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CHAPTER 1

In the year 1936, the afternoon of that late spring day was well advanced, but heat still glared from the dusty road. The man pushed his aged bicycle vigorously but the rear tyre was flat and the weight of the tool bag on the carrier caused the deflated tyre to writhe and squeak against the frame of the machine.

Bicycle, tools and owner were liberally coated in dust from the roughly surfaced road, which climbed inland towards the small Sicilian town of Avranino, crouched below the great snow-capped, brooding black flank of the volcanic mountain, Etna.

Nearer the town, the road wound beside ribs of grey-black weathered basalt. The remains of lava flows from the 1860 and earlier eruptions, these looked like the bones of huge prehistoric animals that had died long ago amid the olive trees and clumps of coarse grass that now dotted the lower slopes of the mountain.

Salvatore Bardolino halted, breathing heavily while leaning on the bicycle, and took from the pocket of his crumpled cheap grey suit a once brightly coloured but now grubby handkerchief and mopped his brow. Behind him the distant sea shimmered, turning from bands of metallic grey to purple in the heat haze. Before him rose the massive shape of Etna, dark and menacing, with its high shawl of snow and a wisp of vapour above. Beyond the mountain, the Sicilian sky was a hard, flat blue.

Salvatore claimed to be a mosaicist, a designer, maker and layer of mosaics. In truth, he was mainly a layer of floors, most of which were of the local veined green marble, quarried near Syracusa along the coast to the west. Now and again he might be asked to provide an inset pattern around an entrance doorway or along the edges of a corridor, but even he had to admit that his experience as a mosaicist was limited. Now thirty one years old, Salvatore was swarthy of complexion, with abundant black, curly hair, handsome in a fleshy way, with small, even white teeth, a thick black moustache, and belying his slightly brigand-like features, gentle brown eyes with long dark lashes.

That day had not been a good day, despite the prayers of Salvatore to the Virgin to bring him good luck and honest reward for his labours. His client, an undertaker in a small but steady way of business on the edge of the nearby city of Catania, had unfortunately become quite unexpectedly and dramatically bankrupt and so was forced to cancel his commission to Salvatore to provide and lay a plain and sombre marble floor in that part of his premises used for the viewing by grieving relatives of their dear departed. This was to have been a highly polished floor of dark grey-green marble with a tasteful castellated ribbon decoration in polished black marble around the entrance and edges of the room, and although laid, it still awaited its decoration and the later stages of grinding and polishing to bring the lustre of the marble to life.

News travelled fast in that small community, and before even the most worried and committed creditor (one who cast small crucifixes and coffin handles in brass) could reach the funeral parlour, the undertaker, with much wringing of hands, had told Salvatore with tears in his eyes (part of his stock in trade, thought Salvatore wryly) that the floor work could not go forward, his services were no longer required, and what was more, the undertaker had not the wherewithal to pay him for the materials and the work done so far. Times were hard but people would go on dying and Salvatore had little doubt that the funeral parlour would in time be in business again under a more capable and better funded proprietor who would want the work finishing, so he had packed his tools into his grip, sadly shaken the hand of the tearful undertaker and set out on the uphill ride home to Avranino. Three kilometres from the village the rear tyre of his bicycle punctured, and when we come upon him he is approaching the outskirts on foot, sweating copiously, swearing occasionally and wondering what he is going to tell Lenora, his wife of ten years and the mother of their daughter, Silvia, who is just a little older than the duration of her parents’ marriage. Salvatore lifts his elbow from the saddle of the bicycle and raises his head, for there is the noise of a hard driven and well-worn car approaching. In a cloud of gritty dust a battered and elderly FIAT pulls up beside him. It is an acquaintance, Maurizio.

‘Hey! Salvatore! You wanna lift?’ Maurizio had recently returned from several years in America and his native Sicilian Italian now had a strong Bronx accent. ‘What you been doing? Why don’t you leave that old iron behind a rock and carry the toolbag? Come on, I’ll take you to the village. Get in. You can come back for the old iron later, okay?’

Growling thanks and banging dust from his jacket, Salvatore climbed aboard the car. Maurizio was a few years older than Salvatore, taller and leaner, better dressed, with tight black curly hair and a permanent blue-black stubble. He wore a suit and cleanish white shirt, but no tie. Driving one handed, Maurizio lit two cigarettes and handed one to Salvatore.

As they both drew deeply on the cheap tobacco Maurizio said, ‘Still in business on your own? You don’t make much money doing that, I guess.’

Nettled, Salvatore said, ‘Oh, enough, most of the time’.

‘What do you call enough? Do you have a car? An amante? A house by the sea?’

‘You know I haven’t, Maurizio. Times are hard, work is scarce. Much of the time I’m hard put to provide for Lenora and the girl.’

The two men travelled in silence for the rest of the short journey, and in a narrow shady street off the main square of Avranino Maurizio slid the car to a halt outside a bar. Inside, its interior cool and dark, Maurizio, obviously known there, greeted the barman and called for beers.

‘What other work you got now this undertaker guy’s died on you?’

Salvatore said, ‘Not a lot. Some floor finishing for a lawyer, the one who built that big place up on Etna.’ He gestured towards the snowy shoulder of the volcano, visible through the open door of the bar. ‘The real money’s in supplying and laying the floors, though. The lawyer’s job is just finishing work, polishing. Dusty, but it’s a big place and it will keep me going for a while.’ He chuckled sombrely. ‘And he’ll pay me.’

Maurizio finished his drink and banged his glass and some money on the counter.’I gotta go, a business appointment. You understand, I’m sure. It’s been good to see you Salvatore. Now listen! I have contacts, I might be able to find work for you. When we were kids at the scuola together you were clever, quick to learn. You learned quite a bit of English and some Spanish, I remember, yes?’

‘What sort of work?’ Salvatore was wary, for Maurizio had the reputation of being just a little on the shady side, and no-one was quite sure what he had done in America, or who he did it for.

‘Confidential services. Maybe overseas. Dealing with foreigners. Well paid and not illegal.’ Maurizio put his finger to the side of his nose. ‘Not a word, not even to Lenora. I’ll get back to you, okay? Remember, you don’t want to be polishing marble floors and not being paid for it all your life, eh?’ With a wave of his hand and in a swirl of cigarette smoke, Maurizio bustled out through the doorway of the bar. Wordlessly the barman placed before Salvatore a second beer, already paid for by Maurizio. Salvatore pulled up a stool and sat long and silently over the second drink, while the shadows lengthened on the cooling street outside.

Unlike many Sicilian husbands of that time, Salvatore did discuss most matters likely to affect the future of his little family with Lenora, his wife, but even so it was a few lean weeks later before he mentioned to her, in the most guarded way, Maurizio’s offer to help him to find more lucrative work.

A calm, handsome, olive skinned, solidly built woman of peasant stock, with a heavy jaw and prominent nose, and thick black hair already streaked with grey, Lenora Bardolino listened carefully to what her man had to say.

‘This man, Benito Mussolini, they say is going to transform our country’, she said gravely. ‘They used to call him Il Buffone, but they do no longer. He is said to already be building great new motor roads and public buildings on the mainland, and could make some sort of alliance with the Germans. And there is brave talk of a bridge across the straits to connect us with the mainland. Like most politicians he is certainly a crook and a liar and if he can take true control of this country we’ll be even worse off than we are now. There has been little work for you since that maggot of an undertaker cheated you, and I think, husband, that if Maurizio can put you in the way of more lucrative work, even if it might mean going to another country for a time to do it, you should seriously consider it. We are still young and may make our fortune elsewhere if God wills it, yet return to Avranino to live our later years in comfort.’

Having delivered herself of these wise words Lenora turned to her preparation of their evening meal. Salvatore planted a delicate kiss on the nape of her neck, absently patted her ample behind and poured two glasses of the rough local red wine. Tomorrow he would go and see Maurizio.

***

Maurizio was, to Salvatore’s way of thinking, uncharacteristically subdued before their interview with his sometime employer. This took place some four weeks after Salvatore’s conversation with Lenora. The two men waited before a cluttered desk in the hot and dusty silence of the Catania office of a notaio, a solicitor, above a dingy parade of shops, now ostensibly closed for the afternoon siesta. Dust motes drifted in the sunlight that sliced through the grimy venetian blinds, and the two men waited, perched tensely on slightly rickety upright chairs.

Maurizio cleared his throat, then spoke in a hoarse whisper. ‘Professor Enna is his name, don’t forget.’

‘Yes, you said, and I haven’t.’ Salvatore was annoyed by his friend’s sudden nervous diffidence.

Neither spoke for a full minute, then there was the sound of footsteps and the door was flung smartly open by a slim, black clad young clerk, who barked, ‘Stand! Il Professore Enna!’

Salvatore came to his feet so abruptly that his chair fell to the floor behind him, but he dared not turn to retrieve it. Professor Enna said, ‘Eh, Bardolino, we are obliged to you for coming. And you, Maurizio.Sit down, gentlemen, and let us talk.’

***

The sun was low over a flat and brassy sea when Maurizio and Salvatore came out on to the pavement. A warm wind blew along the street and eddies of dust spiralled in the gutters. Salvatore felt as if he had been wrung out, with every part of him exposed to the sharp mind and insistent, penetrating questions of Professor Enna. Immensely tall and immaculately suited, the professor had hawk-like features, deeply lined, and glittering, dark brown, almost black eyes. What little hair he had was still black, oiled and combed straight back from his high forehead. Salvatore could not guess his age; anything between fifty and seventy, he thought. A remarkable feature of the professor was his hands, which were large, even for such a tall man, with long spatulate fingers and close clipped nails. On the back of each hand was tatooed a tiny, leaping leopard.

Catching Salvatore looking at the tatoos the professor had said, ‘From my days at sea. The follies of one’s youth are sometimes difficult to erase, eh Maurizio?’ Salvatore had looked hastily away, with a muttered apology, while Maurizio, blank faced, said nothing.

The inquisition, for that was what it was, had lasted almost four hours, and by the end of it the professor had drawn from Salvatore information about himself and his family that even he had forgotten. He had already known things that Salvatore thought Maurizio must have told him but he also knew such things as the name of Lenora’s maternal grandfather and the fact that the old man had enjoyed a number of brushes with the law for smuggling. In response to Salvatore’s quiet query as to whether this was relevant, the professor said sharply, ‘If I ask, it is relevant. It is not for you to question the reasons for my questions, do you understand?’

‘Yes sir,’ said Salvatore, suddenly aware of dangerous ground. He looked across at Maurizio, who did not meet his eye. ‘I am sorry sir.’

Professor Enna stood up and looked across to the small open-sided cubicle where the young clerk who had brought him to them had sat for the whole time making rapid and copious notes. ‘Thank you Enrico. One clear copy to me and the original pages of your notes to me also, for destruction. The clerk nodded, clicked his heels, hissed, ‘Si, Professore’ and with a brief yet penetrating glance at Salvatore and Maurizio, bustled from the room, notebook in hand.

The professor shook hands, first with Maurizio, then with Salvatore. ‘This interview is now over. I and my colleagues will consider your application, Bardolino. I believe I do not have to say that all dealings and transactions between us so far are highly and totally confidential, and that if we offer you a position with our organisation you will accept it. If we do not, you will never discuss this interview with anyone, ever. Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir’.

The professor looked interrogatively at Maurizio, who echoed, ‘Yes, sir.’

After they were dismissed and as they walked along the street Salvatore made to turn into the entrance to the first bar they came to. His companion caught his sleeve. ‘Not here! The professor sometimes eats in that ristorante, over there. We’ll be better to take a drink a little further away from his office. Learn to think ahead and be careful, kid, okay?’

After a quiet drink at another bar, monosyllabic under a barman’s level, incurious gaze, they drove out of the town in Maurizio’s car. Parking on an open, straight stretch of lonely road, Maurizio said, ‘My interview six years ago was the same. They’d found out a lot about me.’

‘Did you tell him those things about me, and about Lenora’s grandfather?’

‘No. Nothing. It’s all on record, they can research it. They are everywhere, remember that!’ ‘Who are they?’

‘We don’t ask! Remember that!’

‘What happens next?’

‘If they don’t want you, nothing. If they do, you’ll be approached within the next couple of weeks.’

‘Can you tell me what the work will be?’

‘No. But I’m certain that like me you’ll go away from Sicily as do many to seek their fortune. As I did, and you’ll return, with luck, wiser and richer.’ He started the car engine. ‘It’s getting dark, let’s go. I’ll take you back to Avranino.’Raising his voice above the whine of the car’s gears, Salvatore said, ‘Tell me Maurizio, do you still work for the professor?’

‘Not all the time now, but if he calls me, I have to go.’

Thirteen days after the meeting with Professor Enna Salvatore was offered employment. Attending when summoned to the same office, this time alone, he saw the same clerk, who bade him wait while the professor finished a telephone call.

‘Have you worked here long?’ Salvatore asked sociably.

Snakelike, the clerk Enrico regarded him coldly.’We do not discuss any aspect of our business, with anyone, not even each other’, he hissed. ‘Do not forget that, Signor Bardolino, ever.’

Chilled, Salvatore said, ‘Oh, Sorry, very sorry.’

Professor Enna said, ‘It is decided that you will enter the employ of the organisation, with immediate effect.’ As Salvatore beamed broadly and jumped to his feet, extending a hand, the professor said, ignoring it, ‘This means that you and your family will go to England in due course. Not yet, for you must learn English so that you may deal with the English in the way of business. Sit down, there’s a good fellow, and we have arranged for you to attend a teacher of English in the town here.’ He handed Salvatore a card. ‘This is her name and address, you will begin tomorrow, and you attend in your working clothes. She will not ask why and you will not tell her why you learn English, understood? The fees are taken care of.

‘I understand, but what about my business?’

‘You continue with it while you remain here. And we will put you in the way of certain work. Any shortfall of earnings occasioned by your duties for us, genuine shortfall, mind you, will be made good, and you will not lose by this arrangement. When we send you to England you will go as a mosaicist and marble floor layer. There is a demand for such skills in that country and few to satisfy it, and it suits our purposes that you carry on your trade there.’

Salvatore desperately wanted to ask what, other than ply the trade of mosaicist, he was to do for his employers in England, but he dared not.

‘When shall we go to England?’ he asked diffidently.

‘We hope within a year, but this will depend upon your progress, and remember-’

Salvatore raised a hand ‘Do not discuss, not even with my wife and daughter.’

Professor Enna permitted himself a small wintry smile.’Good. You are learning’

CHAPTER 2

The months that followed were hard work for Salvatore. The English lessons, easy at first, called for great concentration, and study was something which to him had become foreign from disuse. But his business in the locality improved, and with more commissions he worked longer hours. The failed undertaker was succeeded by a more enterprising and better financed mortician and he was called back to complete the flooring at the funeral parlour, and was promptly paid for it. While he mentioned to no one that he was associated with Professor Enna, his business invoices were now settled quickly, he bought a small and ancient Fiat van on a limited line of credit, and before the autumn Lenora was able to buy a new winter coat. Well aware of the difference to their fortunes she nevertheless kept her own counsel and neither questioned nor commented on their modestly improved income, nor did she discuss it with anyone else. Their daughter Silvia, a happy and uncomplicated child, seemed unaware of these slight changes and asked no questions.

There were further interviews with Professor Enna. Sometimes he would pick up Salvatore in his Lancia as he left the apartment of the teacher of English, Isabella Rossi. At other times he would be at her apartment when Salvatore arrived. On those occasions Signorina Rossi quietly disappeared into another room. Sometimes she would tap on the door later with small cups of strong, dark coffee, place it quietly before the men and withdraw. On other occasions when she did not come in Salvatore felt sure she was listening beyond the door.

Salvatore discovered during these interviews that the Professor had a good command of English, and was rapidly evaluating his progress. After some eight months during which his proficiency and fluency improved markedly, Salvatore summoned up the courage to ask Professor Enna when his work would commence.

The professor looked steadily at him for a long moment.’Very soon, Bardolino, you and your family will emigrate. To England.’ Salvatore nodded excitedly. ‘There you will commence trading as Bardolino and Son, flooring and mosaic specialists, winners of the Brussels Exhibition Gold Medal in 1904. No, it does not matter that you do not have a son, nor that there was no Brussels Exhibition in 1904. The English like family continuity in a small business and with them a medal inspires confidence. They never check these things.’

The Sicilian spring flowers quickly. The cold rains of winter desist, the brownish, gentle hills blush light green with new grass, then pink with the wild lupinella, and the sun, mounting higher in the sky, gives out a fiercer warmth, and the sad, wild dogs and cats seek shade earlier in the day. Salvatore had always enjoyed the spring season. A romantic, he responded to the longer days and balmy airs with a springier step, for he was still a young man, and at such times he could be heard to sing during his work, in a light tenor voice, while his thoughts dwelt on the fragrant and ample charms of Lenora, and the evening walks they would take on the fertile lower slopes of Etna.

***

The spring of 1937 was well advanced when the family Bardolino took ship at Catania, on the British tramp steamer Wirral, sailing to Liverpool with a cargo including sawn marble loaded at Siracusa. After passage through the straits of Messina and a final call at Palermo to pick up four passengers, German tourists, the purser had said, Wirral had passed through the Straits of Gibraltar and was now pitching across the Bay of Biscay, bound for Bristol, then Liverpool, which was her home port. Lenora, not a good sailor, lay below in their cabin. Silvia, thought Salvatore, was with her mother as a dutiful daughter should be as he stood at the rail in the stern of the ship, surveying the cold, grey, heaving sea, the collar of his thick overcoat turned up against flying foam. Unlike Lenora, he was not seasick, neither was he homesick for Avranino and the sunny slopes of Mount Etna and he looked forward keenly to starting his new business in the great English city of Birmingham. His bodybelt, which never left him, even when sleeping, contained ample English sterling pounds to meet living expenses and the startup of Bardolino and Son, Mosaicists, and sufficient sovereigns were sewn into the lining of his overcoat to meet emergencies and ultimately secure the opening of that necessary and important symbol of respectability, an English bank account.

Turning his back to the wind, Salvatore took from an inner pocket his much thumbed and dog-eared Italian-English dictionary and read, lips moving soundlessly as he memorised. In their windowless cabin in the bowels of the ship Lenora was retchingly sick for the fifth time that day. In a companionway that led to the crew quarters their daughter Silvia, now a well developed twelve, was passionately kissing and fondling the Liverpudlian cabin boy, a strapping lad of some fifteen summers, who had heard much about foreign girls but not got as close as this to one before.

They did not go ashore during the overnight stop at Bristol. Lenora, having at last got her sea legs, had not vomited for three days, and she had no intention of realigning her organs of balance to the firm land until the last stage of the voyage was completed. The passage up the west coast to Liverpool was even rougher than the Bay of Biscay. Triumphantly un-sick and several kilos lighter, Lenora professed to enjoy the wild weather, and developed some semblance of her previous hearty appetite, but all three Bardolinos were relieved when the Wirral slid smoothly into Liverpool Docks as a coal-smoke laden and foggy darkness fell. Passports in hand, they disembarked the next morning and were met at the quayside by one Alfredo Francotti, a mainland Italian from Milan. He took them to his tenement apartment in the Scotland Road area of the city where they were to stay overnight with him and his wife Maria and infant child, while arrangements were concluded to transport Salvatore’s marble stock and the tools of his trade to a lockup near Birmingham.

By contrast to the acrid fog that hung about the dark tenements of Scotland Road, Francotti’s apartment smelled pleasantly, with a yeasty, vanilla flavoured sweet odour. All around the kitchen and dining rooms were enamelled containers with thick, rope covered sides and glass inner compartments.

‘My business’, said Francotti. ‘Ice cream.’ Grimacing, his wife put her hands over her ears, as he took a tarnished brass handbell from a sideboard and shook it, hard. Above the clangour he shouted in his strangulated English, ‘Ice-a creem! Ice-a creem! Stop me and buy ice-a creem!’ In the apartment above someone hammered on the floor and a muffled voice shouted unintelligibly. In a normal voice Francotti said, ‘Gelato. The common people eat it in the spring and summer weather. I have a bicycle, no, tricycle, with a box on the front. I wait outside the sugar refinery and other factories until the men and girls come off shift. And I work the dock areas also. I can sell five hundred ices a day in hot weather. It makes money!’ He put his arm around his wife’s ample shoulders.’Maria and I are going to buy a hotel in Southport one day. And in the winter we sell ices to the big hotels. And to some of the picture houses. Not such big business but is cash business also, steady.’

After a substantial Italian meal of pasta and minced beef, with a bottle of red wine followed by small, sweet cakes and strong, bitter coffee, Alfredo and Salvatore left the two women and the girl Silvia speaking of babies and families, and Alfredo took Salvatore to a public house. Alfredo was known to some of the drinkers, who were customers for his ice cream.

‘Hello there, Eyetie! Has she let you out for a night, then? Who’s your pal?’ In his halting English Francotti introduced Salvatore, drinks were bought, backs were slapped and as his mind became blurred by the strong dark beer Salvatore’s gaze flew from one new acquaintance to another as he strove to understand the adenoidal accent and noisy quick-fire speech and witticisms of the Liverpudlians.

As the evening wore on a battered piano was opened, and resounding chords and noisy, spontaneous singing broke out. By some good fortune Salvatore knew the tune, with words in Italian, of The Last Rose of Summer, and as his sweet tenor soared, relaxed to a felicitous degree by three pints of stout, the bar fell silent. After his last chorus there was a roar of approval.

A huge Liverpool-Irish stevedore draped his massive arm around Salvatore’s neck, almost pulling him off balance. Wiping an eye with the back of his hand he said in a breaking voice, ‘By the Holy Mother, young Eyetie, ye have a voice like spun glass.’

A hand pulled at his sleeve, and Salvatore found himself looking into the face of a man of military appearance, yet shabbily check suited, with a toothbrush moustache and bloodshot, drinker’s eyes. A greasy visiting card was tremblingly presented. ‘Foster, my dear fellow, Jack Foster. I work as an agent for the Alhambra Theatre, here in our great city of Liverpool. You can make a good living on the stage in music hall with that voice and your good looks. Come and see me tomorrow and I’ll get you an audition. Don’t forget now!’ He turned and was gone, through the swing doors of the bar and out into the street. The card said, J. A. S. Foster, Theatrical Agent, 6a Denby Street, and there was a telephone number. Salvatore put it into his waistcoat pocket.

As they walked, more than a little unsteadily, away from the pub, followed by the fading and disharmonious strains of A Song at Twilight, Alfredo said, smiling, ‘They are a warm people.’

Salvatore nodded vigorously. ‘They speak so fast, I cannot understand much.’

‘Later, some of them will fight. In the street, but no real harm done.’

‘Alfredo.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you work for, you know? The professor?’

‘I am an ice cream man, but you know that I must. In a day or two I will see that you and your wife and daughter are taken by lorry to a village beyond Birmingham, in what they call here their middle-lands, where there is a place for you to store your trade stock and give you a temporary lodging.’ Alfredo linked his arm through Salvatore’s and in the light of a gas street light stared hard into his face.’We don’t know how important our work for the organisation is but we are little people, and we will prosper by it. We must all do our own work, run our businesses, do as we are told, carry out orders exactly, and never discuss any matters of the organisation with anyone’. He looked quickly behind him. ‘Never forget that! Never! There have been those who talked carelessly, even as we might do now, and they did not return to their homes.’

Salvatore, a chill of fear at his shoulders, nodded in the darkness. His companion checked his stride as they neared the gaunt tenement and craned back to look upwards. He unbuttoned himself and urinated noisily against the wall of the building, Salvatore followed suit.

‘No light above. Looks as if they’ve gone to bed. Quietly up the steps, now.’ Both men removed their boots and melted into the shadows of the communal stone staircase, then silently ascended to the second floor.

Two days later and very early in the morning, before sunrise, Salvatore, Lenora and Silvia boarded a venerable Scammel lorry owned by a taciturn, oil-stained, tobacco chewing and diminutive Scot, one Fergus Duncan, who drove them, steadily and noisily, with much clashing of worn gears, first to Birmingham, and then beyond that great city to a town called Redwich, where there were many manufacturies of needles, springs and small metal components, then south from Redwich along a high set road known as Ridgeway, to the hamlet of Arwood. It was late that night when the Scammel bumped into the yard of a small farm holding on the edge of Arwood. Stiff and cold from the cramped cabin of the lorry, the Bardolinos stumbled down into a moonlit yard beside tall barn buildings, a low built farmhouse to one side. Duncan banged thunderously on the farmhouse door. Dogs barked, a door opened and their driver could be seen gesticulating while speaking with animation to the farmer, whom Salvatore later came to know as Thomas Langham, who turned and called over his shoulder. Others came with him from the house and a woman spoke to Lenora and Silvia, placing her hands on their shoulders and guiding them towards the welcoming farmhouse lights. The engine of the lorry clattered into life again and Salvatore walked behind as it was slowly driven through the open double doors of a large barn, brightly lit within by paraffin pressure lamps. His wife and daughter entered the house with the woman and the door closed behind them as he stood in the barn doorway, his shadow huge on the yard from the `bright lights inside, while the warm smell of burning paraffin fuel drifted out into the chill evening air.

The attentions of Professor Enna and his mysterious organisation extended to the smallest detail. After a substantial breakfast taken largely in silence following a welcome and comfortable night’s sleep, Salvatore was taken by Thomas Langham to the neighbouring town of Alnebank, which lay on the river plain below the Ridgeway and Arwood. It was a perfect May morning, alive with light airs and birdsong and with a gold-dusted early morning mist, rapidly thinning as the sun ascended. Where the road turned down from the high ground to descend to the river plain whereon the town lay, his host stopped the old Ford van in which they were travelling and with a sweep of his arm embraced the vista below them.

‘Look at it’, he said with pride. ‘You’ll not find a finer view anywhere in the world.’ Thinking for once of his Sicilian hills and the blue Mediterranean beyond, Salvatore said nothing, but nodded and smiled. ‘There,’ said his companion, ‘see the river? And the church on the rising ground above it, and the town grouped around the church? I’ll bet you’ve got nothing like that in Italy!’

A plume of steam rose in the distance. Salvatore said, ‘Sicily, not Italy. Railway? Station?’

‘Oh, yes. Many trains, each day.’

‘To the city, to Birmingham?’

‘Oh yes, Birmingham, where you will do much of your business, once you get started, mark my words.’ He put the van into gear. ‘Now we will go and meet Mrs Zagaglia, who lives near that railway station. She is to be your landlady.’

‘Zagaglia? She is Italian?’

‘Not exactly. She is a high born English lady. She married many years ago an Italian gentleman who imported scientific instruments. He is now long dead and she is quite old, but she speaks your language and has a large house with rooms for you and your wife and daughter. There are cellars and a workshop beneath the house which you must inspect and if you approve of them, and Mrs Zagaglia approves of you, we will move your materials to them from my barn.’

‘I must pay you for your services and lodging.’ Salvatore felt for his wallet. His companion placed a hand on his arm. ‘No. Your cousin Mr Francotti has seen to all that. You owe me nothing.’ He had stumbled over the pronunciation of both Italian surnames. Salvatore did not say that Alfredo was not his cousin. Clearly it was not intended that this good man should know more than was necessary. Again, Salvatore felt a gnawing chill at the apparent omnipresence of his Sicilian employer.

***

Thus it was that Salvatore Bardolino, with more than a little help from friends and employer, began his business in England in the early summer of nineteen thirty seven. Mrs Zagaglia was over eighty, thin, tall and elegant in a Victorianly fashionable way. She spoke fluent ‘high’Italian with euphony and poise, but when she found that Salvatore’s English was adequate and improving rapidly, announced that from then on she would speak no Italian to him nor he to her. With Lenora, whose command of English was rapid but still rudimentary, she was obliged to be a little more accommodating. To Silvia she hardly spoke at all.

The cellars beneath her rambling Victorian house, in Gatteridge Street, close by the Alnebank railway station, gave good headroom and were dry and unusually spacious, extending beyond the plan of the house to finish a short way beneath the gardens behind, and Salvatore was satisfied that there would be ample room to store marble stock for any commission he might get, however large. Access to the cellars was by a door at the foot of a shallow sloping ramp at the rear of the house. Salvatore said diffidently to Mrs Zagaglia that it would help access if this door could be made wider.

‘Can you not make the doorway wider?’ She said. ‘I have no objection to you doing the work.’

‘I?, Oh no, Madame. I am not a builder, I am an artist-craftsman. I do not do building work.’

Mrs Zagaglia smiled wearily. ‘Ah, you Sicilians! So I will find you a builder who will do this work.’

‘Soon?’

‘Soon. And the cost, which I must approve, will go on the rent for the first month. Or maybe two or three months.’She shot him a shrewd glance from her rheumy dark eyes. ‘When completed, and finally paid for by you by extra on rent payments, the work is my property, understood?’ Salvatore nodded vigorously and they shook hands gravely.

The position of Mrs Zagaglia’s house on Gatteridge Street, close to the railway station, would suit very well, thought Salvatore. The house was one of a row of three separate, detached, houses, put up by an enterprising speculative builder shortly after the large factory building which stood opposite had been completed. At the time, he had suceeded in selling the largest house, now occupied by Mrs Zagaglia and the Bardolinos, to the then new owner of the factory, which was originally given over to the plush trade, a material extensively used in the manufacture of hats, which were worn by almost everyone in the late nineteenth century. The second, smaller, house was let to the chief overseer of the plush workings, and the third remained empty for many months before being sold to a Birmingham based manufacturer of perambulator wheels, in a small way of business, who needed to live close by the railway station as he was an habitual late riser who had to be daily at his
place of manufacture.

Sadly, and despite their large gardens, the presence of the factory building opposite and the railway station close by did not give attractive resale values to these very spacious but somewhat gloomy Victorian houses, and there had been many owners and tenants before Mr and Mrs Zagaglia purchased theirs cheaply, for their fortunes had declined in their middle years in the final months of the 1914–1918 war.

An imposing redbrick building on four floors, with large iron-framed windows and a parapeted roof, the factory opposite belonged at the time of the arrival of the Bardolinos in 1937 to a manufacturer of needles, who used it largely for the storage of the coils of wire from which his product was made, elsewhere. Architecturally impressive, the factory generated little noise at that time, but owing to its height it kept much of the early sun from the houses opposite. Lenora hated the great shadow it threw and said as much to Mrs Zagaglia, who nodded sympathetically.

‘My husband was a good businessman,’ she sighed, ‘and although his company did not manufacture anything he imported very good Italian and German electrical measuring instruments to his warehouse in Birmingham, and they were sold all over this country. But then the English in Leicester started to make voltmeters and ammeters, instruments for measuring electrical energy, which were just as good as those imported by Zagaglia, but costing less. Soon, we had a warehouse full of merchandise we could not sell, except at very low prices.’

‘Could you not just send it all back to Germany and Italy?’ Lenora, dark eyes flashing, looked fierce at the perfidy of the British. ‘It was not your fault that the British were, how do they say it, undercosting you.’

‘Undercutting. Unfortunately not. Zagaglia was committed to taking so much stock from those who acted as agents to our manufacturers every month, a year at a time, for which we had to pay, and they would not let us out of that contract. Even if we had not unpacked the shipments of instruments we had to pay for them.’

‘What happened?’

She shrugged expressively. ‘Zagaglia sold what we could. At low prices, while he looked for other lines to import, but without success. In less than a year we were bankrupt. We then lived in Edgbaston, which is a fine part of Birmingham, but all had to be sold. This house, Gatteridge Street, Alnebank, with the factory in front of it and right by the railway station was what we could afford with that which was left when the creditors had been paid off. Zagaglia became ill soon afterwards and he was dead in a year.’ Her voice shook slightly and there were two spots of colour on her pale cheeks. ‘Those profiteers killed my husband, and I, Cecilia Zagaglia, will never forget that!’

CHAPTER 3

Lenora and Mrs Zagaglia now got on fairly well together, but such an harmonious relationship could not be said of the old lady and Lenora and Salvatore’s daughter, Silvia Bardolino. Mrs Zagaglia’s opinion of Silvia was not openly censorious, but could be judged from the marked tightening of her lips and squaring of shoulders when alone with the girl, to be not entirely approving.

The Bardolinos lived in part of the second floor of Mrs Zagaglia’s large house, occupying four rooms and a bathroom and using a separate staircase, originally for servants, at the rear of the premises. The smallest of the four rooms was used by Salvatore as an office, and a telephone was installed. There was no separate kitchen, and they shared the somewhat gloomy ground floor kitchen with the old lady, who found this arrangement well to her liking, as with increasing age she had become conscious of her never generous appetite dwindling, and Lenora’s rich pasta dishes (latterly made from the durum wheat obtained by Salvatore from a Birmingham merchant) tempted her to enjoyment, bringing a flood of memories of the cuisine of her Italian mother-in-law, in far off and more prosperous days in Ravenna in the 1880s.

Salvatore was a fair flooring craftsman and mosaicist and a better salesman and this latter attribute was to prove a happy talent. He had quickly located a jobbing printer in Alnebank, who, after some bargaining, agreed to produce several hundred handbills advertising the services of Bardolino and Son, Flooring and Mosaics, Gold Medal, Brussels Exhibition 1904. In flawless English (checked and corrected by Mrs Zagaglia) it spoke of the long history of classical mosaic floor decoration in Sicily, and the descent of artist-craftsmen such as ‘Mr Bardolino, Head of Our Firm’, from long lines of Greek and Roman practitioners of the mosaicists’ arts. It also spoke, with a sharp eye for the practicalities of business, of ‘use of the finest materials and especially Competitive Prices, particularly for larger contracts’.

Armed with a good supply of handbills, Salvatore had taken the train from the London Midland Alnebank station close by the house of Mrs Zagaglia, to Birmingham. The main line station in Birmingham was hard by the centres of the metal working and jewellery trades, also the great midlands distributive centres for fruit, vegetables and meat. On his first day of canvassing for business Salvatore visited forty eight establishments, on foot, and left his handbills with either principals or senior staff. Almost everywhere he went he saw opportunities for the use of marble floors and counters, and when he returned home on the last train late that night, very hungry and somewhat footsore, he was exhausted but jubilant.

‘We shall make a good living out of that great city’, he said to Lenora.

And as time went by and through the hot, dusty summer, they began to do so. The first commissions were modest, small jobs given out by the cautious Birmingham traders. ‘To give the new foreign flooring fellow a try, y’know.’ At first Salvatore took a handcart, which travelled in the guard’s van of the train, to carry his materials and tools for a day’s work. For the small works which came at the beginning, this was sufficient, and Salvatore became leaner and his muscles developed apace as he pushed the handcart along the bumpy cobbled streets and up and down the short, sharp hills of that part of the city. As he satisfactorily completed the early works and word got around that he was both competent and good value, his first larger job came along, which was a marble mosaic floor for a custard powder factory, which, although situated in a grimy area of the city, was scrupulously clean within, with extensive use of tiled and marbled surfaces. Bardolino, the new man in the business, came with an emerging reputation for good tidy work and competitive pricing, so when it was decided to construct a small new reception area in the modern style, with the company emblem forming the mosaic floor, Bardolino got the job, and as this firm enjoyed considerable prestige in the city, that commission led to others.

Salvatore’s days were long, and as the months went by he worked a six day week every week, but on the insistence of both Lenora and Mrs Zagaglia, he observed the Sabbath at Gatteridge Street, although on such days he was not above spending a little quiet time in his cellar, cleaning and sharpening tools and rearranging his stock of marble and flooring materials. On one such Sunday he found himself discussing with Mrs Zagaglia his need to purchase a motor van now that his business and contracts were getting larger. As there was nowhere to garage a van in the immediate vicinity of Mrs Zagaglia’s house Salvatore opined that it might save him transportation costs if he were to rent a lockup, or even a workshop, in the central Birmingham area.

‘It is a big city, yet like a village, with everyone in the businesses knowing each other and close beside also’, he said, smiling. ‘I don’t explain this very good, but all is close, a little like Sicily, with many related people, and so, when I do good work for one, he tells his brother-in-law, who may be in a different business a mile or so away, and so my name spreads, but all in a small area. Lenora, she loves this town of Alnebank and to live here with you and now Silvia is at the school here I think she too is happy, but I think maybe I should stay in Birmingham from Monday to Saturday and have a workshop and store shed there. Keep my marbles and tools there.’

She placed fingertips together, pursed her lips and looked out of the window. ‘I think, Salvatore, that you should consider most carefully before moving your business from here.’ She looked sideways at him.’As you know, you are primarily here in England to serve others. An organisation. Now you have been so busy in these recent months that you have perhaps slipped a little from sight of this. It is good that you are getting contracts in Birmingham, but if I were you I would not make any change such as you suggest so early. By all means buy a motor van if your business can afford it, for then you can drive to Birmingham every day from here, for it is only twenty miles, and also further afield to speak with new customers and you will not be bound by the times of the trains. But if you feel you must make this move to live in the city during the week, wait until I have consulted Professor Enna on your behalf.’

This was the first time Mrs Zagaglia had made any reference to Professor Enna. Indeed, from their conversations thus far Salvatore could not have known that she even knew of him.

Somewhat stiffly he said, ‘You know the professor well?’

‘He is my cousin by marriage.’

‘Ah. Madame, because of what you say, I will make no changes until all my duties for the professor are made known to me.’ Inwardly, he fumed for appearing so naive as to assume that he could expand or change his business as he liked without reference to his Sicilian master.

She smiled.’Good. I think you are wise. And getting wiser, I can see. Now about the widening of the entrance to the cellars below us, which we spoke of some time ago.’ She pointed downward. ‘I have knowledge of a man who can now do these small building works, and who does not gossip about his work. He is not of this town, but he has done much work here for several years. His name is Mowatt, and he will come here after we return from Mass on Sunday. You will be here to speak with him?’

‘Per certo, ah, certainly. And thank you, Madame.’

‘Let me know what he proposes, and remember, we have delayed too long in this matter and it is important that he commences and completes the work quickly, for he is a man with many commissions.’

***