There was only one other customer, a lorry driver with forearms like rolled pork joints, who sat reading yesterday’s Sun over a plate wiped clean with dunked bread.
Pepe looked at Dryden with eternally disappointed eyes: ‘Focaccia?’
Dryden was one of the few daytime customers who could be inveigled into eating something Italian. Usually he bought freshly baked bread, olives and cheese for his regular late-night meal at The Tower.
‘Sure. Join me for a drink?’
Pepe brought the bread over. It was a rich nutty brown and still warm. Dryden broke it and offered his host some. They ate in silence while Dryden slurped the corretto and Pepe sipped from a small glass of grappa. Outside, through an oval Dryden had cleared in the steam, Humph ate at the wheel of the Capri – a picture of manic concentration.
They talked about Humph’s great loves, his two daughters, and Ipswich Town FC. Dryden waited for the conversation to lapse into easy silence.
‘And Laura?’ asked Pepe.
Dryden saw his chance. ‘Progress is slow. She wants to eat here one day. Perhaps it will be soon, who knows?’ He sipped his coffee: ‘A story – today. They found a body – just the bones – in a tunnel under the old PoW camp. Your father, he was a prisoner there?’
A wooden shield on the wall, which Dryden had noticed the first time they had stopped at Il Giardino almost three years earlier, was set against a background of the Italian flag above the legend ‘Association of Italian Prisoners of War. Ely Branch’.
‘Sure. Papà Marco was captured in the war, early on, in North Africa. They shipped him to Southampton, then by rail to Ely. That was 1941 by then. He was interned in the PoW camp, then released with the rest, at least most of the rest, to work on the fields. After the war he saved and bought this.’ He raised a hand in mock triumph, looking round at the restaurant. His head dropped as he moved a plastic tomato sauce bottle like a chess piece on the table cloth.
‘But why stay? I don’t understand. I guess I’d have been on the first boat back to – where was it? Venice?’
‘Not really. Mestre. It’s on the coast to the north. You wouldn’t like Mestre, Dryden – it is Venice’s workshop, that is what they say. An industrial city, without beauty.’
Dryden considered the slate-blue landscape under the moon he could see through the oval in the steam. ‘But better than this?’
‘Not then. I don’t know much but Dad talked about it a bit, before he died. There was revolution in the north, turmoil, the Right fighting the Left, no one in the middle. There was no respect for soldiers, there is still no respect for soldiers,’ he said, glancing at a picture on the wall showing a young man in a uniform at a village café table.
‘Some went back but the news wasn’t good – no jobs, and more fighting. And anyway, by then people like Dad had been accepted here, had friends, and were working on the land. Even when the soldiers came back there was work.’
‘And romance?’
‘For some. Dad had met Mum at home. But yes, others married local girls. Some of them did it pretty quick before the competition got back from the war.’
They laughed together and drank. Dryden saw that Humph had succumbed to an early evening nap.
‘They meet then, the survivors, the ones who stayed behind?’
‘Yup. There’s the association. They’ve got a website, the lot. Dad founded it. There’s a meeting here next week – Monday lunchtime – always Monday lunchtime – the last Monday in the month. You should come – there’s a story. They want to build a memorial to Dad. He loved his home country, yes, but not like the rest.’
Dryden felt the effects of the grappa trickling through his brain. ‘How did he love his country?’
‘From a distance. He said we’d left. That was it. We had a new life and there was nothing sadder than a patriotic expatriate. We are Italians and proud of that, but Italy is not our country now – this is our country.’
‘Did he ever talk about the PoW camp?’
Pepe looked towards the counter, they could hear his mother singing in the kitchen beyond.
‘A little, perhaps, and perhaps more towards the end. Why do you ask?’
‘Did anyone ever escape?’
Pepe shrugged. ‘I did not hear – but then, for most of them it is something they do not want to remember. There’s a picture of Dad in the camp. Would you like to see it?’
He was back in a minute. The picture was black and white and had inevitably faded with the years but, like most wartime photographs, the quality was pin-sharp. Five men in white vests and overalls sat on the steps of a PoW hut. Each held a spade in one hand and a variety of vegetables in the other, leeks mostly, with onions and celery.