The Painted Altar

Chapter Thirty-Three

Plot reminder: On New Year's Day 1950 Vincenzo (Ettore) learns that Hilda has a brain tumour. Joe, who is mentioned in the final section of this chapter, is the Polish farm hand who has been employed at Woodside Dairy.

~~~~~

My passport arrived the following March along with Hilda's, for both of us our first. She had never even left East Anglia before, she told me. Our trip to France that Easter must have seemed like travelling to the very ends of the Earth.

Whilst true that much of Europe still resembled some post-apocalyptic wasteland, nowhere were the horrors of recent history more evident than in the war cemeteries of Normandy. The remains of Ronald Peter Frecklington, along with those of almost five thousand other men who had fallen at Sword Beach, lie at a site near the town of Bayeaux. Though at Tobruk I had side-stepped countless strewn corpses, witnessed first hand the battlefield clear-up operations -  the bodies tossed like refuse bags onto the backs of lorries, precarious limp-limbed mounds of humanity - nothing had ever brought home to me the full devastating scale of the war than stepping through the gates of that cemetery.

Dear Christ, those endless rows of clean white graves...

Perhaps it was their sheer neatness which struck me most, so removed from the dirt and disorder of battle. The chaos sanitised so that the human mind might begin to comprehend it, the horror catalogued and numbered and put in alphabetical order. A library of war, all muted whispers and the soft curious tread of feet amongst the rows.

When we found Ronnie's grave, I slipped my hand from Hilda's, stooped myself down for a moment.

"Sorry you didn't make it my friend," I whispered, tapping the top of the stone. "So very, very sorry." I felt my eyes begin to well, my words intended in a general sense - not just for Ronnie but for all the fallen. That place, it seemed to transcend nationality. It wasn't for their motherland that those young men had jumped from the landing craft, thrown themselves blindly into the waiting swarm of Nazi bullets, but for all of us. Every last man, woman and child.

Rising back to my feet, I brushed a comforting hand down Hilda's arm. Stepped away then, left her alone to weep her maternal goodbyes.

*

There is no unit of measurement for love. No centimetres of love. No kilos, watts, decibels. Love is absolute, as incalculable as the universe. It is a pure brilliant white, never some sub-shade of grey. You cannot love one person less or more than another. You either love them, or you don't.

My love for Hilda Frecklington wasn't inferior to my love for Irene Brennan. I loved both women equally and profoundly, felt them in my very bones. No, the difference in my relationships with the two wasn't a question of quantity of love, rather the nature of it. As previously described, Irene was the crash of a rogue wave breaching the hull of a trawler. Hilda, by contrast, felt more like the slow unravelling of dawn on the distant horizon. Whilst Irene was the fiery blast of an opened furnace door, Hilda offered the cosy warmth of a winter log fire. If I loved Irene like a bird the sky, then I loved Hilda like a dog loves everything grounded and familiar. Everything that represents home.

Her passing the following September was a moment of great emotional ambiguity. On the one hand, there was an enormous sense of relief that her suffering was now at an end. No more those unbearable grinding headaches. No more that shaky extended hand searching for the wall, the doorframe, my shoulder, anything at all to keep her steady as she shuffled once more to the toilet just minutes after the last time. No more would I have to witness that grey, barely recognisable figure there in the hospital bed, ever more withered with each visit, a fallen summer fruit disintegrating into October. No more the grunts, the groans, the undignified croaks of the prematurely aged.

Then on the other hand there was the anger, the simmering sense of injustice. Oh, who knew how things would have panned out had she lived her allotted three score and ten. Whether I in my late-forties would still have been able to justify celibate cohabitation with a seventy-year-old. Yet even so, I was unable to estinguish that burning flame of ire in my heart. All those years which had been stolen from us. The meandering country walks with the dogs playing at our heels. The Christmases, the Sunday lunches, the ha'penny stake games of cribbage. The less strenous life my studies would have afforded her. The books she would finally have had the time to read, the places we would have visited together, the adventures shared.

Mostly though, what I felt was a debilitating sense of loss. Even now, fifty-seven years later, it's a grief which has never quite lifted. Still hovers like the shadow of a cloud over my days.

*

Much as her life, Hilda's funeral was a sad, sober affair. That the assembled mourners numbered barely a score reflected much more the social isolation that came with being a farmer's wife than it did Hilda's character. Though few, those of us present in the crematorium that grey September day knew the splendour of the soul we were bidding our farewells to. We'd been inspired by her humility, stoicism and loyalty. The words I offered at the lectern were spoken not just on my own behalf, but I liked to believe also on behalf of Ronnie, her first husband John, everyone whose life had in some way been touched by hers. I don't think there was a dry eye in the house.

There was cousin who'd made the trip over from Suffolk - Hilda's only remaining family, a bank manager's wife who she'd mentioned a couple of times in passing, and never particularly glowingly. As the post-funeral sherry and sandwiches neared their end, it was I alone who the solicitor ushered to one side however.

"Everything, Hector," he said simply. "It's all yours, right down to the last nail."

In 1950, I would soon learn, a British woman could not legally leave her estate to a foreign national unless married to him. I would also learn that her tumour had first been diagnosed in May of the previous year. I have no doubt therefore that as she'd coyly smiled at me out in the neighbouring fields that golden June evening, said that she wasn't the one who was going to get down on one knee, the matter of her last will and testament had been chief among her machinations.

*

Being the owner of a cattle farm carried with it the sort of responsibilities which can prematurely grey and wrinkle a man, and thus one night not long after the funeral - the pair of us armed with a bottle of vodka to help lubricate mental faculties - Joe and I sat down and worked out a plan by which the deeds could be signed over to him. Chief among the stipulations, of course, was a bargain sale price. That this in fact was little more than half of what I might have received had I held out for another buyer to come along was of peripheral concern. Mine is not the cold ruthless heart of a businessman, and it seemed only right that Joe - a war hero and a man who in those final months of Hilda's life had kept the place going almost single-handedly, worked himself into the ground - should share in my good fortune. Within two months he had wed his girl Rita; within a year, had become a father. I'm sure it would have gladdened Hilda's heart to have heard Woodside Dairy once more echo with the cries of a baby. To have felt the glow of a young and loving family again warm the winter cold.

I would meanwhile rent a flat along Trinity Street in Cambridge for the remainder of my undergraduate years, throw myself into my studies with a renewed vigour and sense of mission. It was no longer only Ettore Lo Bianco I wished to do honour to, but Hilda Frecklington too.

Though undeniably the proudest day of my life, my graduation ceremony in June 1953 was also on many levels one of the saddest. Whilst the sea of applauding faces beneath the stage as the dean handed me my degree roll included Joe and Rita, Mr and Mrs Habergham, as well as a couple of other regulers from the White Horse, and whilst I was eternally grateful to each of them for their presence and support, my mind couldn't help but linger on the faces which were missing. Hilda of course. Ettore. Mostly though, I pictured my mother and my father. My sisters Rosalba, Lidia and Erica. And oh Christ, my little brother Salvatore too. He'd just been a kid of twelve the last time I saw him; invisibly, surreptitiously, would by then have grown into a strapping young man of twenty-four.

Never as on that day have I missed my family so much. Never as on that day I have I questioned the decisions I took. The choices made, the sacrifices suffered.