Plot reminder: With Lucio's help,  Mary has traced her father's younger brother, Salvatore D'Ambra. She has just discovered that her father had been married.

~~~~~

The details emerged from the old man's mouth like snowflakes from a winter sky. Slowly at first, just individual floating white blurs. Then faster, all at once, a sudden wind-tossed flurry.

The name of my father's wife had been Ada Pucci, something of a local beauty in her day. She and my father had both been sixteen when they'd first started courting. Back row of the pictures to begin with, then during the warmer months their moments of intimacy had been played out in the much more private theatre of the moonlit beach. It had been towards the end of that summer - 1940, Italy now conjoined in conflict - that the news of Ada's pregnancy had broken...

"Things had been different back then," my uncle sighed. "A young man got a girl in the family way... Well, there was just no other option. Not round these parts anyway. They got married in San Andrea church, a freezing cold day just before Christmas. I can still remember it. Can still picture that look on Vincenzo's face." There was a regretful shake of the head. "Poor sod, looked like a convict being led in through the prison gates."

An interesting analogy, I reflected, given how the final years of his tragically short life would pan out. A prisoner not just physically and literally, but perhaps spiritually also.

"Ada's father was a fisherman too, just like ours. Neither family had much money to help them out. A cold water affair here in the harbourside was the best that could be arranged ." A swept hand indicated the limited confines of his home. "Not even half the size of this place. Imagine."

I took a sip of the coffee Grazia had poured from metal cafeteria: strong, even by local standards.  "And the baby?" I  enquired, as matter-of-factly as I was able to feign. The baby: my half-brother or half-sister, in other words.

By way of response, Salvatore rolled eyes heavenwards, touched forefinger from top to bottom of sternum, right then left.

Oh dear Lord... Another jab-punch to my heart. Wasn't sure how many more of them I would be able to take.

"Was common in those days," reflected Grazia sadly. She too swiped hand in genuflection. "All lambs of our Lord."

"The spring it must have been," her husband continued. "Then as I said the following May his cards came and off he went to war. Shipped from Brindisi to Alessandria, thrown straight into bloody mess that was Tobruk. September or maybe it was the October, he and his platoon got taken by the English." There was a glance in my direction, as if remembering I was a representative of said race. "Better your lot than the Germans or Russians so I've heard."  He paused to reach for one of the homemade campagnole biscuits which Grazia had laid onto the table. As with his bald crown, the back of his hands too were liver-spotted, the skin webbed between finger bones like waxed paper. "Sent him to Kenya first," the old man resumed, swiping back of hand across mouth. "Kenya, for the love of God! Then the English, must have realised they were missing a trick. Shipped my brother and the rest of the captured Italians off to the motherland, set them to work out in the fields. Fed them well enough though he said in his letters."

Letters, I thought...

"Wouldn't happen to have kept any of them, would you?" I asked.

"The earlier ones from Egypt and Kenya, no. These he always addressed to Ada see." A smile momentarily illuminated the old man's face, as if some long lost memory had been unearthed. "Could barely read though, poor thing, always came round to ours. My sister Rosalba was the best at reading and writing, that sort of thing. We'd all gather round like elementary school kids round the maestra while she read them out loud." Rosalba had been the eldest of the three sisters, we learnt, all of whom had now passed away.  "Mostly he just said all was fine. Couldn't write anything negative or critical see - wouldn't get past the censors." He was forced to raise his a little voice a little to compete with the repetitive thud of a ball against a neighbour's wall, the squeals of scurrying children. "They were regular at first, once a week or so, then gradually got less frequent. I think whatever they might have had between them, Ada and he, by the time he got to England it had pretty much disappeared. The distance, I suppose. The years that had passed." Once more, there was a pitying shake of the head. "You know, I felt sorry for them. Both of them. If it hadn't been for the pregnancy they'd have just been childhood sweethearts, nothing more than that. Would have been free to just drift apart." He took sip of his coffee, dabbed a handkerchief to forehead; barely gone ten a.m but it was already getting hot. "Anyway, it got so he started addressing his letters home rather than to her. After Rosalba passed away, I found a bundle of them in her chest of drawers all tied up in a ribbon."

"Should be in the back of the wardrobe somewhere," Grazia said, struggling herself upright.

As she stepped away into the corridor, I had Lucio enquire if there might be a photograph too. There was a dutiful nod: would have a root through the biscuit tin of old shots she kept in her bedside cabinet.

"Was after the Armistice,' my uncle resumed. "The letters, they just stopped coming. At first we thought maybe there was some problem, that the Germans were attacking the mail planes just to spite us. But there were other families in Punto San Giacomo who had men in England and they still got their letters coming through. Well my father, he tried his best to reassure mamma. Vincenzo was safe, no harm could come to him. But still, it was hard to explain why he didn't write any more." The old man's gaze seemed to lose focus for some moments. "Then when the whole damn thing finished, mamma, she called Bari. She called Milan, called Rome. So many men. So many hundreds of thousands of men. Nobody knew anything. Wouldn't be the only Italian just to stay there in England, they told her. More work, better life, never mind the rain." His eyes had regained their focus, now scorched pleadingly into my own. "Okay, okay. But still no-one knew how to explain. Why didn't he write?" He let out a long exhale then, as if exhausted by the flood of memory, the rekindled burn of frustration.  "Ada eventually moved in with a carpenter from the local boatyard. Widower, had lost his wife in childbirth. Baby had survived, the third. Well, mamma and my sisters, they resented her for this. Always whispering and gossiping, spreading stories that weren't even half true. Can't say as I blamed her though. Vincenzo wasn't coming back, simple as that. It was time to move on."

Ada too, we learnt, had now passed away. I was glad for her though. Pleased that her life story had taken a positive turn, that in bringing up the carpenter's children, in having his warm body to snuggle up against on cold winter nights, she might have glimpsed something approaching happiness.

"Whenever I picture my brother, I always picture him with a pencil in hand."  The old man's eyes had become moistened with nostalgia's sad, twinkling glaze. "When he wasn't sleeping or out on the trawler, was never without one in his hand. Pretty damn good he was too, I'd say. Inherited his gift from our grandfather, mamma always used to say. Only one of us that did."

I wish I'd taken a camera with me to Ravensby, could have shown him a photo of the altar - could have let him behold the beauty and hope his brother had created for his fellow prisoners - but how was I to have known?  Instead, I had to describe it to him, trust that Lucio's translation would somehow project the image into his mind.

"Yes, he mentioned it his letters.' He nodded, half-smiled - another detail retrieved from the cobwebbed corners of his memory. "The day he left for the war, I remember he gave me a dirty postcard he'd got hold of somewhere. Used it for his drawing - you know, the study of the female form or what have you. Said I wasn't to tell mamma or our sisters." The emotion in his voice squeezed it half an octave higher. "I was only twelve. Still too young to understand he might never come home again."

Finally, a tear plopped out onto leathery cheek. One sixty-six years in its forming.

*

Grazia hobbled back from the bedroom a couple of minutes later, the triumphant smile of a completed mission on her face. It was a smile which soon faded however when she noticed the red rim to her husband's eyes, the moist sheen across his cheeks.

"All this remembering, it isn't good for him. Please, don't ask him to remember any more."

After placing the successfully located letter bundle and photograph before Lucio and I, she retook her seat beside her husband. Patted the hand stretched out across the table, squeezed lips into a reassuring smile.

Beside me, Lucio was untying the letter bundle, the ribbon striped a patriotic green, white and red. I instead steered hand towards the photograph - carefully, almost tentatively, as if afraid it might burn my fingers. The significance of the moment wasn't lost on me: there I was in my father's childhood home about to glimpse his image for the very first time. After sixty-three years - sixty-three long, suffered, soul-yearning  years - finally we were about to come face to face.

The shot was small in dimension, two inches by an inch and a half perhaps, little bigger than a modern passport photograph. Monochrome of course, the picture quality a little grainy. At some point it had also become creased, a jagged white line running diagonally across the image, fracturing the the young man's face at left jaw, exiting above right ear. Yet even despite such imperfections, had someone presented me the shot without telling me the identity of its subject, there would have been no doubt in mind, none at all: this was my father.

He was wearing uniform, the bottom edge of the shot slicing across ornate-looking lapel badges, the top edge trimming the uppermost section of peakless, diagonally skewed cap. Shadows slanted towards bottom left from a high, unseen sun, he was framed square-shouldered, front on. The lips were unsmiling, but not sullenly so I didn't think - the picture seemed to be an official one, each private in turn obliged to step outside onto the parade ground or wherever, just another of the day's endless banal duties to be carried out. One copy to be clipped to each soldier's file, no doubt, a second to be folded inside a letter home for mothers and sisters and sweethearts to cling to, a fragile two-dimensional replacement of what the war had borrowed from them, threatened to steal forever.

Immediately evident upon a close study of the face were the details Irene had described to me, the ones she'd carried in her mind's eye throughout all those decades - the curve of the upper lids, the slight downward slant of the brows. Delineations which seemed as familiar as the view from one's own front window. As familiar as the face in the mirror, yes. Somewhere in the undertones, in the marbling of light and shade, I was reflected there too.

The most striking aspect of all however was the shadow. I don't mean those dark splashes pooled beneath eyebrows and cheekbones, cascaded from nose, gathered into the contour beneath lower lip. Not those actual physical voids of light, but rather that other shadow - the one which lay behind, somewhere beyond the parade ground sun, out of sight. The type of shadow which can cast its darkness over a whole world, an entire personal universe.

The shot must have been taken in the summer of '41, at some point before my father and his platoon were shipped down to Egypt. He'd at the time only recently turned eighteen - an age at which most young men are still waiting for life to begin, that longed-for adventure which for good or for bad was about to play itself out. And whilst the physical fact of my father's youth was disarming, heartbreaking even - the face little more than a boy's - there was something world-weary to his expression too. Life was already known to him, the full spectrum of its triumphs and its tragedies. The face was that of a man no longer in its thrall.

I held the photo closer to my eyes, not so much that I might see him better but that he might see me.

Did you love Irene? I voicelessly enquired. Love her as much as she loved you? Did she reignite you? Reconnect you to the world?

There were other questions too:-

Did she know you were married?

Why did you borrow those thirty shillings from her?

And of course:-

Where are you? Whatever became of you?

Surprisingly however,  it wasn't this the question I most desperately craved the answer to, I realised. No, that was a different one entirely:-

Who were you father? The man I'd always hoped you were, or the man I'd always hoped you weren't?

~~~~~