‘It was the ash,’ I pointed out.
‘Ah yes, the ash.’ He nodded. ‘My boy told me that it blew right across to the Adriatic coast — six inches of ash in the streets of Bari, two hundred kilometres away, he told me.’
One of the crew came aft at that moment and ordered us to fix our safely belts. A few minutes later we touched down at Pomigliano. The airport was hot and dusty. The sun blazed out of a cloudless sky. The air was almost tropical after Milan and I wished I’d changed into lighter clothing.
The airport bus took us into Naples through narrow, squalid, tram-lined streets where the houses opened straight on to the road and bare-footed children played half-naked in the gaping doorways. Naples hadn’t changed much — the same poverty and dirt. The white-painted hearses of the children would still be winding up the Via di Capodimonte to the cemetery and for all I knew the homeless would still be dying of malnutrition in the quarry vaults under the Via Roma. We came in by way of the Piazza Garibaldi and the Corso Umberto and as the bus ground its way through the chattering, laughing crowds time seemed suddenly to have stood still and I was back in 1944, a flight-lieutenant with nineteen German planes and more than sixty bomber sorties to my credit and nothing worse than a bullet scar across my ribs. That was before Maxwell had got me posted to Foggia, before I’d started those damned flights up to the north, dropping officers and supplies to the partigiani in the Etruscan hills.
At the air booking office I said good-bye to Hacket. He had been kind and helpful, but I wanted to be on my own. To be honest, I found him a tiring companion. ‘Where are you staying?’ he asked me as we stood on the hot pavement.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ll find some little hotel along the waterfront, I expect.’
‘Well, you’ll find me at the Hotel Grand. Any time you feel like a drink, just give me a call.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’ll come and have dinner with me sometime.’ A taxi drew up and I got in with my suitcase. ‘And thank you again for being so kind to me last night.’ Then I ordered the driver to go to the Porto Santa Lucia. ‘I’ll telephone you,’ I said as the taxi drove off. I looked back and he waved his grey homburg to me, his rimless glasses catching the sunlight so that he looked like an owl surprised by the noontide glare. He looked very American, standing there in the sun with his sleek grey suit and the camera slung across his shoulders as though it belonged there permanently, like a piece of equipment issued to him before he left the States.
The taxi crossed the Piazza del Plebescito, past the Palazzo Reale where the big Naafi Club had been during the war, and slid down to the waterfront. The sea was flat like a mirror, a misty blue burnished by the sun. The sails of yachts gleamed like gliding pyramids of white, and humped against the skyline was the dim outline of Capri, half lost in the haze. I stopped at the little port of Santa Lucia that nestles against the dark, rocky mass of the Castello dell’Ovo. Sitting there in the warmth of the sun, watching a fishing boat preparing to sail, with the sweep of Naples Bay spread before me and Vesuvius standing in the background like a huge, battered pyramid, Milan faded away, a nightmare only vaguely remembered. I felt relaxed and at peace with the world, like a ghost that has come back and found his youth again — sight, sound, smell, it was the same Naples, a wonderful heady concoction of riches and squallor, sun and dust and ragged, thieving urchins. Probably they still sold their sisters in the Galleria Umberto and stole from every unguarded vehicle that ran down the Via Roma. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about the mixture of wealth and poverty and the thousands who died every day of starvation and horrible, incurable diseases and filled the hearses that the gaunt horses dragged up to Capodimonte. It was all romance to me and I just sat there, drinking it in and letting the lotus of Naples take hold of me.
I hadn’t booked accommodation. But I knew it would be all right. I just felt that nothing could go wrong now.