Sandlands Read online

  A life split between two countries. Was not Salvatore himself now nationless, a migrant like the birds? His brief days as a combatant had begun and ended in 1942. On his eighteenth birthday, which fell in February on the feast of Saint Valentine, he’d signed up with the Regia Marina; after receiving his uniform and ten weeks’ basic training at a naval base in Sicily, he boarded the destroyer Espero, a battle-scarred veteran of the first war, and was torpedoed off the Maltese coast on his very first voyage, bound for North Africa with a troopship convoy. For seventy minutes Salvatore fought his war in the churning, ink-black water, not for politics or the mother country but simply for his life. He and his fellow survivors were plucked from the foaming, oil-slicked flotsam by the British vessel which had sent them down, were issued with different, dry uniforms and escorted under guard to Gibraltar, and thence through Spain and France on a troop train with other prisoners of war to an internship camp in Portsmouth. By midsummer, just four short months after his enlistment, he found himself back out in the sunlight, riding cross-legged on the back of a carrier’s cart towards the Suffolk farm where he was to be put to work.

  From drilling in Emilia-Romagna in February he was haymaking in Suffolk in June. From seed time to harvest and with no blow struck in anger in between, his experience of the war seemed curiously like a dream, or something that had happened to another man entirely. This was his real life, this continuity of rising and washing, of working and sweating and tilling the soil, and laughing and talking and eating and drinking, and his face cool on the rough cotton bolster at the end of the day. The language was strange, and rose and fell in ways which jarred upon his ear at first, but he soon learned to follow and fit his tongue to its daily patterns. The soil was finer and sandier than back in San Cesario; the beer was russet brown with a thin, yeasty taste and there were potatoes every day and rarely macaroni; the soups and stews were under-seasoned but hearty, and Harry Beck was a hard worker and a temperate taskmaster. The rhythm of the farming day, the farming year, was much as it had been in Italy, his pleasure the same in simple tasks carefully accomplished. He would soon have been here one whole year round: when he arrived at midsummer the nightingales were still singing and now in April they sang again.

  In the first days when, separated from his compatriots at the camp and unable to connect with his watchful hosts in anything but shrugs and smiling bafflement, he found himself missing home all at once with an intensity that was like a mallet blow beneath the ribs, it was to the stables that he had fled for consolation and companionship. The two farm horses accepted with patient equanimity his overtures of friendship, and with whiskery, velvet-muzzled pleasure the titbits of apple core or bread crust that he saved for them. These Suffolk punches had the same sweet-sour breath, the same stoutly muscled quarters and warm, dust-scented flanks as the working horses of Ferrara stock on the farm at home, though their coats were a ruddier chestnut and they were clean-heeled, not feathered at the fetlock like Perla and Pietro. Jack was the younger and taller, while the stockier of the pair was his mother, Jewel. A fanciful name, by English standards – though there were plenty of farmers round San Cesario who called their horses Pulcinella or Imperatore or even Greta Garbo. But the dogs at Nightingale Farm were Meg, Bess and Mick, and Jewel was Harry’s one flight of sentiment. ‘My precious ruby’, he called her, in tones he rarely used with his wife or daughter, and ‘my diamond girl’. One evening when Salvatore had been at the farm for less than a month, the two men coincided at Jewel’s stall. ‘Just checking on the mare’ was what Harry said, but his hand held fat sweet carrots, sliced with his pocket knife. He told the story of the night when Jack was foaled, presenting with feet forward and the cord around his neck, and how poor Jewel had sweated and strained for hours to no avail. ‘I thought I’d lost her,’ he said; and though Salvatore grasped no more of the story than one word in four, the sense of it was clear. We have our own jewel at home, our Perla, he wanted to say, but lacked the means. It didn’t seem to matter – they understood each other just the same.

  In the big brick barn beneath a tarpaulin stood a beautiful blue Standard Fordson tractor, relegated to a place beside the binder and the old steam thresher. Under its wraps, Salvatore could see that its paintwork had been kept polished to a shine that would have passed muster aboard the Espero. Once, before the war, it must have been the pride of the farm. But you couldn’t get the diesel these days, so it was Jewel and Jack who were back in everyday service – and Harry, he guessed, none the sorrier for that. Salvatore had always had a knack with horses. They seemed to trust the unhurried sureness with which he adjusted straps and fastened girths; even these foreign animals pricked up their ears to his chirrup, or fell calm at his murmured Italian endearments. Right from a boy he’d had an eye for a straight furrow, as soon as he had strength to handle the plough. Slowly, through the damp misty months of the English autumn and winter, he had won the respect of the man who was his employer, host and gaoler, and with it that of the land workers round about – unexpressed, perhaps, but equally ungrudged. With so many of the young men gone, the burden of farm work had fallen on older shoulders or to women, and schoolchildren kept home from lessons to pick fruit or help bring home the hay. The war was just the war to these unexcitable country people, and once wariness subsided, Salvatore’s broad back and deft hands counted for more with them than his southern skin and alien, black crow’s-wing hair, for more than birth or military allegiance. Nations might rise and fall and treaties be forged or broken, but there still remained the soil to be tilled, the stock to be fed and the crops to be fetched in.

  He was at the final corner now, at the top of the rise and within a pebble’s throw of the pigsties and the bramble patch; there at the turn of the lane he stopped to rest his aching back and listen for a while. And there it was – starting with a characteristic low whistle and a series of repeated fluting peeps, it began its gentle woodwind warm-up, before the sudden, heart-stopping rush and rise as it launched its evening aria. L’usignolo; voice of heaven, angel bird. The nightingale.

  As he stood he closed his eyes and let his mind trace out the melody as it rose and fell. He knew no other bird which could combine within a single phrase that round, full-throated tone like a thrush or blackbird before soaring up as impossibly high as the trilling of a skylark. But his favourite of all was a low, bubbling warble, a note so pure and liquid clear you felt refreshed to hear it, as if you had actually drunk the spring water the sound resembled, welling fresh from the rock. Cool’d a long age in the deep-delvèd earth. It was a line from an English poem he’d had recited to him that lodged in musical snatches in his mind. The poem was about a nightingale, he knew, and although he didn’t completely understand the words or what they had to do with the little bird, their mysterious sound seemed somehow to match the other-worldliness of its song. Beaded bubbles winking at the brim... With the late sun bathing his tilted face, Salvatore stood still and drank deep.

  * * *

  At the crest of a small rise where the lane swung left, Flavio stopped for a rest. He was more than a little breathless, though he hadn’t walked far and the gradient had been slight. He sounded like an old man – and perhaps after all that is what he was, or shortly would be – an old man like his father. Not that Salvatore had lacked for breath, for his lungs had always been strong and it was his mother whose last months had been measured out in snatched and wheezing gasps. With Salvatore it was the liver and stomach that failed him at the end, so that he lay gaunt and sallow on the pillows and was constantly cold, clutching the quilt up high over jutting collarbones and ribs. There was a peculiar intimacy about the care of the old, bringing Flavio physically closer to his parents than he had been since a small child, or even a baby. Physically closer, but not, in the end, emotionally. Perhaps it was the preservation of self-respect which produced, as it seemed to him, with both mother and father in turn, a compensating withdrawal into self, into memory and an interior life beyond the immediate, mundane indigni
ty of spooned soup, bedpans and the sponging of limbs. Maybe as eyesight faded there was a natural retreat into a past which stood preserved in fresher colours. Or perhaps it was simply an effect of the proximity of death. Whatever the reason, Flavio perceived the distancing and respected it, though it frequently left him feeling lonely even before he was finally alone.

  It was almost evening now, and the twittering of skylarks which had formed the background soundtrack since he alighted on the single platform at Campsea Ashe, seemed all at once to have ceased. They were like the cicadas in the countryside back home; you only noticed them when they stopped. The silence was suddenly palpable, so that the faint noise of one distant passing engine called attention to itself, like a cough at a funeral. Such a quiet spot. Could he live somewhere this quiet? His father had never mentioned the silence, but maybe the rest of the world back then had been less clamorous.

  Then into the stillness came a sound he recognised at once in his stomach and diaphragm – although it took his mind a while to catch up, to register first that it was birdsong, and then that it could only be a nightingale. Directly from the throats of angels, he thought. It was his father, though, and not Nonna, who had told him about the nightingale’s habit of returning to the same nest site. That was something Salvatore had found out here in England. All those thousands of kilometres of journeying, and they came back to the same small clump of bushes where they had reared their chicks the summer before, or where they had themselves been fledged. It was beyond the resource of science to understand, his father had said, how it should be so, what genetic patterning or undetected sense enabled these little birds, with their simple, elementary brains, to trace one-eighth of the globe’s circumference and find their way back home. A miracle of nature.

  Indeed, there was much, it appeared, that his father had learned in England on the subject of the nightingale. There was a poem – a poem in English, seemingly taught to him by the daughter of the house, the young Miss Beck, who had learned it by heart at school. The self-same song that found a path... Old Salvatore could recite phrases from its stanzas even as closer memory grew dim; Flavio’s English was rudimentary and unadapted to the language of poetry but his father had repeated the words so many times that some at least had taken a flimsy hold. The self-same song that found a path... But it was no good – the rest of the line was lost.

  Might he now in fact be close to the place where his father had stayed? Of course it was simplistic to assume that the presence of a nightingale must indicate the proximity of Nightingale Farm. Perhaps they were a common species in these parts, and they were singing all round the village at every lane corner. And yet something stirred inside him which was more than the growl of a stomach that had had nothing inside it but a plastic-wrapped airport sandwich since his morning espresso. Something told him he was near the spot, that this was the same nightingale, or rather, the great-great-great grandson of the one that Salvatore had heard. How long was one nightingale generation? A year, or two, or three? In seventy years, how many birds had hatched, and fledged, and flown?

  The people of the farm, those earlier Becks, what had become of them? Of the older couple – the farmer, Harry, and Marjorie, his wife – and their two surviving children? Salvatore had spoken of one son killed outside Tobruk in ’41, but another was away fighting in Singapore and Burma at the time of his billeting with the family and might have come through unscathed, and then there was the younger child, the girl – Eileen, was it, or Irene? – who was fifteen or sixteen and still at school. About her, Flavio’s father had been almost entirely silent – except as the source of the nightingale poem. Their ages were not so very far apart. But a man of eighteen, nineteen, who had been to war – he doubtless regarded her as just a bambina.

  After he left the farm, towards the end of ’43 following the signing of the Sicily Armistice, Salvatore had lost touch with his English hosts. Flavio never understood quite why, whether there had been some breach or falling-out between them – though it was an irony if that were so now that they were no longer enemies but allies – or whether their connection was just another casualty of the upheavals of war. Flavio knew only that his father heard no more from the family in Suffolk and that it was a sadness to him.

  * * *

  Salvatore stirred himself from the reverie induced by the bird’s song. It was growing late and he would be expected. There would be rabbit stew tonight to go with their potatoes; Harry had trapped a brace of them early this morning on the Five-acre, up near the edge of the little beech copse. He’d made a rueful joke of it at breakfast, self-mocking. Even a farmer can’t be sure of pellets for his shotgun nowadays, he’d said, with everything commandeered for the Home Guard. Here am I, setting traps for my own rabbits like some skulking poacher, while we save our shot for Hitler. Marjorie had glanced up at that and sent her husband a warning look. We’re past all that now, Salvatore had wanted to say. If I’m here then it’s your side I’m on, if I’m on a side at all; when it comes to empty stomachs, war’s the same for all of us. And maybe she’d caught the echo of his thoughts, because she laid a kindly hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I hope your mum and dad have got a rabbit for the pot tonight as well.’ Irene, at the end of the table, said nothing at all, but her smile was like a shaft of sunshine on a foggy day.

  She’d be back in from feeding the chickens by now, would have her pinafore on over her school blouse and be helping her mother peel the potatoes for supper. ‘Taters’, the old couple called them; it seemed that half the time there were two words to learn in English for every one. They were proud of their lass in their gruff, unspeaking way – a scholarship pupil at sixteen when most girls her age were out in the fields or else in Ipswich, at Turner’s on the munitions line – but she still had to pull her weight at home. Maybe, chores done, she’d be curled in the small armchair beside the kitchen range, with her algebra primer and that wrinkle of concentration between her eyebrows that made him want to smooth her forehead as if she were a cat – or perhaps with one of her books of poetry.

  From behind him, as he turned into the sandy track which led down to the farmhouse, the nightingale’s song still trailed on the breeze. My heart aches... Why should a sound so beautiful make you, hearing it, feel sad? But it did: the English poet knew it, and he was right. ...where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes... In his head the song of the bird merged and melded with Irene’s voice, speaking the words of the poem: her soft voice, her soft blonde hair and softer eyelids, half lowered over eyes so liquid dark they made him think of mirtilli. ...or new love pine at them beyond tomorrow... He hardly knew what the lines might mean. He only knew that, like the birdsong, they filled him with a nameless longing – for peace, for family, for home in Italy, and for home at Nightingale Farm. Whatever the future might bring, he knew that when he reached the farmhouse door Irene would be there, and that she was beautiful, and he loved her.

  * * *

  There had been a picture on his father’s bedroom wall, in the last months: a painting executed by his own hand. Its appearance had taken Flavio by surprise, since Salvatore had never picked up a brush in all the time he’d known him. It was pleasing enough in a broad-stroked, naive way, and Flavio wondered why it had not been out on view while his mother was alive. He’d asked his father as much, and received no more than a shrug in reply. Perhaps there had once been words between them. She had laughed at his artistic efforts, perhaps, and his pride had been wounded, and the painting stored away. Towards the end, when he was confined to the bed, Salvatore had gazed at it increasingly often. Flavio had caught him several times staring with tears in his eyes, and had wondered why – though old men could be sentimental and cry for no great reason. The subject matter, at any rate, was no secret: his father had told him it was Nightingale Farm.

  Thus it was that now, as he stopped at the top of a sandy track and looked down the gentle incline, he recognised the house at once. There could be no mistaking it: the configuration of trees had shifted sl
ightly, but the big oak was still there to the left of the gate, and the walls were painted the same warm shade of dusky pink. From the central brick chimney, in defiance of the season, there even spiralled a twist of smoke, exactly as in the painting. It was almost as if he knew the place himself; he could almost have been coming home.

  His luggage would be at the inn by now; they would be looking out for his arrival. Mrs Beck or Miss Beck, whose letter was in his trouser pocket, was not expecting him before tomorrow. Surely it would be a gross intrusion to arrive unannounced a day early, and at this hour? The English, he had heard, were a conventional people, with particular ideas about good manners. But even as these logical, practical arguments rehearsed themselves inside his head, his feet were turning down the track towards the five-barred gate, familiar from his father’s depiction, and approaching the farmhouse door.

  The bell was an old brass one: a ship’s bell, with a chain attached. He took hold of the metal ring and pulled, setting the bell swinging to emit a clear, resounding clang. A pause, then muffled footsteps; the door swung open and a woman stood before him on the step.

  She was about his own age or perhaps a little older, with a wing of smooth hair that must once have been black. The berry eyes that lit on him held curiosity but no surprise.