And whilst Boyd and the driver embarked in this manner upon an amicable chat in front, I sat with Monique in the back and told her about the ship we had at Naples and how if there was any difficulty with the authorities we’d smuggle her out. I told her about Stuart and how we’d got the L.C.T. off the rocks at Bossiney. By the time we ran into Tivoli familiarity with our background was giving her back some degree of confidence.
The first pale light of the early summer dawn was showing behind the jagged peaks of the Abruzzi as we swung south on to a side road that led to Valmontone and Route Six.
The flat plain of Rome stretched ahead in the darkness. But by the time we hit the main Rome-Naples highway, with the city well away to our right, it was light enough to see the outline of the Alban Hills.
The sun rose behind the line of the mountains to the east and the trees began to slant their shadows across the road. In the valley of the Sacco we found a gush of clear water falling from the rocks through which the road was cut. We stopped the car and washed ourselves. The fresh morning sunlight was already making the rock warm to the touch.
Until that moment I hadn’t really realized what a disreputable trio we looked. Boyd had only the dirt of the outhouse walls on his blue suit. But I was a wreck, my shirt torn from collar to waist, no jacket and no tie. My trousers were rent at the knee and were caked with filth where I had hit the muck of the farmyard. My shoes were covered with a film of dust that had caked on the liquid dung. Beneath the dust, the muck was still wet. But the girl was in a worse state than any of us. It was on her face and neck and hair. Her legs were caked with it and her dress was indescribably filthy.
Early though it was, the flies swarmed round us, settling on clothes and skin, filling the air with a low hum and driving us nearly frantic with their persistence. The driver watched us nervously. I think he suspected us of being Sicilian gangsters.
I washed my face and hands, and then I washed my shoes. I could do nothing about my trousers but leave the muck to dry on them. When I had finished, I looked round to find the girl standing disconsolately by the car. The toes of her bare feet were dug into the road edge and she did not look very happy.
I glanced across the road. Bushes grew there in the shade of some low trees. ‘If you go over there and throw your clothes out to me, I’ll wash them for you,’ I said. ‘They’ll dry in a few minutes in the sun.’
I sensed her relief at the suggestion, though she looked as nervous as a young deer. A fractional hesitation, and then she nodded. Her lips started to frame the Italian ‘Grazie,’ but what she said was, ‘Thank you.’
I understood her momentary hesitation when I had her clothes in my hands. There was only the roughly patched black dress.
When I had washed it for her, she didn’t wait for it to dry, but put it on damp and came out into the road again and washed herself, while Boyd and I and the Italian driver smoked a cigarette and tried to fend off the flies. I glanced at her once. She was washing her hair. She noticed me looking at her, shook the hair out of her eyes, wrinkled her nose and began to laugh.
But I didn’t feel like responding. I had just tried to produce my cigarettes and had suddenly realized that with the loss of my jacket I had also lost not only my cigarette case, but my wallet, my cheque book and my passport.
The cigarette case was a silver one given me by my mother on my twenty-first birthday. It had been all through the war with me. The wallet and the cheque book I didn’t really mind about, except of course that they handed Mancini complete evidence of my identity if he wished to make trouble. But it was the loss of the passport that was really annoying. It meant hanging around at the British Consul’s office in Naples in order to get it renewed.
I felt angry and dispirited. Things seemed to be going wrong. And my mood was not improved when we eventually climbed back into the car to find it seething with a million flies and the smell of dung increasingly unpleasant after the cool dampness of the air in the valley.
Fortunately Boyd had a little money oft him and we were able to buy some food in Frosinone and a pair of straw sandals and a cheap cotton dress and underwear for the girl.
She changed into the new clothes behind a stone wall just outside the town. It was staggering the difference they made. The sandals, which were heeled, made her taller and accentuated her long limbs. The bright colours of the cotton print brought out the golden brown of her arms and face, and her small firm breasts, lifted and pointed by a brassiere, thrust impatiently at the cotton of her frock. She had borrowed a comb from Boyd, and her fair hair, combed back from her head, gave her a boyish look.
It was then that I first realized that she was an extremely attractive girl.
She had the black dress in her hand as she came out from behind the wall. She started down the road towards us. But after a few paces she stopped. She looked down for a second at the dress. Then, with a gesture almost of abandonment, she flung it over the wall.
She came towards us then with long, swinging strides. She looked like a Scots girl — very free and easy in her movements. She was smiling as she came up to us as though she had dropped her past over the wall with the black dress.
It was getting hot and the glare of the sunlight as we drove on and lack of sleep made me drowsy. I woke to find Boyd shaking me. ‘We’re just coming to Cassino,’ he said.
High on our left the battered fragments of the monastery stood white and dusty against the blue bowl of the sky like jagged remnants of a gargantuan tooth. We skirted Monastery Hill through neat little rows of jerry-built Government houses. Down the hill into Cassino proper, we found that nature had moved in on the ruins. The place was covered in dusty greenery. It was no longer impressive.
Somehow I felt deeply disappointed. It should have been preserved as a monument to the folly of man. Once the scarred and battered hillside had been terrifying. Now it was just an untidy jumble of weeds. The same thing had happened in France after the previous war. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it here. Perhaps because there had been so much talk at the time of preserving the ruins as a warning to future generations. But then of course there had been so many other ruins after Cassino — bigger and better ruins. I had only seen Cassino once before — but it had impressed me the same way that the lava of Vesuvius covering Massa di Somma had impressed me. The sun had been setting and I had been in a jeep travelling from Naples to Rome just after the capital had fallen. There had been no living thing in the whole of Cassino then. The crumbled masonry and gaunt fragments of the battered town had stood solitary and lifeless, the stone a warm dull red in the evening light.
As we slid away from it along the dead straight road of the plain below — the same road that had once been the most heavily shelled stretch in the world and had rightly been called the Mad Mile — the weeds in Cassino seemed fair comment in a world that forgets so quickly the death of its sons.
We had a snack at Capua and got into Naples shortly after three in the afternoon. I told the driver to go straight to the docks. I wanted to find out whether Stuart had fixed up a cargo and if so when we were sailing. There was Monique to accommodate and I needed some money to pay for the hire of the car.
But down on the mole I could see no sign of the Trevedra. ‘Shifted ‘er berth, I expect,’ said Boyd. And I must say I wasn’t worried. You’re always liable to shift your berth in a big port. He might have had to move to take on his cargo.
I went to the Port Authorities office and enquired for the present berth of the Trevedra. The clerk glanced at his chart of shipping. ‘Not there,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s sailed.’