Chiuso, Aperto

 1.

He stretches out his arm reaching for Giulia, and suddenly all Naples is around him: Torre Annunciata, Torre del Greco, Resina and Portici – twelve miles of shoreline, houses shattered by allied air raids, the still standing walls daubed here and there with dubious welcomes. Vivono gli Alleati!’ He smells the stench from the bomb-broken sewers and sees the choking white clouds of DDT sprayed by the military checkpoints, the butchers’ windows except for a few chicken gizzards, and the matrons selling their bodies in return for tins of army rations, using the overflowing cemeteries as al fresco brothels.

Somehow, pathetically, unstoppably, life goes on: hollow-eyed men holding out with exquisite courtesy the engraved cards of their old professions; the scugnazzi – the filthy street urchins – yelling English obscenities as they dart past, the bustling street stalls selling stolen allied cigarettes, sugar, medicines, binoculars and cameras. And driving through it all, a pulsing force, ancient and stoic: the countryside waking with the seasons, the baked brown earth of the Mediterranean summer yielding to the new green of the September rains and the first fine days of autumn, the ottobrate, when whole neighbourhoods, young and old hand-in-hand, head out of the city to gather chestnuts, herbs and mushrooms and net the fluttering clouds of tiny migrating birds. And among them Giulia: rail-thin and ragged but beautiful. 

Jack Hartley wakes. A muscular fair-haired man whose compact body hints at barely contained anger, which if provoked could flare into sudden violence, he is shivering violently under the piled-up blankets and the lumpy pink quilt. The bedroom grate where he scattered a handful of coals the night before is now only a pile of grey ash. He glances at the alarm clock: 6.30 – an hour before he needs to leave for work. For a few more minutes he lingers trying to extract what warmth he can from Ida’s turned-away, snoring body. Lying there, he inventories the contents of the room: a dressing table with plastic ivory handles – a snatch at pre-war elegance; the black snout of a gas mask and a cracked Victrola gramophone on top of the rickety plywood wardrobe. A suit is draped on a chair above a pair of worn shoes – his working self waiting to be put on. 

With a sudden jerk Jack hurls himself out of bed and, teeth chattering in the freezing air of the bedroom, pulls his suit over the underclothes, socks and shirt he’d been wearing in bed, then steps across the carpet to the window, feeling its thin threads chill between his toes. Squinting through the thin curtains and the frost blooming on the window pane, he looks down on the street: deep snow already and more tumbling out of the heavily charged skies, their flakes swirling and dancing in the yellow-green light of the gas lamp opposite. The coldest winter in living memory, colder even than Moscow the wireless had said yesterday, and no let-up in sight. 

He races down the stairs to the kitchen and fills the kettle – thank God the pipes haven’t frozen! – lights a gas ring and puts a kettle on. Next, he busies himself with the fire, raking out yesterday’s ashes while retaining any serviceable cinders, then thrusting in balled-up bunches of newspaper. He touches their points with a match. Reluctantly, grudgingly, the flames take hold.

A hiss. The kettle has boiled. Jack scatters coffee grains into a mug and pours the bubbling water over them. Next he tugs open the kitchen door to reveal a large flat triangle of drifted snow with a milk bottle poking out of it like a miniature white mill chimney. Already frozen of course and, even if melted, unusable: watery whey topped by a plug of fatty cream. No matter. Jack will take his coffee black, cupping his hands round the mug to harvest the heat. He saws off a hunk of bread from a loaf and slides it under the grill, which, as he lights it, flares into life with a dull growl. 

By now a phantom of warmth has entered the room. Jack flings himself down into a sagging armchair, pulls out a packet of twenty and lights up. Automatically he switches on the wireless and catches a news bulletin: ‘emergency measures … coal shortages … Shinwell the energy minister to address the House later’ before irritably snapping it off. The whole country seems to be sinking and not just under snow and ice. Two years since the war and what is there to show? A victory like tastes like defeat. But promises, yes, plenty of promises, a whole unrationed shop-full of them! Was it for this we fought? An existence of dead-ends, hand-me-downs and endless making-do.

Jack’s thoughts drift back to the night before. As always, he had stayed out as late as he dared after work. Anything to avoid the nagging and the squalling kids. Usually he would have ended up at the dog track, losing what little money he could spare. Why did he gamble? Was it for the thrill he no longer got from his wife? Like the thrill he got from stealing at work. Or was it to confirm a message and hammer home the signal his failed life seemed to be sending him?

But that night races were off due to the weather. Instead Jack headed into a pub for a pint and pie. Exploring it gingerly, his tongue located a small mound of meat that perhaps once had been part of an animal. Now even spuds and bread had been drawn into rationing’s miserable embrace – something they had not dared even in the deepest depths of the war! Soon people might be eating cats and dogs, maybe even each another!  But the ale redeemed all. For once it wasn’t watery – so delicious in fact that Jack had downed creamy pint after pint. 

After that he walked into the first cinema he came across, if only to sink himself into the audience trough of body heat. Jack sat through the film, drowsy from the beer, dully aware of the projector beams weaving and twisting like searchlights through the dense fug of cigarette smoke billowing up from the overcoated rows below. 

Then, home on the last, near empty bus. Fortunately the family had gone to bed, allowing Jack a precious hour’s mulling alone in front of the dying kitchen fire before sliding into the chilly sheets next to Ida. He fell asleep at once only to be woken almost at once by the baby’s hungry bawling. He could hardly complain. War baby, austerity baby, what could the future hold for him? Afterwards he only managed a few broken snatches of sleep. No wonder he feels exhausted.

Something is burning. Toast! Cursing himself, Jack jumps up and retrieves it. Waste not, want not. Scraping burnt crumbs into the kitchen sink, he smears the slice with dripping from a jar and forces it down. A cough. Susan, his seven year-old daughter is standing in the kitchen doorway watching him, her big child’s eyes full of fear and mistrust. 

‘Get yourself a drink!’ Jack snaps. ‘Water’s in the kettle. Then get back to bed.  Your mother will be down soon to get you off to school.’ Susan turns and flees back upstairs. 

Jack feels a pang. Why does he act like this? The war of course. Yes, the war had driven a wedge between them, but it wasn’t just the war. His family just happened to be the nearest object that the massive frustration machine of life was bearing down on, grinding and crushing out his dreams. Jack knows that he takes his resentment out on his family and that in return they repay him with hostility but he cannot stop himself. Besides, the machine would never allow it. It will grind on as long as there are lives to be fed into it

Jack stubs out his cigarette, carefully replacing the half-smoked butt in the packet for later, then climbs back up to the bathroom. He splashes cold water over his head, applies a blob of hair cream and combs his hair into a field of stiff glistening ridges. Next, he squeezes shaving cream onto his face and, having screwed an ancient blade into his razor, rasps it over his chin, nicking himself badly in the process. To staunch the blood, he rips off a scrap of Izal toilet paper and sticks it on the cut. 

He assesses the results in the bathroom mirror. Could be worse. His complexion, no doubt reddened by the cold, looks healthy enough, but otherwise his reflection depresses him. Where now the schoolboy athlete or the young recruit posing proudly in his new uniform? Streaks of grey are already lifting through in his thinning hair, the eyes are bloodshot and baggy and the cheeks seamed and sunken. He draws back his lips to reveal an undisciplined rank of khaki irregulars. Time maybe to have them out and replaced with a false set.

Then back downstairs again, and, muffled in overcoat, hat and gloves, out into the biting air of the street. Overnight the wind had driven the snow into a desert of white dunes stretching as far as the eye can see. Almost at once Jack is plastered by a thick white coat of flakes. Shaking the iridescent crystals out of his eyes, he glances at the neighbourhood, a few rows of rented houses built in the thirties round a small gritted area known as the Square. How geologically distant that decade now seems, he thinks bitterly, with its picture palaces and radio dreams, its shops bursting with brash new brands, its little runabouts and trips out into the country for servietted cream teas in faux-timbered roadhouses, their dance bands and crooners – all, all of it falling under the coming shadow.

Jack, by now a lumbering snowman, climbs the railway bridge leading into town, the tracks below buried deep under the snow. A memory comes back to him: Mosley’s visit and the riot. Jack and his mates had chased one of the terrified Blackshirts along these rails before catching the wretch and beating him half to death on the sleepers. Where now are his old radicalism? Still down there somewhere, deep frozen under the snow and the years?

Jack presses on past old Victorian terraces and new post-war prefabs. Past the mill chimneys – black fingers pointing into the snowy skies – the empty, reeking fish shops and the dusty windows of drapers’ shops. Past the town’s worst slum, the ‘Birdcage’, a place where no birds sing but tribes of barefoot urchins swarm over the pavements. Past the good lads and the bad lads, the spivs and the street corner boys and the grafters, the allotment-tillers, the library book borrowers and the chapel-going God-botherers. Why don’t they realise what’s been – is still being done – to them and rise up? But they never will.

Jack reaches the centre of town, its square dominated by a war memorial, on one side the public library and on another the grammar school, whose tower clock has stopped frozen for the past two months at half past two. Jack had gone there and been happy there. Once upon a time and long ago. Queues of early shoppers trail round corners, the more optimistic of them with empty prams, sledges or hand carts. Firemen crouch on top of the town hall roof snapping off the giant icicles that hang down from its eaves like huge stalactites. As they crash onto the cordoned-off pavement below, they explode in great geysers of icy splinters. Let them crash, thinks Jack, let everything crash!

The bus to the nearby city where Jack works is already waiting in the bus station with its engines throbbing, its seats packed to overflowing. Jack climbs on and somehow manages to find a seat. Somewhere warm at last. After what feels like an eternity the bus moves off, bucking and bouncing over the washboard-like ruts left by the tractors clearing the roads.

As the bus slowly sways and shudders forward, Jack wipes a small patch on the window clear of condensation and stares out at the frozen canal, the shut-down factories and on the distant hills the tiny black roofs of snowed-in farms. Family, bus, work – the chain that locks his dreary life together. Could he break it? Does it matter anyway? Does anything matter?

After a time the bus reaches an avenue of stone mansions built by the city’s Victorian wool merchants in their confident heyday. It chugs past a park, an art gallery and museum and another grammar school before shuddering to a halt next alongside a department store. Below the road to the left is a fog-filled valley out of which poke the twin floodlights of a football stadium. Jack gets off the bus and threads his way through a warren of terraces down to the factory where he works, stepping cautiously to avoid the icy slides made by the neighbourhood’s children. 

Jack works is in the factory’s accounts department, issuing invoices, pairing them with payments, adding up time sheets, working out wages after stoppages. He detests it – not just the poor pay but the mean monotony. But it was all he could find after five years away at war. In his mind’s eye he sees a column of tiny numerals plodding endlessly forward into the future, its figures halting now and then to be meaninglessly checked and corralled. He’d found a way though, to hit back at the frustration machine: theft – not just pilfering the petty cash but falsifying invoices and pocketing the sums involved. But you can’t cheat the frustration machine. He promptly loses what he steals at the races.

The morning drags past. Finally, blessedly, a hooter sounds the signal for dinner time. Jack gets up and heads off into the city centre to grab a sandwich in one of the new coffee bars that seem to be springing up everywhere. He walks through the door and, incredibly, before him is Giulia serving behind the counter. Jack is stopped in his tracks, a shot-through tank, utterly dumbstruck, his mouth gaping wide with astonishment.

‘Giulia, what on earth … ?’ he finally manages to blurt out.

Giulia laughs. ‘Working. What do you think? I’ve got a job as a waitress here.’

‘Here? Why? Whatever are you doing here?’

Giulia looks him squarely in the eyes. ‘You of course, you silly English fool. What else? I found out where you worked. I meant to catch you one evening after you left but you found me first. I wanted to show you something.’

‘Show me what?’

‘You’ll see. Look, we can’t talk here. I’m busy. Come back when I get off at five and I’ll explain further.’

Still sunned, Jack nods and backs out, all thoughts of lunch forgotten. As the afternoon drags past interminably images of Giulia tumble through his brain. Work finally over, he rushes back to the café. Giulia is already waiting in front looking pleased. Seeing her smiling, Jack is suddenly angry.

‘I just don’t get it, Giulia. Why have you followed me here? I thought you didn’t want anything more to do with me. I rang you again and again after I was posted to Milan and you just hung up on me. And you never replied to any of my letters either. Now I find you here. Why?’

In response Giulia simply hooks her arm through his and leads him down the street.

‘Where are you taking me, Giulia? Come on, tell me.’

Giulia smiles mysteriously. ‘You’ll see.’

They pass rows of terraces, before Giulia halts. As she turns and faces him, a door behind her opens, light and heat spilling out from it onto the icy pavement.

‘Who lives here, Giulia?’

‘The Italian family I’m staying with. Come in. It’s alright. They’re kind people.’

She enters and Jack follows. Inside, children are darting in all directions, shouting and laughing. They look up at Jack with curiosity. A woman comes forward and passes a baby to Giulia who in turn hands it to Jack. 

‘Jack, say hallo to your son. Alessandro.’ She looks down fondly at the child. ‘Look, Alessandro, here is your father.’

Jack takes the child I his arms and gazes at it, lost for words. He suddenly feels as if he is looking down from a dizzying height inside himself. Below, fresh and unsuspected fields of feeling are slowly unfurling. He hears himself sobbing.

Giulia puts her arms round him. ‘I’m sorry. I never meant to break off with you. It was just that panicked when I found I was pregnant. I was terrified what you would do. But after Alessandro was born my mind felt clearer. I realised how much I loved you and how much needed you. That’s why I came here: to find you. Well, are you angry? Don’t worry, I won’t force you into anything. If you don’t want anything more to do with me I’ll go back to Naples.’ 

Jack fights to make sense of the emotions welling up inside him. 

‘Angry? No, not angry at all. Confused, yes, but happy – happier than I can say. And I can tell one thing straight off. From now on you will be my family. The three of us are going back to Naples together.’

‘But you have a family here. Are you going to abandon them?’

Jack laughs bitterly. ‘Abandon them? We’ve already abandoned one another! Ida hates me. We’ll just torture one another to death if I stay with her. No, my mind’s made up. We’re going back to Naples, all three of us. I’ll try to help – I’ll send her what money if I can afford it. But that’s as much as I’ll do.’

Giulia tightens her grip round Jack. For a long time they stand like that hugging, the baby between them. Then the mother of the family shows them into an inner room where can talk more privately and make their plans for the future. At the end of the evening Jack leaves, promising to return first thing the next morning. 

Four days later finds them back in Naples, the ugly-beautiful city, war-scarred but reviving. The frustration machine has released its grip. Happiness is possible again. He loves and is loved back. He matters.

                                                          2.

The young woman is stood in front of an open hotel bedroom window, staring out at the brilliant blue bay, unsettled by its glittering intensity. Blonde, of medium height, she has a buxom figure that hints at possible plumpness in later life. She is wearing a miniskirt and a top with bright swirls and sunbursts of orange and purple – not styles she normally favours. But they are the fashion and she is, after all, on holiday. Maybe it is time to make an effort. 

1967, she reflects, the so-called Summer of Love. Certainly there is a new and urgent radiation in the air, a buzzing charge of expectation and assertiveness. She senses it running through her pupils – the way they charge into school clutching their new LPs and ‘trannies’, wearing their uniform skirts as short as they dare, chattering endlessly about boys in groups, and the bold, impudent eyes through which they stare back at her in class. But the new current does not run through her. Though still young, she feels past her prime, old and worn and out of tune with the times.

She remembers a peculiar dream, a nightmare rather, she had during the night. She could not recall the exact details have stayed with her: hot, dark and subterranean. Through it something had been running, something horned and hoofed, snuffling and hooting as it hunted her down.

From the café terrace below her window the voices of her three friends, Elena, Maria and Mia, rise up unaware they are audible. Susan listens, eavesdropping guiltily, and realises with a shock that they are talking about her.

‘So nice and kind – not like the others over there.’

‘Dignified too – always the English lady.’

‘But too much the schoolteacher perhaps. Always with the book and the ruler!’

‘But there is more underneath, I think.’

‘Under the ice? Maybe that is why she likes us hot Italian girls!’

They laugh.

A schoolteacher, yes, that’s right, that’s what she is, the spinster, competent in class, sat in the corner of the common room. School had always been a door in her life, the door out of that terraced house in the years when she was young . She had sailed through her 11-plus and gone to grammar school, finally winning a place at university to study languages with the official blessing of a ‘state scholarship’. After she got her degree, decisions seemed to make themselves without her intervention. She moved back in with her mother and brother and found a job at her old school. A retreat? Certainly. A defeat? Possibly

Over time she put together a life, carefully piecing it out of the routines of work, a handful of acquaintances among colleagues, visits to theatres and museums and holidays taken abroad to improve her languages. In time she had found herself a small flat and moved out from her mother’s. She even took driving lessons and, with help of a loan, bought herself a smart little car, its cheerful glossiness, she somehow felt, both a promise and rebuke in her life. A little republic, she thought, that’s what she was, a small island republic, independent and well run and even sometimes visited by others, but one above a bedrock of bitterness and anger, whose roots she recognised only too well.

She listens again to the voices.

‘Maybe she will stay. Her Italian is good.’

‘But always with the English accent!’

The speaker says a few words of Italian, artificially stretching them out and exaggerating them. Susan feels her face blush. And she thought her accent was so perfect! For some reason she feels suddenly exposed and unprotected. 

She had met the girls the summer of the year before. Shopping in the little town where she taught she had bumped into them and they had somehow fallen into conversation. They were called Elena, Maria and Mia, they told her. Their ‘leader’ seemed to be Mia, a pretty girl with auburn hair and tiny white teeth that glittered as she talked and laughed. Elena, quieter and more reserved was a classic Madonna type, tall and elegant with dark almond eyes, an olive complexion and fine hands and cheekbones, while Maria was rounder and dumpier, constantly smiling and nodding in agreement in agreement with the others.

They had been delighted to find someone who spoke Italian and, crowding round Susan on the narrow pavement, spilled out a stream of details of their lives in England. They had found jobs in the local mills, they said, lured by advertisements placed in the Italian press by English managers needing to bolster their workforces. At first they had lived in hostels, grim prefabs constructed alongside the mills. The wages were good – certainly compared to those they had been paid in Italy and by scrimping and saving they managed to send good money back to their families. Slowly things had improved, and the three friends had been able to move out together into a rented place of their own.

‘But it was so hard at first. So hard!’ Mia said. ‘The weather, the long hours and all those terrible clattering machines.’

‘And the English faces, pale and white like snowmen!’

‘And the food so stodgy and greasy – always the chips. No oil, no pasta, no fruit, no ice cream – above all no wine. Oh, how we suffered!’ They rolled their eyes and laughed mock-ruefully.

So Susan was a teacher.  She should come and teach them, improve their English. They’d pay her something of course. Susan had agreed, delighted to have the chance to practise her Italian and earn a little extra pin money.

So their lessons together began, conducted in English, Susan insisted,. Afterwards they relaxed and chatted in Italian. They served her little elegant cups of coffee – real Italian coffee, rich and black, brewed in a bubbling percolator and served with delicate almond biscuits. After a time, proper meals replaced these snacks – pasta in delicious sauces and topped with grated Parmigiano, and glass after glass of dark red wine. Susan began taking them out to the countryside in her car and nearby cities where they inspected the stores and dress shops with quizzical amusement. 

It had been a new beginning in Susan’s life, almost a rebirth. Susan confided how her father had abandoned the family, how they never learned what became of him, though wads of money would sometimes land on their doormat in envelopes plastered with foreign stamps. She omitted to tell them about the shame when it came to light he had been stealing money at work. All the same they clucked their tongues sympathetically. So awful not to have a father to look after her! But how strong of her to make a life for herself. And they were appalled that someone so accomplished had found no boyfriend. 

One day, before the lesson began Mia had turned to Susan. ‘I have big news for you, Susan. Someone is coming over to talk to us – a scittore, a journalista who wants to write about us Italian girls working here in the mills. He’s called Riccardo. We met a few times back in Italy.’ The three looked at one another and giggled. ‘You must meet him, Susan. He is young, handsome, charming. Maybe you will fall in love!’ 

The journalist duly arrived, and the girls invited Susan round to meet him. They were right: Riccardo was young and handsome, although not at all Italian in appearance, if anything rather English: fair haired, blue-eyed and with a fresh pink complexion. Playfully, the girls tried to push them together, but Susan held back. She liked him but no more. And she sensed a similar distance in him, an ironical, watchful detachment. Nonetheless Riccardo seemed very interested in her, plying her with questions about her life and past – questioning Susan thought of as the professional curiosity of a journalist. 

Riccardo stayed a couple of weeks. The day before he left he made a formal little speech, bidding her goodbye and inviting her to visit his family in Italy. The girls chimed in enthusiastically: ‘We’re going back ourselves next summer for a break. You must come along with us.’ Susan had not taken much persuading.

She listens again to the voices of her friends spiralling up from the terrace.

‘But it is a wicked game they play, I think.’

Susan’s ears prick up. What game?

‘She’ll be angry when she finds out.’

‘Maybe not. She might be happy.’

‘But here he is at last, the spoilt boy, the pampered heir. Late as always. Good morning Riccardo.’

‘Yes, I am here. But tell me, mie tre strege giovane, where is Susan?’

‘Upstairs making herself beautiful for you. Tell us, Riccardo, how are you enjoying your pezzattino d’incesto?’

‘Cut that out! Don’t use that word! And stop calling me Riccardo!’

‘As you wish, Alessandro.’

Alessandro?

‘So where is he, the old one?’

‘Over there, at that table in the corner.’

‘Ah, the connected one – il contabile, il capo. old fox pulls your strings, Alessandro, and off you jump. One little tug and away you go to England to play the journalist.’

Play the journalist?

‘Hold your tongue! Speak of him with respect. He is my father, I love him, and it is a pleasure and duty to serve him. Susan has long been a matter of much concern to him. Besides I was curious myself to meet my sister myself, well, my half-sister.’

Susan reels. Suddenly she sees it. A charade all along. Her father had sent this Alessandro to spy on her. Her three friends have known about it all along. Maybe not at first but later certainly. And now they are all having fun at her expense. What a fool she had been to trust them!

Susan throws down the hairbrush she was holding and charges downstairs, past the gaping faces of the guests in the lobby. Storming into the blinding sunlight of the terrace, she strides up to Alessandro, grabs a glass from the table and hurls its contents into his face. 

‘So where is he then? Where is my father?’

With trembling fingers they point to an older man with thinning fair hair, an uneasy smile on his tanned, lined face. He is wearing a smart white suit clutching a panama hat in his hands. Seeing Susan advance, he rises, drops the hat and holds out his arms. Susan smacks his hands aside and slaps him across the face, sharp and hard, leaving the vivid crimson imprint of her palm on his cheek.

‘So now after all this time I’m supposed to come here and play the long-lost daughter. Well, I’ve got news for you, father. I’m not going to play your little game. I’m going back to England. And don’t dare come after me again – either you or this son of yours. Leave us alone! Get it in your old head: we don’t need you. You left us in the lurch long ago but we got on just fine without you and we don’t need you now.’

Susan turns on her heel, runs back up to her bedroom, throws herself face-down on the bed jamming her fingers into her ears, too furious even to cry. Someone is knocking on the door. The knocking goes on, then stops. After a time Susan gets up, inches over to the window and sneaks a glance down at the terrace. Deserted, thank God! She throws herself back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Images of what has just happened replay endlessly across the plaster. She clamps her eyes firmly shut and turns her face away.

So this is life: a game of contempt played by selfish little liars. Well then, from now on she’ll play her part in it. The schoolmistress, they’d called her, always in control. She’ll fix that on her face forever. Life may go on but she’ll squeeze it iron-flat. She’ll look out for herself corner. People will never take her by surprise like this again. Maybe there’ll be a man and love of a sort, but he will be a little man, a tame man, a man firmly under her thumb, someone she can always be certain of. It’ll start tomorrow. She’ll catch the first plane back to England she can. After a while her mind goes blank and she falls asleep.

Light and warmth and scents are flooding through the open window. Susan realises with a shock that she has slept through the night in her clothes. She sides off the bed, stands up stiffly, showers, puts on fresh clothes and goes down to breakfast. Her decision to return to England flaps somewhere at the edges of her thought. But the power to act on it seems to have deserted her, at least for now. Instead, she steps out on to the tiles of the terrace, sits and turns her face to the early morning sun, enjoying its warmth through half-closed eyes. 

Time passes. Susan opens her eyes and looks round. Alessandro and her father are sat at a table in the corner behind huge bunches of flowers and boxes of sweets, snatching glances towards her direction. Susan hears herself laughing out loud: they look so funny like figures in a comic opera. Hearing her laugh, they at once leap up and run over. Forgetting their arms are full, they try to embrace her, only for their gifts to tumble down in a heap on the ground. Susan listens as her father blurts out a few words.

‘Susan, please forgive what happened yesterday. It was a clumsy, stupid trick. I should have known better. And forgive me for everything else too – abandoning you and your mother and brother all those years ago. But I felt I had no alternative. I was a dead man walking there. I had to get out. I did what I could – I sent money. I know it wasn’t enough. But let me make up it to you now. Please don’t turn your back me now I beg you.’

He explains how he has built a life here with Giulia and their children – five now including Alessandro. He is, a man with fingers in many pies, many important contacts, a well-respected man

‘But you must join us for lunch. The family are all up at the house waiting to meet you. Please come.’

In a daze Susan hears herself muttering some words of agreement and she allows herself to be led up a long winding stairway behind the hotel. Finally they halt in front of a large old house, its walls thickly clustered with bunches of purple fuchsia and pink bougainvillea and pierced by two huge doors of intricately carved oak. The doors swing open and Susan finds herself in a blazing courtyard with tables decorated with masses bright flowers, great bowls of food and row upon row of bottles. Children dart between the tables, screaming with excitement. There are cries of welcome and good wishes and endless, incomprehensible introductions. An older woman steps forward and hugs her – Giulia she guesses – followed by a long line of sons, daughters and other relatives. Glasses lift and clink. Susan is made to sit and eat and drink although she feels little appetite. The day scene plays out before her eyes like some remote, incomprehensible carnival. 

At long last the light fades and candles are lit. The guests prepare to take their leave, pressing on her further rounds of good wishes. ‘Move out of your hotel and move in with us,’ Jack whispers in her ear. She should remain here in Italy. They could be useful to one another. He has lots of interests and her languages could be invaluable. Don’t go back to England right away, he urges. At least stay for a while and think it over. As he whispers, she is aware of him watching her closely, swerving and sidling round the flanks of his words in order to gauge her reaction. Susan, though, says nothing, simply pecks at his cheek, gathers her things together and heads down the hill to her hotel.

As she makes her way down the narrow cobbled stairway she realises with surprise that she no longer hates her father. Somehow she cannot connect the old man basking in the courtyard with the younger man twenty years ago, the bitter loser hitting out at everything around him. He seems to have found himself as well finding his family. Capo, the connected one, the girls had called him. Maybe he still is some sort of criminal – very probably he is – but he appears to be on good and easy terms with his own corruption. Maybe he has had to be like that to carve out a life here. Despite herself, Susan registers a thrill that her father, foreign–born has somehow managed to insinuate himself into the ranks of the local Camorra. However crooked, there had been some mastery, some potency there.

Whatever her father has become, he has now given her a great gift, a gift above all others: a release from the burden of hate. She has not forgotten or forgiven but she is free of him, finally free. As Susan threads her way through the lengthening shadows under the dark blue bowl of the Mediterranean evening sky, she sees herself with new eyes: she matters – matters intensely in one way but not at all in another, one more link in in a chain of taking and giving, of loving and being loved.

She has woken from her trance and has reached a decision: she will not stay but will go back to England and deal with her life there – her job, her mother and her brother. Probably she will never come back here. It is the past. A dice’s throw of birth, an accident of biology had tied them together. No more. Their trajectories had long since parted. He had gone through his door, she will go through hers. She will be her own woman, firmly in control but not the old tight control – ceaselessly and nervously pacing the ramparts of self. She is still young, she can change. Chiuso, aperto. Her door is open, and she will pass through.