The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store

by Jo Riccioni

  ‘Of course.’

  They were silent for a few seconds.

  ‘We should talk,’ Mrs Repton said. Connie pulled her hand away. ‘I’ve heard you might be leaving?’

  She didn’t answer. Vittorio must have told Mr Gilbert: she assumed that was how Mrs Repton knew.

  ‘I just want to be sure you’re making the right decision.’

  ‘I am.’

  Connie felt herself being studied and turned her face to the window. She heard Mrs Repton take a few paces across the kitchen.

  ‘There are other ways of leaving Leyton, you know.’

  The stone of the trough sink was hard and chill against Connie’s hip, strangely comforting.

  ‘Do you love him?’ Mrs Repton asked.

  The hooves of the bay skittered across the courtyard, as if eager to be off. ‘It’s the Hamerton Hunt this morning, isn’t it? I forgot,’ Connie said, wishing she had remembered and come later.

  Mrs Repton sighed. ‘Yes. Henry’s riding out. I’m to join the ladies at Stoke House in the car.’

  ‘You look very nice,’ Connie said blandly.

  Mrs Repton laughed, and the fox fur shivered under her breath. ‘Yes, I’m good for that at least, aren’t I?’ She said it as though she was merely voicing Connie’s thoughts.

  Connie didn’t take the bait. ‘I should go before I make us both late.’

  ‘Wait.’ Mrs Repton took her arm. ‘The mural project’s finished. Did you know?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Harvey told me Swann’s done the heraldic crests and the scaffolding’s all down.’ Mrs Repton cocked her head. ‘You haven’t been in to see them lately, have you?’

  Connie stiffened. ‘I’ve been busy. I expect I’ll see them at the dedication service along with everyone else.’

  Mrs Repton looked down at her boots. She seemed to be struggling with something. ‘I just wanted you to know that a little money has changed hands recently. For Lucio, I mean.’ She glanced through the window towards her husband. ‘Not enough, I know, but I’ve done what I can for him. It might allow him to work on his art for a while. Between us, Harvey and I were thinking we could help him get an exhibition together, introduce him to our connections in the art world … well, eventually, anyway.’

  Connie studied her beautiful face, the face she had watched in private whenever she’d had the chance as a child. Up close she saw now the unevenness of her pale skin, the particles of powder that glistened across her nose, the slight bleed of her lipstick. She felt she should say thank you, but she couldn’t find it in her. Her thoughts kept going back to the murals in the church, how they went beyond Leyton, how they spoke to something bigger and better than the meagre approval of Mrs Repton or Mr Gilbert, the condescension of their connections.

  ‘He still won’t get any credit for St Margaret’s, though, will he?’ she said. Mrs Repton took a breath to speak, but Connie interrupted. ‘I don’t mean money.’

  ‘Perhaps not now, no …’ Mrs Repton hesitated. ‘But who knows how the truth will out in the future? Besides, as I understand it, Lucio doesn’t want any acknowledgement. He’s been quite adamant about it.’

  ‘That’s only because his father doesn’t approve. And he doesn’t want to cause trouble with the parish.’

  ‘Is it?’

  Connie didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure that was truth of it, after all. There was so much she wasn’t sure of.

  ‘Some things are better for everyone if they’re kept a secret.’ Mrs Repton picked up her gloves and slipped one on, smoothing her thumb over the soft leather. Outside, the bay beat out another syncopated rhythm on the cobbles as Mr Repton mounted. She touched her fur and straightened, as though readying herself for some onerous task ahead.

  ‘Who knows?’ she continued brightly, raising her chin and smiling with the face of another person. ‘Perhaps in decades to come the experts might trace the parish murals to the early work of the famous Lucio Onorati.’ She gave a piping laugh that Connie imagined she reserved for the ladies at Stoke House. It seemed to be the saddest thing Connie had ever heard pass her lips: yet another of the pretty delusions Mrs Repton draped about herself. And perhaps Mrs Repton felt this too, because for an instant she seemed utterly lost again, as she had when Connie had found her barefoot in the grass on the night of the harvest fair.

  When they said goodbye, Mrs Repton kissed her and whispered, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Connie felt the stole brush against her cheek and was reminded of Mrs Repton’s Siamese, the sheen of its fur in the twilight, the dark undercoat glimpsed like a secret beneath. Fromit, a series of disparate images rippled outwards in her mind: her mother’s red shoes clicking down the lane, Mr Gilbert’s arm around Vittorio through the bull’s-eye pane, photographs slipped inside the pages of books, a seashell in a pocket, a stub of candle in the window. Perhaps they were all guilty of those small self-deceits, as cosseting as a second skin, the fears and the disappointments hidden underneath. And Connie understood she was as guilty as anyone.

  ‘Won’t be long before the whole village migrates south, I reckon,’ Mrs Livesey was telling Mrs Cleat. She crossed her arms under her breasts when she saw Connie and eyed her suspiciously. Connie’s heart jumped to her throat. She hadn’t told Mrs Cleat her plans. To do so would be to reveal them to Aunty Bea, and she wasn’t ready for that battle yet. ‘Leyton’s not good enough for the young anymore,’ Mrs Livesey continued. ‘Seduced by the big smoke, they are. Although why they’d want the dirty, crowded, bombed-out ruins of London over fresh air and fields is beyond me.’

  Mrs Cleat ignored her customer and continued slicing the ham. Mrs Livesey scanned the back shelves as if for something more colourful to inspire her. ‘I’ve heard it’s not a coincidence Mr Gilbert and Agnes are moving back to London at the same time.’ Connie saw her run her tongue over the rogue tooth that pressed against her lip.

  ‘For goodness sake, Janet, Harvey Gilbert’s old enough to be her father,’ Mrs Cleat said.

  ‘Only just.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t but a few years ago she were pulling up her socks in his playground. I hardly think he’s been seduced by Aggie Armer’s womanly wiles just yet.’ Mrs Cleat took out the ledger and slapped it on the counter. ‘I’m sure two people from the same village can share a carriage to St Pancras without announcing the banns!’ She licked her pencil and held it above the page officiously. ‘Will it be anything else today?’

  Connie thought how much Mr Gilbert would have laughed at the seeds of this scandal being sown. She missed him. Every time she heard his name, the shame of their last exchange flared up in her all over again. She wanted to apologise, but he hadn’t been into the shop since, only coming in on her afternoon off, and she was still building up the courage to go and see him. But it appeared that her time had come: not long after Mrs Livesey left that morning, Mrs Cleat sent her to the schoolhouse with Mr Gilbert’s newspaper, clearly wanting reassurance her nose for scandal was still finely honed.

  She entered the gate of the yard as the children were bundling out of the classroom for morning play. Inside, Mr Gilbert was dusting the chalkboard.

  ‘I remember when that was my job,’ Connie called out, leaning against the doorjamb. He glanced at her before going back to the task. ‘I used to be so proud to be the one to do it.’

  ‘I remember,’ he said. He turned back and held the felt out to her. She crossed the room and took it from him, beginning to dust where he had left off.

  When she’d finished, she said, ‘I’m going to miss you when you go.’ He was silent. ‘I just … I wanted to come and say —’

  ‘Let’s not, Connie. There’s no need. Everything you said was true. And I should thank you, really. That’s partly what made me realise I needed to go back to London, to city life. There’s nothing here for me. I’m hiding from the truth
if I think so.’ His expression showed less sorrow than relief.

  He didn’t say any more, but held out his hand. She slipped her fingers inside his and felt his affectionate squeeze. ‘I hear you’re planning to leave yourself,’ he said.

  She nodded and saw that he didn’t smile or frown, that he didn’t make any judgement at all. He released her hand and took a piece of paper and a pen from his desk, scribbling something down. ‘My address in London,’ he explained. ‘If you ever want to come and see me — for anything — you know where I am.’

  She felt herself flood with gratitude, the consolation of knowing he still wanted the best for her, perhaps still believed in her, even after everything.

  ‘And this,’ he added, bending to open a drawer. ‘I found it when I was packing and kept it for you.’ He handed her a small fat book, bound in red and somewhat tattered. Baedeker’s Rome and Central Italy, the gilt letters of the title read. ‘It’s a bit well thumbed, but I wanted you to have it. You might need it one day.’

  She held the book in her hand, not daring to look at him because her eyes were starting to sting with the terrible tears of uncertainty and self-doubt.

  ‘Do you think so?’ she barely managed to ask.

  ‘I hope so,’ he said. He came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘You know, Connie, sometimes it’s a relief to give in.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He pulled away from her and reached for the brass bell on the shelf behind his desk. ‘Go and look at the murals. You’ll see.’ And he strode to the edge of the yard and began to ring, the sound clattering through her bones and making her sigh as it used to, when the school day was over and all she had left was the damp walk across the fields to Grimthorpe Lane and Aunty Bea.

  She left Cleat’s that afternoon with the dark already settling in. She pulled on her gloves and hat and wheeled her bike from the alley. Vittorio had telephoned when Mrs Cleat was at her Christian Ladies meeting. He was buoyant with news: he’d found a club that made the Roxy seem like a barn dance; she would need new clothes; he’d already met someone who could get meat and sugar on the black market; the flat above the garage had no proper kitchen, so he’d put his name on the list for a terrace in Overington Street; it had an indoor toilet and they could walk straight to the pictures and the shops; there was even a park over the road where women with children met in the mornings.

  She felt almost dizzy, not from excitement but from the sudden clarity of the images he cast before her: keeping house, cooking, shopping, scrubbing shirts and, one day, nappies. She stood on the pavement next to her bike, peering through the dusk until she could no longer see the slow curve of the high street, the fields shaken out across Bythorn Rise. All she could make out before her was a row of terraced gardens, square and aligned as postage stamps, the limp lines of washing, the prams under the kitchen windows.

  She didn’t hear the ringing of the bell along the high street until it was right upon her. ‘That’ll be Mrs Jellis, I ’spect,’ Mrs Livesey said, standing beside her in clodded wellies and peering after the ambulance that was heading for the rise. ‘Been in labour since yesterday morning. Should’ve called the midwife last night. Never usually takes her above a day to have a baby. Fancy calling the ambulance, all the way from Benford! Never heard anything so ridiculous.’

  Connie left her murmuring her disapprovals to the others who had gathered on the street to see the spectacle of the ambulance. She felt a rankling in her stomach the whole ride home, a watery uncertainty that wasn’t just about Vittorio and the prospect of Luton. She told herself it was the smell of diesel hanging over the road, or the smoke from distant bonfires that always clung to the open fields at this time of year. But when she got home, the ambulance was pulling away from the lane; and the small crowd of women on the verge, the kids playing Walk the Plank, all turned their chapped cheeks towards her. No one spoke. The only sound was a newborn wailing from Mrs Jellis’s open window. Connie dropped her bike in the road and ran inside to find the house dim, her call echoing through the empty rooms.

  It was Aunty Bea who came home that night. Connie watched her at the coat stand, reaching to take off the hat that wasn’t on her head. She had never seen her aunt leave the house without a hat, or a headscarf at the least, and her tired pillbox was still hanging next to Uncle Jack’s trilby on their hooks. Aunty Bea straightened, her lips parting, her hands falling back to her sides. She seemed shrunken, misplaced, standing there in the narrow hall, so childish that Connie could not help remembering herself hovering in that very spot, her coat half unbuttoned, her mother’s cheap perfume lingering about the mirror while she’d swallowed hard to fight back the tears. She crossed the hall and put her arms about her aunt, but she was stiff as a china doll, her face as white and unyielding. She pulled away from Connie, clamping tight her mouth, as if terrified something might fall from her lips.

  ‘Aunty?’ Connie asked, holding on to her wrist.

  But Aunty Bea started to climb the stairs. ‘There’s so much to do,’ she muttered. ‘He’s left me with so much to do.’

  Montelupini

  1943–1944

  They did not go to the caves beyond Cori, to the places they had heard other families were hiding their boys, the places where refugees from Rome had settled in makeshift camps. Instead they preferred to keep to themselves, to stay in the grottos they knew around Montemezzo, the familiar hunting grounds Lucio had traversed with Otto and Viviana, where they could descend sometimes and look down on the village far below.

  They arranged their camp inside a cavernous chamber, near a spring that dripped through a crack in the mountain. An overhang allowed them to keep a fire burning, sheltered from the rain and wind and snow. Lucio spent the first days foraging for dead wood, which he chopped and stacked against the walls of the cave, partially insulating them from the stony chill and providing a store of dry firewood. But at night they woke shivering when the embers had died, and huddled for warmth on either side of Viviana. He would gaze out at the black sky then — sharp as ice, the stars curdled against it — and listen to the endless gush of water, the bats chattering from somewhere deep within the network of caves, the lonely lament of a wolf high in the range.

  When their food stores began to run out, he went further and further into the mountains to hunt with Viviana. Fabrizia had given him Urso’s pikes, but he most often used them as walking sticks, never coming across prey big enough to justify their use. It still wrenched his stomach from time to time to pry the bloodied, shivering creatures from Viviana’s paws. He strived to the beautiful accuracy, the calm kill that Otto had shown him, but hunting was an art, like the precision of his pencil: one bad stroke and the essence of a thing was changed, the whole turned ugly. And yet it sickened him less now than returning with nothing and seeing his mother’s pale face, the hollow of her cheeks, her animal eyes as she scanned him for food. So he trekked further into the range, sometimes leaving her for days at a time, laying traps and following tracks, not able to bear the emptiness of her smile at his empty hands.

  Sometimes, on clear nights, when the moon was full and bright as a coin in the pool of the sky, he descended towards the village, even as far as the stable at Collelungo. On occasion he discovered eggs or potatoes wrapped in a waxed cloth and left on the chicken roost — by Fabrizia or Fagiolo, he assumed. He replaced them with a spinosa quill or a pheasant feather, some useless, innocent token to show they were alive. That Fabrizia did not try to find them told him enough about the state of affairs in Montelupini: she was being watched. Everyone was watching everyone.

  His mother’s advancing pregnancy seemed to bring on her seizures more and more, visiting her both day and night. He would sense her waking up, catch her fingering the spittle encrusted around her mouth, unable to find the energy to lift her head even though she had slept the entire night. She said it was the baby, but he blamed himself for not finding
her enough food, for not keeping her warm, for her worries about Vittorio, whom he had done nothing to dissuade from leaving. Each time he waited for her to come around, he would study her face, the colour of the chalk tracks that criss-crossed the mountains; the lines that, even in this forced sleep, cut into her forehead and around her mouth; the ridges of blue veins mapped along her hands. And it seemed that each time she opened her eyes, she came back to him a little less, as though, despite the life growing inside her, death was claiming her bit by bit.

  He tried his best to distract her, to distract himself. He hummed the old brigands’ tunes she used to sing, or recounted the tales of their exploits that she had told him as a small boy. Using charred sticks, he drew for her in the journal that Otto had given him, or on the walls of the cave. She would lie under her blankets then, her dry lips parted, and he’d feel her grow still, her hunger and fatigue overtaken for a time by concentration, the same way he lost himself in the task of creating the pictures: the body abandoned to the imagination.

  But by the height of winter they were living mindlessly, alive to nothing but the need to eat and keep the blood from freezing in their veins. They spent days hunkered about the fire, while winds or snowstorms sucked and buffeted at the cave’s entrance and Viviana howled. They ate stewed herbs and dandelions, and the boiled cracked bones of animals, hunted weeks earlier, some of which even Viviana had already discarded.

  The sketches on the cave walls took on a life of their own. They seemed to Lucio to have been made by someone else, someone open to the minute form and shape of the world. He felt drained of that sensibility now, bled of it, as cold and calcified as the cave itself. The days passed, and it was like everything before had been sloughed like a skin, and he could believe they’d always lived there, there in that prehistoric time, before the war, before the village, when everything was reduced to the barest pulse of life.