily averted his gaze, she’d realised that he had never really been perusing the shelves, that he’d always been looking at her. She was flattered. And from that day on she’d proffered him the brightest of smiles as soon as he’d arrived. ‘Hello there,’ she’d call, and he’d return a quick nod before diving for the catalogues. She’d never dared push any further, for fear of scaring him off. But when the workers came into town on the weekends, Violet always looked forward to seeing the handsome young foreigner. He was an admirer, one with far more taste than some of the others who made lewd remarks to which she never responded. He made her feel special.
‘Where you would like lunch?’ Pietro asked, and she looked blankly at him. ‘Is your lunchtime. You said.’
‘Oh, I’m not hungry; shall we go for a walk?’
It was a fine day in late March, but the heat of summer had gone, and Violet buttoned up the cardigan of her blue twin-set as they walked through the lunchtime crowd that thronged Cooma’s main street. She initiated the conversation with questions. Where was he based? she asked. Spring Hill, he said, he’d been working on the Snowy for nearly three months now. And where was he from? Milano, he said, a big city in the north of Italy.
He looked like a film star, she thought, dark-eyed and romantic, and she liked the way he flicked his hair from his face – it was debonair. She’d like to go to Italy, she said, she intended to travel one day. Heavens above, she’d never even been to Sydney, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.
Centennial Park, just a block away, was crowded and Violet could see several people she knew, so she decided to head for the creek instead, where they could sit on the grassy bank overlooking the water. Pietro automatically followed her lead as she chatted away. Her family had a property near Adaminaby she said, as they turned down Bombala Street beside the park, but since she’d been working at Hallidays she lived with her aunt in town.
‘I like working at Hallidays. Mr Halliday’s a good boss, and it’s a very good store, one of the best in town. I get to meet so many interesting people.’ The smile she flashed him was a personal compliment. ‘I like living in Cooma too,’ she said, ‘it’s so cosmopolitan.’ It was a word she’d learned recently – her Auntie Maureen used it a lot – and Violet thought it sounded very sophisticated.
Pietro didn’t know what ‘cosmopolitan’ meant, but he nodded anyway. ‘Is nice place, Cooma,’ he agreed, enjoying her company and feeling more relaxed by the minute. He was proud to be seen with her. Several young men had called ‘G’day, Vi’ as they’d passed and he’d been aware of their admiring glances.
Violet’s prettiness had come as a surprise to everyone, especially her family. Throughout her childhood she’d been a freckle-faced tomboy who could outride and outrun every one of her male peers. And, as a late developer, with a chest as flat as a board at the age of sixteen, it had appeared she was destined to remain a tomboy. Then, shortly before her seventeenth birthday, she had blossomed, overnight it had seemed to her confused father. Already taller than average, her body had suddenly filled out to match her height until, like a healthy young mare, she was perfectly proportioned. Her face, too, had taken on a womanly glow, the Irish antecedents on her mother’s side clear in the colouring of her hair and skin. She was pretty rather than beautiful, but it was the bloom of youth and the sheer animal health of Violet Campbell that made her so attractive.
At the junction of Massie Street, as they neared the creek which meandered through town, a young woman crossing the road called, ‘Hello there, Vi.’
‘Hello, Grace,’ she called back. ‘That’s Grace Tibbert,’ she said, walking down the slope to where the bank was strewn with the early autumn leaf litter from the now bare-limbed trees. ‘She was two years ahead of me at school. She’s a receptionist at the Department of Main Roads now.’ Violet said it with the utmost respect.
‘Vi,’ Pietro said thoughtfully, as he took off his trench coat and spread it out on the grass for her.
‘Yes?’ She was so impressed by the offer of his coat that the response to her name was automatic.
‘People, they say Vi.’ He’d noticed that her fellow assistants and many of the customers at the shop also called her Vi.
‘Yes, but I prefer Violet,’ she said rather primly as she sat. ‘Thank you for the coat. Won’t you be a bit cold?’ He was in a short-sleeved shirt.
But he appeared not to hear. ‘Violet is more pretty,’ he agreed and he sat on the ground beside her. ‘In Italia we say Violetta.’
She was entranced, it sounded so bea
utiful. ‘Violetta,’ she said, but the way she said it, it didn’t sound beautiful at all. ‘Say it again.’
‘Violetta.’
Her intention to impress forgotten, Violet studied his mouth as he spoke the word. She loved the way his tongue seemed to rest on the ‘t’.
‘It’s much nicer than Violet,’ she said. ‘Say it again.’
‘Violetta.’ He sounded each syllable slowly.
She laughed, delighted. ‘Say something else in Italian,’ she urged, her eyes once again trained on his mouth.
Her enthusiasm was so beguiling that Pietro no longer felt in the least self-conscious. ‘Sei tanta carina, Violetta,’ he said softly. And, watching her eyes focussed on his mouth as he formed the words, he fell hopelessly in love.
‘What does it mean?’ Violet asked, breathless in her admiration. ‘What did you say?’ She thought that never, in the whole of her life, had she heard anything so romantic.
‘I say you are very pretty, Violetta.’
‘Oh.’ Her attention switching from his mouth to his eyes, she was taken aback by the intensity she saw there, and she found herself momentarily spellbound, just as Pietro himself had been in the shop. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Then, with an awkward laugh, she looked away, diverting her attention to the willows that graced the opposite bank, and the spell was broken. But not before it had been well and truly cast. Violet was feeling a little shaken.
‘Is true.’ Pietro’s confidence remained surprisingly intact. He was sorry if he’d embarrassed her but he’d been stating the truth.
‘Are your mum and dad still in Italy?’ She reverted to the safety of small talk.
‘They are dead. The war.’
‘Oh.’ She didn’t know what to say. She’d intended to ask about brothers and sisters as well, but now she didn’t dare – they might be dead too.
Realising he’d embarrassed her further, Pietro took up the baton. ‘Your family,’ he said, ‘you have brother? Sister?’
‘Two brothers,’ she said, smiling her gratitude. ‘They’re older than me, they help Dad on the property.’
‘Tell me of your property.’ Pietro hugged his knees to his chest and hunched forward eagerly, like a child awaiting a story, and Violet, once again on home ground, relaxed. Her family were cattle graziers, she said, they had been for generations, then she launched into a full account of her childhood.
He reacted in all the right places and in all the right ways. He was concerned to hear that she’d fractured her collarbone in her first gymkhana when she was ten years old, and impressed when she told him she’d got back on the horse and won the event anyway. ‘It was the way Dad taught us,’ she said with a touch of pride. And he laughed when she told him how she’d smuggled Beth, the blue heeler, into the house in the dead of night so that she could have her puppies on the sofa.
‘I was only six so I didn’t get into trouble,’ she said. ‘Dad actually thought it was funny, but Mum wasn’t too happy. A bitch having pups is pretty messy, I can tell you.’ She wondered briefly whether it was quite proper talking about birth to someone who wasn’t from the country, but she needn’t have worried.
‘I know this,’ he said, his laughter stopping abruptly. ‘I help my goat have her baby.’
‘Really?’ She was surprised. ‘You said you came from a big city.’
He was surprised himself. He’d forgotten about his goat’s baby, and the image that had flashed through his mind had startled him. His hand emerging from the animal’s womb, having turned the baby that had been pointing in the wrong direction. How had he known to do that? Who had taught him? His hand, covered in blood, the blood dropping scarlet onto the snow. It was an image he’d not seen before and he didn’t want to think about it. It was too dangerous. Automatically, his fingers strayed to his chest, and the strip of leather he could feel resting there beneath his shirt.
‘Before Milano,’ he said, ‘was farm. No matter. Go on,’ he urged. ‘Tell me more.’
She told him about the winter of ’49, when her father had been out rounding up stray cattle and hadn’t come home for nearly a week. ‘He was caught in a blizzard,’ she said. ‘Mum was really worried, but I knew he was fine. I’d only just turned thirteen, but I knew it. I was right, too. He’d been holed up in a cattleman’s hut living on rabbits. My dad’s a really good shot,’ she added boastfully, ‘and a week later he walked in the front door and said “bad weather up there”.’
Again, there was pride in her laughter, and Pietro noticed how much her father featured in her conversation. ‘You love your father very much,’ he said.
‘Oh yes, my dad’s my hero.’ Her dad had been her hero for as long as she could remember, which made the current rift between them all the more upsetting. ‘He’s a fine man,’ she added. She’d heard it said many times ever since she’d been a little girl – ‘he’s a fine man, your dad, Vi’ – and she’d always believed it. That’s why she hadn’t liked the glimpses she’d seen of him lately; she hadn’t found them fine at all.
‘And your farm,’ Pietro said, noticing that she’d become thoughtful. ‘You love your farm very much.’
She nodded, still distracted enough not to correct him. She would ordinarily have said, ‘We call it a property. Farmers grow crops – we’re graziers, we run cattle.’ She liked informing people of the difference.
‘Why you come to town?’ He could tell that he’d gained her attention with the question. He’d jolted her from her thoughts, and he hoped she didn’t mind. He hoped she didn’t consider him too inquisitive, but he was very interested in her story. ‘You talk much love of your father and your farm,’ he urged. ‘Why you leave? Why you come to live in Cooma?’
She hesitated. He’d not offended her by asking; she’d have liked to have confided in him. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, and it was the truth. What else could she say? ‘I don’t want a life like my mother’s.’? That’s what she’d thought at first. But then did she want a life like Auntie Maureen’s? That’s what her father most feared, she was sure of it, that she’d go the way of his own sister and leave the land. But she didn’t want to be a career woman like Auntie Maureen. She didn’t know what she wanted, it was too confusing. She only knew that she wanted her father to love her and to treat her the way he had when she was a child, instead of burdening her with his mistrust and suspicion.
‘You watch yourself, girl,’ he’d said to her, only last week, just before he’d headed home after the Cooma Show. He’d never called her ‘girl’ before, and he’d been even more aggressive than when she’d announced her intention to get a job and move into town. ‘It’d be just for a while, Dad,’ she’d said at the time, astounded by his belligerence. Fortunately her mum had intervened. ‘Be fair, Cam,’ Marge said. ‘You gave the boys time off when they finished school.’ He’d muttered something about it being ‘hardly the same’, but he’d had to give in. And then, when she’d been thrilled to see him in town for the Show, he’d been angry all over again. As if she’d done something wrong. ‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ he’d said, ‘you keep away from Miss Minchin.’
Keep away from Miss Minchin? She wasn’t sure if she’d heard right. ‘Why?’
‘You just do like I say. You keep well away from her, girl, you hear me?’
‘But you always told me to listen to every word she said.’
‘Well, I changed my mind, didn’t I? I don’t want you hanging around her.’
‘But why?’
‘Because she’s not a good influence.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I bloody well say so, that’s why!’ And he’d stormed off without even a goodbye.
‘I suppose I just wanted a change,’ Violet said now, aware that Pietro was waiting for her to continue. ‘I’ll go home one day, it’s where I belong.’ But home to what, she wondered. She’d hated the several months after she’d left school. ‘You stay and help your mother, Vi,’ her dad had said at dawn as he and the boys had set off to work the propert
y. And, along with the drudgery of cooking and cleaning, her mother had started her on an intensive course in book-keeping. ‘A bloke on the land needs a wife who can do the books, Vi,’ Marge had said, quoting her own mother-in-law. ‘Grandma Campbell taught me and now I’m teaching you. You’ll be running a property of your own one day.’ Marge was proud of her bookkeeping skills. The terror her mother-in-law had instilled in her long forgotten, Marge was proud to be a Campbell woman.
Violet had been shocked by the sudden change in her circumstances. It had seemed only yesterday she’d been treated like a son, accorded the respect of a son by her father, who’d loudly applauded when she’d outridden her older brothers. ‘That’s my Vi,’ he’d always boasted. But he no longer treated her like that. She was aware that she’d matured quickly, but that was hardly her fault. And while she enjoyed suddenly being attractive to boys and even occasionally flirting with them, she didn’t feel she’d done anything to warrant her father’s suspicion, and she wished that her mother would stop schooling her to be someone’s wife. Things were moving too fast.
‘I like working at Hallidays,’ she said brightly. She wished she could have spoken more openly to Pietro. It would be nice, she thought, to talk to someone other than Auntie Maureen, someone nearer her own age, but she didn’t know what to say. ‘It’s a very good store, one of the best in town. And Mr Halliday’s a very good boss.’
‘Yes. You say.’ She was changing the subject – he’d offended her. ‘I am sorry.’
‘Why?’
‘I ask too much questions.’
‘No,’ she said hastily; he looked so contrite. ‘No, it’s fine, honest.’ Then she had a sudden thought. ‘Do you know what the time is?’
Pietro looked at his watch. It was the first he’d ever owned and it had cost him a whole fortnight’s pay. He usually made a show of consulting it, hoping people would notice what a fine watch it was, but he didn’t this time. He’d offended her so deeply that she wanted to leave. He felt terrible, and automatically he flicked back his hair. ‘It is twenty minutes before one o’clock.’
