Just half an hour later the train creeps into the station, between two near-deserted platforms. Clare smiles at Pip as they stand and stretch and gather themselves, but it’s she who wants reassurance, not Pip. Hot, heavy air is the first thing to greet them, and it has the smell of blood on it. The unmistakable metal reek of gore. The deep, fortifying breath Clare had been taking sticks in her throat, and she looks around, repulsed. The sky is an immaculate blue, the sun low and yellow in the west. They move away from the hissing train, and the buzz of insects fills their ears.
‘What’s that smell?’ says Pip, holding the creased sleeve of his blazer to his nose. But then they hear a shout, and see a figure waving from the window of a car.
‘Ahoy, dearly beloveds!’ Boyd’s voice is tight with excitement. He waves his hat and laughs, and when he emerges from the vehicle it’s with an unfolding of long limbs, the unfurling of a long spine. He is tall and narrow and, ever fearful of appearing clumsy, he moves with exaggerated grace.
‘Ahoy!’ Clare calls, relieved. She has brought them this far, and has the soothing feeling of handing control back to her husband. She and Pip cross quickly to the car, and Clare turns to wave the porter over with their luggage.
‘Make sure you’ve all your bags. I wouldn’t put it past them to miss one and carry it all the way to Taranto,’ says Boyd.
‘No, this is all of them.’ Boyd hugs Clare, hard, then turns to Pip and hesitates. This is new, too – this slight awkwardness between them. It tells Clare that Boyd can see his son’s encroaching adulthood just as clearly as she can. They shake hands, then smile, then bashfully embrace.
‘Philip. You’re so tall! Look – far taller than Clare now,’ Boyd says.
‘I’ve been taller than Clare since the Christmas before last, Father,’ Pip points out, slighted.
‘Have you?’ Boyd looks troubled; his smile turns strange, as though he ought to have known or remembered this. Clare is quick to deflect him.
‘Well, you do spend most of your time sitting in a chair, or on a bicycle, or in a boat. It’s hard to tell your height,’ she says. Just then the breeze blows and brings the tang of blood and violence anew. Boyd pales; what’s left of his smile vanishes.
‘Come on, climb in. The slaughterhouse isn’t half a mile south of here, and I can’t bear the smell of it.’
The car looks brand new, although there’s a fine veil of dust dulling its crimson paintwork. Pip examines it at appreciative length before they climb in. The driver, dark and inscrutable, barely nods at Clare as he and the porter secure their bags, but his eyes return to her, again and again. She tries not to notice. He would be handsome but for a harelip; a neat divide in his upper lip, and in the gum behind it, where his teeth are twisted and uneven.
‘You might get a few looks, dear girl,’ Boyd tells her in low tones, as the car pulls away. ‘It’s the blond hair. Rather a novelty down here.’
‘I see,’ she says. ‘And do you get looks, too?’ She smiles, and Boyd takes her hand. His hair is also fair, though now it’s filling with grey it looks more silvery, and seems to have an absence of colour. It’s thin across the top of his scalp; his hairline has crept back and back from his forehead and temples, like an ebb tide slipping from a shore. This is what Clare notices about him when they have been apart for a while, though this time it has only been a month: that he is growing old. He asks how their journey was and what they saw, what they ate and if they slept. He asks how their garden in Hampstead looked, before they left it, and when Pip’s school report is due. He asks all this with a strange desperation, a kind of manic neediness that immediately puts Clare on edge, at some bone-deep level where memory and experience reside. Not again, she begs silently. Not again. She sifts hurriedly through her mind for something she’s missed – some sign, something he might have said on the phone, or before he even left; some hint of what the problem might be. She has done as he asked, and brought herself and Pip all this way to him, and yet there’s something wrong. There’s clearly something wrong. They leave the station behind in a cloud of pale dust, and though fresher air comes pummelling in through the windows, Clare is certain she can still smell blood.
Chapter Four – Ettore
Piazza Plebiscito is full of men dressed in the typical black. These are the giornatari, the day labourers; men with nothing to their name, and no means to feed themselves but the strength of their backs. In the shadowy dawn they are a dark scattering against the pale stones of the pavement. The murmur of voices is low; the men shuffle their feet, cough, exchange a few low words. Here and there an argument starts, shouts ring out and there’s a scuffle. Once he and Valerio are in their midst Ettore can smell the grease in their hair, the sweat of all the days before on their clothes, the hot, stale fug of their breath. It’s a smell that has been with him, all around him, since the first days he can remember. It’s the smell of hard work and scarcity. It’s the smell of men as animals, muscle and bone made hard by graft. The overseers are there, on their horses or standing holding them by the reins, or sitting in little open-topped carts. They hire five men here, thirty there; one shepherd wants a pair of men to help trim his flock’s feet. It’s easy work but he can pay next to nothing, and the men eye him in disgust, knowing that one or other of them will have to take his low wages.
This is how it was always arranged, until the Great War. Those that want work come to the piazza, those that want workers meet them there. A wage will be offered, and men selected. There is no negotiation. Then, after the war, things changed. For two years, things were different – the worker’s unions and the socialists won some concessions, because during the war men like Ettore and Valerio, who had so little cause to fight, were promised things to keep them in the trenches. They were promised land, better wages, an end to the unending hardship of life, and afterwards they fought to make the landowners and proprietors keep those promises. For a few febrile months, it seemed like they might have won. They established a closed shop of labour, in which only union men could be hired, and no one from outside the county. Wages and hours were fixed. The labour exchange kept a roster to make sure each man got his fair share of work, and there was to be a union representative on each farm, to make sure conditions were met. This was only the year before, towards the end of 1920. But somehow it’s all coming unravelled again. The tide in this simmering feud, which is generations – centuries – old, has turned again.