* * *
The whole of Italia seemed to be crowded inside the bothy. The emotionalism of the relationship between the prisoners something beyond her ken. A physical embrace between men, something she had never seen before. They were sparing of loving words and gestures, the men on the farm. If ever she were to set eyes on Finlay clasping Beel in his arms she would have thought they had lost their wits in a world that had come to an end.
‘Buona Natale, signorina.’ One of the visiting Italians stepped forward to greet her.
‘Buona Natale,’ she responded, smiling because she knew she had got the accent right.
‘Parla italiano. Lei parla italiano.’ He swung round to inform the company. ‘Allora! Lei parla . . .’
His reaction overwhelmed her, forcing her into truth. ‘Poco italiano. Poco poco . . .’
‘Poco. Poco!’ They began to surround her. Grinning in appreciation. ‘Bene. Bene.’
‘Dance me.’ Elbowing his way through them, Luigi laid claim on her. ‘Dance. Me.’
* * *
‘Che bella cosa,’ he sang, his head thrown back, his eyes closed as they circled as if in a trance.
‘Che bella cosa,’ the others took up the song, serenading her within a circle of music.
‘Che bella cosa . . .’
Never before had she felt so desirable. Knowing in that moment how Eve must have felt, waking up from the trance of her creation, to look into the dark, appreciative eyes of Adam.
Coyness, which until now, she hadn’t known she possessed, took over. Brought to the surface by her awareness of Paolo’s presence. Surely he would see her now, reflected in the admiration of other men’s eyes.
Tomorrow, she would feel ashamed of her posturing, of her emphasis on her physical attributes. So blatantly displayed, an offering to Paolo.
* * *
It could never be Paolo. She realised that, catching a glimpse of him, seated on the windowsill, absorbed in conversation with a friend from the camp, unaware of her existence, apart from the circle of celebration.
The dream that had so often kept her awake at night would have to be put by, laid away, maybe forgotten in time. The desert island her imagination had created for herself and Paolo, flora’d and fauna’d for their sole benefit and appreciation, that island would sink down and disappear into a sea for which she had not yet conjured up a name. That had distressed her: a dream, to be whole in substance, demanded perfection in the smallest of its parts.
‘One time posseeble,’ Luigi whispered, as he saw her to the door when the evening ended. ‘One time posseeble jiggy-jig. For Natale.’
For the first time, for seconds as long as centuries, she hesitated, trapped within her thoughts. She would lie quiet at nights now, by the side of her man, bereft of the ecstasy of her wakeful dreams, bereft of the possibility of Paolo.
‘No time possible,’ she said at last. ‘Maybe,’ she heard herself promise, aware of the anticipation that had come over Luigi. She owed him that much for her hesitation. ‘Maybe . . . some day. One day.’
* * *
‘That looks like the minister.’ Kirsty stopped in her tracks to rap on the young woman’s window. ‘I could swear it’s him, on one of his visitations.’
The sight of anybody, far down on the main road, always demanded their attention. Crusoe, catching his first glimpse of Man Friday. Sometimes, sometimes, the young woman had a great urge to cup her hands against her mouth and shout across the distance to any passer-by. ‘Look up. I’m here. Look up. And give me identity.’ Prisoners though the Italians were, they would one day be free of this isolation. She envied them that.
When she was a child, on her rare jaunts to the country, she had thought that the fields and woods and all of the land belonged to everybody. To each and all. Took the brown furrowed fields for granted, the way she accepted the wild hyacinths growing in the woods. She hadn’t realised that every acre of that wide, childhood land belonged to an individual, was the property of. And, for that property, other men worked the miracle of a precise and patterned earth, ploughing it, dragging it, rolling it to change its patterns to green shining corn.
Even now, grown up, the illusion would return, when she walked down to the village and turned to look back on the uplands she had left behind, seeing it the way a townsman might see it. The tractor quiet in the distance, purring across the fields. Beel and Finlay forking the hay for cattle fodder. Picturesque men. Silhouetted against the rick, a leisurely image. Unhurried, seen from a distance.
She knew now, though, that such images not only deceived the eye, they cheated the mind, for the tractorman was no leisurely tin toy figure, but a man who whiles needed the precision of a mathematician, or a lifetime’s experience, to manoeuvre his machine through its different tasks and different gradients.
Screwing her eyes tightly together, she could see that the corn had already begun to bree, covering the fields with a fine green mist. Hard to believe that such fragility had survived the heavy roller that had gone over it yesterday, hard to believe it survived such an onslaught in its small, shimmering, elasticity.
* * *
‘Lift up sacks. Lift up tatties. Lift up shit.’ Luigi grumbled as he came towards them at the end of a day spent in carrying sacks of potatoes to the lorry, for sale in the town. He hadn’t yet learned that the only way to carry a heavy sack was to hoist it high on his shoulders. His inability to do so had not only irritated the men who knew how, but had impeded their own bent and burdened approach to the lorry, and had aroused Finlay’s anger.
‘Finlay speak me lazy,’ he mourned. ‘Everybody speak me lazy. Plenty work me, Napoli. Plenty work . . .’
‘Plenty skive here,’ Kirsty muttered. ‘You’re not in Napoli now.’
Strange to hear the sound of Luigi’s city echoed by Kirsty. As if Napoli was a place with which she was familiar, and one that was not up to much in her opinion. Kirsty had no intimacy with cities. Even the knowledge of her market town was proscribed to High Street, MacInley’s Tearoom, and the bus terminal. For the young woman—with half her childhood spent in the streets—Luigi’s Napoli merged easily into her own remembrance. Not even ignorance of its language could have made of her an exile from Sturm und Drang. Thrust and parry. Pitting of wits. And sleight of hand . . .
‘I believe him,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s lazy when they’re doing the thing they like to do.’
‘You didn’t like the threshing mill,’ Kirsty pointed out. ‘You said that yourself. On and on about it for days, but you did it. That’s the difference. You did it.’
‘Milk!’ Luigi shouted from the door of the bothy. ‘Milk for supper, me.’
‘You’d better see to that one’s milk,’ Kirsty advised, turning to go. ‘Or he’ll stand bawling there all night. And you,’ she reminded Luigi, in the passing, ‘you had to wait till you was born.’
‘Luigi can wait,’ the young woman decided, catching up with Kirsty. ‘He can just wait till the other Italians come.’
Time, since the Italians’ Christmas party, had taken on a quality of nightmare in the young woman’s mind, had turned into a game of hide-and-seek, where the cry of ‘I spy’ became translated, on Luigi’s tongue, to the persistent reminder, ‘You promise. One day. You promise . . .’
Sometimes, the young woman remembered, sometimes in the lost days of childhood, the hiding place could become more fearful than discovery itself. She had felt safer when Paolo haunted her waking dreams than she felt now, confronted by the full-blooded reality of Luigi.
‘I would have thought he would have keepit to the hill,’ Kirsty said when the shepherd swung down into view. ‘Lambing being just on top of him,’ she concluded, straddling the seasons.
* * *
A man apart, the shepherd. Solitary, working only with other men at the shearing and dipping, even his cottage was outdistanced from the Cottar Row. The young woman liked the shepherd, and the fine ‘speaks’ they had on their rare encounters. The things she had learne
d from them. Snow, warm enough to kill, if you sheltered within it and fell asleep in its warmth. Sheep that whiles got drunk, gorging themselves on the young broom. The broom was as potent as that when young and new. The ewe, with the mischance to fall on her back, that would be dead within the hour. The creature unable to raise herself up again, because she was not ‘born balanced’. And hoodie crows, ‘the carrion brutes’, diving always to peck the eyes of the stillborn lambs.
She would like fine to work with the shepherd. There seemed to be no monotony to his days, unlike the other men, making their way home from the tattie shed. She had seldom seen them quicken their pace. They would walk in their downbent gait to their graves. It was monotony that was beginning to make herself feel old. Or maybe it was marriage that had shut a door, the door that led to romance and adventure, one that she had never given herself time to unlock.
‘There’s something amiss,’ Kirsty said, as they watched the shepherd signalling to the men. ‘Something gone wrong.’
‘Combustion,’ muttered Finlay, as he went past. ‘Shepherd saw it steaming up as he happened by.’ They’d gone, he roared in accusation to the men, and built the damned stack with stuff that was wersh. Too green. Too raw. And the best thing they could do now was to get themselves up to the barn for ladders, and move themselves down to the haystack.
Strange, the young woman thought, staring at the stack in the distance, standing as it had always stood. Nature secretly, stealthily, committing arson. Fire without flame.
There would be flame right enough, Kirsty assured her, if the stack was left to itself. They would soon see the flames rising when the men took the thatch from the top of the stack.
* * *
Green and growing taller the corn now. Out now in the field the cattle nosed the grass, sniffing out their old smells again. The farm-workers pausing to catch their breath between the urgency of seasonal demand. ‘Time now to straighten my back and light up my pipe,’ as Beel expressed it. And he surely needed that, was Kirsty’s dry observation, for she wondered why Beel ever bothered to smoke a pipe at all, since he never seemed to get the damned thing to draw.
But if the pace of the farm had slowed down, work in the cottages in the Row was beginning to speed up, was taking on frenzied proportions, Kirsty whitewashing the sills of her windows. And Meg, beating the life out of her ‘clootie’ rugs, gazing askance as the young woman swept past them, bound for Achullen Wood.
* * *
‘The weather,’ Kirsty warned, ‘could break any minute now.’ The tattie planting would soon be on top of them, Meg reminded her. And by the looks of it, the summer would be gone before the young woman made a start to her spring-cleaning.
‘The cleaning will keep,’ she shouted back, when she had got beyond reach of their reproaches. ‘The wild hyacinths won’t.’
The mass of them cast a blue bloom across the wood itself. Forcing themselves up into the consciousness of the trees. The only wood flowers that had the power to impose such colour. The early snowdrops couldn’t do that, she remembered, standing knee-high amongst the strong flowers. Nor the aconites. She had never been tempted to uproot the snowdrops, to take them away from the small, close intimacy of their groups. Meg and Kirsty always boasted that they loved flowers enough to let them grow. Maybe they had the right way of it. Maybe her love was too possessive. Too destructive.
Plunging her face down into their dew-drenched mass, her senses aching at the intensity of their scent . . .
Shade-loving hyacinth
Thou comest again
And thy rich odour seems to swell the flow
Of the lark’s song
The redbreast’s lonely strain . . .
They were right, Kirsty and Meg. She had to admit that. For the wild hyacinths began to droop in her arms, limp from the moment she had uprooted them from the wood. Protesting as she did so with their broken, squelching cry.
‘You go wood,’ darting out of the bothy, Luigi looked accusingly down on the hyacinths. ‘You no speak me you go wood. Perche? Perche you no speak wood? Me posseeble wood. You. You promise one day . . .’
All the water in the world could not revive the hyacinths. But she would never be guilty of such an offence against them again, for the wood had become proscribed territory. Luigi had unwittingly ensured that.
We’ll go no more a-roving
In the middle of the night
Tho’ the heart be ne’er so loving
And the moon be ne’er so bright . . .
* * *
‘I’ll never look a tattie in the face again,’ Kirsty vowed, straightening herself up from the drill she was planting. It was enough to put you off tatties for life, Meg agreed, reminding them there was still the Kerr’s Pinks to be planted yet. Her reminder causing them to stand in depressed contemplation of the work that still had to be done.
‘What’s all this then?’ Beel shouted from his tractor. ‘The Mothers’ Meeting?’
‘Fathers not invited.’ The young woman’s attempt at levity sounded flat to her own ears.
‘You want to get your backside up off that tractor,’ Kirsty advised him, ‘and get your back bent over the tattie drills.’
‘No chance,’ Beel laughed. ‘I wouldn’t want to do you all out of your jobs.’
‘Cut the claik,’ Finlay roared, taking a flying leap over the dyke, and landing himself amongst them in the tattie field. ‘Just you keep your mind on your tractor,’ he warned Beel. ‘You’re cutting the corners some fine. You’ll have the whole bloody caboodle coupit in amongst the drills.’
It served Beel right, they agreed, as they stood uncertain whether to get on with their planting again, or to wait in hope of a full scale ‘row’ blowing up between Finlay and Beel, giving them a legitimate excuse for a breathing space. It was Kirsty who came to the conclusion that they would be well advised to get on with the planting. ‘With Finlay in a mood like that. It’s well seen that he’d got out of bed wrong side this morning.’
‘Where to hell are the Italians?’ Finlay demanded. ‘I gave orders for every man jack of you to be at the tatties.’
The Italians, Beel reminded Finlay, were across there in the Nether Park, gathering stones and rooting up thistles as Finlay himself had ordered them.
‘Christ!’ Finlay’s expletive brought Beel’s tractor to a bumping halt, and riveted all attention on the field where the Italians were working. ‘You’ve gone,’ he accused Beel, ‘you’ve gone and given the buggers billhooks. They’ll have the legs cut off beneath each other.’
‘Want to see the Italians come at the double?’ the young woman whispered to Kirsty. ‘Watch this, then.’ Running to the dyke, she shouted across to the Nether Park, ‘Bull. Quick. Run Luigi. Bull come. Bull come quick.’
‘You stupid-looking bitch,’ Finlay thundered, as the Italians sent the billhooks flying and scrambled over the dyke to safety. ‘You’ll try that trick once too often.’
Lacking in appreciation. That was Finlay’s trouble. The young woman felt resentful. At least she had managed to get the Italians on to the tattie field ‘at the double’.
‘You would think,’ Kirsty commented, ‘that the Italians would know the difference between a bull and a cow by this time.’
‘It’s all that tits,’ Beel informed her, doubling up with laughter over his steering wheel. ‘That’s what gets the Italians muddled up. All that tits.’
It was Beel’s ‘pea-sized brain’ that got Beel ‘all muddled up’, Finlay snapped, and the sooner he took himself out of Finlay’s sight, the better.
* * *
The bad start to the morning set the ‘mood’ of the tattie planters for the rest of the day. The squad spirit had gone, with the Italians huddling dourly together and Finlay and Beel stumping around the field, ignoring each other.
The young woman would never, not if she lived to be a hundred, get used to the sudden changes of mood that could come over the workers. You would think a field too wide for offence to close over
it. The sky too high for offence to thrive beneath it.
The mood was infectious though. It was beginning to affect herself. She would never, she vowed, as she stumbled over the clods lying unbroken in the drill, she would never sing, laugh, dance, or try to cheer them up again.
Time itself began to be measured out in inches. Distance defined by the planting of a potato. Twelve inches one foot. One foot. One potato.
‘Another rotten tattie,’ Kirsty shouted over to Finlay, straightening herself up to wonder who on earth had he gotten to ‘sort this lot out. Enough to put you clean off your supper,’ she confided to the young woman since Finlay had taken no notice of her complaint. The young woman ignored it also . . . ‘I have piped unto you. And you have not danced. I have mourned with you. And you have not wept.’ She would do neither. Never again, renewing her vow as she hopped over to the dyke to free her wellingtons from the clods that encrusted them. No wonder the townsfolk nicknamed them clod-hoppers. No amount of harrowing, rolling, raking or gathering would ever free their earth of fast-cleaving clods . . .
‘I’m just helping myself to a two three wee tatties for my hennies,’ Kirsty was confessing to Finlay. ‘Is that all right with you?’
‘You can help yourself to the whole bloody field,’ Finlay barked, loping past them to guide Beel and the tractor through the narrow field. Desperate now for one civil word out of anybody at all in the whole wide world, Kirsty turned to the young woman as a last resort. ‘What about your hens? Are you not taking back a tattie or two for your hens?’
‘My hens,’ the young woman informed her, as she swayed to find her balance after a day rocking around in the tattie drills, ‘my hens wouldn’t look at rotten tatties.’
Another Time, Another Place Page 7