Dead and Alive

CHAPTER EIGHT

We stayed the night at Vicovaro, slipping out of the albergo at one in the morning. We let the Italian driver sleep on. We wanted no witnesses. The moon was lower over the mountain tops as we drove the Lancia towards Fertile.

Looking back on it, I suppose it was a pretty crazy thing to do. Kidnapping girls isn’t the healthiest of sports, especially in Italy where the jails have a bad reputation. But I don’t see what else we could have done. After what she had told me I could not leave her at the farm. And how else was I to get her away? A legal wrangle would have lasted years.

When I broached the matter to Boyd, he said, ‘Wot the hell! We didn’t conquer this bleedin’ country to have bastards like Mancini chuckin’ their weight about and beating up girls who should by rights be in Blighty.’ And he didn’t know the full story of what the girl had been through. ‘Anyway, it ain’t as dangerous as you make out,’ he added. ‘If we get the kid out orl right, reckon Mancini won’t squawk. And the law ain’t orl that hot in this land of treasures. I found that out pretty nippy like when we was running the coastal trade. An’ I don’t reckon it’ll have changed much in a couple of years. The Carabinieri ain’t paid enough to make it worf their while ter refuse a bribe like wot a London copper is.’ And he gave me a sly wink.

There was a lot in what he said. The difficulty was going to be to get her out of the farm. I found myself wishing that Stuart was with us and that we had those arms that Dugan had found. If they were waiting for us with shotguns, it wasn’t going to be too healthy.

We reached the spot where we had parked the car the previous morning. I turned and then switched off. ‘You’ll find the ignition key under the left-hand seat,’ I told Boyd.

Then we went down through the fields to the stream and along the bank towards Percile. It was nearly two when we reached the Mancini farm, a vague huddle of buildings in the shadow of the trees. The moon had set behind the mountains now, but the pale light of it still lingered in the warm summer sky.

We entered the yard of the farm stealthily and stood in the shadow of an outhouse that smelt of pigs. The place was very silent. And yet it did not seem asleep. It had the watchful stillness of a wild thing. The air was heavy with the rank odours of the farm. But it was not the smell of an English farm. It was foreign and made me feel jumpy.

We didn’t speak, but stood quite still until the luminous dial of my watch showed it to be past two.

There was no sign of the girl.

‘You stay here,’ I said to Boyd. ‘I’ll circle the farm and see if there’s a handkerchief at any of the windows.’

He said, ‘Okay,’ and I moved off along the wall of the outhouse. My shoes squelched in a morass of wet dung. I felt the warm heavy-smelling liquid top the uppers of my shoes. But I dared not try and avoid it. There was still enough light for me to be seen if I moved out of the shadow of the buildings. The end of the outhouse abutted onto the farmhouse itself. On this side there were two small windows on the upper floor. They were closed and reflected the pale light of the sky like blind eyes.

Round at the back it was the same. All five windows were closed and there was no sign of a handkerchief. I circled the farm until I was gazing at the front door. This was open. But all the windows on this side too were shut. There was no sign of life.

I worked my way back to where I had left Boyd.

He was not there.

I thought perhaps I had made a mistake in the growing darkness. But a little farther on I found the same morass of liquid dung.

A cock crowed.

I felt the menace of the place all round me. One half of my mind was wondering where the hell Boyd could have got to. The other half was detached and thinking about who built the place and what dark scenes the old grey stones had witnessed.

The silence of the yard was shattered by the crash of an iron bar on stone. It sounded as loud as the gates of Hell being thrown back, and a dog began to bark. A door creaked and Boyd and Monique erupted into the yard from the outhouses on the other side. Some one shouted. And then a man’s figure appeared in the front of the house. He had a gun. But he did not fire. ‘Aspetti!’ he shouted and began to run towards them.

It was Mancini. Even in that dim uncertain light I could not mistake his thick powerful figure.

‘Run for the car,’ I called out to Boyd.

‘Okay,’ he replied, and he and the girl made for the track along the stream bank.

I crouched, ready to do something that I hadn’t done in years. Mancini was running across the yard now. Big though he was he ran well, with long powerful strides. As he reached the middle of the yard, I launched myself from the shadow of the outhouse. I made straight for his legs in a flying tackle and caught him nicely at the knees. I felt the solid bone of his leg against my shoulder and then he hit the stone of the yard with a thud that must have shaken him badly.

I dived for the shotgun which had fallen from his grasp. But his hand reached out and fastened on the collar of my coat. He was winded by his fall. But his hold was firm though I struggled desperately. He was breathing in great gulps of air with a sobbing sound in his throat. A moment and he would be fully recovered. I knew I hadn’t a hope against him at close quarters.

I kept free of his other hand which was searching for a hold and wriggled out of my jacket. A quick twist and I was free.

I reached the gun a moment before he did and then ran for the track.

He started to run after me. But he was too shaken. As I made the bank a confusion of shouts broke out behind me. He was calling for his horse. I settled down to run steadily and carefully.

I caught up with Boyd and Monique in the fields below the main road. ‘Thank God, you’re okay, sir,’ he panted. ‘I was a bit worried. ‘E ain’t hexactly Tom Fumb’s baby bruvver. Wotjer hit ‘im wiv — an atomic bomb?’

I told him about the tackle. I knew it would please him. He was a great boy for Twickenham. ‘Where did you find the girl?’ I asked as we clambered into the car.

‘She was locked in one of them outhouses,’ he replied. ‘A filthy stinkin’ bloody hole of a Calcutta. There was a little grating winder in it and she’d tied ‘er ‘anky to it. I caught sight of it across the yard just after you’d left me. The draw-bar on the door was secured by a padlock. But I managed to pick that. Then o’ course I went an’ spoilt it orl by dropping the bleedin’ bar. Still, orl’s well wot ends well, as ol’ Bill would say.’ He gave me a nudge with his elbow and speaking out of the side of his mouth, said, ‘Cor, stone the crows! She don’t ‘alf smell a treat though. The floor of the place were just like a ruddy sewer.’ His nose wrinkled and he grinned. ‘Pardon my mentioning it, sir, but you don’t smell so ‘ot yourself. I ‘card you walk into the muck as soon as you’d left me. Thort you was going to give the whole game away by swearing bloomin’ orful like wot yer does on the bridge when somefink’s gawn wrong.’

The car did in fact smell like a dung heap. I thought at first it was my shoes. But now I realized that by far the strongest smell emanated from the back of the car.

I switched the interior light on and looked round. The girl was sitting close up in the back seat — a tight bundle of filth that smiled at me apologetically, her teeth showing white in a dirty face.

‘All right?’ I asked.

She didn’t speak. She simply nodded. Her eyes were very wide.

I switched the light off and the swathe of the headlights seemed to leap out into the darkness of the winding mountain road again.

As we swung down the mountain road along the valley side to Vicovaro, I tried to figure out how she must be feeling. So far, I realized, I had only been thinking of myself. I had promised to find the girl, and then when I had discovered the circumstances in which she was living I had to satisfy my conscience and intervene. It had — I realized it now — been a game to me. There’d been a brutal farmer to outwit, a risk to be taken. That was all, as far as I was concerned. And afterwards the trouble of getting her back to England.

I hadn’t looked at it from her point of view at all.

Her wide eyes and slightly tremulous smile, and the way she sat tense and small in the corner of the car, were eloquent of her state of mind.

And as we drove down through the dark mountains I think I came near to understanding her mood.

However hateful Mancini had been, the farm was at least a home to her. She knew what it was like to be alone and a refugee. The village had given her friends and a background. And then two strangers had come with word of her mother. And now she was alone with them in a car, her dress all covered in filth where she had been flung on to the floor of a dung-strewn outhouse by the furious Mancini — and she was now realizing that she did not know these two strangers, did not know whether they could in fact get her back to England, did not know what was to become of her.

Later the trip might seem an adventure to her, for she was young and youth responds to the unknown. But just at the moment she was uncertain and a little scared. With every kilometre the car made down the valley, she was getting farther and farther from the life she knew and nearer and nearer to the outside world. She was intelligent enough to realize that the past few years had not equipped her to cope with that world. It made her very dependent upon us. And dependence upon people you don’t know is not very reassuring, even when you’re young and leaving a person you detest.

At Vicovaro we stopped just long enough to pick up the Italian driver.

He was very sleepy and disgruntled at being hauled out of bed at four in the morning. As he climbed into the driving seat and smelt the sickly-sweet farmyard stench of the car, he burst into a stream of furious Italian. He spoke so fast and so volubly that neither Boyd nor I could understand what he was saying. But I got the general idea, and I couldn’t really blame the fellow. It was a nice car and it would need a lot of cleaning and disinfectant before it was even fit to be hired by a Neapolitan tart.

‘You gonna drive or do we dump you here?’ Boyd asked threateningly in Italian.

The stream of words was suddenly dammed. He glanced quickly from one to the other of us. ‘I drive,’ he said, and climbed in behind the steering wheel. But as he let in the clutch he started again. ‘La mia macchina,” he cried, ‘e rovinata.’ ‘If you’re so worried about the way your car smells, why don’t you give up eating garlic?’ Boyd suggested. ‘Yer bref is so bleedin’ orful that it’s a wonder ter me you notice a nice clean smell like dung.’

And whilst Boyd and the driver embarked in this manner upon an amicable chat in front, I sat with Monique in the back and told her about the ship we had at Naples and how if there was any difficulty with the authorities we’d smuggle her out. I told her about Stuart and how we’d got the L.C.T. off the rocks at Bossiney. By the time we ran into Tivoli familiarity with our background was giving her back some degree of confidence.

The first pale light of the early summer dawn was showing behind the jagged peaks of the Abruzzi as we swung south on to a side road that led to Valmontone and Route Six.

The flat plain of Rome stretched ahead in the darkness. But by the time we hit the main Rome-Naples highway, with the city well away to our right, it was light enough to see the outline of the Alban Hills.

The sun rose behind the line of the mountains to the east and the trees began to slant their shadows across the road. In the valley of the Sacco we found a gush of clear water falling from the rocks through which the road was cut. We stopped the car and washed ourselves. The fresh morning sunlight was already making the rock warm to the touch.

Until that moment I hadn’t really realized what a disreputable trio we looked. Boyd had only the dirt of the outhouse walls on his blue suit. But I was a wreck, my shirt torn from collar to waist, no jacket and no tie. My trousers were rent at the knee and were caked with filth where I had hit the muck of the farmyard. My shoes were covered with a film of dust that had caked on the liquid dung. Beneath the dust, the muck was still wet. But the girl was in a worse state than any of us. It was on her face and neck and hair. Her legs were caked with it and her dress was indescribably filthy.

Early though it was, the flies swarmed round us, settling on clothes and skin, filling the air with a low hum and driving us nearly frantic with their persistence. The driver watched us nervously. I think he suspected us of being Sicilian gangsters.

I washed my face and hands, and then I washed my shoes. I could do nothing about my trousers but leave the muck to dry on them. When I had finished, I looked round to find the girl standing disconsolately by the car. The toes of her bare feet were dug into the road edge and she did not look very happy.

I glanced across the road. Bushes grew there in the shade of some low trees. ‘If you go over there and throw your clothes out to me, I’ll wash them for you,’ I said. ‘They’ll dry in a few minutes in the sun.’

I sensed her relief at the suggestion, though she looked as nervous as a young deer. A fractional hesitation, and then she nodded. Her lips started to frame the Italian ‘Grazie,’ but what she said was, ‘Thank you.’

I understood her momentary hesitation when I had her clothes in my hands. There was only the roughly patched black dress.

When I had washed it for her, she didn’t wait for it to dry, but put it on damp and came out into the road again and washed herself, while Boyd and I and the Italian driver smoked a cigarette and tried to fend off the flies. I glanced at her once. She was washing her hair. She noticed me looking at her, shook the hair out of her eyes, wrinkled her nose and began to laugh.

But I didn’t feel like responding. I had just tried to produce my cigarettes and had suddenly realized that with the loss of my jacket I had also lost not only my cigarette case, but my wallet, my cheque book and my passport.

The cigarette case was a silver one given me by my mother on my twenty-first birthday. It had been all through the war with me. The wallet and the cheque book I didn’t really mind about, except of course that they handed Mancini complete evidence of my identity if he wished to make trouble. But it was the loss of the passport that was really annoying. It meant hanging around at the British Consul’s office in Naples in order to get it renewed.

I felt angry and dispirited. Things seemed to be going wrong. And my mood was not improved when we eventually climbed back into the car to find it seething with a million flies and the smell of dung increasingly unpleasant after the cool dampness of the air in the valley.

Fortunately Boyd had a little money oft him and we were able to buy some food in Frosinone and a pair of straw sandals and a cheap cotton dress and underwear for the girl.

She changed into the new clothes behind a stone wall just outside the town. It was staggering the difference they made. The sandals, which were heeled, made her taller and accentuated her long limbs. The bright colours of the cotton print brought out the golden brown of her arms and face, and her small firm breasts, lifted and pointed by a brassiere, thrust impatiently at the cotton of her frock. She had borrowed a comb from Boyd, and her fair hair, combed back from her head, gave her a boyish look.

It was then that I first realized that she was an extremely attractive girl.

She had the black dress in her hand as she came out from behind the wall. She started down the road towards us. But after a few paces she stopped. She looked down for a second at the dress. Then, with a gesture almost of abandonment, she flung it over the wall.

She came towards us then with long, swinging strides. She looked like a Scots girl — very free and easy in her movements. She was smiling as she came up to us as though she had dropped her past over the wall with the black dress.

It was getting hot and the glare of the sunlight as we drove on and lack of sleep made me drowsy. I woke to find Boyd shaking me. ‘We’re just coming to Cassino,’ he said.

High on our left the battered fragments of the monastery stood white and dusty against the blue bowl of the sky like jagged remnants of a gargantuan tooth. We skirted Monastery Hill through neat little rows of jerry-built Government houses. Down the hill into Cassino proper, we found that nature had moved in on the ruins. The place was covered in dusty greenery. It was no longer impressive.

Somehow I felt deeply disappointed. It should have been preserved as a monument to the folly of man. Once the scarred and battered hillside had been terrifying. Now it was just an untidy jumble of weeds. The same thing had happened in France after the previous war. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it here. Perhaps because there had been so much talk at the time of preserving the ruins as a warning to future generations. But then of course there had been so many other ruins after Cassino — bigger and better ruins. I had only seen Cassino once before — but it had impressed me the same way that the lava of Vesuvius covering Massa di Somma had impressed me. The sun had been setting and I had been in a jeep travelling from Naples to Rome just after the capital had fallen. There had been no living thing in the whole of Cassino then. The crumbled masonry and gaunt fragments of the battered town had stood solitary and lifeless, the stone a warm dull red in the evening light.

As we slid away from it along the dead straight road of the plain below — the same road that had once been the most heavily shelled stretch in the world and had rightly been called the Mad Mile — the weeds in Cassino seemed fair comment in a world that forgets so quickly the death of its sons.

We had a snack at Capua and got into Naples shortly after three in the afternoon. I told the driver to go straight to the docks. I wanted to find out whether Stuart had fixed up a cargo and if so when we were sailing. There was Monique to accommodate and I needed some money to pay for the hire of the car.

But down on the mole I could see no sign of the Trevedra. ‘Shifted ‘er berth, I expect,’ said Boyd. And I must say I wasn’t worried. You’re always liable to shift your berth in a big port. He might have had to move to take on his cargo.

I went to the Port Authorities office and enquired for the present berth of the Trevedra. The clerk glanced at his chart of shipping. ‘Not there,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s sailed.’

‘It couldn’t have done,’ I told him.

He glanced down the list of names in his book of sailings. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Sailed 03.30 last night. Destination — London.’

A sudden hollow feeling hit me in the stomach. ‘But that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘My name is Cunningham. I’m part owner. She can’t have sailed. She must be standing off in the Bay.’

The clerk wiped a globule of sweat off the end of what would once have been described as a Patrician nose, and looked up at his wall chart again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not standing off. You can see for yourself. There are the names of all the ships that are standing off tonight.’

‘Probably Mr McCrae left a note for me then,’ I suggested.

He looked round at his message rack. The pigeon-hole under C was empty. To his annoyance I had him look at the address of every envelope in the whole rack. But not one was addressed to me.

There was nothing for it then but to go back to the mole and see if any of the stevedores or the crews of other ships moored alongside could tell us anything.

But somehow I knew it was useless. When I told Boyd, he shook his head and said, ‘It ain’t like Mr McCrae. He’s been too long a soldier to leave an RV without notifying the rest where the stragglers’ post is going to be.’

All we could find out from men working on the mole and from neighbouring ships was that the Trevedra had pulled out in the early hours of the morning. I actually interviewed a man who had been on watch on the ship that had pulled in to the vacant berth and his timing of the Trevedra’s departure confirmed that given me by the clerk at the Port Authorities office.

I tried to ignore the feeling of suspicion that crept into my mind. I couldn’t believe that Stuart was crooked. If he had really sailed for England he must have had good reason. But if he had, he was sure to have left a message for me somewhere — at the bank, for instance.

Having reached that conclusion I felt a sense of relief. ‘How much money have you got?’ I asked Boyd.

‘Just over two thousand lire,’ he said.

And I had a gold wrist-watch. The bank would be closed now, but I could pop the watch and that would pay the driver. I paid him the full amount I got for the watch. It was safer to overpay him. Then we went to a quiet tenement hotel behind the waterfront where they didn’t worry about the fact that we had no baggage.

We fed that night at a little trattoria full of tobacco smoke and the sour smell of stale vino. Over the meal I told Monique what I knew of her mother. She listened in silence, her big grey eyes fixed on me. When I had finished, she said, ‘I shall have to work. Will they take me on a farm? I am good with animals. They like me.’

‘Farmin’ ain’t the sort o’ work for the likes of you,’ Boyd cut in.

She laughed. It was a pleasant musical laugh and it made me feel strangely happy, for it was so light-hearted and gay. ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘I’ve been a farm girl for over two years now. What other work is it that I can do?’

What she said was true. There was nothing else she could do. And it was my responsibility that she was leaving the world she knew and going to a strange country that she had only visited twice on holidays. My acceptance of that responsibility produced in me a feeling of tenderness for her — that and the strong wine we were drinking which was Lacrima Cristi from the slopes of Vesuvius. ‘There’s no need to worry,’ I said. ‘For instance, you might get a job as interpreter. The French tourist traffic is increasing. Everyone in Europe wants to come to England to see the ruins of London. Promise me you won’t worry about a job. We’ll see you through.’

She smiled. I think she knew I was getting a little drunk. ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘And thank you.’

I must have been feeling very tired for my mood changed suddenly to one of despondency. ‘Anyway, before we worry about getting you a job, we’ve got to get to England,’ I said. And then I explained to her about the Trevedra and how we didn’t know what had happened.

‘What puzzles me,’ I continued, turning to Boyd, ‘is how he got a crew together in such a short time. He couldn’t have sailed her himself. He would have had to sign on a skipper.’

Boyd shrugged his shoulders. ‘It ain’t difficult in a big port like this. Though why ‘e didn’t wait for us I can’t think.’

‘I should have wired him from Rome,’ I said. ‘But he didn’t suggest there was any urgency.’ We had finished our meal now and as Boyd paid the bill, I said, ‘Anyway, don’t let’s worry about it. I’ll get some money from the bank in the morning and there’ll be a letter from him explaining. Then we either follow on the next boat or have a pleasant holiday on Capri waiting for the Trevedra to come out again.’

‘What about Miss Monique’s papers?’ Boyd asked as we went to the door.

‘I’ll fix that with the British Consul when I see him in the morning about a new passport,’ I told him. ‘It shouldn’t be all that difficult.’

Outside it was very dark and the streets showed wet in flashes of forked lightning that periodically split the clouds, outlining the mass of the Castello San Elmo towering high above the city. What I had taken to be the sound of traffic, blurred against the hum of conversation in the trattoria, had been the distant roll of thunder. The streets were empty. But it was not raining.

I took the girl’s arm as we turned down the street towards our dingy hotel. She started at my touch and stopped, her arm withdrawn from mine as though I had hurt her. The lightning forked and I saw her in its photographic flash rigid against the stone of the houses that flanked the street, her eyes wide and startled. Then it was black again and I heard her voice close to me saying, ‘Please — it is very foolish of me. I am sorry.’ And I remembered all that she had been through and how she had taken her hand from mine as we sat on the pebble-strewn bottom of the stream.

But instead of showing her that I understood, I said, ‘You’re a strange girl, Monique.’

Then it began to rain big summer drops from the heavy sky and we ran for it through the dark streets to the hotel.

Next morning, the rent in my trousers mended and wearing Boyd’s jacket which fitted me a little tightly, I presented myself at the Banco di Napoli. I explained that my cheque book had been stolen. The cashier gave me an old-fashioned look and asked me for a specimen signature with a sly grin that was a bit wide of the mark in the circumstances. I also asked him for a letter that I was sure my partner had left for me.

In a few minutes he returned with a new book. ‘I am afraid there is no letter for you from Signer McCrae,’ he said. ‘Here is your new cheque book. I have arranged for no cheques on the old book to be cashed.’ Gold teeth flashed in his sallow face and the lenses of thick-rimmed spectacles were blind circles of white as they caught the light from the glass roof. ‘Our clients often lose their books in Napoli. It is a bad city. Often the girls are working for a forger. It is necessary for us to be very careful. Were you thinking of drawing at all, Signer Cunningham?’ I had opened the new book and was on the point of writing out a cheque for twenty thousand.

He had to repeat the question for my mind was struggling to grasp the fact that Stuart had left me no message. ‘Are you sure my partner did not leave a note for me?’ I asked.

‘Quite sure,’ he said. ‘They are always left with Signer Borgioli, one of our assistant managers. If you like I will ask the cashiers?’

I nodded and he went along the counter. I watched him as he spoke to each of the cashiers in turn. One by one they glanced curiously at me and shook their heads.

Then suddenly he was back again with a little man who had false teeth that did not fit and a little pointed beard. ‘This is Signer Mercedes. He saw Signor McCrae the day before yesterday.’

The little man nodded vigorously. ‘Si, si — he was a tall man with a beard, yes? He came in the morning and drew out all the cash in your account except for a nominal thousand lire.’

‘He drew out all the cash in our account?’ I repeated. I couldn’t believe it.

‘Except for the nominal thousand. He said he had to pay for a cargo, but would be banking with us again on the return trip.’

‘That was why I was asking whether you wished to draw, signore,’ put in the first cashier. ‘It would be very difficult — impossible. The manager would not agree — that is except for the thousand lire. You have only had an account with us for a few days.’

‘And he left no note — no message?’ I asked again.

They both shook their heads.

There was nothing I could do. I thanked them and went out into the sunlit roar of the Via Roma.

It was hot and that horrible doubt of Stuart was back in my mind. There was only one other place in Naples he could have left a message for me. Guidici’s office above the Galleria Umberto.

I turned left down the Via Roma. It was in the Galleria that I first realized how desperate our position was. The sun streamed through the glassless roof and the heat of it struck up from the tiled paving. But it looked cool under the gaudy umbrellas of the pavement cafes where the usual prostitutes sat sipping iced drinks, waiting to pick up a man or for their pimps to bring a client to them. I felt the need of a drink badly.

It was then that I realized that I hadn’t any money. I couldn’t have a drink. I couldn’t even eat. All we had in the world was the remains of Boyd’s two thousand.

I went up the dark stairs to Guidici’s office with a foreboding that there would be no message for me. And I was right.

The secretary shook her mop of hair at me and her eyes fastened like black buttons on the roughly patched rent in my trousers. I insisted upon seeing Guidici himself. But there was no message. ‘Signer McCrae has not been here at all since he came with you about the cargo,’ he said.

There was nowhere else I could go.

I went back to the hotel and explained the situation to Boyd and Monique. We sat in committee in my room. We called for our bill and found that it left us with just four hundred and twenty-six lire. And Boyd had a cheap wrist-watch. That was all we had between ourselves and starvation.

The prospect was not good.

‘I just don’t believe a bloke like McCrae would walk out on ‘is pals,’ said Boyd. ‘Hit ain’t in the nature of the man. Stands ter reason like that if a bloke’s bin an orficer in the Army as long as ‘e was, ‘e don’t walk out on ‘is pals. Dugan wouldn’t neither. Jack’s as straight as they come.’

That’s what I thought. But the fact remained that two days ago, while we were at Percile, Stuart had drawn but all our capital and sailed with the Trevedra, leaving no message. ‘Clearly,’ I said, ‘since we’ve no choice, we must work on the assumption that he’s left us flat. We need money. And we want to get back to England.’

‘Reckon it won’t be difficult for us to work our passage back,’ Boyd said.

I glanced quickly at the girl. Her grey eyes met mine and I knew that she had understood. Also I knew that she wasn’t afraid. I suppose she was now accustomed to expecting the worst — poverty and uncertainty had been her life for so long.

I said, ‘There’s nothing to stop you working your passage back, Boyd. But I’m not moving from Naples unless I can take Monique back with me.’

‘Strewf, guvner, you don’t think I was suggesting going without her, do you? But I reckoned wiv her knowledge of lingos she might get a job as a stewardess.’

We must have talked it over for nearly an hour. ‘The upshot of the whole thing is,’ I said finally, ‘that we must find a cheap place to live and some means of getting hold of some money. Clearly the three of us can’t go down to the docks this afternoon and expect to be offered jobs at once in a ship sailing to England.’

And this was where Monique suddenly spoke for the first time.

‘There is a little place at the top of a house in the Vico Tiratoio where I lived for a time with my aunt. It’s not a very nice place. It’s a — sort of pensione. But the Signora was kind to me and I am sure she would let us have rooms for a time without wanting immediate payment. She often helps people. Sometimes they repay her. Many strange people come there. And there is a Scotch man in the next house — perhaps he is still there. He would help. He is an artist, but not very good. He makes papers for people. And he knows le monde des apaches. Many people come to see him for his papers.’

We both stared at her in astonishment.

It was difficult to remember that this kid from a mountain farm had lived for three months in one of the worst quarters of the city.

There was nothing else to be done. We paid our bill and followed Monique. After a quarter of an hour’s walking I found myself standing outside the trattoria in the narrow street above the Via Roma where I had stood only a few days ago, wondering about Monique and the strange life she must have led there.

We climbed the dark narrow stairway which the drunk had climbed, our footsteps sounding loud on the hollow wooden stairs.

And so we found rooms — little cubicle affairs, flimsily partitioned with stained matchboarding and clearly designed for one purpose only. The Signora, a big raddled motherly Neapolitan, welcomed Monique like a long lost child and seemed surprised when we insisted on a separate room for her. I did not like the idea of living in such a place. But we were little better than beggars and could hardly assume the right to be choosers. The Signora did not look impressed at our promise of ultimate payment — she smiled indulgently, her eyes on Monique with what I thought to be a covetous gleam.

Boyd and I shared a double bed in one cubicle and Monique had the next cubicle to herself. I understood now why she had never even considered trying to get to Naples. If she had come to this house, the Signora would have looked after her for a time. But kindly disposed though she might be to the strange cases that found their way to the top of those wooden stairs, sooner or later she would have insisted on her working for a living. And I could well imagine what hell that would have been to a fastidious girl who did not like being touched.

The trattoria down below had an upstairs room for regular clients that was reached by a door at the top of the first flight of stairs. Here you could get food as cheap as anywhere in Naples. The three of us lunched there in the stuffy fly-ridden half-light provided by a grimy window. We lunched well off pasta asciutta and red wine for the price of a few lire each.

After lunch I left Monique in Boyd’s care and went to the office of the British Consul. With some difficulty I obtained admission to the Consul himself. He eyed me without enthusiasm and did not offer me a seat. If you want a sympathetic Consul, avoid big ports. He listened to my story attentively, but without surprise. When I had finished, he said, ‘There’ll be a little delay, but I can fix you up with a temporary passport. The girl is going to be more difficult. I can get her an Italian passport, but if her guardian notifies the police there may be trouble. Anyway, how do you propose to get her to England if you have no money?’

He was very off-hand about the whole thing. I could see that he did not believe my story in full. He thought I was entangled with the girl. He was willing to get me a passport, but not anxious to have anything to do with her.

It was useless to protest. I told him not to worry about the girl, but to go ahead with obtaining a temporary passport for myself. I asked him whether there was any British organization in Naples through which I could obtain a loan. His reply was, ‘I am afraid not. But you can work your passage back. I’ll give you a note to one of the shipping lines.’ And he scribbled a line or two on a sheet of paper, slipped it into an envelope and handed it to me.

From the Consul’s office I went to see the Naval Liaison Officer. I told him the story and his reaction was the same as the Consul’s. ‘I can probably arrange for you both to work your passage home. But to do anything for the girl is quite out of the question.’ There were several other naval officers there, but none that I knew. I was too embarrassed even to raise the question of a loan.

Though the sun was now dipping behind the heights of the Vomero, the streets were still stiflingly hot as I made my way up into the city. I felt dispirited and exhausted by the time I reached the Vico Tiratoio. We were in a bad fix and I didn’t see how I was going to get the girl back to England. And I was definitely not going to leave her alone here in Naples.

The sweat rolled off me as I climbed the dark stairs, and I began to swear obscenely and childishly at Stuart.

Boyd and Monique were not in the pensione. I went down to the trattoria, thinking they might have decided to eat. But they were not there either.

I began to walk through the deepening shadows of the narrow streets. I had a sense of frustration. I was nearly thirty. And it irked me that at that age I could be stranded in a foreign city with literally no one to turn to. It made me realize what a hell of a gap the war had torn in our lives.

My sense of loneliness made the throng of life in the drab back-streets more vivid. The film of dirt on the hairy legs of the girl who shuffled ahead of me in wooden soled sandals, the urgent shrill cries of the ageless women behind the street stands, the beggars, the boys who wandered barefooted through the streets pimping for their sisters who were still in their teens, the tawdry makeup of a woman standing hopefully beneath the tinsel-decorated lamp-lit shrine of the Madonna at the street corner, the poverty and the dirt, and the sour smell of streets that had no proper sanitation — it was all imprinted on my mind as the background to which I was doomed until I could fix a passage for the three of us.

And when we reached England, the prospect would not be very much brighter unless we could get hold of Stuart. Neither Boyd nor I had a job. I had no money — no one to whom I could turn for money. And Monique’s mother could hardly support herself, let alone her daughter.

I felt as depressed as I have ever felt.

The shadows deepened and lights appeared in the street-level hovels where people not only worked, but lived. It was the end of the day when the poor of Italy come out of their shops and their stuffy rooms to sit on chairs in the street, smoke their last cigarette and gossip.

I walked through street after street where the doors of the ground-level rooms were open to show the sordid intimacy of a one-room home with its iron bed and dirty sheets, a torn stained table-cloth laid with a frugal meal of pasta or nod or just pane, with the inevitable carafe of vino. And the strange thing was that anybody might be born to this life. It was just the luck of the draw. Only a man of character could rise out of this cesspool of filth if he were born to it — and then he would have to be either a crook or very lucky.

Without thinking about it I eventually arrived back in the Vico Tiratoio. I went up to the trattoria and found Boyd and Monique already settled down to plates heaped with steaming tomato-flavoured pasta. ‘Strewf! I thort you was lost,’ Boyd said as he pulled a chair up for me and shouted for another plate of pasta. ‘You weren’t in when I got back so I went for a walk,’ I told him. ‘Where have you been — sight-seeing?’

Boyd grinned and glanced across at the girl. ‘Show him,’ he said.

She slipped her hand inside her dress and brought out a bulky envelope. She handed it to me almost shyly like I

a child that has done something that it fears is wrong but hopes will be approved.

Inside were some papers and a slim book. The papers were civilian identity documents. The book was a passport visa’d for England.

‘How the hell did you get this?’ I asked. I spoke sharply. I was excited and at the same time angry. The passport photograph had been taken that afternoon, for it showed her in the print dress we had bought her in Frosinone.

Boyd answered for her. ‘They’re forged,’ he said. ‘But they’ll do in an emergency. The way I look at it is this. The bloke offered ter do it. Why should we refuse? If we did get her a berf as a stewardess we’d be pretty mad if it fell through because she ‘adn’t got the necessary papers.’

‘Who was this forger?’ I asked.

Boyd was about to reply when Monique said, ‘Please. You remember I told you I knew a Scotch man who — ‘

‘Scotsman,’ I corrected her automatically.

‘Yes — a Scotsman who was kind to me when I was here before? We went to him this afternoon. He is now very ill — his legs will not walk …’

‘He’s paralysed,’ Boyd interrupted. ‘Got a packet in Naples after he deserted. This Goddamned city’s full of disease.’

‘He’s a deserter and he forges passports and papers for all the crooks in Naples — is that it?’ I asked.

‘He is an artist,’ Monique said. ‘I don’t know what is a deserter. He does work for many bad people. He is not a good man. But he has been a friend to me. And when I told him that we had no money and wanted to get to England and that I had no papers or passport, he made them. He is very ill,’ she added as though that explained everything.

‘We’re going to his studio tonight for a drink,’ Boyd said. ‘He says he thinks he can help us.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ I said. I felt angry — humiliated. You say the man is a deserter, a forger, and diseased. Even Monique says he is not a good man. Why did you take her there?’

Boyd looked aggrieved and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I weren’t in no position to stop ‘er. The young lady’s got a mind of ‘er own. Anyway, it won’t do no ‘arm to look in. He’s friendly — and we ain’t hexactly overburdened wiv friends at the moment. Besides, he said he’d give us some Scotch, an’ speaking for meself I could do wiv a nice drop of Scotch.’

I shrugged my shoulders. I was too depressed to argue. And what Boyd said was true. Any straw was worth clutching at.