The Last Pier Part 41

Because of the war, thought Carlo. Only twenty-four hours, if that, and already this man talks about it as if it has been going on for years.

'I know,' Lucio said, in English.

Still he didn't move.

'Your government must not panic,' Lucio said. 'We are law-abiding people. We are not Fascists.'

'Of course!' Robert Wilson agreed.

He stood up and took another cigarette out of his case. Then he offered one to Lucio who shook his head slightly.

'You are good friends of the Maudsleys aren't you?'

'Yes,' Mario said. 'My daughter is engaged to Joe Maudsley.'

'So I heard. Congratulations. An Anglo-Italian union. I wish them every happiness!'

'Thank you.'

On the stairs, behind the slightly open door, Carlo continued to listen to his father's sweet, friendly voice and his uncle's anger.

'Goodbye,' Robert Wilson said, holding his hand out to Lucio who turned away at the same instant.

'Thank you for coming,' Mario said. 'And don't worry about the Italian community here. We are all loyal to Britain. Besides,' he added, beaming, 'we are neutral in this war.'

Another pause when a floorboard creaked.

'When exactly did your brother come over to England?'

'Lucio? In 1932. I invited him. We needed more help.'

Carlo felt a twinge in his chest.

As his father walked with the Wilson man to the door, Carlo was certain this was no ordinary visit. This man wasn't interested in Mario. This visit was about something else.

'Would you like a box of biscuits?' Mario asked, timidly.

'No thanks,' Robert said.

He slipped his cigarette case back into his pocket.

'I suppose you never thought of returning to your home?' he asked, casually. 'Just for the duration of the war I mean? You might find it safer in your own country.'

They had moved outside to the front entrance and Carlo crept further down the stairs. The two men stood for a moment in the doorway. The air was clean and fresh and faintly fishy. A low strain of music came drifting towards them from a blacked-out upstairs room. Richard Strauss' Horn Concerto, written for this dark hour. Both men paused and stared up at the sky, listening to the slow sadness of the French horn. Mario felt a jolt of fear.

'Beautiful,' Robert Wilson said. 'Strange how a German could produce such sublime music! You like Richard Strauss.'

It was a statement. Mario nodded. The music swelled and rushed towards its last bars and then there was silence.

'My home is here,' Mario said.

He sounded unutterably sad.

'We are entwined with you,' he said. 'Your history is ours too. We will stand by this country and resist this madman, together.'

He spoke humbly and seemed close to tears. Papi is growing old, Carlo thought, watching Robert Wilson's silhouette as he walked away. He remembered an odd comment Lucio had made recently. He had seen Robert Wilson several times giving Rose's Aunt Kitty flowers.

'He always buys that woman seven flowers,' Lucio had said. 'And I don't trust her either.'

But Robert Wilson was some sort of official. It was pointless to antagonise him.

Unease curdled in Carlo's stomach. A bell was ringing a warning in his head.

'The hunt,' his uncle had said, 'will soon be on. And Kitty McNulty is in the story somehow, you'll see!'

Mussolini was not finished with Germany yet. They were still in danger.

Looking out of the upstairs window, Carlo saw Lucio hurrying off somewhere. There was no sign of Mario. Uneasy without knowing quite why, he decided to follow his uncle, to make sure he was not in any danger. Which was why, when some time later the explosion occurred, it was Carlo who raised the alarm. Lucio, still swimming in the river, heard nothing. Both missed the two small figures, one of them holding up a jar of glow-worms, running towards Selwyn Maudsley. Moments before Scotland Yard arrived.

IN THAT THEATRE of war, with all the world's stage in such chaos, the Lead Man played many parts and inevitably caused havoc.

'The war made fools of everyone,' Carlo told Cecily. 'Everything frightened the adults, they suspected everyone.'

It was hardly surprising the children had picked up on this fear.

The Leading Man, drinking claret and smoking strong cigars, delivered rousing speeches. He commissioned a splendid set of posters that would live in the hearts of the British people forever.

It wasn't his fault that he didn't get everything entirely right. It wasn't his fault if some people died unnecessarily. This was a war, dammit. People died in wars. Only the insane believed otherwise.

When the Leading Man said, 'Collar the lot!' he had meant it. In a manner of speaking.

The Stage Managers took their instructions from him and called for all hands on deck. The file (it was a new file that drew material from the old Black List files) had a new name. It was t.i.tled W.A.R. (Warning. Alien. Risk.) A man was put in charge of Operation W.A.R. A man with several names.

Some called him Robert Wilson. Others Sweet William. Still others (now dead) had called him Captain Pinky.

He had an official code name, seldom heard until now: FINCH.

And a birth name that no one ever found out. Although afterwards he was called Dr Calvino, in memory of the work he had done to stamp out the fifth column, and in memory of a man who wrote Italian fairy tales.

It was considered an honour.

But during the conflict Finch had two important jobs. To find out about the fifth column and identify the man code-named 'Wotan'. In order to do this he had gone to Suffolk where there were groups of Italians cl.u.s.tered together near the Hokey-Pokey Ice-Cream Parlour. It wasn't Finch's fault that he should fall in love with Wotan's lovely daughter. That had not been part of any plan.

After the war Finch was ordered to leave the British Isles for a time. When he returned as 'Dr Calvino' he hunted out Agnes. Hunting was his speciality but he found, on this occasion, that in her presence all he had loved and lost came back to smite him. He reeled as from a physical blow, his face turning pale, his heart breaking all over again. He smiled a smile of infinite sadness.

'I loved her, you know,' he told Agnes, simply. 'She had my love then, she has it still.'

Agnes had nothing to say. Objects danced through the doors of her mind. She saw shoelaces of liquorice and jelly babies beside copies of Schoolgirl's Own. What did that mean? Dr Calvino let her ramble on. Better for the evening sun to fall full on her face as it sank for the last time. He understood how the rhythm of life for those who waited at home had been destroyed and he saw himself as a symbol of sorts. The cause of a million displaced people.

'I did not know then, how in only a few hours, she would be dead,' he told Agnes, following his own train of thought. 'I just knew that her face and the scent of the tobacco flowers nearby brought out all my feelings for her, in that last dusk.'

Dr Calvino looked at Agnes for her reaction but there was none. He felt he was speaking to an empty room.

'I shall never forget her,' he said, very softly, a prisoner of remorse. 'She is my life.'

And then he left.

Dr Calvino was put out to gra.s.s. Always after that, it was Rose's face he saw in his dreams. It was her unresolved look, the light draining away like a tide, that haunted him so terribly. These fluctuations of emotion drove him mad.

Some things, it seemed, flourished in a time of war. In his diary he wrote, You win some, you lose some.

He wasn't an original man.

After the war, information, hard to come by during it, emerged from behind the bombed-out buildings. Like revellers after a drunken party, on unsteady feet, Information came sheepishly out of hiding. It was too late to change anything.

By now, the Molinello family, what was left of them, had flown to Italy. The story of Lucio and Mario, Giorgio and Luigi and Beppe and all the other prisoners travelled across the Atlantic Ocean on small rafts of rumour.

This was what Carlo found out.

The Molinello men had been taken to a camp.

Rumour suggested it was in Bury.

They were close enough to be visited, but Anna and Franca and Carlo hadn't known this at the time.

In the camp, living like rats, they sent home letters.

It took two months for the first letter from Mario, destination censored, to arrive. Reading it, horror-struck, Anna and Franca packed a parcel and sent it to the PO Box address.

The next letter to arrive came a month later.

My dear Anna and Franca and Carlo, I don't know if you received my letter written on December 12...

Despairingly they packed another parcel.

Christmas came and went.

No one remembered it afterwards.

For Anna and Franca and Carlo, grief was the club foot they dragged around wherever they went. They had no idea where their menfolk were.

Joe came home and quietly married Franca in Our Lady of The Rosary. A week later he was gone, and some time after they heard he was missing in action. Franca had no more letters from him after that. Agnes, of course, was incapable of pa.s.sing on information but many years later Carlo heard that letters from the forces to any foreign nationals in Britain were destroyed. Enquiries came to nothing, all their loved ones had vanished in a bunch; flowers cut in their prime.

In the New Year a few Italian women began contacting each other from different parts of the country. Very soon Anna heard talk of Italian men being rounded up and sent to prisoner-of-war camps around Britain.

The ice-cream parlour closed its doors and in order to make a little money Anna took in sewing when she could. Overnight the town put up a barricade of hostility towards them. It was as if they had never lived in England for all these years. Then in the spring of 1942, Cook and Partridge came to visit. They asked if Carlo might help with the enormous amount of work to be done at Palmyra Farm before the harvest.

Anna hadn't wanted him to go. Franca couldn't bear the name of the place mentioned. Carlo hadn't wanted to either but they needed the money and Partridge and Cook had a look of such sadness that he went.

They never spoke of what had happened. No one was mentioned but Cook made Carlo small sugarless apple turnovers to take home and Partridge gave him rabbit and vegetables whenever he could.

Once, just before the war ended, Cook kissed him and told him he was very brave. Just like Cecily. There had been tears in her eyes. Once too, Carlo saw Partridge mend the bicycle Cecily used to ride. He took it apart, oiled it and then he painted it a brilliant blue. Like the blue robin on the packet of starch Cook once used to wash the child's clothes.

When the war had been over for three months the Molinellos finally heard the rest of the story. They had moved to the village of Grondola, in Tuscany. Further down the valley the little town of Pontremoli was almost unrecognisable. The Germans while in retreat had attempted to blow up all that was beautiful. A medieval church, a Romanesque building that had withstood centuries of earthquakes. Other towns had been flattened too, as had the harbour area of La Spezia.

Only the sea, indestructible and salt blue, remained.

'You lived from one day to the next, Cecci,' Carlo said.

Cecily knew.

Weeks pa.s.sed, months; years. Suddenly, two years had pa.s.sed. The war remained in the near distance but you were still in it. It was there, decaying in your head.

The rest of the story came via a stranger pa.s.sing through Grondola. The man brought Anna a basket of bright yellow zucchini flowers, picked and ready for frying. He remembered the ice-cream parlour in Bly. It was he who confirmed they had been in the camp in Bury.

There had been barbed wire, broken windows, filth everywhere.

The internees slept on bare boards.

The lavatories were disgusting.

The only water they had came from eighteen cold water taps.

There were 500 men. Each with their own prison number.

'Your husband Mario was there,' the man said. 'And your sons.'

And in amongst the medieval army of lice and dirt was Lucio. Almost unrecognisable.

'I was shocked,' the man said, speaking into an equally shocked silence. 'What were we doing in a place like this? There were Germans there with us!'

This had confused them further.

'What had we done except keep shops?'

The camp's commanding officer finally told them the real reason behind what was happening.

'You are a Fascist threat to the British people,' he had said, waving aside all protest, trampling on their hopes as if they were ants. At that Lucio became incandescent with rage.

'I told you all not to go near Mussolini's social club,' he'd screamed. 'Did you listen? I told you the administration was toxic.'