In the Wolf's Mouth (14 page)

‘Now that isn’t really fair. I didn’t say that.’

‘More or less. You don’t care is the problem. You’re just as bloody idle and indifferent as the rest of them.’

‘Look here, Walker, I’d rather you weren’t, you know, insubordinate in a way that made difficulties between us.’

‘Oh, fuck difficulties. Do you see what I’ve done? I’ve won England a part of the world.’

‘That definitely is insubordinate. There are penalties for that, Walker.’

‘I would be being insubordinate if I were your inferior. But I’m not. I’m your superior in every way so logically I cannot be insubordinate.’

‘In every way except rank so piss off out of this room before you put us both in an awkward situation. Don’t you see what this means? You ask me if I do. This means we’re winning the war. We’re winning it!’

‘Some of us are.’

26

The long, tediously detailed labour of evacuation was housewife’s work, a porter’s work. Every action of it pained Will.

Moving, the sea ran always on their left-hand side. Turning a corner there’d be a shove of wind and the sea would flash and then disappear as the convoy wound through schematic, insignificant towns that could have been won as sleepy corners of the British Empire. Now they were just lagging behind action, not taking it. When they caught up to the battlefield Will saw in one place long lines of stretchers leaning against a wall in the sun, the canvas smudged with quiet shapes of drying blood.

27

Returned to his unit, racing, finding them among the others. All the men looked different and alike. They were pared down by battle, gaunt, in faded uniforms, unshaven. Seeing him, seeing that George wasn’t dead, that he was alive, thin and weary, sliding his pack down from his back, Ray ran to him and caught him, shocking the taller man who didn’t recognise him at first and then did. Ray grabbed the sides of George’s head, the dry prickles of his hair, and kissed him, pressed his mouth to George’s and held it there. George squirmed backwards, his lips wriggling to form words of complaint and then, just for a fraction of a second, before he put his hands on Ray’s chest and shoved him away, he kissed back, an answering pressure in his lips. George flung him off. Ray let himself fall to the ground, laughing. He looked up. He was floating. He was mixed with the enormous sky. He saw George scowling down at him and laughed some more.

With his long straight fingers, George kept whisking particles of dust or lint from his clothes. His face lengthened with the effort of looking down at himself. He said that Dunphy was dead. And Randall was dead. And Carlson. They had all died at the same moment, or two moments, two big shells landing one after the
other. Coyne was killed later. George was right beside him when it happened. A sniper blew off Coyne’s jaw and it landed on George’s forearm. George flicked at his clothes, remembering the sensation of this thing, this object, warm and light as a teacup. Coyne had drowned in his bubbling holes.

‘I picked the jaw up, with all of the teeth in there, and held onto it in case it was going to be useful but it wasn’t. He died. I balanced it back on his face so he could be buried with it and we ran.’

Ray and George stood together in the evening air, a soothing moisture in it, a substance in the distances. No sound of fighting, only voices and more men arriving.

George was different now. Sometimes, in flashes, Ray could get his old self out of him, but in the silences George’s face hardened and he disappeared.

Ray asked finally, ‘Did you shoot? Remember what you said that time that had me worried all the time, did you stick to it?’

George opened his mouth and inhaled looking up at the sky. He closed his eyes and Ray understood. But knowing that George had been doing exactly what Ray had prayed he was doing and had defended himself brought Ray no relief or peace of mind. Instead it made Ray sad, awfully sad, to think of gentle George being forced to do that and maybe killing people, to think that they were all forced to do that. Ray stood next to his friend enclosed in this sadness, knowing he would never be outside it again. This had happened to them all. This was for ever.

28

They were done with Africa now. That was the news, the reason for celebration. The men played in the sea. Despite the fact that Ray’s hearing was now crisp, finished and sensitive, he was not permitted to join them. He sat on the beach, pouring handfuls of sand over the gaunt bones of his feet, and looked at the men splashing and laughing in the brilliance of the sun-struck water, the light sliding about their shoulders, over their heads and backs. Feet kicked up and disappeared. George was not among them, as far as Ray could see. Ray had to let go of that, of George, and to try not to panic. He had to care about himself instead. His return to his unit had been short-lived. Ray had been called out to form part of a special division of men, men with Italian names – all the Rossos and Rizzos and Romanos – who would be last to arrive in the invasion of Sicily that was to follow. They were to stay there and secure the peace.

One man rose up in the sea, eyes closed, his hands on his head, water pouring down his face and lips and Ray felt the cool of that over his own head, the relief.

Ray’s head burned often, with memories, with fear. But now he would miss the battle. In Sicily he would not really be a soldier any more. He would be part of the peace. George would have liked that for himself
but George was not an Italian. Ray had to forget about George now, to let him go. Perhaps it would be better for him to think of him as dead already. Ray twitched at a memory: in the mess of action once he’d had that thought, that everything was dead already, only some of it moved and lived. That wasn’t really going to help. He just had to hang on until it was over. That was all. He had George’s address back home. If they ever got back home, he would get on a bus and use it.

Part Two
Sicily

1

The Princess liked to outpace her guards, to kick up and canter as far from them as she could, making them chase, but here in the motor car there was nowhere to go. One guard sat beside her. He breathed through his nostrils as loudly as a farm animal and bit at the corner of his moustache as he stared out of the window, a pistol on his hip. When she was a little girl there were always more of them, men on the other side of the windows, crouching on the running boards with rifles across their backs. As a child she’d envied them: she wanted to ride on the outside of the car. Now the threat was much diminished but still her father wouldn’t let her travel without at least one to protect her.

In front, the driver in his cap paddled his feet, jerked his levers and turned the wheel. Outside the windows the landscape changed. The bricks and avenues of Palermo gave way to the countryside, the landscape hollowing, rising up into rigid, incessant hills. She was not sad to be leaving the city. It would be good to be out again on horseback with the wind striking her. For a while. This was the task of Luisa’s life: evading boredom in one of two places. She did this by moving arrhythmically between them, taking her friends by surprise in Palermo, going among the feathers and
ballrooms and knowing eyes and then suddenly substituting them with the sun and emptiness, the peasants and her father’s travails. There she was free to ride within a certain range, as long as she was accompanied and kept away from the malevolent edge of the country that was always there, encircling. She sensed it looking out of the motor car. The landscape was vigilant. It knew things. It could see her.

In a walled garden in Palermo, by a pond in which large goldfish slowly twisted, rising and fading, a Fascist mayor had told Princess Luisa that there was absolutely nothing to be worried about, that the party had smashed those backward rural criminals. He had jutted out his chin in a ridiculous imitation of the Duce. All the Fascists these days strutted and posed like him even as a light sheen of panic appeared on their faces. At parties aristocrats from the old families caught each other’s eyes and shared this observation. They themselves felt confident, monumental, historically vindicated, while the Fascists struck attitudes and drank and spoke too much. The effect of events in North Africa on Luisa’s own pet Fascist, Mauro, a Tuscan of refined, not to say pretty, features, was to make him more ardent. He wanted to marry her.

Mauro Vecchio was the prefect of Sant’Attilio, a part of the island he confided in her that he found squalid and incomprehensible. The best of Sicily was the east, where the Greeks had been. The half-Arab peasants of the west could not be made political. It wouldn’t take, any more than you could teach pigs to speak Latin. You could move the feeding trough, make them trot in a different direction, and that was as far as it
went. Luisa’s father disliked him for these opinions, the Prince having a peculiar, dimly Tolstoyan reverence for the tough local people that somehow survived his dealings with them. Mauro and her father liked to argue it out in the persons of The Future and The Old Wisdom. Now, it seemed her father had won the argument. Mauro had retreated to Palermo and Luisa suspected he would never return, although as he drove with her to the city in his official car, he had promised her that he would, no matter what happened.

The conversation on the bouncing back seat of the car was a long coda to the conversation in the garden. Sitting on the pedestal of one of the statues, Mauro had looked up squinting against the light and asked Luisa to marry him. The answer, of course, was no, although Luisa could not have said why the ‘of course’ was so immediate and definitive. She liked Mauro. He was always entertaining in his silk shirts and boots, declaring things. He was ardent, about her, about Italy. But there was something she was sure she should have felt that she didn’t. It was a kind of terror that she wanted to feel, her solitude broken open, a fiery golden tearing into the centre of her by the man who would then have the right to marry her, and that she had never felt.

In Palermo, Mauro had sent messages to the apartment in the palace where she stayed with her cousins (the Prince having long since rented out his Palermo residence to his nephews). She had replied only insincerely, with jokes and exhortations to courage. She had met the usual people and done the usual things in an atmosphere now effervescent with the closeness
of war. Until, that is, being there had bored her and she’d left.

Arriving home, the driver got out, trotted around and opened the door for Luisa. The guard waited and walked behind. Luisa saw Angilù walking from the main door towards the wing of estate management rooms. He stopped where he was and lifted his hat, almost as though he was showing her his balding head, a little surprise he kept for her. Angilù wouldn’t have understood this comical thought, he was always so serious and hard-working. The Princess waved at him, allowing him to walk away.

Into the lion’s mouth, the echoing hallway where the dogs came out to greet her, claws scrabbling on the tiles. She rummaged briefly among their furry necks and sides, their warm, damp breath, before walking through to her father’s study. Presumably Angilù had just come from there. The image of him standing outside, subordinate, his hat uplifted, stuck in her mind for some reason. She found him a frustrating man. He’d been working with her father, around the house, for almost twenty years and he always kept such a pious distance from her. Only once, when she was a girl, she remembered, he’d treated her like one of his own children. Luisa used to follow him around, pursuing him at his work. She was playing outside with some kind of seeds that he needed, tossing them onto the ground, and he’d grabbed hold of her, handling her roughly, and scolded her. She had been so shocked and outraged at this unprecedented behaviour that she had wailed with scarlet anger. She could still see the fear that had appeared in his eyes, the
desperate effort to placate her before anyone else saw. After that assertion of her will, Angilù had kept away. When she followed him, he ignored her respectfully. Luisa felt at odd moments abandoned by him still, his veneration of her a kind of denial. She would have liked to talk to him sometimes, she imagined he knew interesting things, but he was mute. She could have asked him questions and he would have been forced to answer, but it was not the same.

Her father was sitting in his red armchair with the wireless on, his gaze resting in midair, a slightly foolish look of cogitation on his face. Cigarette smoke was rising slowly along his arm and up from his head. It rolled with turbulence when he saw her and moved. ‘Ah, my dear.’ He stood up. ‘One moment.’ He went over to the wireless, a waist-high cabinet elaborate with honey-coloured grilles, and switched it off.

The Princess approached and kissed the Prince’s proffered cheek.

‘Well,’ he asked, sitting back down on his armchair, the leather cushions huffing and crackling. ‘What news on the Rialto?’

‘They’re scared, Father. They think Sicily is next and that the Germans are about to arrive in force. Rumours. I think Mauro might be making plans to escape.’

‘Doesn’t that rather suggest he won’t marry you?’

Luisa laughed quickly, dismissively. ‘I wouldn’t have married him.’ Mauro appeared to her mind’s eye the way he always did, his pretty features like an illustration in a children’s book, a simple, impertinent face.

‘That’s a relief. A few years ago I suppose you might
have got away with it, when things were different for them. Now I would certainly forbid it.’

‘Yes, Father. But there’s no need. I’ve already forbidden it.’

‘Good.’

‘I’m going to change. I want to ride before dinner. Any news here?’

‘I just had Angilù in here.’

‘Yes, I saw him.’

‘There’s a lot of news coming back from cousins in America. Certain people who left a long time ago are apparently helping the Americans. Which suggests that the news in Palermo may be correct. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

‘Nobody does.’ The Princess thought her father looked very old in his chair, the way his long, narrow thighs jutted out and converged weakly at the knees, his bony hands on the armrests. He had worked very hard for the estate. Prince Adriano was a rare eccentric: a Sicilian landowner who liked the land.