She gave him his supper, sat down with him, and ate sparingly and in silence. While he finished his meal she sat back, watching him. She reminded him, as she sat in the shadows with her hands in her lap, of her attitude during the first evenings they had spent together; yet there was a difference. She had been remote, then, and the only expression he had been able to discern in her eyes had been one of inquiry. Tonight there was a repose in her face that told of gratification. Her eyes, profound and inscrutable as those of a cat, were lit only with knowledge, with possession. The talkativeness and the clinging anxiety, which she had come to display as their association progressed, were gone. She was all solicitude, but she no longer tried to intrude. She was content to wait upon him in silence and humility.
She said, ‘I have kept some water in a pitcher, in a cool place. I know that you prefer it to wine when you are hot.’
‘Yes, I am still hot. Can you see it, then? I took a bath after the game, but I am still sweating.’
‘The heat is too great. Here the men do not play football in summer. They work when they have to, and when they do not work, they sleep. But then,’ she sighed, smiling, ‘the English!’
‘We did not play until the sun began to go down. Besides, we are soldiers, we are used to it. Rosario came with us. He enjoyed the game.’
She grimaced, ‘That one!’
‘Oh, I like Rosario. He is an intelligent fellow.’
There was dissent in her eyes, but she did not answer. He lit a cigarette. She said, ‘Go to bed early. It will do you good. There is still some cocoa left in the tin you brought. I will make you a cup in a little while, and you will sleep well.’
‘Aren’t you going to have any?’
‘There is only a little left, and I do not like it much.’
She moved away across the room, and as he spoke to her she turned her head to look back at him with a shy grace that he had never before noticed so acutely. Despite their moments of disharmony, she seemed beautiful in a new way each time he saw her, like a precious stone intricately cut and filled with changing lights and colours. He saw things in her that he had seen neither in his wife nor in any other woman before.
It was hard to remember his wife now, and when he did so it was to compare her unkindly with Graziella. When he saw Graziella standing before him, miraculously still yet relaxed throughout her body, he remembered his wife standing tensed or fidgeting, a picture of impatience or uncertainty. When Graziella walked he flinched at the memory of his wife’s firm stride. When Graziella received him with eyes that were like dark pools of submission he remembered his wife’s eyes, always anxious or angry or inquiring, always expressing some kind of conflict with his own. When Graziella embraced him hotly he remembered his wife’s alternate moods of greed or unwillingness, and her pathetic gracelessness.
He told himself that he was not being fair; that, under the spell of this dream-life between battles, his memory was being warped. He tried to remember the good times, the times that ought to make a man homesick, that were so remote from this alien, sun-sodden island; shopping with his wife on Saturday afternoon, for instance; spending an evening with her among their friends in the saloon bar of the Vicar of Wakefield; Christmas with the family – pudding, paper hats, roaring fire, the room full of warmth and laughter, his wife’s face flushed with merriment; sprawling side by side in two deck chairs at Margate. It was no use. He could not make these memories real in his mind. It was the old life, which had become alien; further away, beyond the battlefields, than the stars that sprinkled the night sky. Lethe was not more final, more potent than the narrow Simeto.
Graziella was standing at the stove, fanning the charcoal glow with a tireless, hypnotic movement of her hand. She was looking at him, utterly without thought, and he submitted, living only in the pinpoints of light that gleamed from the darkness of her eyes.
His eyelids drooped. He felt himself succumbing to the warmth and comfort which she wove about him. After a little while he went gratefully to bed. She brought his cocoa to him in bed as if he were her child, and when he had drunk she climbed in beside him. They were lying under a single thin coverlet. He felt her, vibrant, near him, but she did not interfere with his peace. She turned her face to him, scrutinizing him with an air of secret triumph, and put her arm loosely around his shoulders. ‘There!’ she murmured, when he was comfortable against her. ‘Isn’t that nice?’ There was something in her manner of a mother’s placid command.
They talked drowsily. It was good to talk, of the baby’s upsets, of English dishes he wanted her to prepare, of his friends and her neighbours, of her childhood and his.
‘It feels so good,’ he said, ‘to be here with you. All my worries disappear.’
‘You have many worries. I have seen.’
‘Not many.’
‘What is it, then, that disturbs you?’
He hesitated. He could not bring himself to talk to her of his wife. Once they had been able to discuss the lives which they had left behind; but not now. He knew that it would ease him to talk to her, in the darkness, of his wife, but he knew, too, that it would hurt her. ‘Oh, things happen in the company. Men do foolish things, and I have to punish them. I have to, or they would do worse things and get into more serious trouble. But sometimes they resent it.’
‘But they like you. I know. Honeycombe has told me, and women have told me, too.’
‘Perhaps. I don’t know. Men have curious minds. They are always looking for someone to blame.’
‘That disturbs you?’
‘It ought not to, but it does. It is weak of me.’
‘Ah, no!’ she murmured. ‘You have the heart of a man, not of a soldier.’
He closed his eyes. ‘And there is one of my friends who is in very serious trouble. You do not know him, but I have told you about him. He is the brother of the soldier who was killed the night we came.’
‘They have not found him yet?’
‘No. He is one of the nicest men I have ever known, very quiet, very thoughtful. I do not know what happened to him.’
‘It is not strange, to want to avenge a brother.’
‘Perhaps, but we cannot leave him at large to make things worse for himself. I have been to look for him twice. If we are to help him we must find him.’
‘I knew that the police were looking for him, but I did not know that you, too, wanted to find him.’ She paused. He felt her fingers tighten on his shoulder, and as she spoke he was again aware of the secret triumph in her. ‘You should have told me before. If only I had known!’
‘Why? What can you do?’
‘You should have told me before! Ciccio will know.’
‘Ciccio?’
‘Ciccio will know. He and his band of ragamuffins, they wander all day in the streets, they steal, they make deals, they talk with everyone, they know every thief, every smuggler, every bad house in this town.’
‘It is not possible. One man in all this town!’
‘You do not know! There is nothing that these boys do not know about the bad things of this town. Among the bad people here, there is a whole trade of hiding deserters. Ciccio himself has made money from it. He has told me.’
‘The little rat! And you people let him behave like that?’
‘Who is to stop him, and how? There are many like him.’
‘Where is he?’
‘You cannot do anything now. In the morning I will find him for you. Perhaps he will tell you something.’
‘When I get my hands on him, he will tell me something!’
‘In the morning,’ she soothed. ‘There is time in the morning. Sleep now, darling, sleep.’
§§§§
The oil lamp, turned down, made only a feeble stain of light in the darkness. Rosario lay on his narrow bed by the wall, listening to his mother’s wheezing from behind the curtain across the room. It was hot, and the confined space was fetid with the smells of the night and of garlic. On the other side of the wall the murmur of co
nversation had died down.
He stared up into the gloom until his head ached and curtains of colour swirled before his eyes. These were the terrible hours, endless, when he could not sleep; his imagination raged, torturing his body, seizing on every sound that came from beyond the wall – the thump of boots falling to the floor, the creak of the bed, laughter – to goad his passions into life. He gloated, in agony, on the story that each sound told him, and dreamed obscenities. He sank into that state, on the borderlands of sleep, when the senses remain awake to outward stimulus but the mind is dizzy and released; fresh visions came, to relieve his torment, of triumph and revenge. Disjointed scenes succeeded each other; he was murdering her; he was standing, bloody and victorious after combat, while her lover cowered at his feet and she looked on in wonder; he was saving both their lives and acknowledging their shamed gratitude; he was rich and successful, passing her arrogantly with an adoring woman on his arm and feasting on her discomfiture; he was dead, and she was weeping over him in remorse; he was haranguing the people, denouncing the foreigner and his whore, and the crowd was roaring for blood. There was solace in these dreams, but the pain on awakening was all the greater.
He went over everything that had happened during the day, letting his mind twist good into bad, finding an evil motive for every innocent action. He remembered how he had slouched, alone and unheeded, along the touchline of the football field while the British soldiers had cheered and shouted around him, excluding him from their boisterousness and jostling him without apology. Time after time Craddock had come running past, with never a look his way or a friendly wave. After the game, when the team had come off the field, Craddock had been a hero, the men had surrounded him, thumping him on the back and congratulating him. Rosario, eager to be at his friend’s side, to share his triumph and show his status to this crowd, had pushed towards him and tried to walk off the field arm-in-arm with him, as was the way of friends in this country. Craddock had pulled his arm free and said, laughingly, ‘Here, I’m not your sweetheart!’ What was that, Rosario asked himself now, but a repudiation? What else but an English insult? And why had he said ‘sweetheart’? What had he meant? Had Graziella told him? Was he mocking? Rosario remembered the murmuring he had heard through the wall, and the laughter. Oh, if she had told him! If the two of them were laughing at his misery! He reached under the mattress and took out his knife. He pressed the flat of the blade against his chest, shocking himself awake with its icy touch. For that he could kill! He could kill!
He sat up cautiously. He peered across the room, and made sure that his mother was asleep. He reached up to the picture that hung on the wall above him, and slowly moved it aside. Beneath it there was a tiny hole in the wall. He raised himself, careful to make no sound, and put his eye to the hole. The humiliation was like a whip across his face. Something had driven him to bore this hole in the thin plaster wall, an inexplicable longing to trample on the last shreds of his dignity, to feed on the visible evidence of his own shame. He could see nothing; even when they were awake he could only see a spot of light through the hole, and an occasional blur of black as one of them moved across it. Now there was only darkness.
He hated himself for this. It was the symbol of everything in his life that had become filthy; his love, this room, the ageing heap of decay that snored in the other bed, the sixpenny brothels to which he had to go to vent himself. And they, those two glutting themselves on each other behind the wall, were the authors of his shame.
He lay back, but there was no rest. The visions continued to pass before him.
§§§§
In the morning Craddock and Graziella found Ciccio. He grinned impudently when Craddock asked for information, and held out his hand. ‘How much?’
‘Come on, what do you know?’
‘Cigarettes, money, alla same. How much?’ There was a sparkle of cunning in Ciccio’s eyes.
Craddock knocked the boy down with the back of his hand. Graziella was dumbfounded. He stood over Ciccio and spoke, briefly but with great anger. Ciccio whined threats and excuses, saw the look on Craddock’s face and began to sniffle. Graziella stood by, clutching her hands together in distress. She wanted to plead with Craddock; instead she appealed to Ciccio to speak. Craddock motioned her to be quiet and poked the boy in the ribs with the toe of his boot. He said roughly, ‘Well?’
‘I will find him,’ Ciccio muttered. ‘But if I do not go to work this morning I will lose money.’
‘When you come back, ask the sentry for me. If you do not come by twelve o’clock I will send the police for you.’
‘I will find him.’
Ciccio went; and in the afternoon Craddock, Honeycombe and Fooks set off in the company truck to bring in Jobling.
Harry had put as much distance as he could between himself and his former hiding-place. The address which Ciccio had brought back was on the outskirts of the town, among the warren of rock-and-plaster hovels which sprawled beyond the Garibaldi Gate.
Craddock drove out through the gate. At the crossroads a Military Police jeep was drawn up in the kerb, its crew of four still as a group of statues beneath the sun. ‘It can’t be far from here,’ said Honeycombe nervously. ‘If he starts shooting we’ll have that lot on top of us in ten seconds. They’d blow the daylights out of him.’
Craddock said, ‘We won’t give him the chance.’
They turned off the main road and the truck crept into what seemed like a city of stables. There were no streets here, only unpaved tracks, baked into ruts and potholes over which the truck lurched and jounced. A frightening quietness hung over the whole quarter. The windowless shacks leaned on each other as if in sleep. The people squatted in their doorways, looking at the truck in apathetic silence, cloaked like Arabs against the sun, too indifferent even to brush away the flies that crawled on their malaria-drawn faces.
The three men parked the truck and made their way on foot along an alley whose aperture was little more than a dark crack between two houses, so narrow that they had not seen it until they had come abreast of it. Craddock was walking now as if he were on patrol. He raised his hand and the men behind him halted. He sidled along the wall until he came to a doorway. The seconds spun out in the sunlight as he edged himself round the jamb of the door. His movements were almost imperceptible. He looked back and nodded. The other two came on quietly. He laid the back of his hand against his cheek. Their quarry was asleep. He pointed at Honeycombe and at himself; at Fooks, then at the doorway. His companions signalled that they understood. They waited, aware of the loudness of their own breathing. He gave them the ‘come on’ sign and plunged in through the doorway. Honeycombe leaped after him and Fooks moved forward to block the doorway.
Craddock was half way across the earth floor before Jobling awoke to the thump of boots. Craddock saw the look of panic and hatred in Jobling’s face and the hand sliding under the pillow. No time now for comradely pleading. He shouted, ‘The gun!’ and hurled himself across Jobling’s body, groping for the other man’s gun hand. Honeycombe dived low, as if in a rugby tackle, scooped the pistol from under the pillow and flung it across the floor to Fooks. Craddock toppled backwards on to the floor with Jobling on top of him, and a flurry of blankets fell away from them. Jobling butted downwards with his head. Craddock felt the terrible impact against his temple and half-swooned into darkness and pain, but he clung on tenaciously. Honeycombe came crashing down on top of them, chopping with his clenched fist at the back of Jobling’s neck. Fooks, from the door, could hear from among them only an animal grunting and, from Jobling, inarticulate noises of protest and fury. Jobling broke free. Blood poured from his nostrils and stained the front of his shirt. Fooks came forward and grappled with him, Honeycombe dived for his knees, and they brought him down like a pair of hunting dogs. Pinioned by their arms, Jobling threw his head back, his mouth wide open in a soundless agony. Craddock had picked up the pistol. He measured his distance and brought the barrel of the pistol down against the side of J
obling’s head. Jobling cried out, and Craddock struck again. Honeycombe relaxed and said, panting, ‘That’s it!’ Jobling lay in a heap on the floor.
‘By God!’ said Craddock, feeling his own forehead. ‘He’s give me a headache, all right!’
They picked Jobling up and carried him to the truck. Craddock kept watch while the other two hid their captive under a tarpaulin and fastened up the tailboard again.
‘Where are we going to put him?’ Fooks asked, as the truck slowed up outside the billet and turned in through the porch. ‘In the guardroom?’
‘In the stores,’ Craddock answered. ‘I want to see what I can do with the captain before we give him up.’
Craddock backed the truck tight up to the door of the stores so that no one could see what was being unloaded, and they hustled Jobling into the room.
‘This is the best place,’ Craddock said. ‘The window’s barred. Reckon we’ll have to tie him up for a bit, though.’
They bandaged the gash in Jobling’s head, bound his hands and feet, and made him as comfortable as they could against a bale of old clothing. ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ Craddock said, ‘it’s for your own good. It won’t be for long.’
Jobling glared back. ‘You yellow dog! I never thought you could sink so low!’
‘We’ll bring you some grub in a jiffy.’
They locked the door and went to their rooms to wash.
A half-hour later Craddock came downstairs. He asked the sentry, ‘Has the captain come in yet?’
‘Just gone into the office, sergeant.’
Craddock went into the office.
‘Hallo, sergeant,’ the captain said. ‘Where’d you get that bruise on your forehead? Girlfriend been biffing you with the old rolling pin?’
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