‘Baby, I can’t really …’ She raised floured hands, adjusted her fringe with her wrists as she turned inside his grip. ‘You’re dressed up.’ He kissed her hard on the mouth. She squeaked complaint then acquiesced, softening under the force of him. He pushed his tongue into her mouth, pressed it up against her front teeth so that they raked the surface as he withdrew.
‘I’ve got business,’ he said. ‘I’ll see you later. What are we having?’ he asked, peering over her shoulder.
‘You’ll find out,’ she said.
Hours later Cirò had found the coffin maker’s down in the city harbour. He stopped outside to smoke a cigarette and think for a moment and look at the water. This wasn’t nothing he was doing. He was even afraid. Big boats standing there. Big white seabirds flying athletically overhead. The stevedores’ voices bounced with a prompt, echoless lightness over the surface of the water. Cirò was an inland Sicilian. For him the sea was strange, dangerous, dazzling and beyond his calculations. It meant travel to invisible places. It meant the edge of his world, the end of it.
He threw down his cigarette then knocked on the door. He gave the name of the mutual friend who had sent him. They nodded. A boy made him coffee while they waited for a weeping widow to finish her order and leave. She pressed the tears from her cheeks with a black-bordered handkerchief and argued them down to a good price in dignified whispers. Cirò smiled at her sharpness. When she was gone they locked the door and showed Cirò his coffin and how it worked, the latches and hinges inside, the sliding panels to open the vents. They made out documents with the name and address of a family. He would be their uncle. They told him to urinate and then climb in. Standing over the drain at the back he found he couldn’t pee. He came back and stepped up on a chair then into the coffin. It was a little tight at the shoulders of his strong, short-levered body but otherwise fine. He lay there and looked up at the wooden planks of the ceiling and their faces bending over him. ‘Don’t open the latch,’ they said, ‘until five hours after you feel the motion of the sea. Then you just climb out and mingle in the crowd. You’re just another passenger.’
They put on the lid with its false screw heads. He latched it inside and opened the vents. It worked: he could breathe. After a minute or two he felt himself lifted up and processing out on a trolley. He began to feel very calm in an enclosing darkness that was safe and simple. He felt more protected than he had for many years. After days of much agitation arranging everything for this moment, hiding things, instructing people, he relaxed. The motion lulled him. Cirò Albanese was almost asleep when they loaded him onto a ship bound for America.
Part One: North Africa 1942
1
And here was a world intact, like a dream of his childhood. After years of war, not a sign except the intriguing sight from the train of numerous unfamiliar young women in the fields, land girls brought in presumably from Birmingham and Coventry, too distant to be seen properly, labouring silently. In London there were shelters, sandbags, militarised parks, blacked-out windows and gun emplacements. Here, nothing, trees washed through with sunshine and birdsong, the smell of the ground breathing upwards through the thick moist heat. As Will started out, his feet remembered the exact rise and fall of the walk home from the station. How perfectly his senses interlocked with the place. He knew that when he rounded this corner, yes, here it was, the peppery smell of the river before he could see it. He could picture the dim bed of round stones, the swaying weeds, its surface braided with currents. A full-fed river. Behind his left shoulder, away up for a couple of miles, was the rippled shape of an Iron Age hill fort where he’d played as a child, battling his brother down from the top. Everything here was still clean and fresh and in place, the countryside sincere and vigorous. It was as though he were walking through the first chapter of a future biography, with his kitbag on his shoulder.
Will decided to avoid the village and headed down through the wood. According to his father this was a recent planting, maybe only a hundred years old. It was still coppiced in this section, which had a peculiar regularity. The evenly spaced, slender trees always made him think of stage scenery. When the wind died the coppice had an indoor quiet, the quiet of an empty room.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’
Startled, Will turned to see his younger brother, Ed, wearing his hunting waistcoat, his open shotgun hooked over his shoulder. ‘For God’s sake, Ed.’
Ed smiled. They shook hands.
‘You didn’t hear me, did you?’
‘Can’t say I did.’
‘Makes a fellow wonder who’s been in training and who hasn’t.’
Ed was much given to stealth. He loved hunting and had a straightforward aptitude for it that Will sometimes envied, often mocked. Ed would appear suddenly in a room, quiet in his body, his senses splayed around him, then smile and go out again without saying anything. Father had been in a way similar, although sharply clever, a quiet grammarian indoors but a sportsman outside, hard-riding, red-faced, breathing great volumes of air, his hair sweated to his head. A mere schoolmaster, he’d been invited to join the hunt after the last war when he’d returned with a medal, with the medal. It was outdoors that Will was allowed glimpses of what he took to be his father’s mysterious heroism, that undiscussable subject. There was a kind of calculated rampaging, his movements very hard and linear. Ed had a different quality. He was less reflective, less troubled by thought, simply a live moving part of the world of trees and creatures and water. Will wasn’t sure how he himself would be described. He wasn’t a natural sportsman although he was efficient and strong enough. He always noticed the moment of commitment, the threshold he had to cross between thought and action, his mind instigating his body. He didn’t think he should notice; it made him feel slightly fraudulent. His movements were effective but too invented. He was playing a part.
‘Why aren’t you fishing?’ Will asked. ‘I can’t imagine there’s anything left to shoot. I thought the woods would be stripped bare with rationing having everyone setting snares and popping their shotguns.’
‘Ah, but for them wot knows the old woods like I does.’ He opened his waistcoat to show hanging inside its left panel a rabbit, teeth bared and eyes half closed. ‘And,’ he said, reaching into his front pocket and carefully lifting out a bird, ‘… there’s this.’
‘You little tinker. A woodcock. When everyone else is working on the nth permutation of bully beef.’
Will took the bird from him. Its head, weighted by its long bill, hung over Will’s fingers on the loose cord of its neck. The small body was still warm, the plumage shining with the airy burnish of a living bird. Will’s senses were lighting up, home again after weeks of training grounds, weapons drills, diagrams, distempered huts and dismal food. ‘That’s a very kind homecoming gift,’ Will said.
‘It isn’t any such thing,’ Ed said and took the bird back, refolding its wings to fit into his pocket.
‘All for you. You going to sell it on the black market?’
‘No.’ Ed was impatient. ‘I’ll give it to Mother. You’ll probably eat it tonight in a pie.’
‘Did she send you out to meet me?’
‘Er, no. How could she if we didn’t know you were coming?’