Learning by Heart (28 page)

Pietro laughed. ‘Perhaps customs should be broken.’ He had been watching her.

‘But you wouldn’t break a custom,’ she said, ‘a tradition. A family tradition, say?’

‘No.’ He frowned. ‘But, then, all things change. Perhaps I should change them.’

‘There’s something you want to change?’

He twisted his cup on its saucer.

She leaned towards him. ‘Pietro,’ she said, ‘why would my husband be nervous today?’

‘Because of the war,’ he said. ‘Returning to the place.’

‘I know it’s because of the war. I know where he landed. I know what day. And I know that Alex was with him, or met him soon afterwards.’

‘I think they met in Taormina.’

‘OK. Taormina,’ she said. ‘But where did my husband meet your father?’

‘Near Noto,’ Pietro said. ‘But don’t you know all this?’

‘I don’t know anything,’ she told him.

‘Not how he met my father?’

‘Nothing.’

Pietro pushed his cup aside and leaned almost across the table. ‘You do not know why my father talks so much of Richard Ward,’ he said, a statement, not a question.

‘No.’

‘This is very strange,’ Pietro said.

‘He won’t speak of it,’ Cora told him, ‘and especially not this week.’

‘But he is a hero,’ Pietro explained, amazed.

She put her hand to her head, pressed the point between her eyes for a second. ‘I thought he would tell me,’ she murmured. ‘I wanted him to tell me. Now … everyone knows but me. He didn’t even want me to go with him today.’

‘But there is nothing to hide,’ Pietro said, perplexed. ‘This was a very good thing that he did, a very good thing that my father has always talked about, that he told me when I was a child, and many times since.’ He looked around himself, as if the answer to the conundrum might suddenly occur to him. ‘If someone I loved had done such a thing, I would be very proud of it.’

‘All I know is that he landed on a beach,’ she said. ‘Was there some sort of trouble there?’

‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘They landed and came straight ashore.’

‘There was no trouble, no bombardment?’

‘Not much.’

‘Was there fighting?’

‘Not at first. It came later, at Catania. Then it was bad.’

Cora frowned at him. ‘And your father?’

‘My father was a boy, ten years old.’

‘And something happened with your father and grandfather?’ she asked. ‘Near here? At Noto?’

Pietro shook his head slowly. ‘I cannot believe you don’t know,’ he said. ‘Your husband is a very …’ he searched for the word that had deserted him ‘…
modest
man.’

She sat quietly, waiting.

‘My father and grandfather were on the road. My father saw the jeep, he thought it was an American jeep, and he ran from the field to the road …’ He smiled. ‘Boys do such things, look at cars. They knew the ships were on the coast and my grandfather was hurrying. He was worried. He wanted to be in his own house.’

‘And this was Richard’s jeep?’

‘Yes. Mr Ward and two other men.’

‘And what happened?’

‘My father ran out into the road, and there was a gun, a place where guns were set up, a … I don’t know what you call it …’

‘An emplacement? A dug-out?’

‘Yes, a gun emplacement. It had been there for a long time, but no one had been stationed there for weeks. And they thought it was empty. But inside the emplacement there were two soldiers.’

‘Two German soldiers.’

‘They had a radio, and no machine-gun, just rifles …’

‘They were snipers.’

‘That is right. And they shoot.’

‘They shot your
father
?’

‘No, but they shot, and my father began to run to the jeep, to tell them. And my grandfather – you did not know my grandfather. He was a very angry man …’

‘Alex called him unstoppable.’

Pietro smiled. ‘Yes, unstoppable. He ran to the guns because they had tried to shoot his son, just a boy.’

Cora put her hand to her mouth.

‘I think they knew their position was to be given away.’

‘By your father.’

‘Yes.’

Cora tried to put herself into the jeep, to see the road ahead through Richard’s eyes. A frightened boy careering towards them, and shots from the side of the road.

‘I think my father was very frightened, and the men from the jeep were calling for him to lie down in the road, or in the ditch. But he didn’t lie down. And they stopped the jeep and Mr Ward got out, and he caught my father and put him inside the car, and he always remembers this, being pulled from the road and lying down in the back of the jeep, among the cans and ammunition and the tarpaulin. And he could hear his own father, and then nothing.’

‘What had happened?’ Cora asked.

‘My grandfather had been shot.’

‘Not killed?’

‘Injured. He was lying on the ground. And Mr Ward went to carry him, and he, too, was hit by a bullet.’

‘Oh, my God,’ Cora breathed.

‘You see,’ Pietro said, ‘I think those soldiers were supposed just to look, to report, and they were young boys too. They were not much older than me.’

‘They were frightened.’

‘Yes, everybody was frightened, maybe.’

‘And after that …’

‘Mr Ward went to the emplacement. He killed one soldier; they captured the other.’

‘But he had been injured?’

‘And they had tried to …’ Pietro put his hand to his throat and pulled his index finger across it.

‘What?’ Cora said, not quite believing.

‘One of the men, with a knife …’

‘He tried to cut Richard’s
throat
?’

‘Yes,’ Pietro said.

Cora sat back in her seat. While they had been talking, the sun had crept round the square and was now blazing full on their table. For a moment, everything became clinically clear to her, all the shapes heavily delineated, as if someone had drawn round the table, the cutlery, the bowl of brown sugar, with a fine black pen. She blinked, and the sharpness of the images dissolved.

‘It’s very hot now,’ Pietro said.

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Very hot.’

‘Would you like to go into the cathedral?’ he asked. ‘That, too, has a secret.’

She looked at him.

‘I will show you,’ he told her.

She followed him round the cathedral, glad to be out of the heat. Dutifully he showed her the mosaics, the paintings and sculptures. She listened, read the guidebook, and stood in the centre of the aisle at last.

‘It feels curious,’ she murmured.

‘It’s been many things,’ he told her. ‘A temple, a Christian church, a mosque.’

‘Where I come from,’ she said, ‘we have an abbey church. The first kings of Wessex are buried there.’

‘You have always lived there?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Except for a few months in London.’

‘What is it like, where you live?’

‘Green,’ she said. ‘Like Sicily.’

‘Sicily is only green in the spring,’ he said. ‘In the summer, the fields are burned so pale yellow it is almost white. In the summer, we are on fire.’

‘I would like to see that,’ she said. ‘Something so bright, days so hot.’

‘You would suit it here,’ he said. ‘It would suit you.’

She sat down on a nearby chair and, after a moment, he sat in the row in front, and turned to her. ‘There is something the matter,’ he said.

She shook her head. For some unaccountable reason, an image had come into her head of the hours and days she spent every year in pruning and training the trees, in making the fans and espaliers along the lines and walls. It was an exact occupation, cutting back the laterals in early summer, shortening the shoots in early autumn. She saw herself counting the leaf shoots from the base, clipping them carefully, tossing them into the basket on the path; carrying summer away and throwing it on to the fire. A shudder went through her.

‘I have offended you with something I have said?’ he asked.

She pushed herself back in the chair. ‘No, no.’ She made a concerted effort to erase her thoughts. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Something to do with today? You are thinking about your husband. You are worried?’

‘No,’ she said truthfully. Worried was not the word. She was falling. That was what it felt like. And it struck her, with almost unbearable force, that she had been dreaming through her life, marking time, and that it was a kind of retreat, a shadow. She felt a longing to be out in the light, and she hated herself for thinking of Richard in that line of thought, for thinking of him as the dark into which she had strayed.

And in the dark he kept his secrets.

Pietro was staring at her intently. His hands were on the back of his own chair, folded one over the other. She glanced for a second, no more, at the long, slim fingers.

She raised her head. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ she said. ‘What do you like to do?’

‘I’m sorry, what do you mean? At university?’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Tell me about your family.’

‘I have four sisters … you have met them.’

‘I didn’t get a chance to speak to them. What are they like?’

‘Oh, like girls,’ he said, and rolled his eyes expressively.

She laughed. ‘And they are all called after goddesses.’

Pietro grinned. ‘My father,’ he said. ‘A romantic.’

She thought of Richard using the word of her a few nights before. ‘Is that good?’ she asked.

‘What is better?’ Pietro asked.

She looked away, at the dim lights in the sacristy, at the cool stone of the floor. ‘And what do you do with your time?’ she persisted. ‘What sort of things?’

‘I read,’ he said.

‘You do?’

‘Too much,’ he told her. ‘My father says that my head is in the clouds. When I was a little boy, I read all the time. He thinks it is not so good. That is one reason why I study the course. To keep my head here.’

‘To fix you in place,’ she said.

She had meant it lightheartedly, but he frowned.

‘And you always come home,’ she said. ‘Don’t you travel?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I will one day.’

‘You have plans? Where will you go?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘A long way.’

‘To find what?’ she asked. ‘To see what?’

His gaze lingered on her.

‘You haven’t told me the secret,’ she said. ‘You promised me a secret.’

He shifted in his chair. She saw him swallow hard, compress his mouth, as if holding back what he had been going to say. She was intrigued. A sensation raced through her, a constriction of the chest, a tightening in the pit of her stomach.

Moments passed. When he looked up again he was smiling. ‘And you, too, are named for a goddess, like my sisters.’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘So you say.’

‘I do say,’ he insisted, ‘and that is how it should be.’

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Why?’

He gestured to her. His voice brightened. ‘This is how she should look, Persephone, Kore, with light hair, the colour of the sun she longed for.’

‘The goddess of the underworld can’t have blonde hair,’ she pointed out. ‘She would be dark.’

‘No, no,’ he persisted. ‘She is caught in the dark, but she is the summer.’

‘And she was stolen,’ Cora said quietly. He had leaned closer to her. ‘This is one legend I don’t really know,’ she said.

‘For nine days, her mother Ceres looked for her,’ he told her. ‘When she couldn’t find her, she made the land burn. She took away the water. The crops failed, the earth passed into winter. And it was only when her brother Zeus saw what was happening that he intervened.’

‘And he freed her.’

‘Only for a while. She was released to spend two-thirds of the year with her mother, when the earth blooms, and a third of the year with Hades.’

‘This island is full of gods,’ Cora remarked. ‘An island of immortals.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled, agreeing, ‘they are everywhere. The sons of Zeus and Thalia were born here; Demeter and Hephaestus fought over it; Charybdis made the whirlpools at Messina; Alpheus followed Arethusa here; Helios owned land here; Heracles laboured here …’ He threw up his hands. ‘And more. And more. And more.’

‘An island of gods and giants,’ Cora mused. ‘And light.’

‘And light,’ he agreed.

There was a beat between them: a moment of absolute silence.

‘And Persephone,’ she asked. Her voice dropped low, almost to a whisper. ‘Did she ever leave Hades for good? Did she ever untie the contract? Was she ever freed?’

‘Never. The pact was for ever.’

She met his gaze. ‘And there she stayed?’

‘Always,’ Pietro said. ‘For eternity.’

Cora got up. Suddenly she felt claustrophobic, smothered, suffocated.

Pietro sprang to his feet.

‘Can we go?’ she asked.

‘What is the matter?’ he said.

She almost ran up the aisle to the doors. On the steps, as she emerged, she took a gulp of air. She walked to her right, to the balustrade at the edge of the steps, and put her hands flat on the stone. Then, as Pietro came up behind her, she turned again and went down the steps. The piazza was full of people – it was lunchtime. She turned right again, down the narrower street alongside, and went a few paces, then stopped to lean against the wall of the church.

She felt his hand on the small of her back, then in the centre.’What is it?’ he asked. ‘What can I do?’

She didn’t look at him: she looked at the stone, and then her gaze travelled upwards. She was standing against a massive column, much wider and taller than those at the front of the church. They were set into the wall – or, rather, the wall had been built round them. She squinted against the sunlight to the top, then looked back at him.

‘The temple of Athene,’ he murmured. ‘This is its secret beginning, here before anything else.’ He took his hand from her back, and stood away from her, very still, very upright.

The heat pressed in on her. The light flexed, refracted as if from a mirror. She put her hand to her face, her eyes. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘that anything is immortal?’

‘That lives for ever?’

‘Like the gods, for ever.’

‘Like this temple, indestructible? Oh, yes,’ he told her, with conviction. ‘We are immortal, all of us.’

‘And what if you do wrong?’ she asked. ‘Something wrong?’ She began to tremble. ‘You believe in their retribution? Their bolts of thunder and lightning?’