by Jo Riccioni
‘Do you mean you’re going to use all this to buy a crown for some statue?’ Vittorio asked.
Their father was already making his way towards the door, his back to them, a sign that the conversation had ended. He reached for his hat. Vittorio had removed the watch and was dangling it on two fingers, shaking his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You can’t until you see how much we’ve lost, how much we could recoup with this.’
Their father stood with the door handle in his fist. Lucio studied his back, straight and stiff, the muscles of his neck that ran in two proud cords, so rigid he seemed unable to turn his head to them. He remembered his mother’s back at the window as Padre Ruggiero took the last bottles of Raimondi Gold from the kitchen table. Lucio understood what his father was trying to do, the desperate, flawed reasoning of it, his own form of penance. But did he truly believe it would buy back their honour, atone for what his mother had done, silence all the rumours — Otto, the money and supplies, the saint’s crown — sins to which Lucio had also been a party? He wanted to show him his mistake, laugh in his father’s face as Nonno Raimondi would have done, or shout out the whole brutal reality of what had been. But he didn’t. The truth of it only floated in his head and drifted away, settling again somewhere deep and silent within him, like the silty sediment in the lake.
Each night, he sat on the battlement walls, witnessing his father knock on doors and shutters, collecting what paltry treasures he could from the villagers to trade and sell, making up the shortfall for the crown. He came back with religious medallions and broken communion necklaces, long-hoarded crochet work and linen raided from wedding chests, cosseted medals from the last war — all the hidden things that even the Nazis, the gruppi, the Allies wouldn’t have wanted had they found them. He made a mendicant of himself until he had enough. Enough for Padre Ruggiero to commission a goldsmith in Rome, enough for the Bishop of Segni to come for the consecration on the saint’s day that winter.
But even then it wasn’t enough for his father. Perhaps it was just Lucio who noticed it. His father prayed to the effigy in San Pietro’s that December night, expecting to find some sense of atonement, some resolution there. But all Lucio saw in the candlelight was the shadow of his father’s cheeks, hollow and angular once more, the uncertainty of his open mouth. He watched his eyes casting about the altar, hard and restive, and saw there was no peace in them, only regret and yearning.
He’d once overheard someone at the osteria saying his mother had made Aldo Onorati a lost man. He hadn’t understood at the time what they meant, but now he thought he did, and he knew they were wrong. Seeing his father there in the church, Lucio sensed that without her, he was more adrift than ever before. Replacing the crown had been a distraction and, now it was done, Lucio realised that even the saint couldn’t help his father stop loving his mother, bitterly and in spite of himself. And he knew that, like the rest of the village, his father needed someone to blame. When those dark eyes settled on him, Lucio felt every inadequacy, every failing and disappointment of his life, as if he was living each one all over again.
Leyton
1950
All day at Cleat’s, Connie found she was revisiting old images of herself, as though the painting at St Margaret’s had flicked a switch in her, flooding light along a dim and dusty corridor that showed the approach of someone she’d thought had gone for good. After work she cycled home slowly, preoccupied, and when she got back to the house in Grimthorpe Lane, she nearly tripped over something left sitting in the hallway. She put on the lamp and saw it was a suitcase. She’d never seen it before and was surprised her aunt had call for such a thing, when she hardly ever stepped foot beyond Leyton. She went into the kitchen and found Aunty Bea sitting at the table.
‘Whose case is that in the hall?’ Connie asked, leaning against the sink to rub her shin. But the instant the words had left her mouth she knew the answer. Her aunt wouldn’t look up, only poured the tea into a single cup and returned her hand to an envelope lying next to the milk jug. She tapped its edge along the table, business-like, aligning the contents. She’d been waiting.
‘Sit down.’
Behind her, on the dresser, Connie saw the urn.
‘Mrs Livesey brought it back,’ her aunt said with manufactured calm. ‘Found it lying on the green.’ Her face flushed as if beyond her control, and then she hissed, ‘Janet Livesey … of all people!’ Her words were barely a whisper. She almost seemed frightened of her own rage, wrangling it like some unwieldy, amorphous burden that bulged and seeped out in unexpected places.
‘Is that what you care about?’ Connie said. ‘Not what I did, but what people might think?’ She refused her aunt even the compliance of sitting. ‘Well, I don’t regret it. I’d do it again if I had to.’
Strangely, Aunty Bea began to nod. She turned to Connie at last, and her smile was thin and forced. ‘I used to say things like that at your age. But, you see, you do regret — that’s the very nature of getting older. That’s what you’re left with.’
Not me, Connie wanted to throw at her. You, perhaps, but not me. But all of a sudden she was full of doubt; she couldn’t be sure. They were silent. The faucet let out a dribble of water that made Connie shiver. Half of her wanted to bury her face in her aunt’s neck; the other half wanted to take it in her hands and squeeze as hard as she could.
‘You’ll take this with you — down to Luton. Use it to get yourself set up.’ Aunty Bea slid the envelope across the table like she was dealing Connie a hand of cards. She could see it contained money. ‘He left it to you … in his will.’ Her aunt waved her hand in the direction of the sitting room. ‘And them books by the wireless. You can take those, too.’
Connie sat down, the shock of it settling in her limbs. ‘So you know about Luton?’
Her aunt stood abruptly, the tea things rattling on the tabletop. ‘D’you think so little of me?’
‘I could have thought so much more, if only you’d let me.’
The clock on the mantel took up where the soft clink of the cups ended. Connie thought she saw a genuine sadness creeping into her aunt’s face.
‘That’s where we’re different, then,’ Aunty Bea said. ‘Because I always thought so much of you, regardless.’
Connie reached for her aunt’s hand. ‘Aunty Bea …’
But she turned to the door and shook her head, her hair the colour of autumn leaves against a winter dusk. ‘Just go.’
Fossett found her at the bottom of the rise. He’d pulled up at the gate in the farm’s truck after feeding the birds in the spinney. She’d struggled down the hill in the half-light, balancing the case on the handles of her bike, all her plans teetering as precariously now, her mind swimming with regret and doubt. When she reached Lucio’s gate she couldn’t help but sit there until the dark came, watching the copse by the brook, scanning the ridge and across towards the Big House, until she’d given up and the tears had come.
‘Now then, what’s this?’ Fossett asked, ducking his head to catch her eye. ‘Off somewhere? And so late? You waiting for someone?’
When she didn’t answer he helped her down from the fence and opened the passenger door of the truck. ‘Well, come on now, lovely. En’t no one coming down here this late.’
She sat in the lumpy seat and listened to him lifting her bike and the suitcase onto the bed of the truck. She pressed the heels of her hands into her face before he got behind the wheel and started the engine.
‘I can’t go back,’ she said, afraid he was going to swing the truck around and back up the rise.
‘Oh, I see.’ She heard him make a noise at the back of his throat, a soft chuckle. ‘I can understand that.’ He grimaced at her, conjuring the image of Aunty Bea. ‘Still, don’t mean he’s coming.’
‘Who?’
‘Your young fella what you sat here waiting for all them months.’
His words drenched her with humiliation. Had even Fossett read her better than she’d read herself?
‘I give him a lift to Benford train station this morning. Said there weren’t nothing to keep him in Leyton anymore.’
She felt as if he had knocked all the air out of her.
‘I ’spect now he meant you, going off to Luton, like … with his brother.’ He was watching her expectantly. Perhaps the whole of Leyton had seen through her.
‘Oh, for goodness sake, did someone put up a notice on the parish board?’
He laughed. ‘Not that I seen, but you know Leyton.’
‘Well, where was he going? Lucio, I mean. What was he going to do? Did he tell you?’
‘Whoa! Steady on.’ Fossett ran a hand over his chin. ‘Let’s see now. He said that Mr Swann had offered him some work in London.’
‘Really?’ She didn’t know whether she was surprised or disappointed, more relieved or angry. ‘Really?’ She fidgeted in the seat. How could he have gone without telling her, without saying goodbye? But then she realised that was exactly what she had once intended to do.
‘No great loss, I suppose. Someone had already tipped him off on the price of them cony skins. I were on a tidy wicket there for a while.’ He winked at her and she shook her head at him, struggling not to smile.
‘Where are you taking me, Fossett?’ she asked. She had the suspicion he was enjoying himself.
‘Mrs Cleat’s, of course,’ he said. ‘She’ll know what to do.’
Fossett was right. Perhaps he was instinctive about people in the same way he was about his dogs and birds. He seemed to know that Mrs Cleat only needed to be needed to bring out the best in her. Connie felt ashamed at not seeing it before, not going to her earlier, after all their years of working together. She took Connie under her roof unquestioningly — even at the expense of a renewal of hostilities between herself and Bea Farrington, another schism in the Christian Ladies — and managed every angle of village gossip in her indomitable way.
‘I had a room to rent and Connie wanted to be nearer the shop,’ she fired off over the counter in the days that followed. ‘Simple as that,’ she added, her steely eye implying that further questions on the matter would reveal the utter stupidity of the asker. Despite her loyalty to St Margaret’s, she took a surprisingly romantic view of Connie’s scattering of Uncle Jack’s ashes on the crease, even going so far as to motion the parish council to erect a plaque on the side of the clubhouse, which read:
In Memory of
Our Keeper of the Green
Jack Farrington
1900–1950
And any detractors of the much-anticipated mural project, particularly those quick to voice their disdain at St Dorothea being portrayed as a well-known local redhead, found themselves quickly silenced at Cleat’s. ‘Why shouldn’t Mr Swann want to paint a head of hair like that, tell me? Artistic types see the beauty in what others might find … well, a little brash and confronting. That’s the nature of art, is it not?’ Connie couldn’t help but think Mr Gilbert would have been quite proud of the old girl.
But most of all, Connie was surprised by Mrs Cleat’s help in another matter that weighed more heavily on her mind. Her nights were often restless with it, and when she got tired of fighting her pillow and the satin eiderdown that kept slipping from the bed, she would descend the creaking stairs into the shop, pacing the unlit shelves, running her hand over the Formica, cocking her head at the moon that rippled through the bull’s-eye pane. The counter always smelled of Parma Violets these days. Mrs Cleat called the rolls of purple sweets her one indulgence and said they were the true sign the war was over. Their intense musky perfume had trailed behind her ever since supplies had become more regular, but Connie knew they also wreaked havoc on her digestion.
Late one night in the shop, she heard a rustle of paper behind her and turned to find Mrs Cleat dissolving a Beecham’s into a glass of water.
‘I thought I heard the stairs,’ she said. The rags in her hair caught the moonlight as she tossed back the drink with a shudder. ‘Come on, now. Let’s have a cup of tea.’
They sat in the back kitchen and she felt the shopkeeper studying her, waiting less for the tea to brew than for her to speak. When she didn’t, Mrs Cleat said, ‘Well, are you going to tell him you’re not coming, or will I have to do it?’
‘Tell who?’
‘Prince Charming, of course! Who d’you think I meant?’
Connie had to close her mouth.
‘I do answer my own telephone sometimes, you know.’ Mrs Cleat swilled the pot gently. The slosh of the tea inside was comforting to Connie.
She sighed. ‘There’s just so much more I want, Mrs Cleat. So much more I want to see and do than ending up —’ She stopped. It felt such a relief to say it to someone, but she didn’t want to belittle the shop, or indeed those things that Mrs Cleat might at one time have wanted for herself: love, marriage, a family.
‘Course you do. Don’t you think I seen that? Soon as you explained them Berkel compression scales to me, I said to myself, Make the most on her, Eleanor, ’cause you won’t have her for much longer. She’s going places on her own steam, that one. And I told your aunt only the other day, Did you expect she’d be slicing government cheddar all her life, Bea?’
Mrs Cleat took her hand. ‘She’ll come around, you’ll see. In the meantime, I suggest you stop leaving this lying around and actually do something about it.’ She reached to the chair beside her and took from its seat a brochure. It was an admissions booklet for Avery Hill Teacher Training College in Greenwich. Mr Gilbert had sent it to her after she’d written to tell him she was living with Mrs Cleat.
‘Do you really think I could?’ she said.
‘Mr Gilbert seems to think so, and he’d be the one to know, wouldn’t he?’ Mrs Cleat sniffed and poured the tea, glancing at Connie fingering the pamphlet. As she set down the pot, her face reddened and her eyes glittered. She pulled a handkerchief from her cuff.
‘What? What’s wrong?’ Connie asked.
Mrs Cleat shook her head and fanned her face like she was having a hot flush. She tutted. ‘No, nothing … nothing at all …’ She balled the handkerchief into her fist and straightened the buttons of her housecoat. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, Connie Farrington. It’s times like this I realise it was all good for something.’
‘What was?’
‘The war, of course. For women like you and me.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You do. Just looking at you … and remembering myself.’ Her focus softened. ‘Course, in my day, a lot of it was nothing but dreams, but some of us still had them. You’ve got such opportunities now,’ she said. ‘Such possibilities.’ And she licked her handkerchief and buffed at a spot on the table, before taking the pot to the sink.
When Connie finally went to bed, she thought of what Mrs Cleat had said. Women like you and me. Not many months ago, she might have been mortified at such a comparison. But perhaps it wasn’t so far from the truth in some ways: she had never thought before then that Mrs Cleat had chosen the shop, her independence, above another husband, above children. As she creaked up the stairwell, the smell of Parma Violets lingered about Mrs Cleat’s bedroom, and from within came the sound of ledger pages turning long into the night.
Over the next few days, she tried to telephone Vittorio, but she couldn’t seem to catch him at the garage, and the messages she left went unanswered. When Mrs Cleat caught her hanging up the receiver for the fourth time that week, confused and almost teary with frustration, she insisted that Connie go to Luton the next day.
‘Dear me, it’s only common decency to break off with a chap to his face,’ Mrs Cleat reassured her, as if this was a formality with which she herself had been repeatedly burdened. Connie was momentarily amused at the thought of Mrs Cl
eat dispatching suitors with the prickly courtesy she reserved for her accounts overdue. But the following morning, the dread of what was ahead of her had become physical, a heaviness in her limbs like she had already done a day’s stocktake in the back store.
On the steps of the shop, Mrs Cleat picked lint from the lapel of Connie’s mackintosh and thrust out her chin to indicate she should stand up straight. ‘And be on your guard for diddies and pickpockets hanging about the stations,’ she warned. She scanned Connie once more, giving her the curt nod of her approval, before hurrying back to her counter. ‘I don’t know. The young today,’ she tutted to Mrs Jellis. ‘What d’they think we done before the telephone, I ask you?’ But she nodded again at Connie through the bull’s-eye pane as she buffed the Formica.
The bus to Benford and the subsequent train to Luton seemed to take an age. She used to imagine this trip south so often, buoyant with the fantasy of escape, of her life beginning: the fields and cows and hedgerows through the carriage windows would melt into a blur behind her, and the solid lines of spires and rooftops, dense as trees in the woods, would greet her ahead. But now she was too preoccupied with the draw and tug of her stomach, sickened by the rocking carriage and the prospect of what she had to do when it stopped.
At Luton station, unable to face prolonging her agony with the confusion of buses and timetables, she hailed a cab. It was the first taxi she had ever been in, but her dread at visiting Vittorio dampened the small thrill of her extravagant independence. She couldn’t truly enjoy the ride past the imposing town hall, down wide streets with their seemingly endless cars and buses, shops and cinemas, hotels and teahouses, the pavements of people. When she reached the garage on the other side of town, the cars on the pristine forecourt shone unnaturally bright in the winter sun, arranged in perfect angles to the street — ready to be driven away, to drive someone away. A wave of doubt broke over her: everything here seemed so busy and new and of-the-future, purposely other-than-Leyton. Was she making the right decision? She watched the cab pulling off. No one came onto the forecourt to greet her. The office behind the rows of cars was empty. She walked up to the open doors of a workshop at the back. Inside, she found a Vauxhall on the jack, with a pair of overalled legs underneath it that did not belong to Vittorio.