The Way Ahead (21 page)

The wait for the off was going to be nerve-racking, the date governed by conditions, the need for secrecy absolute. Nothing could be done about Germany’s acceptance that an attempted invasion was inevitable, but everything possible had been done to deceive them as to time and landing area. Field-Marshal Rommel was in command of Hitler’s Western defences, and represented a formidable foe indeed to catch off guard.

A Commando force, in which Colonel Lucas and Tim were present, waited at an airfield.

In London, at the Free French headquarters, liaison officer Subaltern Eloise Lucas, wife of Colonel Lucas, was being kept in the dark, but there were hummings and murmurs that created tingles of excitement.

That night, suspicions burning, Polly lay awake. I’m going to have a breakdown at the thought of Boots being thrown into France against a million iron-jawed Nazi fanatics. They’re freaks. They like marching into hell for demon Hitler. That man’s unfortunate mother must have had a carnal visitation from Satan himself. On the other hand, Polly old girl, it’s got to be opened up, this Second Front, and in the years to come when the twins ask me what their father did in the war against the mad
Fuehrer
, I’ll be able to tell them he landed on his doorstep and asked to have five minutes alone with him.

Oh, good thinking, Polly, now have hysterics.

Hysterics didn’t arrive, however. Instead, she dropped off. She had not driven an ambulance for four years over the muddy roads of France for nothing.

Polly could look at the devil without flinching.

Saturday evening

THEY SAT AT
the kitchen table, Caterina Angeli and Pilot Officer Nick Harrison, playing a card game by the light of a candle lamp. There was no electricity in the region. Supply was cut from eight every evening until six in the morning, and sometimes later. Under the German occupation, Italy was becoming an impoverished country, although in the south, the Allied armies had liberated the people. In the north, however, the Germans were still thick on the ground, and doing their worst in their hunt for Italian Jews. They had received help from collaborators in other occupied countries. They received none from Italians, not even from those who were still adherents of Mussolini, currently the head of a tinpot Fascist state in the extreme north of Italy.

The Allied advance was grinding on slowly, and it was Nick’s fifth day in the house of his Italian Samaritan. They knew each other now. They had exchanged names, after all, as well as personal
details
. She had told him a great deal about her late husband, Pietro Angeli, a courageous partisan who had died a vicious death at the hands of the Gestapo. Nick had told her about his wife and children, and the bombing raids suffered by the people of Britain since 1940. Caterina said war was always terrible, but who could forgive the German people for the way they had turned this war into the most barbaric conflict ever known? They had caused the Allies to reciprocate in kind, for it was true, wasn’t it, that German towns and cities were being devastated by Allied bombers?

‘Very true,’ said Nick.

‘They cannot complain,’ said Caterina, ‘they worship Hitler as if he were God, and they carry out evil deeds for him. When they are defeated – and you must defeat them, Nicki – they will try to make excuses. My Pietro told me there can be no excuses, that they knew how Hitler and his SS treated the Jews well before the war began, and they stood aside. Worse, many of them informed on Jewish neighbours, and Pietro said thousands have been sent to die in terrible camps. Mussolini at least did not attempt to deliver a single Italian Jew to Hitler, and nor did he wish to fight Britain or America. France, yes, perhaps, because of Corsica. He always said it would be a mistake to fight your country, and I am happy to make up for that mistake by looking after you until your soldiers arrive.’

‘I’m happy that you’re happy,’ said Nick.

‘Ah, we are happy friends, yes?’ said Caterina.

‘As a friend, I’ll do something about that old bike
sometime
, say tomorrow, while you’re at church,’ said Nick.

‘But what is old is old,’ said Caterina.

‘I’ll give it a lift before old age collapses it,’ said Nick.

‘A lift?’

‘I’ll perk it up.’

‘What is perk it up?’

‘I’ll get rid of its creaks and make it sing sweetly instead,’ said Nick.

‘But who would bother?’ asked Caterina. ‘In Italy, everything is used until it falls to pieces.’

‘I’ll bother,’ said Nick, ‘and give it a few more years of life.’

Caterina smiled and shrugged. What did a few creaks and jangles matter?

All the same, Nick gave it a go. On Sunday morning, he took the bicycle to pieces while she was at Mass. He got rid of much rust, cleaned the wheel spokes and rims, oiled everything that needed oiling, took the kinks out of the mudguards with a muffled hammer, polished all metal surfaces, and reassembled the machine. When Caterina returned from church, the bike was shining. She tried it, and it hummed very sweetly. She expressed delight. For Nick, it had been something to do, since she insisted every day that he must not go out and show himself, however much he needed exercise, nor answer the door if anyone should call. She reminded him frequently that there were German SD men in the village, as well as the man Enrico Bonetti, who called himself a patriot, but was still a Fascist in her opinion. Friends of hers were
watching
him all the time, for she knew something had made him sneak up on her house and prowl around it. She had persuaded her friends to believe that Bonetti suspected she was a partisan herself.

‘That bike will last a few more years now,’ said Nick, while she was still purring over it.

‘Ah, you are a lovely man, Nicki,’ she said. ‘See, you have turned it into a new one. But you have not been outside with it, have you?’

‘No, I haven’t shown as much as a toe out of your door,’ said Nick.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘There are no whispers about you, but a toe would be enough to bring eyes to my door and then there would be many whispers. If only one reached the ears of Enrico Bonetti, it would be enough to satisfy him that you are here, and you would have to run.’

‘That’s the man you think is a Fascist?’ said Nick.

‘Yes,’ said Caterina. ‘He denies it, of course, and laughs at the idea, but if I ever found out he was the one who betrayed my Pietro, I would have to kill him. You would agree, Nicki?’

‘Yes, as long as you had an alibi,’ said Nick.

‘Who needs an alibi in such a war as this, when everyone is killing everyone else?’ said Caterina.

‘There’s no answer to that,’ said Nick, and thought of his parents, his resilient mother, his carefree father, and his likeable sisters. What was the war doing to them, was it changing them, making them hard and revengeful? He hoped not, although he knew himself to be very different from the young man whose world was happily governed by his enthusiasm for football and his love for Annabelle.

‘Nicki,’ said Caterina, ‘I heard after Mass that the fighting is very fierce, but that the British and Poles are pushing at the Germans every day. So they will be here tomorrow, perhaps. They are expected in this region, yes, because the guns are getting louder, and the German secret police in the village are getting ready to leave.’

‘Louder means nearer,’ said Nick.

‘Then so are your comrades,’ said Caterina. ‘It is not too bad for you, waiting here?’

‘If I’m impatient,’ said Nick, ‘I’m also well off. I’ll wait a day or two longer.’

In the evening, they played another game of cards by the light of the lamp. Cribbage. Caterina knew the game and was quick at it.

‘Seven,’ said Nick, placing the card face up on the table.

‘Fifteen for two!’ exclaimed Caterina exultantly, showing an eight, and pegging her score.

‘Twenty-one for a run of three, six, seven and eight,’ smiled Nick, putting a six down. He was in fine fettle, his leg healing nicely, and he frankly found Caterina enjoyable company. ‘Got you there, Catie.’

‘Ah, you think so?’ she said, and put down a ten. ‘Thirty-one for two. Now who is winning this game?’

‘You are,’ said Nick, ‘but I warn you, I don’t like losing.’ He stiffened, sure he had heard a little noise outside the back door. Caterina heard it too. She sprang to her feet, darted and locked the back door with a silent turn of the key. She looked at Nick. He nodded and disappeared fast. Someone knocked on the door. Caterina took her time to answer it.
From
out of the darkness, a man smiled at her, then spoke to her. Caterina was friendly, responsive and natural. A few minutes later, she softly called from the foot of the stairs.

‘Nicki?’

He reappeared and came silently down the stairs.

‘No trouble?’ he whispered.

‘A friend to tell me he has been listening to Allied short-wave broadcasts on his concealed radio, and that the Germans are now retreating fast. The Allies have broken through. He says the Canadians are going straight for Frosinone, that the British and Polish are east of the Canadians, and in the west the Americans are on the coastal roads that will take them to Rome if they can break the Germans again. It is good, yes?’

‘If it’s good for you and Italy, it’s good for me,’ said Nick.

‘My friend also told me it’s not known if either the retreating Germans or the advancing British will pass through Asconi, but if some of the Germans do, no-one is to demonstrate or to provoke them.’

‘Who is your friend?’ asked Nick.

‘Our priest,’ said Caterina.

‘Have you been to confession since my arrival?’ asked Nick.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Was that why he came to give you this news?’ asked Nick.

‘He did not say so, and would not,’ said Caterina.

‘But he knows I’m here?’

‘I never speak of my confessions,’ said Caterina.
‘But
you are a good man, Nicki, and if someone brings news that is happy for you, let us be grateful. I will remember you when you have gone.’

‘We’ll remember each other,’ said Nick. ‘Shall we finish the game?’

‘Of course,’ said Caterina, ‘and with some wine, eh, my
Inglese
?’

‘You talk my language in more ways than one,’ said Nick.

‘I am pretty good, yes?’ she smiled.

‘Wizard,’ said Nick.

They finished the game and what was left of a bottle of wine, and then Nick said he’d go up.

‘I’ll get some sleep in,’ he said, ‘in case the Eighth Army gets here at the crack of dawn.’

Caterina, taking up the lamp, asked softly, ‘Do men of the RAF make much love to women?’

‘Not while I’m looking,’ said Nick. ‘Myself, I only make love to my wife, and that’s not been often this last year or so. It’s the bloody old war.’

‘Do you love your wife, Nicki?’

‘Yes, very much,’ said Nick, ‘and my children.’

‘Then I wish victory to the Allies and your happy return to your wife and children,’ said Caterina.

She rode her refurbished bicycle to school in the morning. Three minutes after she’d gone, Nick swore to himself. He’d made a mistake, a mistake neither of them had realized. The damned bike. Her pupils and anyone else who saw it would want to know who had improved the look of the machine and done away with its creaks and jangles. What
would
she say to them, that she had done it herself? She must.

A little after ten, when he was busying himself by cleaning the white-washed walls of her kitchen, the sudden noise of heavy vehicles stunned his ears. He ran up to his bedroom, the place of religious pictures, and from the window his view brought to his eyes two troop-carrying German trucks full of soldiers of the Third Reich. They were preceded by two open cars containing officers, and followed by two German Tiger tanks that looked enormous against a cluster of houses roofed with warm brown tiles. Behind them were other military vehicles. People were out of their homes, staring at what was passing through. Germans in retreat. The people melted away. Germans in retreat were never good-tempered.

The convoy stopped, and two minutes later Caterina ran into her house.

‘Nicki!’

Nick was down in a flash.

‘The ruddy foe,’ he said.

‘Yes, and the bicycle, and many questions about it, and I laughed but made no answer. Enrico Bonetti was looking on and smiling, and telling me the Germans are searching for an RAF pilot. How did he know they were unless he has been in touch with them? Now they are here.’

‘If they’re retreating, they won’t stop to look for an airman who might or might not be here,’ said Nick.

‘They are talking to the men, and Enrico Bonetti
is
among the men,’ said Caterina. ‘He will make a loud protest, they will drag him away, and then, having made himself look a good patriot in front of people, he will talk. He will tell them about an old bicycle on which someone has performed a miracle, and which belongs to the widow of a man who was hanged as a partisan. Nicki, we must both go, south over the fields, and quickly.’

Nick noted her deep concern, thought about her husband, tortured before being hanged, and said, ‘Yes, quick, then.’

They were out of the house and away in a very short time, Caterina wearing a jacket over her blouse and holding her handbag, Nick fully kitted and carrying a bottle of wine. He knew the necessity for keeping thirst at bay if their flight lasted all day. The weather was cloudy and fresh, the fields of common land running adjacent to vineyards. The uneven ground made the going a little rough, but they went at a good pace, alternately running and walking, Nick’s healing leg no great problem, and they left the village well behind after ten minutes.

‘It is only a kilometre and a half to the road that will take us south,’ said Caterina, flushed and heated.

About a mile, thought Nick.

‘What are the odds, I wonder, on us meeting up with the Poles or my own lot?’ he mused.

‘Odds are always a matter of luck,’ said Caterina. ‘One can hope for good luck, but never rely on it.’

‘Well, if it arrives, we’ll both shake hands with it,’ said Nick.