‘You want me to play cribbage with you?’ she repeats.
‘Look, Sophie. You’re right. You’re leaving tomorrow. I was … I thought … Well, never mind. Cribbage is much better than sex, anyway.’
I like him. I like him a lot.
Sliding off the hanging chair, Sophie steps over the snoring dog and sits on the sofa. ‘I’ll be red.’
***
Sophie turns to Sam at the porch door. ‘Thanks, Sam. That was fun.’
‘Ah, to think you’ll always think of me as the man who introduced you to cribbage.’
She laughs. ‘It was fun. Really. I never have a chance to just … to just be easy. It was easy tonight, with you.’
‘That’s me. I’m easy.’ The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles. ‘Or, I could be if you’d let me.’
Sophie laughs. ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
They stand for a moment, the silence broken only by the thundering waves on the beach below. ‘So, I’ll call a taxi in the morning.’
‘No, I’ll drive you.’
‘On the bike?’
Sam raises his eyebrows in mock offence. ‘Don’t you like Miss Julie? There’s always the old pickup truck, but she could go at any minute.’
‘Miss Julie is fine.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you back to Ellie’s?’
‘No, she’s just up the hill.’
‘Okay. Watch out for those fairies.’
‘I will.’
Sam shuts the door behind her. She turns towards the path. The waves crash on the beach below and the branches of the spruce trees whip around her in the growing wind.
She turns back to the cottage. The door opens before she’s finished knocking.
‘I don’t have a heart of ice.’
‘I never thought you did.’
Chapter 44
Monte Cassino, Italy – 19 March 1944
Thomas presses himself against the jagged limestone of the castle’s remaining wall. The burnt-out shell of the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino – immolated to sacrificial rubble in the Allied bombing of the previous month – lies ahead on the crest of Monte Cassino, now a nest for the German paratroopers who have dug in, allowing them eagle-eyed views of the smaller Hangman’s Hill and Castle Hill below. The strains of a gramophone recording of ‘Besame Mucho’ drift down from the monastery, filtering through the barrage of Allied artillery guns.
He glances to the south towards Naples. The ink-black sky is washed with a glow of yellow and red where Vesuvius is throwing its innards into the sky. Too far away for them to worry about. There were other things to worry about. Like taking Hangman’s Hill without ending up like one of the poor suckers rotting on the rocky hillsides, their bodies blackened by the creosote poured over them to cover the stench.
He fingers the cluster of wilted green weeds pinned to his uniform lapel. ‘Italian shamrocks,’ Father Ryan had said as he’d handed them out for St Patrick’s Day. St Patrick’s Day and his own birthday. Happy Birthday to me. And not even a Catholic.
He closes his eyes and tries to draw Ellie’s face in his mind. Her hair the colour of the sandy beach at Lumsden, her eyes the blue-grey of an August sky over the North Atlantic shore. He breathes deeply, searching for the elusive lavender of her scent. The fingers of his right hand twitch, remembering the warmth of her skin and the hills and valleys of her body.
Machine gun fire blasts through the sharp pre-dawn air from the direction of Hangman’s Hill, setting off a response from the Essex Regiment and the Newfoundlanders edging their way over the craters and rubble to the hill.
‘You ready, Tommy?’ Charlie Murphy adjusts the chinstrap of his helmet and picks up his rifle.
‘It’s madness, Charlie. They’re gonna pick us off like ducks on a pond if we tries to attack the monastery from Hangman’s Hill. They’ll have a clear view of us from up there.’
‘Don’t I knows it, b’y. But you gotta do what they says. We’re just soldiers.’ A thick cloud of white smoke wafts through the rubble of the castle from the smoke bombs being lobbed at the hills from the divisions below. Charlie coughs and waves at the smoke. ‘Holy Joe, how are we meant to see where we’re goin’ through this stuff? We won’t be able to see the white tape the engineers laid out on the path.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that, Charlie, the tape’s blown to hell. We’ll just have to try to figure out where to step. If you blows up, I’ll knows not to step there.’
Thomas reaches into his tunic pocket and pulls out a metal flask. He unscrews the top and takes a long swig. He taps it on Charlie’s rifle. ‘Here you goes, b’y. Have some Dutch courage. You knows what they says, you gotta be a drunk or an idiot to be a soldier, and I knows I’m not an idiot.’
***
Thomas and Charlie follow the others down the side of Castle Hill, stumbling past bomb craters and the smashed mountain stone. The bodies of Allied and German soldiers killed in the battles of the previous week litter the hill like debris, and Thomas is glad of the black night and the thick smoke that cloaks them from view. They are a few metres up Hangman’s Hill when a grenade crashes onto the hill above them, sending out shards of stone like daggers. A split second of silence, then the screams as men jolt back to consciousness. It’s true what they says. We all cries for our mothers and our lovers in the end.
A blast of machine gun fire. Men falling through the smoke. Thomas grabs Charlie’s arm and they run towards an opening in the mountain face. Bullets ricochet off the stone around them as they dodge into the crevice and flatten themselves against the ground.
‘Holy, Jaysus, God,’ Charlie says as he pants into the dust.
Outside, the air is a mash of the throbbing artillery guns, exploding grenades and blasts of machine gun fire. And the screams and cries of men.
‘We’d best lie low, Charlie. Till things calm down.’
‘Like I was ever gonna go out there, b’y. There’s no way in hell. I intends to live a long, long life.’ He lifts his head and yells towards the opening. ‘You bloody bastards!’
A whizz. A ricochet. A gasp.
Charlie slumps against Thomas, his eyes wide in surprise, a trickle of blood tracing down his cheek from the neat hole in his forehead.
***
‘Tommy? Komm nach draussen, Tommy.’
A stone rolls into the crevice. Thomas’s heart beats a drum in his chest. Another stone hops along the ground, stopping an inch from his nose. His fingers turn white where they grip the barrel and trigger of his rifle. So, this is how it ends. Tom Parsons and Charlie Murphy dead on Hangman’s Hill. They couldn’t put that on their gravestones. His mam wouldn’t have that, that’s for sure. It would have to be something more … heroic. The dawn is colouring the sky above the smoke pink. He has a clear view of Monte Cassino and the ruined monastery, sitting like a pink pearl above the fog. Maybe heaven looked like this. Maybe he was already halfway there.
Rising to his feet, he takes a deep breath. I’m sorry, Ellie Mae. I’m sorry.
He runs out of the crevice, just as a grenade explodes outside. His body is in the air. Then he hits the ground hard, his head smashing against a rock. He is falling. Falling. And then, nothing.