The Painted Altar

Chapter Thirty-Four

And here my story comes to some sort of an end I suppose, the proceeding half a century a mere footnote to those tragic and tumultuous years of the war and its immediate aftermath.

After Cambridge, I spent two years in London studying for a Master's in Fine Art Conservation. My flat was above a butcher's shop just five minutes from St Paul's. The war had been over for ten years by then but there were still entire streets which were just mounds of rubble. The whole of the East End, people told me, had been flattened like a trodden ants' nest. Though I've spent much of my life touching up and reanimating religious art, I've never been a church-going type myself. I sometimes wonder though if Wren's cathedral survived that hailstorm of Nazi bombs due to an act of divine intervention. It seems the only logical conclusion.

Following my Master's, I worked for a few years for the National Trust. As you might imagine, the post-war period was a boom time in my line of work. Numerous were the public galleries and museums and listed buildings which had taken a hit, or else been shaken and dishevelled by one close by. Numerous the works of art which needed saving, Numerous too, sadly, those which despite our best efforts were just plain unrescuable.

It was '59 when I packed up my things and got on a flight bound for Milan. By that point I'd spent seventeen years of my life in England, only one less than I'd spent in Punto San Giacomo, and I suppose the call of my homeland - so admirably dragging itself back to its feet post-conflict - was a strong one. That is without of course considering professional motivations: it isn't perhaps too much of exaggeration to claim that there are as many artistic gems in need of care and protection here in Italy as in the rest of Europe combined.

A return to Puglia was not of course an option; hadn't been one since that day in September '43 I'd stepped out from treeline and announced to the smirking auburn-haired figure waiting for me amongst the cows that my name was Ettore Lo Bianco. For my own protection, my movements, any life I wished to carve out for myself, would have to be confined to the north of the country.

Even then I was to receive a shock, just my third day back in the country, a Sunday. I was sipping a cappuccino outside a bar along Corso Venezia when a passing voice suddenly called out in exclamation.

"Vincenzo!"

It took a moment to even register that the person was addressing himself to me, sixteen years having by then passed since anyone had called me by that name. Enough time for my reflexes to have dulled. To have almost forgotten that Vincenzo was indeed my name, the one my parents had chosen for me.

Looking up, I saw a smartly dressed man two or three years younger than myself, a little girl of six or seven holding onto his hand. Gazing up into his face, the decades seemed to peel away. Though I couldn't remember his first name, I recognised him as the younger brother of Rocco Palumbo, a boyhood friend from Punto San Giacomo. Like many southern-born men in the post-war economic boom, he'd evidently settled in the north.

"Vincenzo D'Ambra, that you? But I thought---"

"I'm sorry," I replied in English, "but I don't speak Italian." As a lie it was a somewhat ill-conceived one, I immediately realised - there on the table beneath me was the local classified paper opened out to the flats for rent section, my red pen having circled several of the more interesting ads.

Palumbo at first frowned, his lips then stretching into that slowly dawning smile of someone believing that their leg is being pulled.

"Ah come on Vincenzo. Stop playing with me would you? I know it's you."

All I could do was keep repeating that I didn't understand Italian. That he must be getting me confused with someone. That my name was Peter and that I was from London.

By this time several heads had turned in our direction from neighbouring tables; elsewhere, passers-by were slowing their steps to gawp. Sensing perhaps that her father seemed to be making a public spectacle of himself, Palumbo's daugher began to forcibly tug at his hand.

"Papa, the ice-cream. You promised me ice-cream."

I'll never forget that expression on his face as he stepped away, his confusion curdling to scowled disgust.

"What's the matter with you D'Ambra? Us folk from Punto San Giacomo not good enough for you any more?"

They're words I've carried in my heart through all these decades like sharp little stones trapped inside a shoe.

*

Within an hour I was on a train, got myself the hell out of Milan. Given my qualifications and experience, I didn't imagine I would have much difficulty finding a suitable job in some other northerm city, and so it proved. A few weeks later I found myself the newly appointed head of art restoration for the region of Veneto, and here in Verona I've remained ever since. There have been no more incidents like my encounter with Rocco Palumbo's brother that day in Milan, but even as I have greyed and drooped and withered, the ageing process making it ever less probable that someone might recognise me - that some obdurate ghost step from my old life into the new - not a single second of my life has passed free from the shadows. Not a single breath escaped my lips that wasn't snatched or stuttered.

As for women, yes, there have been a few. No-one who has stolen my heart like Irene Brennan or Hilda Frecklington both did, and as I always suspected no woman ever again would. Intimacy was something I always feared, I suppose. That I might allow someone to get too close, enough so to rip off this fragile mask I wear.

The nearest I again came to true love was a history teacher at the local Classical Lyceum by the name of Mariella. Had we met twenty years earlier than we did who knows how things might have been different. We were both in our fifties however, too old and settled in our ways for the idea of cohabitation to appeal. I would call round to hers on Saturday evenings, share first her table and then her bed. We went on holidays together - European art capitals, leaf-kicking autumn weekends in the mountains. If ever one of us needed, felt the weight of solitude begin to press, the other would be there. When she passed away five years ago it was the first time I had cried since Hilda Frecklington's funeral. At eighty-six years old, I guess romance is done with me now.

It's a clichè to say it I know, but then something doesn't become a clichè unless imbued by the chime of truth. All these years, they have flown by, each ever faster than the previous. At the speed of sound, I am now hurtling towards my death.

That's the thing about life. Just as you begin to work it out, suddenly it ends.

This is the end of part three. In part four, which consists of five final chapters, the narrative voice returns to Mary. As well as unveiling the novel's central mystery, this short, ultimate section will also tie up the story's various subplots. If you enjoyed part three, and appreciate the historical research which went into it, it would put an enormous smile on this amateur writer's face if you could give me the Wattpad thumbs up of a vote (the star symbol). Even more gratefully appreciated would a brief comment of feedback/constructive criticism via the speech bubble symbol.

Thanks so much everyone for your support.