The Moon Tunnel

6

Humph brought the Capri to a halt by a lone poplar, its black trunk reflecting the cold white light of the moon. Out on the fen, beyond the city, the evening was clear and brittle, the sky a planetarium turning slowly overhead, the vanished sun an amber smudge to the west. Dryden considered their destination gloomily, a line of buildings broke the horizon like an Atlantic convoy. The road sign, pointing drunkenly down into the black earth, read simply ‘Ten Mile Bank’. It looked like the kind of place that couldn’t afford a village idiot.

They were just twenty-five minutes from the centre of Ely, but they’d travelled back decades in time. A vestigial mist lay in the Forty Foot Drain, obscuring any small boats tied up by the village wharf. On top of the flood bank ran half a mile of intermittent civilization: tied cottages, a Methodist chapel, a supplier of tractors and heavy agricultural gear, and a featureless brick working-men’s club with a neon sign that didn’t flicker because it didn’t work. The club was subsidized by a large farming conglomerate which owned everything you could see, including the horizon.

At the end of the bank there was a T-junction where the village’s only street met a B road. Set back from the junction was the biggest local employer, a sugar beet factory dominated by three 120-foot metal cylinders you could see from the coast thirty miles to the north, trailing white smoke across the sky like the Queen Mary entering New York harbour. The moon caught the smoke now, three great plumes of spectral light obscuring the stars lying low along the edge of the distant sea.

Humph swung the cab into a lay-by opposite the factory gates and pulled up outside a roadside café. The temperature was falling fast, the sun long gone in the west. The café’s exterior was a brutal example of post-war utilitarianism: a single-storey concrete façade with a lone flourish – a carved stone block showing an Italianate scene of a Roman ruin overgrown by exotic flowers, below the just-discernible stencilled words Il Giardino – The Garden. Steam fogged its metal-framed windows, obscuring the interior.

‘Usual?’ said Dryden, climbing out and not waiting for an answer.

He’d known Humph for five years now, but it seemed more like a lifetime: a wasted lifetime. Since the crash Dryden had not driven a car, haunted by the claustrophobia and the panic which had swept over him as they’d slipped beneath the waters of Harrimere Drain. Humph had ferried him about in those weeks after the accident, waiting patiently outside The Tower Hospital on the outskirts of town while he sat by Laura’s bedside.

Eventually Dryden had taken the job on The Crow and dumped his Fleet Street career. Laura’s coma, the latest example of the newly diagnosed Locked In Syndrome, had dragged on for weeks, to months, and into years. Humph, meanwhile, had effortlessly evolved into Dryden’s informal chauffeur. Daytimes were spent dozing in the cab, but for Dryden’s occasional travel demands. They spent a lot of time going nowhere, but they were company for each other, like book ends.

So no need to wait for Humph’s reply. Three fried eggs, six rashers of bacon, one ciabatta sandwich. Sensible eating rules, which Humph made occasional efforts to enforce, did not apply after dark.

The interior of the café was a surprise for visitors. The tables had checked cloths and Chianti bottles held guttered candles. The walls were testimony to the impossible dream that Ten Mile Bank, and its disparate community of far-flung farms and smallholdings, could support an Italian restaurant. Pictures of Venice hung in gilt frames, plastic bunches of grapes decorated the beams along with cascades of garlic and chillies. A high shelf held a line of wine bottles. Dryden loved the place, chiefly because it reminded him of where he had met Laura, in her father’s north London Italian café.

Like a thousand other institutions attempting to introduce the British to fine food, Il Giardino had long ago resorted to the lucrative trade of supplying the Great British Breakfast. The counter was standard greasy spoon: Formica stained by a generation of spilt tea. And while a chalkboard offered spaghettial aglio, lasagne verde and Bolognese, an array of frying pans indicated that the all-day breakfast was indeed the best seller at £4.95, with tea and two slices of fried bread. Humph’s ‘usual’ was, Dryden noted with satisfaction, already bubbling on the grill.

The man behind the counter was always behind the counter. Dryden called him Pepe, as everyone did. Pepe Roma was, Dryden judged, in his mid to late thirties. Italian film-idol looks had been severely marred by a decade frying food under artificial lights and a lifetime of turnip-nipping Fen winters. He swept a scrubbed hand back through already thinning jet-black hair. The curve of his skull caught the neon light above the grill.

‘Dryden,’ he said. ‘What can I get you?’ Dryden was an erratic and eccentric eater, usually preferring to snack from provisions squirrelled away in his coat pockets.

He considered the chalkboard but let his eyes rest on the ancient, but still gleaming, espresso machine.

‘Corretto?’

Pepe went below the counter and reappeared armed with a murderous looking bottle of grappa. ‘You don’t drive, eh?’

There was only one other customer, a lorry driver with forearms like rolled pork joints, who sat reading yesterday’s Sun over a plate wiped clean with dunked bread.

Pepe looked at Dryden with eternally disappointed eyes: ‘Focaccia?’

Dryden was one of the few daytime customers who could be inveigled into eating something Italian. Usually he bought freshly baked bread, olives and cheese for his regular late-night meal at The Tower.

‘Sure. Join me for a drink?’

Pepe brought the bread over. It was a rich nutty brown and still warm. Dryden broke it and offered his host some. They ate in silence while Dryden slurped the corretto and Pepe sipped from a small glass of grappa. Outside, through an oval Dryden had cleared in the steam, Humph ate at the wheel of the Capri – a picture of manic concentration.

They talked about Humph’s great loves, his two daughters, and Ipswich Town FC. Dryden waited for the conversation to lapse into easy silence.

‘And Laura?’ asked Pepe.

Dryden saw his chance. ‘Progress is slow. She wants to eat here one day. Perhaps it will be soon, who knows?’ He sipped his coffee: ‘A story – today. They found a body – just the bones – in a tunnel under the old PoW camp. Your father, he was a prisoner there?’

A wooden shield on the wall, which Dryden had noticed the first time they had stopped at Il Giardino almost three years earlier, was set against a background of the Italian flag above the legend ‘Association of Italian Prisoners of War. Ely Branch’.

‘Sure. Papà Marco was captured in the war, early on, in North Africa. They shipped him to Southampton, then by rail to Ely. That was 1941 by then. He was interned in the PoW camp, then released with the rest, at least most of the rest, to work on the fields. After the war he saved and bought this.’ He raised a hand in mock triumph, looking round at the restaurant. His head dropped as he moved a plastic tomato sauce bottle like a chess piece on the table cloth.

‘But why stay? I don’t understand. I guess I’d have been on the first boat back to – where was it? Venice?’

‘Not really. Mestre. It’s on the coast to the north. You wouldn’t like Mestre, Dryden – it is Venice’s workshop, that is what they say. An industrial city, without beauty.’

Dryden considered the slate-blue landscape under the moon he could see through the oval in the steam. ‘But better than this?’

‘Not then. I don’t know much but Dad talked about it a bit, before he died. There was revolution in the north, turmoil, the Right fighting the Left, no one in the middle. There was no respect for soldiers, there is still no respect for soldiers,’ he said, glancing at a picture on the wall showing a young man in a uniform at a village café table.

‘Some went back but the news wasn’t good – no jobs, and more fighting. And anyway, by then people like Dad had been accepted here, had friends, and were working on the land. Even when the soldiers came back there was work.’

‘And romance?’

‘For some. Dad had met Mum at home. But yes, others married local girls. Some of them did it pretty quick before the competition got back from the war.’

They laughed together and drank. Dryden saw that Humph had succumbed to an early evening nap.

‘They meet then, the survivors, the ones who stayed behind?’

‘Yup. There’s the association. They’ve got a website, the lot. Dad founded it. There’s a meeting here next week – Monday lunchtime – always Monday lunchtime – the last Monday in the month. You should come – there’s a story. They want to build a memorial to Dad. He loved his home country, yes, but not like the rest.’

Dryden felt the effects of the grappa trickling through his brain. ‘How did he love his country?’

‘From a distance. He said we’d left. That was it. We had a new life and there was nothing sadder than a patriotic expatriate. We are Italians and proud of that, but Italy is not our country now – this is our country.’

‘Did he ever talk about the PoW camp?’

Pepe looked towards the counter, they could hear his mother singing in the kitchen beyond.

‘A little, perhaps, and perhaps more towards the end. Why do you ask?’

‘Did anyone ever escape?’

Pepe shrugged. ‘I did not hear – but then, for most of them it is something they do not want to remember. There’s a picture of Dad in the camp. Would you like to see it?’

He was back in a minute. The picture was black and white and had inevitably faded with the years but, like most wartime photographs, the quality was pin-sharp. Five men in white vests and overalls sat on the steps of a PoW hut. Each held a spade in one hand and a variety of vegetables in the other, leeks mostly, with onions and celery.

‘Here,’ said Pepe, putting a finger on the figure on the right. But Dryden had already spotted the family resemblance, disfigured only by the meagre diet of the camp.

‘They had a garden,’ said Pepe. ‘Dad always said it kept them sane as well as fed. They sold some in the town – a surplus, so I guess they were good at it. Il Giardino – that’s why he chose the name.’

Dryden was looking at the smiles. The teeth gleamed, but this was no synthetic effort for the camera. The eyes glittered too, and each man’s arm was hitched to that of his neighbour, in a gesture of friendship and solidarity – and perhaps something else. Conspiracy?

‘They shared the work, the six of them.’

‘Six?’ said Dryden.

Pepe shrugged. ‘I guess the sixth took the picture.’