Collected Stories

The Smoke Trees of San Pietro

My father was a great horseman. My mother was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. I was taken to watch my father jumping as a member of the military team in Linvik when I was five years old. The team did not win that afternoon but my father’s performance was faultless and he himself received a personal award. I remember the applause and his saluting, and my mother’s fingers tightening; on my arm. ‘Oh, how deserved that is!’ she whispered, and when my father joined us later you could see that he was proud. He smelt of horses and of leather, as he always did when he’d been jumping: to this day, I can evoke that smell at will.

That is the most vivid memory of that early time in my childhood. We drove away from the stadium and then there was my first dinner in a restaurant, my mother and father on either side of me, red roses in a vase, a candle burning in a wooden candlestick that was painted blue and green. ‘One day,’ my father predicted, anticipating that in time I, too, would be a member of the military team. Already I was promising: so he insisted when he watched me cantering with my mother along the grassy path beside the birch woods. In the restaurant they touched their wine-glasses and my father requested the waiter to pour me just a little wine so that on this particular occasion I might have my first taste of it. Johan my father called the waiter, while I wondered which feature it was that in particular made my mother’s beauty so remarkable. One moment it seemed to be the candlelight gleaming on her pale hair, the next the blue of her eyes, and then her lips and the tiny wrinkle on her forehead, and then the graceful way she held her head. My father’s hand reached across the tablecloth for one of hers, and there that memory ceases.

There is another one. In his surgery Dr Edlund probed my eyes with the beam of a torch that was as slim as a pencil. The disc of his stethoscope lingered on my back and chest, my reflexes were tested, my throat examined, my blood gathered in a capsule, the cavities of my body sounded. And afterwards, when weeks had passed, it was declared that I was not strong. Tiredness in future was to be avoided; I must canter more gently; becoming hot was not good. ‘He will be different from what we imagined,’ my father said. ‘That is all.’ I did not, then, sense the disappointment in his voice.

It was because of my delicate constitution that my mother first took me to San Pietro al Mare, initiating a summer regime that was to continue throughout my childhood. We went by train and because of my delicate constitution more time was devoted to the journey than might otherwise have been considered necessary. A night was spent in Hamburg, at the Hotel Kronberg, then by day and night we went slowly on, the air noticeably warmer each time we stopped at a station. A final night was spent at Milan, at the Hotel Belvedere. We arrived at San Pietro al Mare in the early afternoon.

I think, that first evening, my mother was a little nervous. She addressed the hotel staff in English and was apprehensive lest she was not correctly understood. In the restaurant, at dinner, she spoke very slowly to the waiter and I did not entirely follow what was said because I did not yet understand much English. But the waiter, who was extremely rapid in all he did –flicking open our napkins and expertly covering our knees with them, running his finger down the menu to make a suggestion, noting my mother’s order on his pad – did not once request her to repeat a word. When he had gone my mother asked me if I felt tired, but I was not in the least. From the moment the train had begun to slow down for San Pietro I’d felt exhilarated. I was supposed not to carry heavy luggage but I had done so none the less, assisting the porter at the station to pack our suitcases into the taxi while my mother was at the Cambio. We had driven by palm trees – the first time I had ever seen such trees – and beyond them the sea was a shimmer of blue, just like the sky. Then the taxi turned abruptly, leaving behind the strolling couples on the promenade – the men in white suits, women in beach dresses – and the coloured umbrellas that offered each café table a pool of shade. For a very short time, no more than half a minute perhaps, the taxi climbed a hill which became quite steep and then drew up at the Villa Parco. The palm trees and the promenade were far below, the limpid sea appeared to stretch for ever.

At dinner I said I had never been in such an exotic place. The dining-room where we sat was more elegant and gracious, and a great deal larger, than the restaurant my father had taken us to on the evening of his triumph with the military team. I had never before seen so many people dining at the same time, many of them in evening dress. Spirit stoves burned at each table. Glass doors which stretched from the ceiling to the floor were thrown wide open to a terrace with a decorated balustrade – coloured medallions set among its brief, grey pillars. Beyond that the garden of the Villa Parco was spread with flowers that were quite unfamiliar to me: burgeoning shrubs of oleander and bougainvillaea, and trees called smoke trees, so my mother said. In the hotel I loved the sound of Italian, the mysterious words and phrases the chambermaids and the waiters called out to one another. And I loved the hesitant English of my mother.

The next morning – and every morning after that – my mother and I bathed among the rocks because Dr Edlund had prescribed as advantageous the exercise of unhurried swimming. We took the lift that descended to the bathing place from the hotel garden and afterwards we lay for a short time in the sun, covered with protecting creams, before walking to a café for an albicocca. We watched the people sauntering by, remarking on them when they were unusual. In this connection my mother taught me English words: ‘haughty’, ‘wan’, ‘abstracted’, and made me say in English, ‘Thank you very much’, when the waitress brought our albicocca. Then we would return to the hotel garden where, until lunchtime, my mother read to me from Kidnapped. I drew the faces of the waiters and the hall-porters, and the façade of the Villa Parco, and the white-painted chairs among the smoke trees. A visitor at the hotel would take one of these iron chairs and carry-it to a secluded place and later idly leave it there. Or a tête-à-tête would occur, two of the chairs drawn away in the same manner and then vacated, two empty glasses left on a table. After lunch we rested, then swam again, and again visited the town. ‘We must complete our postcard,’ my mother would say on the way in to dinner or during the meal itself, and afterwards we would do so before dropping the postcard into the letter-box in the hall. Sometimes I made a drawing on it for my father, a caricature of a face or the outline of a shell we’d found, and from my mother there would always be a reference to my health.

That pattern of our holiday, established during our first summer at San Pietro, remained to influence the subsequent years. We always left Linvik on a Tuesday and stayed, en route, at the Hotel Kronberg in Hamburg and the Belvedere in Milan: we always remained for July and August at San Pietro. But on the later occasions there were differences also: my mother was no longer nervous about her English; the staff at the Villa Parco remembered us and welcomed us with increasing warmth; some of the other visitors, familiar from previous years, would greet us when we arrived. This pleased my mother but, for myself, I preferred the novelty of strangers. I liked to watch the laden taxis draw up, the emergence of a man and woman or a family, an elderly person of either sex issuing orders to a younger companion, or the arrival of a solitary figure, always the most interesting from the point of view of speculation. Monsieur Paillez was one of these: he appeared at the Villa Parco for the first time during our third summer, to be assessed by us, and no doubt by other regulars as well, when he strolled down the terrace steps late one afternoon, a thin, tall, dark-haired man in a linen suit. He sat not far from where we were and a moment later a waiter brought him a tray of tea. He smoked while he drank it, taking no interest either in his surroundings or the other people in the garden.

‘A town called Linvik,’ my mother said, and two ladies in the garden listened while she described it. The ladies were Italian, Signora Binelli and her daughter Claudia. They came from Genoa, they told my mother, which was a city renowned for its trade associations and its cuisine. They spoke of formidable grey stone and formidable palaces, stirring in the false impression that the palaces had been carved out of the side of an immense grey mountain. A passenger lift went up and down all day long between the heights of Genoa and its depths, making its passage through the mountain rock. This information the Italian ladies repeated, remarking that the lift was a great deal larger and more powerful than the one that conveyed us from the garden of the Villa Parco to the bathing place. The palaces of Genoa were built of rectangular blocks and decoratively finished, they said, and the earlier imprecision was adjusted in my mind.

Signora Binelli was very stout. She had smooth white skin, very tight, that seemed to labour under as much strain as her silk dresses did. She knew, my mother murmured once as we walked away from the two Italian ladies, not to wear over-bright clothes. There was always some black in them – in the oak leaves that patterned dark maroon or green, behind swirls of blue or brown. The Italians knew about being fat, my mother said.

Signora Binelli’s daughter, Claudia, was not at all like that. She was a film star we were told, and certainly she presented that appearance, many of her fingers displaying jewelled rings, her huge red lips perpetually parted to display a glistening flash of snowy teeth. Her eyes were huge also, shown off to best effect by the dark saucers beneath them. Her clothes were more colourful than Signora Binelli’s, but discreetly so. My mother said Claudia had taste.

‘Buon giorno,’ Monsieur Paillez greeted my mother and these ladies one morning in the garden, inclining his head as he went on his way to the lift. We sat at one of the tables, shaded by its vast blue-and-grey umbrella. Claudia’s swimming bag hung from the arm of her chair; sunglasses obscured her magnificent eyes. A yellow-backed book, Itinerario Svizzero, was on the table beside the ashtray; she smoked a cigarette. Signora Binelli wore a wide-brimmed white hat that protected the skin of her face from the sunshine. The sleeves of her dark dress were buttoned at her wrists; her shoulders and much of her neck were covered.

‘Paillez,’ Signora Binelli said. ‘Is it in France a name to know? Count Paillez?’ Bewildered by these questions, my mother only smiled in reply. Claudia removed the cigarette from between her lips. She did not think Monsieur Paillez was a count, she said. She had not heard that in the hotel.

‘We do not have counts in my country,’ my mother contributed.

‘In Italian we say conte,’ Signora Binelli explained. ‘So also contessa.’

‘I take my swim,’ Claudia said.

My mother said we would take ours soon. In prescribing this form of exercise for me Dr Edlund had reminded my mother that it must not be indulged in while food was in the early stages of digestion: we always permitted two hours at least for my breakfast of tea and brioche to settle itself before I entered the sea. Others, I noticed, were not so meticulous about such matters, but I had become used to being different where health was concerned. A day would come, Dr Edlund had confidently assured me, when I would look back on all this mollycoddling with amusement – and with gratitude also, he hastily added, for I would be the stronger for it. He was not telling the truth, as doctors sometimes cannot. My life was confined to childhood, was what he’d told my mother and my father: it would not reach beyond it. ‘We do not speak much of this,’ my father had said in a moment when he did not know I could hear. My grandmother had come to Linvik for a few days: it was she he told, and he’d been wise enough to keep the news from her until her departure was quite imminent. Care and attention saw to it that my childhood continued to advance without mishap, my father said, but even so my grandmother hugged me tearfully before she went, pressing me so tightly into her arms that I thought my end would come there and then. That was some time before my mother and I spent our first summer at San Pietro al Mare. I was eleven the summer Monsieur Paillez arrived at the Villa Parco.

‘Well, we might go now,’ my mother said, and we gathered up our things and descended the slope of the lawn to the lift that took us to the bathing place. Signora Binelli, in search of deeper shade, had moved to a table beneath the trees.

There is very little I have since liked better than swimming among the rocks at San Pietro. The water was of a tranquillity and a clear blueness that made it seem more like a lake than the sea. The rocks were washed white, like smooth, curved bones that blissfully held your body when you lay on them. Two small bathing huts – in blue-and-grey canvas similar to the lawn umbrellas – became a world, my mother’s and mine, safely holding our belongings while we swam or floated.

‘T’amuses-tu?’ Monsieur Paillez slipped by me, his overarm strokes hardly rippling the surface. ‘Ti’ diverti?’ And finally translating into the language I had become familiar with: ‘You enjoy yourself?’

‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, thank you.’

‘C’est bon,’ he called back, over his shoulder. ‘We are here to enjoy ourselves, eh?’

An attendant supplied my mother with inflated cushions to lie on, but I myself preferred the bonelike rock. Claudia had made a personal territory of a narrow little cape, spreading on it her towels and various possessions from her bathing bag, then stretching herself prone, and slumbering. The other bathers disposed themselves in similar ways, oiling the skin of their legs and backs. Monsieur Paillez briskly dried himself and went away.

That same day, an hour before dinner, my mother and I were returning from our evening walk around the town when a taxi drew up beside us and Monsieur Paillez said:

‘May I offer you a lift?’

When my mother explained that our walk was taken for pleasure the Frenchman paid the driver and fell into step with us. This was a considerable surprise. (‘I was quite astounded,’ my mother remarked later, as we went over the incident during dinner.)

‘I have a little business to conduct in Triora,’ Monsieur Paillez said. ‘How cool it is now!’

It had been oppressive in Triora, he said. How pleasant it always was to return to San Pietro! ‘I greatly admire the smoke trees of San Pietro. Do you not also, madame?’

My mother said she did, and a conversation ensued between them concerning shrubs and horticulture. After that my mother revealed that she and I had been coming to San Pietro al Mare for three years, and Monsieur Paillez confessed that he did not know it as well as we did, this being his first visit. He had decided he might prefer the sea and a good hotel to what Triora had to offer. Triora he knew particularly well.

‘We have always been happy at the Villa Parco,’ my mother said.

Monsieur Paillez asked questions in a polite manner: if our journey to San Pietro was a long one, how we made it, where we stayed en route. My mother answered, equally politely.

‘You have travelled from Paris, Monsieur Paillez?’

‘Ah, no. Not Paris. I travel from Lille. Have you by chance heard of Lille?’

My mother had and when he questioned her again she mentioned Linvik, repeating the name because Monsieur Paillez had difficulty in understanding it at first. He had not known of our town’s existence.

‘Well, quite like Lille maybe,’ my mother said. ‘With manufacturing interests.’

‘Though less extensive in size I would suggest?’

‘Oh yes, much less extensive.’

‘The scent in the air is the evening scent of the smoke trees,’ Monsieur Paillez said. (Afterwards – over dinner – my mother confessed to me that she had only been aware of the familiar scent of bougainvillaea, and had never before heard that smoke trees gave off a perfume of any kind.)

‘Such a place!’ Monsieur Painez enthused as we passed through the gardens of the hotel. ‘Such a place!’

That was the beginning of Monsieur Paillez’s friendship with my mother. The following morning, when we were resting after breakfast on the lawn, he did not pass our table by but again dropped into conversation and then inquired if he might sit down. Signora Binelli and Claudia, emerging from the hotel ten minutes later and about to join us, as on other days, did not do so. Signora Binelli settled herself beneath the smoke trees, Claudia went straight to the lift. It was clear to me – though possibly not to my mother and Monsieur Paillez, who by now were exchanging views on Mozart’s operas – that the Italian ladies were displeased.

‘What fun Così fan Tutte is!’ Monsieur Paillez later exclaimed in the lift. ‘It is the fun of it I love.’

The excursion to the bathing place, and the routine that followed it, did not vary from day to day. Everything was the same: my mother and I swimming for twenty minutes or so, then lying in the sunshine before swimming again, Claudia claiming her private territory, other swimmers occupying their places of the day before, Monsieur Paillez briskly drying himself and going away, as if suddenly in a hurry.

‘Business in Triora!’ Signora Binelli remarked one evening when he did not return to the hotel at his usual time. It was not yet too cool for me to be permitted to remain on the terrace with my mother while she took her aperitif. Signora Binelli and Claudia occupied the table next to ours, as always they did. Since the evening Monsieur Paillez had halted his taxi it had become his habit to join my mother while she had her aperitif and he his. A general conversation then took place, the Binellis drawn into it because it was natural that they should be, I the only silent one.

‘There is not much business, I would have thought, in Triora,’ Claudia said, placing her cigarette on the table’s ashtray in order to select an olive. ‘Not business to attract a Frenchman.’

‘Monsieur Paillez visits his wife,’ my mother said. ‘It is his manner of speech to call it business.’

‘Wife!’ Signora Binelli repeated sharply. ‘Moglie,’ she translated, visibly annoying her daughter.

‘I am not uneducated,’ Claudia retorted. ‘So Monsieur Paillez is married, signora?’

‘His wife is an Italian lady.’ My mother paused. ‘She is in the care of nuns.’

‘Le suore,’ Signora Binelli supplied, and Claudia crossly sighed.

‘An asylum for the afflicted in Triora,’ my mother said. ‘She being of Triora originally. I think aristocratic.’

Abruptly Signora Binelli changed the subject. She did so in a manner that suggested the one engaging our attention required thinking about before it might profitably be continued. ‘Claudia is to have a part,’ she announced. ‘We hear today. A fine part, in Il Marito in Collegio.’

‘It’s just a possibility,’ Claudia corrected, retaining the crossness in her voice. ‘First the film must be financed.’

Monsieur Paillez did not join us that evening, nor did he appear in the dining-room. My mother did not remark on this, but when we left our table we had to pass close to the Binellis’. ‘He would not surely have gone without saying goodbye?’ Signora Binelli said. With small, beady eyes she peered from the fatness of her face, searching my mother’s expression for the explanation she clearly believed her to possess. ‘Monsieur Paillez said nothing to me,’ my mother replied, but when we had reached my room she quietly murmured, almost to herself: ‘His wife has not been well today.’

After breakfast the next morning he did not join us, nor did he arrive at the bathing place. My mother, I thought, became a little disconsolate, as if some flickering of doubt had crept into her mind, as if she’d begun to imagine that she was wrong in the explanation that had occurred to her. But if this doubt had indeed begun to haunt her it was soon dissipated.

‘This has been a sorrowful time for me,’ Monsieur Paillez said in the town that evening, appearing suddenly beside us as we left the pharmacy where one of my prescriptions had been renewed. ‘Since yesterday at midday it has been unhappy.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘From time to time this has to be.’

Monsieur Paillez had a mobile face. His expressions changed rapidly, his dark eyes conveying the mood that possessed him, even before the line of his lips did. His wife was mad, my mother had told me when I’d asked her the evening before, not quite understanding the exchanges with Signora Binelli. It was not easy for Monsieur Paillez, my mother had added.

He walked with us back to the hotel and then sat on the terrace, ordering the aperitifs for my mother and himself and an albicocca for me. He had bought a linen hat in Triora, to match his suit. The sun was always fierce in Triora, he said.

‘You have returned to us!’ Signora Binelli cried as soon as she saw him sitting there.

‘Ah,oui,’ he replied. ‘I have returned.’

In English he had difficulty with his h’s, but only when they came at the beginning of a word. Sometimes he repeated what he’d just said, in order to set that right. He nodded after he’d agreed he had returned. He listened while Signora Binelli said everyone had missed him.

‘Monsieur Paillez is safely here again,’ she pointed out to her daughter when she arrived on the terrace. ‘He has not gone without farewells.’

‘Never,’ Monsieur Paillez protested. ‘Never would I be guilty.’

That evening – no doubt because of his low spirits – Monsieur Paillez sat with us for dinner. ‘I do not intrude?’ he said. ‘I would not wish to.’ My mother assured him he did not, and I do not believe she once observed the staring of Signora Binelli across the crowded dining-room, or Claudia’s pretence that she had not noticed.

‘Tell me what you like best to draw,’ Monsieur Paillez invited me, ‘here in San Pietro.’

I could not think what to reply – the rocks where we bathed? the waiters? the promenade when we sat outside a café? Claudia or Signora Binelli? So I said:

‘The smoke trees because they are so difficult.’ It was true. Try as I would, I could not adequately represent the misty foliage or catch the subtlety of its colours.

‘And no drawing of course,’ my mother said, ‘could ever convey the smoke trees’ evening scent.’

She laughed, and Monsieur Paillez laughed: at some time or another, although I could not guess when, his error in imagining that the smoke trees gave off a night-time perfume had become a joke between them. Sitting there not saying anything further, I received the impression that my mother had come to know Monsieur Paillez better than the moments after breakfast on the lawn, and the whiling away of their aperitifs, allowed. I experienced the bewildering feeling that their exchanges – even those in which I had taken part – conveyed more than the words were called upon to communicate.

‘My dear, go up,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll follow in a moment.’

I was a little shy, having to leave the dining-room on my own, which I had never done before. People always looked at my mother and myself when we did so together, some of them inclining their heads as a way of bidding us good-night, others actually saying ‘Buona notte’ or ‘Bon nuit’. No one bothered with me on my own, except of course Signora Binelli, who remarked: ‘So they have packed you off!’

‘Buona notte, signora.’

Claudia clapped together the tips of her fingers, pleased that I spoke in Italian because she had taught me a few phrases. I had said good evening beautifully, she complimented, calling after me that certainly I had an ear.

‘That poor child,’ her mother tartly deplored as I pushed at the dining-room’s swing-doors. ‘What a thing for a child!’

That night I had a nightmare. My father and I were in the rector’s house in Linvik. The purpose of our being there was mysterious, but having eaten something with the rector we were taken to a small room which was full of the clocks he collected and repaired as a pastime. Here, while he and my father were in conversation, I stole a clock face, attempting to secrete it in my clothes. Then it seemed that I had stolen more than that: springs and cogs and wheels and hands had been lifted from the blue baize of the table and filled all my pockets. ‘I insist on the police,’ the rector said, and I was made to sit down on a chair to which my father tied me with a rope. But it was not the police who came, only the old man who delivered firewood to us. ‘This is a new treatment,’ he said, taking from the blue baize cover on the table the minute hand of a grandfather clock and inserting its point beneath one of my eyelids.

‘Now, now,’ my mother said. ‘It’s only a nightmare.’

Her embrace protected me; her lips were cool on my cheek. The garlic in the veal escalope had made it rich, she said, and begged me to tell her the dream. But already it seemed silly to have been frightened by such absurdity, and although I told her about the woodseller’s punishment I was ashamed that in my dream I had not been able to recognize this for what it was.

Behind my mother as she bent over me there was an upright rectangle of light. It came from the open doorway of her bedroom: because of my delicate constitution we always had adjoining rooms in the hotels where we stayed. ‘Shall we have it like that tonight?’ she suggested, but I shook my head, and rejected also her suggestion that my bedside light should be left burning. It was cowardly to capitulate to the threat of fantasies: my father may once have said so, although if he had he would not have said it harshly, for that was not my father’s way.

I believe I slept for a while, impossible to gauge how long. I awoke abruptly and recalled at once the rector’s clock-room and the fear that had possessed me. Without my mother’s consoling presence, I did not wish to return to sleep, cowardice notwithstanding, and was immediately more wide awake than I had been when she’d come to put her arms around me. I lay in the darkness, fearful only of closing my eyes.

I heard the murmur of voices. A crack of light showed beneath the door that led to my mother’s room. I stared at it and listened: my mother was speaking to someone, and being spoken to in return. There would be a silence for a while and then the murmur would begin again.

When the door unexpectedly opened I closed my eyes, not wishing my mother to know I was frightened of sleeping. She came softly to my bedside, stood still, and then re-crossed the room. Before she closed the door she said: ‘He is sleeping.’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice replied that that was good.

Their quiet exchanges began again. What did they say to one another? I wondered. Had she told him about my delicate constitution? Had she said that in spite of Dr Edlund’s bluff pretence it was accepted by everyone that I would not live beyond my childhood? I imagined her telling him, and Monsieur Paillez commiserating, as my mother would have over his mad Italian wife. I was glad for her that she had found such a friend at San Pietro, for she was so very kind to me, travelling this great distance down through Europe just for my sake, with nothing much to do when she arrived except to read and swim and exchange politenesses. I was aware that it had not been possible for my mother to have other children, for once I had asked her about the brothers and sisters who were not there. I was aware that sacrifices had been made for me, and of the sadness there would one day be for both my mother and my father, when my life came to an end. I should feel no sadness myself, since of course I should not know; I expected nothing more, beyond what I’d been promised.

I slept and dreamed again, but this time pleasantly: my mother and father and I were in the restaurant I had been taken to after my father’s success in the jumping ring. Around us people were laughing and talking, and so were my mother and father. There was no more to the dream, but I felt happy when I remembered it in the morning.

‘There is a fine Deposition in Triora,’ Monsieur Paillez said on the lawn after breakfast. ‘You might find it worth the journey.’

My mother answered as though she’d been expecting the suggestion. She answered quickly, almost before Monsieur Paillez had ceased to speak, and then she turned to me to say a visit to Triora might make an outing.

‘There is a pretty trattoria not far from that church,’ Monsieur Paillez said. ‘Its terrace is shaded by a vine. Once or twice I have had lunch there.’

And so, after our swim that day, my mother did not lie on the inflated cushions nor I on the white rock I had made my own, but dressed ourselves and were as swift as Monsieur Paillez about it. The taxi he took every day to Triora was waiting outside the hotel.

I enjoyed the change in our routine, though not the Deposition, nor the church which housed it. We didn’t spend long there, hardly more than a minute, finding instead a café where we wrote our daily postcard to my father. We have come today to Triora, I wrote, with Monsieur Paillez, who is visiting his mad Italian wife. We have seen a picture in a church. At last there was something different to write and for once the words came easily. I was smiling when I handed the postcard to my mother, anticipating her surprise that I had completed my message so quickly. She read it carefully, but did not immediately add her own few sentences. She would do that later, she said, placing the postcard in her handbag. (I afterwards found it, torn into little pieces, in the wastepaper basket in her room.)

‘At peace today,’ Monsieur Paillez reported in the trattoria with the vine. ‘Yes, more at peace today.’

It was usually so, he explained: when his wife had had a bad spell there was often a period of tranquillity. Because of it he did not visit the asylum in the afternoon, but returned with us to the Villa Parco and joined us when we swam again.

‘It is almost certain that Claudia has secured the part,’ Signora Binelli announced on the terrace before dinner. ‘All day long the telephone has been ringing for her.’

My mother and Monsieur Paillez smiled, though without exchanging a look. Claudia, arriving on the terrace, said the part in Il Marito in Collegio was far from certain. The telephone ringing was always a bad sign, implying indecision.

Just for a moment on the way in to dinner Monsieur Paillez’s hand gently cupped my mother’s elbow. Tonight he sat with us also, even though his spirits were no longer low, and as he and my mother conversed I again felt happy that she had a friend in San Pietro, one who could be called that more than the Binellis or any of the other guests could. That night I woke up once, and listened, and heard the murmuring.

On the way back to Linvik – in Hamburg, I believe it was – my mother said:

‘Let’s forget about that day we went to Triora.’

‘Forget it?’

‘Well, I mean, let’s have it as a secret.’

I asked her why we should do that. She did not hesitate but said that on that day, passing a shop window, she had seen in it what she wished to buy my father for Christmas. She had not bought it at the time, but had asked Monsieur Paillez to do so when he was next in Triora.

‘And did he?’

‘Yes, he did.’

Monsieur Paillez was just my father’s size, she said: whatever the garment was (my mother didn’t identify it), he had kindly tried it on. ‘I shall not say much about Monsieur Paillez,’ my mother said, ‘in case I stupidly divulge that little secret. When you talk about a person you sometimes do so without thinking. So perhaps we should neither of us much mention Monsieur Paillez.’

As I listened, I knew that I had never before heard my mother say anything as silly. Every evening after the day of our excursion to Triora Monsieur Paillez had stepped out of his taxi in front of the hotel and had joined us on the terrace. On none of these occasions had he carried a parcel, let alone handed one to my mother. In Triora I could not recollect her pausing even once by a shop window that contained men’s clothes.

‘Yes, all right,’ I said.

That was the moment my childhood ended. It is the most devious irony that Dr Edlund’s bluff assurances – certainly not believed by him – anticipated the circumstance that allows me now to look back to those summers in San Pietro al Mare, and to that summer in particular. It is, of course, the same circumstance that allows me to remember the rest of each year in Linvik. I did not know in my childhood that my mother and father had ceased to love one another. I did not know that it was my delicate constitution that kept them tied to one another; a child who had not long to live should not, in fairness, have to tolerate a family’s disruption as well as everything else.

At the Villa Parco, when we returned the following summer, Monsieur Paillez was already there, visiting his mad Italian wife. The very first night he shared our table, and after that we did everything together. Signora Binelli and her daughter were not at the hotel that year. (Nor were they again at the Villa Parco when we were. My mother and Monsieur Paillez were relieved about that, I think, although they often mentioned Signora Binelli and her daughter and seemed amused by the memory of them.)

‘We had snow in Lille as early as October,’ Monsieur Paillez said, and so the conversation was on this night, and on other nights – conducted in such a manner because my presence demanded it. Later my mother did not say that we should avoid mentioning Monsieur Paillez when we returned to Linvik. She knew it was not necessary to go through another palaver of silliness.

When I was sixteen and seventeen we still returned to San Pietro. What had begun for my mother as a duty, taking her weakling child down through Europe to the sun, became the very breath of her life. Long after it was necessary to do so we continued to make the journey, our roles reversed, I now being the one inspired by compassion. The mad wife of Monsieur Paillez, once visited in compassion, died; but Monsieur Paillez did not cease to return to the Villa Parco. In the dining-room I sometimes observed the waiters repeating what there was to repeat to younger waiters, newly arrived at the hotel. As I grew older, my mother and I no longer had adjoining rooms.

In Linvik my father had other women. After my childhood ended I noticed that sometimes in the evenings he was drunk. It won’t be long, he and my mother must have so often thought, but they were steadfast in their honourable resolve.

Slow years of wondering washed the magic from my childhood recollections and left them ordinary, like pallid photographs that gracelessly record the facts. Yet what a memory it was for a while, his hand reaching across the tablecloth, the candlelight on her hair. What a memory the smoke trees were, and Signora Binelli, and Claudia, and the sea as blue as the sky! My father was a great horseman, my mother the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. ‘Ti diverti?’ Monsieur Paillez’s voice was hardly raised as he swam by: how pleased I was that he had chosen to address me!

In my borrowed time I take from an ebony box my smudged attempts to draw the smoke trees of San Pietro and reflect that my talent did not amount to much. Silly, it seems now, to have tried so hard to capture the elusive character of that extraordinary foliage.