The mist is massing thickly on the hills when the last lorry clanks past the infirmary, delivering supplies up the hill for the new chapel.
‘It’ll blow away in the first storm,’ I say to Dot. ‘Won’t it?’
There is no answer, and when I turn, Dot isn’t behind me – I’m so in the habit of speaking to her that I’d forgotten she isn’t there. I haven’t seen her all morning and I’m starting to worry.
I search behind the curtain in the infirmary: our bed is neatly made and bare. Her boots are gone. I walk past the lines of beds, aware of the men’s eyes following me. None of them calls but, still, their gaze feels like something heavy pressing on my skin. I keep my head down.
The bed that had been Cesare’s is empty too – he was sent back to his hut yesterday evening, still coughing, but without the fever. He had recovered so quickly, after he’d spoken to Major Bates about the chapel. Every time I saw him, he seemed stronger, his limbs filling out, his eyes brightening. He and Dot had sat late into the night whispering. She had laughed and leaned forward over his bed. I had watched from behind the curtain as her hair fell across his face. I had watched him reach out and gather it in his hand, twisting it into a long red rope. My breath had stopped in my chest. I’d imagined him winding that rope of hair around her throat, or yanking on it to pull her in closer.
I stepped forward.
He’d looped her hair over her shoulder and released it so that it spilled down her back. She’d tucked it behind her ear and smiled at him.
Still, the fear swelled like a balloon beneath my ribs. He’s pretending – I know he is. All the prisoners are play-acting the role of polite gentlemen, but it is a shabby costume. I know how a man can pretend to be affectionate and concerned when he wants something. I know how warmth can deceive.
Now I can’t find Dot, the mist is closing in and there are a thousand men on this island, not to mention the cliffs. Not to mention the curse.
I push my face up to the infirmary window, but all I can see is the greyish churn of the fog, pressing against the cold glass like some slick-backed beast.
It’s a ridiculous curse, the one they say is on this island. That if two people fall in love here, someone will die. I tell myself it’s a story, a foolish superstition. But that doesn’t stop the sick twisting in my stomach, and the thought that I cannot escape: the story tells us that someone will die, but it doesn’t say who. A lover, it says, but which one?
I hear soft footsteps behind me and turn suddenly to find Bess behind me, her eyes wide as if she is frightened of me. I must, I realize, look half wild. I smooth my hair and press my mouth into a smile. ‘Have you seen Dot?’ I try to keep my voice level.
‘No, I . . . Not since I heard you . . . talking to her last night about the chapel.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, turning away, bundling myself into my coat, my scarf.
‘You can’t go out in this,’ Bess says.
‘I have to find her.’
‘But the cliffs!’ Bess voice rises in pitch. ‘Con, it’s not safe.’
She grabs my arm but I brush her off.
The men are sitting up in their hospital beds, watching me, talking to each other in a rapid patter of Italian. What are they saying? What are they planning? I dig my hands into my coat pockets and push my shoulder against the door. Gasping at the cold air, I call Dot’s name.
The mist swirls around me, swallowing the sound. It’s like shouting with a cloth pressed over my face. Suffocating.
For a moment, the memory of his hand covering my mouth, and how small my smothered scream had sounded.
What if he’s waiting out there for me?
I close my eyes against the nausea. I dig my nails into my palms. ‘No time for this, Con,’ I say aloud, to myself, to the mist, to whatever creature or human may be listening.
I make myself walk, counting my steps. I can see perhaps two paces in front of me, but any further is a swirling grey blur.
I set off in the direction of the bothy – it is up the hill from the camp, so I know I am walking away from the cliffs. Dot and I have rarely been back to the bothy – when I asked if we might return there, away from the camp, she’d shaken her head. At first, when I was ill, she’d said I needed to be near to the infirmary. Once I was better, she still insisted that we stayed. We both knew why, although neither of us said it.
In the back of my mind, as I walk, is the fear of Dot returning to the bothy alone and discovering the necklace I’d hidden in a gap between the bricks in the fireplace. I imagine her questions – how would I answer them? How can I lie to her? My cheeks burn and my pulse quickens at the thought.
A gust of wind, and the mist clears for a moment. Ahead of me, I catch sight of a dim shadow, a figure moving quickly up the hill.
‘Dot!’ I shout, into the mist. The figure doesn’t stop – if anything it moves faster, then disappears as the fog regroups.
‘Dot!’ I call again. And I can hear footsteps now, fading, as if someone is fleeing from me.
I begin to jog, blinking against the damp air, then stretching my eyes wide, but it’s useless. I can’t see or hear anything. I run faster, wishing she’d stop.
She must be thinking of the argument we’d had last night, when she’d told me about the chapel. For two weeks, after Dot had helped Cesare across to Major Bates’s office, I’d known something was wrong. The prisoners all seemed suddenly excited, and Dot often talked to Cesare in whispers, both of them laughing. He made quick, expansive gestures with his hands, and I watched, thinking how strong they looked, how easily they could crush her.
‘What’s he telling you?’ I’d asked her, time and again. But she wouldn’t say.
Finally, last night, Bess and I had been sweeping the infirmary when we’d watched a lorry drive past, loaded with sheets of metal and skeins of wire, followed by another two lorries, each carrying a metal hut.
‘What are they doing?’ I asked Bess, expecting her to be as baffled as I was.
‘Oh,’ she said casually, hardly looking up, ‘that’ll be for the chapel.’
‘The what?’
She stopped sweeping. ‘Didn’t Dot mention it?’
I waited until the evening, until the curtain was drawn around our little sleeping area.
‘When were you going to tell me that the men are planning to build a chapel?’ I demanded.
‘I thought you knew.’ Dot’s eyes slid from mine.
Behind the curtain, one of the men coughed.
‘So, they’re staying here, are they? They’re living on the island.’
‘I don’t know, Con.’ Her voice was soft and she held out her hands. ‘What’s the harm if they are –’
‘You don’t see it, do you? Or else you see it and you’re pretending not to. As long as he is here, you’ll be happy.’
Dot stepped back, her expression suddenly cold. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You know exactly what I mean.’
I watched the movement of her throat as she swallowed. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine his hand around my neck. So many times since that day last summer I’d looked in the mirror and traced the invisible outline of each of his fingerprints. He hadn’t squeezed hard at first. He’d been so tender when he gave me the necklace – he’d told me he loved me.
I blinked, to bring myself back to the infirmary. ‘You can’t trust Cesare. You don’t know him. You don’t know what he might do.’
‘I’m not you,’ she said.
And I knew what she meant: that she wasn’t naive, that she wasn’t allowing herself to be deceived. That she wouldn’t be foolish enough or weak enough to get herself into trouble. I knew she meant that she believed nothing bad would happen to her. I knew she meant that she wouldn’t blame herself if it did.
I sat on the bed, closing my eyes. My face felt rigid. Ice in my veins. I pulled my legs up and hugged them, as though I could close myself off somehow. I imagined myself inside a shell. Some creature that is soft and unformed, protected by an armoured carapace. But still I felt the tears on my cheeks.
Dot put her arms around me but I stayed rigid. After some time, I lay down. I could feel her watching me but I said nothing. And, as so often over the past months, at the last moment before I fell asleep, I remembered again the feeling of pushing my coat down over the sailor’s face. And I knew that I must be a monster to do such a thing. That I must be a monster to long for that for myself sometimes. The peace, the silence.
In the morning, when I woke, Dot was gone.
‘Dot!’ I cry now, into the blank, faceless mist on the cold hillside. She will hear me; she will turn; she will run back to me. ‘Dot!’
And then my foot catches on a dip in the land and I fall, my ankle twisting, my hands smacking painfully against the rocky ground.
I lie there for a moment, stunned. The mist eddies around me in a silent blanket, no noise except my own sobbing breaths. No movement apart from the rise and fall of my chest.
She’s gone.
Pain scythes through my ankle when I stand and, though each step is agony, I continue up the hill, limping and, when the pain gets too much, crawling. My hands are ripped by stones and gorse bushes and, through the thin material of my trousers, I can feel my knees throbbing with a warm wetness that must be blood.
I can’t leave her out here.
And then I see a shape moving in the mist. A man. A man, walking towards me. And I know who it is.
He’s found me. And we’re out here alone. In the fog, no one will hear me cry out. No one will hear me scream.
I stay very still, my body frozen, my face pressed against the cold, damp ground. My breath is tight in my chest, as if something is pressing down on my airway. As if fingers are digging into my windpipe.
And I know that I was foolish ever to leave the bothy at all, foolish to think that I could work in the infirmary, that I could be anywhere near Angus without putting myself in danger.
If I can just stay still, perhaps he won’t see me.
I open one eye, then the other.
Stillness, except for the swirling mist. And silence. No sign of the figure in the mist. It wasn’t my imagination – I saw him, I’m sure of it. And perhaps he’s out here, searching for me still.
Gradually, I make my limbs move. I manage to push myself upright, to crouch and then to crawl forward. Slowly. The rocks dig into my knees. I wince and struggle to my feet, still breathless, still waiting to feel his hand on my shoulder, his fist in my hair.
I walk forward quietly, moving up the hill. Away from the camp, away from the infirmary. Away from the men.
At last, I see a building rearing out of the mist. At first it is distorted by the vortices of whirling cloud, but then it resolves itself into home. Our home. The bothy. The place where I know we’re safe.
Before our parents left, before everything with Angus, I used to feel like that about returning to the blue house in Kirkwall – even the sight of it was warmth.
Some tension in my gut uncoils and I drag myself over the doorstep, calling Dot’s name, wanting to throw my arms around her, to apologize, to tell her that all I want is for her to be safe.
But the bothy is empty, the fireplace cold. The bed hasn’t been slept in.
With a sob, I turn back to face the blank rectangle of mist in the doorway and I shout her name again and again, the sound disappearing into the mist.
There is no reply.
The mist has cleared and it’s almost dark when I reach the bothy. My throat is raw from shouting for Con. My legs ache and my stomach clenches around itself. I’ve eaten nothing all day. Instead I walked along the beaches and, with my heart in my mouth, I stared into the beating water beneath the cliffs, searching for her pale skin, her red hair.
In the end, I’d returned to the bothy, although I doubt she will come back here as I know the roof reminds her of Angus.
The bothy looks gloomy and skeletal in the dusk, almost as if it is years into the future, after Con and I have gone and the land is rising to reclaim our abandoned home. But as I reach the door, the shadows resolve themselves into the solid shape of the place we left some weeks ago.
My lamp casts shivering shadows on the pockmarked walls. The little table is bare. The stove, when I touch it, is cold. She hasn’t been here.
As I turn to leave, I hear a sound. Something like an exhalation from the corner of the room. I wheel around, the lamp swaying in my hands, so that the light flickers and almost dies.
The blanket on the bed is moving.
And I think of the curse on this island, the stories that Con has always been so ready to believe: the talk of dead lovers and restless ghosts and desolate spirits. I think of the Nuckelavee: the skinless monster, half man, half horse, that is said to crawl from the sea, ready to exhale madness and disease.
The blanket shifts and writhes, then sits upright. And, in the shaking lamplight, the monster turns into Con.
‘Dot! You’re safe!’
‘God, Con, you terrified me! What were you thinking, running off like that?’
She rubs her eyes, which look swollen, as if she has been weeping. ‘I was looking for you. Where were you?’
‘I went to check on some of the patients in their huts.’
Con’s gaze hardens and, despite myself, I can feel my heart beating faster, can feel the anxiety, the shame. I had left the infirmary early that morning, while Con was still sleeping. The guards on duty were used to seeing me walk around the camp, so no one stopped me when I approached Cesare’s hut. I paused outside the door, hearing movement within. What if the men were getting dressed? And what would they think, finding me outside the hut before first light, asking for Cesare?
Just as I turned to go, the door to the hut opened and one of the men emerged. He saw me, jumped, exclaimed something in Italian, then said, ‘Scusi!’
I held up the bottle of sulfa tablets I had taken from the infirmary. ‘Is Cesare here?’ I felt ridiculous – what had I been thinking?
But then the man called behind him and, suddenly, Cesare was there, smiling.
‘Dorotea. You are well?’
‘Yes, I brought . . .’ I held up the sulfa tablets again.
‘Thank you, but I am not needing. I am better.’
‘Oh. Good.’
I could see the men behind him glancing at each other and grinning, and I felt my cheeks heating.
‘You are good nurse,’ said Cesare.
‘Thank you.’
One of the men muttered something in Italian. Cesare snapped a reply and glared at him.
Oh, Lord, what are they saying?
‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you are better –’
‘The huts are here for building the chapel,’ he said, his face bright. ‘They are on the hill, I think. You will see them with me?’
‘Now? But –’
‘Major Bates is letting me see them. He tells the guards to let me see the huts, work on them. We can go now. No hurt, you will see.’
I tried to return his smile. I couldn’t say no – I didn’t want to – and yet I was aware of the whispering, grinning men behind Cesare, and what they would think. And I was aware of the guards, who would see me walk out of the camp with a prisoner. However much freedom Major Bates, in his guilt, was allowing them, it wouldn’t change what the guards would say to each other.
I thought of Con – all the rumours that had started about her. The lewd jokes that were shouted at her in the street before we left Kirkwall.
Cesare watched me, his expression more serious. ‘You do not want? You can tell me this.’ But something in his face was closing down, as if he’d had a new thought about me, as if I had disappointed him.
‘No!’ I said. ‘I can come with you.’
Now, as I watch the same expression of disappointment on Con’s face, I know I can’t tell her that I walked out of the camp gates, with Cesare at my side. I can’t tell her that I walked up the hill with a strange man, a foreigner, and that, as we walked, the mist began to close around us.
So I say, ‘I took medicine for Cesare. And when I got back to the infirmary you were gone. I’ve been looking for you ever since.’ All of this is true, in some way.
‘Oh,’ she says, and I can see she doesn’t believe me. Then she says, ‘I think we should come back and live here, in the bothy.’ She raises her chin, and there’s a defiant set to her mouth.
The lamp flickers; the shadows on the walls shift.
‘All right,’ I say. ‘You want to stay now? Won’t Bess wonder where we are?’
‘We can go back down to the camp tomorrow.’ Con is still watching me, and I know that if I object she’ll fire question after question that I cannot answer. I know she’ll demand to be told where I really was this morning.
I can’t tell her that, as I walked up the hill with Cesare, our footsteps were in time. I can’t tell her the joy I felt at seeing him happily tell me about the men’s excitement over the chapel. I can’t tell her that the mist grew dense around us and we never reached the huts. I can’t tell her that I was confused suddenly, that I didn’t know which way to turn.
‘I’m lost,’ I’d said, feeling fear well in me and clutch at my throat. I didn’t know if I was frightened of this man, this stranger, or if it was the simple terror of being disoriented. I didn’t know if I was scared because – because I wanted to be lost with him. I wanted . . . something I couldn’t name. And the wanting travelled through me like fire.
Then, with the fog blanketing our eyes and filling our lungs, Cesare had reached out and taken my hand.
‘Stop,’ he’d said. And he laced his fingers through mine.
I turned to face him. Tendrils of mist spiralled between us.
‘You are frightened?’ he asked softly.
I nodded, unable to speak past the fear.
‘I am frightened also,’ he whispered.
We stood like that for some time while the mist shifted around us, while the waves throbbed on the distant beach, while my own pulse vibrated in my ears. I was aware of the warmth of his hands, their size, their strength.
He squeezed my fingers gently and said, ‘We must go back to the camp.’
I nodded.
‘It is down the hill?’
I nodded again. We turned and began walking slowly back in the direction of where the camp must have been. Neither of us said anything. He kept hold of my hand and, very gently, he rubbed his thumb over my knuckles.
Finally, the shape of the wire fence and the shadow of the guard on the gate emerged from the mist.
‘There,’ I said.
Cesare still didn’t let go. Only at the very last minute, just before the guard saw us and called out for us to identify ourselves, did he give my fingers a final squeeze, then let my hand fall back to my side.
Before he walked to his hut, he said, ‘We will see the chapel hut another day, Dorotea?’
I had walked back to the infirmary, my hand warm from his.
Now, as I build a fire in the bothy with Con, I can still feel his fingers through mine.
I am frightened also, he had said.
Con places the last piece of wood in the grate and leans forward to light the match. As she does so, I see a flash of gold at her neck.
‘What is that?’
‘What? Oh!’ Her hand flies to her throat and she pulls up her jumper so that the gold chain she is wearing is entirely hidden.
We stand, looking at one another. A dry log shifts in the growing flames. It is hard to tell whether the colour in Con’s cheeks is from the sudden heat or something else.
‘It’s nothing,’ she finally says. ‘I must get another log for the fire.’
She pushes past me, out of the bothy, and I hear her footsteps going around the side of the building, past the woodpile. Where on earth could she have got a necklace? It doesn’t look like anything our mother would have left behind – she was never one for jewellery, and we sold the rings she had left long ago, during that first hard winter. Could Con have found the necklace somewhere, perhaps, or – and this is a troubling thought – could she have stolen it? I don’t recognize it, but I do know the expression on Con’s face. It’s the look she used to wear after shouting at our parents. It’s the expression she wore when she returned to the blue Kirkwall house last year, with her skirt torn and livid marks on her neck.
Shame.
There is a scrape against the wall, and I can imagine her, leaning her back against it, looking out into the swelling darkness.
I place my hand against the wall where she must be standing on the other side. I close my eyes, willing some peace, some calm, to pass through the thin layer of plaster and brick.
When Con returns to the bothy, some minutes later, she isn’t carrying a log for the fire. She walks past me and begins undressing for bed. I watch, from the corner of my eye, as she pulls her sweater off over her head.
The necklace is gone – no glint of gold. Around her throat instead, are deep, red scratches, as if something has clawed at her. Or as if, standing there, alone in the dark, my sister has tried to scrape off her own skin.
When he first sees the old metal huts, half rusted and moss-coated, Cesare has to work hard to keep the smile fixed upon his face. He and a small group of men, including Gino and Marco, have been released from digging duties to decide what supplies they might need.
All of them stare at the building that is to be their ‘church’. A bundle of tangled barbed wire lies next to the decaying huts.
The guard who had accompanied the prisoners up the hill pokes the wire with his toe. He is young and blond and new – just recently put in charge of supplies. He’d introduced himself by name, as Stuart, and then, perhaps worried about seeming too friendly, had shouted at them to get moving. When Cesare had met his eye, the guard had given a nervous grin, which he quickly turned into a frown.
But he had soon relaxed, and as they walked up the hill, he’d told Cesare about his five younger sisters: how much they argued and how much they ate.
‘Gannets, they are. Bloody gannets.’
‘What is gannets?’
The guard had glanced at Cesare in surprise and said, ‘You know, those birds. Greedy buggers.’
‘Yes.’ Cesare had smiled, not knowing which bird the guard meant, but enjoying, for a moment, the familiarity – the companionship in assuming that another person understood what you were saying. You know, those birds.
Now Stuart stands, blinking nervously, holding a clipboard and a scrap of paper flapping in the wind, and pokes at the wire again.
‘And this is a church you’re making? A church, from this . . . stuff?’
Cesare nods, more confidently than he feels.
‘And,’ Stuart says, ‘you don’t think someone’s pulling your leg?’
‘He is right,’ Gino says in Italian. ‘This is a pile of shit. They’re laughing at us.’
‘Fooling us,’ Marco agrees, ‘so that we will work on their barriers.’
The other men agree loudly, in Italian, and Stuart watches them, listening to the patter of foreign language, the angry gestures. Cesare notices his hand moving towards his baton.
‘Stop!’ Cesare says in English, but to the Italians, not to the guard. ‘Stop this complaining. We ask for a place to pray. This is our place. It does not look like a church – it is not a church. It was a prison, this place, or it was used in war. These huts are the dark places. We live in the huts like this. We know. But –’ he holds up a hand so the men can’t interrupt ‘– but we will make this a beautiful place. We will bring light to this place. In these huts, there will be no more the war. In these huts, we will make the peace.’
The men nod. Some of them smile. And they follow Cesare, one by one, into the darkness of the first hut.
Like the huts they sleep in, it is cold and draughty. The whole structure is a single semicircle of corrugated steel. In some places, rain has corroded the metal and scrawled curlicues of rust over the ceiling and walls. The air smells sharp and bitter, and Cesare is reminded strongly of the Punishment Hut, of the terror that had gripped him, of the way that the cold air had seemed to squeeze him, like a promise of death to come.
The men gaze around them, their eyes wide, and Cesare can see the despair in their expressions. He feels it himself, but he mustn’t show it. If the men object, or rebel, if the mood in the camp plunges, they will all refuse to work again. Once more, there will be lines of men standing in the yard every day, shivering in their thin uniforms, then limping to the mess hut to eat bread and drink water before being pushed out again into the wind and the rain. If there is another riot, no amount of guilt or kindness from Major Bates will save them.
This hut is more than a chapel. This hut is life.
‘Listen!’ Cesare says. ‘Shut your eyes and listen.’
The men look at him doubtfully. Gino raises an eyebrow, and Cesare shoots him a pleading glance. They all close their eyes. Even Stuart, the guard, stands with his arms folded and his eyes shut.
The wind gusts over the sea into the chapel. And as it escapes through the rust-crazed cracks in the roof, it whistles. A high note, at first, when a sudden fierce blast billows in, followed by a lower note as the wind drops, then a higher note again, higher still, and dropping lower once more. Softly, Cesare hums the five notes.
‘Listen,’ he whispers in Italian. ‘It sounds like the Ave Maria.’
The men look sceptical. Gino opens his mouth to object, but before he can, Cesare hums the five notes again. They rise through the echoing space, resonating off the metal walls. Unmistakably, the start of the Ave Maria.
One by one, the men’s faces break into smiles and, when the wind gusts through the chapel again, the men all hum the five notes, then continue to hum the rest of the song.
Ave Maria, Gratia plena . . . Ave Dominus–…
Even Stuart hums along – somehow this foreigner, this Orcadian, knows the tune, the Catholic prayer that feels like the sound of home to the Italian men.
Cesare’s eyes fill with tears as the men’s voices unite in the prayer, the plea. The sound rises, swirls, swells to fill the space. And in this rusted old hut, this piece of discarded war junk, there is sudden beauty. The men’s faces fill with wonder and hope as they sing. They must picture, as Cesare does, the vast, beautiful churches of home. The gleaming altar. The arching ceilings, covered with beautiful frescos.
In Cesare’s church in Moena, there is a painting of the Madonna and Child above the altar. Maria’s face is so peaceful, her eyes so full of warmth and hope, like the face on the prayer card he carries in his pocket.
He will paint the same picture above an altar here, he decides, only Maria’s face will look like Dorotea’s. He imagines her peaceful smile, as the men sing. He remembers her hand in his as they walked through the mist. Her cold fingers, which had slowly warmed in his. He hasn’t seen her since. Perhaps he’d frightened her away, somehow. Their joined hands had felt . . . like peace. It is the same feeling he has now, surrounded by song, full of music, which is swelling out of the chapel and must be echoing through the air, over these islands.
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
After the final notes have faded, they walk out into the cold, clear sunlight, blinking. Cesare feels cleansed somehow, as if the few moments in the church have drained some of the anger that has been storing over the past months. The other men’s faces are livelier too and they talk to each other – and to Stuart, in English, discussing how beautiful the church will look, how it will remind them of home.
Stuart holds up his clipboard. ‘What will you need?’
The men begin to list the bags of cement and sand, the quantities of metal and wood.
‘And paint,’ Cesare says. ‘I need paint.’
Stuart writes it down and scans the list. ‘Major Bates has said you can have spare cement from the barriers and any other scraps you can find on the ships in the bay.’ He gestures out towards Scapa Flow and the sunken vessels from the last war.
‘But,’ Stuart frowns, ‘paint may be difficult to find.’
Cesare tries not to let his disappointment show, as the glowing church in his mind fades and is replaced by a drab, gloomy building, where everything is the same colour as the barriers.
He forces a smile. ‘It is good,’ he says. ‘We start with cement. No painting yet.’
The next evening the men sit planning in the rusted hut, which will become the chapel. They have been allowed to light a fire just inside the doorway, and although sometimes the wind blows choking clouds of smoke into the structure, no one minds. They are here together, away from the itchy anxiety of the cramped sleeping huts, where fear always lurks: fear of the guards; fear of these strangers, from all over Italy, who must suddenly become something akin to family; fear of the weather; fear of the next morning and the shrill, insistent whistle that will drag you outside to face other, more brutal fears.
Among them is a slightly older man, grey-haired and a little stooped, who had come to Cesare’s hut yesterday and introduced himself as a priest.
‘Father Ossani,’ he’d said. ‘You are building a chapel, they say.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Cesare had replied.
‘Well,’ Father Ossani said, ‘I would like to lead this church, if you do not already have a priest. And I’d like to help now too.’
‘With the building?’ Cesare looked doubtfully at the small man, his skinny arms and bowed posture – they couldn’t have him working in the quarry, surely.
‘Not the building,’ Father Ossani said, ‘but if you need supplies I can apply pressure to the major. No one likes an angry priest.’ And then he’d winked.
Cesare gave a delighted laugh and assured Father Ossani that he would prove very useful.
Now the priest is here, sitting among the other men in the shell of the echoing building. At first, the men were shy with him, but they are too excited to stay quiet and reserved for long.
They have mixed a small quantity of cement in a bucket, taking turns to stir and mix it with a stick. Cesare watches as Gino beats too enthusiastically, tipping the bucket and splattering cement over Marco’s boots. Cesare expects Marco to shout and rage, but he laughs, cuffs Gino over the head and, with his forefinger, wipes some of the cement off his boot then smears it onto Gino’s. It is the same cement that they have been using to build the barriers, the same thick grey sludge that, along with the rock from the quarry, has bent their backs and made their muscles ache for months.
But here, in this building that will belong to them, the cement has become something to laugh over, something to share. In the corner of the chapel, two of the men, Vincenzio and Alberto, have started to press a layer of cement against the rusting metal of the inside wall. Cesare has told them already that this will not be necessary, that Major Bates has promised he will find boards coated with plaster, enough to cover the inside of the chapel. ‘There will be a shipment in the next two weeks,’ he’d said, not meeting Cesare’s gaze.
Since Cesare’s time in the Punishment Hut, the major’s eyes always slide from his, and while he is eager to provide material, he doesn’t want Cesare in his office for long. His expression, as Cesare turns to leave, is one of pained relief. While Cesare lies awake in his hut at night, it has occurred to him that the war is horrific for everyone. The captors are almost as damaged as the captives. No one will leave this place unscathed.
Now the two men in the corner are laughing while they try to make the cement stick smoothly to the metal wall, while the others are gathered around Cesare, watching as he sketches an outline of how he envisages the outside of the chapel.
‘So,’ he says, in Italian, ‘we will place the two huts together and we will layer concrete over them. From the front, it will look just like a stone chapel. But you must think how you want the inside to be, and how we will make these things from scraps.’
‘We will need an altar,’ says Marco, ‘and an altar rail.’
‘A font,’ says Gino, ‘and candle-holders,’
Cesare writes it all down, then calls to Stuart, who is dozing in the corner. ‘We will have how much metal?’
Stuart stirs. ‘Plenty. Plenty of metal, plenty of concrete.’
Cesare nods, imagining a finely wrought metal screen to separate the ornate sanctuary and altar from the rest of the chapel. That is where he will paint his picture of the Madonna, as the central figure behind the screen. To anyone entering the chapel, the delicate metalwork will seem to protect the figure of the Blessed Mother. She will appear enclosed and untouchable.
If he can get paint, of course – Stuart is still doubtful about this.
As the men continue to talk, Cesare sketches a quick outline on paper. He captures the curve of her jaw, the upward tilt of her mouth as she smiles. But it is impossible to draw her eyes. Maria should look self-possessed, serene. Her eyes shouldn’t carry the intensity he sees every time Dorotea looks at him. The expression that is so close to hunger.
As he finishes the drawing, leaving the eyes blank and expressionless, he makes a decision: if she does not return to the camp tomorrow, he will slip away from the chapel and look for her. He will go to her bothy alone and he will find her. He will speak to her. He will try to tell her how often he thinks of her, how he can’t stop wondering about her, wanting her.
But how is it possible to say such things without frightening her away? How is it possible to talk about want and need, when those words, in any language, sound like demands?
Cesare knows he won’t sleep tonight: he will lie awake, trying to find the right words. Although perhaps the right words don’t exist in any language. There’s no name for this feeling, just as there’s none for the sensation he has as he dips his brush into paint and runs it over canvas.
Still, he has to find a way to tell her, somehow.
I am woken by watery winter sun creeping under the bothy door, carrying the faintest promise of spring. We have stayed here for three nights, Dot and I, and each night my sleep has been more restless. Each night I lie awake, listening to the laughter from over the hill – the knocking and banging and scraping from that chapel. If I fall asleep, briefly, then the sound turns into the slow, repeated clud of a shovel on rock, a grinding rasp, like a wooden box scraping past stone.
Dot has lain awake too, sighing. Occasionally, if there is the sound of laughter, she sits up. Sometimes, when she thinks I’m asleep, she creeps to the door, pulls it open a crack and stands staring out into the night. I watch the silhouette of her back. She looks so vulnerable, so alone.
We don’t talk about the men or the chapel during the day. We round up the sheep and the chickens. We sweep out the grate and gather scraps of driftwood. We cut and gather blocks of peat to burn.
Twice, in the quiet, firelit evenings, Dot has said, ‘I should check on the men in the infirmary.’ And by infirmary, she means chapel, and the man she wants to see is Cesare. I’m no fool and someone has to keep her safe.
‘Not yet,’ I’ve replied, both times. ‘The camp gives me nightmares.’
And she nods, smiles at me, but I can feel her retreating from me, hour by hour. I want to tell her to come back. I want to tell her that I’m keeping her safe.
But if I do, I’m worried she’ll tell me I’m being foolish, that I need to forget what happened to me, that not everyone is the same. I’m worried she’ll tell me that what happened was somehow my fault. And even though I know it was, although I know I’m to blame, I’m worried that, if she says these things, it will sever something between us for ever.
This morning, when I wake, the bed next to me is empty, and I know that she will have walked down towards the camp. I begin pulling on my trousers, ready to follow her, but then I hear a scuffling outside and I realize that it wasn’t the light that had woken me.
The sunlight under the door is cut off and there is the scrape of a boot on our step.
A sharp knocking. Tap, tap, tap.
I freeze, one leg still in my trousers, breath held.
The shadow shifts. A boot creaks. Angus? Is it Angus, looking for me? Is the door locked? Where could I hide? What can I reach? There is a metal poker for the fire, but I don’t know if I will have time –
Tap, tap, tap.
I pull my trousers on, as quietly as possible, then stand very still, my gaze flicking between the metal poker and the shifting shadow under the door.
‘Dorotea!’ calls a voice.
Cesare.
I stand absolutely still, ignoring the clenching panic in my chest. He will leave soon. He must leave. And then I must find Dot and make sure she is safe.
The boot scrapes again on the doorstep. The slash of light reappears, and then is cut off again, and there is a rockslide beneath my ribs as I realize – Oh, God! – that Cesare is kneeling on our doorstep.
I see his fingers – his workman’s fingers, grubby-nailed – appear in the gap beneath the door, and I glance at the poker again. It would take a moment. He would never expect it. My panicked breaths are loud in my ears and, for a moment, I’m back within those nights when I’d be woken by the sound of our father’s terrified shouts. Dot and I would huddle in our room, listening to him weeping. He would never tell any of us what he dreamed, but I guessed he was back in France, crouched in a trench. Some terror stays with you, in your blood and bones.
Now there is another knock and a rustling as the man pushes something beneath the door. A piece of paper. I don’t move. I won’t touch it. It’s as if he’s entered the bothy himself and it takes all my strength to remain absolutely still and silent, when every jolt of my blood tells me I should scream or hide or run or –
That poker!
The creak and scrape of his boot as he stands.
A rasp as he presses his face against the door.
‘I am sorry,’ he whispers, ‘if I have frighten you.’
Is he talking to me? Or has he somehow terrified Dot? Is that why she has stayed here with me for three days? Is she scared of him? Has he hurt her? Some part of me knows that he cannot have, surely. She would have told me. I would have known.
Some terror lurks in blood and bone.
Unbidden, the feeling of hands around my throat. I force air in and out of my lungs and I watch the shadow under the door disappear, watch the sunlight return.
I count to sixty twice, and then I tiptoe forward and snatch up the piece of paper from the floor.
On it are two sketches. One is the outline of a woman’s face, and even though the eyes are blank, I recognize the angle of Dot’s jaw, the shape of her mouth. We are identical, but this is her without question. Somehow, he has caught the softness of her expression, the vulnerability she doesn’t know she radiates. The other sketch is of a pair of hands, the fingers interlaced. I have to study the paper carefully to see, in the confusion of linked fingers, that one hand belongs to a woman and the other to a man. Again, without needing to be told, I know that this is her hand held in Cesare’s. I am struck by how much bigger his hand is than hers, by how the veins and muscles and bones of his hand entirely envelop her tiny, pale fingers.
I hold my own hand out in front of me, curling it into a fist.
‘Oh, Dot,’ I say aloud. ‘What have you done?’
It fills me with terror, the thought that she has allowed this to happen – that she’s allowed this man to become infatuated with her, that she’s placed herself entirely at his mercy. And now he won’t leave her alone, just as Angus won’t leave me alone.
I should have told her everything. I should have warned her. This is my fault, my fault.
And then I tear the sketches into tiny pieces and I scatter them into the glowing embers in the grate. When I prod them with the metal poker, they flare, flicker and blacken.
Soon, the only remaining sign of the drawings is my own laboured breath and the images in my mind, which I cannot shake.
I finish dressing quickly, pulling on two sweaters and gloves: though it is warmer than it was, the bite of winter still lingers in the air.
Then I walk over the next hill, in the direction of the infirmary. I won’t tell Dot about the drawings or Cesare’s visit, but I must see her, must see that she is safe and well.
As I near the breast of the hill, I hear men’s voices and I stop.
There is banging and hammering, and a shout of laughter. And then, under those noises, the sound of . . . singing.
Men on our hillside, the prisoners apparently allowed to roam free. Men laughing and talking and planning . . . God knows what they could be planning. My first thought is to return to the bothy, to close the door and wait for Dot to return, then tell her we must leave – even if it means returning to Kirkwall.
But the singing grows louder. It is a simple melody and reminds me of something my mother used to sing:
I would spin a web before your eyes,
A beautiful web of silver light,
Wherein is many a wondrous sight.
The tune the men are singing is not the same as my mother’s, but is similar enough to bring tears to my eyes.
I should have stopped her going, I think. I should have stopped them both.
And suddenly I am lying face down on the turf, half crawling to the top of the hill, where I will be able to see the men, the foreign prisoners who are singing this familiar song.
They are gathered outside the two metal huts, seated in a circle on the ground. Most of them sprawl, half lying down, as if they are on a picnic with friends, and they don’t look like soldiers. They could be men from anywhere at all.
One man is standing in the middle, hunched over something. He points at a grey lump of cement in the centre of the circle, and the others cheer and applaud. Then he pulls one of his friends to his feet and sprawls in his place at the edge of the circle; the next man takes cement from a bucket and layers it onto the grey lump.
What are they building?
They begin to sing again, and suddenly it is as though I am watching my father, sitting around a fire with his friends as they passed around a ripped fishing net and a jug of beer. I used to love sneaking onto the beach to watch them repairing the nets and boats. Each man was suddenly friendly with the others. It didn’t seem to matter which men were there, and how they might gripe at one another during the day. There was something in that making that was about more than the net, more than the boat.
And now, watching the prisoners, my stomach pressed hard against the cold soil of my home, I see, suddenly, how lonely they must be, in this strange land, so far from everyone they love. And I feel my own loneliness anew, like the hollow, aching socket from a dug-out tooth.
I touch the spot at the base of my throat where my breath suddenly feels tight, as if something – someone–is squeezing the air from me still and always, long after those fingerprints have faded. But I can feel the ghost of something else there too, as I watch the men. Another presence. Another absence. The trace of the necklace I’d buried three nights ago behind the bothy.