All That Man Is

1

The next morning he needs to do the shopping. There is nothing in the house. He drives, as soon as it is fully light, at about eight, to the Lidl in Argenta. From the house, near Molinella, the main road points straight towards it. Dead straight, and lined in places with windy poplars. This is flat land. The horizon dominates here.

Argenta: a suburban fragment in the middle of the plain. He waits at a traffic light and passes through the centre, and then along the canal, its surface giving back the winter sunlight. The car park is empty this early on a weekday morning. He parks near the entrance and wheels a trolley into the bright warmth of the interior.

He knows where to find what he needs. When he was last in Italy, earlier in the year, he started shopping here. He pushes the trolley past the piled-up stuff, sometimes taking things, or stopping to look at what there is. He needs to put his glasses on to study the label on a packet of tea. Then he takes them off and nudges the trolley on to the next thing. He is evidently in no hurry. He takes a moment to remove his overcoat and fold it over the edge of the still nearly empty trolley.

He selects his fruit with care. He tears off one of the small plastic bags and then, after failing for a few moments to separate it open, starts to fill it with tangerines.

He turns his attention to the apples.

He selects, with inquisitively squeezing fingers, an avocado.

One lemon.

He takes his list out of the pocket of his trousers to make sure he has not forgotten anything in this part of the shop. Apparently satisfied, he pushes on, towards the drinks, where he spends some time comparing the prices of the various lagers they have, still packed on pallets. The prices of things hang on signs — loud yellow signs, with the price printed in a font that looks almost as though it has been handwritten with a marker pen. (He wonders, for a moment, whether the signs are, in fact, handwritten. No — too uniform.) He puts a six-pack of Bergkönig lager into his trolley and moves on. He ignores the wine. He would never buy wine here.

Non-foods is next, and he spends some time fussing with sponges and washing-up liquid.

The stuff in his trolley, the small quantities of everything — he has just taken a shrink-wrapped pack of two sausages from a fridge — suggest a man who is living alone.

And indeed he is here on his own.

He arrived last night at Bologna airport — the late Ryanair flight from Stansted. The taxi through the wintry darkness to the house. The house was cold. Entropic forces were gnawing at it. There were mouse droppings on the floor. Signs of damp, again, in the wall at the foot of the stairs. Still in his coat he sat down on the small sofa in the hall. He felt weak and frozen. His breath hung in the air in front of his mouth as he sat there, with the key still in his hand. He had to start the heating — to struggle with the oil-fired furnace. He had a small glass of grappa. He managed to start the heating.

It is nearly ten when he transfers his shopping from the trolley to his old VW Passat estate, and then wheels the noisily empty trolley back to the mass of others near the entrance. He asks himself whether there is anything else he needs to pick up in Argenta. Nothing much springs to mind, and he wonders, starting the car, whether to stop somewhere for a coffee. The Piazza Garibaldi. There are a few places there where it might be a pleasure to sit in the cold sunlight with a cappuccino and a newspaper for half an hour. He is undecided as he drives back along the canal. What decides it is the lack of parking space in the small piazza. He feels a faint pang of disappointment. It is not worth trying to find somewhere else to park, though, and soon he is out of Argenta again, among fields that stretch to the luminous winter horizon.

—

He thinks about death quite a lot now. It is hard not to think about it. Obviously, he doesn’t have that much time left. Ten years? In ten years he will be eighty-three. More than that? Well, probably not. So about ten years. Seen in one way, that is frighteningly little. It is terrible, how little it seems, sometimes. Waking at five a.m. on a December morning, for instance, in the large damp bedroom of the house near Argenta, the turquoise walls still hidden in darkness. The quiet ticking of the clock on the table next to the bed. It is terrible how little it seems. And since the operation two months ago he has understood that even ten years might be optimistic. He has had, since the operation, this strange permanent awareness of his heart and what it is doing, and this fear that it will suddenly stop doing it. He lies there, unpleasantly aware of its working, and of the fact that one day it will stop. He feels no more prepared to face death, though, than he ever has.

It is starting to get light in the large turquoise bedroom.

He has been lying there, awake, for two hours, thinking.

It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people — and of course friends and acquaintances are already falling. People he has known for decades. A fair few are dead already. He has attended their funerals. The numbers are starting to thin out. And still he finds it hard to understand — to properly understand — that he will die as well. That this experience is finite. That one day it will end. That ten years from now, quite probably, he just won’t be here.

There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, still lying there, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself — and that world will die with him. That world — that subjective experience of the world — which for him is the world — will not in fact outlast him. It is the ending of that stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable. He is staring at the enormous walnut wardrobe that stands on the far wall of the room, and he is aware, in an unusual way, of that stream of perception, of perceiving things. Of the pleasure of perceiving things. Of seeing the light from the window pass through slits in the heavy drapes and in dust-filled shafts find the surface of the wardrobe, the deep, time-darkened varnish.

Of hearing footsteps on the gravel outside.

—

The footsteps are Claudia’s. Claudia, the Romanian daily. His wife, Joanna, must have phoned from England and told her he was there.

‘Buongiorno, Claudia,’ he says, appearing downstairs in his dressing gown and slippers.

He has lost weight, a lot of weight, since she last saw him in the early part of the summer. Then he looked over-inflated, with a high, unhealthy colour. He doesn’t look healthier now, particularly. He seems shrunken, diminished. ‘Buongiorno, Signor Parson,’ she says. She is preparing herself for work. They speak Italian to each other — Claudia knows no English. Her Italian isn’t perfect either. It is worse than his. She arrived a few years ago, to join her son, who installs kitchens for IKEA in Bologna. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t know you are here.’

‘Did Joanna call you?’ he asks.

‘Signora Parson, yes. I am sorry,’ she says again.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he tells her. ‘Thank you for coming in. I’m sorry I didn’t call you to let you know I was here.’

‘Is okay,’ she says.

‘I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here,’ he says. They are in the kitchen and he starts to make his coffee, spooning it into the machine. ‘Just a week or two, I think.’

It is unusual for someone to be here at this time, first week of December. Christmas, sometimes, they are here. Not so much any more. In the old days, quite often. When Simon was little, and Joanna’s mother was still alive. In the old days. No Claudia then. An Italian lady, they used to have. And she had had to stop working. Some medical issue. What was her name? They stayed in touch for a while. Did they visit her in hospital in Ferrara or somewhere? He might have a memory of that, or he might be mixing it up with something else. Anyway, he has no idea what’s happened to her now. All these people you know in a lifetime. What happens to them all?

He is pouring some muesli into a huge mug, pouring skimmed milk over it. The skimmed milk still seems more like water than milk to him.

Claudia is asking what she should start with.

‘Maybe upstairs?’ he suggests, wanting to be left in peace in the kitchen for a while.

He sits at the table, eating muesli, hearing her heavy feet making the old steps squeak as she marches upstairs with her things.

How old is she? he wonders. Not young. Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times — he picks her up, occasionally, in his IKEA van.

—

When he has finished his muesli, he settles in the wing chair in the sitting room — an old one, in need of restuffing — tapping at his iPad. It was a present from Cordelia, while he was in hospital after the heart op. He has always been a technophile, what is now known as an ‘early adopter’ — he was the first among his friends, in about 1979, to own a video, a VHS player. He learned how to use the iPad in a day or two.

He taps at it.

Tap.

Tap.

Emails. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. He has had to stop doing most of the things he used to do — his post-retirement portfolio of interests. Down to nothing now, nearly. There is an email from Cordelia, which always pleases him. She talks about this and that. Asks how he is feeling. She says that Simon — her son, his grandson — has had a poem published in some magazine. Just a university magazine probably, though she doesn’t say so — she wants to make it sound as impressive as possible. Simon is in his first year at Oxford. She has attached the poem to the email and he looks at it while Claudia stomps about overhead, making the little glass pieces of the chandelier tinkle. (The chandelier was there when they bought the house — very valuable, they were assured.) The poem seems to be inspired by the famous miniature of Sultan Mehmet II in which he is shown smelling a flower.

The portrait shows this — his eyes fixed elsewhere

,

Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose

To the Turkic scimitar of his nose

.

The engrossing necessities of money and war

,

The wise politician’s precautionary

Fratricides, the apt play of power —

All proper activities in his sphere

,

And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?

A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;

Not beauty, I think, whatever that is

,

Not love, not ‘nature’

,

Not Allah, by that or any other name —

Just a moment’s immersion in the texture

Of existence, the eternal passing of time

.

Not terrible, he thinks. Some nice phrases. The engrossing necessities of money and war. Yes, that was nice. (He still misses them, after nearly ten years, those engrossing necessities, waiting for him at the end of the Tube journey to Whitehall, still feels that without them he is not properly living.) Yes, it was a nice way of putting it. And then there was…Where was it? Yes –

Just a moment’s immersion in the texture

Of existence

The words had made him think of the way he spent a minute or two, earlier that morning, staring at the wardrobe upstairs. The sense he had had then of losing himself in the act of perception. A moment’s immersion in the texture of existence — the texture of it. Yes. Well done, Simon. He will write him an email, he thinks. He will praise the poem — not too much, just enough to encourage him, and with qualifications. Cordelia has a tendency to praise her son unqualifiedly, which isn’t healthy. Simon is, it has to be said, just a little odd. He was there, in Argenta, that spring, with a friend. They were travelling around Europe and had stayed for a day or two. The friend — what was his name? — had been a lively fellow. Fun to have about the place. Simon, as usual, solemn and withdrawn. Less so towards the end. They had had some nice talks, the three of them, about serious subjects — literature, history, the state of Europe.

Claudia is at the door.

She wants to know if it’s okay to start on the kitchen.

—

When she has left, he showers and dresses, and makes himself lunch. He sets a place at the table in the kitchen — the dining room seems too formal a setting in which to eat a two-egg omelette, alone. He wonders whether to have a glass of wine with his omelette and salad. In the end he has two, which means he will not be able to drive anywhere for a few hours. He had thought he might drive somewhere. To the Valli di Argenta, perhaps, and walk there for half an hour — he is supposed to walk a few miles a day, and today the weather is dry and mild.

The afternoon seems to stretch out interminably in front of him. He tidies up a few drawers that haven’t been attended to for years — loses himself for a while in looking at old opera tickets and tourist maps and invoices for things he has long forgotten paying for. He sits at the piano and tries to play — it is terribly out of tune, and his fingers also soon start to hurt. They won’t do what he tells them to do. He keeps making mistakes and stops in frustration. He still feels strangely depressed about the trip to Ravenna yesterday. He went to Ravenna yesterday — just on a whim, he had nothing else to do — and got into difficulties with the traffic. He got lost and flustered, and ended up driving the wrong way down a narrow one-way street. He didn’t know what he had done until he met a van halfway down, its lights flashing irritably, and without space to do anything else, he had to reverse out the way he had arrived, looking over his shoulder, squinting with stress and an increasing sense of isolation. The street was straight; it shouldn’t have been a problem. Somehow, though, he kept losing the line. He kept having to stop and start again. He was holding the wheel tightly as if it was something preventing him from drowning. The driver of the van was shouting inaudibly like someone in a silent film.

He thinks of the faces of the people on the pavement, witnessing the scene, laughing, pointing to show him his mistake, smiling at him. Not unsympathetically, some of them. In a way that just made it worse. It was obvious from their expressions that what they were seeing was something pitiful — an old man, out of his depth, making a mess of things.

That was what their faces said they were seeing.

And it was a shock.

That wasn’t how he thought of himself at all.

Afterwards, when he had finally found somewhere to park, he walked the streets for a while, feeling absurdly shaken, and found himself, eventually, outside Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo.

It was hardly warmer inside than it was outside.

There were a few people there, not many, milling about, looking at the mosaics, those echoes of Byzantium. He himself had seen them many times — the long frontal lines of white-toga’d figures, white on gold. He has never been a Christian. Of course he was brought up in the vaguely or vestigially Christian setting of England in the 1940s and ’50s, but even in his earliest years he had not believed in God, in Jesus, or any of that. They had always been just words to him. Just stories, like other stories. That was not particularly unusual, he thought, for someone of his generation. He stood there, looking up at the impassive, pink-cheeked faces. In lines like a school photo. And then that extraordinary image, at the end, of the curtains opening, as if to show us something — only there’s nothing there, just a flat gold space, a surprising area of plain golden tiles. A pigeon had got in and was fluttering about up there.

He stayed for a few more minutes and then went out and looked at the outside of the basilica. The campanile, standing against the grey sky. He knew the history, sort of. Theoderic the Ostrogoth etc. Murdered his predecessor with his own hands — invited him for dinner apparently and personally murdered him. They were fighting over Italy. The Western Empire was falling apart.

Something about the whole episode depresses him. He is still weighed down, the next day, by the sense of his own uselessness that had taken hold of him as he was driving, as he was struggling with the Ravenna traffic — and then the fuck-up in the one-way street. It depresses him. Depresses him out of all proportion, you would think, to what actually happened, embarrassing as that was.

—

Later, and unexpectedly, Joanna phones.

She asks whether Claudia has been in.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘she was here.’

‘You managed to get the heating going?’ Joanna asks.

This question irritates him — the suggestion that he might not have managed it. He lets a moment pass, his eyes finding the photos on the sideboard where the phone is: family photos, and photos of himself with John Major, with Tony Blair — the prime ministers he served. ‘Yes,’ he says.

‘So the house is warm enough?’

‘The house is fine.’

There is a pause. ‘Well, I just thought I’d call and see how you are,’ she says.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Okay. Now listen, Tony.’ And she starts to tell him how she has to go to New York for a few days, to head office — she is a seniorish manager in a pharmaceutical firm — for some annual appraisal.

Dusk is falling in Argenta. He sees it through the tall windows of the sitting room. Darkness settling on the flat land. She is off to New York. And he is here, in Argenta, with its tractor showroom, its marsh museum.

‘Well, have fun,’ he says.

‘I’ll be back on Friday.’

That doesn’t mean much to him. He isn’t sure what day it is today.

There is a pause, a longer one. ‘You are okay, Tony?’ she asks, sounding slightly embarrassed, as if the question were intrusively personal.

‘I told you. I’m absolutely fine.’

She says quickly, ‘Did Cordelia send you Simon’s poem?’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘And? What did you think?’

‘It wasn’t bad.’

Afterwards, he wishes he hadn’t been so offish with her. It was nice of her to phone. Something about the way she spoke to him though. It was like the way those people had looked at him in the one-way street yesterday as he struggled to reverse in a straight line. That was something he had once been able to do — reverse in a straight line. He looks at his watch.

He waits a little longer and then has some more wine. A very fine Barbaresco, a present from someone years ago that he had been saving for a special occasion. He opened it at lunchtime, impulsively, and drank half of it alone, in the middle of an ordinary weekday, with an indifferent omelette. What was the point of waiting, anyway?

He drinks some more now with some cheese and prosciutto, a few olives, assembled on a plate. A football match on the TV. Some Serie B match between teams he has never even heard of playing out a nil — nil draw on a December afternoon. The stadium is evidently half-empty. Still, it dispels the silence. It passes the time.

He wonders whether to phone Cordelia. In the end he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to disturb her. He is depressed — he wouldn’t be able to hide that from her, she would hear it in his voice — and he doesn’t want to make her feel down too. He doesn’t want her, in future, not to want him to phone. Which she won’t if he’s always whining at her, droning on about his problems, asking questions that obviously don’t interest him, leaving long despondent silences on the line.

He pours himself some more of the Barbaresco. Actually, it’s excellent. One of the finest reds produced in Italy. He is able to appreciate that; there seems to be a sort of hole, though, where his pleasure in it should be. It’s a waste, he thinks, to drink it in this state.

He looks at his watch.

It’s too early, surely, to turn in?

The house, now that the football is finished and he has turned off the TV, is oppressively silent.

He sits in the wing chair and tries to read. His thoughts keep wandering. He thinks of Alan. He has a half-brother, Alan. How old is Alan now? Eighty-five? Hardly able to walk. Hardly able to stand up — any sort of movement at all involves physical pain and mental anguish. Humiliation. He thinks of the last time he saw him. Alan’s hair looked soft and effeminate — and snowy white, obviously, like the large soft trainers he always wears now. He had tried to smile when he saw Tony. He hadn’t been able to stand up. He had just shivered in his chair, trying to smile, his jaw wagging as he struggled to speak, to say something. ‘How are you, Tony?’ he had finally managed, in a weird, slurred voice. His skin looked as though it was dead already, as if the outer layers of him were dead already. His faded eyes peered out with fear, and a sort of hostility, from that dead face.

He is still sitting there with the book in his hands — Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.

You couldn’t really talk to Alan any more, that was one of the saddest things.

He was fading away.

Fading away.

Do we all end up just fading away?

—

There are moments of serious fear, during the night. At one point, he is sure that something is going wrong with his heart. Then later, a nightmare of some sort.

A huge stick-insect-like thing with lazy eyes.

For a long time it is motionless, until he almost stops fearing it.

Then it starts to move.

Touches him.

He wakes with a yelp of horror, and takes hours to fall asleep again, once the fluttery panic of the nightmare has swum away, thinking about Alan, and about how little time he himself has left. He lies there in the dark, somehow horrified by his situation, as if it is something he has only just found out about. As if someone has just told him, for the first time, that he is seventy-three years old.

2

When he next wakes it is light in the room.

It is nearly eight.

He feels, dragging himself into a sitting position, exhausted and depressed.

Today he must do something.

He decides, staring defeatedly at some fresh mouse droppings on the antique tiles of the kitchen floor, to drive to Pomposa abbey. When he was sorting out one of the drawers yesterday he found some old entrance tickets to the abbey — they went there years ago, with Alan and his wife, he thinks, when they were staying once — and he decides that he would like to see it again. He doesn’t remember much about it. A medieval monastery, near the sea, some way north of Ravenna.

Anyway, what it is isn’t really the point. He has to do something, drive somewhere. Where exactly hardly matters.

It will take an hour or so to drive there, he thinks. He’ll arrive at eleven, say, have a look at the abbey, whatever there is. Have lunch perhaps — he seems to remember there was a place to eat there — and then drive home. Stop in Argenta to pick up a few things. And then have tea and spend an hour or two on Clark’s Sleepwalkers.

Freezing fog hangs outside the windows. The sea of freezing damp that spreads over this floodplain every winter. He has, these days, an intense physical aversion to the cold. The house’s old heating is just about doing its job — it is faintly warm in the tall rooms — and he finds the thought of leaving that warmth distressing. And driving in this fog. That would be asking for trouble.

He takes the stairs, slowly, and in the bathroom starts to fill the tub with steaming water. He will have a hot bath and see how he feels after that. He takes his pills, a multicoloured meal of them. Then he struggles over the tall edge of the tub and submerges himself in the heat of the water. He lies there sleepily in the steam. Feels his joints ease and loosen.

Afterwards, while he is shaving, the sun shines in at the window. The fog is lifting.

He dresses warmly. Two jumpers. His heaviest socks.

The trees that line the edges of the property — serving as a windbreak — are nearly leafless. The bushes and shrubs of the garden look brown and dead though the grass is still green. He opens the garage. A dark blue VW Passat estate. British originally, it has Italian plates now.

The idea of driving still makes him nervous. He takes his seat at the steering wheel with an unwelcome sense that he is perhaps not up to this.

Now that the fog has lifted, everything seems unusually well defined. The leafless poplars standing along the road, which is whitish with cold, throw faint shadows across his path.

He is not particularly aware of driving slowly. People keep overtaking him, though — there is a permanent little queue of them.

He has already passed through Argenta, and turned at San Biagio onto the road that leads to the lagoon, the long straight road across flat farmland. There is nothing in particular to love about this landscape. They had wanted, originally, something in Tuscany. This was twenty-five years ago, when Cordelia left home. Something in Tuscany. It turned out, however, that Tuscany was more expensive than they had anticipated. So rather than settle for one of the disappointingly poky little houses they were shown in the Chianti they decided to widen their search to other areas, and as they moved further and further away from Florence, the houses they were shown started to look more and more like what they had in mind — a substantial elegant villa with an acre of mature, secluded garden. That was what they wanted, and in the end that was what they got. What they had not foreseen was that it would be here, all the way over on the other side of the peninsula, in an area in which, at the outset, they had had absolutely no interest. And such a desperately flat landscape. (When, in the 1970s, as deputy head of mission at the embassy in Rome, he had had to attend an event in San Marino — to follow an oompah band and people in operetta costumes up to the top of the rock — he had seen it from up there, the flat land stretching north, and shuddered.) The house itself had won them over. Its distinguished, almost aristocratic demeanour. Still, it had seemed eccentric, and when it was theirs they wondered whether they had made a mistake. Slowly they made their peace with the place, until they felt a kind of love for it. You learn to love what’s there, not what’s not there. How can you live, otherwise?

Sun falls on the fields on either side of the road, on sudden expanses of still water. Even though the heating is not on in the car, he starts to feel too warm in his coat and stops to take it off — at a sleepy petrol station, Tamoil, one of the unmanned self-service ones they have around here. Next to it is a dirt track leading off into empty fields, and irrigation ditches, half-frozen now. Silence, except for a passing vehicle sometimes.

The lagoon, when he arrives at it, shines like a sheet of metal. From there he picks up Strada Provinciale 58, which wanders, even quieter, through the wetlands of the Po delta. There is something pleasantly hypnotic about the driving. The interior of the Passat is nice and warm. There is no impatient queue behind him now — he has the landscape to himself, until he joins Strada Statale 309 — the main road along the sea — and pootles in the wake of a truck, not wanting the stress of trying to overtake. The truck wallows in the wind that hits them from the direction of the sea, the sea itself not visible, only indicated by the signs pointing off at frequent intervals to lido this and lido that. Lido delle Nazioni. Lido di Volano.

—

He nearly misses the turning. He sees the campanile, and suddenly understanding what it is, immediately indicates and turns. The time it took to drive here passed so quickly. He doesn’t feel that he should be there yet. And yet here he is.

Nothing is familiar. If he was here before — and he was — he has forgotten everything. The little track-like road winding away from Strada Statale 309, first seeming to wander in the wrong direction, away from the tall campanile that sticks out above a stand of trees, and then turning on itself and taking him, past a vista of fields stretching to the horizon, to a little lake, a few dumpsters next to a wall, some parking spaces on an apron of tarmac.

He puts the Passat in one of the spaces, most of which are empty. The frigid air shocks him when he opens the door. There is quite a strong smell of dog shit. A sign indicates, surprisingly, that thieves are a problem here. He looks around at the silent, empty scene. The only sound is the quiet shushing of traffic on Strada Statale 309. Thieves? Not now, surely. Anyway, there is nothing in his car for them to steal. He puts on his scarf and locks the Passat.

The campanile is a few hundred metres off. He sees it through the leafless trees. Starting to walk towards it, he is weighed down, somewhat, by a feeling that this is pointless, what he is doing. He feels tired and cold, and he is not actually very interested in seeing this place. That is obvious now that he is here, walking towards it over the frost-blanched tarmac, quickening his step to keep warm. And in fact there does not seem to be much to see. The setting is a sort of sparse park. He passes two modest-looking places to eat, set behind empty terraces on one side of the road that leads to the campanile. Only one of them seems to be open — there is a sign outside, anyway. And it occurs to him that the abbey itself may not be open, on a weekday morning at this time of year.

It is open, however.

What there is of it.

—

After he has looked it over, he walks back to the place with the sign outside. A very simple place — not where they ate with Alan and his wife when they were here years ago. There is a slot machine with flashing lights. Old posters on the walls. Dusty bottles of wine for sale on shelves. He sits down at a small table. A man puts a paper place mat in front of him, and hands him a laminated menu. The only other people eating there are a middle-aged couple speaking in low voices at another table. German, they seem to be. He quickly scans the menu. He is not very hungry. He wants something hot. He orders soup.

He only spent half an hour looking at the abbey — a series of low brick buildings, very plain, with small windows. A few modest pieces of carved white marble. Inside, it was mostly just empty rooms. There was a courtyard with a square of lawn and a well in the middle. It was all quite evocative. A memorial to a way of life that went on here for a thousand years, a way of seeing the world. One side of the courtyard was formed by the side wall of the abbey church. The whole interior of the church was painted with scenes and figures. He spent some time in there, looking with a historian’s interest at the painted walls, the strange and often violent scenes depicted on them. A man on fire. Naked women. A sort of devil, with suffering people in his enormous oval mouth.

When he had had enough, he stepped out into the porch. The low winter sun shone into the deep porch. Set in its walls were some marble tablets, memorials for the important dead. In a tranquil and unhurried mood, he studied some of these. They were in Latin, obviously, a language he learned a lifetime ago. He is still able, sometimes, to make something of it, and in one of the inscriptions he found five words that made him stand there thoughtfully for a while. A single Latin sentence, on a piece of stone in memory of a man who had died hundreds of years ago.

The waiter puts the hot soup on the table in front of him, and some bread sticks individually wrapped in paper.

‘Grazie,’ he says.

‘Prego,’ the waiter says, as he walks away.

The Germans at the other table have unfolded a map of northeastern Italy. Poring over it, they talk to each other in quiet voices.

The waiter is talking to someone too, though nobody is visible. He speaks again, in a scolding tone. And then a little girl emerges from somewhere and walks over to one of the empty tables where she sits down. She must be…Seven years old? She sits at the table, looking out the window, her feet swinging well short of the floor.

Tony eats his soup — minestra di fagioli. Green leaves of cabbage float in it, huge creamy beans.

Unselfconsciously, and still staring at the window, at the empty stillness of the winter day, the little girl has started to sing something in a soft, lisping voice.

While he eats his soup, he tries to understand the words of the song. She is singing it for a second time now.

‘Gennaio nevicato,’ she sings, her lips hardly moving.

In January it snows.

‘Febbraio, mascherato.’

February is masked.

‘Marzo, pazzerello.’

March is mad, madness.

‘Aprile, ancor più bello.’

April, even more lovely.

‘Maggio, frutti e fiori. Giugno, vado al mare.’

May, fruits and flowers. June, off to the sea.

‘Luglio e Agosto, la scuola non conosco.’

July and August, school is unknown…No school.

‘Settembre, la vendemmia. Ottobre, con la nebbia.’

September, the, er…harvest. October, foggy.

‘Novembre, un golf in piú. Dicembre con Gesù.’

November, an extra jumper. December, Jesus.

Having finished the song, she wipes her nose with the back of her hand. She has auburn hair, pale skin. She sees that he is looking at her. Her eyes are greenish.

He smiles. ‘That was a nice song,’ he says to her, in Italian.

She says, ‘I learned it at school.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well…’ He is not sure what to say. ‘Well done,’ he says.

She shrugs and starts to sing it again, evidently with nothing else to do, staring out the window.

‘Gennaio nevicato. Febbraio, mascherato…’

The Germans are paying for their meal.

They leave and the waiter starts to tidy their table.

‘Un caffè,’ Tony says to him as the man passes with an armful of plates. He acknowledges the order with a single nod. His daughter — if she is his daughter — is still singing.

Novembre, un golf in più. Dicembre con Gesù.

And the Germans are unexpectedly there again. They hurry in, obviously agitated.

The waiter is at the espresso machine, whacking something.

‘Polizei!’ the German man almost shouts. ‘Polizei!’

The waiter doesn’t stop what he is doing. He just turns his head, and the German says something in his own language which the waiter does not seem to understand.

The man tries English. ‘Please, you must call the police,’ he says.

‘You must call the police,’ echoes his wild-eyed wife.

In Italian, the waiter says, ‘The police? Why?’

‘You must call them,’ the man says, still speaking English. ‘Our car…Somebody has.’ And he motions with his fist.

‘Somebody has broken into your car?’ the waiter says, sticking to Italian himself, and sounding wearily unsurprised.

‘Yes, yes,’ the man says in English, understanding. ‘You must call the police.’

‘Okay,’ the waiter says, unexcitably. ‘I’ll call the police.’

First, though, he takes Tony his espresso — something Tony appreciates, though it evidently exasperates the Germans, particularly the woman, who turns to the door with an outraged sigh. The waiter returns unhurriedly to the bar and picks up the phone, which is attached to the wall next to a calendar with pictures of agricultural machinery.

It suddenly occurs to Tony that his own car might be in danger. He says to the Germans, who are waiting nervously, ‘Do you mind my asking where you’re parked?’

The man stares at him as if he hasn’t understood. However, he then says, motioning, ‘Over there, next to the small lake.’

‘Oh,’ Tony says. ‘I’m parked there as well.’

The man just shrugs, as if he has more important things to worry about than where other people are parked, and turns to the waiter, who is still on the phone saying something about ‘another one’.

When the waiter has finished, Tony is standing there with a ten-euro note in his hand.

Fearing the worst, he leaves and starts to walk towards the small lake and the parking spaces, the insistent smell of dog shit. That sign, warning of thieves — shouldn’t have ignored it. The Passat is in view now and he quickens his pace. It looks okay. Yes, it is okay. In one of the other spaces an Opel estate with German plates has had a window smashed. Poor Germans. Probably on holiday, and now this to deal with. As he tries to find his way back to the main road, he passes the arriving police. Maybe he should have stayed and translated for them, the Germans — they didn’t seem to know Italian, and they’ll be lucky if the police speak English. Not much English spoken out here. Even the tourists in summer are mostly Italian. Well. They’ll sort it out. He is already at the junction with Strada Statale 309. He needs to turn left — he needs both lanes to be clear. He sits there with the indicator ticking, traffic coming from both directions. The sun, already starting to sink, is in his eyes and he lowers the visor. Distant trees melt into the cold yellowish glow of the horizon. Still the traffic comes. His index fingers tap the black plastic of the steering wheel. This is silly now. He stifles a yawn. There is a truck coming from the left. Nothing, finally, from the other side. It is quite far off, the truck. Surely it is far enough for him to pull out across it. Not if he waits. So don’t wait. Do it. Now.

3

Amemus eterna et non peritura.

Amemus — Let us love. Eterna — that which is eternal. Et non peritura — and not that which is transient.

Let us love what is eternal and not what is transient.

4

He is in an unfamiliar room. The light is dim. It seems to be evening, or very early morning. He is lying on a bed, looking up at the ceiling, high above him. There is something up there, some sort of light fitting. Maggio, frutti e fiori. Giugno, vado al mare…His head feels very heavy, foggy. Ottobre, con la nebbia. He does not know where he is. From somewhere on the other side of a door, he hears what seem to be footsteps, voices. The door has a panel of frosted glass in it, and figures slide across it sometimes, dark smudges, animating the facets of the panel for a moment. Amemus eterna et non peritura.

5

It is sunny in the room. Joanna is sitting there. ‘Hello, Tony,’ she says.

‘Hello,’ he says.

‘You don’t know where you are,’ she suggests.

She looks tired, he thinks. He says, ‘No. Where am I?’

‘You’re in hospital, in Ravenna.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to be in New York?’ he asks.

‘Yes, I am.’

She is sitting on a chair next to the bed.

‘And I have to go in a couple of days,’ she says.

‘Okay.’ He still feels woozy and it takes him a while to ask the obvious question: ‘Why am I here?’

‘You don’t remember anything?’

He tries. Then he says, ‘I was at Pomposa abbey. Wasn’t I?’

‘There was an accident. The Passat’s a write-off,’ she informs him.

‘What accident?’

‘They seem to think what happened,’ she says, ‘is you were pulling out of a minor road, and trying to turn left, and a truck was coming, and someone was overtaking it, and you didn’t see them until it was too late.’

There is a longish silence.

‘I don’t remember any of that,’ he says.

‘Well, you ended up in a field, apparently. And if it wasn’t for the airbags we wouldn’t be talking now. You’ve got concussion, the doctor says.’

‘Concussion?’

‘Yes. I think they want to do a CAT scan tomorrow, just to make sure there’s nothing else.’

He feels slightly nauseous. He lies back on the pillow — he has been half-sitting up to talk to her.

‘The car’s in my name,’ she says. ‘That’s how they found me.’

He is staring at the light fitting on the ceiling. His eyes follow the wire across the ceiling to the wall over the door, and then along the top of the wall to a small hole in one of the other walls. He feels strange.

‘I’ve brought you some things,’ she says. ‘Pyjamas and so on.’

‘Okay. How are you?’ he asks vaguely.

The question sounds odd. She hesitates. ‘Fine,’ she tells him. Then she says, maybe feeling that that wasn’t enough, ‘You know how it is, at this time of year.’

He struggles to remember what time of year it is.

Joanna seems distracted by something and turns her head, though in fact there is nothing there, only the pale impersonal space of the small hospital room.

There is, undoubtedly, an awkwardness to this. The way they have lived, for twenty years or more, makes it awkward. They have each looked after themselves, more or less, for all that time. They have not often had to ask the other for help — and when they did it was in a worldly tone, as negotiating equals, and in practical matters — loans, professional favours. Not like this.

Tony seems helpless and dopey in the bed, wearing a hospital smock with a number tattooed on the fabric near his shoulder.

‘I flew out last night,’ she says, turning to him again from the oddly low sink. ‘Ryanair. From Stansted.’

He doesn’t seem interested. ‘Yes?’

‘You know — the flight that gets in about midnight.’

He does know that flight. He arrived on it himself, only a few days ago. The taxi from Bologna airport to the house, half an hour through the wintry darkness. And the house, unused for months, the temperature of a fridge, the olive oil opaque and waxy. Mouse droppings on the floor. Signs of damp in the wall at the foot of the stairs. They had made him feel overwhelmed, somehow, those things. The mouse droppings, the spreading patch of damp. Still in his coat he had sat down on the small sofa in the hall, his breath hanging in the air in front of his mouth…

‘Do you want me to stay?’ Joanna’s voice says.

She is standing now, at the window, looking out. He does not know what there is to see. When he says nothing, she says, ‘The doctor did say at this stage you just need rest. You should try and sleep, he said.’

‘Okay.’

‘Do you want me to stay?’ she asks again, moving the emphasis slightly to the word stay this time.

She sits, again, in the chair — a low chair of scruffy green fabric — waiting for him to answer.

‘No, it’s okay,’ he says.

‘You should try and sleep,’ she advises.

‘Yes.’

She takes his hand for a moment. That too feels awkward, holding his dry hand like that. She isn’t sure why she took it. The physical intimacy of it feels excessive, anyway, now that she is holding it. She understands that she has no feel for what to do in this situation. They have lived merely as friends for so many years. She isn’t sure what she owes him in a situation like this. There is no precedent for it. The heart op — that long hospital stay — was all organised and prearranged and in the familiar surroundings of West London. She didn’t have to fly across Europe overnight at no notice to appear at his side, surprising him, as she did today. She didn’t have to tell him where he was, and what had happened to him. He never seemed as helpless then as he does now. She had wondered, on the plane, whether she needed to do this, whether it was her place any more. If she didn’t do it, though, who would? She is still holding his hand. She squeezes it — out of embarrassment more than anything else — and puts it down.

‘I’ll look in tomorrow morning,’ she says.

‘Okay.’ He wonders what time of day it is now.

She puts her coat on. It seems to take for ever. Then she says again, ‘I’ll look in tomorrow.’

She has already opened the door, letting in noise from outside, when he says, ‘Joanna.’

She stops in the doorway, very aware now of how much she wants to leave.

‘Thank you.’

She doesn’t know what to say. ‘That’s alright,’ she says finally, and leaves.

—

An hour or two later — it is already dark outside, the light on the ceiling is on — a doctor arrives. He is very young. Not much more than thirty, by the look of it. A nice-looking man. He asks how Tony feels. ‘Okay,’ Tony says.

‘Do you feel sick?’

‘Sometimes. A little bit.’

‘Headache?’

‘Slightly. Not really.’

The doctor says they will do a CAT scan in the morning. If everything is okay — if there is no haemorrhaging inside his head — he might be able to go home tomorrow, or perhaps the next day. ‘You have been very lucky,’ he says, smiling.

—

In the morning he feels more or less normal. He has, which he didn’t quite have before, a normal awareness of his surroundings. He is in hospital. He is very much aware of that now. Already this year he has spent many weeks in hospital. He has already spent more time in hospital this year, he thinks, than in his entire life up till now. And here he is again. He is sitting on the edge of the tall bed staring at the scuffed grey floor. And there’s just going to be more and more of this, isn’t there? Hospitals. Doctors. His only purpose in life now, it seems, is to stave off physical decay and death for as long as possible. His life, in terms of any sort of positive purpose, would seem to be over already. He feels very depressed. Amemus eterna et non peritura. The words pass through his mind from somewhere. Painfully, he eases himself off the bed and plants his pale feet on the floor. The sink is two light-headed steps away. Over it there is a mirror. His face is a shock. No one told him about that. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says, furious. He stands there for a few seconds, leaning on the sink until his head stops spinning. The tap is weird — a horizontal lever about six inches long. He fiddles with it until water starts to flow. Fills one of the plastic cups and lifts it to his split, disfigured lip.

He is still looking at himself in the mirror. At his monstrously enlarged face, his partially shaved head. At the overall patheticness of the figure he presents.

Those words again.

Amemus eterna et non peritura.

Pomposa.

Memories of the hour or so he spent there materialise in his mind. It is almost disconcerting, the way they are just suddenly there. Walking through the plain spaces of the abbey. The inscription in the porch: Amemus eterna et non peritura. And the thoughts he had while waiting for his soup, his minestra di fagioli, and staring through the window at the still, winter day outside, winter daylight on leafless trees.

So what is eternal?

Nothing, that’s the problem. Nothing on earth. Not the earth itself. Not the sun. Not the stars in the night sky.

Everything has an end.

Everything.

We know that now.

6

Joanna drives him home in a car provided by the insurance company. She has already sorted all that out.

He had so looked forward to leaving the hospital. On the drive home, however, his spirits are low. He isn’t sure, now, what he was looking forward to. It is snowing lightly, ineffectually. Small flakes that won’t settle, that melt as soon as they touch anything.

They arrive at the house.

They stopped at the Lidl in Argenta first and they take the shopping in, Joanna doing the heavy lifting.

‘That damp patch needs seeing to,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘And you know that we have mice?’

‘Yes.’

They sit down to have lunch together. It is strange, them being here together like this, in this house. It has been many years since it was just the two of them, here.

‘I have to leave tomorrow,’ Joanna says.

‘Okay.’

‘I spoke to Cordelia,’ she tells him. ‘She’s going to come and stay with you for a while. A week, she said she might be able to manage.’

He tries not to show how pleased he is. ‘That really isn’t necessary.’

‘I don’t think you should be on your own.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘She’s already got her plane ticket, Tony.’

‘Well, it’s very kind of her.’

Joanna says, picking at potato salad, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay longer myself.’

He sort of waves that away with his fork.

They eat, for a minute or two, in silence.

‘It’s a shame about the Passat,’ he says, obviously perked up by the news about Cordelia.

‘Oh, come on, it was ancient. It was time to junk it, anyway.’

‘I liked it.’

‘So did I,’ Joanna says.

‘Remember we used to drive down in it?’

‘Of course.’

‘That was fun.’

She says, pouring herself some more wine, and in a tone which is almost drily flirtatious, ‘It had its moments.’

They used to drive down in the Passat — and before that in an old Volvo 740 — down through France, through the Mont Blanc tunnel and out through the Valle d’Aosta into Piedmont, the shimmer of Lombardy. He always particularly loved driving through the Valle d’Aosta — the drama of the valley, and the way that heightened the sense you had there of passing from northern to southern Europe.

How wonderful those long drives seem now. Thinking about them makes something ache in him.

Memories of fresh damp air.

He has a sip of wine. Notices that his hand is shaking.

Anyway, that all stopped when the Passat was domiciled in Argenta, about twelve years ago. It was already fairly old then.

Joanna is telling him something: ‘Cordelia’s going to help you find a new car, she says.’

‘Is she?’ he asks.

It seems there was a hint of scepticism in his voice — Joanna says, ‘She does know about cars.’

‘Yes, she does,’ he agrees.

‘She’ll help you find something. In Ravenna, I suppose.’

‘Or Ferrara,’ he suggests.

‘If you like. Have you finished?’

He nods, and she takes his plate, with hers, to the kitchen.

—

Outside, it has stopped snowing — it’s just miserable. A frozen, damp day. Joanna spends some time on the phone. He doesn’t know who she’s talking to. She speaks to several people. It sounds like work, he thinks, eavesdropping from his wing chair with Clark’s Sleepwalkers on his lap. He’s not making much progress with it. He’s just not that interested, is the main problem. Things just don’t interest him as much as they used to.

She asks him, when she has finished on the phone, if he wants to watch a film.

‘A film?’ he says, slightly as if she’s interrupting him, as if she’s distracting him from something important. ‘Alright.’

He notices the full glass of wine in her hand. She’s drinking a lot of wine, he thinks. She’s uneasy, with them here together like this. ‘What film?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. We’ve got all these DVDs.’ She is at the shelf, in her voluminous woollens, starting to look through them. ‘Groundhog Day?’

‘We must have watched that,’ he says unkindly, ‘twenty times.’

‘Okay. On Golden Pond?’

‘No.’

‘The Bucket List?’

He snorts.

‘How about Driving Miss Daisy?’

‘God, no.’

She makes some more suggestions, all of which he irritably dismisses.

‘Why don’t you choose, then?’ she says, starting to lose patience. ‘Come here and choose something yourself.’

‘Joanna…’ He is still sitting in the wing chair. He puts his hands together, the points of his fingers, as if about to offer her some wisdom.

Then he just sighs, and says, sounding put-upon, ‘What else is there?’

‘There are loads. About Schmidt?’

He sighs again.

‘About Schmidt?’ she half-shouts, turning from the shelf.

‘No!’

‘Do you actually want to watch a film?’ she asks.

‘Not really,’ he says, with a sort of defiance.

‘Why didn’t you say so, then?’

‘Where are you going?’

She is leaving the room. ‘I have things to do.’

‘What things?’

‘Work. I’m supposed to be in New York.’

That infuriates him. ‘I didn’t ask you to come here,’ he shouts after her.

Alone he puts his hand over his eyes — feels the tenderness of his damaged face, which he had forgotten about.

Then she is there again, standing in front of him.

‘Look,’ she starts, making an effort, ‘I’m here because I thought you needed help…’

‘I don’t need your help,’ he hears his own voice say.

There is a moment of ominous silence.

‘Well, fuck you, then,’ she says quietly.

He hears her walk up the stairs, the sound of her door shutting.

After a few minutes he stands up, stiffly, and follows her. He feels dizzy on the stairs, has to stop for a moment.

Softly, he knocks on her door. ‘Joanna?’

Nothing.

‘Joanna…I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘I’m not myself today.’

He doesn’t open the door — that’s not allowed, hasn’t been allowed for years.

‘Please come downstairs,’ he says to the painted wood, which was once white, probably. ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry — I mean it.’

Downstairs, he makes the tea — in a warmed pot, the old-school way. People just don’t do that any more, he thinks sadly.

When he enters the sitting room — when he shuffles in with the tray — he is surprised to find her already there. She is on one of the sofas, with her large unfeminine feet on the pouf, looking unsentimentally at her own hands. ‘It’s just so depressing,’ she says.

‘What is?’

He puts down the tray.

‘I mean, I’m only here for two days, and something like this happens.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘It was my fault.’

‘Yes, it was.’

He sits down in the wing chair, flops down into it, so that his legs swing up slightly. He sits there, panting.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

He says, ‘Okay. A bit dizzy. I’ll be okay.’

‘You shouldn’t be doing anything,’ she says. ‘The doctor told me you shouldn’t do anything for a few days. You should have let me deal with the tray.’

‘I’ll be okay.’

She stands up and pours the tea.

Then they watch The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

He starts wheezily snoring about halfway through.

7

One always imagines that there will be some sort of serenity at the end. Some sort of serenity. Not just an awful sordid mess of shit and pain and tears. Some sort of serenity. Whatever that might mean. And what that might actually mean becomes problematic up close. Amemus eterna et non peritura. That would seem to be sound advice, if serenity is what one is after. The same problem, though — what is eterna? What is eternal, in his world? Wherever he looks, from the loosening skin of his weak, old man’s hands — which somehow don’t seem to be his, since he does not think of himself as an old man — to the sun shedding white light on the flat landscape all around, wherever he looks, he sees only peritura. Only that which is transient.

Joanna has left. She had an earlyish plane and left just as the late dawn was lightening the sky over the poplars of Strada Provinciale 65, a field or two away. The taxi was outside, vapour spewing from its tailpipe. She had hauled her suitcase downstairs and in the entrance hall she had stopped for a moment and said to him, ‘Cordelia will be here this afternoon.’

A minute later he was alone, in the kitchen, trying not to succumb to an unexpected flood of emotion, with trembling hands spooning coffee into the percolator.

How little we understand about life as it is actually happening. The moments fly past, like trackside pylons seen from a train window.

The present, perpetually slipping away.

Peritura.

He sits in the wing chair with his iPad.

Tap.

Tap. Tap.

Emails. No new emails, other than the spam and semi-spam that never stops.

He still hasn’t written to Simon about his poem. He will do that now. First he has another look at it.

The portrait shows this — his eyes fixed elsewhere

,

Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose

To the Turkic scimitar of his nose

.

The engrossing necessities of money and war

,

The wise politician’s precautionary

Fratricides, the apt play of power —

All proper activities in his sphere

,

And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?

A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;

Not beauty, I think, whatever that is

,

Not love, not ‘nature’

,

Not Allah, by that or any other name —

Just a moment’s immersion in the texture

Of existence, the eternal passing of time

.

That final phrase. It didn’t make much of an impression on him last week.

He stands up and fondles the radiator, fondles its warmth with his stiff hands.

The passing of time. That is what is eternal, that is what has no end. And it shows itself only in the effect it has on everything else, so that everything else embodies, in its own impermanence, the one thing that never ends.

Which would seem to be an extraordinary paradox.

Claudia says, ‘Good morning, Signor Parson.’

Startled, he turns. ‘Oh, Claudia. Hello. How are you?’

‘I’m okay, Signor Parson,’ she says, not trying very hard to hide the fact that she is tired and fed up. She also has problems with her joints in this weather. They have talked about it.

‘Where you like me to start?’ she asks.

‘The kitchen?’ he suggests. ‘Or upstairs? I don’t mind.’

He is trying to hold onto the feeling he had, a moment ago, of everything as the embodiment of something endless and eternal, of the eternal passing of time. For a moment he had felt it. Felt it.

‘Okay,’ Claudia says. ‘I start upstairs, okay?’

And that through its very impermanence.

Only something as paradoxical as that, he thinks, has any hope of…Of what?

He says, ‘Fine. Thank you, Claudia.’

He is still standing at the window.

Of helping.

For a moment he had felt it, and it had helped.

—

Cordelia arrives at four o’clock, just as it is getting dark. She is forty-three now. It seems incredible. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she says, when she has dismissed the taxi. He is waiting in the doorway, waiting to help her with her suitcase, which she does not let him do. In the sitting room they drink wine. He wishes now that he’d saved the fine Barbaresco to share with her. He tells her about the accident, what he can remember, that he was at Pomposa abbey. He thanks her, again, for coming to stay.

When he thanks her she just smiles, and stands up and looks at the books on the shelves. She is tall like her mother. ‘I’m reading Clark’s Sleepwalkers,’ he tells her, from the wing chair.

‘Oh, yeah? Interesting?’

‘Very,’ he says.

‘Tell me about it.’

He tries to explain, what he understands of it — how Europe stumbled into this near-death experience — and then says, when it’s obvious he isn’t making much sense, ‘I haven’t finished it, of course. I’m less than halfway through.’

‘M-hm.’

With donnish interest, he asks, ‘What are you reading?’

‘Bring Up the Bodies,’ she says. ‘Finally.’

‘She’s good on the politics,’ he tells her, like someone who would know.

‘I’m enjoying it,’ she says.

Then she starts to talk about something else: ‘How was it with Mum?’

The question is just perceptibly loaded.

‘Fine,’ he says vaguely. And then, with more emphasis, ‘It was very sweet of her to come. She was supposed to be in New York or something.’

‘I know.’

Somehow too solemnly, he says, ‘And thank you, Cordelia, as well. I know how much you’ve got on…’

‘That’s about the fourth time you’ve thanked me,’ she says. She is smiling. ‘You can stop now. I feel fully thanked.’

‘Okay,’ he laughs, as always hugely enjoying her manner.

He is somewhat in awe of her.

‘So it was fine with Mum?’ she asks, pressing on with that.

Joanna must have spoken to her, he thinks, phoned her from the airport and told her something.

‘It was fine,’ he says. And then again, trying not to sound so threatened, ‘It was fine.’

There is a short silence.

To end it, he asks after Simon. Says he read the poem she sent.

‘And?’ she wants to know. ‘What did you think?’

‘I was impressed,’ he says, and Cordelia looks pleased. That was his aim — to please her. He says, ‘He and his friend were out here in the spring, of course.’

‘Yes,’ Cordelia says, ‘I know.’

‘What was his friend’s name again?’

‘Ferdinand.’

‘That’s it. A very entertaining young man.’

‘Yes.’ The proposition seems to make her uneasy, slightly. ‘I suppose.’

‘I liked him.’ He is sort of staring off into the middle distance when he says that. ‘We had some very nice talks,’ he says, smiling at her.

‘You and Ferdinand?’

‘And Simon, of course.’

He asks, after a few moments, ‘Is, er, Ferdinand up at Oxford too?’ There is something strange and deliberate, she thinks, about the way he says the name. And, actually, about the way he keeps talking about Ferdinand.

‘Yes, he is,’ she says.

‘Same college? As Simon.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Simon’s at St John’s, isn’t he?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well,’ he says, a little wistfully. ‘It was fun to have them here for a few days. What do you want to do for dinner?’ he asks.

‘I thought we might go out.’

‘Now that’s an idea. Where?’

‘That place in Argenta?’

He knows the place she means — they have been going there for years. ‘Sure. That’d be very nice. I’ll phone them up. Reserve us a table.’

‘Do you want me to do it?’

‘No, I think I can manage,’ he says.

The phone is on a sideboard. Next to it is a tatty little notebook full of handwritten numbers. He turns the pages until he finds what he is looking for. Then he picks up the phone and very slowly and deliberately punches the number into it. While he waits for them to answer, holding the phone to his ear, he inspects his slumped, jumpered image in the dark window.

—

Over the next few days, Cordelia takes things in hand. She gets a man in to look at the damp patch at the foot of the stairs. She finds and installs an ultrasonic device that is supposed to dissuade mice from establishing themselves in the house. She sets Claudia to work on specific tasks, which Claudia seems to appreciate. Within a few days the whole house seems more orderly and hygienic, more inhabited somehow.

Together they look on the Internet at second-hand cars for sale in the area. They find something that she seems to think would be suitable for him — a five-year-old Toyota RAV4, automatic. The next day they drive to Ferrara to have a look at it and she haggles the price down a thousand euros and they take it back to Argenta, she driving the insurance company’s car and he driving his new Toyota. He finds it much easier to handle than the old Passat. And there is something about the way she makes it all seem so easy — on his own, he knows, he would have been terribly daunted by the task of sorting it all out. Somehow she makes it seem effortless. She makes the phone calls. She takes him through the Italian forms, telling him what to write and where to sign. She sorts out the insurance. Yes, he is slightly in awe of her. She has such vitality. She wins at Scrabble when they play, which they do once or twice on those winter evenings that start at four o’clock, when darkness falls outside, suddenly, taking you by surprise.

—

One afternoon Claudia’s son shows up in his IKEA van, to take her home. He arrives early, while she is still working her way through a load of ironing, and waits in the van.

‘There’s an IKEA van at the end of the driveway,’ Cordelia says, having seen it from an upstairs window. ‘Have you ordered something?’

‘No,’ he tells her. ‘That’s Claudia’s son. He works for them. He’s waiting for her.’

‘Shouldn’t we ask him in?’

‘We could. I suppose.’

From the window he watches her tap on the window of the van and say something to the Romanian, who then leaves the van, and follows her back to the house.

He hears her speaking to him in her fluent if English-accented Italian as she leads him into the kitchen.

After a while he joins them and says hello. He only stays for a minute, hovering awkwardly. Then he is back in the wing chair with The Sleepwalkers, though less able to absorb its ideas than ever.

When Claudia and her son have left, Cordelia finds him there, and they talk about them, the two Romanians. Very nice people, they decide.

‘He’s very good-looking,’ Cordelia says.

Her father nods, apparently in agreement. And then says, hurriedly, as if it was not something he had ever thought about, ‘Would you say so?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘He’s married, I think,’ he says, oddly.

‘Well, so am I,’ Cordelia points out.

‘No.’ He seems flustered. And knowing that he seems flustered makes him more flustered. ‘I just meant…’

‘I said he was good-looking, that’s all.’

‘Okay.’

He tries to smile — knows he doesn’t quite pull it off.

She is looking at him strangely, is how it feels. He says, ‘Well, it was nice of you to ask him in.’

She doesn’t seem to hear — she just keeps looking at him in that strange way.

He has hoisted The Sleepwalkers up in front of him — is staring without seeing it at a map of Europe in 1914.

She knows, he thinks.

What does she know, though? What is there to know? What does he know himself? That certain men…What would the word be? Fascinate him? And that disturbed by this fascination — if that is the word — he is sometimes…What? Ineffably embarrassed in their presence? That’s it, though. That’s all there is to know. Not even in his imagination has he ever…

Finally he lets his eyes leave the page — the same page, the map of Europe in 1914 — and look for her.

She isn’t there.

There is a sense that something has happened. That something has passed between them. He feels slightly sick, as he did when, about twenty years ago now, Joanna said to him that he was ‘obviously queer’. It had seemed an extraordinary thing to say. With Joanna, the subject was never mentioned again, not even alluded to. That was, however, when they started to live more or less separately. He doesn’t know if she has ever said anything to Cordelia about it.

He finds her in the kitchen.

She is holding a framed photo — her parents. The way they live — mostly apart — has always upset her.

‘What’s that?’ he asks.

She doesn’t answer.

And he thinks, standing at her shoulder, sharing her view of the photo of himself and Joanna — She’s thinking it’s all a sham. It’s not all a sham, though. He wants to tell her that. He doesn’t know what words to use.

He is trying to find a way of saying it when it occurs to him that perhaps Joanna does see it as a sham, their marriage, the forty-five years they’ve spent together, and sort of together. And of course Cordelia will see it from her mother’s point of view, mostly. She will pity her mother, for having had to live for so long like that. With someone who is ‘obviously queer’. The words still seem to have nothing to do with him. He wonders if Cordelia knows about Joanna’s affairs. Probably she knows more than he does — he knows nothing specific. It’s difficult to know what information passes between them, his wife and his daughter.

She is still looking at the photo. He’s in morning dress, you can just make out. It’s the day he got his knighthood, twenty-odd years ago.

‘The day I landed the K,’ he says.

It is so obviously not what she is thinking about, so obviously not the aspect of the image that is absorbing her, that to say it makes him sound much less sensitive than he actually is, much less perceptive. He knows that, and knows that it’s the price he pays for steering things away from what he does not want to talk about, or for trying to steer them away.

She seems to have taken the hint, though. ‘Yup,’ she says, and puts the photo down. ‘Is it too early for a glass of wine?’

He looks at his watch.

It’s not even five.

She says that in London it’s office-party season, the Christmas drinking season, liver-punishing time. Afternoons in the pub. All that.

‘I vaguely remember,’ he says.

‘Do you still miss work?’ she asks, obviously not very interested, but knowing that he doesn’t mind talking about that so much.

‘Not as much as I used to.’

He stoops thoughtfully to the wine rack.

‘Not as much as I used to,’ he says again.

He puts a bottle on the table.

‘I’ve had to accept,’ he says, matter-of-factly, ‘that my life, in terms of potential, is over.’

It’s as if he is trying to make up for not wanting to talk about what she wants to talk about — the forty-five years he has spent married to her mother, what was the story there — by talking with unusual frankness about something else.

That’s what he thinks himself as he starts to open the bottle, first nicking the lead foil, and then unpeeling it. With a satisfying heaviness, it separates from the glass underneath. He says, ‘I don’t have much left to offer. In a practical sense.’

‘You shouldn’t say that.’ She still seems distracted, her mind on something else.

‘Oh, I’ve achieved everything I’m going to achieve.’

‘Professionally, you mean?’

‘Yes. Partly. I mean, I’m not down in the mouth about it,’ he says. ‘I’m very proud of what I’ve achieved.’ Which is true. Even as he says it, though, he is aware of how weightless, how intangible, how even strangely fictitious, his achievements feel — even the ones he is proudest of, like his minor part in negotiating, over many years, the expansion of the European Union in 2004. Something, he is not sure what, seems to nullify them. He says, trying to maintain his philosophical tone, ‘I’m very proud. It’s just that that’s it now.’

‘Do you want a hand with that?’ Cordelia asks. She means the wine he is struggling to open.

He hesitates for a moment. He seems to think about what to do. Then he says, ‘Yes, okay, please,’ and passes it to her.

‘Now this wine,’ he says, obviously keen to talk about happier matters, ‘we got, your mother and I,’ he slightly emphasises, as if to point out that they did sometimes have fun together, which indeed they did, ‘some years ago, when we went down to Umbria, in the old Passat, may she rest in peace, and we got this wine in Perugia, I think. Anyway, it’s one of the best, supposedly, that they make down there, and I think it’s time it was drunk.’

‘Hear, hear,’ Cordelia says — though something is still missing from her voice.

He pours out two glasses, not too much in each, and slides one over to her.

‘So,’ he says. ‘To…?’

He waits a moment — long enough for her to smile, and shrug. The smile is wistful, sad, it withholds something, is unpersuaded.

He does not let it deflect him.

‘To life?’ he suggests.

She seems to weigh this up, then acquiesces. ‘To life.’

—

The next morning they drive to Ravenna. He needs to have another scan at the hospital. They take the new Toyota. Cordelia drives.

As they drive towards the sea the farming country gives way gradually to something more garish — the tourist economy of the sandy coast. There are signs for theme parks. Hotels. Everything shut up for winter. Except that the prostitutes who line Strada Statale 309 in summer are still there, though fewer. Bosnian girls, quite a lot of them, he has been told.

‘Poor things,’ he says.

Cordelia nods, driving.

They near Ravenna and there are signs for the Area Industriale. For the merchant port. She handles it all unproblematically — the tricky, poorly signposted approach, the Ravenna traffic, the one-way system; he is almost embarrassingly impressed by the way she handles it.

‘You’re doing very well,’ he says, as they stop at a traffic light somewhere in the city — she seems to know where they are, though he has no idea.

She laughs and says, ‘Thanks,’ and they set off again, with that sureness of purpose that so impresses him.

They decided, that morning, that they would have lunch in town, and then present themselves at the hospital for his appointment, which is at two o’clock.

They park in a public lot near the Zona Monumentale, and start to walk. They are looking for a hat for him. She wants to get him one for Christmas.

Via Cavour is hung with Christmas decorations, and the smart little shops shine in the darkness of the day. They stop at shops that seem promising and in the end he gets a soft brown Borsalino, which somehow fits his thin face. His face is thin now, and haggard-looking. The damage from the accident persists in nasty yellowish patches. Obviously pleased with the hat, he wears it as they look for somewhere to have lunch. They find a place on Via Maggiore that he thinks he once went to, years ago, and, if it was the same place, has positive memories of. Snow is starting to drift down in small flakes when they go in, into the sudden, stunning warmth, and ask for a table for two.

‘This is the place,’ he tells her, as, having shed their outdoor things, they sit down.

‘Okay.’

‘The food’s excellent. Or was. Now, who knows.’

The decor definitely tends to kitsch.

There is no written menu. Just a jovial man who wanders up and tells them, as if they were old friends, what he has today.

When they have told him what they want, someone else — a small woman, with a face as hard as a dried pea — arrives with his quarter-litre of red wine, and Cordelia’s green bottle of sparkling water.

All around them, office workers, it seems, are eating lunch.

Outside the snow is still falling.

He is trying to tell her about Amemus eterna et non peritura, about ‘the eternal passing of time’. It is on his mind again. This morning he woke very depressed. He lay there for some time, not moving as the turquoise walls appeared. The hospital loomed, that was part of it. The CAT scan, and whatever news it had for him. He has been having headaches, the last few days. He has been as weirdly aware of what’s happening in his head as he has been for months now with his heart. That sense of physical fragility frightened him during the night, and he tried to find again the feeling he had last week of everything impermanent embodying, through the very fact of its impermanence, something endless and eternal.

He is trying to explain that now to Cordelia.

‘It’s important,’ he says, struggling to make sense, he can see that on her face, ‘to feel part of something larger, something…something permanent.’

‘Yeah,’ she says patiently, pouring herself some more water.

She doesn’t see the point of this, he thinks.

He’s not sure he does either. It seems so elusive, even to him, when he tries to put it into words — or indeed when he doesn’t.

‘I’m not making much sense,’ he apologises.

‘No, it’s interesting,’ Cordelia says.

The pasta dish arrives — some sort of massive ravioli, in a heavy iron frying pan, still sizzling, which the hard-faced woman puts down without a word on a wooden place mat, and leaves there for them to serve themselves.

‘Grazie,’ he says, as she walks away.

He is still trying to formulate his thoughts, what he was saying to Cordelia, trying to say.

Hungrily, she has started on the ravioli.

‘Is it okay?’ he asks.

‘Lovely,’ she says.

And he is very moved, suddenly, by the sight of her.

Overwhelmed.

His eyes overflow.

She notices his moist-eyed stare and smiles at him, questioningly.

Feeling foolish, he shakes his head, declining to explain, and starts to eat. In a sense this love he feels just makes it more awful, not less, that this is all going to end. It is extraordinarily painful to think that there will be a day when he sees her for the last time.

Still nearly tearful, he stops eating for a moment and looks up.

There is a sense, he is sure, in which he is tricking himself into these feelings, about everything embodying something endless and eternal. Fear and sadness are obliging him to come up with something. Something to soften the nightmarish fact of ageing and dying. These ideas about the eternity of time. Within the eternity of time there is only a mystery — only a sense that there is something that we will never know or understand. An empty, unknowable space. Like, in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, that mosaic of the curtains opening to show us nothing, only a patch of plain golden tiles.

Cordelia is talking about Simon. Normally she talks about him a lot. This week she has made an effort not to. He is aware of that. Now she is talking about him, though.

He listens, his fingers on the stem of his wine glass.

She is touching on the aspects of her son that strike other people as odd and admitting, unusually, that she worries about them sometimes.

He tries to soothe her. It’s not exactly unheard of to be a bit strange at that age, he says, especially highly intelligent people, and Simon is undoubtedly one of those.

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ he tells her, putting his hand over hers.

She nods.

It’s what she wants to hear. Whether it is true or not, who knows.

Only time will tell.

He pays and they leave, putting on their coats and scarves near the door. He puts on his new hat and looks at himself in the mirror: an old man.

With a definite effort he pulls open the door.

He lets Cordelia leave first, then follows her out.

The air is frigid, stings the skin of his face.

Via Maggiore is fading away in the dusk