by John Harris
The Americans were grievously disappointed to find that no one was in immediate need of their wealth and man-power, but with transatlantic generosity they had started to land stores and men at once.
A conference was held in the saloon of the Great Watling Street, the Italian captain, who was the senior officer present, doing Hannay the honour of asking his opinion. Hannay confidently suggested that in spite of the crowds and the noise from the mountain the situation wasn’t half as bad as it had been earlier in the day, and pointed out that Mont’ Amarea was curiously quieter than it had been at noon; that the people were calm now that help had arrived and that there seemed no immediate need to evacuate any more than those who really wished to go. Daylight, he concluded, might be better than dark to start any serious evacuation and would cause less accidents.
The Italian captain concurred and an announcement was made over the ship’s loud-hailer that comforted the people on the mole in their chilly vigil through the night.
As the first faint tinges of grey edged into the purple of the night and it became possible to pick out faces among the mass of people in the piazza, they all stirred their stiff limbs and began to get to their feet to prepare for embarkation. The boats now stood ready to carry people out to the warships and the crowd began to bunch together in families, collecting their bundles around them.
Then someone pointed towards the summit of Amarea and his frantic, relieved shout split the morning air.
‘The mountain! Look! It’s stopped!’
Several heads were turned, then people struggled to their feet and stared at the slaty sides of the mountain in amazement.
The pall of mist and cinder dust which had been hanging over the crater for days had disappeared in the breeze which had sprung up, and only a steady column of smoke rose into the sky to mingle with the low cloud. Then they became aware that the noise they had listened to on and off half the night was dying and that now there was only the faint whistling sigh high again in the heavens.
There was a thin cheer from the crowd, which was broken by the whimpering of babies. Then someone stared at the ships in the bay beyond the Great Watling Street, and the knowledge that rescue was at hand gave them courage, and courage gave them the ready optimism of mankind.
‘It’s 1892 all over again! The mountain’s fooled us once more!’
There was a lot of laughter, some of it ashamed, some of it relieved, then old Tornielli, who had finally abandoned his cellar in the hope of being taken aboard a ship, claimed that he had not made his way to the shore through fear of the mountain but because he felt that the authorities might need some help if an evacuation were to take place.
‘I came to be close to the boat,’ Tomaso the fisherman said. ‘I can run faster than Meucci.’
‘I came because my wife insisted,’ someone else replied. ‘And because the children were frightened.’
Emiliano, on the fringe of the crowd, where he had been crouching with his family through the night, suddenly realised that among the crowd around him there were many from the topmost outskirts of the town, some of them even from the villages on the slopes above Forla’s palace, and that many of them would be seeking coffee and food as soon as they discovered they had come to no harm. Only a small bar at the end of the mole was there to provide it. Danger suddenly didn’t seem quite so imminent.
He rose to his feet and tucked up the apron he had still been wearing when he had put up the shutters and joined the crowd heading for the mole the night before. Then he set off hurriedly up the hill again towards the Piazza Martiri, shooing his children before him with gestures. Old Tornielli, seeing him go, realised what was in his mind, and it occurred to him that in the uproar Emiliano might well need some assistance if his custom grew too big for him to cope with – particularly if his waiter were not around. So, seeing the possibility of earning some money, he began to push his way out of the crowd.
Then Tomaso, realising why Emiliano and Tornielli had gone, thought of breakfast and headed after them, followed by Mamma Meucci and her children. As they pushed out of the mass of people, two men started to disagree over the possession of a goat, and in the argument that followed fear was forgotten as everybody took sides.
One by one and in families, the crowd began to break up. With the coming of daylight, new courage had come to them all. All those fears which had hemmed them in with darkness were dispelled now that they could see what was happening and life suddenly became normal again. The men began to laugh – nervously at first and then at their own fears. Mothers began to shriek at their squalling children, and Hannay, watching from the bridge of the Great Watling Street, saw the crowd grow thinner, first at the edges, then in the middle where the people had huddled together for warmth during the night. There was still a touch of hysteria in the behaviour of everyone but a tremendous relief that it had been no worse.
A chestnut seller was hunting round the piazza for his baskets which had been upset in the darkness. The owner of the little bar by the Via Maddalena, seeing Emiliano heading up the hill, had realised what was happening and was whipping down his shutters as fast as he could in the hope of being ready first. Next door to him, the fruit shop proprietor, eyeing the wreckage of his stall which had been knocked over and smashed by the surging crowd the night before, set about putting it together again.
A beggar picked up an abandoned umbrella, decided it might be worth a few lire still, and hurriedly slipped away with it under his coat. The rubbish and the wreckage of the crowds in the piazza were gradually picked over and dispersed, while the growing breeze sent the scraps of paper that had contained loaves and sausages fleeing before it to whirl with the last of the dusty ash from the mountain into the corners and up the Via Maddalena where they were finally scattered under the arches of the Musco.
The ships’ captains watching from the bridges of the Procida, the Ladybird, the Francis X. Adnauer and the Amsterdamster, seeing the crowd thinning out in the Piazza del Mare, immediately cancelled the orders they had given to send away all the ships’ boats which had been lowered during the night.
‘I’ll be god-damned!’ the captain of the Francis X. Adnauer said in amazement. ‘They’re going home again.’
Sailors from New York and Nebraska, from London and Sheerness and Chatham, from Anzio and Salerno and Genoa, from the Hague and Rotterdam, watched in astonishment as the islanders, with their ready adaptability, accepted the fact that they were safe and immediately started to behave normally again, disappearing into the narrow streets off the Piazza del Mare, among the alleys and the little shops and the courtyards where the washing still hung out among the rubbish and the pots of geraniums and the broken tiles like so many flags of truce. They felt cheated and annoyed, as though all their work and lack of sleep was for nothing.
‘The ungrateful sods,’ said a hairy-faced petty officer from the Ladybird as he sat in the stern of a whaler under the ship’s side, waiting for the final word that would send him into the shore. ‘The sods don’t sodding well want rescuing now.’
They stared up at the mountain but, even in their annoyance, they had to admit there was nothing particularly threatening about it at that moment. A slight breeze had sprung up in the night and had carried away the dust pall from the summit, and the sun was actually shining weakly on the slopes. The column of oily smoke climbed slowly into the clouds in a calm way that indicated no danger at all.
When the orders came to pick up evacuees, the few boats that headed for the steps of the mole and the chosen spots against the Piazza del Mare found they were returning empty. Only a few of the more timid, a few of the oldest, and a few of those people who had come only a few months before from the mainland in the hope of picking up an easy living among the tourists who had recently discovered the island, were anxious to depart. The rest of them, thinking of their meagre savings and the price of rents on the mainland – if there were rooms to be had at all – were only too anxious to get back to their shops and benches, and thei
r fields and stables. Even the tragedy at San Giorgio seemed to have been forgotten in the general feeling of relief.
The frustrated sailors shouted and argued and grumbled from the boats bobbing under the mole and off the beach and occasionally, when they lost their tempers, pretended they hadn’t understood and jammed some protesting and angry old man into the boats and took him out to one of the ships only to bring him back again on the next trip. But for the most part they were beginning to realise that their recall from canteens and cinemas in Malta and Naples, their frantic loading of supplies and bandages and food on the mainland the night before, the changes of course and the mad dash across the Tyrrhenian, and their all-night slog over boats and equipment were all suddenly pointless. The mountain had played one of its splendid jokes on them all.
In the Palazzo di Città, where he had spent the night with his family, sitting close to the telephone, blank-eyed with defeat, Mayor Pelli became aware of gaiety outside in the piazza. He hurried to the window and looked out. To his amazement, the people who were crossing the square were moving up the hill, not down. And they were laughing, their dusty features creased with happiness and relief. A glimmering of hope in his face, he hurried from his office to the back of the building and, staring at the mountain, he saw that the smoke pall had cleared and that the column of jetty vapours that rose from the crater had subsided a little.
The explosions and the unspeakable roaring of the night before had given way again to the familiar high-pitched whistling sound.
‘We’re safe,’ he shouted as he ran to his wife, his voice echoing through the corridors. ‘The mountain’s quiet again! It’s all over!’
He embraced his wife and each of his children, relieved that nothing worse had happened; then, as he realised that the mountain’s traditional behaviour meant reprieve for him if he were quick, he seized the telephone and rang up the coastguard’s office where he got a first-hand account of how things were progressing in the Piazza del Mare.
He put the instrument down again, his eyes beginning to show relief. ‘Piero, Piero,’ he shouted, and Piero Tornielli, his face haggard with sleeplessness, appeared in the doorway, rubbing his aching behind which was suffering from a night in one of the office chairs.
‘Piero,’ Pelli said, his voice growing firmer all the time as his politician’s resilience brought strength back to his decision. ‘There’ll be no evacuation now. Everybody’s going home. It’s all over. It’s 1892 all over again.’ He thumped the table confidently, not noticing Tornielli’s agonised face and sluggish movements.
‘Piero, we’ve got the answer now to Bosco. We were right all the time. We were right to wait. Get in touch with the coastguards again and get them to pass a message to the captains of the ships in the bay. Ask them to come to my office for wine. We must formally offer our thanks and our apologies for the trouble we’ve caused.’
His face split into a smile to which the miserable Piero failed to respond. ‘This is going to prove expensive,’ he said gaily. ‘Somebody’s going to present us with a nice bill for last night. There was a lot of damage done, too. It’s heaven-sent to lay at Bosco’s door.’
He stopped dead, his expression changing to one of amazement as, through the open window, he heard the sound of a loudspeaker blaring from in front of the Archivio at the other side of the square. Bosco, also seeing the opportunities in the night’s events for Pelli, was endeavouring to undermine his arguments by getting in his own blow first.
‘People of Anapoli,’ he was saying, ‘you’ve seen how the authorities waver, how they have to be told what to do by the workers–’
Pelli whirled round.
‘Piero,’ he shouted. ‘Quickly! Ring up Giovanni and tell him to get the loudspeaker car moving. Get hold of a bill-poster. Get some pamphlets out. Make sure everyone knows our meetings are still on.’
He thought suddenly of Patch and his angry gestures the day before.
‘And, Piero,’ he said, his voice dropping, ‘get the police headquarters. There are things I wish to do.’
Thirty-four
By mid-day it was all over. The crowds had left the Piazza del Mare and the mole and the grey-sand beach where the whalers with their angry crews bobbed. Only the homeless from San Giorgio still hung around, still shocked-looking, still dazed, still bewildered, still unable to appreciate the relief of everyone else, waiting for the assistance that Pelli’s workers were organising for them. They had little else to be thankful for.
Don Dominico was the first to make a move to find out what damage had been done outside the Porto. Perched behind a motor-cycle volunteer, his skirts tucked up around him, he roared round the island road to Fumarola. But all there was to see were the evidences of the previous night’s panic. The stray dogs and cats were still in the streets, the pigeons were on the roofs, the goats were still on the mountainside – even, he was delighted to note, in Amadeo Baldicera’s field where they had found the dead birds.
He immediately hurried to his untidy study followed by his dogs and telephoned the news to the café in the Piazza del Mare.
When they got his message, the people of Fumarola set off for home, and those from Colonna del Greco and Corti Marina sent motor-cyclists to their villages. As soon as they heard their homes were untouched also, they set off again with their motor-scooters and their Fiats and their motorcycles, with their mule-carts and donkey carriages, and their bicycles, and on foot, queuing for buses or trailing their families and their dogs behind them out of the Piazza del Mare after the people of the Porto, who were hurrying home to make sure no one had slipped into their houses while they had been away.
Even the Haywards, startled to an awareness of being alive again by the sunshine that was beginning to warm the slopes of Amarea, noticed the sudden absence of people in the Piazza del Mare and, to their surprise, their car, still standing unharmed where they had left it the night before. It took them some time to make up their minds, but the fact that none of the other English people on the island had turned up on Hannay’s ship during the night gave them increased courage, and they thanked him stiffly, trying to pretend they’d never been afraid, and climbed down the swaying gangplank to the mole.
By the time the afternoon sun had crept round, instead of the terrified, half-clothed people who had occupied the Piazza del Mare the night before, the panicky mules and donkeys and the noisy dogs, there were now English, Dutch. American and Italian sailors, sitting round the smoky little bar near the Via Maddalena and exchanging with each other in stumbling three-word sentences their disgust at the fiasco of the evacuation. Whatever their nationality, they were at one in their lower-deck fury at what they considered the brass-hats’ bungling. A few of them even wandered into the Piazza Martiri to jam the delighted Emiliano’s bar with their noisy demand for ‘vino’, and even as far as the Town Hall where Pelli was marshalling his arguments for an assault on the politics of Bosco.
It was the very normality of the place that made all the more puzzling the appearance of the policeman at Mamma Meucci’s in the afternoon with a request for Patch to call at the Town Hall.
Pelli was sitting in his office when Patch arrived. His carpet was marked with the dust from the shoes of his numerous visitors. Behind him stood Carpucci, the sergeant-major of police, and the captain of the Procida, and to one side, a little out of his depth, the captain of the Ladybird. The hall outside seemed full of naval officers of all nationalities.
‘Good afternoon, Signor Patch,’ Pelli said in English, and immediately, from the stiff tone of his voice, Patch realised something was wrong. ‘Please sit down.’
‘Thanks,’ Patch said warily. ‘I’ll stand.’
Pelli introduced the naval men. ‘This is Commander Havanter, of your own country’s ship, Ladybird,’ he concluded and the British officer nodded. ‘We thought it might be a good idea to have him hear what we have to say. We shouldn’t like a garbled report to go out of the island – even over a trivial affair like this. He agreed to
be present.’
The words had an ominous note in them.
‘What trivial affair are we talking about?’ Patch asked. Pelli ignored him and spoke in whispers with Carpucci before he turned to him again.
‘This is a most unfortunate thing, Signor Patch,’ he said, looking up. Patch stared back at him, conscious of the disapproving features of the immaculate Commander Havanter and, for the first time, of his own untidy, paint-daubed clothes. ‘What is?’ he asked. ‘Tell me what’s wrong?’
Pelli put his finger-tips together. ‘I’m obliged to ask you for your residence permit,’ he said. Patch gazed unbelievingly at him for a moment. There was an atmosphere of artificiality about the whole scene – the policemen, the two naval officers, Pelli, a little shame-faced as he waited, and Piero Tornielli in the background with a smooth expression of triumph on his face.
‘Why?’ he asked, his expression becoming hostile. ‘It’s quite in order.’
‘That’s not the point, Signor Patch. We’re asking you to return it.’
‘Why?’ Patch was leaning forward over the desk now, his brows down in a dogged, driven look.
‘You can hardly expect to be allowed to remain here after the trouble you’ve caused.’
Patch smiled bitterly as he began to realise what Pelli was up to.
‘I see it now, Mr Mayor,’ he said. ‘You want me out of the way.’
Pelli shrugged. ‘The town has been very badly frightened, Signor Patch. We can’t take chances on the possibility of disorder. The police feel it would be best for you to leave.’