Collected Stories

Running Away

It is, Henrietta considers, ridiculous. Even so she feels sorry for the girl, that slack, wan face, the whine in her voice. And as if to add insult to injury, Sharon, as a name, is far from attractive.

‘Now, I’m sure,’ Henrietta says gently, ‘you must simply forget all this. Sharon, why not go away for a little? To… to…’ Where would a girl like Sharon Tamm want to go? Margate? Benidorm? ‘I could help you if you’d like me to. We could call it a little loan.’

The girl shakes her head. Hair, in need of washing, flaps. She doesn’t want to go away, her whine protests. She wants to stay since she feels she belongs here.

‘It’s only, Sharon, that I thought it might be easier. A change of scene for a week or two. I know it’s hard for you.’

Again the head is shaken, the lank hair flaps. Granny spectacles are removed and wiped carefully on a patchwork skirt, or perhaps a skirt that is simply patched. Sharon’s loose, soiled sandals have been kicked off, and she plays with them as she converses. She is sitting on the floor because she never sits on chairs.

‘We understand each other, you see,’ Henrietta continues softly. ‘My dear, I do want you to realize that.’

‘It’s all over, the thing I had with the Orange People. I’m not like that any more. I’m perfectly responsible.’

‘I know the Orange thing is over. I know you’ve got your feet quite on the ground, Sharon.’

‘It was awful, ’smatter of fact, all that.’

The Orange People offer a form of Eastern mysticism about which Henrietta knows very little. Someone once told her that the mysticism is an excuse for sexual licence, but explained no further. The sect is apparently quite different from the Hare Krishna people, who sometimes wear orange also but who eat food of such poor quality that sexual excess is out of the question. The Orange People had camped in a field and upset the locals, but all that was ages ago.

‘And I know you’re working hard, my dear. I know you’ve turned over a new leaf.’ The trouble is that the leaf has been turned, absurdly, in the direction of Henrietta’s husband.

‘I just want to stay here,’ Sharon repeats. ‘Ever since it happened I feel I don’t belong anywhere else.’

‘Well, strictly speaking, nothing has happened, dear.’

‘It has to me, though, Henrietta.’

Sharon never smiles. Henrietta can’t remember having ever seen a smile enlivening the slack features any more than a hint of make-up has ever freshened the pale skin that stretches over them. Henrietta, who dresses well and maintains with care the considerable good looks she possesses, can understand none of it. Unpresentable Sharon Tamm is certainly no floosie, and hardly a gold-digger. Perhaps such creatures do not exist, Henrietta speculates, one perhaps only reads about them.

‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ Sharon Tamm says. ‘I thought it only fair, Henrietta.’

‘Yes, I’m glad you did.’

‘He never would.’

The girl stands up and puts her sandals on to her grimy feet. There is a little white plastic bow, a kind of clasp, in her hair: Henrietta hasn’t noticed it before because the hair has covered it in a way it wasn’t meant to. The girl sorts all that out now, shaking her head again, taking the bow out and replacing it.

‘He can’t hurt people,’ she tells Henrietta, speaking of the man to whom Henrietta has been married for more than twenty years.

Sharon Tamm leaves the room then, and Henrietta, who has been sitting in a high-backed chair during the conversation, does not move from it. She is flabbergasted by the last two impertinent statements of the girl’s. How dare she say he never would! How dare she imply some knowledge of him by coyly remarking that he cannot hurt people! For a moment she experiences a desire to hurry after the girl, to catch her in the hall and to smack her on the face with the open palm of her hand. But she is so taken aback, so outraged by the whole bizarre conversation, that she cannot move. The girl, at her own request – a whispery whine on the telephone – asked to come to see her ‘about something urgent’. And although Henrietta intended to go out that afternoon she at once agreed to remain in, imagining that Sharon Tamm was in some kind of pickle.

The hall door bangs. Henrietta – forty-three last month, dressed now in a blue jersey and skirt, with a necklace of pink corals at her throat and several rings on the fingers of either hand, her hair touched with a preparation that brings out the reddish brown in it – still does not move. She stares at the place on the carpet where the girl has been crouched. There was a time when Sharon Tamm came quite often to the house, when she talked a lot about her family, when Henrietta first felt sorry for her. She ceased to come rather abruptly, going off to the Orange People instead.

In the garden Henrietta’s dog, a cairn called Ka-Ki, touches the glass of the french windows with her nose, asking to be let in. Henrietta’s husband, Roy, has trained her to do that, but the training has not been difficult because the dog is intelligent. Henrietta crosses the room to open the french windows, not answering in her usual way the fuss the dog makes of her, scampering at her feet, offering some kind of gratitude. The awful thing is, the girl seemed genuinely to believe in the extraordinary fantasy that possesses her. She would have told Roy of course, and Roy being Roy wouldn’t have known what to do.

They had married when Roy was at the very beginning of his career, seven years older than Henrietta, who at the time had been a secretary in the department. She’d been nervous because she didn’t belong in the academic world, because she had not had a university education herself. ‘Only a typist!’ she used bitterly to cry in those early, headstrong quarrels they’d had. ‘You can’t expect a typist to be bright enough to understand you.’ But Roy, urbane and placid even then, had kissed her crossly pouting lips and told her not to be so silly. She was cleverer, and prettier, and more attractive in all sorts of other ways, than one after another of his female colleagues: ever since he has been telling her that, and meaning it. Henrietta cannot accept the ‘cleverer’, but ‘prettier’ and ‘more attractive’ she believes to be true, and isn’t ashamed when she admits it to herself. They dress appallingly for a start, most of the women in the department, a kind of arrogance, Henrietta considers.

She clears away the tea things, for she has naturally offered Sharon Tamm tea, and carries them to the kitchen. Only a little less shaky than she was in the sitting-room after the girl’s final statements, she prepares a turkey breast for the oven. There isn’t much to do to it, but she likes to spike it with herbs and to fold it round a celery heart, a recipe she devised herself. She slices parsnips to roast with it, and peels potatoes to roast also. It isn’t a special meal in any way, but somehow she finds herself taking special care because Roy is going to hate it when she mentions the visit of the girl.

She makes a pineapple pudding he likes. He has schoolboy tastes, he says himself, and in Henrietta’s view he has too great a fondness for dairy products. She has to watch him where cream is concerned, and she insists he does not take too much salt. Not having children of their own has affected their relationship in ways like this. They look after one another, he in turn insisting that she should not Hoover for too long because Hoovering brings on the strain in her back.

She turns the pudding out into a Pyrex dish, ready to go into the oven in twenty minutes. She hears her husband in the hall, her own name called, the welcoming bark of Ka-Ki. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ she calls back. ‘Let’s take a drink to the garden.’

He is there, by the summer-house, when she arrives with the tray of sherry and gin and Cinzano. She has done her face again, although she knows it hardly needs it; she has tied a red chiffon scarf into her hair. ‘There now,’ she says. ‘Dinner’ll be a while.’ He’s back earlier than usual.

She pours gin and Cinzano for him, and sherry for herself. ‘Well, then?’ She smiles at him.

‘Oh, nothing much. MacMelanie’s being difficult.’

‘That man should be shot.’

‘I only wish we could find someone to do it.’

There is nothing else to report except that a student called Fosse has been found hallucinating by a park keeper. A pity, apparently, because the boy is bright and has always seemed to be mature and well-balanced.

‘Roy, I’ve something to tell you.’

‘Ah?’

He is a man who sprawls over chairs rather than sits in them. He has a sprawling walk, taking up more room than is his due on pavements; he sprawls in cinemas and buses, and over the wheel of his car. His grey hair, of which there is a lot, can never acquire a combed look even though he combs it regularly and in the normal way. His spectacles, thickly rimmed and large, move about on his reddish face and often, in fact, fall off. His suits become tousled as soon as he puts them on, gaps appearing, flesh revealed. The one he wears now is of dark brown corduroy, the suit he likes best. A spotted blue handkerchief cascades out of an upper pocket, matching a loose bow tie.

‘Sharon Tamm was here,’ Henrietta says.

‘Ah.’

She watches while he gulps his gin and vermouth. His eyes behind the pebbly glass of his spectacles are without expression. His mind does not appear to be associated with what she is saying. She wonders if he is thinking that he is not a success in the department, that he should have left the university years ago. She knows he often thinks that when Mac-Melanie has been troublesome.

‘Now, Roy, you have to listen.’

‘Well then, I’m listening.’

‘It’s embarrassing,’ she warns.

‘What is?’

‘This Sharon Tamm thing.’

‘She’s really pulled herself together, you know. She’s very bright. Really bright, I mean.’

‘She has developed a fantasy about you.’

He says nothing, as if he has not heard, or has heard and not understood.

‘She imagines she’s in love with you.’

He drinks a mouthful of his drink, and then another. He reaches out to the tray on the table between them and pours himself some more, mostly gin, she notices. He doesn’t gesture towards her sherry. He doesn’t say anything.

‘It was such an awkward conversation.’

All she wants is that it should be known that the girl arrived and said what she did say, that there should be no secret between them about so absurd a matter.

‘I had to tell you, Roy. I couldn’t not.’

He drinks again, still gulping at the liquid rather than sipping. He is perturbed: knowing him so well she can see that, and she wonders how exactly it is that MacMelanie has been a nuisance again, or if he is depressed because of the boy, Fosse. His eyes have changed behind the glass of his spectacles, something clouds his expression. He is trying not to frown, an effort she is familiar with, a sign of emotion in him. The vein that comes and goes in his forehead will soon appear.

‘Roy.’

‘I’m sorry Sharon came.’

Attempting to lighten the atmosphere, she laughs slightly. ‘She should wear a bra, you know, for a start.’

She pours herself more sherry since he does not intend to. It didn’t work, saying the girl should wear a bra: her voice sounded silly. She has a poor head for alcohol of any kind.

‘She said you can’t hurt people.’

He pulls the spotted handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes sweat from his chin with it. He runs his tongue over his lips. Vaguely, he shakes his head, as if denying that he can’t hurt people, but she knows the gesture doesn’t mean that. He is upset by what has happened, as she herself has been. He is thinking, as she did, that Sharon Tamm was once taken under their wing. He brought her back with him one evening, encouraging her, as a stray dog might be encouraged into the warmth. Other students, too, have been like daughters or sons to them and have remained their friends, a surrogate family. It was painful when Sharon Tamm left them for the Orange People.

‘Of course I know,’ Henrietta says, ‘that was something we didn’t understand.’

Vaguely he offers her more sherry, not noticing that she has had some. He pours more of his mixture for himself.

‘Yes, there was something wrong,’ he says.

They have been through all that. They talked about it endlessly, sending themselves to sleep with it, lazing with it on a Sunday morning. Henrietta found it hard to forgive the girl for being ungrateful. Both of them, she considered, had helped her in so very many ways.

‘Shall we forget it all now?’ she suggests, knowing that her voice has become nervous. ‘Everything about the wretched girl?’

‘Forget?’

That is impossible, his tone suggests. They cannot forget all that Sharon Tamm has told them about her home in Daventry, about her father’s mother who lives with the family and stirs up so much trouble, about her overweight sister Diane and her brother Leslie. The world of Sharon Tamm’s family has entered theirs. They can see, even now, the grandmother in her special armchair in the kitchen, her face snagged with a sourness that has to do with her wastrel husband, long since dead. They can see the saucepans boiling over on the stove because Mrs Tamm can never catch them in time, and Leslie’s motor-cycling gear on the kitchen table, and Diane’s bulk. Mr Tamm shouts perpetually, at Leslie to take his motor-cycling clothes away, at Diane for being so fat, at his wife, at Sharon, making her jump. ‘You are stupid to an extent,’ is the statement he has coined specially for his wife and repeats for her benefit several times every evening. He speaks slowly when he makes this statement, giving the words air, floating them through tired exasperation. His noisy manner leaves him when he dispatches these words, for otherwise – when he tells his wife she is ugly or a bitch – he shouts, and bangs anything he can lay his hand on, a saucepan lid, a tin of mushy peas, a spoon. The only person he doesn’t shout at is his mother, for whom he has an exaggerated regard, even, according to Sharon, loves. Every evening he takes her down to the Tapper’s Arms, returning at closing time to the house that Sharon has so minutely described: rooms separated by walls through which all quarrels can be heard, cigarette burns on the edge of the bath, a picture of a black girl on the landing, a stair-carpet touched with Leslie’s motor-cycling grease and worn away in places. To Henrietta’s sitting-room – flowery in summer because the french windows bring the garden in, cheerful with a wood fire when it’s cold – these images have been repeatedly conveyed, for Sharon Tamm derived considerable relief from talking.

‘Well, she told me and I’ve told you. Please can we just put it all aside?’

She rises as she speaks and hurries to the kitchen. She opens the oven and places the pineapple pudding on the bottom shelf. She bastes the turkey breast and the potatoes and the parsnips. She washes some broccoli and puts it ready on the draining board. He has not said, as she hoped he would, that Sharon Tamm is really a bit pathetic. Ka-Ki sniffs about the kitchen, excited by the smell that has come from the oven. She trots behind Henrietta, back to the garden.

‘She told you too, didn’t she, Roy? You knew all this?’

She didn’t mean to say that. While washing the broccoli she planned to mention MacMelanie, to change the subject firmly and with deliberation. But the nervousness that Sharon Tamm inspired in her when she said that Roy couldn’t hurt people has suddenly returned, and she feels muzzy due to the sherry, not entirely in control of herself.

‘Yes, she told me,’ he says. ‘Well, actually, it isn’t quite like that.’

He has begun to sweat again, little beads breaking on his forehead and his chin. He pulls the dotted handkerchief from his pocket and wipes at his face. In a slow, unwilling voice he tells her what some intuition already insists is the unbelievable truth: it is not just that the girl has a silly crush on him but that a relationship of some kind exists between them. Listening, she feels physically sick. She feels she is asleep, trying to wake herself out of a nightmare because the sickness is heaving through her stomach. The face of the girl is vivid, a whitehead in the crease of her chin, the rims of her eyes pink. The girl is an insult to her, with her dirty feet and broken fingernails.

‘Let’s not mention it ever again,’ she hears herself urging repetitiously. ‘MacMelanie,’ she begins, but does not continue. He is saying something, his voice stumbling, larded with embarrassment. She can’t hear him properly.

There has never been an uneasiness about their loyalty to one another, about their love or their companionship. Roy is disappointed because, professionally, he hasn’t got on, but that has nothing to do with the marriage. Roy doesn’t understand ambition, he doesn’t understand that advancement has to be pursued. She knows that but has never said it.

‘I’m sorry, Henrietta,’ he says, and she wants to laugh. She wants to stare at him in amazement as he sprawls there, sweating and fat. She wants to laugh into his face so that he can see how ridiculous it all is. How can it possibly be that he is telling her he loves an unattractive girl who is thirty years younger than him?

‘I feel most awfully dejected,’ he mutters, staring down at the paving stones where they sit. Her dog is obedient at his feet. High above them an aeroplane goes over.

Does he want to marry the girl? Will she lead him into the house in Daventry to meet her family, into the kitchen where the awful grandmother is? Will he shake hands with stupid Mrs Tamm, with Leslie and Diane? Will he go down to the Tapper’s Arms with Mr Tamm?

‘I can’t believe this, Roy.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you adore her?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Have I been no good to you all these years, Roy?’

‘Of course you have.’

They have made love, the girl and he. He tells Henrietta so, confessing awkwardly, mentioning the floor of his room in the department. He would have taken off the girl’s granny glasses and put them on the fawn vinyl by the leg of his desk. He would have run his fingers through the lustreless hair.

‘How could you do this, Roy?’

‘It’s a thing that happened. Nobody did anything.’ Red-faced, shame-faced, he attempts to shrug, but the effort becomes lost in his sprawling flabbiness. He is as unattractive as the girl, she finds herself reflecting: a stranded jellyfish.

‘It’s ridiculous, Roy,’ she shouts, at last losing control. ‘It’s madness all this.’ They have had quarrels before, ordinary quarrels about ordinary matters. Mild insults were later taken back, apologized for, the heat of the moment blamed.

‘Why should it be ridiculous,’ he questions now, ‘that someone should love me? Why should it be?’

‘She’s a child, you’re a man of fifty. How could there possibly be a normal relationship between you? What have you in common?’

‘We fell in love, Henrietta. Love has nothing to do with having things in common or normal relationships. Hesselmann in fact points out –’

‘For God’s sake, Roy, this is not a time for Hesselmann.’

‘He does suggest that love abnormalizes –’

‘So you’re going to become a middle-aged hippy, are you, Roy? You’re going to put on robes and dance and meditate in a field with the Orange People? The Orange People were phony, you said. You said that, Roy.’

‘You know as well as I do that Sharon has nothing to do with the Orange People any more.’

‘You’ll love her grandmother. Not to mention Mr Tamm.’

‘Sharon needs to be protected from her family. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t want ever to go back to that house. You’re being snide, you know.’

‘I’m actually suffering from shock.’

‘There are things we must work out.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roy, have your menopausal fling with the girl. Take her off to a hotel in Margate or Benidorm.’

She pours herself more sherry, her hands shaking, a harsh fieriness darkening her face, reflecting the fury in her voice. She imagines the pair of them in the places she mentions, people looking at them, he getting to know the girl’s intimate habits. He would become familiar with the contents of her handbag, the way she puts on and takes off her clothes, the way she wakes up. Nineteen years ago, on their honeymoon in La Grève, Roy spoke of this aspect of a close relationship. Henrietta’s own particular way of doing things, and her possessions – her lipstick, her powder compact, her dark glasses, the leather suitcase with her pre-marriage initials on it, the buttoning of her skirts and dresses – were daily becoming as familiar to him as they had been for so long to her. Her childhood existed for him because of what, in passing, she told him of it.

‘D’you remember La Grève?’ she asks, her voice calm again. ‘The woman who called you Professor, those walks in the snow?’

Impatiently he looks away. La Grève is irrelevant, all of it far too long ago. Again he mentions Hesselmann. Not understanding, she says:

‘At least I shall not forget La Grève.’

‘I’ve tried to get over her. I’ve tried not seeing her. None of it works.’

‘She said you would not have told me. What did you intend, Roy?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘She said it wasn’t fair, did she?’

‘Yes, she did.’ He pauses. ‘She’s very fond of you, you know.’

In the oven the breast of turkey would be shrivelling, the pineapple pudding of which he was so boyishly fond would be a burnt mess. She says, and feels ashamed of admitting it: ‘I’ve always had affection for her too, in spite of what I say.’

‘I need to talk to her now. I need to tell her we’ve cleared the air.’

He stands up and drinks what remains of his drink. Tears ooze from beneath his spectacles as he looks down at Henrietta, staring at her. He says nothing else except, yet again, that he is sorry. He shuffles and blows his nose as he speaks. Then he turns and goes away, and a few minutes later she hears the bang of the hall door, as she heard it after Sharon Tamm had left the house also.

Henrietta shops in a greengrocer’s that in the Italian small-town manner has no name, just Fiori e Frutta: above the door. The shy woman who serves there, who has come to know her, adds up the cost of fagiolini, pears and spinach on a piece of paper.

‘Mille quattro cento.’ Henrietta counts out the money and gathers up her purchases.

‘Buon giorno, grazie,’ the woman murmurs, and Henrietta wishes her good-day and passes out into the street.

The fat barber sleeps in his customers’ chair, his white overall as spotless as a surgeon’s before an operation. In the window his wife knits, glancing up now and again at the women who come and go in the Maigri Moda. It is Tuesday and the Jollycaffè is closed. The men who usually sit outside it are nowhere to be seen.

Henrietta buys a slice of beef, enough for one. In the mini-market she buys eggs and a packet of zuppa di verdura, and biscotti strudel ‘cocktail di frutta’, which have become her favourites. She climbs up through the town, to the appartamento in the Piazza Santa Lucia. She is dressed less formally than she thought suitable for middle age in England. She wears a denim skirt, blue canvas shoes, a blue shirt which she bought before the weekend from Signora Leici. Her Italian improves a little every day, due mainly to the lessons she has with the girl in the Informazioni. They are both determined that by the winter she will know enough to teach English to the youngest children in the orphanage. Sister Maria has said she would welcome that.

It is May. On the verges of the meadows and the wheat fields that stretch below the town pale roses are in bloom. Laburnum blossoms in the vineyards, wires for the vines stretching between the narrow trunks of the trees. It is the season of broom and clover, of poppies, and geraniums forgotten in the grass. Sleepy vipers emerge from crevices, no longer kept down by the animals that once grazed these hillsides. Because of them Henrietta has bought rubber boots for walking in the woods or up Monte Totona.

She is happy because she is alone. She is happy in the small appartamento lent to her by friends of her sister, who use it infrequently. She loves the town’s steep, cool streets, its quietness, the grey stone of its buildings, quarried from the hill it is built upon. She is happy because the nightmare is distant now, a picture she can illuminate in her mind and calmly survey. She sees her husband sprawling on the chair in the garden, the girl in her granny glasses, and her own weeping face in the bathroom looking-glass. Time shrinks the order of events: she packs her clothes into three suitcases; she is in her sister’s house in Hemel Hempstead. That was the worst of all, the passing of the days in Hemel Hempstead, the sympathy of her sister, her generous, patient brother-in-law, their children imagining she was ill. When she thinks of herself now she feels a child herself, not the Henrietta of the suburban sitting-room and the tray of drinks, with chiffontidily in her hair. Her father makes a swing for her because she has begged so, ropes tied to the bough of an apple tree. Her mother once was cross because she climbed that tree. She cries and her sister comforts her, a sunny afternoon when she got tar on her dress. She skates on an icy pond, a birthday treat before her birthday tea when she was nine. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said in Hemel Hempstead, and then there was the stroke of good fortune, people she did not even know who had an appartamento in a Tuscan hill town.

In the cantina of the Contucci family the wine matures in oaken barrels of immense diameter, the iron hoops that bind them stylishly painted red. She has been shown the cantina and the palace of the Contucci. She has looked across the slopes of terracotta roof-tiles to Monticchiello and Pienza. She has drunk the water of the nearby spa and has sat in the sun outside the café by the bank, whiling away a morning with an Italian dictionary. Frusta means whip, and it’s also the word for the bread she has with Fontina for lunch.

Her husband pays money into her bank account and she accepts it because she must. There are some investments her father left her: between the two sources there is enough to live on. But one day, when her Italian is good enough, she will reject the money her husband pays her. It is degrading to look for support from someone she no longer respects. And one day, too, she will revert to her maiden name, for why should she carry with her the name of a man who shrugged her off?

In the cool of the appartamento she lunches alone. With her frusta and Fontina she eats peppery radishes and drinks acqua minerale. Wine in the daytime makes her sleepy, and she is determined this afternoon to learn another thirty words and to do two exercises for the girl in the Informazioni. Le Chiavi del Regno by A.J. Cronin is open beside her, but for a moment she does not read it. A week ago, on the telephone to England, she described the four new villas of Signor Falconi to prospective tenants, Signora Falconi having asked her if she would. The Falconis had shown her the villas they had built near their fattoria in the hills, and she assured someone in Gloucester that any one of them would perfectly suit her requirements, which were sun and tranquillity and room enough for six.

Guilt once consumed her, Henrietta considers. She continued to be a secretary in the department for six years after her marriage but had given it up because she’d found it awkward, having to work not just for her husband but for his rivals and his enemies. He’d been pleased when she’d done so, and although she’d always intended to find a secretarial post outside the university she never had. She’d felt guilty about that, because she was contributing so little, a childless housewife.

‘I want to stay here.’ She says it aloud, pouring herself more acqua minerale, not eating for a moment. ‘Voglio stare qui.’ She has known the worst of last winter’s weather; she has watched spring coming; heat will not defeat her. How has she not guessed, through all those years of what seemed like a contented marriage, that solitude suits her better? It only seemed contented, she knows that now: she had talked herself into an artificial contentment, she had allowed herself to become a woman dulled by the monotony of a foolish man, his sprawling bigness and his sense of failure. It is bliss of a kind not to hear his laughter turned on for a television joke, not to look daily at his flamboyant ties and unpolished shoes. Quella mattina il diario si aprí alla data Ottobre 1917: how astonished he would be if he could see her now, childishly delighting in The Keys of the Kingdom in Italian.

It was her fault, she’d always believed, that they could not have children – yet something informs her now that it was probably more her husband’s, that she’d been wrong to feel inadequate. As a vacuum-cleaner sucks in whatever it touches, he had drawn her into a world that was not her own; she had existed on territory where it was natural to be blind – where it was natural, too, to feel she must dutifully console a husband because he was not a success professionally. ‘Born with a sense of duty,’ her father once said, when she was ten or so. ‘A good thing, Henrietta.’ She is not so sure: guilt and duty seem now to belong together, different names for a single quality.

Later that day she walks to the Church of San Biagio, among the meadows below the walls of the town. Boys are playing football in the shade, girls lie on the grass. She goes over her vocabulary in her mind, passing by the church. She walks on white, dusty roads, between rows of slender pines. Solivare is the word she has invented – to do with wandering alone. Piantare means to plant; piantamento is planting, piantagione plantation. Determinedly she taxes her atrophied memory: sulla via di casa and in modo da; un manovale and la briciola.

In the August of that year, when the heat is at its height, Signora Falconi approaches Henrietta in the macelleria. She speaks in Italian, for Henrietta’s Italian is better now than Signora Falconi’s rudimentary English. There is something, Signora Falconi reveals – a request that has not to do with reassuring a would-be tenant on the telephone. There is some other proposition that Signor Falconi and his wife would like to put to her.

‘Verrò,’ Henrietta agrees. ‘Verrò martedí coll’ autobus.’

The Falconis offer her coffee and a little grappa. Their four villas, clustered around their fattoria, are full of English tenants now. Every fortnight these tenants change, so dirty laundry must be gathered for the lavanderia, fresh sheets put on the beds, the villa cleaned. And the newcomers, when they arrive, must be shown where everything is, told about the windows and the shutters, warned about the mosquitoes and requested not to use too much water. They must have many other details explained to them, which the Falconis, up to now, have not quite succeeded in doing. There is a loggia in one of the villas that would be Henrietta’s, a single room with a balcony and a bathroom, an outside staircase. And the Falconis would pay just a little for the cleaning and the changing of the sheets, the many details explained. The Falconis are apologetic, fearing that Henrietta may consider the work too humble. They are anxious she should know that women to clean and change sheets are not easy to come by since they find employment in the hotels of the nearby spa, and that there is more than enough for Signora Falconi herself to do at the fattoria.

It is not the work Henrietta has imagined when anticipating her future, but her future in her appartamento is uncertain, for she cannot live for ever on strangers’ charity and one day the strangers will return.

‘Va bene,’ she says to the Falconis. ‘Lo faccio.’

She moves from the Piazza San Lucia. La governante Signora Falconi calls her, and the tenants of the villas become her temporary friends. Some take her out to II Marzucco, the hotel of the town. Others drive her to the sulphur baths or to the abbey at Monte Oliveto, where doves flutter through the cloisters, as white as the dusty roads she loves to walk on. On either side of the pink brick archway are the masterpieces of Luca della Robbia and sometimes the doves alight on them. This abbey on the hill of Oliveto is the most beautiful place she has ever visited: she owes a debt to the girl with the granny glasses.

In the evening she sits on her balcony, drinking a glass of vino nobile, hearing the English voices, and the voices of the Italians in and around the fattoria. But by October the English voices have dwindled and the only customers of the fattoria are the Italians who come traditionally for lunch on Sundays. Henrietta cleans the villas then. She scours the saucepans and puts away the cutlery and the bed linen. The Falconis seem concerned that she should be on her own so much and invite her to their meals occasionally, but she explains that her discovery of solitude has made her happy. Sometimes she watches them making soap and candles, learning how that is done.

The girl, walking up and down the sitting-room that once was Henrietta’s, is more matter-of-fact and assured than Henrietta remembers her, though her complexion has not improved. Her clothes – a black je sey and a black leather skirt – are of a better quality. There is a dusting of dandruff on the jersey, her long hair has been cut.

‘It’s the way things worked out,’ she says, which is something she has said repeatedly before, during the time they have had to spend together.

Henrietta does not reply, as she has not on the previous occasions. Upstairs, in blue-and-brown-striped pyjamas, purchased by herself three years ago, the man of whom each has had a share rests. He is out of danger, recovering in an orderly way.

‘As Roy himself said,’ the girl repeats also, ‘we live in a world of mistakes.’

Yet they belong together, he and the girl, with their academic brightness and Hesselmann to talk about. The dog is no longer in the house. Ka-Ki has eaten a plastic bag, attracted by slivers of meat adhering to it, and has died. Henrietta blames herself. No matter how upset she’d felt it had been cruel to walk out and leave that dog.

‘I gave Roy up to you,’ she says, ‘since that was what you and he wanted.’

‘Roy is ill.’

‘He is ill, but at the same time he is well again. This house is yours and his now. You have changed things. You have let the place get dirty, the windows don’t seem ever to have been opened. I gave the house up to you also. I’m not asking you to give it back.’

‘Like I say, Henrietta, it was unfortunate about the dog. I’m sorry about that.’

‘I chose to leave the dog behind, with everything else.’

‘Look, Henrietta –’

‘Roy will be able to work again, just as before: we’ve been quite assured about that. He is to lose some weight, he is to take care of his diet. He is to exercise himself properly, something he never bothered with. It was you, not me, they gave those instructions to.’

‘They didn’t seem to get the picture, Henrietta. Like I say, we broke up, I wasn’t even living here. I’ve explained that to you, Henrietta. I haven’t been here for the past five months, I’m down in London now.’

‘Don’t you feel you should get Roy on his feet again, since you had last use of him, as it were?’

‘That way you’re talking is unpleasant, Henrietta. You’re getting at me, you’re getting at poor Roy. Like you’re jealous or something. There was love between us, there really was. Deep love. You know, Henrietta? You understand?’

‘Roy explained it to me about the love, that evening.’

‘But then it went. It just extinguished itself, like maybe there was something in the age-difference bit. I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll never know, Henrietta.’

‘Perhaps not indeed.’

‘We were happy for a long time, Roy and me. As happy as any two people could be.’

‘I’m sure you were.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that. Look, Henrietta, I’m with someone else now. It’s different what I’ve got now. It’s going to work out.’

A damp coldness, like the fog that hangs about the garden, touches Henrietta’s flesh, insinuating itself beneath her clothes, icy on her stomach and her back. The girl had been at the hospital, called there because Roy had asked for her. She did not say then that she was with someone else.

‘May I just, you know, say goodbye to Roy? May I be with him for just five minutes, Henrietta?’

She does not reply. The coldness has spread to her arms and legs. It oozes over her breasts; it reaches for her feet. In blurred vision she sees the steep cool streets of the town, the laburnums and the blaze of clover in the landscape she ran away to.

‘I know it’s terrible for you, Henrietta.’

Sharon Tamm leaves the room to have her last five minutes. The blur in Henrietta’s vision is nothing now. She wonders if they have buried her dog somewhere.

‘Goodbye, Henrietta. He’s tons better, you know.’

She hears the hall door close as she heard it on the afternoon when the girl came to talk to her, and later when Roy left the house. It’s odd, she reflects, that because there has been a marriage and because she bears his name, she should be less free than the girl. Yet is not the life she discovered for herself much the same as finding someone else? Perhaps not.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, when she brings him a tray. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry about all this mess.’

He cries and is unable to cease. The tears fall on to the egg she has poached for him and into his cup of Bovril. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’