The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  ‘The uni-ver-sity, you say? And what kind of learning would she be doing at this uni-ver-sity of yourn, Mr Gilbert? Something for the war effort?’ Her deliberate use of the article — as if there was only one university, like the Odeon, the grubby picture house in Wellsborough — her purposefully obtuse questions, her thick Leyton accent had made Connie grind her teeth in embarrassment.

  At least Mr Gilbert hadn’t played to Aunty Bea’s fool. ‘She’s full of potential, Mrs Farrington, and with young men still enlisting she has more chance of matriculating than ever before. You know as well as I do what that can open up to her. But the war won’t last much longer.’

  ‘Won’t it, now? They said that four years since, didn’t they? Still, don’t reckon it affects your life much, not here in the schoolroom.’

  ‘Christ, Beatrice!’ It was the first time she had heard Mr Gilbert truly raise his voice. ‘Kids need an education even in wartime. Teaching is my war effort.’ There was a pause, the clearing of a throat, the awkward scuff of shoes on the flagstones.

  ‘Thank you for your special attention to Connie, Mr Gilbert, but we Leyton folk has simple needs. You might be better off spending the time with one of your London kiddies.’

  ‘Beatrice.’ Connie heard the sadness in his softened voice. ‘I might have come back from Town with the evacuees, but I was born here, as you well know. I think I have a good idea what Leyton people need.’

  But it was Aunty Bea who had emerged from the schoolroom first, straightening her scarf, her expression flinty, as it always was when the Lord’s name had been taken in vain. In one glance both Connie and Mr Gilbert understood: Connie would not be going to St Bernadette’s. Aunty Bea couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to leave Leyton, to leave the life God had given them, unless, of course, it was to enlist and defend that life. Mr Gilbert, in her mind, was doubly damned for leaving Leyton in the first place and then for running straight back from London as soon as the war allowed him. As for Connie’s future, Aunty Bea had, in her parochial wisdom, secured it well before that interview. She started at Cleat’s within the month. The sight of her in a white serving coat, snipping rations coupons, instead of milking cows or scrubbing other people’s floors, sometimes caused Aunty Bea to bite down on her lip with suppressed pride when she came into the shop. Such was her satisfaction that she had done right by her sister’s child.

  Connie pulled on the low wooden gate of the schoolhouse, feeling its familiar grumble along her arm. Four years on and she felt even more of a child than she had at thirteen, more ignorant and blinkered, as if everything she knew about the world, about the war, about life, had been reduced to the shelves of Mrs Cleat’s shop. At least Mr Gilbert had provided her with a view beyond the hedgerows of Leyton, even beyond England. He still lent her books and journals, but her favourites were the museum catalogues of the art he had studied in Paris, Florence and Rome when he was not much older than she was now. She followed the thumbed pages, the sculptures and frescoes, the naked warriors and gods in dramatic poses. She traced them by the light of her bedside lamp and felt guilty for thinking less about their mythical and biblical stories than about their breathtaking bodies. Once, she had found a photograph, slipped between the pages of a Baedeker: an olive-skinned man dressed all in white, standing on the steps of a fountain in some square of luminous marble. His face seemed to reflect that glow, lit with an expression that suggested to her the excitement of possibility, of the limitless future stretching out before him. On the reverse side was an inscription in fading cursive:

  Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte

  Dono infelice di bellezza, ond’ hai

  Funesta dote d’infiniti guai,

  Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte

  She had gone to sleep memorising the words night after night without understanding them. They came back to her now, an incantation conjuring that other world of youth and beauty and possibility, as she heard Mr Gilbert’s voice: La famiglia … La famiglia Onorati.

  As she neared Cleat’s, the prospect of the dim counter, and the dimmer Mrs Cleat, slowed her pace. She felt like she could keep walking, past the shop, past the Leyton signpost in the lane snaking down the hill, south towards London, towards Dover, towards anywhere but Leyton. Leyton, where the low grey sky was a lid over the single file of the high street, unchanged for generations. The squat buildings of stone and brick seemed as naive as a toy village, she thought, living out the pretence, the replica of a life. She should keep walking. She could keep walking, in the same way her mother had done. But then where would she be?

  She caught her reflection in the shop’s bay window across the road: her thin skirt, dun cardigan buttoned to the neck, the flat leather lace-ups on pale legs, that cottony frizz of copper hair. She felt like she might be swept away on the faintest gust of wind or disappear under the vigorous buff of Mrs Cleat’s counter cloth. In the passing chug of the morning post van, the smudge of her was gone, and she was left staring at the chipped lettering of the window: Cleat’s Corner Store. The mere sight of it made her feel ordinary.

  Her mother had christened her Marylyn — a name she had perhaps intended for billboard lights, a name that would go places, a name too grand for the rollcall of Leyton Village School. It was the only thing her mother did give her, a token gesture that Aunty Bea believed was better packed in the suitcase of her sister’s other pretensions when she left Leyton on the number 11 bus. Legs Eleven. It was painfully fitting. Connie remembered the shabby glamour of her mother’s silk stockings, her red shoes gaudy beneath her coat, a pheasant feather in her hat attempting finesse. The shoes, she recalled, had rounded toes embroidered with roses, and heels that clicked like a flamenco dancer’s — too quick, too restless for the lanes of Bythorn. She had held her mother’s hand at the door to Aunty Bea’s, like they were popping in, dropping something off. But once inside, her mother had shaken her free and stood smoothing a thumb under her lips, examining her reflection in the hallway mirror. ‘It won’t be forever,’ she heard her tell Aunty Bea in the kitchen. ‘Your lives are … well, better suited to it. You’ve got this house. You’ve got Jack. Jesus, Bea, you’ve even got Christ!’

  She had often wondered why her mother’s life wasn’t better suited to keeping her, but no one had ever offered a real explanation. She had heard the word divorce mouthed over the lips of teacups, or whispered above her head as if it was a disease and she was carrying it. But her father had already been gone so long that all she could remember was the uneventful click of the door, his trilby bobbing past the kitchen window, the scratch of his shoes on the pavement outside, while her mother militantly flicked through the pages of Britannia and Eve.

  At Aunty Bea’s stern little terrace in Grimthorpe Lane, she would sit waiting for her mother on the stone wall that ran along the front of the workers’ cottages. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, the lane kids chanted, wringing the colour from her name and chalking it into the village playground. Where did your mother go? And in her head she would sing, With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty shoes all for show. But the shoes, once they had gone, never came back. Aunty Bea kitted her out with a sturdy pair of Church’s boots, combed her hair for nits, and scrubbed her with carbolic soap until she was as shiny as a new penny in the collection plate on Sunday. And she renamed her Constance. That was what they needed in their lives, Aunty Bea said. In Bythorn, where the mud from the fields coated everyone’s steps, life had no room for red shoes.

  For several months Connie saw the Italians at a distance: a bent spine among the sprouting sugar beet west of Leyton House, the back of a head juddering along the ridge in a tractor, or a shadow in the lit window of the cottage at dusk. But she had learned to tell them apart, even from afar: the broader shoulders, the thicker, blacker hair of one brother; the more confident, graceful energy of the other. She had hoped their paths might cross as she cycled home from work and they walked to the schoolhouse fo
r their lessons with Mr Gilbert, but she only ever saw them on the bridle paths between the fields. She guessed this shortcut must have saved them two of the four miles of road between Bythorn Rise and the schoolhouse, but they still reached Leyton in the dark and left in the dark. And the less they were physically seen in the village, the more their presence seemed to intrude, fuelling ridiculous anecdotes and hushed speculation over pints in the Green Man, in the same way that Axis spies had done during the war. The shop never failed to provide her with daily titbits of misinformation and wild rumour, which she did her best to disregard but which piqued her curiosity even more.

  ‘No, not one letter,’ she heard Agnes Armer, the postal assistant, telling Mrs Cleat one afternoon in late spring. The smell of keck and hawthorn carried in from the hedgerows through the open door of the shop.

  ‘Not a single letter from the Continent,’ Agnes continued, clicking the word neatly on her tongue. Connie was rearranging tins of Carnation along the back wall and took a while to tune in to the conversation.

  ‘After all these months, not a word from anyone in their own country?’ Mrs Cleat asked, her eyes busily scanning Agnes’s for evidence of a chink in their glacial blue.

  ‘Mm.’ Agnes rolled a blonde curl around her forefinger, as if she had already lost interest in the topic. She had been two years above Connie at school, a girl conscious of her own prettiness, and its power when combined with an air of languid self-assurance. Even in the playground, Connie had seen first-hand how one crack in that temple of bone china wielded the same force as any broad-fisted, pimple-faced bully.

  Connie had applied for the postal assistant’s job. Aunty Bea had huffed that she could hardly see how tearing off stamps was any different from tearing off rations coupons. But Connie had thought it was the closest she might get to leaving Leyton, handling mail that was at least going somewhere else. Agnes, however, had returned from London with a secretarial diploma and some French mascara, and Mr Tonkiss, the postmaster, was a lost man. For Agnes, the job was apparently a fill-in until she decided what she wanted to do with her life back in Town. Two years on she was still in Leyton.

  ‘Not one letter. Don’t you think it strange, Agnes?’ Mrs Cleat prompted again.

  ‘Well,’ Agnes replied. ‘I really don’t like to comment.’

  ‘All I can say is,’ Mrs Cleat continued, heedless, ‘Henry Repton must be giving them Eye-talians all they need because they haven’t as much as stepped foot inside this shop.’

  ‘Have they not?’ Agnes glanced at Connie and let out a closed-lipped laugh that might have passed for a cough. ‘Perhaps you need to start stocking Chappie, Mrs Cleat,’ she said.

  ‘Chappie? You mean the dog meat? In the tins?’

  ‘Mm,’ Agnes murmured. Connie could not tell whether she was more amused at the information she knew or how badly Mrs Cleat wanted it.

  ‘And?’ Mrs Cleat urged.

  ‘Mm … I’m not sure I should say.’

  ‘Well, Aggie Armer, spit it out or don’t.’ Mrs Cleat stood erect and indignant, tired of being played. ‘What’s dog meat got to do with the price of eggs?’

  Connie rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. She knew that Mrs Cleat could still remember Agnes Armer holding up her sticky hand for mint humbugs before the war. It was unlikely she would let herself be reeled in by Agnes’s adult artifice just yet.

  ‘Mr Watt over in Clopton told me the older boy bought two cans of Chappie from him last week.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never seen a dog on the farm, have you? Mr Repton keeps all his hounds over at Hamerton ever since Mrs Repton got bitten by that bitch of Fossett’s before the war. Not likely Mr Repton would let the Italians have a dog then, is it?’ Agnes paused to let Mrs Cleat catch up, then added with a change of tone, ‘Supposed to be very resourceful cooks, the Continentals. They say the WOPs at the camp in Sawtry could make a meal out of anything.’

  Agnes stood before the counter and smoothed her hands down the front of her flannel skirt, with the assuredness of a woman ten years older. She blinked at Connie as unnaturally as a doll. Mrs Cleat was still confused. Connie became aware of her pulse beating in the dip of her throat, a heat spreading through her chest. Stop it, she wanted to say. Don’t — but the words didn’t seem to make any noise in the space between herself and the untouchable Agnes.

  Agnes raised her eyebrows into thin arches and left the shop with her packet of tea, the smart clack of her patent shoes a counterpoint to the lazy tick of the afternoon. Mrs Cleat gazed after her, buffing the counter distractedly. When she spoke, it was not to Connie, but to rehearse the news as she now understood it. ‘I see. Well … dog meat … from a tin. Even in the war we didn’t stoop to that. Really, it makes your stomach turn … almost savages. How can Repton let them live like it?’

  Connie listened, feeling weak. She would have to hear the story pieced together and regurgitated by Mrs Cleat to half of Leyton, to witness her embellishments and emphases, finely tuned to the tastes and opinions of each customer. It might not have occurred to Mrs Cleat, as it had to Connie, that if indeed the story was true, the Onorati boy couldn’t understand the label on the tin and had bought the meat by mistake, on the basis of price alone. But such an explanation would not concern Mrs Cleat, who knew that it was sensation, not sympathy, that kept half her customers coming into her shop.

  By the time spring was nearly done and the light lingered up on Bythorn Rise, Connie had become familiar with those parts of the farm where the Onorati brothers could most often be seen. She began to suspect that the taller of the two boys also looked out for her, so often did she find him at some occupation — or none at all, as if waiting there in the late afternoons.

  One protractedly grey day after work, she rounded the corner of Repton’s as the sun finally broke the blank sky. The light had that renewed quality of dawn about it, and as she got off her bike, she held up her face, enjoying its meagre heat on her skin, the goosebumps it raised on her forearms. When she opened her eyes again, he was standing two steps away, on the other side of her bicycle. She flinched, and the shudder of the handlebars made the bell ting, a lingering, artificial sound among the hum and purr of insects in the grass before the hedgerow. She tried to arrange the expression on her face, not wanting to appear shocked, but he had already backed away from her.

  ‘It’s alright,’ she said. Then, not knowing what else to say, she blurted a stiff ‘Hello.’ He didn’t answer, and she was wondering whether she should get back on her bike when he nodded and reached to open the gate. From over his shoulder, he motioned to her: a downward scooping gesture, almost the opposite of beckoning, but clearly intending her to follow.

  She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure about him or what he might want with her, so she hesitated. He stood patiently at the gate, and in his face she saw no flirtation or playfulness, no assumption or judgement in the making, just a child-like invitation to see what he had to show.

  She let her bike fall into the verge and walked towards him. He looked down at her shoes, her ugly practical lace-ups, and as she grabbed the gate from him he pointed at a pair of wellies sitting behind the post. Had he planned it all then, this meeting? She didn’t know whether to feel flattered or alarmed. Such a strange thing to do: to think about her shoes in the mud of the bridle path. His own boots were caked with fresh clods layered upon the dried. She couldn’t imagine any of the village boys thinking of such a thing. Everyone had muddy shoes in Leyton, except perhaps Agnes. She left her lace-ups in the grass and followed him, slipping around at first, until she got her feel for the oversized boots. He led her along the emerald wheat, up around the rise to a field left fallow. They were closer now to the outbuildings of Repton’s farm: the two chicken barns to their right and the gamekeeper’s cottage backing onto the spinney to their left, before it the gentle rise of another paddock, where Repton’s horse g
razed lazily.

  Halfway along the hedgerow, the boy dropped to his haunches. Instinctively she copied him, like they were playing a game, and as she did he reached out towards the maythorn laden with blossoms and nudged back a jagged branch with the cuff of his shirt. The petals released a faint cherry scent as they fell like snow across their feet.

  Deep inside the hollow of the hedge was a nest, neat and tight, with four brown eggs. A fifth, in the centre, was broken, the wet blue chick recently emerged. She couldn’t help catching her breath even though she had run wild in the spinneys and hedgerows, had prodded and plundered a hundred nests growing up. But this act of discovery was so simple, so long forgotten, that it took her by surprise. With a dirty wrist, the boy pushed back his hair. It inched again to the bridge of his nose, so luxurious in its sheen that she felt the urge to touch it, as she had the eggs in their nests as a child. She watched the way he drank everything in: the spectacle of the newly hatched chick; the precision of the nest; the twitching female on her stump, sending out her creaking alarm; the dull, self-contained eggs. There didn’t seem any need to speak, to disturb something already perfect. So they stayed quiet, until the bird gathered the courage to hop in increments back to the nest and dance on its edge, ruffling her wings.

  He let the branches fall back and they stood facing each other in the hedgebank. As she tried to think of what she might say to him, something he might understand, she felt rain on her face, and saw the grey that had re-formed across the evening sky. He led her back to her bike, both of them slipping in their haste as the rain became heavier and the mud of the bridle path got wetter. She reached the gate, where her shoes should have been, but she could not find them in the drooping grass. The downpour became a pelting mist as she searched, and it was only when she felt something cover her back that she realised he had gone to her bike and retrieved her mac. She pulled it over her head and finally threw the hateful shoes into her basket.