‘It was? Gee! This is a bit of luck for me meeting someone who saw it before the eruption. What was it like?’
His excitement was infectious. ‘The lower slopes were quite gentle,’ I said. ‘But the last bit was steep, like a battlement of lava. And the top was a plateau about a mile across which steamed with the heat pouring out of the fissures. The whole plateau was composed of solidified lava which rang hollow like metal casing as we walked across it. Right in the centre of the plateau was a huge heap of cinders about 300 feet high. From Naples it looked like a small pimple right at the very top, but close to it was more like a slag heap.’
‘And that was where the crater was?’
I nodded. ‘We climbed the slag heap and from the top we were able to look down into the crater mouth.’
‘Could you see anything?’
‘Oh, yes. She was blowing off about every thirty seconds then, sending stones whistling up to a height of about 2000ft.’
‘You don’t say. Wasn’t it dangerous?’
I laughed. ‘Well, I’ll admit I wished I’d got a tin hat with me. But fortunately the funnel of the crater was sloped slightly away from us. We could hear the stones falling on the other side of the plateau. And inside the mouth of the crater great slabs of red hot, plastic rock were rising and falling like phlegm in the throat of a dragon.’
He nodded, eyes gleaming. ‘A remarkable experience. I must tell my boy about this. A very remarkable experience. And you say the mountain is greatly changed?’
‘It was the ash,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah yes, the ash.’ He nodded. ‘My boy told me that it blew right across to the Adriatic coast — six inches of ash in the streets of Bari, two hundred kilometres away, he told me.’
One of the crew came aft at that moment and ordered us to fix our safely belts. A few minutes later we touched down at Pomigliano. The airport was hot and dusty. The sun blazed out of a cloudless sky. The air was almost tropical after Milan and I wished I’d changed into lighter clothing.
The airport bus took us into Naples through narrow, squalid, tram-lined streets where the houses opened straight on to the road and bare-footed children played half-naked in the gaping doorways. Naples hadn’t changed much — the same poverty and dirt. The white-painted hearses of the children would still be winding up the Via di Capodimonte to the cemetery and for all I knew the homeless would still be dying of malnutrition in the quarry vaults under the Via Roma. We came in by way of the Piazza Garibaldi and the Corso Umberto and as the bus ground its way through the chattering, laughing crowds time seemed suddenly to have stood still and I was back in 1944, a flight-lieutenant with nineteen German planes and more than sixty bomber sorties to my credit and nothing worse than a bullet scar across my ribs. That was before Maxwell had got me posted to Foggia, before I’d started those damned flights up to the north, dropping officers and supplies to the partigiani in the Etruscan hills.
At the air booking office I said good-bye to Hacket. He had been kind and helpful, but I wanted to be on my own. To be honest, I found him a tiring companion. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked me as we stood on the hot pavement.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll find some little hotel along the waterfront, I expect.’
‘Well, you’ll find me at the Hotel Grand. Any time you feel like a drink, just give me a call.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’ll come and have dinner with me sometime.’ A taxi drew up and I got in with my suitcase. ‘And thank you again for being so kind to me last night.’ Then I ordered the driver to go to the Porto Santa Lucia. ‘I’ll telephone you,’ I said as the taxi drove off. I looked back and he waved his grey homburg to me, his rimless glasses catching the sunlight so that he looked like an owl surprised by the noontide glare. He looked very American, standing there in the sun with his sleek grey suit and the camera slung across his shoulders as though it belonged there permanently, like a piece of equipment issued to him before he left the States.
The taxi crossed the Piazza del Plebescito, past the Palazzo Reale where the big Naafi Club had been during the war, and slid down to the waterfront. The sea was flat like a mirror, a misty blue burnished by the sun. The sails of yachts gleamed like gliding pyramids of white, and humped against the skyline was the dim outline of Capri, half lost in the haze. I stopped at the little port of Santa Lucia that nestles against the dark, rocky mass of the Castello dell’Ovo. Sitting there in the warmth of the sun, watching a fishing boat preparing to sail, with the sweep of Naples Bay spread before me and Vesuvius standing in the background like a huge, battered pyramid, Milan faded away, a nightmare only vaguely remembered. I felt relaxed and at peace with the world, like a ghost that has come back and found his youth again — sight, sound, smell, it was the same Naples, a wonderful heady concoction of riches and squallor, sun and dust and ragged, thieving urchins. Probably they still sold their sisters in the Galleria Umberto and stole from every unguarded vehicle that ran down the Via Roma. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the mixture of wealth and poverty and the thousands who died every day of starvation and horrible, incurable diseases and filled the hearses that the gaunt horses dragged up to Capodimonte. It was all romance to me and I just sat there, drinking it in and letting the lotus of Naples take hold of me.
I hadn’t booked accommodation. But I knew it would be all right. I just felt that nothing could go wrong now.
For that day, at any rate, I was right. There was a bright, newly-painted hotel that looked out across the port of Santa Lucia and when I ordered the taxi to drop me there they welcomed me as though they had been expecting me. They gave me a room on the second floor looking out over the Bay. There was a little balcony and I sat there in the sun and went to sleep with the blue of the Mediterranean glittering below me.
Later I got a taxi and went to a little restaurant I’d known out beyond Posillipo. The night was warm and there was a moon. I had frutti di mare and spaghetti, and Lachrima Christi, eating at a table in the open with the inevitable Italian fiddler playing O Sole Mio and Sorrento. The stillness and beauty of the night brought a sense of loneliness. And then I remembered that Zina Valle was arriving in Naples the next day and something primitive stirred in my blood. At least I ought to thank her for changing over those drinks. She’d probably saved my life. It was an excuse to call on her at any rate.
That night, when I got back to the hotel, I asked for the telephone directory. Valle, Cssa. Zina, Villa Carlotta. She was there all right and I made a note of her telephone number.
I woke next morning to sunshine and a lovely warm, scented air coming in through the open balcony windows. Sitting up in bed I looked out on to the blue of Naples Bay with the fishing boats and the yachts putting out from Porto Sanazarro Barbaia. I had breakfast on the balcony in my dressing-gown and then sat with a cigarette and a long cognac and seltz, dreaming of what I would do with myself all day in that golden, sunlit world. It seemed so wonderful that I couldn’t believe that the spell could ever be broken. I would go out to the restaurant for lunch and then I’d lie in the sun on the rocks by the water’s edge. And later I would telephone the Villa Carlotta.
I reached the restaurant just after twelve and as I was paying off my taxi a big cream-coloured Fiat swung into the parking place. There was nobody in it but the chauffeur. He got out, tossed his cap into the back and unbuttoned the jacket of his olive-green uniform. He wore nothing under the jacket. He undid the belt of his trousers and slipped them off, revealing a pair of maroon bathing trunks. I stood there, staring in fascination at this transformation from chauffeur to bather. He must have been conscious of this, for when he’d tossed jacket and trousers into the car he turned and scowled at me. He was a well-built, broad-shouldered youth of about twenty with a strong face and a mass of long, black hair which he had a habit of tossing back from his wide forehead. His eyes looked very black under the scowl. And then the scowl was replaced by a wide, urchin grin.