Cecilia, on her return, hasn’t moved.
‘Why don’t you go and have a lie-down?’ Chiara says. ‘You’re tired. I’ll call you when it’s dinner time.’
Cecilia allows herself to be led up the narrow staircase to the room they share under the sloping ceiling where the two beds, the bigger one and the truckle bed, stand side by side, separated by a low chest. Chiara lights the candle and puts it on the chest inside its glass frame.
‘So you’ll know where you are if you wake up before I come back and it’s dark,’ she says.
Cecilia sits on the side of the big bed. ‘I don’t know,’ she says.
Her face is pale and shadowed, lit from below by the flickering flame, with deep hollows under her eyes. She doesn’t know what it is she doesn’t know. She knows only that she doesn’t know it.
Chiara kneels and unbuckles Cecilia’s shoes. ‘You’ll feel better if you have a snooze,’ she says.
‘Don’t leave me,’ Cecilia says.
And so Chiara sits on the lower bed, holding Cecilia’s hand. She stares at the crucifix hanging on the wall but she thinks instead about the picture of Jesus that used to hang over their bed in the apartment in San Lorenzo. How, after the time that it fell from the wall, when their mother came to light the red lamp with the taper, a new supplication was added to their prayers: ‘Do not turn Thy face from us, Jesus.’
She remembers that she became attuned to any change in Cecilia’s breathing pattern. The first bleating sounds would insinuate themselves into Chiara’s own sleep, into her dream, so that she would think she was here, up at Nonna and Nonno’s farm, and that a sheep had strayed. That would be her signal. She would snap awake, slide out of bed and grip the bed-end, ready. When the seizure began, she would press her whole weight against the bed, bracing it against the wall so that it didn’t bang and shake Jesus loose, and no one would know. After the fit had passed and Cecilia slept, Chiara would check that her sister’s tongue was not going to choke her, then she would lie down again, holding Cecilia’s hand to keep her from straying. In the morning it would be hard to wake Cecilia, and she would be drowsy and uncommunicative over breakfast.
‘Was she all right in the night?’ Mamma would ask, and Chiara would nod.
‘Yes, but it was noisy, and we couldn’t sleep.’
It was true. In the street outside, men were drilling into the pavement and turning it all over. As if they were ploughing the cobbles. Not to plant, though, but to uncover what was hidden beneath. The rich treasure of ancient Rome. Rome reunited with itself, with its own past in a seamless line, the wireless said. Glory days.
Mamma would narrow her eyes at bleary Cecilia and then at Chiara, who would yawn too to demonstrate their tiredness more convincingly.
‘Cover your mouth with your hand,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘We don’t all want to see your tonsils.’
Chiara looks at her sleeping sister. How tired I am, she thinks.
She goes across the landing to Nonno and Nonna’s room. It is cold and smells of mould. Some tiles have come off the roof on this side of the chimney, and the heavy rains they had back in October have found their way in. A greenish stain like seaweed on the chimney breast is spreading outwards. Things these days are either too dry or too wet. The balance is missing. Nonna can’t get up the stairs any more, so the bed has been taken downstairs and reassembled there. The boy sleeps at her side on a nest of blankets on the floor.
‘We don’t bolt the door,’ Nonna said, the first night they were here.
‘We do now,’ Chiara replied, sliding it across and turning the key in the lock.
‘What if we need to go in the night?’
‘You can use the commode.’
When she comes down in the morning these days, she finds Nonna already up and the little boy asleep in the bed.
The floorboards sigh and bow as Chiara crosses the room. She peers out of the window, hoping to see Gabriele and the boy appearing over the brow of the hill. The wind has got up, and the pomegranate trees bow their heads. She shivers, feeling a soft crumbling at her core. Bleak outside and in.
She turns away and picks up a book from the bedside table. A Guide to Italian Mountain Birds. The pages are stuck together. She prises them apart and there, out of a page depicting a bluethroat perching on a twig, comes a faint whiff of her grandfather’s cigar. She aches for him as he was when she was a child, when he would stride off up the track in his hobnailed boots with Gabriele and the men from the village, his rifle over his shoulder, his hessian bag to carry the catch strapped to his belt, his trousers tucked into the thick woollen socks that Nonna knitted on five needles.
The picture that comes to her, though, is of the old, old man, the sad old man who outlived his only son.
She turns away and fumbles her way down the dark staircase.
‘I need to go,’ Nonna says. ‘Help me up.’
Nonna has two sticks that Gabriele fashioned for her. She uses only one when she’s in the house but both when she ventures out unassisted. Chiara gives Nonna her arm, and they walk slowly across the yard to the outhouse. She waits at the door for Nonna to finish her business. The sun has not entirely disappeared, and the sky to the east is a radiant lilac. She can see the first shimmer of the moon. Somewhere, a long way off, she can hear explosions. It can’t be thunder because the sky is clear.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Chiarina,’ Nonna says on the way back to the house. ‘I can’t be here on my own. It’s not right. I’m eighty-seven and I can’t hear very well and my legs don’t work. Eighty-seven. Those men, they said, we are your friends. We will get you a good price for your sheep. But I don’t know them.’
‘What men?’ Chiara says.
‘Those ones that like killing things,’ Nonna says. ‘Alfonso is very quiet these days. I worry.’
‘Who?’ Chiara says.
She leads Nonna over the threshold to her place in front of the hearth. Alfonso was her father’s name.
‘But where is he now?’ Nonna says as she settles into her chair. ‘My little man.’
‘He’s gone with Gabriele to the olive press. I told you. They’ll be home soon.’
They should be back by now.
Chiara goes to the kitchen, stares at the stew bubbling in the pot and gives it a stir. She steps down into the cold pantry, lifts her pinny and holds it against her eyes. After a minute she returns to the kitchen. She moves the stew to the oven. She divides the bread dough into two loaves, pummels them one last time and sets them on a tray to bake in the other, hotter side of the oven.
At Cecilia’s table, she snaps the cover back over the sewing machine and picks up Goffredo’s jacket.
‘Won’t be a minute,’ she says to Nonna and hurries out the door.
She crosses the yard and goes out onto the track. The man from Viterbo, who sleeps with his wife in the grain store, is having a coughing spasm. When the hacking sound finishes, he spits. Chiara slips past, down the track to the barn. She opens the door quietly and stands just within, one hand behind her on the latch, the other holding the jacket. Goffredo has not lit the lamp, but she can see him in the slatted half-light, the glow of his cigarette. He is lying in the hay, smoking, his arms behind his head, gazing up at the rafters. His vest moulds to his ribcage, hugs the hollow of his abdomen.
‘I brought your jacket,’ she says.
He starts and turns his face towards her. He extricates one of his arms from behind his head, takes the cigarette from between his lips and pushes himself up on one elbow.
‘Thanks,’ he says.
She pulls the door shut and lets the latch down.
‘Do you want to try it on?’ she says, taking a step closer and holding it out.
‘It’ll fit,’ he says, ‘it’s my jacket.’
‘But still,’ she says and she walks towards him, kneels down in the hay at his side. She sees how young he is. She would put him at nineteen or twenty. Black hair sprouts from his armpits.
He
examines her face. ‘Your husband on the Russian front, was he?’ he says.
She doesn’t know where he got this idea, but why not, she thinks. ‘Yes,’ she says and she shivers at the cold there, out on the icy steppes.
‘You’ve not had news of him?’
‘No,’ she says.
She lifts his hand with the cigarette in it and holds it to her own mouth, takes a puff, tastes on her lips the smoke and his salty fingers. He removes the cigarette, pinches its lit end between his finger and thumb and puts the stub in a tin by his side. He puts his hand up towards her but it stops midway, hovering in the air. She reaches out, takes hold of his wrist and guides his hand to her breast, to the place in the middle near where her heart wildly beats.
‘It doesn’t mean you can stay,’ she says, her voice muffled by the press of his flesh. ‘That’s not what it means.’
But she knows he’s not listening, and he doesn’t care what it does or doesn’t mean.
It’s the donkey that alerts them to the return of Gabriele and the boy, her hooves clattering and then her bray, the ‘I’m home, fetch out the oats’ call that she always makes at the bottom of the track where it turns towards the house.
Chiara draws blood when he presses the palm of his hand against her mouth to muffle her cries.
Blood for blood, she thinks.
When she steps outside into the yard, smoothing down her apron, Gabriele, with the help of two men she has not seen before, is hauling the first barrel of oil in through the door.
‘Two more for dinner tonight,’ Gabriele says, introducing them: Manfredo and another one whose name she doesn’t catch because she has caught sight of the child behind them, his eyes burning bright like hot coals. It is one of those moments again, when he is back in this world, truly present. They are coming thick and fast these moments, she thinks, for both of them.
She grins at him. He doesn’t smile back. He never smiles, never speaks. But one day, she thinks, he will, and she’ll be there.
Her hands smell of the man now, stronger than the juniper and the dough, the meat, blood and earth, overlaying everything, even the decay. They might all be dead tomorrow, but they’re alive today.
‘Never says a word. He just pulls at my sleeve, and I look down, thinking he wants to stop for a piss, excuse my way of speaking, signori, and he’s got his finger on his lips, shushing me. I look up where he’s looking and I see them, two of them, standing on the higher path.’
Gabriele’s voice rises, creaking like the wind in the trees, and he coughs to adjust it.
‘I had my head down. I didn’t see them, didn’t hear them,’ he says, his pitch lower, heartier.
He looks around the circle of faces as they sit in the firelight, their plates on their laps. Gravy drips from the piece of bread in his hand.
‘Two of them,’ he repeats, ‘and one switches on a torch and he starts shining it around and about. Me and him,’ he jabs his thumb towards Daniele, ‘we creep behind a bush, me and the little man, eagle eyes.’
She can smell Goffredo on her fingers although she rinsed her hands before dinner, and she can feel his eyes on her, but she is watching Daniele, on the opposite side of the hearth. He shrinks further into the shadowy space he has chosen between the side of Nonna’s armchair and the hearth.
‘We can’t move the donkey without making a noise so we leave her there, out on the track, by herself. Any minute, it could have… ’
Gabriele shakes his head at the impossibility of explaining all the things that could have happened: that the donkey, left alone, might bray or move a hoof or snuffle or snort or rumble forward with the cart; that the torchlight might find her; that they might be discovered out after curfew, and seized, arrested or worse. That the oil, God forbid, that the oil might be taken.
‘But it didn’t,’ he says.
They are so many tonight the room is crowded. It is good they have the oil and the bread to fill them up and make the dollop of unexpectedly tasty stew–which might have burnt, neglected as it was, but instead is cooked just right–go further.
All these years, she thinks, all her life in fact, she has known Gabriele, the shepherd. He has come and gone according to his own law and sometimes he has eaten bread and cheese at their table. But never, until this war, has she sat down and supped with him, night after night, as an equal.
‘He doesn’t say much but he’s a clever little bugger, excuse my way of speaking, signori,’ Gabriele says. ‘Signorino,’ he adds with a kind of bow to Daniele.
He mops up the last of his gravy, solemnly chews the crust of bread and gazes into the flames, his moment of unaccustomed animation at an end.
They have blown out the lamps and are eating by the light of the fire because they don’t want the house shining out like a beacon if the German patrol should come in this direction.
Everything already tasted better in the orange glow and heat, with everyone crowded round in a circle, sitting where they can, on benches and on the floor and two to a wooden chair, and with the thick, peppery-sweet oil to help the food slide down. But now, hearing how hard-won the oil was, how nearly lost, the flavours are enhanced. They tear off pieces of the fresh bread and dip them in the green-gold liquor. It flows down the inside of their throats, coats their tongues and loosens them.
The woman from Viterbo, Signora Morelli, who now announces that her name is Beatrice, is coquettish in the firelight on the end of the bench where Goffredo and the newcomers also sit. She starts on a story about her own encounter with an advance guard of German soldiers, the day of the battle for Rome. Chiara, only half paying attention, replete in new and unfathomable ways, hears the phrase ‘holding the line’ and is left with the impression that if there had been more like Beatrice, Rome might not have fallen.
She gazes around at the faces in the firelight, lingering a moment on Goffredo who is leaning in, talking in a low voice to Manfredo and his friend. Perhaps he will team up with them. No one, after all, wants to be alone. He raises his eyes to her, and she switches her gaze away. One of the brothers from Lombardy pipes up, something about the chickens he and his brother have spotted in the valley at the German encampment and a daring plan to steal them back one at a time.
She’s thinking, Don’t do that, it would be foolish. Don’t draw attention.
People have found new versions of their tales, reached them down from a sagging shelf and given them a polish, buffed them and turned them so that the side that shows is the best side. The hopeful one.
She seeks out Cecilia in the flickering glow and then she realises that Cecilia is not there. She has forgotten to wake her.
THIRTEEN
On the train to Italy, Maria had the space under the window where she slept fitfully, wrapped in her purple crushed-velvet coat, the last in a close-packed line of six recumbent bodies.
Her mum had bought a couchette ticket.
‘I need to know that you’re safe,’ she had said, as if a tightly tucked-in bunk bed in a single-sex carriage was the answer.
Maria hadn’t objected because she was speaking to her mother only when it was strictly necessary but she had returned to the travel agent the following day and changed it for a cheaper place in something called a recliner carriage. She had imagined languid ladies in silk gowns reclining on chaise longues, but in reality it just meant that the seats slid forward and the armrests retracted, so that the whole thing transformed into one uncomfortable and incomplete giant bed.
Until Paris, there had been five of them, which was bad enough, but then another person had come aboard, clambering over the others and squeezing in beside her. His stockinged feet brushed against her cheek.
Sleeping with other people wasn’t something Maria was much used to. She had always had her own room. The strain of holding herself apart from the newcomer reminded her of the time she had shared a bed with her granny, long before her brother and sister were born. She had awoken, sticky with heat, her Bri-Nylon nightie clinging to her skin as if
she were ill. Granny had left the electric blanket switched on. It was cooking them both, releasing their juices as they baked. Granny’s smell was pink and musty, dried roses with an underlying crumbling damp, like the section of the pantry wall where the rain came in. Her own perfume was subtler. She had recognised it without quite being able to smell it. A sense of herself as other and separate and on her own had come to her then, and whenever the vision of this moment presented itself, that was the feeling that accompanied it. The clock tick-tocking out on the landing, and she alone and apart and delineated, on the high, hot bed. She must have been three years old. She had always thought this was her earliest memory but now, revisiting it, she sensed something older, more wordless, hidden lower down, as if tucked beneath. It was bright red, flapping in sunlight, a kite or a banner. As she reached, it flicked away.
Granny. Why had they left her with that woman who wasn’t, as it turned out, even her grandmother? I don’t like Granny, she used to think. Now she understood that it was Granny who didn’t like her.
Erstwhile granny, former granny, ex-granny. Ha! She would never again have to eat mutton and barley stew for tea on Thursdays.
Ex-Granny, of course, must have been in on the deception. The smugness of it. The perfidy. Maria had made her non-biological father, Barry, list them, all the people who knew. No one’s treachery was on a par with her mother’s.
‘I forgave her. Can’t you?’ Barry had said on one of his peace missions to her room, where she kept him on the threshold, barring his way.
‘What did you have to forgive her for?’ she had asked him and then she realised before he had thought of an answer. ‘For me,’ she had said. ‘You forgave her for having me, didn’t you?’
The train was rattling through a tunnel. She lifted the crook of her elbow to her nose, pressing flesh against skin, but she couldn’t seem to detect her own unique scent, whatever made her her.
She awoke to pressure. She was on her back. The boy next to her must have inadvertently flung out his arm in his sleep. It lay across her thighs and had found its way underneath her coat, like a mole looking for its burrow. She picked the arm up gingerly by the sleeve as if it did indeed contain a small wild animal. The boy snored. She pushed the arm into the crack between them. The boy sighed a quivering sigh as if he were having a sad dream of loss.
Early One Morning Page 20
