The Sleeping Mountain

by John Harris

  In the silence as Pelli sat back, Commander Havanter blew his nose in a loud trumpeting noise that made everyone stare at him.

  ‘We’ve no option, Signor Patch,’ Pelli said. ‘If you’d behaved with as much dignity as the other foreigners on the island in the recent upset we should have had no complaint to make. But you’ve been concerning yourself with affairs that should be of no interest to you and, with the excited state of the population, the police are afraid of what might happen if it started again. They have cause even to suspect the reason for your activities.’

  He sat back, wringing his hands with the gesture that meant so clearly that he had already washed his hands of the affair.

  ‘What the authorities on the mainland will do, I don’t know,’ he went on. ‘There is nothing to stop you making an application for a residence permit elsewhere. I’m only asking you to leave Anapoli.’

  Patch was silent for a while, still unable to accept that he was being driven out.

  ‘There’s no appeal against this?’ he asked.

  ‘The police have made up their minds. You could approach your consul, but I’m afraid he’ll naturally contact us for our report. Would you like us to make arrangements for your passage to the mainland?’

  Patch drew a deep breath. ‘I’ll make my own arrangements,’ he said. ‘Doubtless the captain of the ship at the mole will take me when he leaves.’

  ‘That’s very helpful of you, Signor Patch. When is this ship due to leave?’

  Patch’s hot temper flared up and he answered sharply: ‘I don’t know. Tomorrow or the day afterwards. Why should you worry? It’s before the election.’

  Pelli kept his eyes on his blotter as he replied: ‘Thank you, Signor Patch. We should have liked to be generous but with the population as deeply stirred as it has been and with the election so close we can’t take any chances with the police at our disposal. Will that be enough time?’

  Oh, God, Patch thought, why didn’t they throw him out by the scruff of the neck and have done with it?

  ‘It’s enough,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Very well. I won’t detain you any more. You must have a great many affairs to attend to. Perhaps you’d produce your permit some time for the police.’

  Pelli picked up his pen, vaguely ashamed of himself and anxious to be finished with the affair. The policeman who had brought Patch in laid a hand on his arm. Carpucci and the captain of the Procida began to talk earnestly together, obviously trying to look as though it were no business of theirs. Piero Tornielli had turned away to hide the pleasure on his face.

  Patch stared round the room, his temper boiling up again, then he shook off the policeman’s hand and stalked out. The captain of the Ladybird followed him, his cap under his arm.

  Patch rounded on him in the sunshine at the top of the Town Hall steps. ‘Well?’ he said furiously. ‘Can’t you do something about it?’

  Havanter stopped dead. He had obviously expected to leave unmolested and Patch’s vehemence startled him. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked coldly. ‘They only brought me along to see fair play. That’s what I did.’ His features were clearly disapproving.

  ‘But all that damn’ nonsense in there,’ Patch said. ‘Pelli’s lying.’

  ‘I’m not in a position to judge. I can only go on what I’m told. For the record, it might interest you to know that even your own fellow-countrymen here couldn’t find much to say on your behalf.’

  ‘Fellow-countrymen? Who?’

  ‘Woman by the name of Hayworth or Harwood or something.’

  ‘Mrs Hayward, by God!’ Patch’s face was dark with anger.

  ‘That might be the name,’ Havanter said. ‘I met her on my way up here. I lent her a party of men to help with her belongings. She seemed distressed. Naturally, I asked her if she knew you. Apparently she knew you well.’

  Patch laughed bitterly and Havanter went on.

  ‘Pity you didn’t keep your nose out of the affairs of these people,’ he said. ‘Our reputation’s low enough in the Med. at the moment without it sinking any further. They told me in there you were a Communist. Are you?’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Patch said in desperation, as Havanter’s words built up a case against him blacker than it should have been, a case founded on hearsay and half-truths. ‘Can’t a man grow up?’

  Havanter waited until he was calm before he spoke again. ‘Did you interfere in their affairs?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘They told me you led a deputation to the Mayor yesterday. What do you call that?’

  ‘They asked me to speak for them.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The fishermen. I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Are they Communists?’

  ‘God knows. Ask ’em yourself. I didn’t bother.’

  ‘You’ve been to see the Mayor before, haven’t you? You took everything he told you straight to the Communists. They got some good copy out of it. Posters all round the town.’

  ‘What is this – an inquisition?’

  ‘I’m only making my position clear. You’ve been having a fine time one way and another – you and this Leonardi, who it seems is well known as a – trouble-maker.’

  ‘“Crackpot”would be nearer the mark.’

  ‘You even tried to drag the Yanks into it.’

  ‘Raphael’s an old friend of mine. He still is.’

  ‘He’s a Yank.’

  ‘He said he’d do what he could.’

  ‘He didn’t do much, did he?’ Havanter said contemptuously. ‘He didn’t want to get mixed up with politics. He said so.’

  ‘Look–’ Patch made a desperate attempt to explain before it was too late, and it seemed already too late, ‘–it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.’ He waved a hand at the people crossing the piazza, relieved people, still a little excited and hysterical at their reprieve. ‘Ask all those people out there. They’ll tell you.’

  Havanter turned his cold intelligent face towards the sunshine. ‘I don’t think I’ll bother,’ he said.

  Patch flared into a rage. ‘No, you god-damned pale edition of a better generation of sea-dogs, you won’t! You’ve made up your mind already, haven’t you?’

  ‘Cut that out!’

  Patch made a supreme effort to control himself. ‘Where did you get this information?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘Pelli’s assistant. He got it from some woman friend of yours.’

  Patch gave a harsh shout of laughter. ‘My God, stabbed in the back!’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘Nothing. I suppose you made frantic signals to check up on it all, eh?’

  ‘Some of it. I like to be in possession of the facts.’

  ‘So that your own lily-white hands would be clean at the end of it, I suppose?’

  ‘I did my best for you,’ Havanter said calmly. ‘It might interest you to know that this is not my concern. I’d no need to be here at all. I thought I might be able to help you. Now I’m not sure that you need help. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. You did all the agitating. Not me.’

  He put his hat on and pulled the peak over his eye. Then, without another word, he stalked across the dusty piazza where the breeze was already blowing the sifting dust into the corners and into great grey-green swathes under the arcade of the Archivio.

  Thirty-five

  Patch sat on the bed in his room beneath the ugly picture of the Virgin Mary Mamma Meucci had given him. He had been smoking one cigarette after another, his expression angry.

  The rain had started again unexpectedly, just when they had all looked forward to a good day, and was lancing down across the window-panes out of a leaden sky which had boiled up from nowhere before a growing wind that had blown the dust clear and then brought the rain to wash away the last traces of the previous night’s panic.

  He had been storming round the room for a couple of hours now, picking up half-finished canvases to pack them and then, in an explosi
on of fury, flinging them down again in a heap.

  ‘That god-damned officer,’ he said. He seemed to have forgotten Pelli in his dislike of Havanter.

  They all stopped what they were doing and looked up at him – Hannay, from the streaming window where he was sucking his pipe; Mamma Meucci, who was trying with tears in her eyes to tie a bundle of small canvases together with a lot of old string, sighing and groaning and wiping her eyes as she worked; Cecilia, trying to push his clothes into a battered old green suitcase; her grandfather, sitting in a corner, his head in his hands, his white hair disarrayed, staring at the floor.

  ‘Damn his smug self-righteousness,’ Patch said. ‘Behaving as though he were sitting in judgement on me. God, Cecilia, when he talked about you as some “woman friend” of mine, – as though I’d picked you up off the streets – I could have knocked the words down his throat.’

  Cecilia looked up again, gratefully, then she folded a shirt and put it in the case. ‘You should buy yourself some new clothes, Tom,’ she said gently.

  ‘I don’t need new clothes,’ Patch said fiercely. ‘I don’t need new clothes to paint with or to punch naval officers on their snotty noses with. My God–’ he seemed to choke ‘–that bloody Piero!’

  He flung away again, wanting to smash something in his rage, then he found himself in front of Leonardi who looked up and sighed. ‘Again,’ the old man said. ‘Again! They’re laughing at me again all round the town.’

  Patch turned away, deflated, his anger suddenly gone. Old Leonardi had no sympathy to spare for anyone but himself. His only concern was that the mountain had played its infamous jest on him just when he appeared to have been right. His indifference seemed like a symbol. In a month they’d all have forgotten Patch. Any anger they might feel now would have gone cold and he’d be just a name – just one of the many painters who’d once lived there.

  ‘Never mind those little canvases,’ he said wearily to Mamma Meucci. ‘You can have ’em. They’re not worth taking away. They belong to my pre-Hannay period when I was happily drinking myself silly and not worrying about anything.’

  ‘Look–’ Hannay turned round, feeling he ought to say something, ‘–there isn’t all that much of a hurry. I can hold the ship till the weekend.’ He caught Patch’s eye and glanced pointedly at Cecilia. ‘So long as you’re on board they won’t worry.’

  Patch looked quickly at Cecilia, too, then he shook his head. ‘No! For God’s sake, let’s make it tomorrow at the latest! The noose’s round my neck. Don’t let’s delay the drop.’

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ Hannay said in a heavy self-accusing growl, strangely humble for once. ‘I pushed you into it.’

  ‘Don’t lose any sleep over it,’ Patch said with another smile. ‘I’ll get over it. I was getting stale here, anyway.’

  Hannay sucked his pipe for a second and stared out at the bulk of Amarea. Over Mamma Meucci’s loud sighs and sympathetic wheezes, they could hear the high whistling sound through the rain still and from somewhere deep in the mountain’s throat, a faint grumble, a mere shadow of the previous night’s roaring.

  ‘Pelli’s team of experts came after all,’ Hannay went on. ‘But not when he said they did. They were on the Procida. And they came off their own bat. They’re supposed to be starting work tomorrow. They’ll say I’m daft.’

  ‘That was always my opinion.’

  ‘A lot of fuss about nothing.’ Hannay sucked his pipe again unhappily. ‘The ships have laid off in the bay now even. There’s only the Eyetie handy. They’re only sticking around because they don’t want to go home and they’re spinning it out as long as they can. Did you know the Haywards was packing up?’

  ‘There’s no need to make conversation,’ Patch said, and the heaviness had gone out of his voice. ‘I can bear to think of leaving without that.’

  Hannay flushed. ‘Have you contacted the British Consul?’ he asked.

  Patch nodded. ‘He said he’d look into it, but he didn’t think he could do anything about it. That means he won’t.’

  ‘Havanter won’t help you by the sound of him.’

  Patch grinned unexpectedly. ‘If he’d said the things I said, I wouldn’t help him.’

  As he finished speaking, they heard a motor-cycle outrider shatter the silence of the Via Pescatori and almost on top of the racket the sound of Pelli’s loudspeaker car.

  ‘–you’ve seen the irresponsibility of the Communists. You’ve seen the trouble they’ve caused. Destruction, not construction, is what they stand for–’

  ‘Don’t take ’em long to get the rat race going again,’ Hannay growled in his throat. ‘Did you know Orlesi came to see me? In person. Took them crates back ashore. Everyone. I coulda strangled him with his own necktie. The work and the radio messages it entailed! They’ve been unloading that flipping yacht again too!’

  He knocked out his pipe on the window-frame and walked slowly towards the door.

  ‘Cristoforo came to see me. He says to say good-bye to you and thanks for all the cigarettes. He couldn’t come himself. His uncle’s watching him – especially now the ship’s due away.’

  Patch nodded.

  ‘Emiliano looked as though he was going to cry.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. He’s losing his best customer. He’ll be able to put that plaque up now I shan’t be here to stop him. “On this spot Tom Patch defied the combined forces of Mayor Pelli and the British Navy. Inghilterra ed Italia. Loved by one and all.” Looks patriotic. They might even look on me as a sort of Lord Byron in years to come.’

  Mamma Meucci indicated the canvas attached to the easel – the Primavera on which Patch had worked spasmodically throughout all the upheavals.

  ‘Throw it through the window,’ Patch said with sweeping cheerfulness. ‘It makes me feel ill. In the light of present events, it’s plain silly. My next will be a symbolic design presenting the dictatorship of the masses by politicians, petty Caesars and potty little jacks-in-office. All dwarfs and gnomes wearing girdles of forms and slogans, garlanded with dogmatism and reclining on bowers of red tape and indifference. Throw it away.’

  ‘Nay–’ Hannay moved forward, ‘–I’ve taken quite a fancy to them pansies of yours.’

  ‘Help yourself,’ Patch said. ‘Old Tornielli’ll get it down to the mole for a couple of hundred lire.’

  Hannay moved to the door again then he turned and glanced through the window. ‘Not thinking of going anywhere, was you, because there’s a cop across the road watching this place. That Pelli’s not going to let you do any dodging, Mister.’

  The door slammed behind him in that thunderous way he had of making his exit – as though he were a tank backing out of a barracks – and they heard his feet on the stairs.

  Mamma Meucci finished tying up the canvases. ‘That’s all, Signor Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ll get you something to eat.’

  ‘I don’t want anything, Mamma,’ Patch said. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Mamma Meucci sighed, nodded and rolled out. Old Leonardi heaved himself to his feet and followed her, his head hanging between his shoulders.

  Lights were coming on in the houses outside one by one as the daylight lessened. The column of smoke from Amarea moved lazily upwards, cutting the full moon in half with its jetty pall as it emerged briefly from the clouds.

  Patch stared at the roof tops caught by the silver light, knowing he’d looked at them dozens of times before without feeling, and tried to sort out his mixed emotions. With one breath he wanted to say ‘To Hell with the place!’ and with the next he knew he would never quite be able to shake its dust from his shoes. He had become too involved with its people.

  ‘For the first time,’ he said aloud to himself, marvelling at the power of the emotions in him, ‘I’m afraid to leave this damn’ place. I want to stay here even if it sinks under my feet.’ He turned and grinned at Cecilia. ‘It’s a matter of principle chiefly, I think,’ he said. ‘I’d do it all again if I had to.’

  Cecilia
looked up at him, her face showing her loneliness and her helpless rebellion against a world which had become too big to be controllable. ‘Is there no way out, Tom?’

  He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t look like it. They’ll see me safely off and that will be that. I’m a political risk to Pelli as long as I try and to a politician there’s no bogey so frightening as a political risk.’ He smiled. ‘Poor little Pelli. I can’t say I blame him. Bosco’s a crafty devil and he’s got a lot to think about.’

  ‘Tom, you don’t agree with Pelli, do you?’

  ‘No.’ He smiled again. ‘But I feel a bit forgiving all of a sudden. I don’t know why. I think Anapoli means a lot to the poor little soul. He just took a chance for it that didn’t quite come off.’ He turned away hurriedly and rubbed his chin. ‘My God, if I go on like this I’ll be apologising to him.’

  Cecilia was watching him as he moved about. ‘Tom, where will you go?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Some scruffy little dive in Streatham or Chelsea.’ He laughed. ‘A nice concrete road a couple of kilometres long. Full of trim little trees in trim little gardens, all looking as though they’ve been kicked to pieces by the kids or worried by the cats.’ His smile disappeared suddenly. ‘My God, what a prospect!’

  ‘Must you go home?’

  ‘It depends on Pelli. It depends on whether I can get a permit to stay somewhere else.’

  He pushed a pile of pictures straight, aimlessly, obsessed with a sudden feeling of uselessness, as though all he had done up to now had been pointless and aimed nowhere and at nothing. There seemed to be no direction to his life. It had been nothing but a series of events, none of them apparently linked, occurring in first one country then another, a series of different lives lived in a succession of shabby houses where the size of the studio and the shape of the window had been more important than the comfort.

  There seemed no point in it suddenly, without roots in the ground somewhere to make it all worth while, and he felt for a moment as though he had been wandering with one-night stops throughout the whole of his existence.

  He went to the window where Hannay had been standing and stared out at the rain. In the doorway of the apartment block opposite, a man stood smoking, and as he glanced upwards, Patch recognised him as a policeman who lived in the Via Garibaldi.