The Tuscan Child(8)

“Good ride, Mr. Hugo?” he asked as Hugo swung himself down easily from the saddle and handed over the reins.

“Splendid, thanks, Josh.”

Up the steps and in through the front door. His father sitting with the newspaper in the breakfast room, looking up with a frown. “Been out riding, have you? In my day, one changed out of riding togs before one came to breakfast.”

“Sorry, Father, but I am devilishly hungry. How are you today?”

“Not bad, considering. Still short of breath going up the stairs. Still, it’s to be expected, isn’t it? If you’ve been gassed your lungs are bound to be defective.”

“Beastly war. Made no sense at all.”

“I doubt that war ever does, but we don’t seem to learn, do we . . . ?”

Hugo pulled his memory away from that conversation, and from the image of his father’s hacking cough and gradual fading away. Think of your wife, Brenda. Think of your son. He tried to picture them, but already the images were blurred and indistinct, like old photographs. How many years since he’d seen them? Four. Almost half of Teddy’s life. When he’d left, Teddy had been a timid little boy, clinging to Nanny’s skirt. Now he’d be nine. Hugo had no idea what he looked like or what he was doing. Letters only arrived every few months, most of them blacked out by the censor so that they said almost nothing—“Teddy is doing well and sends his daddy love”—leaving Hugo to wonder whether Teddy had been sent away to prep school yet, whether he liked playing cricket, whether he had turned into a good rider . . .

He opened his eyes to see someone standing over him. He sat up with a start, his gloved hand reaching for his service weapon and realising that it was not loaded anyway. He remembered the knife, stowed in the inside of his boot—again completely useless to him. Why hadn’t he thought ahead, prepared to defend himself?

As his eyes focused he reacted with horror. A thin, hooded, faceless figure, garbed in black. The grim reaper. Death come for him. As he attempted to get up, the figure gave a little gasp and stepped back. Then Hugo saw that it was a woman, dressed entirely in black, her head and shoulders covered in a shawl. She was carrying a basket that she now held in front of her, as if to defend herself.

“Are you a German?” she asked in her native Italian, then added, “Deutsch?”

“No. I’m not German. I’m English,” he replied in Italian, grateful that his year studying in Florence had made him reasonably fluent in the language. “My plane just—” He searched for the words “crashed” or “was shot down” and found neither. They weren’t the sort of vocabulary he’d had to use before the war. “My plane went down.” He emphasised this with a gesture of a plane crashing.

The woman nodded. “We heard it,” she said. “The explosion. We didn’t know what it was. We were afraid the Germans were blowing something up again.”

He found her hard to understand. He was afraid that he had forgotten all the Italian he had learned but then realised she was speaking with the strong Tuscan dialect he had heard used among country people. And her hand gestures confirmed what she was saying.

“Are there still Germans in this area?” he asked.

She nodded again, glancing around her as if expecting them to appear at any moment. “Oh yes. They have dug themselves holes in the hills, like rabbits. I do not think it will be easy for your people to drive them out. It is not safe for you to stay here. You must get away to the south. That way.” She pointed. “That is where the Allies are advancing. We hear that they are already close to Lucca.”

“I can’t walk,” he said. “I think I’ve been shot in the leg. I need a place to hide until I can treat the wound and see what needs to be done.”

She glanced up again. “I can’t take you to my village,” she said. “The Germans come through sometimes. They demand lodging and they take our food. You would not be safe. Word would get out, and there are those among us who would willingly sell information for food or cigarettes.”

“I wouldn’t dream of putting you in any danger,” he said. Actually, that was what he’d wanted to say, but he could only produce, “I will not make dangerous for you.”

She spread her hands wide. “If it was just me, I would say yes. I would take this risk. But I have my young son and my husband’s grandmother living with me. I must protect them.”

“Of course. I understand. You must not have danger from me.”

She was frowning at him now. “How is it that you speak my language?”

“I lived in Florence once when I was a young man. I was there for a year to study art.”

“You are an artist?” she asked.

“I wanted to be a painter before the war. Now I’ve been flying planes for five years.”

“This war has robbed us all of what we loved,” she said, and looked away.

He nodded. “If you could just help me up, I’ll be on my way,” he said. “Any moment I could be discovered and you would be in trouble for talking to me.”

“I don’t think anybody would come in this direction now.” She looked around cautiously as she spoke, as if not quite trusting her words. “The olive harvest is over. I myself came to see if any olives still lie among the trees, or maybe there are mushrooms or chestnuts in the forest. We eat what we can find these days. The Germans take what we have.”