Another Time, Another Place

by Jessie Kesson

  ‘It wasn’t Luigi.’ She heard herself telling the officer. ‘It couldn’t have been Luigi.’

  . . . Father forgive me for I have sinned . . .

  That, she realised, must be the easiest part of the confessional. The sinfulness announced, but the sin not yet defined. The officer’s eyebrows rising up in perplexity, demanded definiton.

  ‘Luigi was with me. Up in the heather. When . . . that happened to Else.’

  ‘I see.’ He didn’t, not clearly. His hands scrabbled amongst the papers on his desk as if proof of her statement could be found there. Or maybe, maybe she thought, he was searching for words that could afford her a loophole.

  ‘The time?’ he asked. The precise time she had spent with Luigi, could she remember that?

  ‘No.’ She couldn’t remember that. ‘Not precisely.’ Time out of bounds, time out of mind, time of that kind defied precision.

  Her relationship with the Italian, was it of ‘an intimate nature’? Yes, she had known the nature of the barrow-boy from the slums of Naples, had instantly recognised it, and had deeply understood it. But she knew that was not what the officer meant by ‘intimacy’—knowing. Abraham and Sarah, she remembered, recalling long sermons in the kirk of her girlhood, shortened by her avid researches through the Old Testament. Knowing and begetting.

  ‘Yes,’ she said to the officer.

  ‘A prisoner and a civilian, any civilian,’ the officer was emphasising, ‘in such circumstances . . . You understand?’ His words fading in horror of the realisation that engulfed her. The conviction against Luigi would stand, confirmed by her compulsive confession. Else, by admitting that she could not ‘identify’, had spared him that.

  Twice she had lost the rudiments of dignity, that outward physical dignity that held the visible self together. Once in the heather with Luigi, and now on leaving the officer’s room. Strange, that on both occasions it was the landscape, the land’s life, against which she had protested strongly, that came to her temporary release, diminishing horror.

  Losing herself in the absorption of the solitude of the dark mountain peaks on the other side of the water. Dissolving with herself in their indifference to pain, blame or shame.

  * * *

  ‘That’s that then,’ Finlay said as they straightened themselves up from the stooking to wave goodbye to the jeeps crammed with Italian prisoners on their way to home and freedom. ‘The Looeeshee one will not see that Napoli of his in a hurry. Poor bugger.’

  ‘Poor bugger right enough,’ Beel agreed. ‘For there’s damn all wrong with Else. A bit tousled and scrattit, but as right as rain now that she’s gotten over her skirling and blubbering. Beginning to brag about it now. And no more ravished than Kirsty standing there was ravished.’

  She herself, Kirsty admitted, had never had much time for the Looeeshee one. Too cocksure of himself. But for all that, knowing Else, no man body needed to go the length of rape with that one, not even Looeeshee.

  That was as maybe, Finlay pointed out, grabbing the sheaves to set their minds, by his own example, back to the stooking again. ‘One of you,’ he suggested, ‘might just take a turn up to Achullen to see if Elspeth’s of a mind to give us a hand now that we’ve lost the Italians.’

  * * *

  Elspeth, on her knees, was uprooting the withered nasturtium leaves that drooped amongst the whitewashed stones around her door.

  ‘Finlay says,’ the young woman addressed Elspeth’s back, rigid and bent, ‘Finlay was won­dering, Elspeth . . .’

  ‘So. Finlay was wondering, was he?’ Elspeth spoke without raising her eyes from the ground.

  ‘Elspeth,’ the young woman knelt by the bent figure, to make sure that Elspeth would hear. ‘They’ve gone. The Italians. They’ve gone, Elspeth.’

  ‘You was saying about Finlay?’ Heaving herself to her feet Elspeth flung the withered nasturtium leaves over the fence, keeping a firm grip on the trowel in her hand, as if one wrong word would set it and herself down in attack among the stones again. ‘Finlay. You was saying about Finlay . . .’

  ‘The Italians, Elspeth, they’ve gone.’

  ‘I see.’ Elspeth stood considering what she saw. Her own pain or a reflection of pain that betrayed the young woman by rising sudden up out of its secrecy to look out of her eyes.

  ‘You’d better come in.’ Scraping her trowel careful and clean on the grindstone by the door, she repeated the invitation. ‘You’d better come on inside.’

  * * *

  Only the empty bookshelves in Umberto’s corner and the cigarette stubs lying in the grate remained as proof that the bothy had recently been inhabited. Staring around it, the young woman’s eyes came to rest on the poster of the Madonna still hanging on the wall. Askew now, as if her usefulness was over. She’d had a hard time, this Scottish Madonna, miracles demanded daily, blame and praise in equal measure.

  It was when she was turning to go that the young woman noticed the ship inside a bottle lying on the table. She had caught brief glimpses of it in Paolo’s furtive hands, but now it lay revealed in completion. Lifting it to examine it she saw the note hidden beneath it . . .

  Dina

  Con amore e molta felicità

  Paolo Umberto Luigi

  They had never known her real name, she remembered. And had bequeathed her with a name of their own choice.

  ‘Wifie’, the general title of the Cottar Row touched both her mind and her mouth with irony. Wifie. Luigi would never have found the Italian word for that in his dictionary. Wifie, the title that had made her feel old before her time. Quine. Lass. That was different now, but used rarely, and only by the men.

  ‘How did they get that ship into the bottle?’ the bairns demanded, crowding round the bothy door. ‘How did they get it inside?’

  She didn’t know either, it would remain a marvel and a mystery. But she knew what ‘con amore’ meant, that was what she did know.