Six

 

The wind dropped as suddenly as it had risen. Daylight revealed the three survivors aboard the wallowing forepart of the ship still clinging, bewildered, dazed and exhausted, to the wreckage. The bows were swinging in the waves but the after half of the ship had disappeared, leaving only a tangle of splintered planks, hatch covers and twisted deck houses, all held together by a network of rigging. A corpse was floating face-down in the shallows but it was impossible to tell who it was. The rest of the crew were somewhere beneath the great carapace of torn canvas that shrouded the tangle.

Soon after daylight, with the sea abating all the time, a steam tug appeared alongside. On its side it said Compagnia di Orlando, S. A., and the registration on its stern showed it came from Messina in Sicily. The sun had come out unexpectedly, and in the distance it was possible to see houses and fields.

On the stern deck of the tug was a stout, bearded man in a formal suit, hat and coat. A rope was thrown and the survivors scrambled down the heaving deck.

‘Subito. Spicciatevi. Fate presto.’

The harsh voice of the man at the wheel nagged at Edward but, having survived the night, he had no intention of falling in the sea through too much haste.

‘Chi va piano,’ he snapped back, ‘va sano e va lontano.’

As he reached the deck of the tug, the man with the hat helped him to his feet.

‘You speak good Italian,’ he said.

‘My mother was Italian. She came from Livorno. You may know her family name. It was Uschetti.’

There was no response. The tug went astern, swung about and eventually arrived at what looked like a ferry harbour. Dumped ashore, the survivors were left standing, dazed and bewildered, in the lee of a corrugated iron shed on which a loose sheet swung and rattled in the dying wind. After about five minutes, a trap appeared. Behind it was a horse-drawn cab and a motor car, clanking and steaming. Blankets, food and bottles of wine and brandy were brought and pressed on the wretched survivors. Within an hour, exhausted and still hungry, Edward was half-drunk.

Eventually, he and the others were pushed into the trap, which cantered off inland, bouncing and bumping over a rough unmetalled road to what appeared to be a hospital. There they were undressed and pushed into bed. For the first time in months, Edward was sensuously aware of clean sheets and a soft pillow. He fell asleep in minutes.

When he awoke Edward found himself staring into the face of a nun. She was young and pale and unbelievably beautiful.

‘Dove?’ he said. ‘Dov’ e qui? Where am I?’

‘Messina,’ she said. ‘Ospidale della Santa Maria Ringraziamento.’

‘Quanto sopravvivente? How many survivors?’

She held up three fingers.

Feeling himself gingerly, Edward realised that apart from a mass of cuts and bruises he was unharmed and no one objected to his getting out of bed to see the other survivors. The apprentice’s head was covered with bandages.

‘You saved my life,’ he said.

Edward smiled.

The bosun had a wound three inches long over his right eye and a ferocious headache. ‘That stupid old bugger, Budd,’ he snarled. ‘Sicily’s surrounded by beaches and the old fart chose about the only bit of rock in the whole place to put us on.’ He was already making plans to look up a woman in Reggio di Calabria he’d met on an earlier trip.

‘Widow,’ he said. ‘Nice and plump. All I got to do is take the ferry… That bloody Budd nearly did for us, lad.’

‘Do you think there will be an enquiry?’

The bosun grimaced. ‘Shouldn’t think so. She was an old ship and nobody’s bothered about sailing ships these days. It’s 1908, son, nearly 1909. All they think about these days is reciprocating engines and steam-driven tubs. Just thank your lucky stars you’re alive and go and enjoy yourself at the expense of the government for a bit.’

It had only just begun to dawn on Edward what had happened. Hitherto his only achievements had consisted of playing cricket for the school, winning one or two minor prizes and beating the living daylights out of Cousin Maurice. Since then he had been in half a dozen fights, had jumped ship, travelled to Johannesburg, fled from the police, just avoided a cholera epidemic which had killed hundreds, survived a shipwreck and, he supposed, been responsible for saving the lives of two people.

He was looking forward to going home and telling people like Sam and Georgina about it. Even Aunt Edith and – he paused – probably his Uncle Egg. Somehow, he felt that, while Maurice wouldn’t be very impressed, his uncle might now be able to forgive him for what he’d done.

A young man from the British Consul’s office turned up. He had no chin, wet lips and a high collar that sawed at his ears. He wore a white linen suit, yellow patent leather button boots and a boater. He spoke excruciating Italian and was there, he said, to assist the nuns and a man from the police to take down the names of any relatives and dependants of the survivors.

‘I can’t help, I’m afraid,’ Edward said. ‘I know nothing but their names – you’ll have to ask them yourself.’

‘E Lei?’ The policeman pointed at him and licked his pencil ready to write.

‘No father,’ explained Edward. ‘An uncle.’

‘The name, Signore?’

‘Marmaduke Egbert Bourdillon.’

‘Marmo Duca Eghbertabo Dillon.’ The Italian’s spelling was interesting. ‘Un nobiluòmo?’

‘He thinks your uncle’s a nobleman. He isn’t, I suppose?’

‘No. Just an ordinary chap.’

They managed to get the address down, then the doctor arrived to say that, as Edward was uninjured and not suffering from shock, he would be allowed to leave the hospital.

‘Where do I go?’

‘Just hang on a jiffy,’ said the man from the Consulate. ‘I’ll go and make a few telephone calls. It won’t be much, of course. Just a room or a bed in a dormitory. That sort of thing.’

It was at least an hour before he returned. ‘Found you a place,’ he said. ‘Rather good, actually. Offered to take you in for Christmas and the New Year. Can’t think why. But there we are. Never look a gift horse, eh what?’

‘Never.’

‘The di Orlandos are an extremely wealthy family. Two young children.’ The young man leaned forward and Edward noticed how the high collar bit into the soft neck. ‘I say, old chap,’ he said, ‘you won’t let us down, will you?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘Everybody knows what sailors are. They’re an important family, as I say. It seems you speak Italian. Is that true. Parlo Italiano?’

‘A damn sight better than you do,’ said Edward.

 

The di Orlando family ran a large old-fashioned export-import and chandlers’ business and were the owners among other things of the tug that had taken the survivors off what was left of the George V. Cotterill. A motor car laboured from the hospital up a winding white road to a village called Friddi beyond which was the di Orlandos’ home. This was reached through a pair of huge cast-iron gates set in a high wall. The south end of the house incorporated the ancient walls of a former palazzo, which still retained the original marble pillars and floors. A wide entrance was adorned with statues, and the windows were wide open to a soft breeze that set the leaves of wisteria and roses trembling. The land was enclosed by Roman pines and a long line of cypresses that marched up the hillside like a regiment of soldiers.

Di Orlando was there with his wife to meet Edward as he stepped from the car. It was the same man who had spoken to him on the tug. ‘Welcome,’ he said in English. ‘I speak a little of your language but I feel more comfortable with my own.’

Edward smiled, as they all shook hands. ‘I speak them both, sir.’

He was given a pleasant bedroom overlooking the slope of the hill and provided with a nightshirt and clothes to wear. ‘My son’s,’ di Orlando explained.

The di Orlando children were hardly the youngsters Edward had expected. Salvatore, the son, was a strapping eighteen-year-old, articled to a solicitor in Messina. His passion was girls, and, when he wasn’t in the office, he was to be found hanging round the village pump in Friddi eyeing the local talent. He wasn’t the slightest bit impressed that his family was entertaining the survivor of a shipwreck. He began to remind Edward of his cousin, Maurice.

His sister, Rafaela, was a lance-straight scornful beauty, tall for an Italian with a stateliness beyond her years. She was a little older than Edward, slender and exquisitely formed, and her thick raven hair was plaited and bound over the top of her head in Sicilian style. Beneath it great, dark eyes smouldered.

‘Your mother,’ di Orlando said after a delicious supper of roast chicken. ‘Her name was Uschetti and she came from Livorno. Would she be related to the Uschetti family who build boats?’

‘She was their daughter.’

Di Orlando frowned. ‘She was a headstrong woman, as I recall. Runaway marriages are not how things are done in Italy. It was a great disappointment to the family.’

‘It wasn’t for my mother,’ Edward said. ‘She and my father were very happy.’

‘Is your family important?’

‘Not particularly. But it’s an old family and well-known.’ Edward was beginning to resent the line of questioning.

‘I am surprised you are not an officer,’ said di Orlando. ‘In Italy the sons of good families are always officers.’

Edward explained how he had sunk the Fairy and run away to sea. ‘I thought it safer to stay away for a while.’

‘I hope the sparks will have stopped flying.’

The family seemed in no hurry to send him on his way, and did everything in their power to make him feel at home. Signora di Orlando even took him with her daughter in the carriage on a picnic near Taormina, where he dutifully admired the remains of the Roman theatre.

They drove along the lower slopes of the hills. They were fringed with a scrappy covering of cactus – chiefly prickly pear and sisal, whose tapering leaves ended in a long black spike as hard as ebony and as sharp as a needle. The carts that rattled round the island, painted with the pictures of saints in gaudy colours, stirred up a white dust that left all the foliage by the roadside looking grey and dead. The land was dry as a desert with occasional patches of cultivation, where the earth had been ploughed and dug by wooden implements whose design dated back to Christ. Edward had heard snatches of bird song but had barely laid eyes on a bird. But now and again he spotted a herd of cattle or a few goats and sheep.

‘Our land,’ Signora di Orlando explained, as they passed through a grove of olive trees, ‘stretches as far as you can see. Most of the island is owned by people who live in Rome and Naples. People prefer to work for us.’

Rafaela, the daughter, lifted her head proudly. ‘Because we take care of them,’ she said. ‘And unlike some on the island, they eat meat regularly. We provide schools and a doctor for their illnesses. We are successful because we’ve never been absentee landlords. We’ve never been troubled by the Fasci.’

‘The Fasci?’

‘A secret society the peasants formed to protect them from oppression. In Italy the North gets everything and Sicily nothing. The di Orlandos have always stood up for the South and the people trust us.’

The di Orlando business consisted of warehouses near the ferry jetty, and a gloomy but impressive office in the city near the Church of Santa Maria Alemanna, where Edward was introduced to the staff. The manager, Dummo, was a short, pompous man with pince-nez, and his deputy a long thin man called Jenschi. They reminded Edward of a circus act.

‘And this is Evrone, the chief clerk,’ Dummo said casually. ‘And his deputy, Zoparella.’

The clerks bowed. Since Edward was di Orlando’s guest no one knew how to address him. Everybody in Italy had a title – Ingeniere, Professore, Dottore. In the end, since he had been a sailor, they settled for Capitano.

But little time was wasted on the clerks, and, as they sipped cold wine in di Orlando’s office, they were joined by a couple of business associates. Clearly di Orlando considered Edward someone of importance.

But Salvatore continued to ignore his existence. Rafaela was friendly but aloof. One evening, taking a stroll after supper, Edward met her on one of the garden paths. Someone was strumming a mandolin on the slopes below the terrace and Edward suggested they should dance to the music.

‘Certainly not,’ she said, backing away. ‘That would not be correct.’

Sicilian life seemed to be centred round traditional feast and saints’ days. Then, the market-place filled with weightlifters, sword-swallowers, quack-medicine sellers, conjurors and jugglers. As Christmas approached, Edward lent a helping hand in the house with the decorations. And, for only the second time since he arrived at the di Orlandos’, he found himself alone with Rafaela. Their hands touched for a moment, as she shifted the position of a porcelain Madonna Edward had just placed above the fireplace in the dining-room.

For a moment, they both stood there in silence, Rafaela gazing fixedly at the floor. Then she raised her deep, dark eyes to his. ‘You must know,’ she said, ‘that I am to be married.’

It appeared the groom-to-be was the son of Salvatore’s boss, Bruno di Porto, a man of thirty-nine. He did the legal work in Messina for his father’s business which was similar to the di Orlandos’.

‘Do you want to marry him?’ said Edward after a while.

‘No,’ she said, and her eyes flashed.

‘Then why must you?’

‘Because that is how marriages are made in Sicily. The businesses will merge and become powerful. The dowry is agreed. That seals the marriage and helps the husband set up home.’

‘But this Bruno di Porto – he’s nineteen years older than you are.’

She shrugged. ‘He is also a chaser of loose women. But he is a sound businessman, I believe.’

‘It’s ridiculous,’ said Edward. ‘Why do you have to marry an old man you don’t love? My mother didn’t.’ But then the rest of the family arrived, and the conversation was over.

Christmas came and there was an exchange of small presents. Edward was embarrassed to receive a suit from the di Orlandos and a gold watch from Rafaela. There was nothing from Salvatore. Friends appeared for dinner and listened open-mouthed to Edward’s story of the shipwreck. He improved it with every telling.

On Christmas Day they went to mass in an ornately decorated church in Messina, driven there in the di Orlandos’ carriage. Salvatore insisted that he preferred the church in Friddi and, being Salvatore, he got away with it.

Silent in the lofty church, his nostrils stung by incense, and his ears tingling from the glorious choir and the high chant of the priests, Edward was tautly aware of the presence alongside him of Rafaela. She looked overwhelmingly beautiful, and he found himself wondering what it would be like to hold her and kiss her and how she would respond.

When it was time to take the bread and wine, Edward was about to follow the family when she laid a hand on his.

‘You are a Catholic?’

‘No.’

‘Then you are not allowed to take the sacrament.’

But she gave him a little smile and her fingers remained on his hand, a little longer than they needed to.

It was the first time she had shown any warmth towards him. As they sat on the verandah in the evening, under the watchful eye of Signora di Orlando, he sat quietly, enjoying the slender column of her neck, the patrician nose, the fine eyes, the luxuriant and glistening hair. Salvatore, as usual, had vanished and was doubtless already involved in some amorous escapade with one of the village girls. Later, Rafaela played the phonograph, but she seemed impatient with Gigli and Galli-Curci, and they played a decorous game of chess instead. Occasionally, their hands met, often enough for Edward to suspect it was deliberate, and several times he caught her looking at him. When their eyes met, Rafaela’s dropped at once.

No one was hurrying to send him back to England and the di Orlandos seemed to be treating his stay with them as an extended holiday. With di Orlando and his son occupied with their own affairs during the day, Edward and Rafaela had often gone into Friddi, occasionally doing a little shopping.

‘We must watch out for vipers,’ she warned, as they took a short cut home through the fields.

When he took her hand to help her over a wall, she didn’t try to reclaim it when they reached the other side. But when they slipped descending a grassy bank and rolled together in a giggling heap to the bottom, she sat up, her face close to his and her laughter died abruptly. She pushed him away, her face suffused with blushes as she brushed the grass from her skirt.

 

One day during the week after Christmas Edward asked, ‘Could I take you into town this evening?’

‘Not alone.’ There was a long silence. ‘But Zia Monica would be allowed to act as chaperone.’ Rafaela seemed to read Edward’s thoughts. ‘She is not difficult to lose,’ she smiled. ‘For a short time only, of course. For half an hour or so, we can slip away.’

‘Have you done this before?’ Edward looked at her quizzically.

She blushed. ‘Only with my girl friends,’ she said. ‘Never with a man. First, of course, you will have to ask my father. I will tell him I wish to buy New Year presents. Then you must ask him if you may accompany me. He will think hard about it but he will say yes, but that Zia Monica must come along.’

It seemed as grave an undertaking as asking for Rafaela’s hand in marriage, and di Orlando considered it with the greatest seriousness. Eventually, he agreed.

‘I will inform Zia Monica,’ he said. ‘Rafaela wishes to buy presents and she will be glad of your help with the parcels. I will arrange for you to use the carriage.’

Zia Monica was a desiccated woman in black. As Rafaela had said, she was not intrusive and sat opposite them in the carriage, staring straight ahead while they talked. She carried a prayer book and wore a shawl round her shoulders and a black bonnet on her head.

As they wandered round the shops, the young bloods leaning on the walls and corners pretended to faint as Rafaela passed. When she took no notice they whistled and sighed and pretended to shoot themselves.

Later, Edward and Rafaela sat talking in a street café over coffee. Zia Monica still didn’t interfere and studied her prayer book. It was the oddest courtship. Eventually, strolling back through the town, they managed to give her the slip while she was looking in a shop window. There was a side street with a gate and a shady garden with trees, and lights showing dimly through the branches. Edward found himself pulled into the darkness. Immediately, two soft arms went round his neck and he felt Rafaela’s mouth on his. It was a tremulous kiss, so much so that he wondered if Sicilian concepts of honour had made it her first attempt. But as he kissed her back she clung more tightly and the kiss became fiercer.

‘It is terrible,’ she said. ‘We have only a few minutes and next year I have to marry Bruno di Porto.’

‘For God’s sake Rafaela, you don’t have to. Marry me.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied. ‘You have no money and I don’t wish to live like a pauper. Nor do I wish to have my family constantly bemoaning my treachery as the Uschettis do about your mother.’ She was suddenly a different person, vibrant, forthright and full of initiative. He was tremendously aware of her near him, of her perfume, her beauty and sexuality.

‘Married to this Bruno fellow,’ he said, ‘you’ll be stifled.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘Bruno is old and I shall always be alone with dozens of children. I don’t want that kind of life.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Some women take lovers.’ She gave a sudden grin. ‘The Borgias used poison. Sicilians prefer bombs. Perhaps I’ll try something like that.’

‘Perhaps that’s why my mother ran away with my father.’

‘I expect so. I want to be treated as a woman, not a clause in a marriage settlement.’

‘Have you ever…kissed Bruno di Porto?’

She gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘Never,’ she said, then smiled. ‘If we were older, I would say come along to my room tonight when everybody’s asleep.’

‘You can’t mean that.’

‘No, I don’t. Oh Edward. I want to do so much. I want adventure. I want to run a business. I want to make money. If I could run my father’s business, I would modernise it, revolutionise it. There is so much opportunity. Everything’s so backward here.’

This was not quite the adventure that Edward had in mind, but he could see she was quite serious.

‘Do you know anything about it?’

‘Of course. I used to go to my father’s office as a little girl and sit at a desk he provided for me. I still do. He thinks I am just playing. I was when I was a child, but I learned about things. I watched him work with the accountants. Tax evasion is a national sport in Sicily, you know… He thought my interest was just the whim of a silly girl because girls don’t go into business, but by that time it was more than just a game to me.’

‘What about Salvatore, when he takes over?’

‘He will ruin everything. I would do things much better than he ever will.’

‘Wouldn’t he let you help?’

‘I’ve told you. Girls don’t do that sort of thing. In any case, Bruno di Porto wouldn’t allow it. Have you an arranged marriage waiting for you?’

‘I’ll decide whom I’m going to marry.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Salvatore will waste his money, his chances, everything. If I had my way, I would immediately open a depot on the other side of the strait in Reggio di Calabria and have imports for the mainland landed there, not here to be transported by ferry across the water. I’d have an office in Rome and use Civitavecchia and look into the possibilities of Brindisi, Venice and Genoa. Orlandos could be as big and important as anyone in Italy. And quickly, too. Italy has been a united country only for fifty years and it is growing all the time. Opportunity is everywhere.’

Talking business seemed a strange way to conduct a lovers’ meeting but they clung to each other a few minutes longer. The heat was intense and for a while Edward thought it was the heat of lust. Then he noticed dogs were barking all over the city, asses were braying, and a cock crew frantically despite the hour. The night had become close and very oppressive.

They found Zia Monica in a panic, looking for them, but Rafaela apologised humbly enough to calm the old aunt’s fears. As she turned to lead the way back to the carriage, she threw Edward a glance that almost made his knees give way.

‘Storm coming,’ di Orlando said, when they got home.

It was impossible to sleep. Edward lay on the bed, wondering if Rafaela were expecting him to make a foray down the corridor to her room. Sweat trickled down his forehead, and his throat was dry. He wanted her desperately. But did she really want him? He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.