With his long straight fingers, George kept whisking particles of dust or lint from his clothes. His face lengthened with the effort of looking down at himself. He said that Dunphy was dead. And Randall was dead. And Carlson. They had all died at the same moment, or two moments, two big shells landing one after the other. Coyne was killed later. George was right beside him when it happened. A sniper blew off Coyne’s jaw and it landed on George’s forearm. George flicked at his clothes, remembering the sensation of this thing, this object, warm and light as a teacup. Coyne had drowned in his bubbling holes.
‘I picked the jaw up, with all of the teeth in there, and held onto it in case it was going to be useful but it wasn’t. He died. I balanced it back on his face so he could be buried with it and we ran.’
Ray and George stood together in the evening air, a soothing moisture in it, a substance in the distances. No sound of fighting, only voices and more men arriving.
George was different now. Sometimes, in flashes, Ray could get his old self out of him, but in the silences George’s face hardened and he disappeared.
Ray asked finally, ‘Did you shoot? Remember what you said that time that had me worried all the time, did you stick to it?’
George opened his mouth and inhaled looking up at the sky. He closed his eyes and Ray understood. But knowing that George had been doing exactly what Ray had prayed he was doing and had defended himself brought Ray no relief or peace of mind. Instead it made Ray sad, awfully sad, to think of gentle George being forced to do that and maybe killing people, to think that they were all forced to do that. Ray stood next to his friend enclosed in this sadness, knowing he would never be outside it again. This had happened to them all. This was for ever.
28
They were done with Africa now. That was the news, the reason for celebration. The men played in the sea. Despite the fact that Ray’s hearing was now crisp, finished and sensitive, he was not permitted to join them. He sat on the beach, pouring handfuls of sand over the gaunt bones of his feet, and looked at the men splashing and laughing in the brilliance of the sun-struck water, the light sliding about their shoulders, over their heads and backs. Feet kicked up and disappeared. George was not among them, as far as Ray could see. Ray had to let go of that, of George, and to try not to panic. He had to care about himself instead. His return to his unit had been short-lived. Ray had been called out to form part of a special division of men, men with Italian names — all the Rossos and Rizzos and Romanos — who would be last to arrive in the invasion of Sicily that was to follow. They were to stay there and secure the peace.
One man rose up in the sea, eyes closed, his hands on his head, water pouring down his face and lips and Ray felt the cool of that over his own head, the relief.
Ray’s head burned often, with memories, with fear. But now he would miss the battle. In Sicily he would not really be a soldier any more. He would be part of the peace. George would have liked that for himself but George was not an Italian. Ray had to forget about George now, to let him go. Perhaps it would be better for him to think of him as dead already. Ray twitched at a memory: in the mess of action once he’d had that thought, that everything was dead already, only some of it moved and lived. That wasn’t really going to help. He just had to hang on until it was over. That was all. He had George’s address back home. If they ever got back home, he would get on a bus and use it.
Part Two: Sicily
1
The Princess liked to outpace her guards, to kick up and canter as far from them as she could, making them chase, but here in the motor car there was nowhere to go. One guard sat beside her. He breathed through his nostrils as loudly as a farm animal and bit at the corner of his moustache as he stared out of the window, a pistol on his hip. When she was a little girl there were always more of them, men on the other side of the windows, crouching on the running boards with rifles across their backs. As a child she’d envied them: she wanted to ride on the outside of the car. Now the threat was much diminished but still her father wouldn’t let her travel without at least one to protect her.
In front, the driver in his cap paddled his feet, jerked his levers and turned the wheel. Outside the windows the landscape changed. The bricks and avenues of Palermo gave way to the countryside, the landscape hollowing, rising up into rigid, incessant hills. She was not sad to be leaving the city. It would be good to be out again on horseback with the wind striking her. For a while. This was the task of Luisa’s life: evading boredom in one of two places. She did this by moving arrhythmically between them, taking her friends by surprise in Palermo, going among the feathers and ballrooms and knowing eyes and then suddenly substituting them with the sun and emptiness, the peasants and her father’s travails. There she was free to ride within a certain range, as long as she was accompanied and kept away from the malevolent edge of the country that was always there, encircling. She sensed it looking out of the motor car. The landscape was vigilant. It knew things. It could see her.
In a walled garden in Palermo, by a pond in which large goldfish slowly twisted, rising and fading, a Fascist mayor had told Princess Luisa that there was absolutely nothing to be worried about, that the party had smashed those backward rural criminals. He had jutted out his chin in a ridiculous imitation of the Duce. All the Fascists these days strutted and posed like him even as a light sheen of panic appeared on their faces. At parties aristocrats from the old families caught each other’s eyes and shared this observation. They themselves felt confident, monumental, historically vindicated, while the Fascists struck attitudes and drank and spoke too much. The effect of events in North Africa on Luisa’s own pet Fascist, Mauro, a Tuscan of refined, not to say pretty, features, was to make him more ardent. He wanted to marry her.
Mauro Vecchio was the prefect of Sant’Attilio, a part of the island he confided in her that he found squalid and incomprehensible. The best of Sicily was the east, where the Greeks had been. The half-Arab peasants of the west could not be made political. It wouldn’t take, any more than you could teach pigs to speak Latin. You could move the feeding trough, make them trot in a different direction, and that was as far as it went. Luisa’s father disliked him for these opinions, the Prince having a peculiar, dimly Tolstoyan reverence for the tough local people that somehow survived his dealings with them. Mauro and her father liked to argue it out in the persons of The Future and The Old Wisdom. Now, it seemed her father had won the argument. Mauro had retreated to Palermo and Luisa suspected he would never return, although as he drove with her to the city in his official car, he had promised her that he would, no matter what happened.