The Painted Altar

Chapter Fifteen

Plot reminder: After an online search, Mary and Lucio have traced one of the fellow prisoners mentioned in Vincenzo D'Ambra's wartime letters home - a wine producer called Francesco Brancaleone from the region of Campagna around Naples.

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And thus fifteen minutes later I found myself bouncing along in the passenger seat of Lucio's ancient Fiat Panda, an excited Dante fidgeting around behind us, trying his best to clamber over handbrake and gearstick and join us in the front. As for Lucio's promise that we'd be there by four o'clock - a four-hour drive thus reduced to a little over three - he seemed to be doing his best to make good on it. For my own part, I fought against my natural inclination for order and measure. Just took a deep breath and tried to - what was that expression? - go with the flow. Wasn't I fifty per cent of this, after all? Half of a reckless, exuberant southern Italian? Four of those eight pints of blood squirming along my veins, weren't they tied to this dry, rock-strewn landscape we were rattling through? I was a one-woman testament to the dominance of nuture over nature, that sociological maxim which states that a prince brought up amongst wolves will be far more wolf than prince. My biological grandfathers had been a Liverpool docker and a Puglian fisherman, and yet I, by way of a stuffy middle class upbringing, had become a stuffy middle class woman. Aloof, bound only to my work. But there jerking and lurching along in Lucio's rusty tin can of a car, Dante licking at the back of my ear, I came to realise that maybe the war had not yet been lost after all. For sixty-three years my true self had been subdued, pushed to the cowering shadows, but for all this she was still alive, not quite beaten into subsmission. I could feel her beginning to stir, could almost hear the crack of her limbs as she stretched herself awake.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

Lucio waited until he'd navigated another screeching white-knuckle ride of a roundabout before casting me a sideways glance.

"Doing what Mary?"

I swept out a hand, a gesture both vague and yet all-encompassing at the same time. "This. Helping me out."

For me it was a mystery as inexplicable as the workings of a telephone, how it was possible to hear someone's voice on the other side of town, the other side of the world.

From the toss of his shoulders, it seemed it might equally have been as much of a mystery to him too.

"Perhaps I feel I need to have an adventure. The Lord knows it's been a long time since the last one."

I found myself wondering what he meant by adventure exactly? The specific youthful folly of jumping in the car and embarking on a six- or seven-hour round journey without any guarantee of further leads being unearthed? The more general context of this strange little amateur investigation I'd been conducting? Or something else entirely? Something amorphous, as yet to be defined. A faint distant sparkle amidst our mutual darkness.

He nodded sombrely to himself. "My good friends always say I live my life through books. Feel things only as an echo." There was another sideways glance across at me. "So I'm trying to live my own story. Feel the full force of things."

I found myself wondering once more about his wife. About whether I should just come out and ask him about her. Maybe that was what was expected of me. As computers, how to discuss personal matters was something I'd never really got the hang of. There wasn't even an instruction manual one could refer to, a technician to call.

He'd turned his eyes back to the road ahead, his smile discernable from that spray of creviced ridges at the corner of his eye.

"And Dante, I think he likes having adventures too."