Swordpoint (2011)

by John Harris

  ‘Ancora, ancora,’ Avvocato Vanvitelli insisted as they finished their platefuls. ‘In Italy is always much pasta. Oggi, festa – mangiamo molto.’

  Chicken appeared, cooked with tomato and pepperoni, followed by fried salami and slices of pork with peas.

  ‘Where did you get it all?’ Warley asked Graziella.

  She gave him a shy, happy smile. ‘My father is a lawyer,’ she said. As you will be one day. He has always something to offer in exchange. A lawsuit for a piece of pork. A will for a case of wine.’

  The Orvieto, what was called ‘the real wine’, appeared with the main dish and by the end of it Taylor was trying to sing ‘Lili Marlene’ in Italian to Francesca, watched by the sharp eyes of La Nonna, while Avvocato Vanvitelli kept up a running commentary on the lot of Italy.

  ‘E sempre la miseria! Siamo poveri, tutti poveri! Quando finirà la guerra?’

  So full they could hardly move, Avvocato Vanvitelli called for music. La Nonna sang a shaky ‘0 Sole Mio’, and then they started to dance to the gramophone. Stupefied by the wine, Taylor had fallen asleep but Deacon danced with Francesca, Avvocato Vanvitelli with La Nonna, Jago with one of the adoring little boys, and Warley with Graziella. It was an Italian dance and gravely, wearing her calm smile, Graziella advanced and retreated before him, hands on hips, bobbing and circling with a strange cool dignity, her face as calm as if she were at Mass.

  ‘I am so happy, Uoli,’ she said.

  Beyond the cypresses at the end of the garden, the greyness of the day was everywhere, stretching away to the horizon, hill upon hill. Graziella stared at it as they stopped dancing, faintly pink in the face, her breath coming quickly. She looked at Warley, then looked away again, quickly, as if she were embarrassed.

  ‘Quando finirà la guerra,’ she whispered. ‘Quando finirà?’

  The last night seemed the worst of all the nights. Few ventured out, not even for the ritual evening stroll that always took place in Italian streets. Syzling braved the rain and spent most of the time in the bed of his widow, with his clothes steaming in front of a fire she built up. Well-fed and satiated, he left her just as the rain stopped for the first time, wearing clothes that were dry again.

  Captain Jago borrowed a half-tonner and went to see his nursing sister in Calimero. What he intended was obvious from the fact that he’d tossed his bedding roll and a ground-sheet in the back, but it proved unnecessary because the nursing sister had a room in a small house near the hospital and the other sister who shared it with her was on duty, so they didn’t argue and slipped into bed there and then.

  Private Fletcher-Smith, his teeth chattering with cold and damp, clutched his girl between the stacked winter logs and a pile of straw in the barn of the little farm where she lived with her mother. Her warmth made him forget all about literature and they took off their glasses, which were becoming steamed up anyway, and considering life too short for intellectual exercises decided to use the pile of straw instead. His love-making was hurried and clumsy because they were both virgins; but afterwards, while the girl returned to the house shivering and fearful of what she’d permitted, a proud and overjoyed Fletcher-Smith almost danced back to his billet, feeling that he didn’t care now if it rained for ever.

  Warley’s parting from Graziella was quiet and subdued. Although she was the older sister and ran the household, she was still young, her slim body moving freely inside her loose dress. Her smooth fair hair, piled on her shoulders, framed a face that was oval in shape with a pointed chin. The impression she had given Warley was one of shyness and purity, but he’d seen her glance at him occasionally with eyes that were as old as woman herself.

  He wasn’t a man of great experience with girls, but he suspected she wasn’t the type to play at love and he was intelligent enough to realise that one couldn’t make hard and fast rules for the reactions of a member of one sex on a member of the other. Graziella had been educated in Rome and she displayed an instinctive womanly wisdom that was curiously secretive and independent.

  With Avvocato Vanvitelli heading back to Naples with La Nonna and the two small boys, and Deacon and Taylor at the cinema with Francesca, they were alone and spent the evening playing the piano. It seemed a ridiculous thing to do under the circumstances, and Warley knew that Jago would have laughed like a drain at the time he was wasting.

  But he was supremely, bewilderingly at peace. He had brought a bottle of brandy and had insisted she have a drink with him. He finally forced two on her, which was a lot more than she normally drank, but it made her happy. Warley was a little tipsy, but he was well-behaved and clearly content just to be with her.

  ‘Have another?’ he asked.

  She shook her head. ‘I think it would be better if you did not have another, also,’ she said. ‘It is not very good brandy.’

  ‘I paid eight hundred lire for it.’

  ‘It is not the brandy we used to have.’

  He smiled sadly. ‘Your lire aren’t the lire you used to have either,’ he said.

  It wasn’t meant to hurt, though it did a little with its reminder that the Italian nation was on its knees; but she managed to overlook it, and they sat alongside each other, playing and drinking, until their fingers touched. Warley’s playing faltered and she half-expected him to use the opportunity to take her hand.

  But he didn’t. He simply let his hands fall to his knees and sat silently. Graziella played a few more notes; then she stopped too, and sat looking at him.

  Without a word, Warley leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth. For a second she stared back at him, her eyes huge and starry with long lashes. Then, impulsively, she reached out for him and kissed him back.

  She kept her arms round him for some time in a frightened, gentle way. Then Warley turned to the piano again. He didn’t play but just sat staring at it.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m communing with God.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Today is a crisis.’

  ‘In Italy every day is a crisis.’

  ‘It’s not that. I’ll be leaving tomorrow and things have reached a climax and I felt I needed to think about God.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve a lot to thank Him for.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘We’ve only known each other four days.’

  ‘It’s long enough.’ Warley shrugged. ‘And I’m grateful for being able to get to know you in a quiet atmosphere. If I’d met you at a party you might have seemed different, and so might I. But because we’ve been blessed with the chance to talk – not party talk, but ordinary talk about ordinary things – and not about the war, I feel as if I’ve known you all my life.’

  Graziella studied him carefully. It wasn’t the first time a man had told her he was in love with her. There had been an Italian in 1940, and in 1941 and 1942 Germans who seemed to be attracted by her fair hair and Aryan appearance. Some were sincere, kind men – the British and the Americans didn’t have a monopoly of kindness – and there had even been one from Heidelberg who had played duets with her, exactly as Warley had.

  With Warley, however, it was different. There was a quality of restraint about him that told her he was sincere. It was possible that being in Trepiazze and in safety had swept him off his feet, but somehow she didn’t think so. She had a feeling she knew every movement of his body, every twitch of every muscle, every beat of his heart. She had dug down into her deepest mind for someone she’d ever felt this about before and had discovered she couldn’t find one.

  She had even started to think thoughts she felt she had no right to think, intimate thoughts that should never have passed through the mind of unengaged girl, and guiltily, the night before, as she had prepared for bed, she had paused in front of the picture of the Virgin in her room. ‘You’ll understand,’ she had murmured. ‘You are a woman and I know you will forgive.’

  Warley was still sitting with his hands on his knees, and suddenly
he looked desperately serious and a little lost. She was shelter, warmth, knowledge and common-sense and he felt he needed the embrace of her limbs, the smoothness of her skin, and the fire with which he knew she would envelop him.

  ‘I can think of nothing more beautiful,’ he said, ‘than to be allowed to make love to you. Properly, I mean. As men and women in love should.’

  With a sharp sense of disappointment she felt she’d been mistaken in him after all, and that he was going to spoil everything by proposing that while the house was empty they should go upstairs together. He had carefully avoided physical contact with her and he hadn’t declared his love for her as so many others had with far less reason. Nevertheless she’d believed that something unexpected and unusual existed between them, and his words troubled her.

  But he didn’t fail her. It was ridiculous, he knew, to imagine their relationship could ever mean anything after only four days of knowing each other, yet he stubbornly felt it would.

  ‘But making love to you now,’ he went on slowly, ‘would be wrong. And what I was thinking of wasn’t that sort of thing, anyway. I was thinking of the sort of love-making that a man does with his wife, with the woman he loves. I don’t know, but I think that must be different.’

  The indignation had gone from her eyes, and she was shocked to realise she could as easily have offered herself to him as not.

  ‘I’m jealous of anyone who looks at you,’ Warley went on gravely. ‘Even poor little Taylor, who’s still wet behind the ears.’

  She said nothing because she didn’t know what to say. If he never returned to Trepiazze, if he went on to Rome and the north, if he went home to England, even if – and she caught her breath as the thought crossed her mind – even if he were killed, she felt she would still like to remember and cherish the moment.

  She turned a lost face to him. ‘We must not jump to conclusions,’ she said cautiously.

  He sat up. ‘Why not?’ The words were full of indignation and surprise.

  She tried to tread carefully. ‘There is a war on and things are different in war.’

  ‘My father met my mother in the last war,’ he said briskly. ‘They seemed happy enough. I was the result.’

  ‘That war was different.’

  ‘Men died, didn’t they? I can’t see the difference.’

  ‘The difference,’ she pointed out gently, ‘is that in that war we were on your side.’

  ‘Not all the time.’ He felt he’d caught her out. ‘In the first days we thought you’d come in on the German side. But, in fact, you came in on ours.’

  She smiled. ‘This time, you also thought we’d come in on the German side – I remember your merchant ships going through the Mediterranean in 1939 at full speed in case our warships sank them – and this time we did come in on the German side.’

  ‘It makes no difference, Graziella.’

  ‘It must do.’

  He paused then went on seriously. ‘What do you want more than anything else?’ he asked.

  She was about to say that she wanted the war to end, but she realised it wasn’t just that she needed.

  ‘To feel that when you come back,’ she said slowly, ‘it will be possible for me to be here. To know that you will come back.’

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘The one thing I want is to come back, and to know you’ll be here.’

  ‘It might not happen that way,’ she warned. ‘You might go on to Rome. You might be sent to the Adriatic. You might be sent back to England to fight in this Second Front they say is so imminent.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘I’m here for good. We all are. Nobody wants us. We’re stuck with Italy, and you’re stuck with me.’

  Nine

  There weren’t many as lucky as Warley. But there were a few like Jago and Fletcher-Smith and Syzling who went to their blankets that night feeling better than they had earlier in the evening.

  For most of them, however, it was a wretched night and they tossed and turned trying to stay warm. They were used to sleeping rough and, because they lived in the open air so much, they usually slept like animals, indifferent to the weather. But the few days in Trepiazze had spoiled them; they were just beginning to expect the spring and a little sunshine, and the weather had betrayed them.

  The following morning, the barns, sheds, schoolrooms and houses rang with the stamping of heavy boots, the thump of falling packs. The clatter of weapons and the impatient voices of men.

  When the sergeants arrived, they clattered out into the square. You could hardly say that their blood was quickened by new impulses of vigour and enthusiasm, because it was hard to feel enthusiastic or blood-quickened after a cold night in damp blankets and wearing clothes that were already heavy with rain and smelling of wet wool. Further towards the coast there had been flooding and families were having to be rescued. It had been going on for days – as long, it seemed, as they could remember.

  The solid block of khaki filled the piazza under the statue of Garibaldi, the lines of helmets swathed in nets or sacking like so many rows of brown beetles.

  Henry White stared at the sky hanging over them, violet-grey and threatening.

  ‘I don’t like all this bloody rain,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you can’t always be fightin’ Zulus in the sunshine, can you?’ Parkin pointed out.

  Rich didn’t like the look of it much either. ‘But they say t’ Black Watch are coming up wi’ us to ’elp,’ he said hopefully. ‘Or one of t’ ’Ighland regiments.’

  ‘The Black Watch’s no’ a regiment, ye reid-heided gowk,’ McWatters growled. ‘’Tis a bluidy reeligion.’

  As they squatted in their ranks, eating their breakfasts from their mess tins, the last really good meal they could expect for some time, there was an unexpected hint of sunshine. The town was awake to see them off, standing in the streets to watch them leave – whole families, from wrinkled grandparents to babies in arms, all busy chattering and commenting. A few girls, bolder than the rest, penetrated the ranks to talk to the men they’d been seeing for the past two or three days. A few drew apart: Henry White with his ‘party’; Private Syzling and his woman; Warley with Graziella Vanvitelli; the two fresh-faced lieutenants with her fifteen-year-old sister. Occasionally, a whole household crowded round a single soldier whom they’d taken in and who was now having to leave them behind. Some of the soldiers had the prune-eyed Italian children in their arms, stuffing army stew into them as hard as they could go.

  ‘I’ve never known anything quite like the British soldier,’ Yuell said to Peddy. ‘They know they’ll probably not get another hot meal for days, and here they are giving it all away.’

  In the end, however, it was Yuell who gave the orders that what was left was to be handed to the Italians, and as the information was passed round there was a yell of delight and the crowd dispersed to fetch bowls, cups and plates. Bottles of wine and vermouth appeared, and breakfast turned into a communal feast.

  As the dubious sun disappeared again and a misty rain started once more, the ranks were cleared.

  ‘Company–!’ Heads lifted, and as the orders came they turned and began to move off, the tramp of their boots echoing between the houses. For a moment the town, which had known them for only four days and had seen dozens of other units pass through, watched them dully. Then the children moved forward, followed by the girls, the women and the old men, until there was a whole crowd of them running alongside.

  Fletcher-Smith felt a little bit taller as he saw the wretched expression on the face of his girl friend and her worried eyes behind her cracked spectacles. He thought it was because she was going to miss him, but in fact it was because she was worried in case he’d given her a baby. Lieutenant Deacon and Second-Lieutenant Taylor waved at Francesca Vanvitelli. Warley gave Graziella a somewhat staid salute, but it meant more to her than the smiles the others had to offer. It went with Warley – serious, sober, a gesture of respect as much as anything else – and he saw her lift her handkerchief,
balled in her fingers, to her mouth as she stifled a sob. It had been his intention when he’d arrived in Trepiazze to do a lot of drinking and sleeping, but he hadn’t done much of either – only talking late into the night and playing the piano. As they’d parted, their kiss for the first time had been one of painful intensity and she had cried, hard sobs through clenched teeth and taut lips. Now she looked small and lost as she smiled damply and waved, whispering as she watched him go.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and forever–’

  Warley sighed. He hadn’t come to Trepiazze to see anguish on a girl’s face as she watched him leave.

  As the last of the civilians dropped behind, the soldiers turned, lifting their thumbs in acknowledgement, to assure them that it was all going to be okay. The British thumb, Warley thought. When the Last Trump sounded, the British would disappear into outer darkness still sticking up the good old British thumb, but it didn’t really alter the lonely lost feeling that now came over them as they marched.

  The lorries were waiting outside the town, drawn up in rows, and as they began to cram into them, they moved off in ones and twos, making a long column like a string of broken beads, heading north. It was over. Promises would be forgotten for the most part; letters would be answered for a week or two, then dropped. The comfortable memories would slowly vanish as they found themselves back on the bleak mountainsides. What they had considered home for a short time had vanished. Home from now on was in the front line. They were on the move again.

  Part Two

  The Hilt

  ‘Often cold and soaked to the skin, and with little or no sleep or hot food… the will of these men, for the most part children of the Great Depression of the Thirties… to close with the enemy never faltered. Morally, in comparison with them, the military bureaucrats in the vast Headquarters, warmly housed and regularly fed, looked small indeed.’

  Major-General Hubert Essame