Birmingham Rose (31 page)

‘Better switch it off,’ she suggested. ‘The shadows are horrible.’

‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said, extinguishing the torch. ‘We’ll be all right. We need to go down.’

‘Is it far?’ Maria Grazia asked in a trembling voice. ‘I don’t like it here.’

‘No, not far,
piccola
,’ Falcone said tenderly. ‘Come on – you’re safe.’

They headed down the hillside, along the terraces lined with graves and vaults. Rose’s heart was pounding in her chest. She was trying to keep her thoughts away from ghosts and the stories she had heard about Italian burial traditions. Sometimes bodies were unearthed after being buried for a year. The bones were scraped, then laid in much smaller boxes which were stacked in a chancel house.

She had asked Falcone about it, horrified. ‘They don’t really do they?’

‘It does happen here, but more further south. You have to understand – this isn’t a big country and there are a lot of people. In many parts the ground is made of solid rock, so it’s difficult to find places for burial. You have to find a way to deal with it. You see?’

She had been amazed by his acceptance of such macabre practices.

‘That’s why many cemeteries have wall graves, built above ground. It’s all to save space.’

Rose had seen them, the coffins inserted into slots in a stone structure like a giant chest of drawers.

She sensed Maria Grazia shivering beside her, so she took off her jacket and wrapped it around the child. They walked on slowly, the sound of their feet crunching on dry earth.

Suddenly they all stopped. There was a strange, unearthly sound in front of them, a high moaning, growing louder, making the hairs rise on the back of their necks.

‘My God,’ Rose said. She wondered for a second if it was a cat, but the sound was too loud and full. Maria Grazia turned to Falcone and buried her head against him.

Then they heard another noise, a low grunting, rhythmic and urgent. After a few seconds both cries began to die down together. Rose’s eyes met Falcone’s as the intimacy of what was happening so close by dawned on them both.

Falcone looked away quickly and bent to cuddle Maria Grazia in the darkness. ‘It’s all right,’ he soothed. ‘It’s nothing to be afraid of.’

Without looking at Rose, he said, ‘Lovers meet here during the day. I had not expected them to be here at night too.’

As they continued down the path in silence, Rose was seized by an overwhelming desire to giggle. Tight bubbles of hysterical laughter were welling up inside. She could see herself from the outside, a stranger in a foreign cemetery at two o’clock in the morning, with a prospective priest and a pregnant twelve-year-old, listening to the coupling of complete strangers in the dark. Who would believe her if she told them? A loud snort of laughter escaped and Falcone turned in bewilderment.

‘Are you all right?’

Rose began laughing then, and couldn’t stop. Maria Grazia, quite unused to people roaring with laughter around her, started to giggle at the sight, and eventually, completely astonished, Falcone joined in as well.

Gradually they got themselves back under control. Falcone reached out and put his arm lightly round Rose’s shoulders. ‘You crazy woman. Do you English always act like this when things are horrible? I haven’t laughed so much since – well, I can’t remember.’ Quickly he removed his arm. ‘Come on – we must go.’

Further on the path became much rougher and more stony under foot. Small pebbles rolled away as they walked.

‘This must be the oldest part of the place,’ Falcone said. ‘I’m lost.’

He switched on the torch and shone it in front of them. The sight that met their eyes instantly wiped away any last traces of laughter. At this side of the cemetery some of the oldest wall graves had been built against the rocky side of the hill. With age and erosion, and perhaps from earth tremors in this turbulent area, most of the graves had collapsed. Among the rubble they could clearly make out the broken shapes of coffins. From some, the shrunken bodies had slid out, white, petrified figures, tossed carelessly about among the ruins. Rose would take away the memory of perfectly preserved fingerbones at the end of an arm, pointing up from behind a slab of stone, the hand bent forward at the wrist as if the person behind was relaxing in a bath.

Maria Grazia screamed and rushed in to Falcone’s arms. She had seen the dead before many times, but never in these conditions.

‘D’you still want to find your mother’s resting place?’ Falcone asked her gently. ‘Or would you like to go home?’

‘I want to see it,’ she said, sniffing. ‘I want to know where my mother is lying.’

‘It must be that way,’ Falcone said, pointing.

Once they reached the lowest level it was not difficult to find. All signs of attempts at individual Christian burials came to an end, and in front of them, as Falcone flashed the torch around, was a large area where the ground had been disturbed and refilled to cover one of a number of mass graves. The bombing, the typhus epidemic, the general ill health of the population meant that death carts trawled the streets as if in a medieval plague, and none but the wealthy could hope for a gravestone above their heads. Maria Grazia’s mother had been poor. It was a bleak, sad sight. Flowers and trinkets had been scattered among the stones on the rough soil. Otherwise the graves lay unmarked and indistinguishable from each other.

Maria Grazia stood staring at the place. Falcone laid the torch down on the ground.

‘Find a spot for your flowers,’ he said, putting an arm round her shoulders. ‘You can make it hers. You are very near her.’

The child walked miserably forward, a skinny, pathetic sight with her bulging belly, and her half-crushed blossoms.

She found a place where there were no other flowers, and knelt on the dry earth to place them. After a few moments she threw herself forward on to the ground, weeping. Then she sat back on her knees, rocking slowly in what seemed to be prayer.

Rose moved as if to go and comfort her but Falcone stopped her. ‘Leave her,’ he said. ‘It’s good for her to do this.’

They stood watching her, and Rose felt tears come to her eyes at the thought of her own mother, and the freezing day on which they had buried her. How long ago it all seemed: England, her family, everything, as if it had happened in another life.

She knew that Falcone’s eyes were on her, and she turned to look at him as they stood in the shadow behind the torchlight. He moved awkwardly towards her. Then his arms were round her, drawing her to him, and they embraced, his lips seeking out hers. All the tenderness and longing they had seen in each other’s eyes were expressed in that kiss. Falcone stroked Rose’s hair, and then her face, with wonder, and she leaned against him, filled by emotions she had never known before. For the first time she knew what it was to respond to a kiss, to long for the other person.

She did not know how long they stood in each other’s arms. It was only when Maria Grazia finally stood up and walked slowly away from the grave that they parted. Falcone picked up the torch and they went to meet her. Supporting her between them, they began the climb back to the gate.

‘Thank Christ for that!’ Henry exclaimed as soon as he saw them. ‘You’ve been gone blooming ages. What the hell’ve you been doing?’

‘It took us a bit of time to find her,’ Rose told him vaguely. She had a strange, dreamy sensation of complete happiness, as if nothing mattered, neither the truck, nor getting back to Caserta, nor being exhausted the next day. Everything she needed was here.

They drove back to the city in silence, except for Falcone’s directions. She wondered whether he was thinking, as she was, of the night’s strange, conflicting moods. He sat beside her, his hand laid on the head of the young mother who had fallen asleep across his lap.

On 4 June, two days before the D-Day landings on the coast of France, General Mark Clark led the tanks and trucks of the Allied Forces along the sweeping, majestic roads into Rome. For many of the troops there was an awesome sense that they were moving along the paths of history. But when they reached Rome there was no decisive battle to determine which occupying force should control the fate of Italy. The Germans immediately shifted north to consolidate another line straddling the country’s knee. It felt as if the slow crawl up this long, spiny country would never come to an end.

A week after that, another small but momentous event took place at Il Rifugio. Maria Grazia gave birth to a son, a tiny, fragile creature with only enough strength to snuffle into life. The birth was hard and Falcone was forced to call upon another doctor for help to be sure of saving the child. But enter life he did, and he clung to it. Maria Grazia called him Mauro.

Rose first saw him when he was ten days old, and was entranced by his crinkly perfection.

‘He’s so beautiful,’ she said, smiling tearfully down at Maria Grazia as she let her hold him. ‘Isn’t it an amazing thing?’

The young girl stared blankly at her. She was very pale, and now she no longer carried the weight of the child it was clear how thin she was. Every effort was being made by Margherita, Falcone and the others to feed her up so she could nourish the child with her barely formed breasts. Thanks to Rose and Henry’s monthly ‘drops’, which had so far gone miraculously well, the children were all thriving, except for two boys who had fallen ill and been removed to the hospital for fear of infecting the others.

If it had not been for Falcone distancing himself from her, Rose would have spent the summer in a haze of happiness. How many times during those weeks did she regret that kiss! Such a small thing, that moment of intimacy, but it changed everything. It had brought into the open the powerful current between her and Falcone which, once acknowledged, could not be ignored.

But wasn’t she committed, at least verbally, to Alfie Meredith? It would soon be five years since she had, in a backhand sort of way, agreed to become his wife, a man from a different life, imprisoned in a country she had never seen.

She had tried to abide by her promise, but her feelings for Falcone overpowered everything else. Who was that person who had bound herself to Alfie back in Birmingham? A sad, fragile girl who had no idea of what she was capable. How could she have foreseen meeting Falcone, or the feelings aroused in her by his presence, of wanting to reach out and touch him each time they found themselves close, to stroke his thick black hair or smooth the back of her fingers down his cheek?

She remembered the kiss with longing, but also with a poignant sense of loss. Her own confusion was simple compared with the tension her presence appeared to have set up inside Falcone. He had been so sure where his future lay! Now when she was at Il Rifugio, they were almost never alone, nor did Falcone create opportunities for them to be so as he had before.

They still talked and argued about things, but usually in the presence of Francesco and Margherita, once the children were all asleep. Often they talked about Italian politics. What should happen once the war was over, now that Fascism seemed to be defeated? Magdalena would join in in her deep, animated voice. When Rose and Falcone were alone she found it possible to express her thoughts in a direct way, but she was intimidated by this gathering of educated Italians. She felt truly at home only when they were dealing with the children. Yet she needed more now from Il Rifugio than her work with the children. She needed Falcone. To talk with him, be alone with him, to understand why he was withdrawing from her, shutting her out.

In every other way her life felt charmed. The country came into bloom. Caserta flowered with red and pink geraniums hanging from almost every window and bright blooms of bougainvillea stained every wall across the town. In the countryside oranges and lemons hung ripe on the trees and the vines were heavy with grapes. The heat of the sun softened the road surface, giving it a spongy feel, and the air blowing in at the sides of the trucks was warm and caressing.

Behind the palace the long sweep of grass turned brown and wiry, and the tanks below the cascades gave off a slightly stagnant smell. The ATS pulled up their light cotton frocks on the grass to sun themselves during their hours off duty. Rose found that she had formed an easy, if not intimate camaraderie with Willy, Madge and, of course, Gwen.

As the temperature rose, Naples steamed and came alive with fat green flies which shimmered in dark clouds and settled on anything damp, heading for the face, mouth and armpits.

‘It’s beyond me why you spend your weekends over there when you could get out to Amalfi or Capri,’ Tony said to Rose. ‘God, the stink of the place! Lewis and I get out as fast as we can. Anyway, I thought you were mad keen to see the country round here?’

‘But you’ve never been to Il Rifugio,’ Rose retorted indignantly. ‘And it’s much cleaner there than you’d think. The two nuns spend half their lives cleaning up.’ But he did have a point. There were so many places she still hadn’t seen.

One Sunday afternoon, Rose was sitting in the courtyard with Mauro in her lap while Maria Grazia slept. The baby’s tiny hand gripped her little finger as he lay half asleep. Rose smiled down at him. She’d found a spot in the shade on the warm stone flags, her back against the wall, and she could smell the pungent leaves of a geranium plant growing in a pot near by.

She looked up, to see Falcone watching her. He was standing, his hands in the pockets of his blue dungarees, leaning against one of the pillars of the arched entrance to the staircase. He had been talking with Francesco. Now he stared at her in silence, and she saw in his face such a depth of longing and bewilderment that she had to turn her face back towards Mauro.

Falcone pushed himself away from the pillar and turned to walk inside.

‘What’s eating him?’ Francesco asked.

‘He’s in love with Rosa,’ Margherita said without looking up from her sewing at Rose, who started, but kept her eyes on Mauro.

‘He’s
what
?’ Francesco exploded. ‘He can’t be! He’s going to the seminary.’

Magdalena snorted, pushing her veil back over her shoulders. ‘Can’t be? What nonsense you do talk.’