Collected Stories

Coffee with Oliver

That is Deborah, Oliver said to himself: my daughter has come to see me. But at the pavement table of the café where he sat he did not move. He did not even smile. He had, after all, only caught a glimpse of a slight girl in a yellow dress, of fair hair, and sunglasses and a profile: it might not be she at all.

Yet, Oliver insisted to himself, you know a thing like that. You sense your flesh and blood. And why should Deborah be in Perugia unless she planned to visit him? The girl was alone. She had hurried into the hotel next to the café in a businesslike manner, not as a sightseer would.

Oliver was a handsome man of forty-seven, with greying hair, and open, guileless features. This morning he was dressed as always he was when he made the journey to Perugia: in a pale-cream linen suit, a pale shirt with a green stripe in it, and the tie of an English public school. His tan shoes shone; the socks that matched the cream of his suit were taut over his ankles.

‘Signorina!’

He summoned the waitress who had just finished serving the people at the table next to his and ordered another cappuccino. This particular girl went off duty at eleven and the waitress who replaced her invariably made out the bill for one cappuccino only. It was fair enough, Oliver argued to himself, since he was a regular customer at the café and spent far more there than a tourist would.

‘Si, signore. Subito.’

What he had seen in the girl who’d gone into the hotel was a resemblance to Angelica, who was slight and fair-haired also, and had the same quick little walk and rather small face. If the girl had paused and for some reason taken off her dark glasses he would at once, with warm nostalgia, have recognized her mother’s deep, dark eyes, of that he was certain. He wouldn’t, of course, have been so sure had it not been for the resemblance. Since she’d grown up he’d only seen photographs of his daughter.

‘It was best to let whatever Deborah had planned just happen, best not to upset the way she wanted it. He could ask for her at the reception desk of the hotel. He could be waiting for her in the hall, and they could lunch together. He could show her about the town, put her into the picture gallery for an hour while he waited at the café across the street; afterwards they could sit over a drink. But that would be all his doing, not Deborah’s, and it wouldn’t be fair. Such a programme would also be expensive, for Deborah, in spite of being at a smart hotel, might well not be able to offer a contribution: it would not be unlike Angelica to keep her short. Oliver’s own purpose in being in Perugia that morning was to visit the Credito Italiano, to make certain that the monthly amount from Angelica had come. He had cashed a cheque, but of course that had to be made to last.

‘Prego, signore,’ the waitress said, placing a fresh cup of coffee in front of him and changing his ashtray for an unused one.

He smiled and thanked her, then blew gently at the foam of his cappuccino and sipped a little of the coffee. He lit a cigarette. You could sit all day here, he reflected, while the red-haired Perugians went by, young men in twos and threes, and the foreign students from the language schools, and the tourists who toiled up, perspiring, from the car parks. Idling time away, just ruminating, was lovely.

Eventually Oliver paid for his coffee and left. He should perhaps buy some meat, in case his daughter arrived at his house at a mealtime. Because it was expensive he rarely did buy meat, once in a blue moon a packet of cooked turkey slices, which lasted for ages. There was a butcher’s he often passed in a side street off the via dei Priori, but this morning it was full of women, all of them pressing for attention. Oliver couldn’t face the clamour and the long wait he guessed there’d be. The butcher’s in Betona might still be open when he arrived off the five past twelve bus. Probably best left till then in any case, meat being tricky in the heat.

He descended from the city centre by a steep short-cut, eventually arriving at the bus stop he favoured. He saved a little by using this particular fare-stage, and though he did not often make the journey to Perugia all such economies added up. What a marvellous thing to happen, that Deborah had come! Oliver smiled as he waited for his bus in the midday sunshine; the best things were always a surprise.

Deborah had a single memory of her father. He’d come to the flat one Sunday afternoon and she’d been at the top of the short flight of stairs that joined the flat’s two floors. She hadn’t known who he was but had watched and listened, sensing the charged atmosphere. At the door the man was smiling. He said her mother was looking well. He hoped she wouldn’t mind, he said. Her mother was cross. Deborah had been five at the time.

‘You know I mind,’ she’d heard her mother say.

‘I was passing. Unfriendly just to pass, I thought. We shouldn’t not ever talk to one another again, Angelica.’

Her mother’s voice was lowered then. She spoke more than she had already, but Deborah couldn’t hear a word.

‘Well, no point,’ he said. ‘No point in keeping you.’

Afterwards, when Deborah asked, her mother told her who the man was. Her mother was truthful and found deception difficult. When two people didn’t get on any more, she said, it wasn’t a good idea to try to keep some surface going.

He’d lit a cigarette while they’d been talking. Softly, he’d tried to interrupt her mother. He’d wanted to come in, but her mother hadn’t permitted that.

‘I’m here because of a mistake? Is that it?’ Deborah pinned her mother down in a quarrel years after that Sunday afternoon. It was her mother’s way of putting it when her marriage came up: two people had made a mistake. Mistakes were best forgotten, her mother said.

The dwelling Oliver occupied, in the hills above the village of Betona, was a stone building of undistinguished shape and proportions. It had once housed sheep during the frozen winter months, and wooden stairs, resembling a heavily constructed ladder, led to a single upstairs room, where shepherds had sought privacy from their animals. Efforts at conversion had been made. Electricity had been brought from the village; a kitchen, and a lavatory with a shower in it, had been fitted into the space below. But the conversion had an arrested air, reflecting a loss of interest on the part of Angelica who, years ago, had bought the place as it stood. At the time of the divorce she had made over to him the ramshackle habitation. She herself had visited it only once; soon after the divorce proceedings began she turned against the enterprise, and work on the conversion ceased. When Oliver returned on his own he found the corrugated roof still letting in rain, no water flowing from either the shower or the lavatory, the kitchen without a sink or a stove, and a cesspit not yet dug. He had come from England with his clothes and four ebony-framed pictures. ‘Well, anyway it’s somewhere to live,’ he said aloud, looking around the downstairs room, which smelt of concrete. He sighed none the less, for he was not deft with his hands.

The place was furnished now, though modestly. Two folding garden chairs did service in the downstairs room. There was a table with a fawn formica surface, and a pitch-pine bookcase. Faded rugs covered most of the concrete floor. The four heavily framed pictures – scenes of Suffolk landscape – adorned the rough stone walls to some effect. Across a corner there was a television set.

The cesspit remained undug, but in other directions Oliver had had a bit of luck. He’d met an Englishman on one of his visits to the Credito Italiano and had helped with a language difficulty. The man, in gratitude, insisted on buying Oliver a cup of coffee and Oliver, sensing a usefulness in this acquaintanceship, suggested that they drive together in the man’s car to Betona. In return for a summer’s lodging – a sleeping-bag on the concrete floor – the man replaced the damaged corrugated iron of the roof, completed the piping that brought water to the shower and the lavatory, and installed a sink and an antique gas stove that someone had thrown out, adapting the stove to receive bottled gas. He liked to work like this, to keep himself occupied, being in some kind of distress. Whenever Oliver paused in the story of his marriage his companion had a way of starting up about the business world he’d once belonged to, how failure had led to bankruptcy: finding the interruption of his own narration discourteous, Oliver did not listen. Every evening at six O’clock the man walked down to the village and returned with a litre of red wine and whatever groceries he thought necessary. Oliver explained that since he himself would not have made these purchases he did not consider that he should make a contribution to their cost. His visitor was his guest in the matter of accommodation; in fairness, it seemed to follow, he should be his visitor’s guest where the odd egg or glass of wine was concerned.

‘Angelica was never easy,’ Oliver explained, continuing the story of his marriage from one evening to the next. There was always jealousy.’ His sojourn in the Betona hills was temporary, he stated with confidence. But he did not add that, with his sights fixed on something better, he often dropped into conversation with lone English or American women in the rooms of the picture gallery or at the café next to the hotel. He didn’t bore his companion with this information because it didn’t appear to have much relevance. He did his best only to be interesting about Angelica, and considered he succeeded. It was a dispute in quite a different area that ended the relationship, as abruptly as it had begun. As well as hospitality, the visitor claimed a sum of money had been agreed upon, but while conceding that a cash payment had indeed been mooted, Oliver was adamant that he had not promised it. He did not greatly care for the man in the end, and was glad to see him go.

When Angelica died two years ago Deborah was twenty. The death was not a shock because her mother had been ill, and increasingly in pain, for many months: death was a mercy. Nonetheless, Deborah felt the loss acutely. Although earlier, in her adolescence, there had been arguments and occasionally rows, she’d known no companion as constant as her mother; and as soon as the death occurred she realized how patient with her and how fond of her Angelica had been. She’d been larky too, amused by unexpected things, given to laughter that Deborah found infectious. In her distress at the time of her mother’s death it never occurred to her that the man who’d come to the flat that Sunday afternoon might turn up at the funeral. In fact, he hadn’t.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Angelica had said before she died, meaning that there was provision for Deborah to undertake the post-graduate work she planned after she took her degree. ‘Don’t worry, darling.’

Deborah held her hand, ashamed when she remembered how years ago she’d been so touchy because Angelica once too often repeated that her marriage was a mistake. Her mother had never used the expression again.

‘I was a horrid child,’ Deborah cried forlornly before her mother died. ‘A horrid little bully.’

‘Darling, of course you weren’t.’

At the funeral people said how much they’d always liked her mother, how nice she’d been. They invited Deborah to visit them at any time, just to turn up when she was feeling low.

When Oliver stepped off the bus in the village the butcher’s shop was still open but he decided, after all, not to buy a pork chop, which was the choice he had contemplated when further considering the matter on the bus. A chop was suitable because, although it might cost as much as twenty thousand lire, it could be divided quite easily into two. But supposing it wasn’t necessary to offer a meal at all? Supposing Deborah arrived in the early afternoon, which was not unlikely? He bought the bread he needed instead, and a packet of soup, and cigarettes.

He wondered if Deborah had come with a message. He did not know that Angelica had died and wondered if she was hoping he might be persuaded to return to the flat in the square. It was not unlikely. As he ascended the track that led to his property, these thoughts drifted pleasurably through Oliver’s mind. ‘Deborah, I’ll have to think about that.’ He saw himself sitting with his daughter in what the man who’d set the place to rights had called the patio – a yard really, with two car seats the man had rescued from a dump somewhere, and an old tabletop laid across concrete blocks. ‘We’ll see,’ he heard himself saying, not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand.

He had taken his jacket off, and carried it over his arm. ‘Ε caldo! the woman he’d bought the bread from had exclaimed, which indicated that the heat was excessive, for in Betona references to the weather were only made when extremes were reached. Sweat gathered on Oliver’s forehead and at the back of his neck. He could feel it becoming clammy beneath his shirt. Whatever the reason for Deborah’s advent he was glad she had come because company was always cheerful.

In the upstairs room Oliver took his suit off and carefully placed it on a wire coat-hanger on the wall. He hung his tie over one linen shoulder, and changed his shirt. The trousers he put on were old corduroys, too heavy in the heat, but the best he could manage. In the kitchen he made tea and took it out to the patio, with the bread he’d Bought and his cigarettes. He waited for his daughter.

After Angelica’s death Deborah felt herself to be an orphan. Angelica’s brother and his wife, a well-meaning couple she hardly knew, fussed about her a bit; and so did Angelica’s friends. But Deborah had her own friends, and she didn’t need looking after. She inherited the flat in London and went there in the university holidays. She spent a weekend in Norfolk with her uncle and his wife, but did not do so again. Angelica’s brother was quite unlike her, a lumpish man who wore grey, uninteresting suits and had a pipe, and spectacles on a chain. His wife was wan and scatter-brained. They invited Deborah as a duty and were clearly thankful to find her independent.

Going through her mother’s possessions, Deborah discovered neither photographs of, nor letters from, her father. She did not know that photographs of herself, unaccompanied by any other form of communication, had been sent to her father every so often, as a record of her growing up. She did not know of the financial agreement that years ago had been entered into. It did not occur to her that no one might have informed the man who’d come that Sunday afternoon of Angelica’s death. It didn’t occur to her to find some way of doing so herself. None of this entered Deborah’s head because the shadowy figure who had smiled and lit a cigarette belonged as deeply in the grave as her mother did.

She had no curiosity about him, and her uncle did not mention him. Nor did any of Angelica’s friends on the occasions when they invited Deborah to lunch or drinks, since she had not just turned up as they’d suggested at the funeral. In reply to some casual query by a stranger, she once replied that her father was probably dead. The happiness of her relationship with Angelica was what she thought about and moodily dwelt upon, regretting that she had taken it for granted.

The heat was at its most intense at three o’clock, but afterwards did not lose its fervour. The concrete blocks of Oliver’s patio, the metal ribs of the car chairs, the scorching upholstery, the stone of the house itself, all cancelled the lessening of the sun’s attack by exuding the heat that had been stored. By half past five a kind of coolness was beginning. By seven it had properly arrived. By half past eight there was pleasure in its relief.

Perhaps he had been wrong, Oliver thought later, not to approach the girl: thoughtfulness sometimes was misplaced. If she had waited for the day to cool she would have found herself too late for the last bus to Betona, and a taxi would have been outrageously expensive. Angelica would have taken a taxi, of course, though in other ways, as he well knew, she could be penny-pinching.

But Deborah didn’t come that evening, nor the next day, nor the day after that. So Oliver made the journey into Perugia again, long before it was time for his next visit to the Credito Italiano. The only explanation was that the girl had not been Deborah at all. But he still felt she was, and was bewildered. He even wondered if his daughter was lying low because she’d been sent to spy on him.

‘Si, signore?’ The clerk in the reception of the hotel smiled at him, and in slow Italian Oliver made his query. He wrote down Deborah’s name on a piece of paper so that there could be no confusion. He remembered the date of the day he’d last sat at the café. From the photograph he had of her he described his daughter.

‘Momento, signore. Scusi.’ The clerk entered a small office to one side of the reception desk and returned some minutes later with a registration form. On it were Deborah’s name and signature, and the address of the flat in London. She had stayed one night only in the hotel.

‘Student,’ a girl who had accompanied the clerk from the office said. ‘She search a room in Perugia.’

‘A room?’

‘She ask.’ The girl shrugged. ‘I no have room.’

‘Thank you.’ Oliver smiled at both of them in turn. The clerk called after him in Italian. The girl had given Deborah the name of an agency, not twenty metres away, where rooms were rented to students. ‘Thank you,’ Oliver said again, but did not take the details of the agency. At the café he ordered a cappuccino.

Deborah had enrolled on a course – language or culture, or perhaps a combination. Perugia was famous for its courses; students came from all over the place. Sometimes they spent a year, or even longer, depending on the course they’d chosen. He knew that because now and again he dropped into conversation with one, and in return for a grappa or a cappuccino supplied some local information. Once he’d had lunch with a well-to-do young Iranian who’d clearly been grateful for his company.

‘Ecco, signore!’ The waitress who went off duty at eleven placed his coffee in front of him.

‘Grazie.’

‘Prego, signore.’

He lit a cigarette. Once he’d had a lighter and a silver cigarette case, given to him by a Mrs Dogsmith, whom he’d met in the Giardini Carducci. For a moment he saw again the slim, faintly embossed case, and the initials curling around one another at the bottom left-hand corner of the lighter. He’d sold both of them years ago.

A woman came out of the hotel and paused idly, glancing at the café tables. She was taller than Mrs Dogsmith and a great deal thinner. A widow or divorcee, Oliver guessed, but then a man came out of the hotel and took her arm.

‘Your mother gave you so much,’ Angelica’s irrational chatter lurched at him suddenly. ‘But still you had to steal from her.’

He felt himself broken into, set upon and violated, as he remembered feeling at the time. The unpleasant memory had come because of Deborah, because Deborah’s presence put him in mind of Angelica, naturally enough. More agreeably, he recalled that it was he who’d chosen that name for their daughter. ‘Deborah,’ he’d suggested, and Angelica had not resisted it.

Not wishing to think about Angelica, he watched the waddling movement of a pigeon on the pavement, and then listened to a conversation in Italian between a darkly suited man and his companion, a Woman in a striped tan dress. They were talking about swimwear; the man appeared to be the proprietor of a fashion shop. Young people in a group went by, and Oliver glanced swiftly from face to face, but his daughter was not among them. He ordered another cappuccino because in ten minutes or so the early-morning waitress would be going off duty.

It was a silliness of Angelica’s to say he’d stolen from his mother. He more than anyone had regretted the sad delusions that had beset his mother. It was he who had watched her becoming vague, he who had suffered when she left all she possessed to a Barnardo’s home. Angelica belonged to a later time; she’d hardly known his mother.

Slowly Oliver lit and smoked another cigarette, filling in time while he waited for the new waitress to arrive. As soon as he saw her he crumpled up the little slip that had accompanied his first cup of coffee, and placed on the table the money for the second. But this morning, when he’d gone only a few yards along the street, the waitress came hurrying after him, jabbering in Italian. He smiled and shook his head. She held out the money he’d left.

‘Oh! Mi dispiace!’ he apologized, paying her the extra.

*

‘Deborah.’

She heard her name and turned. A middle-aged man was smiling at her. She smiled back, thinking he was one of the tutors whom she couldn’t place.

‘Don’t you recognize me, Deborah?’

They were in the square. He had risen from the edge of a wooden stage that had been erected for some public meeting. The two girls Deborah was with were curious.

‘My dear,’ the man said, but seventeen years had passed since Deborah had caught her one glimpse of her father that Sunday afternoon. Neither features nor voice were familiar. ‘It’s really you!’ the man said.

Bewildered, Deborah shook her head.

‘I’m Oliver,’ Oliver said. ‘Your father.’

They sat outside, at the nearest café. She didn’t take off her sunglasses. She’d spoken to the girls she’d been with and they’d walked on. She had a class at two, she’d said.

‘Time at least for a coffee,’ Oliver said.

She had a look of him, even though she was more like Angelica. It had been a disappointment, the deduction that she hadn’t come here to seek him out. A disappointment that it was no more than a coincidence, her presence in Perugia.

‘You knew of course?’ he said. ‘You did have my address?’

She shook her head. She’d had no idea. She hadn’t even been aware that he was not in England.

‘But, Deborah, surely Angelica –’

‘No, she never did.’

Their coffee came. The waiter was young and unshaven, not neatly in a uniform like the girls at the café by the hotel. He glanced at Deborah with interest. Oliver thought he heard him making a sound with his lips, but he could not be sure.

‘I often think of you and your mother in that flat.’

Deborah realized he didn’t know Angelica had died, and found it difficult to break the news. She did so clumsily, or so she thought.

‘My God!’ he said.

Deborah dipped a finger into the foam of her coffee. She didn’t like the encounter; she wished it hadn’t taken place. She didn’t like sitting here with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. ‘Apparently he’s my father,’ she’d said to her companions, momentarily enjoying the sophistication; but later, of course, all that would have to be explained.

‘Poor Angelica!’ he said.

Deborah wondered why nobody had warned her. Why hadn’t her grey-suited uncle or one of Angelica’s friends advised against this particular Italian city? Why hadn’t her mother mentioned it?

Presumably they hadn’t warned her because they didn’t know. Her mother hadn’t ever wanted to mention him; it wasn’t Angelica’s way to warn people against people.

‘She used to send me a photograph of you every summer,’ he said. ‘I wondered why none came these last two years. I never guessed.’

She nodded meaninglessly.

‘Why are you learning Italian, Deborah?’

‘I took my degree in the history of art. It’s necessary to improve my Italian now.’

‘You’re taking it up? The history of art?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘It’s lovely you’re here.’

‘Yes.’

She had chosen Perugia rather than Florence or Rome because the course was better. But if she’d known she wouldn’t have.

‘Not really a coincidence,’ he was saying, very softly. ‘These things never are.’

Just for a moment Deborah felt irritated. What had been the use of Angelica’s being generous, unwilling to malign, bending over backwards to be decent, when this could happen as a result? What was the good of calling a marriage a mistake, and leaving it at that? But the moment passed; irritation with the dead was shameful.

‘Is it far from here, where you live?’ she asked, hoping that it was.

Oliver tore a cheque-stub from his cheque-book and wrote his address on it, then tore out another and drew a map. He wrote down the number of the Betona bus.

‘It’s lovely you’re here,’ he said again, giving his daughter the cheque-stubs. An excitement had begun in him. If he hadn’t been outside the hotel that morning he’d never even have known she was in Perugia. She might have come and gone and he’d have been none the wiser. Angelica had died, the two of them were left; he wouldn’t have known that, either.

‘If you don’t mind,’ he heard his daughter saying and felt she was repeating something he hadn’t heard the first time, ‘I don’t think I’ll visit you.’

‘You’ve been told unpleasant things, Deborah.’

‘No, not at all.’

‘We can be frank, you know.’

Angelica had been like that, he knew it to his cost. In his own case, she had laid down harsh conditions, believing that to be his due. The half-converted house and the monthly transfer of money carried the proviso that he should not come to the flat ever again, that he should not live in England. That wasn’t pleasant, but since it was what she wanted he’d agreed. At least the money hadn’t ceased when the woman died. Oliver smiled, feeling that to be a triumph.

‘Angelica was always jealous. It was jealousy that spoilt things.’

‘I never noticed that in her.’

He smiled again, knowing better. Heaven alone knew what this girl had been told about him, but today, now that she was here and Angelica was not, it didn’t matter.

‘A pity you feel you can’t come out to Betona. The bus fare’s quite a bit, else I’d come in oftener while you’re here.’

‘Actually, to tell the truth, I’d rather we didn’t have to meet.’ Deborah’s tone was matter of fact and sharp. A note of impatience had entered it, reminding Oliver not of his wife, but strangely of his mother.

‘I only come in once a month or so.’ He slid a cigarette from his packet of MS. ‘Angelica tried to keep us apart,’ he said, ‘all these years. She made the most elaborate arrangements.’

Deborah rooted in her handbag and found her own cigarettes and matches. Oliver said he’d have offered her one of his if he’d known she smoked. She said it didn’t matter.

‘I don’t want any of this hassle,’ she said.

‘Hassle, Deborah? A cup of coffee now and again –’

‘Look, honestly, not even that.’

Oliver smiled. It was always better not to argue. He’d never argued with Angelica. It was she who’d done the arguing, working herself up, making it sound as though she were angrily talking to herself. Deborah could easily sleep in the downstairs room; there were early-morning buses to Perugia. They could share the expenses of the household: the arrangement there’d been with the bankrupt man had been perfectly satisfactory.

‘Sorry,’ Deborah said, and to Oliver her voice sounded careless. She blew out smoke, looking over her shoulder, no doubt to see if her friends were still hanging around. He felt a little angry. He might have been just anyone, sitting there. He wanted to remind her that he had given her life.

‘It’s simple at Betona,’ he said instead. ‘I’m not well off. But I don’t think you’d find it dreadful.’

‘I’m sure I wouldn’t. All the same –’

‘Angelica was well off, you know. She never wanted me to be.’

Deborah missed her two o’clock lesson because it was harder than she’d anticipated to get away. She was told about all sorts of things, none of which she’d known about before. The Sunday afternoon she remembered was mentioned. ‘I wasn’t very well then,’ Oliver said. It was after that occasion that a legal agreement had been drawn up: in return for financial assistance Oliver undertook not to come to the flat again, not ever to attempt to see his child. He was given the house near Betona, no more than a shack really. ‘None of it was easy,’ he said. He looked away, as if to hide emotion from her. The photographs he annually received were a legality also, the only one he had insisted on himself. Suddenly he stood up and said he had a bus to catch.

‘It’s understandable,’ he said. ‘Your not wanting to come to Betona. Of course you have your own life.’

He nodded and went away. Deborah watched him disappearing into the crowd that was again collecting, after the afternoon siesta.

Who on earth would have believed that he’d outlive Angelica? Extra-ordinary how things happen; though, perhaps, in a sense, there was a fairness in it. Angelica had said he always had to win. In her unpleasant moods she’d said he had to cheat people, that he could not help himself. As a gambler was in thrall to luck, or a dipsomaniac to drink, his flaw was having to show a gain in everything he did.

On the bus journey back to Betona Oliver did not feel angry when he recalled that side of Angelica, and supposed it was because she was dead. Naturally it was a relief to have the weight of anger lifted after all these years, no point in denying it. The trouble had been it wasn’t easy to understand what she was getting at. When she’d found the three or four pieces among his things, she’d forgotten that they were his as much as his mother’s, and didn’t even try to understand that you couldn’t have told his mother that, she being like she was. Instead Angelica chose to repeat that he hadn’t been able to resist ‘getting the better of his mother. Angelica’s favourite theme was that: what she called his pettiness and his meanness left him cruel. He had often thought she didn’t care what she said; it never mattered how she hurt.

On the bus Angelica’s face lolled about in Oliver’s memory, with his mother’s and – to Oliver’s surprise – his daughter’s. Angelica pleaded about something, tears dripped from the old woman’s cheeks, Deborah simply shook her head. ‘Like cancer in a person’, Angelica said. Yet it was Angelica who had died, he thought again.

Deborah would come. She would come because she was his flesh and blood. One day he’d look down and see her on the path, bringing something with her because he wasn’t well off. Solicitors had drawn up the stipulations that had kept them apart all these years; in ugly legal jargon all of it was written coldly down. When Deborah considered that, she would begin to understand. He’d sensed, before they parted, a shadow of unease: guilt on Angelica’s behalf, which wasn’t surprising in the circumstances.

The thought cheered Oliver considerably. In his house, as he changed his clothes, he reflected that it didn’t really matter, the waitress running after him for the money. In all, over the months that had passed since this waitress had begun to work at the café, he’d probably had twenty, even thirty, second cups of coffee. He knew it didn’t matter because after a little time it hadn’t mattered that the bankrupt man had made a scene, since by then the roof was repaired and the plumbing completed. It hadn’t mattered when Mrs Dogsmith turned nasty, since already she’d given him the lighter and the cigarette case. That was the kind of thing Angelica simply couldn’t understand, any more than she’d understood the confusions of his mother, any more than, probably, she’d understood their daughter. You couldn’t keep flesh and blood apart; you actually weren’t meant to.

In the kitchen Oliver put the kettle on for tea. When it boiled he poured the water on to a tea-bag he’d already used before setting out for Perugia. He carried the glass out to the patio and lit a cigarette. The car seats were too hot to sit on, so he stood, waiting for them to cool. There’d been no reason why she shouldn’t have paid for their coffee since she, after all, had been the cause of their having it. Eighteen thousand lire a cappuccino cost at that particular café, he’d noticed it on the bill.