The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store (14 page)

But the further they climbed, the more he realised they wouldn't find his grandfather there. At the top of the hill, they sat among the ruins to rest. The chestnut tree creaked and whispered to itself, and the lights of the village broke the night like shards of glass.

A scrabbling sound on the mule track below became footsteps. They saw the swing of a lantern rising over the ridge: Vittorio stood before them, his breath blowing thick and white.

‘I've asked all over. Umberto Udine hasn't seen Nonno or the donkey and he's grazed his goats halfway to Carpeto today. Fabrizia was in the shop all day and didn't see him cross the piazza either.' He sat down beside them to catch his breath. Lucio saw the expectation in his brother's eyes.

‘So?' Vittorio asked. He nodded encouragingly, as if the force of his own will might put the words he wanted to hear in his brother's mouth.

Lucio rubbed his arms. The sweat from the climb was chilling on his skin.

‘Tell me that he's taken you to the grappa still? Tell me you've asked … that he's showed you.'

‘Vittor,' his mother warned, but Lucio could see that even she entertained some fleeting hope.

‘Tell me, Gufo,' Vittorio continued. ‘Tell me you got it out of the old man.'

Lucio nudged his toe at the cracked casings of fallen chestnuts. Somewhere in the scree below, he could hear a gravelly cough, the disgruntled hock of a badger.

‘Porca Giuda!' Vittorio cried. ‘You didn't do it, did you? The one thing coming to you, the only thing you had to do and you fuck it up!'

‘Vittorio, don't,' his mother said, and his brother growled with frustration. He snatched up his lantern and headed back to the mule path. ‘Where are you going?' she called after him.

‘To see if I can't find him before the frost does. I'll make the old bastard tell me if it's the last words he gasps.'

His brother's lantern disappeared into the darkness. He felt his mother close beside him as the temperature dropped even further, and the crust of moon froze in the vast lake of night.

‘He was never going to teach you, you know,' she said. She crossed her arms about her and ran her hands along her shoulders. ‘He's jealous of it. Jealous as a lover. He'll take it to the crypt. But that's his gift to you.'

He let the words sink in, checked the truth of it in her black eyes, and he felt guilty at his relief — the release from the burden of attention, of expectation, that the grappa would have forced on him. Could Nonno Raimondi really have understood that?

The badger coughed again. They heard its feral spit. He gazed out across the valley and knew where he would find his grandfather.

He reached the plateau of Montemezzo just before dawn broke. Vittorio was right: a frost had settled in the night. The undergrowth was encrusted with it, and for a few minutes, before the first stirring of the birds, he stood listening to his own pulse, and imagined that he was the only living thing in the stiff blue silence. Leaves stirred above him. There was the slow beat of wings among the branches, a night bird retiring. He came to the outcrop and the chapel of Santa Lucia as the first orange rays began to tilt between the trees. The donkey was tied up outside, her ears twitching. He put his hand on her, and she snickered and blew at him as if in reproach that he had taken so long. The grille door was ajar, the key still in the lock. He took it out and held it in his fist: Nonno Raimondi had kept a copy after all these years. The gate keened as he pulled it open. For a second, hope flickered inside him, like the candle burning at Lucia's feet.

Nonno Raimondi was sitting on the floor to the side of the altar, propped against the unfinished mural. His back was to the grille. Around him were his rags and palette, the unwound roll of his brushes.

‘Nonno,' he called, but when he touched his grandfather's shoulder it was leaden, his skin washed in the stony grey that had been creeping from within him for months. Lucio prised the bottle from his hand, but it was not Raimondi Gold. He smelled the turpentine and oil mixture, already separated into its constituent parts. In his grandfather's other hand was a rag, and before him, on the altar wall, he had begun to scrub away at a segment of the mural. Lucio held his lantern up close to the spot. A section of column at the temple of Syracuse had been reduced to a muddy smear, the paint partially dissolved. He peered at it, squinting in the low light. Underneath it, he thought he could make out the ghost of another image: a faintly mottled variegation, as of feathers, and a round yellow eye that fixed him in its sights.

Leyton
1949

On the green, Uncle Jack was oiling the grass roller for its winter hibernation. Connie leaned against the wooden hut the Leyton cricketers optimistically called the clubhouse,
and
savoured the smells of summer: chalk and linseed oil, the old wood of a graveyard of stumps, the musty wadding of leg guards. It was also the smell of Uncle Jack, in her mind. Every Saturday as far back as she could remember, he had mowed and manicured the pitch for the Sunday game, even when there was none to be had. During the war, when the Parishes League was suspended and the Leyton Green was lucky to see a match a month — a motley affair made up of Home Guards, servicemen on leave and too-eager boys — he became even more obsessive in this ritual. He seemed to treat it as his personal war effort, as if national morale was reflected in the glossy nap of his flawless green, the pristine white of his bowling crease.

Connie came to help him on Saturday afternoons after work. As a child she had learned to hide in the clubhouse, knowing the alternative was Aunty Bea and the Christian Ladies in the memorial hall, lecturing on how to knit socks or bottle jam for endless bring-and-buys: Warships Week, Fire Watchers, the Red Cross. Compared with the complex world of female alliances formed over ration-book recipes, amateur operatic programs and, now, church-mural commissions, there was something simple, something restful, about Uncle Jack behind his roller. His patient, measured walk, the neat lift of his sprigged brogues, his self-contained purpose calmed her at times when it felt like Leyton was suffocating her every breath. Pacing silently beside him, trying to match his enormous stride on the flattened grass, was one of the most comforting memories of her childhood, one of the few that anchored her. She still liked to slip off her shoes and place her hand beside his on the rusty handle that stained their palms brown, listening to his soft wheeze as he worked, the legacy of the TB that had kept him at home during the war.

‘You'd think the parish could chip in and get you a new one for next year,' she said, tapping the handle of the roller. With a practised shove, they leaned their weight against the clunking beast of it. The roller let out a prehistoric groan.

Uncle Jack exhaled, nodding towards the memorial hall. ‘They got bigger and better things to raise money for than cricket,' he said.

Through the open door, they could see the clutch of women inside and hear their faint gabble.

‘The Great Mural Scheme for St Margaret's,' she said. ‘Anyone would think it was the Sistine Chapel the way they carry on.'

‘Now then, Rita,' Uncle Jack murmured, but she could tell from the way he teased her that he felt the same. He rarely called her Connie. She suspected he'd been uncomfortable with the name change from the start but, rather than incurring the wrath of Aunty Bea, he had staged his protest by calling her a variety of nicknames, ever changing, sometimes tenuous, often clichéd, but always playing on that one constant as she grew up: the undeniable fact of her red hair. Sometimes she was Greer, Rita or Bette, sometimes Lizzie or Your Majesty after the great Tudor Queen, sometimes plain old Red. But these multiple identities became an early security in her adopted life, the first sign of approbation, growing as they did out of his acceptance of her, his quiet affection.

She nudged him with her elbow. ‘You reckon Rita Hayworth would be getting her hands dirty rolling the village green?'

He shook his head. ‘Course not. The Yanks don't understand cricket,' he said, deadpan as ever.

From the memorial hall, a round of stagy laughter rang out. Connie recognised the sound of nerves fraying. The Christian Ladies were making the last frantic arrangements for Sunday's harvest fair. Mrs Cleat had closed the shop well before lunchtime that morning especially to set up the hall, and Connie had been obliged to help. Even then she had found the women in a frenzy of activity nearing panic. The stakes were high for this year's fair. The proceeds were going towards the services of Mr Harry Swann, the artist commissioned for St Margaret's murals, which, being a cause so close to home, had turned the modest fete into a gala event.

‘They certainly got enough folk donating fare this year,' Uncle Jack said, as yet another family of villagers entered the hall, which was already full of flower arrangements and oversized vegetables, jars of chutney and stewed fruit, cottage loaves and Battenbergs.

‘Even Mrs Livesey brought an offering,' Connie said. ‘A bouquet of carrots in a milking pail and two bottles of stout. You should have seen Mrs Cleat's face.'

‘Nothing wrong with Janet Livesey's carrots. Sweetest in Leyton, I reckon.'

‘Yes, but it didn't stop Mrs Cleat from setting them down behind the sheafs of wheat at the back of the display.
Thank you kindly, Janet
, she says.
We can always rely on you for … root vegetables.
' Uncle Jack's eye glinted as Connie mimicked the shopkeeper. ‘
Some people'll throw any old thing together to get in this hall and see Mr Swann's cartoons for the murals.
'

‘Are they up, then, for all to see?'

Connie nodded. ‘That's why there are so many donations this year. It was Mrs Cleat's idea —
exhibiting the high art alongside the harvest display
. She knew no one could resist having a nose at the sketches. But people could hardly show up empty-handed, could they?'

Uncle Jack gave a loose, knowing laugh and hummed, as if to warm up his rarely voiced opinions. ‘That woman could get the devil to donate his horns if she thought it'd help her cause.'

‘
Mr Farrington!
' Connie feigned outrage, channelling Mrs Cleat again. ‘
I'll have you know Mr Swann is an award-winning artist from the college in London, no less.
'

‘Is he now?'

‘
Oh yes. His cartoons are most uplifting. They have the approval of the diocese itself, I should tell you.
'

‘And what exactly are these
cartoons
?'

‘
They're a die-rama of edificating episodes from Christian history
 
— the flight from Egypt, the Garden of Gethsemane, the stories of St Margaret and St Dorothea. High art it'll be, but rendered to satisfy modern sensibilities. No one can accuse Leyton of lacking vision.
'

Uncle Jack wheezed. ‘Been memorising Mr Gilbert again, has she?'

It was Mr Gilbert who had secured the involvement of his friend Harry Swann in the Leyton mural scheme. Mr Swann was indeed an artist from the Royal College, but Mrs Repton had told her he'd been reduced to earning a living as an ad-hoc set designer in the West End. Despite apparently straitened circumstances, he'd only accepted the Leyton commission under the proviso that he could have free rein in the execution and interpretation of the murals — at least, as much as was possible within the approved religious framework.

‘You're playing with fire, Harvey,' Connie had heard Mrs Repton warning her brother in the library. ‘Hot-headed left-wing muralists with large egos don't mix with country parish committees.'

‘Nonsense. Swann's quite aware what he's getting himself into,' Mr Gilbert replied. ‘Besides, any artist would be a fool not to behave himself for the prospect of a year's continuous work these days, especially one with Swann's debts.'

‘Any artist,
except
Swann,' Mrs Repton corrected him. ‘That's why he has the debts in the first place. How many commissions has he actually finished?'

‘When did you become such a stick-in-the-mud, Evie? Really, sometimes I think playing lady of the manor has knocked all the fun out of you.'

Connie had eagerly awaited the arrival of Mr Swann, whom she imagined as some kind of artistically tortured firebrand pacing the lanes of Leyton and upsetting everyone in the Green Man with his revolutionary opinions. But when by chance she cycled past Mr Swann on the road to St Margaret's one afternoon, she was disappointed to find him a reedy, rat-faced man wearing the clogs of a fen worker and a miner's cap.

‘That Mr Swann,' Connie mused to Uncle Jack above the complaints of the oil-can. ‘He's definitely not the religious type. He doesn't even seem that artistic, does he?'

Uncle Jack hummed again, considering. ‘He's harmless enough, I 'spect. Nurses his pint at the Green Man against the best of us after a hard day. But he only has to open his mouth to show he were brought up on single malt, not stout.'

‘But he hasn't got any money,' she said. ‘I heard Mr Gilbert tell Mrs Repton.'

‘I dare say. Money comes and money goes. But class is not so easy to lose, even if you try.' Her uncle paused. ‘Bit like your Mr Gilbert … parlour pinks, the pair on 'em.'