Birmingham Rose

by Annie Murray

  ‘When I’d taken some out for you and some other bits and bobs, there was still about eighty left. George had it off me.’

  ‘You gave him eighty pound?’ Grace screeched at her, standing absolutely upright now.

  ‘Course I didn’t. He pinched it, when he went off. And he stopped by in Manchester and conned some more out of her on the way to wherever he’s gone.’

  Grace stared at her, speechless for almost half a minute. ‘Did you tell her?’ she managed to say at last.

  ‘No. Couldn’t really, could I? It’d have sounded as if I was on the scrounge or something. What we’re going away on is what I’ve saved, bar the ten pound she sent me.’

  ‘He should be strung up.’

  ‘Probably has been by now, for all we know.’ Rose shut the case and struggled with the rusty fastenings. ‘There – all set. Oooh.’ She gave a little jump. ‘I can’t believe it, Grace. I’m really going – for ten whole days!’

  ‘Nor can I,’ Grace said drily, though she was smiling. ‘Must be mad.’

  With rhythmic, comforting sounds, the Naples train eased its way out through the suburbs of Rome. It was not very crowded and they had seats facing each other. Hilda, exhausted already from the excitement of a very long day – travelling on an aeroplane! – was dozing, her head lolling against the window. Rose felt she could not have slept even if she had been heavily drugged. She watched Hilda, her cheeks soft and lovely in the gentle light of the approaching sunset. Her perverse, self-willed but lovable daughter, here with her in Italy. Bringing these two parts of her life together seemed quite extraordinary.

  She turned her attention to the regal Roman buildings outside the window. Even in the suburbs many of the tenements had a grandeur about them, with their flaking paint in yellow or terracotta or pink, and the contrasting greens and blues of the wooden shutters. Rose took in a deep, satisfied breath. This country! Whatever happened while she was here, at this moment she felt deeply content just to see it, to take in all the half-forgotten things that she loved about it. Fig trees and peeling trunks of eucalyptus softening the sides of buildings, the washing strung across narrow side streets glimpsed as the train hurried past; the baskets and buckets hanging outside windows ready to be let down to receive a delivery of bread or groceries. All the different smells that were so peculiarly Italian, the trace of drains and cigarette smoke mixed with the evening air – and she was sure she could smell the prosciutto between chunks of white bread that the elderly woman was tucking into on the seat across the passage.

  As the light began to fade they passed through miles of fields, with small towns and villages strung along the railway line. Part of the land was fallow now that the summer was closing, and some fields held late crops of hay or spindly maize, with mules and carts still out collecting the dry cobs. On the left ran the line of the mountains, sometimes close enough to see the dark green cover of trees, sometimes smoky grey outlines in the distance, the foothills of the long spine of Italy.

  When it was completely dark outside and the lights were on inside the train, Rose pulled Margherita’s latest letter out of her bag. It seemed incredible that in a few hours she and Hilda would be sleeping in Francesco and Margherita’s flat, and waking with the sun to meet their children.

  ‘Carissima Rosa,’ Margherita’s bold writing looped across the cheap piece of paper.

  We are so happy that you are coming and bringing your daughter with you. How excited we all are about seeing you – it seems now only like a dream!

  I hope you will forgive our little place – it is small and cramped with all of us in it, but we can always find the space for such a welcome guest.

  Your train will arrive in Naples at about 22.00, and Francesco will be there to meet you, we promise you faithfully. I hope you will recognize each other! Please stand in the area near the ticket office and he will come to find you.

  We wait in eager anticipation of your visit – and until then, love and blessings from us all. Margherita.

  The train began passing between buildings again, some of them higher than any Rose remembered from the war. Like Birmingham, she thought. The war has given us all a new face. As they rattled past tenements and factories still dotted with lights, and junctions with roads where cars, lorries and carts waited facelessly behind the gates, she began to smell the sulphury city smell.

  He’s out there somewhere, she thought. His city. The train was slowing now from its hectic pace so that the buildings slid past instead of being whisked immediately from view. They were replaced by light and the concrete of railway platforms as they drew to a halt in the great yawning central railway station in Naples.

  ‘Hilda!’ She leaned across and shook her gently. ‘Come on, love. We’re here.’

  Francesco spotted her the moment she and Hilda walked out from the railway platform. Before she had even had time to look for him he was beside her.

  ‘Rosa!’

  ‘Francesco! Oh, Hilda, this is Francesco.’

  And their arms were round each other, laughing and exclaiming and oblivious to anyone else in the huge, echoing station.

  ‘Come sta? Are you well?’

  ‘Bene – benissimo!’

  ‘I think you’ve got a bit fatter, you know.’ Rose prodded him playfully. ‘It must be married life!’ She found herself speaking slowly, feeling her way into the language again.

  ‘But not much, truly. With six children you don’t get fat! And you – you look lovely as ever. A little different perhaps . . . ?’

  ‘Older – but then who isn’t!’

  Francesco bent down and Rose watched as he smiled warmly at Hilda who glanced doubtfully at her mother before smiling back.

  ‘Welcome, piccola.’ He pinched one of her cheeks affectionately. Unsure, Hilda drew her face away. ‘We have a lot of friends at home for you to play with.’

  Rose explained this to Hilda in English.

  ‘She’ll come round,’ she told Francesco. ‘By tomorrow night she’ll be bossing them all about even if she doesn’t speak the same language. Oh – I can’t wait to see them all!’

  Still laughing and joking, with Francesco carrying her suitcase, they walked out to a side street near the station.

  ‘My brother Carlo lent me his car,’ he said, unlocking a shiny red Fiat. ‘He works as a salesman,’ he said with slight mockery. ‘Impoverished school teachers like me don’t have cars. In any case, if we did we’d never all fit in it.’

  Rose watched him curiously as he settled Hilda on the back seat and stowed her case away. It was true he was not as painfully thin as he had been during the war, but despite her teasing he was still a slim man. And he really did look older, much older. She remembered his pointed, aristocratic face as she had known it before: that aquiline nose and the striking blue eyes. But there was something different now. He looked – she kept glancing at him as he drove them home, struggling for the right word – he looked more ordinary. That was it. And did she look so to him? Had she ever seemed extraordinary? Perhaps it had been the war, its romantic element of adversity and drama that had lent them all a touch of romance. Was this how everything would look now she was back? Ordinary? And if so, would that make it any less of a pleasure to be here, now they were all back to everyday life?

  ‘Why did you move to Pozzuoli?’ she asked, as Francesco steered the car rather joltingly out west away from Naples to the small town along the coast.

  ‘My job is in Pozzuoli, the school. I try to cram some history into their unwilling heads. And my brother lives there, so we can borrow his car!’ he joked. ‘No – but it is smaller, and quite cheap. It’s OK.’

  ‘And you’re happy there?’

  ‘Happy enough,’ Francesco said with a shrug. ‘Yes, why not happy? It’s not a question I often find time to ask myself.’

  It was not a long drive and soon they pulled up in a side street outside a pale, four-storey building. It looked pinkish in the streetlight.

  ‘We’re on the first flo
or so it’s not too much of a climb,’ he told her.

  Rose could hear dogs barking and a buzzing sound, something electric. Cats shrank in and out of the shadows.

  ‘Margherita is on tenterhooks to see you. And with any luck all the children should be asleep by now.’

  The three of them climbed a dark, rather musty-smelling stone staircase. As they got near the top they heard a door open. Margherita must have been listening for them.

  ‘Francesco?’ Rose heard her soft, so familiar voice.

  ‘Yes. We made it,’ he called to her.

  And there she was, outlined in the dim light from the flat. Rose almost stopped climbing the stairs in astonishment. Was that really Margherita? The figure of the woman standing at the entrance to the flat was plump and thick-limbed, her long hair draped down over her shoulders.

  Before she had had time to take in fully the changed appearance of her friend she was at the top and they were embracing and kissing, both with tears of joy on their cheeks.

  ‘At last you are here!’ Margherita cried. ‘I have been so longing to see you! Come in. Come and have some coffee and we will get you settled in. And you, little Hilda – I have some milk for you, cara’.

  Francesco disappeared to take the car back to Carlo. Margherita disappeared for a moment and came back cradling a baby who had a shock of thick black hair.

  ‘She is wakeful tonight,’ she told Rose. ‘This is my little one – Magdalena. She is nearly six months.’

  Rose smiled wonderingly at the baby and called Hilda over to admire her too.

  ‘She’s lovely, Margherita. Quite beautiful. You have so many children already.’

  Margherita smiled with the gentle wistfulness that Rose remembered. She had not really changed so much once they got talking.

  ‘I have been blessed with so many little lives,’ she said. Then with a despairing look she passed her free hand down over her waist and right hip. ‘But that is why I am so fat. You would have walked past me on the street, eh, wouldn’t you? With each one I seem to gain kilos and they never go again. We Italian women are fated this way. Whereas you – you look just the same!’

  ‘Well, I’ve only had one, haven’t I?’ Rose laughed.

  Margherita led them into a little kitchen with a tiled floor and pale blue walls.

  ‘I am so happy to see you.’ Margherita sat suckling the child. ‘I really missed you when you left. And you left us so sadly.’ She smiled quickly and then switched the conversation.

  ‘Your little girl is lovely. Hilda, you are beautiful! She is the same age as my Marco, so they will be able to play. But of course the older ones will have school tomorrow – and Francesco too! We shall have a nice lot of time together. Come now.’ She stood up, fastening her blouse. ‘You can have a look at my babies.’

  Suddenly extremely weary, Rose followed her along a little passage to the bedrooms. The children had all been moved in together to leave a room for her and Hilda.

  As Margherita pushed open a door the light fell on some of the children, some in beds and two on the floor. Rose learned the names of the quiet, sleeping faces.

  ‘Come. We can talk tomorrow.’ Margherita leaned over and kissed both of them again. ‘Thank you for coming – you have made me so happy.

  For two days they did hardly anything but talk. Margherita did not mention Falcone and at first Rose was content to enjoy simply being there. She soon felt at home in the chaotic, ramshackle flat with its crumbling paint and old furniture, shelves and surfaces spilling over with books and papers and children’s clothes and drawings and toys. And she helped Margherita with her chores as they got to know one another again.

  While the three older children were at school, Hilda settled into playing with the others. Caterina, who was three, looked up to her as if she was some kind of pale English goddess, and they soon found ways of communicating. And little Giovanni followed them about and they fussed over him and chivvied him to join in their games.

  Rose learned that Margherita and Francesco were, as he had put it, ‘happy enough’. But they were constantly worried about money, like so many of the families around them. Though Margherita clearly had a Neapolitan adoration for all her children, Rose noticed a suppressed kind of restlessness about her.

  ‘How many children d’you think you’ll have?’ Rose asked her the second evening. They had spent the day shopping for food and walking in the town and were preparing spaghetti for the evening meal.

  ‘As many as God gives me.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  Margherita looked round at her, and Rose saw a look of desperation in her eyes.

  ‘What else can I do? There’s no way of stopping it. The Church tells us that if we limit our relations to the time in the month when it is safe . . .’ She sighed. ‘For some women that works. For me, it doesn’t make any difference. I couldn’t easily say this to anyone else, but I wonder sometimes why I studied. Why do they allow us women to have an education if our fate remains the same – to bear child after child and bring them up in poverty because there are too many of them?’

  The tears welled up and ran down her cheeks. Rose put her arms round her.

  They had barely even mentioned Il Rifugio during those two days. Rose was growing anxious and frustrated. She was eager to reminisce – one of the things she had most looked forward to about coming. In the evenings, once the mayhem of the children had died down for the night, they sat in the stuffy little flat drinking cheap wine and eating bread and late summer fruit, and talking, but they avoided the subject she most longed to discuss. If she asked a question they moved quickly on to something else. Most resolutely they did not talk about Falcone. Up to now she had not been able to bring herself to mention his name either. But to be here so near him, yet as closed off from him as she had been in Birmingham, was agonizing. She found herself constantly watching for his face among the crowded streets, even though they were not in Naples.

  By the third morning she was beginning to feel that if she or someone did not mention Falcone soon she would explode. She walked with Margherita down to the little port to go to the fish markets, the stalls strung out along the front next to the sea. Hilda was fascinated by the fish. They strolled along with the vivid blue of the Mediterranean on one side, dotted with sunlight and coloured boats. And on the other, wooden tubs painted pale blue inside seethed with live eels or shellfish like piles of coloured pebbles, or small silver and orange fish flitting about in the shallow water. On the stalls behind lay heaps of prawns, and larger fish, already dead and glassy-eyed on banks of ice. Their smell was pungent on the air, and mixed with that of the sea and the drains.

  ‘Oh look, Mom!’ Hilda cried, running to bend over a row of tubs where lobsters tangled their claws together, crammed in in a brick-coloured mass. From a nearby one a number of large octopuses stared out balefully, some of their tentacles slipping experimentally out over the side and curling as they touched the ground. Caterina was chatting excitedly and Giovanni gingerly dipped his fingers in the water.

  As they were occupied for the moment, Rose took Margherita’s arm. Speaking loudly to be heard over the long, doleful cries of the fish hawkers, she said, ‘I’ve heard what’s happened.’

  Margherita frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘To Falcone.’

  Margherita’s expression showed first astonishment and then apprehension. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I read it in a newspaper. Why won’t you talk about him?’

  ‘We hoped you would think of him as a priest still. That nothing had changed. We wanted to avoid causing you pain – if that’s what you would feel after ten years, of course. How could we know what you would feel? You might even have forgotten.’

  Rose shook her head impatiently. ‘You’ve seen him recently?’

  ‘Yes, a month or so ago. We didn’t tell him you were coming, by the way. He’s in a lot of trouble. He began to question what the Church teaches and of course that disturbs a lot of people.
He’s obviously very unhappy. He loves his faith deeply, but he’s so disillusioned, with the priesthood especially. And the hierarchy have come down hard on him. You’d think it might be enough to crush a person.’

  Rose hesitated. ‘Did he ever mention me – when you saw him after the war?’

  ‘Of course. In the beginning.’ She paused. ‘I know I never thought he was cut out to be a priest, but that’s for God to decide. He’s had so much to bear, and whether now you should be part of this . . .’

  Rose gripped Margherita’s arm again with a determination that clearly communicated itself.

  ‘I have to see him.’

  Forty-One

  The church of San Domenico Maggiore was a forbidding building of stained, sandy-coloured stone.

  Rose stood in the piazza looking at it. That Falcone had worked and studied here for so long was hard for her to imagine – a place which seemed to suggest such rigidity and conviction. She could not reconcile that with the man she had known; so tender and so confused.

  Now the prospect of simply walking round the building to the seminary and knocking on the door seemed quite impossible. After all, what if he opened the door? She had been partly prepared for approaching the place by Margherita, who seemed to have decided that if Rose was going to do something of such doubtful wisdom she might as well give her as much help as she could. She had insisted that Rose leave Hilda with her for the day.

  ‘Go to them and ask for Father Falcone,’ she told Rose. ‘Tell them that you want him to hear your confession. They may try to get you to accept someone else, but you can say you have something particular to ask him. If he’s busy you can always go back later, can’t you?’

  I’ll go and have a look at the church first, she said to herself. Get a feel of it.

  She walked slowly over to the entrance. She was wearing a pleated skirt in a soft yellow poplin, cream court shoes, and a close-fitting navy blouse. The skirt swished luxuriously round her legs as she walked. She had felt very smart and feminine when she put them on, but now she was unsure of herself. Should she have worn something darker and more staid to come to a place like this?