It was nearly ten minutes before the priest reappeared. He got into the car and we drove on down the track, across the ford and then turned left below the broken arches of the bridge. Beyond the mill the track turned right and ran along the banks of the stream through a cool tunnel of trees. At the end of this track stood Mancini’s farm.
It was a biggish place of grey stone cluttered with outhouses. The farmyard was strewn with dung that steamed in the midday heat. The lazy hum of flies was the only sound when the Lancia’s engine stopped. A small boy came out of the house with a sly sidelong glance. His hands were deep thrust into the pockets of trousers that had once been khaki serge and there was milk on his upper Up which he kept on licking at with quick nervous movements of his tongue.
The priest knocked at the door and a dog barked lazily as though the effort were too much for him in the heat. The flies buzzed incessantly, settling clingingly in the sweat of face and neck. The door with its blistered paint opened suddenly and framed in the darkness of the interior of the house stood a woman of about thirty-five.
Ill
She was a big woman with wide hips and breasts that sagged unsupported beneath her black cotton dress. Her hair clung dankly to her head, which was large for a woman, and she wore a pair of big gold earrings. Her lips were a thin bitter line in the olive skin of her face and she had the dark brown eyes of a bitch that has been whipped too often to expect any good to come of life. Her belly was big with child and where it stretched her dress the cotton was a deeper black with sweat. Her legs, braced wide apart to support the weight of her, were marked with bites which showed a dull red through dark hair. Her big peasant feet were thrust incongruously into an expensive pair of mules, the finery of which was filmed with dirt and threadbare with constant wear.
‘There is an Englishman here to see the Galliani girl,’ the priest said.
She spread out her hands in the Italian gesture of resignation and I saw a great purple bruise on the inside of her left arm, ‘The girl is in the hills looking after the goats,’ she said. She said it flatly, without expression, as though we ought to know that the girl was in the hills looking after the goats.
The priest shrugged his shoulders. ‘I am sorry,’ he said to me. ‘It is as I told you. She will not be down until the sun sets and to search for her on the hills would not be good in the heat. But at least your journey has not been wasted. You will be able to tell her mother that she is all right and well cared for. When Maria Galliani died she made Guide Mancini the girl’s guardian. He is prosperous, as you see. He will find her a good match and he has agreed to provide her with a dote.’ ‘Who is this woman?’ I asked. I did not like the unctuous tones of the priest’s voice nor the way he took it for granted that I would not wait to see the girl.
‘This is Signora Mancini.’
I made no comment. I was not impressed by the woman’s appearance. She looked bitter and cowed. The primitive atmosphere of the village seemed to linger here in the flaming heat of the farmyard. I told Boyd to take a look round the outhouses. Somehow I wasn’t quite convinced that the girl really was away in the hills.
‘Is there anything else you wish to know about the girl whilst you are here?’ the priest asked.
‘I’d like to have a word with this man Mancini,’ I told him. I was thinking of Mrs Dupont back in England, struggling against ill health to earn a living at a typewriter, her daughter the only thing she had left to live for. Was it enough to go back and tell her that her daughter was a goatherd at a farm up in the Abruzzi?
‘You are thinking perhaps that it is hard for a girl who has been well brought up to be working on a farm?’ suggested the priest with uncanny insight. ‘But remember, the girl is not the girl her mother knew. She has seen much poverty. And she is now accustomed to this life. She has no other home in Italy. And “she has assumed Italian nationality.’
That brought my thoughts up with a jolt. It would make it difficult for me to take her out of the country, even if I were willing to assume such a responsibility. ‘When was she naturalized?’ I asked.
‘Just after she and her aunt settled here.’
I turned away from the farm. Perhaps it would be best to leave well alone. ‘I would like to meet Mancini,’ I said.
‘He is up in the village now,’ the priest said. ‘But by the time we get back he will have completed his business there and then he will go on the rounds of his farm. You may have to wait until this evening if you wish to see him.’
I hesitated. That would make another day. Stuart would be wondering what the hell I was up to. As I tried to make up my mind what do do, Boyd suddenly appeared from behind one of the barns and came hurrying towards us.
‘Mr Cunningham,’ he called out excitedly, ‘you remember that bullock cart we met as we crossed the ford coming into the village this morning?’
I nodded.
‘Well, it’s right here in the farm, still full of dung with all the flies in Percile buzzing round it. But I don’t see no sign of the girl.’
‘The girl!’
Good God! Of course — the girl. Fair hair and grey unhappy eyes. And the man who’d struck her — that would have been Mancini. And then I remembered the little boy who had slunk out of the farm as we drove up and the way the woman had said the girl was up in the hills in the flat-toned way people do when they’ve been told to say something that they know to be untrue.
I glanced at the priest. He hadn’t understood what Boyd had said, but he sensed that something was wrong and his dark eyes flickered between us.
I went over to the Lancia. ‘When we were at the church, did a little boy speak to the old man and then come down to this farm?’ I asked the driver.
He nodded. ‘It was the one who was leaving the farm as we drove up.’
So that was it. I swung round on the priest. ‘Get into the car,’ I said. I was seething with anger.
It was the wrong line. I knew that as soon as I had said it. I should have been more subtle. Now I had frightened him. I saw fear leap like a wounded rabbit into his eyes as they shifted from the car and me and on to Boyd. Then he jumped for the open door of the farm, flapping through the entrance like a great black crow that has had its wings clipped.
Before Boyd or I could move the door had closed. The bolt shot home with a rasping sound and we were left staring at the blistered paintwork.
‘Well, of all the bleedin’ — ‘ Boyd checked the stream of obscenities that rose unconsciously to his lips. ‘Wot d’you reck’n his game was anyway?’ he asked.
I couldn’t answer that one. But I was determined to find out.
‘Here come the chuckers-out,’ Boyd said.
A small man with a village-made straw hat on his head had come into the farmyard. He had a shotgun under his arm. The double-barrels gleamed bluely in the sun. The driver began talking fast in Italian. It was plain-he was getting scared.
‘I think a word with the small boy would help,’ I said, and the driver beamed with relief as we climbed into the car.
Back at the church we found the boy sitting on a tombstone swinging his legs and carving a boat out of a piece of wood. The mention of the word Polizia and the offer of a bar of chocolate had the desired effect. The priest had told him to tell Signora Mancini to send the girl to a neighbouring farm and to tell the English when they came that she was up in the hills with the goats.
‘Where is the farm?’ I asked.
He pointed beyond the broken arches of the bridge back along the road to Vicovaro. For twenty lire he agreed to show us.
It was a little mud and stone building in the valley below the main road. We left the car and went down a footpath through a field of bare sticks where tomato plants had already yielded their crop and on through a field of ripening maize that was a warm yellow in the sunlight. A donkey stared at us disinterestedly and a few hens picked in the dirt around the one door. A mangy cat was asleep on the stone doorstep. The sound of running water from the stream mingled with the low hum of flies.