Birmingham Rose (33 page)

‘What’s happened?’

‘Rosa’s brother has been killed,’ Margherita told him. ‘Somewhere,’ she added. ‘
Qualche parte
.’ The words hung woefully in the air.

‘I’m so sorry, Rosa,’ Falcone began.

‘You need some time,’ Margherita interrupted. ‘You shouldn’t be working here this weekend, Rosa.’

Rose started to argue, but Margherita silenced her.

‘You must go somewhere else, somewhere more peaceful and pleasant. Falcone – you take her.’

‘But . . . I—’ Falcone started to say.

‘You are the person we can spare most easily,’ Margherita continued ruthlessly. ‘Take her. Look after her.’ She sighed, tilting her head on one side with a certain impatience. ‘Forget your own struggles for a bit, eh?’

‘No!’ Rose cried immediately. ‘No. I’ll stay here. It will do me good to be working.’ A few months ago nothing would have filled her with greater delight than the idea of two days alone with Falcone, but now, the thought of him being forced to take her away for a weekend against his will filled her with panic. ‘If I’m busy I won’t have to think,’ she protested.

‘Go,’ Margherita said. It was an order. ‘You need to think.’

Rose had never heard her so steely and commanding before. It seemed as if she and Falcone would be thrown out bodily if they refused to go. They looked at each other warily for a moment. It was the first time their eyes had met for a very long time. Rose went and picked up her bag.

*

‘Where are we going?’ she asked as they stepped out into the warm spring air of the streets. The hawkers were in full throat on the pavements.

‘I know a peaceful place I can take you. I used to go with my father. We had holidays there when he needed a rest. You’ll like it.’

‘I’m sorry you have to do this.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry,’ he said stiffly. ‘Margherita’s right. I’ve been too wrapped up in myself. I need to do my duty by other people.’

Quelled by the coldness of the word ‘duty’, Rose fell silent again. They walked along the majestic Corso Umberto and into the Piazza Garibaldi where they could catch a train. Rose felt her spirits plummeting. The easy friendship, the fire of discussion between them, the tenderness – all this had vanished. Now they were like wooden puppets with each other. She felt despairing at the thought of the cold, awkward weekend ahead.

They took a train for Sorrento. Falcone had money and they each paid for their own ticket. He also bought a newspaper. They sat opposite one another, and throughout the entire journey Falcone read the newspaper. Rose often glanced across at his solemn face, the brown eyes moving in concentration across the print. A stranger’s face, she thought. Had she loved him? Who was he? Where was the vulnerable, complex man she had given her heart to?

Determinedly she looked away from him out of the window. She wanted to see more of Italy, didn’t she? But she could have been seeing this same place so much more cheerfully with Gwen. She stared out at the louring shape of Vesuvius. The lava fields from the eruption lay greyish mauve, spongy-looking, and cool now. Villages, orange groves and vineyards pushed defiantly right to the edges of them. On her side of the train she caught glimpses of the sea, the morning sunlight wrinkling in its deep blue surface. How these sights would have exhilarated her had her mood not been so sad.

The train climbed high along the verdant cliffside, and Rose smelt the pine trees. For a time they looked right across the sea, and then gradually rolled down into Sorrento.

Everyone climbed out at the small station. Immediately the place felt different from Naples. Quieter, with almost a holiday feel. Rose was terrified of meeting any service people who might recognize her, and she was relieved to get away from the station. Walking with Falcone and dressed in her black clothes she was certainly not conspicuously British.

‘We have a way to go,’ Falcone told her. ‘I hope you’re not too tired? My friends live on the hillside outside the town.’

‘I’m all right,’ Rose said, though in truth she felt dragged down and exhausted.

Falcone led her along the cobbled streets, usually walking slightly ahead of her, though she was unsure whether this was through impatience to get there or because her presence was unbearable. As they left the town and toiled uphill, past rough cottages with flowers bright at the windows, the stones burning hot under their feet, she became convinced it was because he could not stand to be near her. That long walk in the heat, bothered by flies, seeing his back in front of her, was the lowest point she could remember since being in Italy. With her head aching and her hand sweaty on the handle of her bag, she could only think about what she had lost and this terrible silence that had grown up between them.

For the first time she found herself thinking, ‘I wish I could just go home. Get away and forget it all.’ Hot tears stung her eyes and she wiped them away crossly. She was not going to let him, an alien creature, as she thought of Falcone now, see her cry again. At that moment she hated him.

Falcone stopped finally at what seemed to be the end of the road, at a large house, its front covered in pink, crumbling plaster and shaded by two eucalyptus trees. As he went to knock at the door they heard a dog give a moaning bark somewhere behind the house, and two white geese waddled out from among the weeds and stood muttering at them.

Rose put her bag down and wiped the sweat from her forehead. There was a slight breeze up there and, suddenly refreshed, she looked around her. Not far from the house, where the road petered out, a stepped path built from huge, pale stones wound upwards between the trees which covered the higher slopes of the mountain. She longed to walk there and lose herself among the trees, to escape from Falcone and these people she now had to meet.

The door opened and a voice cried, ‘Paulo! Is it you, really? How marvellous. Welcome, welcome . . .’

An elderly man, with steely grey hair and a stubbly little moustache, opened his arms wide in greeting. His face was deeply lined and tanned the colour of strong tea.

‘Who’s this?’

‘This is Rosa, Signore Finzi,’ Falcone said loudly. ‘Rose Lucas. She is English.’

‘
Un’inglese?
’ Signore Finzi looked puzzled, staring at Rose, who suddenly found herself blushing at the thought of all the questions that must be going through the old man’s mind.

Falcone explained briefly what they were doing there, and their host offered condolences while leading them inside to a large cool kitchen.

‘Clara, Clara! Look who’s come to visit us!’

No sooner had Clara Finzi set eyes on Falcone than he was clasped tightly in her plump arms amid loud expressions of delight, and wasn’t he thin and where had he been all this time and, finally, tears, which she mopped from her round, soft-looking cheeks. His father, his father. It would seem like the old days young Paulo being here – but holy Mother, how it made her think of Doctor Falcone . . . What a terrible, terrible thing . . .’

As soon as Rose was introduced as a friend she also found herself crushed against the signora’s bosom, and kisses landing on her cheeks from lips with a hint of moustache above them.

‘Fetch wine, Angelo – and water,’ the signora commanded at the top of her voice. Rose had quickly grasped that Signore Finzi’s hearing had almost gone. They sat down at the scrubbed wooden table. On a side table the signora had been cutting long strips of tagliatelle. Her husband sat down with them having brought the drinks and the signora talked and talked while she carried on preparing the food.

‘You have come right in time for a meal!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s so long since anyone has been to stay here. We have the rooms ready, but not even the soldiers come. They don’t know we are here, of course, and they want the sea, the bars, the shops. Nothing is like it was in the old days. And we make no money.’ She stopped to take a swig of the wine. ‘But now I have someone to cook for,’ she added, almost like a threat.

‘We must drink to your father,’ she said to Falcone. Looking at Rose she added, ‘Ah –
il dottore
Falcone. What a gentleman. What a doctor!’ Her tears started to flow again. ‘Of all the places he could have stayed, he came again and again to our poor house. Every year, with his children. From when this one was a small boy. Look – I have a photograph.’

Rose glanced nervously at Falcone, but saw nothing but affection and amusement in his eyes. He had relaxed suddenly, and looked younger, as if revisiting this place of his childhood had stripped some of the troubled lines from his face.

The signora swung herself back to the table after taking a small photograph from a shelf of the dresser.

‘There. You remember?’

She held out the picture between Rose and Falcone. Rose saw a tall, thin man with a serious but gentle face, standing rather formally beside two boys. Behind them was the Finzis’ house. The three of them were dressed in dark trousers and jackets. The taller of the two boys next to him closely resembled his father, the face thin and hair lighter than his younger brother’s. Clearly the smaller of the two was Falcone, even if Rose had not known he was the youngest. Darker and stockier than his brother, he stared out of the photograph with the mischievous expression she recognized and those long-lashed eyes.

Without thinking she turned and smiled at him. ‘You’ve hardly changed at all.’

‘It’s true, he hasn’t,’ Angelo Finzi said. ‘He was always like his mother, God rest her.’

To Rose’s surprise Falcone returned her smile, the warmth suddenly back in his eyes. The Finzis exchanged glances.

Signora Finzi put in front of them bowls of delicious tagliatelle with
pomodoro al sugo
and an egg on top, which they both ate hungrily. All the while the signora talked and reminisced and lamented the war, and the tragic murder of
il dottore
, so that neither Angelo Finzi, who sat nodding at what he could hear, nor Rose and Falcone were required to say anything at all. They sat eating beside each other in what now felt a more comfortable silence.

‘You need to rest now,’ Clara Finzi instructed them.

She led them upstairs and into a small passageway at the top from which led several doors. The first she opened was for Rose. It was a simple, white room, very cool, in the middle of which a huge wooden-framed bed took up most of the space. Wooden shutters were closed at the windows, and when she pushed them open, letting in warmer air and languid flies, she realized the room looked over the back of the house. The Finzis had a small plot of land which stretched out to the point where the trees took over. They cultivated it intensively, and among all the rows of growing vegetables and tomato plants, chickens and geese ran here and there. Rose could still hear the dog, but it was not in sight.

She breathed in the warm air, her headache easing off a little now they were out of the direct heat, and turned to the whitewashed room behind her. Over the bed hung a small wooden crucifix. There was a chair and a rough chest of drawers with a deep porcelain bowl resting on top. That was all.

Well fed and tired enough now for all thoughts to be blocked out, she lay down gratefully on the firm, white bed.

When she awoke, the only sound was the clucking of chickens below the window. She had left the shutters open and the light had grown softer, with the gentle, pinkish tinge of late afternoon. Her watch said four-thirty. Slowly she drank the cup of water by her bed and stood up, stretching her limbs.

There were no signs of life in the rest of the house when she left the room, so she let herself out of the front door. She would walk. It would be good to be alone, really alone for a time. Army life meant always being with other people.

The air outside was caressingly warm, full of the scents of herbs and gorse, and from somewhere the smell of frying onions. Rose turned towards the path which led up the hillside and began to climb, still feeling rather muzzy from her sleep. Every few yards along the sloping path there was a deep step, and she could feel the muscles in her legs pulling hard as she climbed between the greyish olive trees, with salamanders scuttling away from the path and the loud, abrasive rhythm of the crickets and cicadas.

She soon realized this was more than a convenient path up the side of the hill. In fact there were no other houses up there that she could see, nowhere for the path to lead. But at every other bend in the route as she made her way up was a little brick shrine, about waist height. Bending to look inside she found that set into each brick column was a roughly painted picture, each bearing a number. The pictures were the same as she had seen on the walls of the austere Naples churches, the fourteen Stations of the Cross. Jesus receives the Cross, Veronica wipes Jesus’ face, Jesus is nailed to the Cross. On the sills of some of the shrines she saw the remains of candle stubs and wilted flowers, perhaps left over from the Easter procession.

It felt appropriate that she should have come walking here to think about Sam. Sam, who had had his own beliefs, in his way, even if he would have staunchly disapproved of the colourful Catholic imagery in this thread of shared belief she was following up between the trees. She tried to concentrate on Sam, to talk to him.

She sat down on one of the cold steps, suddenly overcome by a great welling up of feeling. Hot tears ran down her cheeks.

‘I’ll miss you. I’ll miss you so much.’

Putting her hands over her face she wept for a few minutes, picturing the old, hard life in Birmingham, the way it had all been swept away by the war, changing and displacing all of them. Killing them, one way or another. None of it would ever be the same again. This thought was reinforced by the sight of the worn black skirt pulled tight over her strong tanned legs. It seemed such an alien thing. Who was she now? Who was Rose Lucas? Alone in a far-away country, dressed in strange, foreign clothes, giving her heart to a man who could not love her back. She remembered the smile Falcone had given her as they looked at the photograph together, and it made her cry again. It felt so cruel, that glimpse of how things could have been.