Author's note: I have started publishing part 3 of this novel as a stand alone novella entitled Beyond the Wire, principally so that I can take part in a competition of historical fiction. If you come across the novella in any book lists you're swiping through it will be of limited interest to you. Modifications to the text you're reading here are minor and Beyond the Wire will be published three uploads behind The Painted Altar. Thanks as always for your support.

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Other than the survivors from our own platoon - fellow Puglians mostly alongside a handful of boys from the neighbouring regions of  Molise and Basilicata - camp 106a was also home to the remnants of another platoon, its members in the main hailing from the other side of the Italian south, Calabria and Campania. One of the most effusive and distinctive characters amongst our new western brethren was a Neapolitan boy called Francesco 'Chicco' Brancaleone. That he was the former junior middleweight champion of Campania was a boast he quickly and triumphantly made known to everybody. Given his square jaw and lean, muscle-honed frame, it was  claim nobody put in doubt. Add in the slick, naturally quiffed hair he spent many hours lovingly combing, the michievious twinkle to his eye and infectiously outgoing personality, it was little wonder that he was one of the very few to breach English defences, so to speak. Rosie, I seem to recall his girl's name was. A blue-eyed blonde who looked not a little unlike Bette Davies.

Almost all we prisoners had nicknames.  Michelangelo was my mine on account of the painted altar. Through his bookishness and silent introspection, Ettore Lo Bianco had earnt himself the moniker of 'The Monk'. Chicco Brancaleone, meanwhile,  was known to all as Carnera, after the Italian world heavyweight champion Primo Carnera.

Well Carnera, he must have noted the connection Irene and I had made. Detected that initial romantic spark between us. "Hey Michelangelo," he whispered conspiratorially in my ear one May evening as we rattled campbound in the back of the lorry. "You and Irene ever feel the need for a bit of privacy, I can show you where and how if you like."

It was, I told myself, purely out of academic interest that I tagged along beside him as we made our way to the washroom a few minutes later. "Here," he whispered as we passed under the water tower. He paused his step, eyes swivelling left and right, alert to the apearance of any nearby guards. "The perimeter wire right behind me. Was me and a few other of our boys they had lay it. Only, at one point the guard who was keeping an eye on us nipped off for a pee. That's why if you look closely - and I mean real closely - you'll find the barb's not quite as tightly wound here. If you've got steady hands..." There was a glance down at mine. "Artist's hands like yours.... A lean figure. Well, a man can just about wriggle himself through." A smile crooked the corners of his lips. "Done it myself, couple of times."

"You mean---?"

"Me and Rosie." The smile growing wider, he discreetly tossed his head ninety degrees to the right, towards a clump of ash trees about two hundred metres beyond the perimeter. "Cycles out here from her farmhouse, waits for me in those trees." He now looked down at his own hands, their backs gridded with scars like etching crosshatch. "You'll get a couple of scratches on your way out, another couple on the way back in. You need to be handy with a needle and thread too. Rip your uniform to shreds."

Yes, I recalled seeing him one Sunday morning hunched in the sunshine in his underwear, uniform puddled at his side, face scrunched in concentration as he sought to thread a needle.

"But what about the guards?" I asked.

Luck, he admitted.  Oh yes, there was no getting away from it: one required a touch of  good old-fashioned fortuna. Whilst nocturnal patrols were infrequent, they were also unpredictable. No telling when the on-duty officer might decide to lay down his newspaper or furtive pornography for a moment, have a quick swing round the perimeter.

"But then, what's life without risks?" Carnera concluded. "A blank canvas without a single brushstroke of colour, no?"

There was a meaty slap of a hand on my shoulder, a wide parting grin. And then gone, bouncing his way off to the unruly mob outside the washroom which passed as a queue.

What's life without risks?

It was the same line I recited to Irene that morning several weeks later after I'd presented her with my sketch. After she'd expressed her wistful desire that there was some way we could be alone for a while.

Sergeant Reynolds had at that moment been approaching in the middle distance, his stride lengthening ominously as he spotted us together there in the middle of the field. As Irene had quickly folded sketch into the pocket of her smock, I outlined the details. Exactly what she would need to do, exactly what I would need to do.

"Get away from that girl now you greasy damn wop!"

The sergeant's grunt was boomingly close, the firm shove of his rifle butt against my chest imminent.

"I... I'll need to think about," she whispered, brow furrowed, before scampering back off to her duties.

Those next few days, during the limited occasions we had to exchange a few words, it was a subject we never broached. She seemed distant somehow, her smiles less convincing, her glances not so intense. So much so I felt my heart fogged by a slowly descending sadness, as if by asking her for something she was unwilling or unable to give, I risked losing her. I was still inexperienced in such matters and wondered if I'd read the signals wrong. Apart from the dangers inherent to such  a covert, night-cloaked encounter, I was a married man. Perhaps it had been expecting too much that a girl as dignified and honourable as Irene Brennan would be able to overlook this fact.

It came as a surprise therefore when the second Saturday after I'd first mooted the plan, as we prisoners were wearily being loaded back onto the lorry, I felt the soft bump of her shoulder against mine, the tingling caress of her voice in my ear.

"I've been thinking about what you said. About risks, blank canvases. And I've decided you're right. So I'll meet you in those trees, okay. Half past midnight. Just don't you dare be late you hear me Vincenzo D'Ambra."

The smile she beamed up at me quickly morphed into a stern parting glare.

"And for the love of the Holy Mother, leave your wedding ring behind."

Thus it was I spent a little longer than usual in the washroom that evening. Not just the extra-thorough scrubbing requisite of  an impending romantic tryst, but the prolonged application of soapy water to my ring finger, turning and pulling and squirming, face gurning back at me in the mirror in the effort to wrestle the thing off. Finally I managed to tug it loose, the ting of the falling metal against the ceramic of the washbasin a deafening one.

As an artist, the symbolic significance of the moment wasn't lost on me. As a man in love, profoundly and for the very first time, it felt like the shedding of a necessary weight. The cutting of an anchor line. My heart at last free, offered to the ebb and flow of the tides.

*

She was waiting for me as promised, her presence manifested by a faint inquistive whisper through the trees.

"Is that you Vincenzo?"

"Yes, it's me," I panted breathlessy back. The two-hundred metre sprint from perimeter wire to treeline had felt more like an Olympic marathon.

Our voices guided us into each other's arms, her three dimensions a surprise somehow, almost a revelation. Soft fingertips explored my face, traced a meandering journey from forehead, nose, cheekbones, down to mouth. Almost as if, with my face dirt-blackened as it was, she sought confirmation of my identity from my physical contours. My odour too, her nose for several moments pressing into the hollow of my neck.

"Yes Vincenzo, it's you."

From the basket of  Mrs Harvey's bicycle she produced a blanket for us to lay upon, a cloth and bottle of antiseptic for my wounds. I hadn't breached the wire completely unscathed - other than hands I'd also snagged back of head - but it was nothing too serious. Nothing that wasn't worth it. As for guards, it seemed Carnera was right - surveillance was half-hearted at best. There hadn't been a single light on anywhere. No flicker of a cigarette being lit. No coughs, sighs, spits. No soft tread of approaching feet.

Once my wounds were cleaned and dry, well... then we made love. Rapturously, unreservedly, as many times as we could. Our bodies thrummed by some fizzing electric buzz, minds afloat above and beyond the Lincolnshire night. Above and beyond that God-cursed war. Above and beyond everything which tied us to the ground.

In the lulls between, I held her tightly. More tightly than I had ever held Ada Pucci, more tightly than I would hold any woman ever again. I think as human beings we just somehow know when we we're living them, those images and sensations our minds will drift towards during our last conscious moments  upon our deathbeds. Lying there with Irene in my arms, the faint glow of moonlight blotted by the leaves above, the sound of their gentle rustling in the breeze - these I have no doubt will be mine, just as I'm equally as sure they were hers.

"It's getting on," she whispered finally. "Better get going. Can't risk the Harveys already being up when I get back."

And God damn her if she wasn't right.  Already the horizon was discernable, the former blackness now diluted to an inky blue. It would take her half an hour or more to cycle back to the farmhouse, the same treeless stretch of  road along which the lorry rattled each morning.

"Well, see you Monday then. Out in the fields."

She'd mounted bicycle, was about to push off into the night. As a farewell, it seemed wholly insufficient.

"Irene, I won't forget this night. Not ever. I'll carry it in my heart like the night sky carries the moon and the stars."

"Be careful Vincenzo," she whispered back. "Please."

And with that she was gone, a slowly fading squeak in the darkness. Alone in the night, I contemplated the moon I'd just eulogised, three-quarters full, its glow dimmed behind a wisp of cloud. The north star was effortlessly located a little to its right, nestled amongst a dozen familiar constellations. Beneath, the iron-flat fields stretched to a horizon so low and distant I felt almost at sea. It seemed to call out to me. Beckon me to see what might lie beyond...

There was an English teacher who came to the camp one evening a week, Mr Marston his name. I recalled the tap of his baton against the map that first lesson: London, Birmingham, Bristol... Northwards then, up into Scotland, back down again: Newcastle, Leeds, Nottingham... Then that final tap, firmer, the point of the baton remaining pressed against the paper. And we, gentlemen, are just here. The fine county of Lincolnshire. Few of the class had been paying much attention, but I, the fisherman, had noticed: we weren't far from the sea.

Follow the drone of the returning German bombers, I thought. East, towards the rising sun. Could put ten kilometres behind me before roll call, hit the coast by mid-morning....

For a moment, it seemed like the first step of some grand masterplan. But then what, I wondered? Steal some poor soul's trawler? Even if by some miracle I was able to get my hands on sufficient fuel, the prospect of attempting to navigate my way around the war-ravaged waters of Europe was hardly enticing.

I looked back towards the camp, reflected on all that it represented. Comradeship, adequate rations. A safe haven where to sit out the remainder of the war, however long that might be. And yes, all this wasn't half the reason I had to remain. Not even a hundredth, a thousandth.

Taking a deep breath, I stepped out from the treeline. Began the sprint for the wire.

*

Irene and I would meet covertly amongst those trees a further five or six times, each of our trysts a cruelly brief truce from reality. From the war, the endless bone-wearying toil.  Only once did a sudden sway of torchlight cause my heart a nasty jump, force me to burrow myself stomach down in the dirt, pray I wouldn't be exposed. Over time, I perfected the contortionist wiggle through the barb, was able to emerge the other side more or less unscathed.

Into Irene's waiting arms I had also planned to scurry that first Saturday of September, just as soon as I'd helped Ettore Lo Bianco squirm his way through the wire.

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