From the Consul’s office I went to see the Naval Liaison Officer. I told him the story and his reaction was the same as the Consul’s. ‘I can probably arrange for you both to work your passage home. But to do anything for the girl is quite out of the question.’ There were several other naval officers there, but none that I knew. I was too embarrassed even to raise the question of a loan.
Though the sun was now dipping behind the heights of the Vomero, the streets were still stiflingly hot as I made my way up into the city. I felt dispirited and exhausted by the time I reached the Vico Tiratoio. We were in a bad fix and I didn’t see how I was going to get the girl back to England. And I was definitely not going to leave her alone here in Naples.
The sweat rolled off me as I climbed the dark stairs, and I began to swear obscenely and childishly at Stuart.
Boyd and Monique were not in the pensione. I went down to the trattoria, thinking they might have decided to eat. But they were not there either.
I began to walk through the deepening shadows of the narrow streets. I had a sense of frustration. I was nearly thirty. And it irked me that at that age I could be stranded in a foreign city with literally no one to turn to. It made me realize what a hell of a gap the war had torn in our lives.
My sense of loneliness made the throng of life in the drab back-streets more vivid. The film of dirt on the hairy legs of the girl who shuffled ahead of me in wooden soled sandals, the urgent shrill cries of the ageless women behind the street stands, the beggars, the boys who wandered barefooted through the streets pimping for their sisters who were still in their teens, the tawdry makeup of a woman standing hopefully beneath the tinsel-decorated lamp-lit shrine of the Madonna at the street corner, the poverty and the dirt, and the sour smell of streets that had no proper sanitation — it was all imprinted on my mind as the background to which I was doomed until I could fix a passage for the three of us.
And when we reached England, the prospect would not be very much brighter unless we could get hold of Stuart. Neither Boyd nor I had a job. I had no money — no one to whom I could turn for money. And Monique’s mother could hardly support herself, let alone her daughter.
I felt as depressed as I have ever felt.
The shadows deepened and lights appeared in the street-level hovels where people not only worked, but lived. It was the end of the day when the poor of Italy come out of their shops and their stuffy rooms to sit on chairs in the street, smoke their last cigarette and gossip.
I walked through street after street where the doors of the ground-level rooms were open to show the sordid intimacy of a one-room home with its iron bed and dirty sheets, a torn stained table-cloth laid with a frugal meal of pasta or nod or just pane, with the inevitable carafe of vino. And the strange thing was that anybody might be born to this life. It was just the luck of the draw. Only a man of character could rise out of this cesspool of filth if he were born to it — and then he would have to be either a crook or very lucky.
Without thinking about it I eventually arrived back in the Vico Tiratoio. I went up to the trattoria and found Boyd and Monique already settled down to plates heaped with steaming tomato-flavoured pasta. ‘Strewf! I thort you was lost,’ Boyd said as he pulled a chair up for me and shouted for another plate of pasta. ‘You weren’t in when I got back so I went for a walk,’ I told him. ‘Where have you been — sight-seeing?’
Boyd grinned and glanced across at the girl. ‘Show him,’ he said.
She slipped her hand inside her dress and brought out a bulky envelope. She handed it to me almost shyly like I
a child that has done something that it fears is wrong but hopes will be approved.
Inside were some papers and a slim book. The papers were civilian identity documents. The book was a passport visa’d for England.
‘How the hell did you get this?’ I asked. I spoke sharply. I was excited and at the same time angry. The passport photograph had been taken that afternoon, for it showed her in the print dress we had bought her in Frosinone.
Boyd answered for her. ‘They’re forged,’ he said. ‘But they’ll do in an emergency. The way I look at it is this. The bloke offered ter do it. Why should we refuse? If we did get her a berf as a stewardess we’d be pretty mad if it fell through because she ‘adn’t got the necessary papers.’
‘Who was this forger?’ I asked.
Boyd was about to reply when Monique said, ‘Please. You remember I told you I knew a Scotch man who — ‘
‘Scotsman,’ I corrected her automatically.
‘Yes — a Scotsman who was kind to me when I was here before? We went to him this afternoon. He is now very ill — his legs will not walk …’
‘He’s paralysed,’ Boyd interrupted. ‘Got a packet in Naples after he deserted. This Goddamned city’s full of disease.’
‘He’s a deserter and he forges passports and papers for all the crooks in Naples — is that it?’ I asked.
‘He is an artist,’ Monique said. ‘I don’t know what is a deserter. He does work for many bad people. He is not a good man. But he has been a friend to me. And when I told him that we had no money and wanted to get to England and that I had no papers or passport, he made them. He is very ill,’ she added as though that explained everything.
‘We’re going to his studio tonight for a drink,’ Boyd said. ‘He says he thinks he can help us.’
‘Well, I’m not,’ I said. I felt angry — humiliated. You say the man is a deserter, a forger, and diseased. Even Monique says he is not a good man. Why did you take her there?’
Boyd looked aggrieved and shrugged his shoulders. ‘I weren’t in no position to stop ‘er. The young lady’s got a mind of ‘er own. Anyway, it won’t do no ‘arm to look in. He’s friendly — and we ain’t hexactly overburdened wiv friends at the moment. Besides, he said he’d give us some Scotch, an’ speaking for meself I could do wiv a nice drop of Scotch.’
I shrugged my shoulders. I was too depressed to argue. And what Boyd said was true. Any straw was worth clutching at.
CHAPTER NINE
The so-called artist’s studio was on the top floor of the next house. The door at the head of the dark wooden staircase was opened to our knock by a skinny little urchin of about twelve. As soon as we entered the apartment, it was obvious that, although he lived in a slum, he was not short of money. We were shown into a big room with french windows open to a terrace where evergreens stood in pots half screening a view that ranged across the moonlit rooftops of Naples to the sugar-loaf bulk of Vesuvius.
The shadows were deep in the room. The cold half-light of the moon filtered in to show it expensively furnished in appalling taste.
‘Alfredo! Accendi la luce per favore.’ The voice was soft and slurred.
The urchin went back to the door and the light switch clicked, flooding the room with a golden glow from a big standard lamp in the far corner.
It showed a room furnished partly in the ornate gilt so beloved by the Neapolitan and partly as an artist’s studio. There was a low easel near the window, a litter of paints and brushes and palettes on a table, and a desk with a glass top and a base of chromium.
The man we had come to see was seated in a rubber-tyred wheel-chair at the far end of the room. He had a gaudy coloured rug wrapped round his legs and his hands plucked nervously at the covering with long white fingers, the nails of which were grimed and stained with acids. His head was small and nearly bald and his features emaciated. The birdlike impression he gave was accentuated by the quick thrust forward of his head as he said, ‘Good evening. I am glad you have come. I do not often get visits from my own countrymen.’