Gerald Seymour: The Collaborator

Her name was Immacolata.

On the north side of the park they took a bus and sat on the top deck with the window open beside them so that a zephyr of cooler air reached them. She leafed through the textbook, found English commercial expressions and quizzed him for the exact meaning in her mother tongue. They walked a bit on his territory – Balls Pond, Kingsland, Dalston – reached a pub and sat in a corner of the saloon. Eddie Deacon sensed that she was the most special girl he had ever spent an afternoon and early evening with. He was captivated. Couldn’t think what he offered her beyond a few words in Italian and explanations of a few phrases of more colloquial English, but she seemed to hang on what he told her. Precious few stayed around to listen to him on where he lived or where the language school was, his anecdotes about the daftest Lithuanian students, where his parents lived, what excited or what bored him to death, and when he made jokes she laughed. It was a good rich laugh, and he thought it was genuine, not produced to humour him; he decided, in the pub, that she didn’t laugh often the way her life was.

As dusk fell, they left the pub, her hand again at the bend of his elbow. Now he called her ‘Mac’ – had drifted into it without a prompt from her – and she seemed amused by it.

He walked her almost home, but at the end of a street off Hackney Road, she stopped and indicated they would part here. Now, a streetlight beamed on to her face. He had been with her a few minutes short of seven hours. He wouldn’t have known what to do, but she led. She offered her right cheek and he kissed it, then the left. She was grinning – chuckling as she kissed his lips, and her smile was radiant. He asked if they could meet again. She told him where and when, without asking if it was convenient – which didn’t matter to him because any time and any place were fine. She turned and left him. He watched her going away down a street of little terraced homes that the new rich had taken over. She passed the low-slung German sports cars and the gardens filled with builders’ skips. She was Immacolata, she was twenty-five, two years younger than himself, she was from Naples, and would meet him again in two days’ time. What did he not know? She had not told him her family name, or given him her address and phone number.

She was between two lampposts and the light fell on her hair and on the white blouse. She went briskly and did not look back.

Why had she spent seven hours of her day with him, laughed and joked with him, listened? Because he was attractive and handsome? Because he was a success and taught in a language school? Because of his humour and culture?

Eddie Deacon thought the girl – Mac – was lonely. Sad too.

He would count the hours till they met again, and thought himself blessed.

She was round the corner, gone from his view. He would tick off every hour until they met again and hadn’t done that for as long as he could remember.

Eddie Deacon kicked a can down the pavement then across the width of the street, and was euphoric.

She started to run. There was no pavement, only a track of dried dust at the side of the road. She ran past the stationary cars and vans that had blocked her brother’s little Fiat. Faced with an unmoving jam more than three hundred metres long, she had had no alternative but to get out of the Fiat and head on foot towards the distant gates of the town’s cemetery. To be late for the burial would have been intolerable to Immacolata Borelli.

She had left the car door open. Behind her she heard it slammed, then Silvio’s call, his head protruding from the sun hatch perhaps, for her to run. Everything about the day, and the schedule, had been – so far – a disaster. The call had come to her mobile the evening before, from Silvio, the youngest of her three brothers. He had told her of a death notice in that day’s Cronaca di Napoli detailing the passing of Marianna Rossetti, from Nola, the funeral to be held tomorrow at the Basilica of SS Apostoli, followed by the burial. Immacolata had been in the kitchen of the Hackney apartment she shared with her eldest brother, Vincenzo, who had been shouting questions at her – Who was on the phone? – because he was paranoid about her using a mobile. She had told Silvio she would be on the first flight the next day; she had told Vincenzo that the language school had changed the time of classes, and that she was required early. She ran past the cigarette smoke puffed from the motionless vehicles, and past the cacophony of car horns.

She had not been on the first flight out of Heathrow: it had been overbooked. Her wallet on the check-in counter, opened to display a wad of twenty-pound notes, had not made a seat available. The second flight had seats, but its takeoff time had been put back forty minutes by a leaking toilet. Had anyone ever heard of aircraft stacking over the Golfo di Napoli before landing at Capodichino? There was work in progress on the runway, military flights from the NATO detachment had priority and…

She had not been able to find Silvio because some arrogant bastardo in uniform had not allowed him to park in front of the terminal, and that was more delay. Normally there would have been a minder to sit in the car and tell the official to go fuck himself, but this journey was not normal, had been made in secrecy and was far outside the business of her family. It was only twenty-five kilometres from the airport to the centre of Nola, but there were roadworks and the lights controlling the single lane of traffic were broken.

They had reached the basilica. She had grabbed her handbag off the back seat, snatched up the little black hat with the attached veil, flung herself out of the Fiat, dumped the hat on her head, glanced at her watch as she charged up the steps to the main doors, run inside, heard the crisp echo of her heels on the flagstones and allowed moments to pass before her eyesight could function in the gloom. The space in front of the high altar was deserted, as were the forward pews. A nun had told her that the cortege of the Rossetti family was now well on its way to the cemetery. ‘Such a fine young woman, such a tragic loss…’

Immacolata had gone back down the steps at speed, had nearly tripped, had accosted three people – an idiot, a woman who was stone deaf, a young man who had ogled her – and demanded directions to the cemetery.

She hitched her skirt hem higher.

It was eight months since she had arrived in London with her eldest brother. They had driven all the way north to Genova, then taken a flight to Prague, driven across Germany to Hamburg and flown into the British capital. He had used doctored papers but her passport had been in her own name. In those eight months she had had no contact with her father – it would have been difficult but not impossible – had not spoken to her mother, which could have been arranged but would have brought complications, and had relied on rare, brief conversations with the teenage Silvio. She was now familiar with life in north-east London.

The heat of the summer had gone. Two days after she had met Eddie, the heavens had opened and a thunderstorm of epic proportions had broken, sheet and fork lightning, claps that shook windows, torrential rain, and then cool. The day she had met Eddie, London had been as hot as Naples. It was as if that storm, biblical in its scale, which had caught them out in the open space of Clissold Park, had severed a link with her home city. The deluge had drenched them and they had kissed, then gone to his single room to take off the sodden clothes… and she had lost the link to her city, with the roasting heat, the stench of the streets, the strewn litter, plastic strips and discarded paper, the dumped kitchen gear and the slow rot of dog mess. All were with her now, as she ran on the dusty verge towards the cemetery entrance, as were, ever sharper, her memories of the young woman she had once been proud to say to her face was her ‘best, most-valued friend’.