Plot reminder: After making the acquaintance of a local man named Lucio, Mary has received the bombshell news that there was no DNA match between the remains and her father's brother, Salvatore.

~~~~~

And thus in a finger-click the fog grew denser. The whir of questions in my head ever more dizzying - a deafening tumult, a cacophany of competing voices.

If not my father, then whose remains were they which they'd pulled from the Lincolnshire mud? And why were his ID tags found in the vicinity? The thirty shillings Irene had lent him? Most importantly, what on earth had happened to him? Why had he never returned home from the war?

Feeling Lucio's eyes on me - curious, concerned - I was forced for the moment to swallow down the emotional impact of the news. Put it to one side like one might a novel, leave it there on the bedside cabinet until I had the chance to open it up again. Until I was alone once more in the quiet of my room, could concentrate on it properly - analyse the patterns of the words, the nuances of meaning. Until finally, like the grief I felt for Irene's passing, it might be allowed to seep into my soul.

Right at that moment, disguised as I was in my self-created role, I was restricted to viewing the news as a freelance journalist might. An unexpected twist, the story lent further mystery. And not only this, there was the human angle too. Salvatore D'Ambra. Wouldn't a reporter be keen to gain insight into the poor man's emotional state? The sheer heart-wrenching turmoil which the last few days must have provoked?

Yes, I reasoned - a hard-nosed hack would just carry on regardless. They'd travelled all that way, after all, had racked up quite an expenses bill in need of justification.

Several moments had now passed since Lucio had broken the news; I could feel my heart slip once more into its usual slow, cold beat.

"The brother," I said, turning my attention back to him across the crumb-strewn café table. "I would be eternally grateful to you if you could help me talk to the brother."

*

We agreed to meet right there at the cafė an hour later, time I partially spent attempting to wash the sand from between my toes with the stingy half-hearted squirts of water emanating from the hotel shower head. Principally however the sixty minutes were passed in an equally vain effort at absorbing the bombshell, trying to understand the significance of the news.

When Lucio finally slunk around the corner, I was grateful to see that he'd left Dante at home. He was ten minutes late, but as I would soon learn this represented an admirable level of punctuality in smalltown southern Italy.

Ordinarily, our destination would have represented only a short walk from the meeting point. What with virtually every other passer-by pausing for a moment to exchange a few jokey, back-slapping words with Lucio, it took us almost half an hour. This is why Italians are traditionally viewed as poor time keepers, I came to realise. It wasn't that they set out to be late, deliberately intended to do so. More they were victims of their own gregariousness. It's almost impossible to punctual, I suppose, when the sun shines much more often than it doesn't, and when almost everyone in town is your best friend.

Again, I found myself wondering as to the nature of his relationship with whichever woman it was who'd slipped that wedding band into his finger. It was at least marginally unusual, surely, for a man to be seen in public with an unknown woman at his side. He was a divorcee perhaps, I concluded - a reluctant one, the marital schism effected against his will. Just hadn't been able to bring himself to wriggling loose the ring. Either that, yes, or the poor chap was a widower.

It was towards the neighbourhood beyond the harbour that we stutteringly headed, the opposite side to the pretty beach area. The contrast couldn't have been starker as we entered thr winding maze of streets which still, Lucio informed me, retained a certain local infamy. It was as if the sun were refused entry here, the streets too narrow to grant it access. Little more than a hive of back alleys, the place seemed some poorly-maintained throwback to much less auspicious times, a Mediterranean fishing port's equivalent of a Victorian industrial slum. Many of the windows were boarded up, the former residents having long since escaped to more dignified neighbourhoods. Not all though. Some of the older folk, those like my uncle who had never known or aspired to anything else perhaps, still persisted.

His flat was ground floor, inland-facing. We found him sitting at the front wall, still-nimble fingers sewing repairs to a net. It was something of a tradition, Lucio told me, that the retired fishermen helped the younger men prepare for each evening's sail out. At the sight of our approach he lifted bald, liver-spotted head, the revealed eyes dulled disarming orbs of melancholy. His face was that which I'd imagined my father's would be had he lived - weathered and leathery, cross-hatched by wrinkles like a Hogarth etching. The sort of face which could mislead those who beheld it, was difficult to judge the age of. A younger brother, George Shreeves had informed me over the phone. How much younger than my father, it was difficult to say for sure.

He and Lucio exchanged a few words, the old man looking up at me, nodding, his lips creaking into a dutiful smile. Lucio offered a hand, helped haul him groaningly upright.

"Venga, signora. Venga dentro."

Come on inside, Lucio translated, ushering me through the opened front door, the swish of the net curtains.

The main living space was little bigger than many people's bathroom. A modest kitchen hugged one wall, a sagging, hotpotch collection of bookcases and cabinets lined another. There was no sofa, just a round central table and chairs. Visible through the opened internal door was a short, windowless corridor onto which two other doors joined: a bathroom and solitary bedroom, I could only suppose. It was quite incredible to learn therefore that the place had been my father's childhood home, one he'd shared not just with Salvatore but with three sisters too. Add in their parents and that made seven of them co-habitating a space which by modern standards would be deemed barely adequate for two. The Lord alone knew how they'd managed.

Every available hand's-width of wall space was cluttered by family photos and cheap religious prints. The latest addition to the former category, in pride of place on top of the ancient box TV, was a pink, wrinkled newborn with thick sproutings of black hair. Their first great-great-grandchild, Salvatore's wife informed us, following our gaze. She introduced herself as Grazia - a stout figure dressed in floral housecoat. Whilst Salvatore, Lucio and I settled ourselves at the table, she busied herself preparing coffee.

"They came and asked me to put this thing in my mouth," my uncle began. "A sort of cotton bud, said I had to roll it on the inside of my cheek. Told me they were almost sure it was him, Vincenzo, but just needed to double-check."

Lucio had to concentrate hard to follow the old man's words, ear tilted towards him like a dog's to an unfamiliar sound. Not a symptom of encroaching deafness, he assured me, just that D'Ambra spoke in a particularly thick version of the local dialect. His was the last generation to have grown up without television or mandatory post-11 schooling, Lucio explained; the last, in short, to have had little experience or need of standard Italian.

"I think it was '59 the rumours started. A guy called Lorenzo Palumbo, had grown up here on the harbourside, moved north as a young man. Said he'd seen Vincenzo drinking a cappuccino outside a bar in Milan one Sunday morning. Well, it got mamma and my sisters all excited of course, this idea that he was alive and well and living in Milan. I always said though that Palumbo must have been mistaken, that everyone had someone somewhere in the world who looked a lot like them. If Vincenzo was still alive then why didn't he write? Why didn't he come and visit us? So when the carabinieri came the other day with their cotton bud thing and told me about the bones which had been found... well, it seemed I was right." Those melancholy old eyes turned down towards embroidered tablecloth. "Vincenzo had died in England. Died so, so young."

As she set the coffee things down onto the table between us, Grazia rested a comforting hand on her husband's shoulder.

"It was sad, yes, but in some ways I was happy too." His eyes drifted away again, gaze melting. He shook his head. Shook it hard. "I thought finally we'd get to bury him. Have a chance to say our farewells."

Reaching across, Lucio too offered a comforting hand to shoulder. Uttered a short verse of hushed, consolatory words.

As two days earlier at Irene's funeral, then later parked across the street from my half-sister's house, I found myself grappling with the urge to reveal myself. To show my hand. The man was my uncle, I his niece. We were family, bound by blood. Yet why wasn't I the one to place a reassuring hand on his shoulder? Why not I the one to offer him words of succour? Language barrier or no language barrier, he would have understood them, just as I would have understod his.

Instead, I extracted notebook and pen from handbag, indicated to Lucio that he should ask the old man what he remembered of his brother's war experiences. My disguise was one I wore well. Wore convincingly.

"May 1941," my uncle began. "Conscription card arrived the day after his eighteenth birthday. Time and place where he had to report himself, the provincial barracks in Lecce. Things weren't going so well in North Africa. Mussolini needed men, and needed them fast. What did he care if they were married or not?"

At this point I had to ask Lucio to repeat his translation, verify its accuracy.

Married? My father had been married? But Irene had never told me this.

I found myself glancing at the wedding band there on Lucio's finger. For whatever reason, he'd made the conscious decision not to remove it. But what if my father had made a similarly conscious decision to do the opposite? Wasn't difficult, after all. No more complicated than taking off one's shoe. An object small enough to slip discreetly into a pocket, leave stashed inside a tobacco tin of personal effects like some dark unutterable secret inside a heart.

But really, it mattered little to me whether my father had deliberately hidden his marital status or not, or whether Irene had indeed been in the know but had simply cared little of the fact. I am not the sort of person to be easily scandalised by the affairs of the heart of others, nor I have I ever lived through a time of war, or frankly could even begin to imagine what it must have been like.

No, it wasn't the fact of it in itself which cast its shadow over my soul. More it was the ulterior confirmation it provided of my illegitimate state. Not only had my parents been unmarried to each other, but one of them had been married to someone else. Didn't this render me somehow doubly misbegotten?

It was something I'd always felt, since as long as I was able to calibrate such a thought. I hadn't been born in the way that other people are born. Not some wished-for blessing coaxed and ushered and willed into the world.

Rather, I had gate-crashed my way into it.

Unwanted and uninvited.

~~~~~