The Metal Heart

by Caroline Lea

  May 1942

  Dorothy

  Every night, Cesare paints the chapel by lamplight. And every night, I watch him from the shadows. I don’t know if he sees me. Occasionally, he freezes and half turns. Once, I saw him put down his brush and bow his head. Then he said something that might have been a prayer, but sounded like my name, or so I thought – so I hoped.

  I leaned forward, stilling my breath, straining for the sound of his voice, for the sound of my name on his lips. He was silent, but I watched his shoulders rise and fall with the rhythm of his words.

  I try to leave gifts outside the chapel for him, when I can. Pieces of metal I have found, or paints that I have managed to make using old onion skins, lichen and tree bark. I have boiled up bilberries and elderberries, which have stained my hands blue for days – I remember my mother making paints for us when we were children. She came from Fair Isle to the north, and knew how to make all sorts from plants: paints, medicines and even poisons.

  Sometimes the chapel door is shut and I have to peer through one of the window holes that has been cut in the metal hut. Other nights, it is raining, or a biting wind blows in from the north and I stand in the darkness, shivering, watching him until I can no longer stand the cold. Then I walk back up to the bothy and huddle close to the burned-out fire, drawing a little heat from the dying ashes and trying not to wake Con with the chattering of my teeth.

  Time after time, I’ve asked if she will go back to the camp, to work with me in the infirmary, but she has become more and more solitary. I don’t understand why her fear has grown over time. It is as though everything that has happened to her is an old wound, which, although it seemed healed, has hidden an infection under the scarred surface.

  ‘You will feel better if you come out with me, Con,’ I say.

  ‘I’m tired.’ She looks it, pale and drawn. ‘I’ll go tomorrow.’ And she scratches the skin at her throat until it reddens, until it’s nearly raw.

  She sleeps long hours and still she looks haunted, jumping at every shift of the wind. She must know that I’m going out to the chapel, although she never asks. I can’t meet her eyes when I leave, and when I return. I’m terrified she’ll ask me to stay. I’m terrified that I’ll not be able to stop myself leaving, even if she begs me.

  By mid-May, it is nearly Beltane. There are no bonfires this year, no celebrations – the war has brought so much darkness and silence – but the weather softens. The winds drop, the land brightens, and thin fingers of sunlight stretch through the clouds, making each day longer than the last.

  For a long time, Cesare has been painting the walls at the front of the chapel brown, to look like tiles, but one evening in May, he begins to work on the whitewashed walls next to the altar. I peer around the doorway, watching. His back is to me, as ever, but I can see the stern focus in the set of his shoulders. I have watched him long enough now to know every movement of his hands and arms, yet still, as the delicate blue-black arch of a crow’s head and neck emerge from under his hands, my breath catches.

  I am used to beauty: the shattered sunlight on the sea; the brash purple and yellow of the autumn heather and gorse; two goshawks circling each other in an open blue sky. But I’ve never watched something so beautiful being created and with such ease. He dips his brush into white paint to add light and depth to the crow’s black eyes, and it seems that the bird is staring straight at me.

  And what I feel, along with my sense of wonder, is desire. It is an inescapable tide rising through my limbs, throbbing through my veins; in that moment, the cost doesn’t matter.

  I shift my weight, knowing my boot will creak. Knowing he will hear me. He stops painting. He sets down his brush.

  ‘Dorotea?’ he says, without turning. Inside the chapel, his voice resonates, thea, tia, tear. Not my name, not part of my name, but an echo of sadness and breaking, and yet I find myself walking forward, into the lamplight.

  ‘Cesare.’ His name sounds strange said aloud. I’ve said it to myself so many times in the dark, but it seems foreign to me now.

  I step further into the chapel, my nerves humming, and, to avoid his gaze, I look upwards.

  The building is a marvel: each tile has been carefully painted to give the illusion of height and depth. Even though the ceiling is not the arched roof of a church, it gives the impression of loftiness, of reverence. And on the whitewashed wall near the altar, I can see pencil sketches of birds and animals and angels.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I gasp. ‘How do you paint the flat wall to look like tiles? They seem so real.’

  ‘It is not finished,’ he says. ‘But I show you.’ He picks up a brush, dabs it in the brown paint, then strokes it in the centre of one of the rectangles he has drawn to be a painted ‘tile’. ‘In the middle must be dark. And light at the edge, with white. You try.’

  He passes me the brush and nods towards the wall. I touch the bristles to the rectangle Cesare was just painting. I’m aware of his eyes on my face, aware of the heat in my cheeks. I dare not look at him directly. My hand is unsteady and I blot the paint, making an ugly smear on the tile. ‘Oh! I’ve ruined it.’

  ‘No.’ He smiles, takes the brush from me and, with a deft flick of paint, my mistake is gone. ‘See?’

  Then he passes the brush back to me and watches as I paint more of the tiles, badly.

  ‘I have not seen you,’ he says softly. ‘You are hiding from me?’

  I swallow. I inhale. I paint a shaky line of pale brown around the outside of a tile. ‘Not hiding. I have been busy.’

  ‘You are busy hiding.’ I can hear him smiling and I smile too, despite the tremor in my limbs, the strange electricity flickering under my skin.

  ‘I think I have upset you,’ he says. ‘I think I have hurt you.’

  ‘No!’ I say, turning to him.

  His eyes are dark; his expression is pained. I look away. ‘You haven’t hurt me,’ I say. ‘I just –’

  At that moment, the air-raid siren screams out from over the water in Kirkwall.

  Cesare quenches the lamp immediately and pulls on my hand, dragging me under the concrete altar. My breath is tight in my chest, and his body, so close to mine, feels solid. Comforting and terrifying all at once.

  The door to the chapel is open and, down the hill, I can see the lights in the camp being extinguished one by one. The island becomes a mass of darkness, with bone-white moonlight shivering on the sea.

  We’ve had so few air raids: after the submarine attack, an order came from London for gun batteries to be built all along the coast, protecting the naval vessels moored around the islands, protecting the barriers, protecting us.

  Over the sound of the siren, I strain to hear the noise of a plane’s engine.

  ‘What does a falling bomb sound like overhead?’ I ask, my voice high-pitched. ‘Will we hear it before it hits us?’

  ‘They will not be bombing us,’ he says, and he sounds steady, certain.

  ‘Oh, Con is by herself! In the bothy. I should go to her.’

  I try to stand, but he says, ‘She is safe.’

  ‘She will be terrified.’

  ‘It is dangerous for you to walk out,’ he says. ‘When the siren is stopped, it is safe to walk.’

  I know he’s right but I feel sick. I try to steady my breathing.

  He says, ‘You want to go? Then I will walk with you.’

  I shake my head, then realize he can’t see me in the dark. ‘No. It’s not safe.’

  ‘When I am in the desert in Africa,’ he says quietly, ‘I am frightened. So many men shooting and dying. I do not want to fight. I must. But I am scared. War is made for fear.’

  He still can’t see me, but perhaps he feels me nodding; perhaps he hears my breathing slow slightly as I strain to catch the sound of his voice.

  ‘I must be calm,’ he says. ‘If I am not calm, then perhaps I make a mistake. Perhaps I die. So I make myself calm like this.’ My hand is motionless in his. He turns it over between his own and
places his finger on my palm.

  My stomach jolts. I don’t dare to move.

  ‘I think,’ he says, ‘what is the shapes of the mountains in Moena? I remember this.’ And he traces his finger in a curve over my palm. The hairs on my arms rise, but I am not cold.

  ‘And then I think,’ he says, ‘what is the shapes of the birds and the trees? I remember this.’ With his finger he sketches towering trees with arching branches; on my arm, he picks out the outline of a soaring bird. ‘Albero,’ he says, ‘uccello.’ And I know these must be the words for ‘tree’ and ‘bird’.

  Then I feel him hold out his own palm for me. ‘Draw something. A thing you are remember.’

  So, hesitantly, I trace the outline of the caves to the north of this island. I sketch the path that leads to them. I draw the sea that crashes around the cliffs below them.

  I can’t hear the air-raid siren any longer, and I don’t know if it has stopped, or if everything has disappeared apart from us. His skin is warm. I reach for him. His neck, his face.

  His breath brushes my cheek. In the darkness, his mouth finds mine.

  ‘Dorotea.’ He exhales my name against my lips.

  Constance

  In May, each day stretches out longer than the last. The sun rises high in the sky and the light touches everything. Even the bothy is bright, the dark shadows banished, so that I can no longer doze my way through the days, even if I barely move from the bed.

  And the lighter days seem to draw Dot out more often, too, and for longer. Even when I ask her to stay with me, she waits until I’m asleep – or until she thinks I am – and then she slips from the bothy, like a shadow. I watch her from the window, pulling the old sailcloth to one side to see her going towards the chapel. And I know that she must be going to see him.

  Sometimes I pretend to wake up as she’s leaving and I cry out so that she will stay, at least for a while. It’s not only that I feel safer when she is with me, not simply that her presence exorcizes the darkness or softens the glare of the sun. It’s also that if she’s with me I know that no harm has come to her. I used to watch our mother feigning illness if a storm was coming so that our father would stay with her rather than going out on the boat. She would be doubled over, clutching her stomach, but if she caught my eye, she would flash me a brief smile and I would know: she was keeping him safe. She was keeping all of us safe.

  That was when Dot and I were young, before our mother truly became ill. Before the pain kept her confined to her bed. Before she had to go out on the boat with our father to try to reach a bigger hospital, to try to find some stronger medicine.

  If I could lock Dot in the bothy with me, I would. If I could make her follow me to some deserted island further north, I would.

  One May morning, after Beltane has passed, the fires unburned, I pretend to be asleep, so that she will leave quietly, so that she will not suspect anything. As soon as she has shut the door, I get out of bed, fully dressed, and I follow her.

  The land is green and painfully bright. I squint as I walk over the next hill, in the direction of those huts they are using for a chapel. If she isn’t there, I will go down to the infirmary.

  When I round the hill, I gasp.

  The last time I saw the chapel, it was two ramshackle metal buildings, half rusted, looking as though they would blow away in the next storm. Now, the huts are part of a new creation, something entirely foreign and beautiful. The chapel is smooth-backed, as if it has grown out of the earth, and with a concrete frontage that looks as though it has been taken from a fine sanctuary in another country. It reminds me of pictures I’d seen in newspapers of churches in lands to the south; the same churches that the radio tells us are being bombed now, and are in flames or crumbling, but this is whole and elegant. Some of the men are painting it white and, in the bright summer sun, the building radiates light.

  I can’t see Dot, but I can’t make myself leave. Instead I find that I am walking towards this shining building, walking towards the men who are outside, painting, talking to each other in Italian.

  They have no reason to harm you. I remind myself of the prisoners in the infirmary – not one had tried to hurt me. But then I’d been around other people. Now, I’m alone.

  My shadow falls across the white-painted wall and the two men stop talking and turn, dropping their brushes. They squint, the sun in their eyes, and, for a moment, their faces are full of fear.

  Then they relax into friendly recognition.

  ‘Bella!’ one says. ‘You are well? Where have you left Cesare, eh?’

  ‘I . . .’ I don’t know what you mean. The words die in my throat as I realize that these men must believe that I’m Dot and they seem pleased to see me: their smiles are welcoming, their faces open as they push a brush into my hand.

  ‘We have not painted the tiles by the door,’ one of the men says, still grinning. ‘You are doing this very fine.’

  Then they shove open the door to the chapel and, brush in hand, I walk inside.

  The sight knocks the breath from me. I’d expected the drab cold grey of the men’s sleeping huts – the glimpses I’d caught before they arrived had been of chilly corrugated metal and bare boards. An icy breeze had whistled through some unseen crack and every hut had smelt of rust and damp.

  But the chapel is full of light. Sun pours in through the four windows to reflect off the white walls near the altar, and the painted tiles near the doorway. Around the altar itself are splashes of colour in half-finished paintings: a peach-skinned cherub is wrapped in blue cloth; a crow cradles an open book in its outstretched wings. On the ceiling, the outline of a white dove soars through an impossibly blue sky.

  ‘It’s beautiful !’

  The men look at me strangely, and I remember that they think I’m Dot, and that she must be used to seeing all this wonder. And, suddenly, it’s too much: the thought of all the life that is passing me by while I stay locked in the bothy, locked in my own memories. I don’t know how to escape myself.

  Footsteps outside the door and Dot is there, Cesare behind her. When Dot sees me, her jaw drops. ‘Con! What are you . . .’ She glances at Cesare and flushes. There are blotches of colour on her neck and chest and, for a moment, they look like fingerprints. But her eyes on mine are lively; she looks happier than I can ever remember seeing her.

  I may vomit.

  The memory envelops me like a wave. It is the moment that returns to me in the dark when I try to sleep and in the morning when I wake. The memory that lurks in the silence between heartbeats. Time folds in on itself.

  I’m back with Angus, his hand in mine. He had taken me for dinner and then for a walk along the beach in Kirkwall in the half-dark. For weeks, I had been grieving for our mother and father and had refused when Angus asked me to walk with him. I didn’t know him well. In school, he had been two classes above and popular, but prone to wild outbursts and touches of cruelty towards younger boys. His sudden interest in me was as baffling as it was flattering. I didn’t know then how drawn he was towards people who seemed broken.

  Dot had asked me, time and again, not to go. But the Kirkwall house was heavy with memories and my grief felt crushing. So that evening, when Angus knocked on my door and asked me to walk with him, I said yes. What could be the harm?

  As we walked, he gave me a gold chain. He fastened it around my neck and then touched the point where the clasp touched my skin. My blood jolted and I didn’t dare to move. But when he asked me to walk along the beach, I felt I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to upset him, or to be ungrateful, when he’d been so kind to me.

  The beach was dark and empty away from the harbour. Angus took his shoes off and jumped down onto the sand.

  ‘Come on.’ He held out his hand and I didn’t know how to say no. So I didn’t.

  He put his hand around my waist. I was intensely aware of the pressure of that hand, so it was hard to swallow, hard to focus on anything else. But I felt it would be rude to push him off.


  We walked away from the harbour lights and further along the beach, where the only sound was the rush of the waves, and the only illumination on his face, when he turned to me, was the pale, silvery glow from the moon.

  My chest felt tight. When he wrapped both arms around me, I kept my hands by my sides. He kissed my neck, where his chain lay cold against my skin. His mouth was warm, but it left a cold, damp trail as he brought his lips to mine.

  I recoiled and he stopped.

  ‘Have you been playing games with me? Leading me on?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘You want to be here, don’t you? You liked dinner? And the necklace?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was true: he’d been kind, had listened to me. When I’d told him I missed my mother and father, he’d reached out and held my hand.

  ‘But now you want to go?’ he asked.

  He looked contemptuous and a muscle pulsed in his jaw.

  Mutely, I shook my head.

  ‘Good.’ He kissed me, his mouth wet. He pushed his tongue against my lips and I knew he expected me to open my mouth, but everything in me clamped together; my muscles were rigid.

  He pulled away from me and, even in the half-darkness, I could just make out his frowning confusion and the hard anger in his gaze.

  ‘I thought you liked me,’ he said.

  ‘I do.’ This seemed like the right thing to say, the polite thing to say, the way to stop him getting even angrier.

  ‘Kiss me, then,’ he said.

  So I did.

  I let him kiss me, and I let him lie down next to me on the sand. When he tried to shift his body onto mine, I froze again and pushed him away. But he was so much bigger, so much heavier, so much stronger than me. My arms pressed against his chest made no difference. When I turned my face from his kisses, he put his lips to my neck. His teeth grazed my skin. And I could feel his hands gathering my skirt, pulling it above my hips.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Con.’

  ‘Get off me!’ I shoved him. It was like pushing on a rock, like heaving a wall off my body.