Forest Green, page 9
—
Art had been in the camp for a number of weeks when news filtered through that a unit, moving up from the south, had arrived at the camp to bed down for a few days. Art was in the mess mashing potatoes; the cook had secured a pallet of fresh spuds from god knows where, and since then they’d been eating potatoes every which way: potato fritters, French fries, scalloped potatoes, hash browns, roasted potatoes, and a dish the cook had invented called Potatoes Jubilee which consisted of all the leftover bits of potato fried with canned bully beef. Luckily Art loved spuds. He went out the back door of the mess to fetch another sack.
“Well, hello there.”
Art froze. A familiar voice. For the briefest moment he found himself thinking: Mister Theodore?
He swung round.
But it was Archie. Archie Portman, in the flesh. Archie! About a foot taller and, if possible, even skinnier than he’d been before.
“Man oh man,” Archie said, “it’s about time!” and he gave Art such a great manly squeeze that Art almost stopped himself from thinking that Archie was just about the last person he wanted to see.
Here was the one person in the whole of the Canadian army who really knew who he was, who knew everything there was to know about him.
Archie Portman. Here. In Italy.
* * *
—
That night before curfew, Art and Archie sat out together, sharing a cigarette, the moonlight striking bright on the water, lighting up the coastline.
“They’re moving us all north, but they’re trying to hide it from the Krauts,” Archie said.
“Is that right?”
Archie nodded. “That’s the sum total of my knowledge.”
Nobody told Art anything, he just followed orders.
“Geronimo is a good dog,” Art said. He wasn’t sure what’d made him think of the dog, apart from the fact that he missed him.
Archie barked a laugh. “Geronimo. Good boy.” He paused. He turned to look at Art. “I heard Peg got married.”
That’s right, Art thought, you were always keen on her. “Frank Turner. The new schoolteacher. From Burnaby,” he added. “Came to town and swept Peg off her feet.” Art thought of Peg’s wedding the previous winter, the lavish display in the church. The day had been unseasonably warm and the lake had shimmered in the afternoon light, the beach clear. The wedding party was large, no one seemed to know how or why it had got so grand; perhaps because it was the first proper wedding in the family, a chance to make up for Tilly’s non-event, her soldier husband Duncan Wilson perpetually overseas.
Mrs. Portman had declined the invitation. “Doesn’t seem right,” she’d said to Art’s mother at church one Sunday, “a big wedding when our boys are overseas fighting.”
Art’s mother had smiled and looked away.
“Damn,” said Archie, shaking his head. “Peg. Married.”
Art laughed and gave Archie a shove. “Don’t worry. By the time we get home, all the girls will be so relieved to see us we’ll have to beg them to leave us be.”
He thought about Rose. He thought about Rose most days. He received letters from home regularly, from his mother, Tilly and Peg, even Eddie took it upon himself to send Art compilations of his favourite jokes from time to time. But not from Rose; letter-writing was not her kind of thing. Rose. She’d like the army, Art thought. She loved hard work and routine; if she’d been a man she’d be one of those soldiers who think it’s all a lark, a grand adventure, with polished boots and sharp bed-corners and falling into formation. And, when required, she’d be heroic. He had thought he’d be one of those men as well but he knew now he was not. He’d spent enough time sitting in the back of an army transport, with hardly room to breathe and too much time to think, to convince himself of that. And he had not had an opportunity to prove otherwise.
* * *
—
Art had thought Archie would move out with the rest of his unit, “north,” wherever that was, but that hadn’t happened. Instead, Art, Archie and their crew had become a make-do bomb disposal unit; they were moving through the town systematically clearing unexploded shells and mortar along the way, declaring some buildings safe and many more fit for demolition only. You had to be careful where you tread. They worked in pairs, that was the rule, Art and Archie often together now, everyone assuming “the Okanagan boys” would work best side by side. Archie appeared to be more than happy to work alongside Art—he’d been overseas for nearly a year longer than Art and seemed to want nothing more than to spend time with a friend from home. Art was sure Archie had his own battle stories, but like the other soldiers he didn’t talk about them and for that Art was grateful.
According to Langstrom, a surprising number of townspeople had remained during the battle, and now the rest of the locals were beginning to return from wherever it was they’d been hiding. One day, Art and Archie were working in a building where an unexploded bomb had been cleared away the previous week—Archie with his probe, which was in fact a glorified stick, cautiously making his way across what was left of the ground floor, Art shovelling a path behind him—when Art looked out through the glassless window and saw a young woman dressed in a smart hat and matching coat across the street. She was standing in front of a building that pretty much no longer existed, a heap of rubble between two walls. She was carrying two suitcases and Art watched as she lowered them slowly to a patch of ground Art had cleared earlier in the week. After a few minutes she took off her hat. A few minutes later, she took off her coat, folding it carefully. Art thought he’d better go speak to her before she disrobed entirely.
“I’m just going to see if I can help this lady,” he said.
Archie grunted a reply, concentrating.
As Art emerged onto the street, the woman spun round as though frightened. Art held up his hands. He’d left his gun propped up inside the house next to Archie’s; no one worried much about the Germans anymore. He’d also taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He thought he’d better speak to her, to show his good intentions, but his Italian remained limited. “Ciao,” he said, leaving off the “bella” his comrades had told him to use on the ladies whenever possible. “Don’t worry. We’re clearing up here. We’ll be gone soon.” In his experience Italians didn’t speak English but it was all he had.
He was standing beside her now. She was a bit older than he’d thought, elegant and dark-eyed. He hadn’t really had much to do with the locals; they were all around, of course, trying to pull their lives and their town back together. She stared at him now, silent.
“Is this your house?” he asked, turning to look at the ruin. “Casa?”
“Yes,” she replied in English. “My house, my shop, everything.”
“You had a shop?” Art said. “What kind of a shop?”
“Dressmaker.”
“Dressmaker,” replied Art. He thought of Peg and Tilly and his mother, their endless mending and sewing. “That’s a great trade.”
Her glossy black hair was done up in a simple twist. She had on a pale pink silk blouse and a pale blue skirt that matched the coat and hat she had taken off earlier. She looked like she should be in a movie with Barbara Stanwyck, holding onto the rail of a gorgeous ship, drinking champagne.
“You are a child,” she said.
Art laughed. “Well,” he said, “not really.”
She smiled. “Canadian?”
Art nodded. He’d gotten used to the way Italians said the word, slowly, as if it required thought.
“What are you doing here? Why not fighting?”
“We’ve only just met and you want me to leave?” Art said, but she didn’t get his joke. “Anyway, I’m too young for all that, you said it yourself.”
She turned away. She took a few steps toward what would have been the entrance to her shop and kicked at the rubble, her fine shoes immediately covered in heavy dust.
“There’s no point,” Art said. “Look at it. Besides, you need to be careful. Unexploded bombs.” He brought his hands together and apart and made the noise of a small explosion.
She laughed. Then she looked up, at the clear blue sky that would once have been blocked by her shop—maybe she’d had living quarters up there, with a kitchen and a sitting room and a bedroom. “The door,” she said. “The door is here.” She pointed at the ground.
A cellar. She must mean the door to a cellar. Art volunteered to fetch his shovel. He brought Archie and his probe along for good measure.
It didn’t take them long to clear the door. The heavy metal plate was battered but had held fast. Art turned around to see where she’d gone—she was sitting on one of her suitcases. In her hand, she held a large key.
“What’s your name?”
“Arthur Lunn. This here is Archie Portman. And you?”
“Signora Lavelli.”
Signora, Art thought. Mrs.
She handed him the key.
* * *
—
Winter winds returned to the Adriatic, as though the spring weather had been a tease; some days it was warm by lunchtime, but mostly it was cold and grey which made the town feel grim. Rain came in and conditions in the camp worsened as the army’s attention focused north.
“Fucking mud,” Archie said one day, “it might be the thing I hate most about Europe.”
“There’s no mud back home,” Art replied. They were overseeing a gang of prisoners who were digging a new latrine. The Germans were cheerful, if a little slow-moving, now that they’d figured out they weren’t about to be executed.
“At home everything is brand new and clean and shining,” Langstrom added, his voice grim.
After supper, Art got ready, a shower and a shave, combing his hair in a piece of mirror he had salvaged in town. Langstrom was lying on his cot reading a girlie magazine that he’d already read a hundred times at least.
“Card game?”
Art shook his head. “I’ve got a date.”
Langstrom smiled. Soldiers weren’t supposed to fraternize with the local population but everyone knew about Art’s signora.
“Archie will be disappointed.”
“Archie’s a grown man.”
“You’re lucky to have a friend from back home.”
Art did not reply.
* * *
—
Art moved through the town quickly. The place was coming back to life, more people were returning, moving back into their ruined houses, reopening their ruined businesses, taking back their ruined lives. Art didn’t really understand it—if this was his town, he’d move on. He’d go to Canada. When he’d said this the other day, Langstrom had laughed. “All most people want is to be home with their families, in the place where their families have always been.”
Today Art was a bit later than usual, and he worried she’d be gone. But when he lifted the cellar door, he could smell her perfume. He lowered the heavy cover over his head; he knew his way down the stone steps in the dark now. At the bottom, he pulled the candle from his bag and struck a match against the rough stone wall. The cellar lit up with warm yellow candlelight.
It was a small room, more of a crawl space than a cellar, carved into the stone hillside beneath where her shop had once stood. It reminded Art of the root cellar under his house back home, except without the enormous spiders. Everywhere he looked there was colour, bolt after bolt, stack upon stack. The richest reds, the deepest blues, the brightest emerald greens; in damask, tweed, taffeta, velvet, chiffon, lace, seersucker, and fine cottons; in patterns, prints, embroidery; in shimmering lamé and delicate cloth so fine it was almost transparent.
She was asleep. Up at the back of the space, on a broad shelf he had helped her clear, she had made a bed with multiple layers of flannelette and towelling. His boots were muddy, and he cursed himself for not having taken them off the minute he’d reached the bottom of the steps. He removed them now, and then his clothes—he didn’t have any underwear on, he’d fallen behind on his laundry—and then folded them all as neatly as he could; he was still no good at regulation army folding.
She was lying beneath a piece of red silk. The cool air made him shiver a little and he eased himself beside her. The silk fell against his skin and he thought of Rose. Rose and the silk stockings he’d given her for her birthday one year. Rose and how far away from her he was now.
He closed his eyes. He was tired. He would rest here beside Signora Lavelli.
But she was awake. She put her hand on his…he still wasn’t sure what to call it. When she first saw it she’d asked again how old he was, and he’d lied, as always, he lied so often now it came naturally. “Twenty-one,” he said. He felt wounded when she laughed. But then he’d seen her face and her look of longing. And now, she put her hand there, and he didn’t need to wonder what she wanted, it was always very clear what she wanted, and even though the ceiling was low and they had to be careful not to bang their heads, their elbows, their knees, she rose up, the silk cloth sliding down her body, her breasts skimming his chest as she pushed herself on top of him. He pulled the silk up and placed his hands on her bottom, and she moved and moved, and all around him the rich dense colours pressed in and filled his head.
When he first started visiting her—that was how he thought of it, “visiting her”—he’d thought they might go for a walk along the seafront, or out into the hills behind the town, or that they might go to one of the little bars that had reopened where he could buy her a coffee or a drink. But that didn’t happen. Mostly they didn’t leave the cellar. He’d help her clear away the piles of dirt and rock, and then they would retire downstairs. Sometimes they didn’t pause, but went to the cellar straightaway. She worked in the middle of what was once the ground floor of the house, on a table he had salvaged for her and on a sewing machine she had somehow obtained, and she slept in the cellar—cooking, eating, and washing at a friend’s, someone whose house was more intact than hers. She was back in business, mostly repairs. The women of the town still needed their dresses, the men their shirts and trousers.
He tried to find out more about her. Her English was pretty good—she’d trained as a seamstress in London before the war—and he’d begun to pick up a bit of Italian. He thought girls—women—needed to talk about themselves, needed to be asked questions and gently teased and made to feel pretty, even though Rose was not like that. Girls needed to know your intentions, what you were thinking. He had thought that women wouldn’t do the kinds of things that he and Signora Lavelli were doing without having some kind of promise of—he hated to even think it, but still—marriage.
Signora Lavelli wasn’t interested in talking. He knew she had suffered great losses in this war. One day, she dumped her handbag onto the bed, looking for her lipstick, and out popped a photograph in a little ornate frame. She was in the photo, seated beside a man, with a small boy on her lap. The child looked exactly like her, the same dark eyes and hair, the same slightly pointy chin—the only difference was whatever it is that makes one face that of a lovely woman and another of a handsome boy. Later Art wished he’d had a better look at the man. She’d reached for the photo and tucked it into the side pocket in her handbag. Then she returned the rest of her belongings to the bag carefully, without looking at Art. He leaned back, propped up on one elbow on the bed, and considered what to say. He wanted to ask what had happened to the boy. He opened his mouth to speak, but she gave him a look of warning, her mouth set in a line. So he ran his hand from her shoulder down to her hand instead. She did not turn away.
* * *
—
Another month passed, and the camp emptied out as every unit that came through left with more personnel than it arrived with. Archie was itching to move out, to head north to the fighting. “I didn’t come all this way to sit on my butt,” was what he said, what he kept on saying, loud enough to be overheard by his superiors, making Art wince every time. He’d realized by now that he had no interest in fighting. He’d heard too many grim tales from Langstrom, spent too many nights listening to Milsom’s shrieks. His itch to get going, to do something brave, was gone. He was happy to sit on his butt. Especially when he had Signora Lavelli in his lap.
He’d come up with a new routine for his visits—he snuck off after lunch, when the sunshine made everyone a little sleepy. They were supposed to work in pairs, of course, and most of the time they did, one spotting, the other clearing. Two sets of eyes were better than one and you never knew what you might find, from live ordnance to unexploded bombs. Some of the other clearing crews had found body parts in the rubble and the thought of this made Art feel sick; he hoped to hell that never happened to him. Today he was working with Archie in a building that, if you squinted at it from a certain angle, looked undamaged—the facade was almost completely intact. The heavy front door with its gargoyle-head knocker led to a broad hallway wallpapered in black and white, with a delicate wooden side table where someone had left a notebook and an inkwell. But the pen was missing and the ink had spilled, staining the wood. When you walked to the end of the hallway you could see that the rest of the house was gone, blown through to the next street.
They’d eaten their lunch and were lolling in the shade. Sometimes Archie liked to reminisce about being at home, playing with Geronimo, pillaging the neighbour’s apricot tree in the summer, playing hockey on the rink in the park in wintertime. Thinking about the town and his family made Art feel so homesick that he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. At night alone in his cot he could summon their faces with painful clarity, along with every detail of his house, of his street. But Archie’s endless chatter made Art anxious—would he mention his father? Worse, would he mention his father in front of anyone else in camp? Would the unit find out what Art had done?
Art had been in the camp for a number of weeks when news filtered through that a unit, moving up from the south, had arrived at the camp to bed down for a few days. Art was in the mess mashing potatoes; the cook had secured a pallet of fresh spuds from god knows where, and since then they’d been eating potatoes every which way: potato fritters, French fries, scalloped potatoes, hash browns, roasted potatoes, and a dish the cook had invented called Potatoes Jubilee which consisted of all the leftover bits of potato fried with canned bully beef. Luckily Art loved spuds. He went out the back door of the mess to fetch another sack.
“Well, hello there.”
Art froze. A familiar voice. For the briefest moment he found himself thinking: Mister Theodore?
He swung round.
But it was Archie. Archie Portman, in the flesh. Archie! About a foot taller and, if possible, even skinnier than he’d been before.
“Man oh man,” Archie said, “it’s about time!” and he gave Art such a great manly squeeze that Art almost stopped himself from thinking that Archie was just about the last person he wanted to see.
Here was the one person in the whole of the Canadian army who really knew who he was, who knew everything there was to know about him.
Archie Portman. Here. In Italy.
* * *
—
That night before curfew, Art and Archie sat out together, sharing a cigarette, the moonlight striking bright on the water, lighting up the coastline.
“They’re moving us all north, but they’re trying to hide it from the Krauts,” Archie said.
“Is that right?”
Archie nodded. “That’s the sum total of my knowledge.”
Nobody told Art anything, he just followed orders.
“Geronimo is a good dog,” Art said. He wasn’t sure what’d made him think of the dog, apart from the fact that he missed him.
Archie barked a laugh. “Geronimo. Good boy.” He paused. He turned to look at Art. “I heard Peg got married.”
That’s right, Art thought, you were always keen on her. “Frank Turner. The new schoolteacher. From Burnaby,” he added. “Came to town and swept Peg off her feet.” Art thought of Peg’s wedding the previous winter, the lavish display in the church. The day had been unseasonably warm and the lake had shimmered in the afternoon light, the beach clear. The wedding party was large, no one seemed to know how or why it had got so grand; perhaps because it was the first proper wedding in the family, a chance to make up for Tilly’s non-event, her soldier husband Duncan Wilson perpetually overseas.
Mrs. Portman had declined the invitation. “Doesn’t seem right,” she’d said to Art’s mother at church one Sunday, “a big wedding when our boys are overseas fighting.”
Art’s mother had smiled and looked away.
“Damn,” said Archie, shaking his head. “Peg. Married.”
Art laughed and gave Archie a shove. “Don’t worry. By the time we get home, all the girls will be so relieved to see us we’ll have to beg them to leave us be.”
He thought about Rose. He thought about Rose most days. He received letters from home regularly, from his mother, Tilly and Peg, even Eddie took it upon himself to send Art compilations of his favourite jokes from time to time. But not from Rose; letter-writing was not her kind of thing. Rose. She’d like the army, Art thought. She loved hard work and routine; if she’d been a man she’d be one of those soldiers who think it’s all a lark, a grand adventure, with polished boots and sharp bed-corners and falling into formation. And, when required, she’d be heroic. He had thought he’d be one of those men as well but he knew now he was not. He’d spent enough time sitting in the back of an army transport, with hardly room to breathe and too much time to think, to convince himself of that. And he had not had an opportunity to prove otherwise.
* * *
—
Art had thought Archie would move out with the rest of his unit, “north,” wherever that was, but that hadn’t happened. Instead, Art, Archie and their crew had become a make-do bomb disposal unit; they were moving through the town systematically clearing unexploded shells and mortar along the way, declaring some buildings safe and many more fit for demolition only. You had to be careful where you tread. They worked in pairs, that was the rule, Art and Archie often together now, everyone assuming “the Okanagan boys” would work best side by side. Archie appeared to be more than happy to work alongside Art—he’d been overseas for nearly a year longer than Art and seemed to want nothing more than to spend time with a friend from home. Art was sure Archie had his own battle stories, but like the other soldiers he didn’t talk about them and for that Art was grateful.
According to Langstrom, a surprising number of townspeople had remained during the battle, and now the rest of the locals were beginning to return from wherever it was they’d been hiding. One day, Art and Archie were working in a building where an unexploded bomb had been cleared away the previous week—Archie with his probe, which was in fact a glorified stick, cautiously making his way across what was left of the ground floor, Art shovelling a path behind him—when Art looked out through the glassless window and saw a young woman dressed in a smart hat and matching coat across the street. She was standing in front of a building that pretty much no longer existed, a heap of rubble between two walls. She was carrying two suitcases and Art watched as she lowered them slowly to a patch of ground Art had cleared earlier in the week. After a few minutes she took off her hat. A few minutes later, she took off her coat, folding it carefully. Art thought he’d better go speak to her before she disrobed entirely.
“I’m just going to see if I can help this lady,” he said.
Archie grunted a reply, concentrating.
As Art emerged onto the street, the woman spun round as though frightened. Art held up his hands. He’d left his gun propped up inside the house next to Archie’s; no one worried much about the Germans anymore. He’d also taken off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He thought he’d better speak to her, to show his good intentions, but his Italian remained limited. “Ciao,” he said, leaving off the “bella” his comrades had told him to use on the ladies whenever possible. “Don’t worry. We’re clearing up here. We’ll be gone soon.” In his experience Italians didn’t speak English but it was all he had.
He was standing beside her now. She was a bit older than he’d thought, elegant and dark-eyed. He hadn’t really had much to do with the locals; they were all around, of course, trying to pull their lives and their town back together. She stared at him now, silent.
“Is this your house?” he asked, turning to look at the ruin. “Casa?”
“Yes,” she replied in English. “My house, my shop, everything.”
“You had a shop?” Art said. “What kind of a shop?”
“Dressmaker.”
“Dressmaker,” replied Art. He thought of Peg and Tilly and his mother, their endless mending and sewing. “That’s a great trade.”
Her glossy black hair was done up in a simple twist. She had on a pale pink silk blouse and a pale blue skirt that matched the coat and hat she had taken off earlier. She looked like she should be in a movie with Barbara Stanwyck, holding onto the rail of a gorgeous ship, drinking champagne.
“You are a child,” she said.
Art laughed. “Well,” he said, “not really.”
She smiled. “Canadian?”
Art nodded. He’d gotten used to the way Italians said the word, slowly, as if it required thought.
“What are you doing here? Why not fighting?”
“We’ve only just met and you want me to leave?” Art said, but she didn’t get his joke. “Anyway, I’m too young for all that, you said it yourself.”
She turned away. She took a few steps toward what would have been the entrance to her shop and kicked at the rubble, her fine shoes immediately covered in heavy dust.
“There’s no point,” Art said. “Look at it. Besides, you need to be careful. Unexploded bombs.” He brought his hands together and apart and made the noise of a small explosion.
She laughed. Then she looked up, at the clear blue sky that would once have been blocked by her shop—maybe she’d had living quarters up there, with a kitchen and a sitting room and a bedroom. “The door,” she said. “The door is here.” She pointed at the ground.
A cellar. She must mean the door to a cellar. Art volunteered to fetch his shovel. He brought Archie and his probe along for good measure.
It didn’t take them long to clear the door. The heavy metal plate was battered but had held fast. Art turned around to see where she’d gone—she was sitting on one of her suitcases. In her hand, she held a large key.
“What’s your name?”
“Arthur Lunn. This here is Archie Portman. And you?”
“Signora Lavelli.”
Signora, Art thought. Mrs.
She handed him the key.
* * *
—
Winter winds returned to the Adriatic, as though the spring weather had been a tease; some days it was warm by lunchtime, but mostly it was cold and grey which made the town feel grim. Rain came in and conditions in the camp worsened as the army’s attention focused north.
“Fucking mud,” Archie said one day, “it might be the thing I hate most about Europe.”
“There’s no mud back home,” Art replied. They were overseeing a gang of prisoners who were digging a new latrine. The Germans were cheerful, if a little slow-moving, now that they’d figured out they weren’t about to be executed.
“At home everything is brand new and clean and shining,” Langstrom added, his voice grim.
After supper, Art got ready, a shower and a shave, combing his hair in a piece of mirror he had salvaged in town. Langstrom was lying on his cot reading a girlie magazine that he’d already read a hundred times at least.
“Card game?”
Art shook his head. “I’ve got a date.”
Langstrom smiled. Soldiers weren’t supposed to fraternize with the local population but everyone knew about Art’s signora.
“Archie will be disappointed.”
“Archie’s a grown man.”
“You’re lucky to have a friend from back home.”
Art did not reply.
* * *
—
Art moved through the town quickly. The place was coming back to life, more people were returning, moving back into their ruined houses, reopening their ruined businesses, taking back their ruined lives. Art didn’t really understand it—if this was his town, he’d move on. He’d go to Canada. When he’d said this the other day, Langstrom had laughed. “All most people want is to be home with their families, in the place where their families have always been.”
Today Art was a bit later than usual, and he worried she’d be gone. But when he lifted the cellar door, he could smell her perfume. He lowered the heavy cover over his head; he knew his way down the stone steps in the dark now. At the bottom, he pulled the candle from his bag and struck a match against the rough stone wall. The cellar lit up with warm yellow candlelight.
It was a small room, more of a crawl space than a cellar, carved into the stone hillside beneath where her shop had once stood. It reminded Art of the root cellar under his house back home, except without the enormous spiders. Everywhere he looked there was colour, bolt after bolt, stack upon stack. The richest reds, the deepest blues, the brightest emerald greens; in damask, tweed, taffeta, velvet, chiffon, lace, seersucker, and fine cottons; in patterns, prints, embroidery; in shimmering lamé and delicate cloth so fine it was almost transparent.
She was asleep. Up at the back of the space, on a broad shelf he had helped her clear, she had made a bed with multiple layers of flannelette and towelling. His boots were muddy, and he cursed himself for not having taken them off the minute he’d reached the bottom of the steps. He removed them now, and then his clothes—he didn’t have any underwear on, he’d fallen behind on his laundry—and then folded them all as neatly as he could; he was still no good at regulation army folding.
She was lying beneath a piece of red silk. The cool air made him shiver a little and he eased himself beside her. The silk fell against his skin and he thought of Rose. Rose and the silk stockings he’d given her for her birthday one year. Rose and how far away from her he was now.
He closed his eyes. He was tired. He would rest here beside Signora Lavelli.
But she was awake. She put her hand on his…he still wasn’t sure what to call it. When she first saw it she’d asked again how old he was, and he’d lied, as always, he lied so often now it came naturally. “Twenty-one,” he said. He felt wounded when she laughed. But then he’d seen her face and her look of longing. And now, she put her hand there, and he didn’t need to wonder what she wanted, it was always very clear what she wanted, and even though the ceiling was low and they had to be careful not to bang their heads, their elbows, their knees, she rose up, the silk cloth sliding down her body, her breasts skimming his chest as she pushed herself on top of him. He pulled the silk up and placed his hands on her bottom, and she moved and moved, and all around him the rich dense colours pressed in and filled his head.
When he first started visiting her—that was how he thought of it, “visiting her”—he’d thought they might go for a walk along the seafront, or out into the hills behind the town, or that they might go to one of the little bars that had reopened where he could buy her a coffee or a drink. But that didn’t happen. Mostly they didn’t leave the cellar. He’d help her clear away the piles of dirt and rock, and then they would retire downstairs. Sometimes they didn’t pause, but went to the cellar straightaway. She worked in the middle of what was once the ground floor of the house, on a table he had salvaged for her and on a sewing machine she had somehow obtained, and she slept in the cellar—cooking, eating, and washing at a friend’s, someone whose house was more intact than hers. She was back in business, mostly repairs. The women of the town still needed their dresses, the men their shirts and trousers.
He tried to find out more about her. Her English was pretty good—she’d trained as a seamstress in London before the war—and he’d begun to pick up a bit of Italian. He thought girls—women—needed to talk about themselves, needed to be asked questions and gently teased and made to feel pretty, even though Rose was not like that. Girls needed to know your intentions, what you were thinking. He had thought that women wouldn’t do the kinds of things that he and Signora Lavelli were doing without having some kind of promise of—he hated to even think it, but still—marriage.
Signora Lavelli wasn’t interested in talking. He knew she had suffered great losses in this war. One day, she dumped her handbag onto the bed, looking for her lipstick, and out popped a photograph in a little ornate frame. She was in the photo, seated beside a man, with a small boy on her lap. The child looked exactly like her, the same dark eyes and hair, the same slightly pointy chin—the only difference was whatever it is that makes one face that of a lovely woman and another of a handsome boy. Later Art wished he’d had a better look at the man. She’d reached for the photo and tucked it into the side pocket in her handbag. Then she returned the rest of her belongings to the bag carefully, without looking at Art. He leaned back, propped up on one elbow on the bed, and considered what to say. He wanted to ask what had happened to the boy. He opened his mouth to speak, but she gave him a look of warning, her mouth set in a line. So he ran his hand from her shoulder down to her hand instead. She did not turn away.
* * *
—
Another month passed, and the camp emptied out as every unit that came through left with more personnel than it arrived with. Archie was itching to move out, to head north to the fighting. “I didn’t come all this way to sit on my butt,” was what he said, what he kept on saying, loud enough to be overheard by his superiors, making Art wince every time. He’d realized by now that he had no interest in fighting. He’d heard too many grim tales from Langstrom, spent too many nights listening to Milsom’s shrieks. His itch to get going, to do something brave, was gone. He was happy to sit on his butt. Especially when he had Signora Lavelli in his lap.
He’d come up with a new routine for his visits—he snuck off after lunch, when the sunshine made everyone a little sleepy. They were supposed to work in pairs, of course, and most of the time they did, one spotting, the other clearing. Two sets of eyes were better than one and you never knew what you might find, from live ordnance to unexploded bombs. Some of the other clearing crews had found body parts in the rubble and the thought of this made Art feel sick; he hoped to hell that never happened to him. Today he was working with Archie in a building that, if you squinted at it from a certain angle, looked undamaged—the facade was almost completely intact. The heavy front door with its gargoyle-head knocker led to a broad hallway wallpapered in black and white, with a delicate wooden side table where someone had left a notebook and an inkwell. But the pen was missing and the ink had spilled, staining the wood. When you walked to the end of the hallway you could see that the rest of the house was gone, blown through to the next street.
They’d eaten their lunch and were lolling in the shade. Sometimes Archie liked to reminisce about being at home, playing with Geronimo, pillaging the neighbour’s apricot tree in the summer, playing hockey on the rink in the park in wintertime. Thinking about the town and his family made Art feel so homesick that he wasn’t sure what to do with himself. At night alone in his cot he could summon their faces with painful clarity, along with every detail of his house, of his street. But Archie’s endless chatter made Art anxious—would he mention his father? Worse, would he mention his father in front of anyone else in camp? Would the unit find out what Art had done?
