Too small a wish for such a long regret. You needed magic for the granting of a real wish. For the gaining of something outwith the bounds of probability. The young woman was almost tempted to reveal the heart and matter of a real wish . . .
One week. Just one. Out of all my life. To spend with Paolo. Then I could live fine for the rest of my life with my own man.
‘Canada,’ she told them. ‘That’s my one wish. I’d like to see Canada.’ And near enough true, it was distance that made a lie of it. Canada was a long way from a village near Rome. Instantly regretting, not the lie, but the utterance of it. For it brought Elspeth immediately to mind. It wasn’t likely that Elspeth would set foot in Canada now, Kirsty remembered. Nor that she would set foot in the farm again, not with the Italians around.
‘It wasn’t the Italians’ fault,’ the young woman ventured. ‘Not our Italians. They weren’t even at Monte Cassino.’
‘Our Italians.’ Kirsty, considering the claim, sniffed in rejection.
‘They’re Italians all the same,’ Meg snapped, remembering Abyssinia. Minding it, she said, as clear as anything. Because the minister had got so worked up about it in his sermon, ‘he nearly flung himself out of the pulpit. With the rage that was on him.’
The young woman, ignorant of what had happened in Abyssinia, let her thoughts touch warily down on the here and now. On that other difficulty that had pushed itself into her days, the meetings with Elspeth when the vans came round. Grocer. Butcher. Baker. Dreaded days of the week. Not that Elspeth ever uttered. It was her silence that hurt.
* * *
They must have come into a fortune, Finlay deduced, as he handed them their wages. For they had been in no hurry to collect them. Still. If they didn’t want their money, that was all right by him. He could do fine with it. Himself, apparently, not being endowed with their worldly wealth. His one fear was, now that they’d got their hand on it, they would make straight for The Tappit Hen, and get drunk.
Finlay would have his little joke, they agreed, as they made their way back to the Cottar Row. For none of them had ever set foot in a pub. They left that to the women of the town. Still, they concluded, Finlay wasn’t all that bad. Not when you got to the bottom of him. He hadn’t even kept that hour off her, Meg remembered. That time she had to wait in for the doctor for Jamie’s shingles. She had worked for a foreman once who kept ten minutes off your pay if you didn’t turn up ‘on the dot’!
Although they had never tasted drink, itself, the wage packets, tucked deep down inside their coat pockets, always had an intoxicating effect on them. Their own money. Earned by themselves. Giving them the illusion of independence. To be spent, in illusory moments like these, on themselves. In a conspiracy of spirit.
‘From the bonnie bells of heather
We brewed ale in auld lang syne’
The young woman started to sing in an uprush of feeling that had come over them. Each for the other.
‘It was sweeter far than honey
It was stronger far than wine . . .’
They hadn’t really seen the heather this year, Meg reminded them, tugging them to a standstill, to reflect on the enormity of such a loss. They’d just never got the length of the hill. Time had flown by so fast. And they had no idea where it had gone. There would be other times though. The hill would always be there. At least they had managed to pick the blackberries. A lesser pleasure, the young woman remembered. Riving and tugging amongst the thorny bushes, to emerge as fretful as porcupines. Linking arms together again, they set off for the Cottar Row.
It was sweeter far than honey
It was stronger far than wine.
The young woman was, on this night, the most affluent wife in the Cottar Row, with silver in the tea caddy. And paper money under the mattress.
Snecking her door, she drew her curtains to shut out the inquisitive eye of the night before she settled down at the kitchen table to help her man with the count. They knew to sixpence how much the tea caddy contained. And to a pound how much lay under the mattress. But this was the night of the grand total, with its addition of harvest money. Mill money. And tattie money . . . ‘All the gold in the world’, she remembered. Here it was, spread out in front of them. It had taken on a different dimension from past nights of reckoning though, and become a kind of atonement for the guilt she felt for the betrayal of her feelings towards her man. If he had been a bad man, she thought as she watched him, quiet and serious, smoothing out the crumpled bank notes, or if only he had been her father, or even her brother . . . Jumping up from the table, she could hear herself beginning to gabble. She had worked hard at the threshing mill, hadn’t she now? Even Finlay admitted that. She would work there again. It was well worth it. Wasn’t it? Kirsty and Meg didn’t have as much money as she had the night. But then, they hadn’t worked as hard as her. Wasn’t that right?
‘Aye,’ her man agreed. That was right, that was right enough. Advising her to ‘settle yourself down now. Or you’ll put me clean off the count.’ The real joy of the count lay in the spending of the total.
‘Curtains,’ she suggested. ‘New curtains. Like the ones Kirsty got out of her catalogue.’
There was nothing wrong with the curtains they had, her man pointed out. They were more in need of new planks to shore up the old hen-house.
‘Cockerels, then. Six-week-old cockerels, for fattening up. To sell to the butcher’s van at Christmas.’
‘Some late for that,’ her man reminded her, ‘with Christmas only weeks away.’
‘What about bikes, then? Two second-hand bikes.’
He saw no need for bikes either. ‘Not when the milk lorry runs us into town. On our day off.’
That was only once a month, she protested. There were other times. Other places to see.
Never as far as Napoli, though. Never as far as Roma.
Extra money never bought ‘extra’ things, she realised, as she let the coins trickle through her fingers, having lost interest in their purchasing power. It came down to essentials after all.
‘Even the prisoners have bikes,’ she reflected, as the sounds of laughter reached them from the bothy next door.
‘They have that,’ her man agreed. ‘But then, they didn’t have to pay for them.’
* * *
Kirsty and Meg had already perched themselves up in the dyke. On the lookout for the grocer’s van. And Elspeth had begun to make her way down the hill from Achullen. Poised uncertainly on her doorstep, the young woman decided to join the other wives before Elspeth reached them. She found it easier to stand quiet, within the silence that Elspeth’s presence always brought with it now, than to go crashing through, and into the middle of it.
Strange how herself and Elspeth, who had always had so much to speak about, now seemed to communicate through the voices of Meg and Kirsty.
‘Grocer. Quando?’ Luigi’s voice rang across from the steps of the bothy. ‘Quando? Grocer.’ Unwilling to respond, the young woman squeezed herself further into the circle of her silent neighbours.
‘Your Italian friend is crying on you,’ Kirsty nudged her, breaking the silence, turning away to confide in Elspeth. ‘Little did I think. Little did I dream that a day would come, when we’d have to share the grocer’s van with prisoners-of-war.’
‘Italians at that,’ Elspeth said. For their men, she concluded, their prisoners-of-war in Germany wouldn’t get such liberties. Their men wouldn’t have a copper in their pockets to lash out on anything they fancied.
‘It’s only pocket money,’ the young woman protested. ‘Only for little extras. Shaving soap. Things like that.’
‘Shaving soap!’ The very idea of it, Kirsty claimed, took her breath away. Though it seemed to leave her with enough breath to belittle the commodity, claiming that a bit of carbolic, ‘worked up into a lather’, was good enough for her man. An ounce of bogie a week. A pint of ale on a Saturday. That was the extent of Kirsty’s man’s ‘extras’.
There was, the young woma
n thought, something in Kirsty’s condemnation. Her man had said the self-same thing about the second-hand bikes. Extras were rare in their own lives, hard to come by.
‘Quando? Quando come grocer?’
‘For the love of goodness,’ Meg advised the young woman, ‘have a word with that Italian of yours, or he’ll stand bawling there all night.’
‘Pronto!’ she shouted across to Luigi. ‘Grocer pronto.’ The anger she heard rising up in her voice was inexplicably directed against him.
‘She can even speak Italian now,’ Elspeth said, turning to the other wives.
* * *
They rightly referred to the grocer’s van, rather than to the grocer himself. Peering down on them from between its shelves, his bulk prevented them from having a real good look at his wares, as if he, himself, were reluctant to reveal them. What was it that ‘the Eyetie’ wanted, he demanded, in a tone that implied whatever it was, he might not be of a mind to supply it.
‘Pig. Pig me like. Prego.’
Flummoxed by Luigi’s request, the grocer’s van threw it to the waiting wives for their consideration. ‘ “Pig,” he says. Well, well then, so he would like pig.’
‘It’s bacon he wants.’ The young woman stepped forward. ‘Bacon. That’s what he wants.’
He would need coupons for that, the grocer’s van snapped. And as far as he knew, prisoners didn’t have coupons.
That was right, the young woman conceded. Their coupons were held in the camp. He could, she offered, have some of hers, since there was no law against that! There was no virtue in her offer. It was just that bacon—a luxury at any time—was seldom on her own list.
Herself and Meg, Kirsty offered, would see Elspeth up the length of the hill. For it was just the night for a walk. It was, the young woman remembered, watching them set off together, the kind of night she liked in the days when she accompanied Elspeth. The frost sealed the world to itself. It held the earth, as the moon took to the sky. It would already have begun to weave its fine silver webs on every whin bush from here up to Achullen. She could never resist drawing her fingers through those fine silver webs. A compulsion for touch’s sake. To see if they felt as cold as they looked. Strange that she should remember such a small pleasure with such regret.
‘You no walk? No walk with friends?’ Luigi put his arm across her shoulder.
‘No. Too cold for me. Too much cold.’
* * *
‘Sileence!’ Luigi shot up his arm in command, when she opened the door of the bothy. ‘Sileence. Umberto write. Lettera for me. Mama Mia.’
Paolo, on his stool by the fire, sat entwining his rosary beads around his fingers. The way that Elspeth used to wind her wool on winter nights. ‘Scusi,’ Paolo greeted her, starting to rise up from the stool. ‘No, Paolo,’ easing him down, she shook her head. ‘YOU scusi. You scusi ME.’
Luigi, crouched over Umberto’s shoulder, as if such close physical contact could instill Umberto with words, the words that Luigi himself struggled to find, was beginning to batter against the barrier of Umberto’s objections and rejections.
It wasn’t possible, Umberto insisted. ‘Imposseeble’ for Luigi to mention in a letter that some friends from Napoli had arrived at the main camp. Censorship, Umberto pointed out, would never pass that. Censorship, it appeared, would never pass any of the things Luigi wanted to write.
‘Perche? Perche? Perche imposseeble? PERCHE?’
Perche. Luigi’s anguished whys began to pervade the bothy, countered by the calm, sharp logic of the ex-schoolteacher, until it seemed that nothing worth communicating could ever be penned.
Tearing the letter from Umberto’s hands, to utter the half-truths it contained—Health good . . . plenty rain . . . time soon pass . . . food OK . . .
‘Clock,’ she said, minding on her mission and moving towards the mantelpiece to reset their alarm clock. ‘Tomorrow, one hour early. Tomorrow, winter come.’
* * *
A cold snap had set in. On a morning like this, you’d want to crack the frost-bound world wide open. The men were already setting out to do so. Armed with forks to crash through the ice on the cattle troughs. The others armed with billhooks on their way to the turnip field, on an even more arctic expedition.
‘It’s neeps or forks,’ Finlay was bawling at Luigi. It was always the same when the men were divided into two squads. It always set Luigi dithering, wondering which job would be the easier. Even now with the bogies starting to move off, he darted between one and the other, holding everything and everybody up.
‘The one’s as bad as the other,’ Finlay roared. ‘You can either break your back pulling neeps. Or dislocate your shoulder cracking ice. And I don’t give a bugger what you do, so long as you get a move on and do it!’
‘Gloves no good,’ the young woman tried to persuade Luigi, as he hunched himself round to the back of the turnip bogie. Muffled from head to foot in his balaclava and top coat. Looking for all the world like a picture she had once seen of Scott of the Antarctic. A different kind of explorer, Luigi, but still an explorer adrift in an alien world of turnip shaws and cattle troughs.
‘Gloves no good for turnips,’ she assured him. ‘Gloves get wet. Fingers get frozen.’
‘O come all ye faithful
Joyful and triumphant . . .’
she could hear Kirsty carolling more clearly than she could see her. A dim figure, sweeping her doorstep against the snow whirling down around her. A waste of energy, but not of spirit. Simply a bursting free from the ice-bound days.
‘Thank God the snow’s come at last!’ Kirsty shouted across to her. ‘It’ll take the bite out of the air.’
Even so, Kirsty’s largesse of spirit didn’t extend to accepting the young woman’s invitation to accompany her to Achullen Wood, in search of holly. Although there were holly trees in Achullen Wood, not a one of them, Kirsty claimed, had ever borne a berry. Not in all her years of knowing them.
But then, they were wary, Kirsty and Meg, of the wild abundance that flourished outside their own small, cultivated yards. And the wildness had long since gone out of the flowers they grew and cherished. Flowers with heart-remembered names. Snow in Summer. Lad’s Love. Dusty Miller. Heart’s Ease.
How horrified Kirsty had been last spring when the young woman had gathered hawthorn blossom and set it in a jar on her windowsill. Kirsty’s mother would never allow her to bring hawthorn blossoms into the house, certain that trouble or death would follow in its wake.
She hadn’t believed that of course. But the idea of it had darkened the white cloud of flowers, had dulled her pleasure in them. Sown by a word, superstition’s omen became accepted.
Achullen Wood stood white and sculptured in the precision of its winter, defying an intruder to leave a footmark that would break into the delicately traced signatures of its own inhabitants. Defying an intruder to sound out against its silence, the snap of the holly branches shouting sacrilege in her ears.
She had warned her well, Kirsty said, staring on the berryless bounty the young woman had lugged back to the Cottar Row. For Kirsty knew fine there would be not a berry on the holly. It would, she pointed out regretfully, have been far better to have collected fir cones in the autumn, and painted them all over with yon silver stuff, the way that wife had shown them at the W.R.I. Still, Kirsty conceded, they’d had more on their minds than silver cones in the autumn. Forbye, it was a real ‘scutter’ of a job. If you hadn’t ‘got the hands’ for it. But surely, surely, the young woman wasn’t going to kirn up her kitchen with that berryless stuff.
It was really for the Italians, the young woman explained. They set such store by Christmas.
It was to be hoped, Kirsty protested, that they wouldn’t be kicking up a din, like they always did, with the comings and goings from the camp of strange Italians that you’d never set eyes on. And all the singing that was on them all, into all hours of the night.
* * *
She had set the holly in a jar on the windowsill
of the bothy. Three Christmas cards on their mantelpiece. And put the box of dates she had wheedled from the grocer’s van on the table.
‘Buona Natale,’ she greeted the Italians. ‘Buona Natale.’
The singing that had rung out from the bothy last night left no echo behind itself this morning. If I could paint, she thought, staring round the bothy, I couldn’t capture Christmas. Only a jumbled image of letterless days. Selected by time. Pounced upon. Held high in time’s hands for microscopic examination.
‘Buona Natale,’ she said again to the silent figures on the frieze of her perception. ‘Buona Natale.’
‘Christmas ITALIA!’ mumbled Luigi from beneath the blankets.
‘Natale here too, Luigi.’
‘ITALIA Natale.’
‘Natale everywhere.’
‘Prego. Molto gentile.’ Paolo’s voice reached her as she made for the door. ‘Grazie.’
Maybe Christmas could only happen in Italy, she thought, gazing across on the turnip field where the men were already at work. There was no sign of it on the farm.
* * *
‘We’re in for it now, then,’ her man prophesied, as the bicycles rang past their door. ‘That’ll be some of them over from the camp. We’ll be in for a night of it.’
Maybe the Mass the Italians had attended in the morning had worked some Christmas wonder—beyond the power of holly, and three Christmas cards.
‘We were invited,’ she reminded her man. ‘You too.’ She could please herself. But not him. He would never, he claimed, understand a word they were saying.
She didn’t understand many of the words either, but she could sometimes interpret the sound of them . . .
Another Time, Another Place Page 6