by John Harris
Hannay looked disappointed but he showed no signs of moving, and Patch lost his temper, ‘Oh, hell, man,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a fixation about the bloody mountain!’
‘No, I ’aven’t.’ Hannay seemed indignant to the point of anger. ‘I mentioned it to that Orlesi bloke when I saw him today – the chap who runs the sulphur for Forla. If anybody’s got a fixation it’s you and him and all the others who think there’s nothing happening up there on that flipping mountain. I talked myself black in the face to him. I might just as well have saved me breath. What noise? says he, as if I was something the cat had brought in. What smoke? What rumble? Like he’d gone deaf and blind and bloody daft. I could have sloshed him one across the jaw. What smoke? My God, it’s there plain as the nose on your face. All he did was wag his mitts at me and dodge the subject. Understand my meaning?’
He drew a deep breath while Patch waited for him to continue. ‘I suppose you know,’ he said, ‘that he’s having trouble with the sulphur workers? They can’t work for talking. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. Well, they wouldn’t stop unless they’d got reason. That’s why they haven’t started loading me yet. I was ahead of me schedule when I arrived here. But now–’ he left the sentence hanging in the air, heavy with contempt for Italian organisation.
‘Look,’ he said eventually, ‘it’s my opinion Orlesi and Pelli and their pals don’t want to hear that mountain. They’re frightened of it upsetting business, like you said. Don’t you think you ought to give ’em a bit of a push?’
There was silence for a moment because Patch couldn’t think of anything to say. Hannay was one of those worrying, nagging little people who are always canvassing for a lost cause. If he hadn’t been a ship’s captain, he’d have been president of a league to reduce taxes or to stop them putting up the rates, or standing for Parliament on a platform of anti-vivisection.
‘For Christ’s sake, why me?’ he asked at last.
Hannay stared back unblinkingly. ‘Influence,’ he said simply. ‘It wants somebody with influence. I thought you was pulling my leg with all that talk about Thomas Patch, the painter. Now I know you weren’t. Everybody knows you. Even Anderson, my Number One. Suppose you went to the Mayor and told him you’d got the wind up–’
‘But I haven’t.’
‘You can say you have.’ Hannay was getting irritated.
‘You could say you was worried about the mountain.’
‘It’s not my affair.’
‘It’s everybody’s affair.’
‘Then why the hell don’t you go? Your ship’s in danger if anything happens. That makes it your affair.’
‘I’ve been once,’ Hannay said angrily. ‘And a fat lot of good I got out of it too. If I go again, they’ll just tell me to take me ship away if I don’t like it.’
‘Well, why don’t you?’
Hannay’s face set in an expression of tortured patience.
‘Well, for one thing, I’m supposed to stay ’ere till I get what I came for,’ he said. ‘And for another, I’m not just thinking of me ship. I’m thinking of a few other perishers, too.’
‘A few others? Who, for God’s sake, who can’t look after themselves?’
‘All these Eyeties. All these damn’ people on the island.’
Patch was frankly baffled. Hannay clearly considered it his duty to concern himself with Mont’ Amarea and everybody’s right to expect his concern.
‘You seem to be bloody fond of the Eyeties,’ he said.
‘Oh, but I’m not.’ Hannay shook his head and there was in his face that smug expression that made Patch want to throw something at him, a secure self-righteousness, but at the same time a consciousness of being right that was curiously disarming. ‘Anything but, Mister. I think they’re a treacherous lot of bastards. They nobbled me in Venice in 1940 before the war had even started and I spent the whole blasted shooting match as a prisoner. That’s why I’m the driver of that little sardine tin I’ve got instead of one of the company’s bigger ships. I missed all the best chances. They went to the blokes who’d stayed out of the bag and collected all the medals.’
There was no bitterness in Hannay’s voice. He was merely stating facts, without any bias against the people who had passed him over or against the men who had been chosen in his place. ‘I was Third Mate on the Orloway then. The bastards held up the ship’s manifest. They wouldn’t give us a clean bill of health. They did all they could to stop us leaving. The old game of diplomacy. Understand my meaning? ‘Annay was all for pushing off and chancing it but the captain was an old grannie. He tied himself in knots like an old woman’s entrails trying to sort things out. But it didn’t work. Mussolini declared war and a naval party just walked aboard and ‘Annay went into an internment camp. Where do you think I learned to speak Italian like I do?’
‘I often wondered.’
In spite of his grin, Patch was disturbed by Hannay’s stubbornness and the clear feeling of anxiety that prompted his interest in the islanders’ safety.
‘If somebody else went, they might begin to take some notice,’ Hannay continued. ‘There must be something in it, they’d say, or people wouldn’t be scared. You could say you’d been asked by the rest of the English people on the island to enquire.’
‘I’ll wait until they do.’
Hannay snorted disgustedly. ‘Don’t you ever feel no sense of responsibility?’ he demanded.
Patch shrugged. ‘Who ever heard of a responsible artist?’ He looked at Hannay for a moment, puzzled. ‘It’s no good going on at me,’ he said. ‘I like this place. I picked it out of the whole damn’ world to live in. Now you come, skittish as an old streetwalker looking for a fight, and start pulling it to pieces.’
‘I’m not pulling it to pieces. I want to know what’s going on. I want something certain. Not some half-baked political reply.’
‘Well, ask somebody else. If I tried, I’d probably make a mess of it anyway. I hate being practical. I’m a thinker, not a doer.’
‘You could try.’
Patch turned slowly. ‘Do you go round the world in your little boat stirring up trouble everywhere you come to?’
‘No, I don’t. You know damn well I don’t.’
Patch swung away again and spoke over his shoulder. ‘Then, for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘leave me alone. I came here to get away from people who liked to mind my business. There are too many of ’em in this world. Some of ’em are politicians and some of ’em are newspapermen but they all suffer from the same mistaken impression, like you do, that they’ve a right to tell people what to do. Besides, I’m not the type to follow a cause. My name’s Tom Patch, not Joan of Arc.’
Seven
Four days later, as Mont’ Amarea cast violet shadows along the sea, Alfredo Meucci, Mamma Meucci’s husband, puffed at the scrap of cigarette end he had rescued from his pocket.
His fishing boat was drifting gently near to Capo Amarea and behind him, as the boat swung, the ruins of the Aragonese castle shone in blocks of purple and pink as the early morning sun slanted across it. The mountain stood over the town like a crouching lion.
He sat back, watching the bobbing corks of his lobster pots close inshore and enjoyed the last puffs at the crumbling cigarette end. He had three more pots to drop before he could return home to Mamma Meucci’s breakfast.
As he threw the cigarette away, the throbbing engine in front of him set the headboard of its casing rattling as the propeller lifted out of the water on a sudden steep swell that slid obliquely across the headland, and Meucci turned his lined mahogany face in the direction it had come from, watching for a repetition, his hand on the tiller to counter it.
‘That was a big one, Tomaso,’ he said to his companion, who was sitting in the bows cutting up the heads of Tyrrhenian mullet for bait.
Tomaso, his tangled black curls over his eyes like a mop, gazed towards Capo Amarea, his brows drawn down in a puzzled frown.
‘That’s the third,’ he pointed out. ‘
Where are they coming from?’
The two of them stared across the smooth water that lifted in translucent meadows of blue and watched the big swell roll away towards the open sea.
‘There’s no wind,’ Tomaso pointed out. ‘There’s been no wind since the storm the other day.’
Meucci didn’t answer. He was staring out beyond the headland, his eyes fixed on a stretch of ruffled water. He squinted at it for a moment longer, his eyes unwavering as he concentrated, then he bent over the engine.
‘Let’s move on,’ he said abruptly. ‘We’ll work towards that patch under the headland. There’s something there. The water’s moving. It might be fish.’
Putting the engine into gear, they moved inshore again and emptied the rest of the lobster pots, Tomaso scooping the dripping baskets out of the water expertly, removing the lobsters, jamming the head of a mullet in place with a sharpened stick and dropping them quickly into the sea again. Then Meucci swung the boat’s head towards Capo Amarea and the disturbed water he had seen. His face was expressionless.
He shut down the engine as the boat slipped into the cold shadow of the headland, a gloomy place of wild dark cliffs where black water slopped at the rocks and the crying gulls flew alone. Tomaso busied himself with lines and bait, whistling. ‘The Blessed Madonna’s probably brought us a shoal,’ he said cheerfully. He looked up as his companion didn’t reply and he realised that Meucci had become strangely grave. He stopped what he was doing and swung round. ‘What’s wrong, Alfredo?’
Meucci was staring round him, his face puzzled.
‘There are no fish here,’ he said with certainty, sniffing the air like a dog. ‘Perhaps it’s nothing to do with the Madonna at all. Perhaps even it bears the thumb-print of the Devil.’
Tomaso looked at him wonderingly and turned back towards his work, subdued by the older man’s gravity, chilled by the shadow of the headland and the sudden depth of the sea. He baited hooks for a while longer, then he leaned over to wash the slime of dead fish from his fingers, but as he brought his hand out of the water the look on his face changed to surprise. ‘Alfredo,’ he shouted. ‘The water’s warm here!’
Meucci let go the tiller and leaned over the side. As he straightened up, he was also staring with puzzled eyes at the sparkling drops that fell from his wrist. Silently he put his hand into the water again, withdrew it, then leaned over and shoved the engine into gear once more, fiddling inside the engine house, as though he were looking for something to do.
The bewilderment that had given way to gravity had changed again to something akin to superstitious fear. There, in the shadow of the headland where the sun very rarely penetrated, the water was never anything but cold as the grave. The whole area of sea under the cliffs had a soggy dampness that went with the shadows and the mournful cries of the gulls and the black craggy rocks where the seaweed washed backwards and forwards like the hair of drowned sailors. In a lifetime of fishing in every inlet and bay of the island, Meucci had never known the water anything but icy.
‘Why is it so warm, Alfredo?’ Tomaso repeated, thinking suddenly quiet.
Meucci was staring again at the drops of water among the thick black hairs on his hand.
‘Why is it so warm, Alfredo?’ Tomaso repeated, thinking the old man hadn’t heard him.
Meucci lowered his hand and started to life again.
‘I don’t know,’ he said slowly, not looking at Tomaso. ‘I don’t know, Tomaso. Perhaps even it was hot not so long ago.’
Even as he replied, the engine started to run raggedly and he switched it off with the precise movements of a man not familiar with mechanical things. Around them the silence under the headland seemed immense after the thump-thump-thump of the engine. Then another of the tremendous unexplained swells hit them and the boat swung alarmingly as the huge dark ripple slid beyond them across the bay.
Meucci regained his balance and, bending over, examined the engine.
‘We’ll use the sail,’ he said, half to himself. ‘It’s no good trying to cool engines with water as hot as this is.’
‘Alfredo–’ Tomaso’s anxious voice broke sharply in on his musing and he swung in the direction of the pointing finger, ‘–look, the sea’s alive!’
A vast slow bubble was rising to the surface near them, white and empty and glassy, and as it burst in a thin film of spray that caught the sun edging round the headland, they saw wisps of steam break from it and lift away into the air. Then they noticed other wisps of steam all round them and realised the sea was stirred by other bubbles. Meucci and Tomaso stared at them, frozen by surprise, Tomaso’s knees bending slowly until his head was low behind the gunwale of the boat, only his nose and eyes above its edge.
‘Alfredo, what’s happening?’ His voice was only a whisper as though he were afraid of being overheard.
‘The swells! This is where the swells come from!’ Meucci was crouching too, now, both hands resting on the gunwale of the boat, listening.
‘Ascolti, Tomaso,’ he breathed. ‘Listen! Do you hear that noise?’
Tomaso, his eyes wide, cocked his head and together they could hear a rumbling, low and muffled, as though it came from under the sea.
‘What is it?’ Tomaso twisted on his knees in the slimy bottom of the boat, his eyes fixed again on the brown face of Meucci. ‘It’s like a coffee-pot when it starts to boil.’
He glanced at the sea then at Meucci again, both of them aware now of the eeriness of the sound below them, and the sensation of being surrounded by something malevolent.
‘Do you notice the smell, Tomaso,’ Meucci whispered. ‘It’s the smell of brimstone, the smell of the Devil.’ He crossed himself quickly.
Tomaso sniffed. ‘It smells like Forla’s sulphur lorries,’ he said in more matter-of-fact tones.
With eyes opaque with bewilderment, Meucci stared at the boiling sea for a second longer, then he scrambled to his feet and grabbed for the sails with the clumsy movements of a frightened old man.
‘Quickly–’ he seemed impatient and anxious to be away from the spot, ‘–get the lines inboard, Tomaso. We’d better head home. I’m hungry.’
Eight
When Patch went down to the mole, blinking in the sun rebounding from the walls in a dazzling glare that hurt the eyes, the crowd round Meucci’s boat was like a flock of sea-gulls round a patch of garbage. There were men and women and children, most of them from the harbour area, many of them barefooted and all of them talking at the tops of their voices. Behind them, the narrow houses, washed in pinks and yellows and blues which had peeled off to a scaly tawdriness or had run in the recent heavy rains into great tear-stains beneath the windows, stood like a stage set for a play. Somewhere beyond them, in a blare of sound that seemed to rattle the windows and shudder the lopsided shutters, a loud-speaker car was playing patriotic songs, but it went un-heeded for once like the strings of garlic and the bunches of pimentoes and the twine and the buckets in the empty little shops whose owners argued round Meucci’s boat.
Meucci himself was pottering with the engine, his head inside the casing. His face was grave and he was saying nothing. It was Tomaso who was doing all the talking.
Behind them lay the bulk of Hannay’s ship, nearer to the end of the mole, sharp and clear in the sun which picked out the rust marks where the water had run out of the scuppers. Across the foredeck, a string of underwear was stretched motionless in the still, hot air; and half a dozen Lascar firemen hung over the rail, watching the raggle-taggle of people arguing round the fishermen.
Cristoforo was sitting on an old lobster pot on the fringe of the crowd, his dog beside him, its muzzle under its chin. Patch lit a cigarette and held one out to Cristoforo. To his surprise, the boy shook his head, though he looked at the cigarette a little wistfully.
‘Signor Tom, I have stopped smoking.’
Patch raised his eyebrows. ‘Since when?’
‘Since yesterday, signore. The Captain Hannay says it stunts the growth.’
‘I do, Signor Tom. The Sir Captain says I will never make a sailor if I’m small.’
Patch grinned. The sun, coming over the mountain, was warming to his back and he felt pleasantly lazy. He had been working since daylight with the frenzied energy that sometimes caught him, and he felt now like sitting and absorbing the colour, the reds and blues of the crowd round the boat, the sharp block of black from the ship and the grubby pastel shades of the houses in the background.
Then he noticed Cristoforo studying the sky. It was already the vivid trembling azure of the travel posters and against it the mountain stood out in sharp greys and purples.
He watched the expression on the boy’s face for a while. He was a handsome intelligent youngster and it seemed a pity that he would end up like most of the other children of the harbour; without a church-going, God-fearing mother to hold him straight; slapped by the nuns, cheeking the priests, chased by the police, fighting with the older boys, each day growing more raucous-voiced and sharper with his wits. Then he remembered what Hannay had said about adopting him and it occurred to him that, in stopping Cristoforo smoking, he had already made the first move towards it. Suddenly Patch felt better about Cristoforo and found himself prepared to bet on Hannay’s success.
Instead of teasing Cristoforo again, he spoke gently and with real interest.
‘What can you see up there, Cristoforo?’ he asked, staring up into the sky with him.
‘It’s not what I can see,’ the boy said. ‘It’s what I can’t see.’
‘Well, then, what can’t you see?’
‘Birds, Signor Tom. No birds.’
Patch indicated the seagulls squalling on the water round the scraps of fish Tomaso was throwing out of the bottom of the boat. ‘What are they?’ he asked.