The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  ‘You like it?’ he asked. His face seemed delighted at the expression on hers.

  ‘Whose is it?’

  His smiled faltered. ‘Whose is it? What, you think I steal it?’

  ‘No, of course not —’

  He frowned, and then laughed as if it wasn’t the first time the idea had crossed his mind. ‘Get in.’ She hesitated. ‘Don’t worry. It’s really mine!’ He thumbed his chest. ‘Mr Edwards said I can fix, I can keep it. So I fix it. Come on.’ He leaned across to the rusty passenger door, which stalled as he pushed it open. He shrugged at her. ‘It’s good. The engine is good. Come on. I show you.’ She paused, glancing over her shoulder at the house. ‘Connie, come on. I waited a long time to show you.’

  She walked around to the passenger door and slipped in beside him. He grinned again, and she felt the shudder in the seat as he switched the ignition and the engine fired; the shudder under her skin, as if he had flooded her veins with life. He twisted towards her as he reversed the car back down the cart track, his cheeks shining, his eyes quick and determined. And she remembered the boy who had ridden her bike with the hole in his boot, his complete lack of doubt.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said as they approached the top of Bythorn Rise. ‘You can hardly see a thing.’

  He pulled over at the top of the hill, where the fog was thinner, and they gazed out at it pooling in the dells below, shifting and changing shape as if the black fields were tossing in their sleep beneath it.

  ‘Doesn’t matter where,’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Some place. Any place. We go. That’s what matters.’

  Montelupini

  1943

  Lucio crept up the steps of the house in Vicolo Giotto and lifted the latch of the door as quietly as he could. It was well past midnight and, after his vigil on the freezing battlements, his skin tingled from the sudden warmth of the embers in the kitchen grate. He hadn’t been able to sleep and had gone to watch for signs of his brother, imagining him returning up Via del Soccorso with the donkey that had, once again, gone missing. In his heart he knew he was wasting his time. Vittorio had already been absent three days, and Lucio understood he wasn’t coming back. But the watching, the waiting, the hope seemed easier to bear than his regret at not having stopped him, not having gone with him.

  The day before Vittorio left, they had checked the stable together, to see if the lost donkey might have found its way back. But the stable was cold and smelled of mildew instead of dung, empty as it was now of animals. A single prodigal chicken, which had stopped laying months ago, eyed them with an accusing look and pecked out an indignant complaint as they entered. Vittorio caught it quickly under his arm and it creaked, tired and worn as an old hinge.

  ‘She must have been up in the eaves. Otherwise the crucchi would have taken her when they stole the donkey.’ Vittorio tugged the bird’s feet to keep her still. ‘She’s hardly worth the effort. But,’ he took her neck in a fist and pulled, ‘better in our stomachs than those bastards’.’ And Lucio watched him as he slung the carcass over his shoulder and rifled through the straw of the roosts in the vain hope he might find a long-forgotten egg.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘And that’s all there will be, if the only thing we do is stand around scratching our balls while the crucchi starve us to death.’ He gave Lucio a look and thrust the limp bird into his chest.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Lucio called, but Vittorio was already on the mule track winding down to the village. He only raised his hand without turning back. And Lucio became that small, mute boy again, watching his brother jump from Rocca Re, feeling the desperate lure of the flame, the fear of being burned.

  He should have stopped him. He should have gone with him. Or at least told their mother his suspicions, Vittorio’s endless talk of the partisans, the contacts he had already made with members of the gruppo on their trading trips to Cori. But instead he had gone home and told her that his brother was only away looking for the donkey. He could save her the pain, the worry for a day or two longer, if not himself. But as his mother nodded, he suspected that she already knew.

  When he got in that night, she was waiting for him, standing in the dark at the window overlooking the alleyway. Viviana was stretched out in front of the grate. Even she had given up her vigil for Vittorio by the door. He bent to scratch her between the ears.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For always letting things happen … never doing anything.’

  She drew her shawl about her and stepped away from the window. She looked tired and pale. ‘You really think you could have changed his mind?’

  ‘I could have tried.’

  She came and squatted beside him in front of Viviana. ‘Vittorio was born bigger than his boots. He’s always needed more than everyone else. It was just a question of time.’ He looked at the worry set in her jaw, knitting her brow. She tried to smile, nudging him with her shoulder. ‘The war can’t do much more, can it? We haven’t got a lot left to take.’

  But she was wrong. The next day, Otto came looking for them at the Vigna Alba. They knew something was wrong when the jeep and driver idled at the gate in full view of the washhouse, where the women craned and bobbed their heads like curious birds. He stood under the skeleton of the peach tree, turning his cap in his hand and waiting for them to approach from the rows of naked vines. Viviana jumped up at him in her excitement, but he barely looked at her, his attention fixed on his mother.

  Lucio sensed her begin to shake her head at him, slowly, as if to hold back some terrible truth he was about to speak, and Otto looked so miserable, so guilty and hopeless that Lucio expected him to get back in the jeep and drive away. But he took his mother by the arm, moving her behind the meagre cover of the peach tree.

  ‘I have no choice,’ Lucio heard him tell her. ‘I only found out this morning — the order of a few hours’ notice.’

  ‘Where?’ was all his mother managed.

  ‘Valmontone. Then back to Rome.’ She twisted the sleeve of his jacket in her fist. Otto lowered his face to her hair and breathed deeply. Lucio backed away but his friend turned to him. ‘Wait. I want you to have this.’ He opened Lucio’s hand and thrust into it a roll of lire, bigger than any he had ever seen. ‘It’s all I have now, but I’ll try to send more, I promise. You’re going to need whatever you can get.’ Otto took hold of his mother’s face again and his voice became urgent. ‘Listen to me. You need to use it to buy as much food as you can now. Go to Cori. Buy anything that will keep. Then hide it away, understand? Somewhere the soldiers and the villagers can’t find it. I don’t know how long —’ She nodded to stop him, straightening herself and pulling her hands away. ‘We always knew there wouldn’t be enough time, didn’t we?’ he said. ‘We knew it would come to this sooner or later … didn’t we?’ He glanced from her to Lucio again, seeming to clutch at some desperate hope that he, at least, might understand. Lucio nodded, but inside all he could say was, Not now. Not this soon.

  ‘You’re practising the snares I taught you, yes? … Good … And Viviana will always find something for you. You need to trust her. You should go further up into the ranges. Give her the chance …’

  His mother ran her eyes over Otto, some calm finality settling within them, as if she had already prepared herself in a way that Lucio had not. His skin was flushed with panic, and all the words he wanted to say only hammered in his head and evaporated as breath from his mouth. He heard Otto say his name, but he turned away towards Prugni, stamped black against the paper sky. He remembered Urso raising his hand to the window in Vicolo Giotto, and he couldn’t hold Otto’s gaze, for fear of seeing in it that soft focus, that vision of a future without him in it. He knew they would never see each other again. They all knew it.

  His mother took hold of his wrist as they listened to the sound of the jeep fading along
the Viale Roma. Her nails kneaded into him and he was grateful for the pain of it, the physical insistence of her beside him. Later, as they watched the bonfire they had built catching alight, the heat of it distorting the clean air, the charred skeletons of leaves floating like birds released, his mother doubled over. He caught hold of her, thinking she was having a fit, but she pushed him away, bending over to vomit. There was little to bring up, but the noise she made was like she might turn her insides out on the hard soil. He had woken to the sound of her being sick all the week before, in the quiet of the still black mornings as he lay in bed. And he had noticed that she ate her breakfast later and later, or not at all, as if unwilling to waste the food.

  She stood up and wiped her mouth, looking at him for a while, her face waxy. She didn’t tell him. She knew she didn’t need to. But, more importantly, Lucio saw that she hadn’t told Otto. He could see it in the angle of her chin, the way she pressed her lips together and dragged the black ribbon from her hair. He saw all her reasons in that look: what point would it have served, what would it have changed? She pulled on his hand to steady herself as she got up. Her fingers were cold in his, bluish and fragile as birds’ eggs. He warmed them between his own and they stood watching their breath form and disappear, form and disappear, as insubstantial as the thin smoke of the fire caught up by the wind and lost in the vast blank sky above their heads.

  Leyton

  1950

  Connie slowed her bike at the top of the rise to survey the gamekeeper’s cottage. Set against the glory of the summer evening, it seemed even more squat and lonely than usual. Beyond it, the windows of Leyton House shone rosy gold in the low sun.

  Below her, Lucio’s gate was closed, vacant. She didn’t know why she always expected to see him sitting there when she rounded the corner. He would already be at St Margaret’s, working through the night, even on a Saturday, she knew. Yet the gate felt somehow empty now, without him on it.

  At the bend, she saw Vittorio’s new Ford Anglia. He had pulled up alongside the verge, and was leaning against the front wing, a heel propped on one of its tyres. The smoke from his cigarette drifted over his head and out towards the hedgerow. She straightened the front wheel of her bike, lifted her bare feet to the frame and let herself freewheel down the hill. The air was still warm and dry, thick with insects. She dared herself not to squeeze the brakes until she’d skirted the big pothole right opposite the gate, and when she had, she juddered to a halt a few feet past the car, skidding dramatically. Vittorio threw down his cigarette and caught hold of the handlebars. She was laughing as she dismounted.

  ‘Why do you do that?’ he asked. He pushed the bike petulantly into the verge, so it couldn’t be seen from the road. ‘Look at you now.’ She touched her hair, stiffened and tangled about her shoulders, saw her white blouse flecked with the yellow remains of gnats and midges.

  ‘What?’ She shrugged. ‘If you wanted perfection, you should have picked up Agnes.’

  He groaned and took her by the shoulders, and she let him kiss her, impatiently. He was tired of waiting, she could tell, and not entirely satisfied when she got there. He never was entirely satisfied, she felt. And not just with her.

  ‘Did you even bring shoes?’ he asked.

  She went to her bike and fished her sandals from the basket, waving them at him from a hooked finger. He opened the car door for her.

  The Anglia still smelled new, and the vinyl seat always gave an indignant complaint whenever she got into it. As far as her interest in cars went, she’d always felt more comfortable in the Austin, with its slow, shabby grandeur, like a run-down stately home. But no sooner had Vittorio restored it than he accepted an offer from a sentimental customer at the bowser. Mr Edwards had been so impressed with his sales patter, he’d given him a loan towards his next car, a Hillman that was on the blocks, waiting for a driver who would never come home from the war, and whose widow was only too keen to be rid of the constant reminder. Vittorio fixed up the Hillman and sold it on for a Morris Eight and then the Anglia, until it seemed to Connie that whenever he picked her up at the bottom of the rise, out of sight of the twitching curtains of Grimthorpe Lane, his cars had transformed themselves overnight. He did take her out of Leyton, as he had promised that day in the winter fog. And at first she was thrilled by it. But as the months passed, she’d begun to realise that the places they went were not always the places she wanted to go.

  The first time he had taken her to the Roxy in Wellsborough he’d made her dance, even though she’d warned him she didn’t know how. The song was In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening. Her hand was clammy in his, her steps self-conscious in her worn sandals, and she felt anything but cool. Thankfully no one was looking at her. It was Vittorio everyone wanted to see, in his sharp new suit and shiny Logues, his olive skin rich against his white shirt, the slick of his hair impossibly black. He seemed even more exotic, more foreign than ever, and the attention of as many men as women followed him around the floor, though for a different reason, she understood. Vittorio didn’t appear to mind making enemies as well as admirers.

  They were regulars now at the Roxy on a Saturday night, but she couldn’t say she enjoyed it any more than she had that first time.

  ‘Next Saturday, I take you to Huntingdon,’ Vittorio said. He was thrumming the Anglia’s steering wheel, and she knew something was coming.

  ‘What for?’ she asked as they passed Leyton House.

  ‘For new shoes,’ he said, as though it was obvious. ‘Some good shoes for dancing.’

  She had tossed her sandals on the floor of the car. Like all her shoes, she’d had them since the war, and deep down she probably disliked them as much as he did. But the buckle had been hanging by a thread once, for a day or two, and when she’d fallen asleep at St Margaret’s watching Lucio paint one night, she’d woken to find it sewn back on.

  ‘I don’t need new shoes,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you do. These ugly things,’ he gave a sidelong glance towards the footwell, ‘they make you look like —’

  ‘They’re good enough.’ She didn’t give him the chance to finish. She didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Madonna, it’s not the war anymore, Connie. Let me buy you some shoes.’ He was laughing at her.

  She didn’t know why she kept going to the Roxy with him or why he persisted in taking her. He could have had his pick of the girls there, and he danced with most of them all night anyway. She was used to the powder-room talk as she tried to spruce herself up behind the cubicle door, brushing away the inadequacy she always felt as soon as she walked into the hall with him.

  ‘My God, if I don’t get a dance with him tonight I swear I’m going to die,’ a voice agonised on the other side of the stall that evening.

  ‘With who? Mario Lanza?’ someone else asked. She heard the lusty, honest laughter girls made when men were not around.

  ‘You’ll die anyway, when you hear that accent,’ another voice broke in. ‘He can talk about changing a gasket and make it sound like pillow talk!’

  Connie, unlocking the door of her cubicle, wanted to laugh then, less at the girls preening in the mirror than at herself, remembering the effect he’d had on her the first time she’d met him. But, oddly, that was all she felt when she heard such talk — a kind of mild amusement. When he danced all night with other girls, when other eyes melted like butter at his grin, other waists twisted in his hands, she should have been jealous, she knew. But all she harboured was a kind of relief that she was spared the pressure, the terrible weight of expectation that came with his favour.

  If she was honest with herself, the best part of Saturday nights at the Roxy wasn’t the dancing but the intervals. Everyone left the floor to crowd the bar, and the band switched from their dutiful covers of dance-hall favourites to improvise a few jazz numbers. Bobby Keyes would signal the boys and, from the side of the stage, she’d follo
w the way they changed instruments, unbuttoned their collars; the way they freed themselves from the staid rhythms of the wireless hits, the expectations of the dancers, becoming conscious only of the music. In their focus and fervour she caught a glimpse into another, more colourful, more passionate world. It was the way she felt when she watched Lucio paint.

  Sometimes she thought it was those brief intervals, more than being with Vittorio, more than the rest of the night put together, that made it all worthwhile. All the tiptoeing home in the early hours, contorting herself through the kitchen window, only to hear Aunty Bea’s pert cough from the bedroom, the purposeful rattle of her bedside clock as she rehearsed her arguments, ready to shatter the deceptive peace of the morning. It seemed she and her aunt could barely get through the week these days without some petty squall of bickering and cold-shouldering that by Sunday morning had built to an ominous front of suppressed grievances. And the more they argued, the more Connie stormed from the house, skipping church and damning herself even more in her aunt’s opinion.

  Strangely, the one great accusation that Connie expected never came. The rumours in the village about Vittorio stringing along all the girls at the Wellsborough Roxy would have reached Aunty Bea’s ears by now. And Connie had heard Agnes’s name mentioned often enough alongside Vittorio’s to know her own would easily stand in its place when she was out of earshot. But why her aunt had never thrown this at her in one of their spats, she couldn’t fathom. She assumed it was being saved up for some final offensive of grand proportions.

  Yet even that threat could not force her back to the sitting room in Grimthorpe Lane on Saturday nights. How could she go back to the stale sofa, bookended by Aunty Bea and Uncle Jack, intent on ignoring each other? How could she settle for Arthur Askey joking on and on until she wanted to dash the radio into the grate? She couldn’t. Not now — now that she’d heard Bobby Keyes’s band in the interval, now that she’d seen Lucio’s paintings. Now that she’d peeked through the hedgerow and seen life in colour.