The Painted Altar

Chapter Twenty-Three

I've never held much sway by the foolish notion of love at first sight. Falling in love is not some sudden lightning strike which illuminates the pre-dawn sea, marks with its brief glow the distant line of the horizon. More I would liken the experience to a wave. At first, just an indistinguishable swell in the middle distance. The incalculable ruminations of the ocean, of the universe, then conspire to rear it upwards, animate it with the force of a prey-grabbing lion. Now the roar, the headlong charge towards the gunwale. If the fisherman is not watchful, lacking in experience, the crash will surprise him, leave him disorientated. Yes, that's how Irene Brennan entered my life - as a rogue wave breaches the hull of a trawler.

Naturally, it came as a pleasant surprise that first day they sent us out into the Lincolnshire fields to discover there would be females working amongst us. Land Girls, Captain Terlizzi told us they were called. There were about a dozen of them in total, billeted in two and threes in various local farms. They even had their own uniforms - a smock and some breeches, a felt hat for those infrequent and wearyingly brief periods when the sun might come out. Well, I suppose only the English or perhaps the Germans would think of organising its unmarried young women into some strange sort of pitchfork-wielding army, but we Italian POWs certainly weren't complaining. No siree.

The last time most of the boys had enjoyed close proximity to womankind had been back in the summer of 1940; oh yes, before they shipped us out to Africa, the bordellos of Brindisi and Naples and Catania had done a roaring trade, I can tell you. Given the intervening three years of imposed chastity, of mounting latin frustration, it came as little surprise that the Englishwomen were at first forced to repel a veritable avalache of less than subtle advances. Even the most thick-skulled of my compatriots soon learnt however that these young ladies were of an entirely species to the backstreet hookers they'd blown their stipends on back home. That stategies needed to be more refined, different buttons pressed. That if you wished a Land Girl to be kind and gentle with you, one first had to be kind and gentle with them.

In any case, the guards policed us keenly. There was one I remember in particular, Sergeant Reynolds his name. There was a certain coldness to his lid-slitted eyes, an unequivocal belligerence to the way he brandished his rifle. If he caught you so much looking at one of those girls, he gave you a firm clout to the back of the head with the butt. Captain Terlizzi complained to the camp commander on more than one occasion about the man's heavy-handedness, but the commander was weak or perhaps simply indifferent. Reynolds it was who ruled that particular roost. Ruled it with a rod of iron.

But my word, those English girls weren't afraid of hard work. It's no exaggeration to claim that one of them was worth three of us men. And while we as prisoners of war were guaranteed certain rights by the Geneva Convention, it seemed those poor girls were left to the whims of whichever farmer it was they were billeted with. I remember Irene telling me that she and the other two girls who had been assigned to the Harveys were accommodated in an outhouse with no electricity or running water. That they slept on camping mats rolled on top of a thin covering of straw, little better than mares. That breakfast consisted of a solitary slice of bread fried in the fat left behind by Mr Harvey's bacon. Then there was the sheer crippling weight of the hours they had to work. By the time the camp lorry dropped us off amongst the fields around seven a.m, those girls had already been out there a couple of hours or more; when the lorry returned to round us up again approaching dusk, for Irene and her colleagues the working day was still far from over.

You know, there was a perception we Italians may have held that the British were the lucky ones. That, like some unbreachable moat of a medieval castle, they had the Channel to protect them. That at the first cry for help their former colonies would come running to the rescue, the United States unleash a knockout punch. We forget by how fine a thread things hung during those dark months between the fall of Paris and the attack on Pearl Harbour. Watching those amazing young women strain their backs hour after wearying hour, day after neverending day, I began to understand that it wasn't just through geographical fortune and post-imperial influence that the British prevailed, and thus European democracy prevailed, but that the people were blessed by a spirit of unity, an unwavering committment the common cause, of the sort we Italians can only envy. Their boys on the front needed food, and those Land Girls would have dug to the very centre of the Earth to find them it.

Among the many and varied duties they were expected to perform was the dividing up of the prisoners' lunch rations. It was during one such midday break, our second or third week in Lincolnshire, that Irene and I exchanged our first words.

"I see you're married," she remarked, glancing at the band on my ring finger as she passed over a hunk of margarine-smeared bread. "Must be hard on your wife." Her eyes for a moment met mine, twin kaleidoscopes of amber-flecked emerald. "Hard on you too."

"Yes," I replied. "It's difficult."

There was the flicker of a sympathetic smile before she turned away, slapped a knife-load of margerine onto the next man's bread.

The truth was, Ada had long since ceased to occupy my thoughts. My letters to her had become ever briefer, less frequent. Once-monthly one-paragraph pricks of the conscience, little more. After all I'd been through those last two years, the many horrors I'd witnessed and deprivations suffered, Punto San Giacomo seemed not just a lifetime ago but a whole different existence. I had left as a boy, been reincarnated as a man.

The day following that brief initial encounter, Irene and I found ourselves side by side setting vermin traps at the edge of a field. Or rather, subconciously somehow, I'd contrived to find myself working only a few metres apart from her.

And so it was I told her my story. About Ada, the pregnancy, how we'd lost the baby. About how even though I was married in the eyes of God and to all legal effects, I didn't feel married. Never had done.

I hadn't been expecting her own story to be even more tragic. Her entire family, swept away by the storm of war. An eighteen-year-old girl left alone to navigate the wave-tossed waters. No stars, no distant harbour lights, to guide her. It was inevitable that at a certain point during her account the tears should begin to fall. Inevitable too that I in my role not of enemy soldier or prisoner of war but as fellow human being should for a for a few brief moments wrap my arm around her shoulders, offer her those futile words of comfort which came to my mind.

I think it was our respective friends and colleagues who noticed it before Irene and I ourselves did. The way over those following days and weeks we would naturally gravitate towards each other. The way our mutual gazes were more lingering than they were with others. The way if I tried to express myself in my still limited English it was Irene who more quickly understand than whichever guards or other Land Girls were also in earshot, smilingly toss me the word or expression I needed.

By the end of May it had become clear even to me however. The wave had crashed, my trawler knee-deep in water. Spotting her out in the fields, even in the distance, was enough set my heart purring like an ignited Ducati engine; her approach would meanwhile have it spinninging pirouettes, backflipping somersaults. Whether wakeful or in sleep, Irene Brennan was all I could see.

So much so that the sketch I presented her with was rendered from memory, the culmination of countless practice scribbles in the flickering glow of candle flame after lights out. For all my efforts, I never quite managed to satisfactorily render the concaved line of her nose, nor the effortless half-pout of her lips. As for that contrast of hopeful innocence and deepest melancholy which informed her gaze, I would defy any of the grandmasters to get it right. Particularly not if in their hand they held a mere nib of a pencil, had nothing better than a borrowed potato peeler with which to sharpen it.

It wasn't thus with complete artistic satisfaction that I surprised her out in the fields that late-June morning. I still harboured misgivings, was far from convinced I'd done full justice to her beauty. She was moved though all the same, her eyes glistening moistly as she beheld the sketch there unfolded in her hands. "Oh Vincenzo, this is just so beautiful. I shall treasure it always, I promise." There was always a musical up-and-down lilt to her words, different to the other English people I'd met. Her hometown accent. Liverpool.

"I just wish...", she continued falteringly. Her gaze flitted away, out over the fertile sprawl of the summer fields, as if embarrassed. "Well, that there was some way we could be alone for a while." Her eyes once more located mine, half pleading, half yearning.

My response was earnest, immediate.

"If we are willing to be brave Irene, you as much as I, then maybe there is a way."

~~~~~