The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  Even without the invitation to tea at the schoolhouse, the hour between Mrs Cleat’s return and closing time on a Tuesday was always the longest of the week for Connie. Mrs Cleat atoned for her sin of leaving the shop by having Connie perform penance on her behalf. This took the form of camphor-sprinkling, chalkboard-blacking, potato-sorting, and any other creative shop maintenance Mrs Cleat could devise to keep Connie busy, while giving her a blow-by-blow account of the battle for high art fought over teacups in the church hall.

  When Mrs Cleat finally released her, wearing half the dirt of that morning’s potato delivery, she felt she was tumbling into the schoolhouse like one of the grubby-mouthed lane kids. She stood on Mr Gilbert’s doorstep, feeling ordinary, regretting her timid knock but too afraid to leave for fear she’d already been spotted through the half-open door. She heard voices, an air of tension from deep inside. Something slammed. She backed down from the threshold, but as she hesitated, the door swung wide in the breeze and she saw straight down the corridor to the kitchen, where Mr Gilbert was hovering over a figure seated at his table. At first she thought it was Vittorio, until she saw the broader set of the shoulders, the coarser hair of the brother she had met in the rain at Repton’s gate.

  His head was thrown back, and a tea towel across his shoulder appeared to be stained with blood. Mr Gilbert glanced down the hallway as she was turning to leave. He hurried towards her, but instead of offering a greeting, he reached around and shut the front door. His jovial mood of that afternoon was gone and his face was pale.

  ‘Should I go?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, don’t, Connie. I think it would be better if you stayed.’

  In the kitchen, Connie saw Vittorio leaning against a dresser. He had a paring knife balanced in his hand, and he straightened and put it down as she came in. Across from him on the Aga range, something was frying, its fragrant steam tangible in the golden light of late afternoon. It might have thrilled her to discover Mr Gilbert’s walled garden beyond the back door, which was open to the summer evening, or to find both Italians in the same room, among the unfamiliar aromas of the food. But the boy sitting at the table had his back to her, and as she came alongside him he stood so quickly that the chair fell behind him. Without picking it up, he strode away into the garden. Vittorio called to him in Italian, but his brother was silent, pacing the walls of espaliered fruit trees.

  ‘Connie, sit down,’ Mr Gilbert said. ‘Talk to Vittorio for a minute.’ He rummaged inside a kitchen cupboard and drew out an old Air Raid Precautions tin before grabbing a clean tea towel and stepping outside.

  Vittorio had picked up the chair and was bending to clean something from the floor: it was a pool of broken eggs.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My brother …’ He scooped the eggs and their shells into a cloth and juggled them, dripping, into the sink.

  ‘What happened to him?’ she asked.

  He avoided her eye. His mood was so altered from their encounter in the shop that he was like another person. He took the frying pan from the Aga and lowered the lid back onto the plate. She waited.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said at last.

  ‘It doesn’t seem like nothing.’

  He gave an empty laugh. ‘Nothing. My brother does nothing and thinks too much. Me?’ He muttered something in Italian under his breath. ‘Me, maybe the other way round.’

  Mr Gilbert’s voice drifted in from the garden. ‘… stitches, yes … why ever not? … no, no … sit down …’ She saw him bring the boy around on the grass, making him sit in a wicker chair arranged on the patio. His eyelid was nearly swollen shut, and there was dried blood around his nose, a split above his eyebrow and one in his lower lip, which he explored with the tip of his tongue. She looked back at Vittorio, but he was busy shuffling a wooden spatula into the contents of the pan.

  ‘It’s a waste, this eggs,’ was all he said. ‘Now it’s too thin, the frittata. No good.’ His lips came back to rest together, full as a girl’s. He tilted the pan to show her. At the stove he began to slice through what appeared to be an omelette, but smelled like something else entirely. Around the kitchen counter were stalks of herbs and the skins of garlic, which she had seen listed in French recipes in The Lady but had never actually tasted. Next to the board lay the chopped remains of baby marrows, still firm and glossy green, and she wondered why they had been picked so soon. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen so many eggs in one pan. Aunty Bea wouldn’t keep chickens because of her phobia about rats, and so they were stuck with their ration and the odd gift from neighbours, which was usually stretched into a batter or various bland and pasty puddings. She watched Vittorio at work in the kitchen, his hands quick and skilful in the orange light. She had never seen a man cooking before, and he seemed to her like some magical, slightly fractured version of his sex: the flawed character of a fairytale, fascinating but cryptic; or one of the Romanies she had once seen through the door of a vardo, scouring a pot, as she cycled past Penton Gorse.

  ‘Who did that to your brother?’ she asked.

  ‘Lucio?’ He spoke the name quietly, with a soft sh in the middle, as if he wanted to silence her.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s really not any of my business,’ she said.

  He snorted. ‘Of course your business. You want this bloody man at the table?’ She wanted to smile, to explain the joke, but it didn’t seem right when outside she could hear the low, fraught voice of Mr Gilbert as he tended to the boy’s wounds.

  ‘I don’t think your brother expected me to be here, did he?’ she asked.

  ‘Lucio,’ he shushed her again with the name. ‘Always he’s in the bad place, the bad time.’

  He didn’t offer anything more, so she edged towards the patio doors, intending to see if Mr Gilbert needed her help.

  ‘He got in the way,’ Vittorio said.

  ‘Of what?’

  He began getting plates down from the dresser. ‘I wanted to give Mr Gilbert something, you understand? He never takes the money.’

  ‘For your English lessons?’

  He nodded. ‘He say, You cook for me. You cook me some Italian food, Vic. Is enough. So I take some of the cracked eggs from Repton’s barns. Hundreds of eggs we pack into the truck every day. Cracked ones, we send to the Big House. We never take and they never give.’

  Connie had often seen the damaged eggs piled up in the stoneware bowl in Mrs Cartwright’s kitchen at Leyton House. She also knew that those eggs didn’t always end up in Mr Repton’s afternoon teacake. Aunty Bea liked to say that Edi Cartwright would filch the Eucharist wine for the black market if she ever thought to go into a church.

  ‘We feed the chickens,’ Vittorio continued, ‘we clean the barns, we kill the rats, we pick the eggs. Even I see sometimes this Repton watching us — but never one single cracked egg he give to us. To him, my father is still prisoner.’ His shoulders fell. ‘In Italy, we had eggs … in England only this … this dust.’ He motioned to the packet of powdered eggs on the counter.

  They heard Mr Gilbert’s voice again outside. ‘I said sit down. Stay still.’ Vittorio shook his head.

  Connie tried to piece his story to the scene around her. ‘Mr Repton didn’t do that to your brother?’ She was horrified at the thought.

  ‘Repton?’ Vittorio gave a short, disgusted laugh. ‘Non ha i coglioni.’

  She frowned. ‘My father,’ he went on. ‘He see the eggs on our table. He think Lucio take them. We must do everything right, he says. Everything right. No asking, no taking, just working … working for this Repton until maybe we break our backs and drop in the mud.’ His face had become closed as a fist. He turned to wash out the dishcloth in the sink.

  Connie didn’t know what to say and he kept his back to her, suggesting the conversation was over. She stepped outside uncertainly. ‘Can I help, Mr Gilbert?’ At once, the Italian je
rked his head from the teacher’s hands.

  ‘Connie,’ Mr Gilbert said, bringing the boy’s face back towards him. ‘I’m sorry about this mess.’ She wasn’t sure whether he meant the face or the ruined evening. ‘Sorry you should have to meet young Lucio here in such a state. He needs a stitch or two, but there’s no getting through to him.’ He was applying iodine and gauze to the boy’s split eyebrow, and he indicated for her to replace his fingers with her own, while he searched for a dressing that would fix it in place. ‘Lucio, this is Connie Farrington. She works at Cleat’s. I invited her over for a taste of Italy. This wasn’t quite what I had in mind.’

  They said no more while Mr Gilbert finished treating the cuts. She stood to Lucio’s side, holding up the dressings and scissors, her arms obscuring his face. He still struggled with ragged breath, and his hands, spread wide over his thighs, were also cut and bloodied. The fine stubble of hair shorn at his neck was damp. She began to realise that even in circumstances other than these, he might not have acknowledged their meeting on Bythorn Rise. That afternoon now seemed contained and self-sufficient, completely unrelated to the shop or tea at the schoolhouse or seeing him sitting there on the patio, smelling of Dettol and sticking plaster. Even when Mr Gilbert was done, they looked away from each other, like they had a secret to guard.

  Lucio stood up awkwardly, hovering about Mr Gilbert, and she felt compelled to return to the kitchen and give them some space. He spoke a few words to his teacher, but within minutes he was gone again, striding across the grass to a gate at the bottom of the garden. She saw him hesitate briefly on the threshold before slipping into the thickened light of the summer evening, which hung over the bridle path to Bythorn Rise. Behind him, the gate swung shut, and the handle clicked into its lock with a kind of inevitability that made her unaccountably sad.

  Mr Gilbert seemed to sense it too, for Connie caught his troubled expression slackening with resignation. But by the time he had returned the ARP tin to the kitchen cupboard and washed his hands, he was jovially insisting on their planned dinner, fussing over napkins and glasses, avoiding any mention of what had occurred. He jabbered on about his time in Florence and Venice before the war, and Vittorio became more sullen and uncommunicative, retreating into his own thoughts the more Mr Gilbert talked. Connie imagined a different summer night from this, where she would have become heady on the fumes of the kitchen alone, set adrift between Mr Gilbert’s stories and Vittorio’s attentions. But that night had been eclipsed, and now all any of them wanted was for it to be over.

  Finally Connie got up to leave. ‘I have to,’ she explained to Mr Gilbert. ‘Aunty Bea —’

  ‘Oh yes, Aunty Bea.’ He winced in mock terror.

  ‘No, really,’ she said, laughing. ‘She might have recalled the Home Guard to come and find me by now.’

  On the doorstep, the evening air seemed to clear Vittorio’s mood. ‘Your bicicletta, it’s at the shop?’ he asked her. She nodded. ‘I get it for you.’ And before she could stop him, he had set off down the high street.

  Mr Gilbert touched her arm. ‘No. Let him go.’ He had become serious, even unsure of himself. ‘Connie, can you keep what happened tonight — to Lucio — between us? Mrs Cleat, you know …’

  She was offended. ‘You don’t have to ask that.’

  Mr Gilbert nodded his apology. ‘He does it to protect Vittorio, I think. I suspect it isn’t the first time. But you should understand that things have been difficult … complicated for them … and their father. You know, Connie, I don’t believe in bad people, only bad circumstances. Do you see?’

  He rubbed at his chin with his thumb. She was about to ask what he meant when he straightened. ‘Ah,’ he said, focusing beyond her in the direction of Cleat’s.

  Vittorio was riding her bicycle down the road, arms stiff and knees wide, teetering ridiculously, like a clown on a wire. As he gathered momentum, he began to make swooping curves, barely avoiding the wild verges on each side of the lane. At first she thought he was putting on a show. But when he reached the schoolhouse and she saw his frown, his bright cheeks, his open-mouthed concentration, she realised he was as serious, as determined, as any child.

  ‘His first time, evidently,’ Mr Gilbert said as Vittorio sailed past. She was mulling over his comment about circumstances, bad circumstances, and her own mother, her father, what she could remember of them.

  ‘There’s more to him than what you see, Connie.’

  ‘Isn’t that true of all of us?’

  He looked at her properly, perhaps for the first time that evening. ‘You really are an unusual young woman, you know. I’m not quite sure how you’ve managed to turn out that way, given —’ He stopped. His eyes ran the length of the street. The deflected brilliance of the evening in the windows, the heightened chatter of birds in dusky gardens, did not quite mask the vague sense of curtains twitching. ‘Well,’ was all he said.

  Vittorio returned, breathless, locking the brakes and jerking to a stop by the kerb of the schoolhouse. ‘This bicicletta,’ he called to them, lifting his leg over the bike frame and revealing the underside of his boot, a hole lined with newspaper at the toe. ‘This Ro-yal En-field,’ he articulated the bike’s golden letters, shaking one of the handlebars as he appraised the racing green paintwork. ‘How much you pay?’

  Connie was torn between indignation and intrigue at his candour. It had taken her a year to save the four pounds and six shillings for the new bike. She’d had to squirrel away what was left of her wages after paying board to Aunty Bea, even keeping hold of her thruppences when the collection plate rattled past in church. And all the while, she would curse Uncle Jack’s rusty old Raleigh, which slipped its chain and spat oil on her as she cycled to Cleat’s, mortified by the wooden blocks he’d attached to the pedals because the seat was jammed at his height. She didn’t know whether to feel sorry for the Italian or to laugh at the ease with which he thought he could come by such a bike. She wanted to impress upon him how long she had had to wait for this one token of freedom. But she only reached for the handlebar protectively.

  He shrugged. ‘I think I get one.’ She opened her mouth, but when she looked from his cracked boots to his unfaltering eyes, she closed it again. He had such little doubt in himself, such guileless confidence, she almost believed him.

  Connie rounded the corner of the rise, still engrossed with the events of the evening. At the crest of the hill, though, habit made her stop to look out at the gamekeeper’s cottage. The sun had sunk below the clouds, and the barley and wheat rolling before her shivered in the breeze like the skin of some vast animal. She felt the shudder of it in her own skin and was about to cycle away when she caught sight of a figure at the edge of the spinney.

  At first she thought it was Fossett, off to the Green Man after his rounds checking the young pheasants. But soon she made out the broad shoulders of Lucio Onorati, bent over, examining something in the rough before the trees. When he stood up, she saw in his outstretched fist an animal held by the hind legs. Squinting, she made out the sleek skin, the distended belly of Mrs Repton’s pregnant Siamese. It twitched, like one length of overworked muscle, and the wind over the ridge teased its fur, the colour of fine sand, its darker undercoat glimpsed like a secret. She watched him run his free hand slowly upwards from the neck to the tail, and the cat seemed to settle. She thought of the press of spine under fur, the stretched sinew of its body, the green eyes glazing as they would when she stroked it. For an instant, the shape of them seemed one and the same to her, camouflaged by the silence and the fading light.

  The cuff of his hand was quick and blunt, strangely unsurprising when it came. She imagined the muted crack of bone, like a twig under leaf litter when she walked in the spinney. He descended the fallow towards the brook, the cat limp across his back, nothing more than quarry now in one practised blow of his hand. She gripped at the handlebars of her bike, feeling disconnect
ed somehow, as if she was the foreigner in her own world, not him. But after a while he was nothing more than a shadow, swallowed up by the huddle of sombre trees at the brook’s edge.

  Montelupini

  1939

  His mother sat cross-legged on the battlement wall, watching the piazza below. Lucio loved it when she climbed up and sat beside him, cross-legged, her skirts pulled into her lap like a girl. He loved it even when her fingers worried at the fabric of her hems and her lips were chalky and dry, her skin like wax in the glow of the coloured lanterns strung across the fountain. She was supposed to be in bed, resting, not climbing the walls of the old town barefoot at night to see the festival. But he knew that was precisely why she had done it. She rarely did what she was told, and she refused to indulge her illness or become a martyr to it, as so many women in the village liked to do with their own ailments. When she emerged from a seizure, Lucio could sense the physical relief in her, like the quenching of a desperate thirst after being trapped somewhere, scrambling and clawing her way back towards the light. And afterwards, after those deathly sleeps, when he would hold his fingers to her mouth to feel her breath, she seemed to wake doubly alive, the force of her will thrumming inside her, like a plucked string. He wasn’t going to be the one to silence that, to bully her back to bed.

  Below them the village was celebrating the grape harvest. Padre Ruggiero had blessed the crop, and Professore Centini was judging the ciambelle al mosto, made with the harvest’s grape must. ‘Poor Centini,’ his mother said. ‘He looks like he can hardly squeeze one more mouthful into that cummerbund.’ It was true. The mayor, in full Fascist uniform, was puffing along the sampling table from one identical cake to the next, rubbing the waistband that held his gut as fast as a bilge hoop on a barrel. It didn’t help that most of the bland cakes were destined to be scattered to the chickens: even the children in the village ran away when they were offered one. But the same recipe had been made at harvest time for centuries, and for the Montelupinese, tradition was more important than taste. Behind the mayor Fagiolo was playing his bagpipes, their strangled, reedy melody seeming to aggravate Professore Centini’s discomfort.