Private Angelo

by Eric Linklater

  Some of them, bracing their arms against the backboard of an overloaded cart or heaving at the spokes of a wheel, laboured to keep their cargo moving while the rack-ribbed horse between the shafts trembled with exhaustion and pecked uncertainly on the uphill road. On top of the corded pile of feather-beds and chairs and cooking pots might be a shrivelled grandmother in dusty black and a couple of astonished children.

  ‘If there is any creature in the world more miserable than a refugee,’ said Simon, ‘it is a refugee’s horse.’

  ‘There is no liberation for horses,’ said Angelo.

  ‘None,’ said Simon.

  Angelo sighed. ‘They have at least been spared that.’

  They passed a very old man who was pulling a handcart loaded with a chest of drawers, a mattress, the frame of an iron bed, two saucepans and a variety of articles tied in a red blanket, and a goose in a basket.

  ‘All these people,’ said Angelo, ‘have been liberated and now they have nowhere to live. And before the war is over you will have to liberate northern Italy and France, and Greece and Yugoslavia, and Holland and Belgium, and Denmark and Poland and Czechoslovakia.’

  ‘It may take us rather a long time,’ said Simon.

  ‘And when you have finished no one in Europe will have anywhere to live.’

  ‘You mustn’t exaggerate. It won’t be as bad as that.’

  ‘Speriamo,’ said Angelo.

  The lately reclaimed fields of the Pontine Marshes lay drowned under great lakes of gleaming water, and the roofs of many little houses showed above the surface like tiny red islands. Of trees that had been planted for summer shade there remained in sight only tufts of branches like currant-bushes. A man in a boat tied his craft to a chimney and began to fish.

  ‘I was very glad,’ said Angelo, ‘to see that the bridges over the Tiber had not been blown up.’

  ‘Apparently the Germans made no attempt to blow them,’ said Simon. ‘Our journey wasn’t necessary, as things turned out, but we had a very interesting time. After you mounted your cow –’

  ‘It was an ox,’ said Angelo.

  ‘We fought a very successful little battle, and we had another skirmish, almost as good, at a cross-roads five or six miles further on. But when we came into Rome we had nothing to do except buy a few souvenirs. I got a dozen pairs of silk stockings and some very good perfume, and that was a great piece of luck, because by now, with all those Americans there, every shop will be stripped to the boards.’

  ‘But surely looting is forbidden – at least in Rome?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t loot, you mustn’t say that about them. The Americans aren’t like that at all. They just go shopping. They have so much money there is no need for them to loot.’

  ‘From where do they get so much money?’

  ‘It is the same as we use,’ said Simon. ‘It is printed in the United States and it comes over by the ship-load.’

  ‘And when the war is finished, and you and the Americans have all gone home, and there is nothing left in Italy but the money you have spent – will it be any good to us?’

  ‘That is an interesting question.’

  ‘Would it not be simpler to let your soldiers loot?’

  ‘Angelo,’ said Simon, ‘there are occasions when you become tiresome.’

  ‘I am not being unfriendly,’ said Angelo in his most earnest voice. ‘You must not think that, please. We are very grateful to you for coming to liberate us, but I hope you will not find it necessary to liberate us out of existence. When I think about the future –’

  ‘Your future,’ said Simon, ‘is bound to be complicated by the fact that Italy came into the war quite wilfully, and then was quite decisively beaten.’

  They were approaching the coast and Angelo pointed to the promontory ahead of them. ‘There is Gaeta,’ he said, ‘which was so named by Aeneas after his nurse. I think people were more affectionate in those days. And there’ – he pointed across the glinting sea – ‘there to the westward is Monte Circeo, where Circe the Great Enchantress turned twenty-two of the companions of Ulysses into swine. But when Ulysses came to their rescue, and persuaded Circe to give them back their proper shape, he did not punish them very much for the disgusting things they did when they ran about on four feet. He was magnanimous.’

  ‘Ulysses,’ said Simon, ‘had advantages that we have lost. In his time no one had heard of economics, and a popular leader was not responsible to a hungry electorate, but only to the gods. It was relatively easy to be magnanimous.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WHEN NEWS OF THE Count’s death came by devious routes to Pontefiore, his English Countess had been sustained in sorrow by her sturdy conviction that a person in her position, in time of general loss, could not afford much indulgence in private grief. She also admitted her native belief – Yorkshire was her birthplace – that foreigners met a violent end far more often, and more naturally, than the English; and a little while later she remembered, with appreciable comfort, the mourning she had been obliged to buy, a couple of years before, for an old uncle of Don Agesilas, a gentleman known as the Noble Signor of Rocca Pipirozzi. She had grudged the expense of it, for wealth had never obscured in her memory the narrow circumstances of her girlhood and youth in Bradford, and to spend more than five pounds or so, on anything that could not be regarded as an investment, always gave her a feeling of guilt. She found, therefore, in her great bereavement, a little quiet satisfaction in thinking that the extravagance with which she had mourned the Noble Signor would now be redeemed when those dreary and expensive garments became her widow’s weeds.

  She continued to go about her business of looking after Pontefiore with an apparent composure and real strength of mind that the villagers and the peasants thought most unnatural; but upon which they more and more came to rely as the front of battle was pushed northward into Tuscany. From the earliest days of her marriage she had busied herself among the people and with the affairs of her husband’s estate, and now, when she had become the sole guardian of their interests, and life and property were equally menaced, she set about the problem of securing them, as far as possible, with great vigour and a constant anxiety.

  For nearly three years her greatest solace had been the presence in her house, or in its vicinity, of the young man whom Angelo had seen and recognized as a stranger in Pontefiore, when in the previous autumn he had come home with the Count’s pictures and two truck-loads of flour. This young man was an English soldier, a corporal in the Royal Engineers, Tom Trivet by name, who had been taken prisoner in Libya in the summer of 1941, and made his escape very soon after from a transit camp for prisoners of war near Bari. He had the advantage of knowing where he wanted to go, for his father had married a Miss Goodge, whose elder sister, a teacher in Bradford, had married Don Agesilas. So Tom Trivet, with the help of innumerable people on the way, had walked from Bari to Pontefiore and remained there ever since. But now, to his aunt’s distress, he was about to leave.

  Very soon after the surrender of Italy partisans had begun to appear who, in some parts of the country, declared for the Allies in a bold and forthright manner, but in other parts in a rather shy and tentative way. In the neighbourhood of Pontefiore they were neither numerous nor reckless, but a little company had gradually come into being under the leadership of Tom Trivet and a former member of the Guardia Civile called Pasquale; and some slight contact had been established with the Allied armies. Quite recently a signal had been received that included certain instructions for Corporal Trivet.

  A few hours before he was due to leave he was sitting with the Countess in the small drawing-room that she always used in summer, for it was cool and overlooked a formal garden in which she took continual pleasure. The room itself was full of flowers, two canaries made small noises in a cage, and pale behind the mullioned glass of a bookcase showed the white and gold bindings of her favourite edition of Ouida.

  A stranger, overhearing their conversation, might well have denied
the Countess’s affection for her nephew; for with her northern sense of duty she was taking advantage of her last opportunity to lecture him for his ill behaviour, and her disapproval was enriched and fortified by a Yorkshire accent that seemed to accuse, not Corporal Trivet only, but all the Italian landscape of sins and follies unknown to Bradford.

  ‘That my own sister’s boy should act like that,’ she was saying, ‘and in a foreign country too, where it’s our duty to set an example to people less fortunate than ourselves – no, Tom, no. I shall never forgive you. Though they may be the last words you’ll ever hear from me, I can never forgive you.’

  ‘You’ve forgiven me half a dozen times already, Aunt Edith.’

  ‘And what’s been the result? You just get worse and worse, and now you’re completely shameless. And it’s a falsehood to say that I forgave you. I may have agreed to overlook what happened, for the sake of peace, but that was the farthest I ever went. And it isn’t as though it was one occasion only, as you know well. And you a married man!’

  ‘I was married for five days, and I’ve had four years to think about it. If I’d taken four years to think about it first, I wouldn’t have been married even for five minutes.’

  ‘You never thought about the meaning of marriage, that was the mistake you made. There’s nothing in life more serious than marriage, but you weren’t serious at all. You were only thinking about a few days’ pleasure, and how to guard against interruptions to it.’

  A soldier in the Territorial Army, Tom Trivet had gone to France in the winter of 1939 and returned to England, in a motor-boat from Dunkirk, in the following May. In the peculiar circumstances of the time he had thought it reasonable to marry a girl of his own age – which was then twenty – whom he had known for some years, but who had never excited his emotions until war, and escape from battle, and the prospect of returning to battle had so heated them that any girl’s breath could have blown them to flame. So they married and had their honeymoon in five days of leave, and six weeks later Tom had embarked for Egypt. Several months went by before her letters began to reach him, and when the first ones came, a whole parcel of them, he was dismayed. He had waited for them in a torment of emotional hunger, and when he sat down to read them, in a stony landscape dyed with the setting sun, he had found them as empty of nourishment as the sand that lay in crevices of the rock. There was a great deal in them, but nothing sweet or sound or satisfying.

  In the weeks and months to come he read more and more of her letters, and as he thought of the well-turned limbs, the sleek yellow hair, and the innocent round face he had married, he grew increasingly puzzled and more and more depressed by the cloud of dust she created whenever she bent her head and shook out her brain over the writing-table. When Tom Trivet was captured, and his captors searched him, they found her last two letters in his pocket, unopened.

  Now, to his aunt the Countess, he said sadly, ‘We’ve had all this talk before, and it doesn’t do any good, does it?’

  ‘If it doesn’t,’ she answered, ‘that’s your fault and not mine. All you young people believe that because you want a thing, you’re entitled to get it. But when I was young we were made to recognize our obligations. My generation was taught responsibility.’

  ‘Not very well.’

  ‘No, not very well. Human beings are full of imperfections, and you can’t cure them overnight. But we tried.’

  ‘And we’re trying to do something quite different. You tried to make out that your way of life was worth preserving for ever, and we’re trying to understand what it’s all about.’

  ‘By making love to half a dozen girls in Pontefiore!’

  ‘They’ve taught me quite a lot,’ said Tom.

  ‘Nothing but self-indulgence.’

  ‘And that’s something too. I never had much chance to indulge myself in Bradford, and it wasn’t till I came here that I realized how enjoyable life could be. I’ve been happier in Pontefiore than I ever was in my life before. It’s an odd thing to say in the circumstances, but it’s true enough and I feel all the better in consequence.’

  ‘And the poor girls – do they feel better?’

  ‘From time to time I’ve been led to believe so. – No, don’t look at me like that, Aunt Edith. I didn’t invent human nature.’

  ‘You would have done, if you’d had the chance. You’re brazen enough.’

  Their arguments always followed the same pattern. The Countess would open the attack, and Tom defend himself with energy enough to make her deploy some early principles, a little moral indignation, and the zest that comes with berating a member of one’s own family. Then when her eyes were sparkling and her lips compressed, he would begin his retreat – throwing out a few excuses to impede the pursuit – and when he saw the time was ripe for it, would offer his surrender. An acknowledgment that she was right, and he wrong, was all she ever asked for. She would assume that the past was dead and the future a clean page on which, with better fortune, no blot would ever fall. He, with a proper embarrassment, would accept her conclusion, and then for half an hour they would exchange kindly reminiscences of their native place. That was his only penance.

  But now, when he had made his peace, discomfort remained in the atmosphere and with a renewed emotion, that neither would dream of mentioning, they remembered their impending separation. The Countess covered her feelings by inquiry about his socks and shirts, and Tom disguised his reluctance to leave by assuring her that he would soon return.

  ‘I’ve got to go and meet this Captain Telfer,’ he said, ‘and there’s only two things he can expect me to do for him. One is to show him the way about this part of the country, and the other is to help him with the partisans. I dare say I’ll bring him straight back to Pontefiore.’

  ‘But you won’t stay here. The war has caught you up again and your holiday’s over. But we mustn’t grumble, I suppose. You’ve had nearly three years of it, and that’s a longer holiday than anyone gets in Bradford. And I’ve enjoyed having you here, in spite of your behaviour.’

  ‘Now don’t start that again, Aunt Edith.’

  She shook her head, and pursed her lips, and said, ‘You’d better go now and say goodbye to her. And I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a hundred pounds.’

  A girl called Bianca was waiting for him on the bridge. She was tall and pretty, with an oval face and enormous eyes, one of which squinted a little. Her nature was warmly affectionate and her figure suggested that prudence had been no match for the ardours of her temperament. Tom Trivet had been in love with her for several months, and if his feelings were no longer so completely engaged as they had been, the diminishment was more than made good by the increase of her devotion. She held out her hands to him. Her lips were tremulous, her eyes brim-full of tears. Tom led her into the little wood beyond the bridge, and in the humid heat of her embrace remembered the dry impersonal kiss with which his aunt had bade him goodbye. Her kiss had embarrassed him almost as much as Bianca’s. More, perhaps, for he had not cared to return it with any warmth – though he wanted to – and while to begin with he was reluctant to give Bianca measure for measure, he soon perceived what decency required, and then found it easy enough. There was a great deal of protestation, argument, tears, and renewal of promises before he was allowed to leave, but eventually Bianca appeared to find some comfort in his assurances, and he set off for his rendezvous with Captain Telfer.

  At night, however, Bianca became hysterical and wept noisily for more than an hour, after which she fell asleep and dreamed that she was walking, blind and naked, in a strange land where dreadful voices made unending lamentation; but because she was blind she could not see who the mourners were, and her hands could not find them, for their bodies had no substance. A dozen miles from Pontefiore Tom Trivet lay in the darkness and tried to guess how far away were the two German soldiers whom, from time to time, he could hear talking. He felt quite as lonely and friendless as Bianca.

  The Countess spent most of that evening with
her housekeeper and an elderly steward. So that they might avoid conscription by the Germans, she had given orders that all the younger people of the village should take to the woods, which as they reached the higher parts of the hills concealed the entrances to many caves; and to preserve the proprieties the young women had been directed to the woods east of Pontefiore, the young men to those west of it. She listened to reports of the exodus, and came at last to the conclusion that she had done everything possible for the safety of her tenants. ‘Except, perhaps, for the Donati girls,’ she said. ‘For Lucia and Lucrezia, whom I sent some time ago to the Noble Lady of Rocca Pipirozzi. Do you think they will be safe?’

  ‘ Speriamo ,’ said the housekeeper.

  ‘The house of the Noble Lady is some distance from the nearest road,’ said the steward. ‘It is a house that may well be disregarded by the Tedeschi.’