The Collected Stories

He would not, when the moment came, pay for the mandarinettos or the cake he was now pressing upon his guests. He would discover that he had left his wallet in some other pocket.

‘You must not spoil your looks, eh?’ he said when Ingrid refused the cake. His smile nudged her in a way he might have thought was intimate, but which Verity observed the girl registering as elderly. Brigitta had already been biting into a slice of cake when the remark was made about the losing of looks. Hastily she put it down. They must go, she said.

‘Go? Oh, surely not? No, please don’t go.’

But both girls were adamant. They had been too tired last night to see the Bridge of Sighs by lamplight and they must see that before they left. Each held out a hand, to Verity and then to her father. When they had gone Verity realized she hadn’t addressed a single word to either of them. A silence followed their departure, then Mr Unwill said in a whisper:

‘Those Americans seem rather nice, eh?’

He would hold forth to the Americans, as he had to the German girls, concentrating his attention on the daughter because she was the most attractive of the three. The mother was vulgarly dressed, the father shouted. In the presence of these people everything would be repeated, the painting of the Allemagna Express, the St Martin’s confections, the temporary bridges.

‘No,’ Verity said. ‘No, I don’t want to become involved with those Americans.’

He was taken aback. His mouth remained open after he’d begun to say something. He stared at her, slowly overcoming his bewilderment. For the second time that evening, he asked her if she felt all right. She didn’t reply. Time of the month, he supposed, this obvious explanation abruptly dawning on him, wretched for women. And then, to his very great surprise, he was aware that his daughter was talking about her decision, some months ago, to return to the family home.

‘ “My father’s on his own now,” I told him, “so I have given up the flat.” As soon as I had spoken I felt afraid. “We must be together,” is what I thought he’d say. He’d be alarmed and upset, I thought, because I’d broken the pattern of our love affair by causing this hiatus. But all he said was that he understood.’

They’d known, of course, about the wretched affair. Her mother had been depressed by it; so much time passing by, no sign of a resolution in whatever it was, no sign of marriage. Verity had steered all conversation away from it; when the subject was discreetly approached by her mother or her brothers she made it clear that they were trespassing on private property; he himself had made no forays in that direction, it not being his way. Astonishing it was, that she should wish to speak of it now.

‘I didn’t in the least,’ she said, ‘feel sorry for your loneliness. I felt sorry for myself. I couldn’t bear for a moment longer the routine love-making in that convenient flat.’

Feeling himself becoming hot, Mr Unwill removed his glasses and searched in the pockets of his blazer for his handkerchief. He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. He listened while Verity more or less repeated what she had said already. There had been sixteen years of routine love-making, ever since she was twenty-two. Her love affair had become her life, the routine punctuated by generous gifts and weekends in beautiful cities.

There was a silence. He polished one lens and then the other. He tightened the screws of the hinges with the useful little screwdriver in his penknife. Since the silence continued, eventually he said:

‘If you made an error in coming back to the house it can easily be rectified, old girl.’

‘Surely, I thought, those brief weekends would never be enough? Surely we would have to talk about everything again, now that there was no flat to go to?’ She spoke of the cities where the weekends had been spent: Bruges, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Venice. Bruges had been the first. In Bruges she had assumed, although he had not said so, that he would leave his wife. They had walked through chilly squares, they had sat for hours over dinner in the Hotel Duc du Bourgogne. In Paris, some time later, she had made the same assumption. He did not love his wife; when the children grew up he would leave her. By the time they visited Venice, the children had grown up. ‘Only just grown up,’ she said. ‘The last one only just, that summer.’

He did not say anything; the conversation was beyond his reach. He saw his daughter as an infant, a nurse holding a bundle towards him, the screwed-up face and tiny hands. She’d been a happy child, happy at school, happy with her friends. Young men had hung about the house; she’d gone to tennis-club dances and winter parties. ‘Love’s a disease sometimes,’ her mother had said, angrily, a year or so ago. Her mother had been cross because Verity always smiled so, pretending the happiness that was no longer there, determinedly optimistic. Because of the love affair, her mother had said also, Verity’s beauty had been wasted, seeming to have been uselessly visited upon her.

‘It wasn’t just a dirty weekend, you know, here in Venice. It’s never just that.’

‘Please, Verity. Please, now…’

‘He can’t bring himself to be unkind to his wife. He couldn’t be bad to a woman if he tried. I promise you, he’s a remarkable man.’

He began to expostulate but changed his mind. Everything he tried to say, even everything he felt, seemed clumsy. She stared beyond him, through the smoke from her cigarette, causing him to feel a stranger. Her silliness in love had made her carelessly harsh, selfish and insensitive because she had to think so much about herself. In a daughter who was not naturally silly, who had been gentle as a child, these qualities were painful to observe. Once she could have imagined what it was like for him to hear her refer so casually to dirty weekends; now she didn’t care if that hurt him or not. It was insulting to expect him to accept that the man was remarkable. It dismissed his intellect and his sense.

‘It was ridiculous,’ she said eventually, ‘to give up my flat.’

He made some protest when she asked the waiter for the bill, but she didn’t listen, paying the bill instead. He felt exhausted. He had sat in this very café with a woman who was dead; the man his daughter spoke of was still alive. It almost seemed the other way round. He would not have claimed a great deal for the marriage there had been: two people rubbing along, forgiving each other for this and that, one left alone to miss the nourishment of affection. Yet when the coffin had slipped away behind the beige curtain his grief had been unbearable and had remained so afterwards, for weeks and months, each day a hell.

‘I’m sorry for being a nuisance,’ she said before they rose from the table, and he wanted to explain to her that melancholy would have become too much if he allowed a city and its holiday memories to defeat him, that memories were insidious. But he didn’t say anything because he knew she would not listen to him properly. She could not help thinking badly of him; the harshness that had been bred in her prevented the allowances that old age demanded. Nor could he, because of anger, make allowances for her.

‘Hi!’ one of the Americans whom he’d thought it might be quite nice to know called out. They had finished their ice-creams and were preparing to leave also. All of them smiled but it was Verity, not he, who returned their greeting.

‘It’s I who should be sorry,’ he said on the Zattere. He’d been more gently treated than she: you knew where you were with death, in no way was it a confidence trick. He began to say that but changed his mind, knowing she would not wish to hear.

‘Heavens, how cold it has become!’ She hurried through the gathering fog, and so did he. The conversation was over, its loose ends hanging; each knew they would never be picked up. ‘Buona notte,’ the smart receptionist, all in green now, murmured in the hall of the pensione, and they bade her good-night in their different ways.

They lifted their keys from the rack beside the stairs and stepped over the sleeping cat on the bottom step. On the first-floor landing they said good-night, were briefly awkward because of what had passed between them, then entered their separate rooms. Slowly he prepared himself for bed, slowly undressing, slowly washing, folding his clothes with an old man’s care. She sat by her window, staring at the lights across the water, until the fog thickened and there was nothing left to see.

The Wedding in the Garden

Ever since Dervla was nine the people of the hotel had fascinated her. Its proprietor, Mr Congreve, wore clothes that had a clerical sombreness about them, though they were of a lighter hue than Father Mahony’s stern black. Mr Congreve was a smiling man with a quiet face, apparently not in the least put out by reports in the town that his wife, in allying herself with a hotel proprietor, had married beneath her. Ladylike and elegant, she appeared not to regret her choice. Mrs Congreve favoured in her dresses a distinctive blend of greens and blues, her stylishness combining with the hotel proprietor’s tranquil presence to lend the couple a quality that was unique in the town. Their children, two girls and an older boy, were imbued with this through the accident of their birth, and so were different from the town’s other children in ways that might be termed superficial. ‘Breeding,’ Dervla’s father used to say, ‘The Congreves have great breeding in them,’

She herself, when she was nine, was fair-haired and skinny, with a graze always healing on one knee or the other because she had a way of tripping on her shoelaces. ‘Ah, will you tie up those things!’ her mother used to shout at her: her mother, big-faced and red, blinking through the steam that rose from a bucket of water. Her brothers and sisters had all left the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street by the time Dervla was nine; they’d left the town and the district, two of them in America even, one in London. Dervla was more than just the baby of the family: she was an afterthought, catching everyone unawares, born when her mother was forty-two. ‘Chance had a hand in that one,’ her father liked to pronounce, regarding her affectionately, as if pleased by this intervention of fate. When his brother from Leitrim visited the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street the statement was made often, being of family interest. ‘If her mother didn’t possess the strength of an ox,’ Dervla’s father liked to add, ‘God knows how the end of it would have been.’ And Dervla’s Leitrim uncle, refreshing himself with a bottle of stout, would yet again wag his head in admiration and wonder at his sister-in-law’s robust constitution. He was employed on the roads up in Leitrim and only came to the town on a Sunday, drawn to it by a hurling match. Dervla’s father was employed by O’Mara the builder.

Even after she went to work in the Royal Hotel and came to know the family, her first image of them remained: the Congreves in their motorcar, an old Renault as she afterwards established, its canvas hood folded back, slowly making the journey to the Protestant church on a sunny Sunday morning. St Peter’s Church was at one end of the town, the Royal Hotel at the other. It had, before its days as an hotel, apparently been owned by Mrs Congreve’s family, and then people in the grocery business had bought it and had not lived there, people who had nothing to do with the town, who were not well known. After that Mr Congreve had made an offer with, so it was said, his wife’s money.

The motor-car in the sunlight crept down Draper’s Street, the bell of St Peter’s Church still monotonously chiming. The boy – no older than Dervla herself – sat between his sisters in the back; Mr Congreve turned his head and said something to his wife. Daddy Phelan, outside Mrs Ryan’s bar, saluted them in his wild way; Mrs Congreve waved back at him. The boy wore a grey flannel suit, the girls had fawn-coloured coats and tiny bows in their pigtails. The motor-car passed from view, and a moment later the bell ceased to chime.

Christopher couldn’t remember the first time he’d been aware of her. All he knew was that she worked in the kitchen of the hotel, walking out from the town every day. Playing with Molly and Margery-Jane in the shrubberies of the garden, he had noticed now and again a solitary figure in a black coat, with a headscarf. He didn’t know her name or what her face was like. ‘Count to ten, Chris,’ Margery-Jane would shrilly insist. ‘You’re not counting to ten!’ Some game, rules now forgotten, some private family game they had invented themselves, stalking one another among the bamboos and the mahonias, Molly creeping on her hands and knees, not making a sound, Margery-Jane unable to control her excited breathing. The girl passed through the yard near by, a child as they were, but they paid her no attention.

A year or so later Mary, the elderly maid whose particular realm was the dining-room, instructed her in the clearing of a table. ‘Dervla,’ his mother said when the older waitress had led her away with cutlery and’ plates piled on to her tray. ‘Her name is Dervla.’ After that she was always in the dining-room at mealtimes.

It was then, too, that she began to come to the hotel on a bicycle, her day longer now, arriving before breakfast, cycling home again in the late evening. Once there was talk about her living there, but nothing had come of that. Christopher didn’t know where she did live, had never once noticed Thomas MacDonagh Street in his wanderings about the town. Returning from boarding-school in Dublin, he had taken to going for walks, along the quay of the river where the sawmills were, through the lanes behind Brabazon’s Brewery. He preferred to be alone at that time of his growing up, finding the company of his sisters too chattery. The river wound away through fields and sometimes a dog from the lanes or the cottages near the electricity plant would follow him. There was one in particular, a short-tailed terrier, its smooth white coat soiled and uncared for, ears and head flashed with black. There was a mongrel sheepdog also, an animal that ceased its customary cringing as soon as it gained the freedom of the fields. When he returned to the town these animals no longer followed him, but were occasionally involved in fights with other dogs, as though their excursion into the country had turned them into aliens who were no longer to be trusted. He went on alone then, through darkening afternoons or spitting rain, lingering by the shops that sold fruit and confectionery. There’d been a time when he and Margery-Jane and Molly had come to these shops with their pocket-money, for Peggy’s Leg or pink bon-bons. More affluent now, he bought Our Boys and Film Fun and saved up for the Wide World.

His sisters had been born in the Royal Hotel, but he – before his father owned the place – in Dublin, where his parents had then lived. He did not remember Dublin: the hotel had become his world. It was a white building, set back a little from the street, pillars and steps prefacing its entrance doors. Its plain façade was decorated with a yellow AA sign and a blue RIAC one; in spring tulips bloomed in window-boxes on the downstairs windowsills. The words Royal Hotel were painted in black on this white façade and repeated in smaller letters above the pillared porch. At the back, beyond the yard and the garden, there was a row of garages and an entrance to them from Old Lane. The hotel’s four employees came and went this way, Mrs O’Connor the cook, whatever maids there were, and Artie the boots. There was a stone-flagged hallway with doors off it to the kitchen and the larders and the scullery, and one to the passage that led to the back staircase. It was a dim hallway, with moisture sometimes on its grey-distempered walls, a dimness that was repeated in the passage that led to the back staircase and on the staircase itself. Upstairs there was a particular smell, of polish and old soup, with a tang of porter drifting up from the bar. The first-floor landing – a sideboard stretching along one wall, leather armchairs by the windows, occasional tables piled with magazines, a gold-framed mirror above the fireplace – was the heart of the hotel. Off it were the better bedrooms and a billiard-room where the YMCA held a competition every March; above it there was a less impressive landing, little more than a corridor. On the ground floor the dining-room had glass swing-doors, twelve tables with white tablecloths, always set for dinner. The family occupied a corner one between the fire and the dumb-waiter, with its array of silver-plated sugar castors and salt and pepper and mustard containers, bottles of Yorkshire Relish, thick and thin, mint sauce in cut-glass jugs, and Worcester sauce, and jam and marmalade.

When Christopher was younger, before he went away to school, he and Margery-Jane and Molly used to play hide-and-seek in the small, cold bedrooms at the top of the house, skulking in the shadows on the uncarpeted stairs that led to the attics. Occasionally, if a visitor was staying in the hotel, their father would call up to them to make less noise, but this didn’t happen often because a visitor was usually only in the hotel at night. They were mainly senior commercial travellers who stayed at the Royal, representatives of Wills or Horton’s or Drummond’s Seeds, once a year the Urney man; younger representatives lodged more modestly. Insurance men stayed at the hotel, and bank inspectors had been known to spend a fortnight or three weeks. Bord na Mona men came and went, and once in a while there was an English couple or a couple from the North, touring or on their honeymoon. When Miss Gilligan, who taught leatherwork at the technical college, first came to the town she spent nearly a month in the Royal before being satisfied with the lodging she was offered. Artie the boots, grey-haired but still in his forties, worked in the garden and the yard, disposed of empty bottles from the bar and often served there. Old Mary served there too, and at a busy time, which only rarely occurred, Mrs O’Connor would come up from the kitchen to assist. Dr Molloy drank at the Royal, and Hogarty the surveyor, and the agent at the Bank of Ireland, Mr McKibbin, and a few of the other bank men in the town. The bar was a quiet place, though, compared with the town’s public houses; voices were never raised.

The main hall of the hotel was quiet also, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock and its chiming. There was the same agreeable smell there, of soup and polish, and porter from the bar. A barometer hung beneath a salmon in a glass case, notices of point-to-point races and the Dublin Spring Show and the Horse Show hung from hooks among coloured prints of Punchestown. The wooden floor was covered almost completely with faded rugs, and the upper half of the door to the bar was composed of frosted glass with a border of shamrocks. There were plants in brass pots on either side of a wide staircase with a greenish carpet, threadbare in parts.

‘Your inheritance one day,’ Christopher’s father said.

It was very grand, Dervla considered, to have your initials on a green trunk, and on a wooden box with metal brackets fixed to its edges. These containers stood in the back hall, with a suitcase, at the beginning of each term, before they were taken to the railway station. They stood there again when Christopher returned, before Artie helped him to carry them upstairs. On his first day back from school there was always a great fuss. His sisters became very excited, a special meal was prepared, Mr Congreve would light cigarette after cigarette, standing in front of the fire on the first-floor landing, listening to Christopher’s tale of the long journey from Dublin. He always arrived in the evening, sometimes as late as seven o’clock but usually about half past five. In the dining-room when the family had supper he would say he was famished and tell his sisters how disgraceful the food at the school was, the turnips only half mashed, the potatoes with bits of clay still clinging to their skins, and a custard pudding called Yellow Peril. His mother, laughing at him, would say he shouldn’t exaggerate, and his father would ask him about the rugby he had played, or the cricket. ‘Like the game of tennis it would be,’ Artie told her when Dervla asked him what cricket was. ‘The way they’d wear the same type of clothing for it.’ Miss Gillespie, the matron, was a tartar and Willie the furnace man’s assistant told stories that couldn’t be repeated. Dervla imagined the big grey house with a curving avenue leading up to it, and bells always ringing, and morning assemblies, and the march through cloisters to the chapel, which so often she had heard described. She imagined the boys in their grey suits kneeling down to say their prayers, and the ice on the inside of the windows on cold days. The chemistry master had blown his hair off, it was reported once in the dining-room, and Dervla thought of Mr Jerety who made up the prescriptions in the Medical Hall. Mr Jerety had no hair either, except for a little at the sides of his head.

Dervla managed the dining-room on her own now. Mary had become too rheumaticky to make the journey at any speed from the kitchen and found it difficult to lift the heavier plates from the table. She helped Mrs O’Connor with the baking instead, kneading dough on the marble slab at the side table in the kitchen, making pastry and preparing vegetables. It took her half a day, Dervla had heard Mr Congreve say, to mount the stairs to her bedroom at the top of the hotel, and the other half to descend it. He was fond of her, and would try to make her rest by the fire on the first-floor landing but she never did: ‘Sure, if I sat down there, sir, I’d maybe never get up again.’ It was unseemly, Dervla had heard old Mary saying in the kitchen, for an employee to be occupying an armchair in the place where the visitors and the family sat. Mr Congreve was devil-may-care about matters like that, but what would a visitor say if he came out of his bedroom and found a uniformed maid in an armchair? What would Byrne from Horton’s say, or Boylan the insurance man?

In the dining-room, when she’d learnt how everything should be, ‘the formalities’, as Mr Congreve put it, Dervla didn’t find her duties difficult. She was swift on her feet, as it was necessary to be, in case the food got cold. She could stack a tray with dishes and plates so economically that two journeys to the kitchen became one. She was careful at listening to what the visitors ordered and without writing anything down was able to relay the message to the kitchen. The family were never given a choice.

Often Christopher found himself glancing up from the food Dervla placed in front of him, to follow with his eyes her progress across the dining-room, the movement of her hips beneath her black dress, her legs clad in stockings that were black also. Once he addressed her in the backyard. He spoke softly, just behind her in the yard. It was dark, after seven, an evening in early March when a bitter wind was blowing. ‘I’ll walk with you, Dervla,’ he said.

She wheeled her bicycle in Old Lane and they walked in silence except that once he remarked upon the coldness of the weather and she said she disliked rain more. When they reached the end of the lane he went one way and she the other.

‘Hullo, Dervla,’ he said one afternoon in the garden. It was late in August. He was lying on a rug among the hydrangeas, reading. She had passed without noticing that he was there; she returned some minutes later with a bunch of parsley. It was then that he addressed her. He smiled, trying to find a different intonation, trying to make his greeting softer, less ordinary than usual. He wanted her to sit down on the brown checked rug, to enjoy the sun for a while, but of course that was impossible. He had wanted to wheel her bicycle for her that evening, as he would have done had she been another girl, Hazel Warren or Annie Warren, the coal merchant’s daughters, or a girl he’d never even spoken to, someone’s cousin, who used to visit the town every Christmas. But it hadn’t seemed natural in any way at all to wheel the bicycle of the dining-room maid, any more than it would have been to ask a kitchen maid at school where she came from or if she had brothers and sisters.

‘Hullo,’ she said, replying to his greeting in the garden. She passed on with her bunch of parsley, seeming not to be in a hurry, the crisp white strings of her apron bobbing as she walked.

In her bedroom in the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street she thought of him every night before she went to sleep. She saw him as he was when he returned from his boarding-school, in his grey long-trousered suit, a green-and-white-striped tie knotted into the grey collar of his shirt. When she awoke in the morning she thought of him also, the first person to share the day with. In winter she lay there in the darkness, but in summer the dawn light lit the picture of the Virgin above the door, and when Dervla felt the Virgin’s liquid eyes upon her she prayed, asking the Holy Mother for all sorts of things she afterwards felt she shouldn’t have because they were trivial. She pleaded that he might smile when he thanked her for the rashers and sausages she put in front of him, that his little finger might accidentally touch her hand as only once it had. She pleaded that Mr Congreve wouldn’t engage her in conversation at lunchtime, asking how her father was these days, because somehow – in front of him – it embarrassed her.

There was a nightmare she had, possessing her in varied forms: that he was in the house in Thomas MacDonagh Street and that her mother was on her knees, scrubbing the stone floor of the scullery. Her mother didn’t seem to know who he was and would not stand up. Her father and her uncle from Leitrim sat drinking stout by the fire, and when she introduced him they remarked upon his clothes. Sometimes in the nightmare her uncle nudged him with his elbow and asked him if he had a song in him.

‘That young Carroll has an eye for you,’ her father said once or twice, drawing her attention to Buzzy Carroll who worked in Catigan’s hardware. But she didn’t want to spend Sunday afternoons walking out on the Ballydrim road with Buzzy Carroll, or to sit with his arms around her in the Excel cinema. One of the Christian Brothers had first called him Buzzy, something to do with the way his hair fluffed about his head, and after that no one could remember what Buzzy Carroll’s real name was. There were others who would have liked to go out with her, on walks or to the pictures, or to the Tara Dance Hall on a Friday night. There was Flynn who worked in Maguire’s timber yard, and Chappie Reagan, and Butty Delaney. There was the porter at the auction rooms who had something the matter with his feet, the toes joined together in such a peculiar way that he showed them to people: And there was Streak Dwyer. ‘You’re nothing only a streak of woe,’ the same Christian Brother had years ago pronounced. Streak Dwyer had ever since retained the sobriquet, serving now in Rattray’s grocery, sombrely weighing flour and sugar. Dervla had once or twice wondered what walking out on the Ballydrim road with this melancholy shopman would be like and if he would suggest turning into one of the lanes, as Butty Delaney or Buzzy Carroll would have. She wouldn’t have cared for it in the Excel cinema with Streak Dwyer any more than she cared for the idea of being courted by a man who showed people his toes.

*

‘Dervla.’

On a wet afternoon, a Tuesday in September, he whispered her name on the first-floor landing. He put his arm around her, and she was frightened in ease someone would come.

‘I’m fond of you, Dervla.’

He took her hand and led her upstairs to Room 14, a tiny bedroom that was only used when the hotel was full. Both of them were shy, and their shyness evaporated slowly. He kissed her, stroking her hair. He said again he was fond of her. ‘I’m fond of you too,’ she whispered.

After that first afternoon they met often to embrace in Room 14. They would marry, he said at the end of that holidays; they would live in the hotel, just like his parents. Over and over again in Room 14 the afternoon shadows gathered as sunlight slipped away. They whispered, clinging to one another, the warmth of their bodies becoming a single warmth. She sat huddled on his knee, holding tightly on to him in case they both fell off the rickety bedroom chair. He loved the curve of her neck, he whispered, and her soft fair hair, her lips and her eyes. He loved kissing her eyes.

Often there was silence in the bedroom, broken only by the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane playing in the garden. Sometimes it became quite dark in the room, and she would have to go then because Mrs O’Connor would be wanting her in the kitchen.

‘Not a bad fella at all,’ her father said in Thomas MacDonagh Street. ‘Young Carroll.’ She wanted to laugh when her father said that, wondering what on earth he’d say if he knew about Room 14. He would probably say nothing; in silence he would take his belt to her. But the thought of his doing so didn’t make her afraid.

‘Oh, Dervla, how I wish the time would hurry up and pass!’

Over the years he had come to see the town as little better than a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of dwellings, an ugly place except for the small bridge at the end of Mill Street. But it was Dervla’s town, and it was his own; together they belonged there. He saw himself in middle age walking through its narrow streets, as he had walked during his childhood. He saw himself returning to the hotel and going at once to embrace the wife he loved with a passion that had not changed.

‘Oh, Dervla,’ he whispered in Room 14. ‘Dervla, I’m so fond of you.’

‘Well, now, I think we must have a little talk,’ Mrs Congreve said.

They were alone in the dining-room; Dervla had been laying the tables for dinner. When Mrs Congreve spoke she felt herself reddening; the knives and forks felt suddenly cold in her hands.

‘Finish the table, Dervla, and then we’ll talk about it.’

She did as she was bidden. Mrs Congreve stood by a window, looking out at people passing on the street. When Dervla had finished she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the fireplace. Her thin, pretty face had a frightened look, and seemed fragile, perhaps because she had paled. She averted her gaze almost as soon as the mirror reflected it. Mrs Congreve said:

‘Mr Congreve and I are disappointed that this has happened. It’s most unfortunate.’

Turning from the window, Mrs Congreve smiled a lingering, gracious smile. She was wearing one of her green-and-blue dresses, a flimsy, delicate garment with tiny blue buttons and a stylishly stiff white collar. Her dark hair was coiled silkily about her head.

‘It is perhaps difficult for you to understand, Dervla, and certainly it is unpleasant for me to say: But there are differences between you and Christopher that cannot be overlooked or ignored.’ Mrs Congreve paused and again looked out of the window, slightly drawing the net curtain aside. ‘Christopher is not of your class, Dervla. He is not of your religion. You are a maid in this hotel. You have betrayed the trust that Mr Congreve and I placed in you. I’m putting it harshly, Dervla, but there’s no point in pretending.’

Dervla did not say anything. She felt desolate and alone. She wished he wasn’t away at school. She wished she could run out of the dining-room and find him somewhere, that he would help her in this terrifying conversation.

‘Oh, Christopher has done wrong also. I can assure you we are aware of that. We are disappointed in Christopher, but we think it better to close the matter in his absence. He will not be back for another three months almost; we think it best to have everything finished and forgotten by then. Mr Congreve will explain to Christopher.’

Again there was the gracious smile. No note of anger had entered Mrs Congreve’s voice, no shadow of displeasure disrupted the beauty of her features. She might have been talking about the annual bloodstock dinner, giving instructions about how the tables should be set.

‘We would ask you to write a note now, to Christopher at school. Mr Congreve and I would like to see it, Dervla, before it goes on its way. That, then, would be the end of the matter.’

As she spoke, Mrs Congreve nodded sympathetically, honouring Dervla’s unspoken protest: she understood, she said. She did not explain how the facts had come to be discovered, but suggested that in the note she spoke of Dervla should write that she felt in danger of losing her position in the Royal Hotel, that she was upset by what had taken place and would not wish any of it to take place again.

‘That is the important aspect of it, Dervla. Neither Mr Congreve nor I wish to dismiss you. If we did, you – and we – would have to explain to your parents, even to Father Mahony, I suppose. If it’s possible, Dervla, we would much rather avoid all that.’

But Dervla, crimson-faced, mentioned love. Her voice was weak, without substance and seeming to be without conviction, although this was not so. Mrs Congreve replied that that was penny-fiction talk.

‘We want to get married, ma’am.’ Dervla closed her eyes beneath the effort of finding the courage to say that. The palms of her hands, chilled a moment ago, were warmly moist now. She could feel pinpricks on her forehead.

‘That’s very silly, Dervla,’ Mrs Congreve said in the same calm manner. ‘I’m surprised you should be so silly.’

‘I love him,’ Dervla cried, all convention abruptly shattered. Her voice was shrill in the dining-room, tears ran from her eyes and she felt herself seized by a wildness that made her want to shriek out in fury. ‘I love hint,’ she cried again. ‘It isn’t just a little thing.’

‘Don’t you feel you belong in the Royal, Dervla? We have trained you, you know. We have done a lot, Dervla.’

There was a silence then, except for Dervla’s sobbing. She found a handkerchief in the pocket of her apron and wiped her eyes and nose with it. In such silly circumstances, Mrs Congreve said, Christopher would not inherit the hotel. The hotel would be sold, and Christopher would inherit nothing. It wasn’t right that a little thing like this should ruin Christopher’s life. ‘So you see, you must go, Dervla. You must take your wages up to the end of the month and go this afternoon.’

The tranquillity of Mrs Congreve’s manner was intensified by the sadness in her voice. She was on Dervla’s side, her manner insisted; her admonitions were painful for her. Again she offered the alternative:

‘Or simply write a few lines to him, and we shall continue in the hotel as though nothing has happened. That is possible, you know. I assure you of that, my dear.’

Miserably, Dervla asked what she could say in a letter. She would have to tell lies. She wouldn’t know how to explain.

‘No, don’t tell lies. Explain the truth: that you realize the friendship must not continue, now that you and he are growing up. You’ve always been a sensible girl, Dervla. You must realize that what happened between you was for children only.’

Dervla shook her head, but Mrs Congreve didn’t acknowledge the gesture.

‘I can assure you, Dervla – I can actually promise you – that when Christopher has grown up a little more he will see the impossibility of continuing such a friendship. The hotel, even now, is everything to Christopher. I can actually promise you, also, that you will not be asked to leave. I know you value coming here.’

At school, when he received the letter, Christopher was astonished. In Dervla’s rounded handwriting it said that they must not continue to meet in Room 14 because it was a sin. It would be best to bring everything to an end now, before she was dismissed. They had done wrong, but at least they could avoid the worst if they were sensible now.

It was so chilly a letter, as from a stranger, that Christopher could hardly believe what it so very clearly said. Why did she feel this now, when a few weeks ago they had sworn to love one another for as long as they lived? Were all girls’ as fickle and as strange? Or had the priests, somehow, got at her, all this stuff about sin?

He could not write back. His handwriting on the envelope would be recognized in the hotel, and he did not know her address since she had not included it in her letter. He had no choice but to wait, and as days and then weeks went by his bewilderment turned to anger. It was stupid that she should suddenly develop these scruples after all they’d said to one another. The love he continued to feel for her became tinged with doubt and with resentment, as though they’d had a quarrel.

‘Now, I don’t want to say anything more about this,’ his father said at the beginning of the next holidays. ‘But it doesn’t do, you know, to go messing about with the maids.’

That was the end of the unfortunateness as far as his father was concerned. It was not something that should be talked about, no good could come of that.

‘It wasn’t messing about.’

‘That girl was very upset, Christopher.’

Three months ago Christopher would have said he wanted to marry Dervla, forced into that admission by what had been discovered. He would have spoken of love. But his father had managed to draw him aside to have this conversation before he’d had an opportunity even to see her, let alone speak to her. He felt confused, and uncertain about his feelings.

‘It would be hard on her to dismiss her. We naturally didn’t want to do that. We want the girl to remain here, Christopher, since really it’s a bit of a storm in a teacup.’

His father lit a cigarette and seemed more at ease once he had made that pronouncement. There was a lazier look about his face than there had been a moment ago; a smile drifted over his lips. ‘Good term?’ he said, and Christopher nodded.

‘Is it the priests, Dervla?’ They stood together in a doorway in Old Lane, her bicycle propped against the kerb. ‘Did the priests get at you?’

She shook her head.

‘Did my mother speak to you?’

‘Your mother only said a few things.’

She went away, wheeling her bicycle for a while before mounting it. He watched her, not feeling as miserable as when her letter had arrived, for during the months that had passed since then he had become reconciled to the loss of their relationship: between the lines of her letter there had been a finality.

He returned to the hotel and Artie helped him to carry his trunk upstairs. He wished that none of it had ever happened.

Dervla was glad he made no further effort to talk to her, but standing between courses by the dumb-waiter in the dining-room, she often wondered what he was thinking. While the others talked he was at first affected by embarrassment because at mealtimes in the past there had been the thrill of surreptitious glances and forbidden smiles. But after a week or so he became less quiet, joining in the family conversation, and she became the dining-room maid again.

Yet for Dervla the moment of placing his food in front of him was as poignant as ever it had been, and in her private moments she permitted herself the luxury of dwelling in the past. In her bedroom in Thomas MacDonagh Street she closed her eyes and willed into her consciousness the afternoon sunlight of Room 14. Once more she was familiar with the quickening of his heart and the cool touch of his hands. Once more she clung to him, her body huddled into his on the rickety chair in the corner, the faraway cries of Molly and Margery-Jane gently disturbing the silence.

Dervla did not experience bitterness. She was fortunate that the Congreves had been above the pettiness of dismissing her, and when she prayed she gave thanks for that. When more time had gone by she found herself able to confess the sinning that had been so pleasurable in Room 14, and was duly burdened with a penance for both the misdemeanours and her long delay in confessing them. She had feared to lose what there had been through expiation, but the fear had been groundless: only reality had been lost. ‘Young Carroll was asking for you,’ her father reported in a bewildered way, unable to understand her reluctance even to consider Buzzy Carroll’s interest.

Everything was easier when the green trunk and the box with the metal brackets stood in the back hall at the beginning of another term, and when a few more terms had come and gone he greeted her in the hotel as if all she had confessed to was a fantasy. Like his parents, she sensed, he was glad her dismissal had not been necessary, for that would have been unfair. ‘Did my mother speak to you?’ The quiet vehemence there had been in his voice was sweet to remember, but he himself would naturally wish to forget it now: for him, Room 14 must have come to seem like an adventure in indiscretion, as naturally his parents had seen it.

Two summers after he left school Dervla noticed signs in him that painfully echoed the past. An archdeacon’s daughter sometimes had lunch with the family: he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Serving the food and in her position by the dumb-waiter, Dervla watched him listening while the archdeacon’s daughter talked about how she and her parents had moved from one rectory to another and how the furniture hadn’t fitted the new rooms, how there hadn’t been enough stair-carpet. The archdeacon’s daughter was very beautiful. Her dark hair was drawn back from a centre parting; when she smiled a dimple came and went in one cheek only; her skin was like the porcelain of a doll’s skin. Often in the dining-room she talked about her childhood in the seaside backwater where she had once lived. Every morning in summer and autumn she and her father had gone together to the strand to bathe. They piled their clothes up by a breakwater, putting stones on them if there was a wind, and then they would run down the sand to the edge of the sea. A man sometimes passed by on a horse, a retired lighthouse keeper, a lonely, widowed man. Christopher was entranced.

Dervla cleared away the dishes, expertly disposing of chop bones or bits of left-behind fat. Mary had years ago shown her how to flick the table refuse on to a single plate, a different one from the plate you gathered the used knives and forks on to. Doing so now, she too listened to everything the archdeacon’s daughter said. Once upon a time the Pierrots had performed on the strand in August, and Hewitt’s Travelling Fun Fair had come; regularly, June to September, summer visitors filled the promenade boarding-houses, arriving on excursion trains. Garish pictures were painted with coloured powders on the sand, castles and saints and gardens. ‘I loved that place,’ the archdeacon’s daughter said.

Afterwards Dervla watched from an upstairs window, the window in fact of Room 14. The archdeacon’s daughter sat with him in the garden, each of them in a deck-chair, laughing and conversing. They were always laughing: the archdeacon’s daughter would say something and he would throw his head back with appreciation and delight. Long before the engagement was announced Dervla knew that this was the girl who was going to take her place, in his life and in the hotel.

The Archdeacon conducted the service in St Peter’s, and then the guests made their way to the garden of the hotel. That the wedding reception was to be at the hotel was a business arrangement between the Archdeacon and Mr Congreve, for the expenses were to be the former’s, as convention demanded. It was a day in June, a Thursday, in the middle of a heatwave.

Dervla and a new maid with spectacles handed round glasses of champagne. Artie saw to it that people had chairs to sit on if they wished to sit. The archdeacon’s daughter wore a wedding-dress that had a faint shade of blue in it, and a Limerick lace veil. She was kissed by people in the garden, she smiled while helping to cut the wedding cake. Her four bridesmaids, Molly and Margery-Jane among them, kept saying she looked marvellous.

Speeches were made in the sunshine. Dr Molloy made one and so did the best man, Tom Gouvernet, and Mr Congreve. Dr Molloy remembered the day Christopher was born, and Mr Congreve remembered the first time he’d set eyes on the beauty of the Archdeacon’s daughter, and Tom Gouvernet remembered Christopher at school. Other guests remembered other occasions; Christopher said he was the lucky man and kissed the archdeacon’s daughter while people clapped their hands with delight. Tom Gouvernet fell backwards off the edge of a raised bed.

There was an excess of emotion in the garden, an excess of smiles and tears and happiness and love. The champagne glasses were held up endlessly, toast after toast. Christopher’s mother moved among the guests with the plump wife of the archdeacon and the Archdeacon himself, who was as frail as a stalk of straw. In his easy-going way Christopher’s father delighted in the champagne and the sunshine, and the excitement of a party. Mr McKibbin, the bank agent, was there, and Hogarty the surveyor, and an insurance man who happened to be staying at the hotel. There was nothing Mr Congreve liked better than standing about talking to these barroom companions.

‘Thanks, Dervla.’ Taking a glass from her tray, Christopher smiled at her because for ages that had been possible again.

‘It’s a lovely wedding, sir.’

‘Yes, it is.’

He looked at her eyes, and was aware of the demanding steadiness of her gaze. He sensed what she was wondering and wondered it himself: what would have happened if she’d been asked to leave the hotel? He guessed, as she did: they would have shared the resentment and the anger that both of them had separately experienced; defiantly they would have continued to meet in the town; she would have accompanied him on his walks, out into the country and the fields. There would have been talk in the town and scenes in the hotel, their relationship would again have been proscribed. They would have drawn closer to one another, their outraged feelings becoming an element in the forbidden friendship. In the end, together, they would have left the hotel and the town and neither of them would be standing here now. Both their lives would be quite different.

‘You’ll be getting married yourself one of these days, Dervla.’

‘Ah, no no.’

She was still quite pretty. There was a simplicity about her freckled features that was pleasing; her soft fair hair was neat beneath her maid’s white cap. But she was not beautiful. Once, not knowing much about it, he had imagined she was. It was something less palpable that distinguished her.

‘Oh, surely? Surely, Dervla?’

‘I don’t see myself giving up the hotel, sir. My future’s here, sir.’

He smiled again and passed on. But his smile, which remained while he listened to a story of Tom Gouvernet’s about the hazards to be encountered on a honeymoon, was uneasy. An echo of the eyes that had gazed so steadily remained with him, as did the reference she had made to her future. That she had not been turned out of the hotel had seemed something to be proud of at the time: a crudity had been avoided. But while Tom Gouvernet’s lowered voice continued, he found himself wishing she had been. She would indeed not ever marry, her eyes had stated, she would not wish to.

A hand of his wife’s slipped into one of his; the voice of Tom Gouvernet ceased. The hand was as delicate as the petal of a flower, the fingers so tiny that involuntarily he lifted them to his lips. Had Dervla seen? he Wondered, and he looked through the crowd for a glimpse of her but could not see her. Hogarty the surveyor was doing a trick with a handkerchief, entertaining the coal merchant’s daughters. Mr McKibben was telling one of his stories.

‘Ah, he’s definitely the lucky man,’ Tom Gouvernet said, playfully winking at the bride.

It had never occurred to Christopher before that while he and his parents could successfully bury a part of the past, Dervla could not. It had never occurred to him that because she was the girl she was she did not appreciate that some experiences were best forgotten. Ever since the Congreves had owned the Royal Hotel a way of life had obtained there, but its subtleties had naturally eluded the dining-room maid.

‘When you get tired of him,’ Tom Gouvernet went on in the same light manner, ‘you know who to turn to.’

‘Oh, indeed I do, Tom.’

He should have told her about Dervla. If he told her now she would want Dervla to go; any wife would, in perfect reasonableness. An excuse must be found, she would say, even though a promise had been made.

‘But I won’t become tired of him,’ she was saying, smiling at Tom Gouvernet. ‘He’s actually quite nice, you know.’

In the far distance Dervla appeared, hurrying from the hotel with a freshly laden tray. Christopher watched her, while the banter continued between bride and best man.

‘He had the shocking reputation at school,’ Tom Gouvernet said.

‘Oh? I didn’t know that.’ She was still smiling; she didn’t believe it. It wasn’t true.

‘A right Lothario you’ve got yourself hitched to.’

He would not tell her. It was too late for that, it would bewilder her since he had not done so before. It wouldn’t be fair to require her not to wish that Dervla, even now, should be asked to go; or to understand that a promise made to a dining-room maid must be honoured because that was the family way.

Across the garden the Archdeacon lifted a glass from Dervla’s tray. He was still in the company of his plump wife and Christopher’s mother. They, too, took more champagne and then Dervla walked towards where Christopher was standing with his bride and his best man. She moved quickly through the crowd, not offering her tray of glasses to the guests she passed, intent upon her destination.

‘Thank you, Dervla,’ his wife of an hour said.

‘I think Mr Hogarty,’ he said himself, ‘could do with more champagne.’

He watched her walking away and was left again with the insistence in her eyes. As the dining-room maid, she would become part of another family growing up in the hotel. She would listen to a mother telling her children about the strand where once she’d bathed, where a retired lighthouse keeper had passed by on a horse. For all his life he would daily look upon hers, but no words would ever convey her undramatic revenge because the right to speak, once his gift to her, had been taken away. He had dealt in cruelty and so now did she: her gift to him, held over until his wedding day, was that afternoon shadows would gather for ever in Room 14, while she kept faith.

Lunch in Winter

Mrs Nancy Simpson – who did not at all care for that name and would have wished to be Nancy le Puys or Nancy du Maurier – awoke on a December morning. She had been dreaming of a time long past in her life, when her name had been Nancy Dawes, before she’d been married to anyone. The band had been playing ‘You are my Honeysuckle’ and in the wings of the Old Gaiety they had all been in line, smiles ready, waiting to come on. You are my honey-honeysuckle, I am the bee… Was it called something else, known by some other title? ‘Smoke Gets in your Eyes’ had once been called something else, so Laurie Henderson had said, although, God knows, if Laurie’d said it it probably wasn’t true. You could never tell with songs. ‘If You were the Only Girl in the World’, for instance: was that the full title or was it ‘If You were the Only Girl in the World and I was the Only Boy’? She’d had an argument with Laurie about that, a ridiculous all-night argument in Mrs Tomer’s digs, Macclesfield, 1949 or ’50. ’50 probably because soon afterwards Laurie went down to London, doing something – barman probably – for the Festival of Britain thing. He’d walked out of Mrs Tomer’s and she hadn’t seen him for nine years. ’51 actually it must have been. Definitely the Festival had been 1951.

She rose, and before she did anything else applied make-up to her face with very great care. She often thought there was nothing she liked better than sitting in her petticoat in front of a looking-glass, putting another face on. She powdered her lipstick, then smiled at herself. She thought about Fitz because today was Thursday and they’d drifted into the way of having lunch on Thursdays. ‘My God, it’s Nancy!’ he’d said when by extraordinary chance he’d come upon her six months ago gazing into the windows of Peter Jones. They’d had a cup of tea, and had told one another this and that. ‘Of course, why ever not?’ she’d said when he’d suggested that they might occasionally see one another. ‘Old times’ sake,’ she’d probably said: she couldn’t remember now.

Her flat in Putney was high in a red-brick Victorian block, overlooking the river. Near by was the big, old-fashioned Sceptre Hotel, where drinkers from the flats spent a few evening hours, where foreign commercial travellers stayed. During Wimbledon some of the up-and-coming players stayed there also, with the has-beens. She liked to sit in the Bayeux Lounge and watch them passing through the reception area, pausing for their keys. That German who’d got into the final about ten years ago she’d noticed once, and she liked to think that McEnroe had stayed in the Sceptre before he’d got going, but she hadn’t actually seen him. Every year from the windows of her tiny flat she watched the Boat Race going by, but really had no interest in it. Nice, though, the way it always brought the crowds to Putney. Nice that Putney in the springtime, one Saturday in the year, was not forgotten.

Fitz would be on his train, she thought as she crossed Putney Bridge on her way to the Underground. The bridge was where Christie, who’d murdered so many prostitutes, had been arrested. He’d just had a meal in the Lacy Dining Rooms and perhaps he’d even been thinking of murdering another that very night when the plain clothes had scooped him up. He’d gone, apparently, without a word of protest.

‘My, you’re a romantic, Fitz!’ she’d said all those years ago, and really he hadn’t changed. Typical of him to want to make it a regular Thursday rendezvous. Typical to come up specially from the coast, catching a train and then another train back. During the war they’d been married for four years.

She sang for a moment, remembering that; and then wanting to forget it. His family had thought he was mad, you could see that immediately. He’d led her into a huge drawing-room in Warwickshire, with a grand piano in one corner, and his mother and sister had actually recoiled. ‘But for God’s sake, you can’t!’ she’d heard his sister’s shrill, unpleasant voice exclaiming in the middle of that same night. ‘You can’t marry a chorus girl!’ But he had married her; they’d had to stomach her in the end.

She’d been a sunflower on the stage of the Old Gaiety when he’d first picked her out; after that he’d come night after night. He’d said she had a flimsy quality and needed looking after. When they met again six months ago in Regent Street he’d said in just the same kind of way that she was far too thin. She’d seen him eyeing her hair, which had been light and fair and was a yellowish colour now, not as pretty as it had been. But he didn’t remark on it because he was the kind to remark only on the good things, saying instead she hadn’t changed a bit. He seemed boyishly delighted that she still laughed the way she always had, and often remarked that she still held the stem of a glass and her cigarette in her own particular way. ‘You’re cold,’ he’d said a week ago, reminding her of how he’d always gone on in the past about her not wearing enough clothes. He’d never understood that heavy things didn’t suit her.

In other ways he hadn’t changed, either. Still with a military bearing and hardly grey at all, he had a sunburnt look about the face, as always he’d had. He had not run to fat or slackness, and the sunburnt look extended over his forehead and beyond where his hair had receded. He was all of a piece, his careful suits, his soldier’s walk. He’d married someone else, but after twenty-three years she’d gone and died on him.

‘Good week?’ he inquired in the Trattoria San Michele. ‘What have you got up to, Nancy?’

She smiled and shrugged her skimpy shoulders. Nothing much, she didn’t say. There’d been a part she’d heard about and had hoped for, but she didn’t want to talk about that; it was a long time since she’d had a part.

‘The trout with almonds,’ he suggested. ‘Shall we both have that?’

She smiled again and nodded. She lived on alimony, not his but that of the man she had married last, the one called Simpson. She lit a cigarette; she liked to smoke at meals, sometimes between mouthfuls.

‘They’ve started that thing on the TV again,’ she said. ‘That Blankety Blank. Hilarious.’

She didn’t know why she’d been unfaithful to him. She’d, thought he wouldn’t guess, but when he’d come back on his first leave he’d known at once. She’d promised it would never happen again, swearing it was due to the topsy-turviness of the war, the worry because he was in danger. Several leaves later, when the war was almost over, she promised again. ‘I couldn’t love anyone else, Fitz,’ she’d whimpered, meaning it, really and truly. But at the beginning of 1948 he divorced her.

She hated to remember that time, especially since he was here and being so nice to her. She wanted to pay him back and asked him if he remembered the theme from State Fair. ‘Marvellous. And then of course “Spring Fever” in the same picture.’ She sang for a moment. ‘… and it isn’t even Spring.’ Member?’

Eventually she had gone to Canada with a man called Eddie Lush, whom later she had married. She had stayed there, and later in Philadelphia, for thirteen years, but when she returned to England two children who had been born, a boy and a girl, did not accompany her. They’d become more attached to Eddie Lush than to her, which had hurt her at the time, and there’d been accusations of neglect during the court case, which had been hurtful too. Once upon a time they’d written letters to her occasionally, but she wasn’t sure now what they were doing.

‘And “I’ll Be Around”. ’Member “I’ll Be Around”?’ She sang again, very softly. ‘No matter how… you treat me now… Who was it sang it, d’you ’member?’

He shook his head. The waiter brought their trout and Nancy smiled at him. The tedium that had just begun to creep into these Thursday lunches had evaporated as soon as she’d set eyes on the Trattoria’s new waiter six or so weeks ago. On Thursday evenings, in her corner of the Bayeux Lounge, his courtesy and his handsome face haunted her. Yes, he was a little sad, she often said to herself in the Bayeux Lounge. Was there even a hint of pain in those steady Latin eyes?

‘Oh, lovely-looking trout,’ she said, continuing to smile. ‘Thanks ever so, Cesare.’

The man she had been married to was saying something else, but she didn’t hear what it was. She remembered a chap like Cesare during the war, an airman from the base whom she’d longed to be taken out by, although in fact he’d never invited her.

‘What?’ she murmured, becoming aware that she’d been asked a question. But the question, now repeated, was only the familiar one, so often asked on Thursdays: did she intend to remain in her Putney flat, was she quite settled there? It was asked because once she’d said – she didn’t know why – that the flat was temporary, that her existence in Putney had a temporary feel to it. She couldn’t tell all the truth, she couldn’t – to Fitz of all people – reveal the hope that at long last old Mr Robin Right would come bob-bob-bobbing along. She believed in Mr R.R., always had, and for some reason she’d got it into her head that he might quite easily walk into the Bayeux Lounge of the Sceptre Hotel. In the evenings she watched television in her flat or in the Bayeux Lounge, sometimes feeling bored because she had no particular friend or confidante. But then she’d always had an inclination to feel a bit like that. Boredom was the devil in her, Laurie Henderson used to say.

‘Thanks ever so,’ she said again because Cesare had skilfully placed a little heap of peas beside the trout. Typical of her, of course, to go falling for a restaurant waiter: you set yourself out on a sensible course, all serious and determined, and the next thing was you were half in love with an unsuitable younger man. Not that she looked fifty-nine, of course, more like forty – even thirty-eight, as a chap in the Bayeux Lounge had said when she’d asked him to guess a month ago. Unfortunately the chap had definitely not been Mr R.R.

‘I just wondered,’ Fitz was saying.

She smiled and nodded. The waiter was aware of her attention, no doubt about it. There was a little wink she was gifted with, a slight little motion of the lids, nothing suggestive about it. ‘Makes me laugh, your wink,’ Eddie Lush used to say, and it was probably Simpson who had called it a gift. She couldn’t think why she’d ever allowed herself to marry Simpson, irritating face he’d had, irritating ways.

‘It’s been enjoyable, making the garden, building that wall. I never thought I’d be able to build a wall.’

He’d told her a lot about his house by the sea, a perfect picture it sounded, with flowerbeds all around the edge, and rustic trellising with ivy disguising the outside sanitary arrangements. He was terribly proud of what he’d done, and every right he had to be, the way he’d made the garden out of nothing. Won some kind of award the garden had, best on the south coast or the world or something.

‘I could sell it very well. I’ve begun to think of that.’

She nodded. Cesare was expertly gathering up the plates four businessmen had eaten from. The men were stout and flushed, all of them married: you could tell a married look at once. At another table a chap who was married also was taking out a girl less than half his age, and next to them a couple looked as though they were planning a dirty weekend. A party of six, men and women, were at the big central table, just beside where the salads and the bowls of fruit were all laid out and where the dessert trolley was. She’d seen that party here a couple of weeks ago; they’d been talking about En Tout Cas tennis courts.

‘Once you’ve made something as you want it,’ Fitz was saying, ‘you tend to lose interest, I suppose.’

The head-waiter called out to the other, younger Italian, she didn’t know what his name was, lumpy-looking boy. But Cesare, because he was less busy, answered. ‘Pronto! Pronto!’

‘You’re never selling up, Fitz?’

‘Well, I’m wondering about it.’

He had told her about the woman he’d married, a responsible type of woman she sounded, but she’d been ill or something and hadn’t been able to have children. Twenty-three years was really a very long time for any two people to keep going. But then the woman had died.

‘You get itchy feet,’ he said. ‘Even when you’re passing sixty.’

‘My, you don’t look it.’ Automatically she responded, watching the waiter while he served the party at the central table with T-bone steaks, a San Michele speciality. He said something else, but it didn’t impinge on her. Then she heard:

‘I often think it would be nice to live in London.’

He was eyeing her, to catch her reaction to this. ‘You’ve had a battered life,’ he’d said to her, the second time they’d had lunch. He’d looked at her much as he was looking at her now, and had said it twice. That was being an actress, she’d explained: always living on your nerves, hoping for this part or that, the disappointment of don’t-call-us. ‘Well, I suppose it batters you in the end,’ she’d agreed. ‘The old Profession.’

He, on the other hand, had appeared to have had quite a cosy time in the intervening years. Certainly, the responsible-sounding woman hadn’t battered him, far from it. They’d been as snug as anything in the house by the sea, a heavy type of woman, Nancy imagined she’d been, with this thing wrong with her, whatever it was. It was after she’d dropped off her twig that he’d begun to feel sorry for himself and of course you couldn’t blame him, poor Fitz. It had upset him at first that people had led unattached women up to him at cocktail parties, widows and the like, who’d lost their figures or had let their hair go frizzy, or were old. He’d told her all that one lunchtime and on another occasion he’d confessed that after a year or so had passed he’d gone to a bureau place, an introduction agency, where much younger women were fixed up for him. But that hadn’t worked either. He had met the first of them for tea in the Ceylon Centre, where she’d told him that her deceased husband had been an important figure in a chemicals firm and that her older daughter was married in Australia, that her son was in the Hong Kong Police and another daughter married to a dentist in Worcester. She had not ceased to talk the entire time she was with him, apparently, telling him that she suffered from the heat, especially her feet. He’d taken another woman to a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and he’d met a third in a bar she had suggested, where she’d begun to slur her speech after half an hour. Poor Fitz! He’d always been a simple soldier. She could have told him a bureau place would be no good, stood to reason you’d only get the down-and-outs.

‘Sorry?’ she said.

‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of giving it another go?’

‘Darling Fitz! Dear darling Fitz!’

She smiled at him. How typical it was that he didn’t know it was impossible to pick up pieces that had been lying about for forty years! The past was full of Simpson and Laurie Henderson and Eddie Lush, and the two children she’d borne, the girl the child of a fertilizer salesman, which was something Eddie Lush had never guessed. You couldn’t keep going on journeys down Memory Lane, and the more you did the more you realized that it was just an ugly black tunnel. Time goes by, as the old song had it, a kiss and a sigh and that was that. She smiled again. ‘The fundamental things of life,’ she sang softly, smiling again at her ex-husband.

‘I just thought –’ he began.

‘You always said pretty things, Fitz.’

‘I always meant them.’

It had been so romantic when he’d said she needed looking after. He’d called her winsome another time. He was far more romantic than any of the others had ever been, but unfortunately when being romantic went on for a while it could become a teeny bit dreary, no other word for it. Not of course that you’d ever call poor Fitz dreary, far from it.

‘Where d’you come from, Cesare?’ she asked the waiter, thinking it a good idea to cause a diversion – and besides, it was nice to make the waiter linger. He was better looking than the airman from the base. He had a better nose, a nicer chin. She’d never seen such eyes, nor hair she longed so much to touch. Delicate with the coffee flask, his hands were as brown as an Italian fir-cone. She’d been to Italy once, to Sestri Levante with a man called Jacob Fynne who’d said he was going to put on Lilac Time. She’d collected fir-cones because she’d been bored, because all Jacob Fynne had wanted was her body. The waiter said he came from somewhere she’d never heard of.

‘D’you know Sestri Levante?’ she asked in order to keep him at their table.

He said he didn’t, so she told him about it. Supposing she ran into him on the street, like she’d run into Fitz six months ago? He’d be alone: restaurant waiters in a city that was foreign to them could not know many people. Would it be so strange to walk together for a little while and then maybe to go in somewhere for a drink? ‘Are your lodgings adequate, Cesare?’ She would ask the question, and he would reply that his lodgings were not good. He’d say so because it stood to reason that the kind of lodgings an Italian waiter would be put into would of course be abominable. ‘I’ll look out for somewhere for you’: would it be so wrong to say that?

‘Would you consider it, Nancy? I mean, is it beyond the pale?’

For a moment it seemed that the hand which had seized one of hers was the waiter’s, but then she noticed that Cesare was hurrying away with his flask of coffee. The hand that was paying her attention was marked with age, a bigger, squarer hand than Cesare’s.

‘Oh Fitz, you are a dear!’

‘Well…’

‘D’you think we might be naughty and go for a brandy today?’

‘Of course.’

He signalled the waiter back. She lit another cigarette. When the brandy came and more coffee was being poured she said:

‘And how do you like England? London?’

‘Very nice, signora.’

‘When you’ve tired of London you’ve tired of life, Cesare. That’s a famous saying we have.’

‘Sì?, signora.’

‘D’you know Berkeley Square, Cesare? There’s a famous song we have about a nightingale in Berkeley Square. Whereabouts d’you live, Cesare?’

‘Tooting Bee, signora.’

‘Good heavens! Tooting’s miles away.’

‘Not too far, signora.’

‘I’d rather have Naples any day. See Naples and die, eh?’

She sang a little from the song she’d referred to, and then she laughed and slapped Cesare lightly on the wrist, causing him to laugh also. He said the song was very nice.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz was saying. ‘It was a silly thing to say.’

‘You’ve never been silly in your life, Fitz.’ She laughed again. ‘Except when you married me.’

Gallantly, he shook his head.

‘Thanks ever so,’ she called after the waiter, who had moved with his coffee flask to the table with the business people. She thought of his being in Putney, in the room she’d found for him, much more convenient than Tooting. She thought of his coming to see her in the flat, of their sitting together with the windows open so that they could look out over the river. It was an unusual relationship, they both knew that, but he confessed that he had always liked the company of older women. He said so very quietly, not looking at her, speaking in a solemn tone. Nothing would change between them, he promised while they drank Campari sodas and she explained about the Boat Race.

‘I shouldn’t have said it. I’m sorry, Nancy.’

She hummed a snatch of something, smiling at him to show it didn’t matter in the least. He’d made another proposal, just like he had when she’d been a sunflower at the Old Gaiety. It was a compliment, but she didn’t say so because she was still thinking about sitting with the windows open in Putney.

‘I must get back. I’ll take an earlier train today,’ he said.

‘Just a teeny ‘nother coffee, Fitz? And perhaps…’ She lifted her empty brandy glass, her head a little on one side, the way he’d so often said he liked. And when the waiter came again she said:

‘And have you always been a waiter, Cesare?’

He said he had, leaving a plate with the bill on it on the table. She tried to think of something else to say to him, but could think of nothing.

When they left the restaurant they walked with a bitter wind in their faces and he didn’t take her arm, the way he’d done last week and the week before. On a crowded street the hurrying people jostled them, not apologizing. Once they were separated and for a moment she couldn’t see her ex-husband and thought that he had slipped away from her, punishing her because she had been embarrassing with the waiter. But that was not his way. I’m here,’ his voice said.

His cold lips touched her cheeks, first one, then the other. His large, square fingers gripped her arm for just a moment. ‘Well, goodbye, Nancy,’ he said, as always he did on Thursday afternoons, but this time he did not mention next week and he was gone before she could remind him.

That evening she sat in her usual corner of the Bayeux Lounge, sipping vodka and tonic and thinking about the day. She’d been terrible; if she knew poor Fitz’s number she’d ring him now from the booth in the passage and say she was sorry. ‘Wine goes to your head, Nancy,’ Laurie Henderson used to say and it was true. A few glasses of red wine in the Trattoria San Michele and she was pawing at a waiter who was young enough to be her son. And Fitz politely sat there, officer and gentleman still written all over him, saying he’d sell his house up and come to London. The waiter’d probably thought she was after his body.

Not that it mattered what he thought, because he and the Trattoria San Michele already belonged in Memory Lane. She’d never been there until that lunchtime six months ago when old Fitz had said, ‘Let’s turn in here.’ No word would come from him, she sensed that also: never again on a Thursday would she hurry along to the Trattoria San Michele and say she was sorry she was late.

I’ll he around, no matter how you treat me now… She’d seen him first when they’d sung that number, the grand finale; she’d suddenly noticed him, three rows from the front. She’d seen him looking at her and had wondered while she danced if he was Mr R.R. Well, of course, he had been in a way. He’d stood up for her to his awful relations, he’d kissed away her tears, saying he would die for her. And then the first thing she’d done when he’d married her after all that fuss, when he’d gone back after his leave, was to imagine that that stupid boy with a tubercular chest was the be-all and end-all. And when the boy had proved beyond a shadow of doubt that he was no such thing there was the new one they’d taken on for his tap-dancing.

She smiled in the Bayeux Lounge, remembering the laughter and the applause when the back legs of Jack and the Beanstalk’s Dobbin surprised everyone by breaking into that elegant tap-dance, and how Jack and his mother had stood there with their mouths comically open. She’d told Fitz about it a few lunches ago because, of course, she hadn’t been able to tell him at the time on account of the thing she’d had with the back legs. He had nodded solemnly, poor Fitz, not really amused, you could see, but pleased because she was happy to remember. A right little troublemaker that tap-dancer had turned out to be, and a right little scrounge, begging every penny he could lay his hands on, with no intention of paying a farthing back.

If she’d run out of hope, she thought, she could have said yes, let’s try again. She could have admitted, because it was only fair to, that she’d never be like the responsible woman who’d gone and died on him. She could have pointed out that she’d never acquire the class of his mother and his sister because she wasn’t that sort of person. She’d thought all that out a few weeks ago, knowing what he was getting around to. She’d thought it was awful for him to be going to a bureau place and have women telling him about how the heat affected them. She’d imagined saying yes and then humming something special, probably ‘Love is the Sweetest Thing’, and leaning her face towards him across the table, waiting for his kiss again. But of course you couldn’t live in fantasies, you couldn’t just pretend.

‘Ready for your second, Nancy?’ the barmaid called across the empty lounge, and she said yes, she thought she was.

You gave up hope if you just agreed because it sounded cosy. When he’d swept her off her feet all those years ago everything had sounded lovely: being with him in some nice place when the war was over, never again being short, the flowers he brought her. ‘No need to come to London, Fitz,’ she might have said today. ‘Let’s just go and live in your house by the sea.’ And he’d have been delighted and relieved, because he’d only mentioned selling up in order to show her that he would if she wanted him to. But all hope would be gone if she’d agreed.

She sighed, sorry for him, imagining him in the house he talked about. He’d have arrived there by now, and she imagined him turning the lights on and everything coming to life. You could tell from the way he talked that there were memories there for him, that the woman he’d married was still all over the place: it wasn’t because he’d finished making a stone wall in the garden that he wanted to move on. He’d probably pour himself a drink and sit down to watch the television; he’d open a tin later on. She imagined him putting a match to the fire and pulling over the curtains. Probably in a drawer somewhere he had a photo of her as a sunflower. He’d maybe sit with it in his hand, with his drink and the television. ‘Dear, it’s a fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘It couldn’t ever have worked second time round, no more’n it did before.’

‘Warm your bones, Nancy,’ the barmaid said, placing her second vodka and tonic on a cardboard mat on the table where she sat. ‘Freeze you tonight, it would.’

‘Yes, it’s very cold.’

She hadn’t returned to the flat after the visit to the Trattoria San Michele; somehow she hadn’t felt like it. She’d walked about during the couple of hours that had to pass before the Bayeux Lounge opened. She’d looked in the shop windows, and looked at the young people with their peculiarly coloured hair. Two boys in eastern robes, with no hair, had tried to sell her a record. She hadn’t been keen to go back to the flat because she wanted to save up the hope that something might have come on the second post, an offer of a part. If she saved it up it would still hover in her mind while she sat in the Bayeux Lounge – just a chance in a million but that was how chances always were. It was more likely, when her luck changed, that the telephone would ring, but even so you could never rule out a letter. You never should. You should never rule out anything.

She wished now she’d tried to tell him that, even though he might not ever have understood. She wished she’d explained that it was all to do with not giving up hope. She’d felt the same when Eddie had got the children, even though one of them wasn’t his, and when they’d gone on so about neglect. All she’d been doing was hoping then too, not wanting to be defeated, not wanting to give in to what they demanded where the children were concerned. Eddie had married someone else, some woman who probably thought she was an awful kind of person because she’d let her children go. But one day the children would write, she knew that inside her somewhere; one day there’d be that letter waiting for her, too.

She sipped more vodka and tonic. She knew as well that one day Mr R.R. would suddenly be there, to make up for every single thing. He’d make up for all the disappointment, for Simpson and Eddie and Laurie Henderson, for treating badly the one man who’d been good to you. He’d make up for scrounging tap-dancers and waiters you wanted to be with because there was sadness in their faces, and the dear old Trattoria San Michele gone for ever into Memory Lane. You couldn’t give up on Mr R.R., might as well walk out and throw yourself down into the river; like giving up on yourself it would be.

‘I think of you only,’ she murmured in her soft whisper, feeling much better now because of the vodka and tonic, ‘only wishing, wishing you were by my side.’ When she’d come in at half past five she’d noticed a chap booking in at the reception, some kind of foreign commercial traveller since the tennis people naturally didn’t come in winter; fiftyish, handsomeish, not badly dressed. She was glad they hadn’t turned on the television yet. From the corner where she sat she could see the stairs, where sooner or later the chap would appear. He’d buy a drink and then he’d look around and there she’d be.

The Property of Colette Nervi

Drumgawnie the crossroads was known as, and for miles around the land was called Drumgawnie also. There was a single shop at the crossroads, next to a pink house with its roof gone. There was an abandoned mill, with tall grain stores no longer used for any purpose. Drumgawnie Rath, a ring of standing stones that predated history, was half a mile across the fields where Odd Garvey grazed his cattle.

It was in 1959, an arbitrary date as far as the people who lived in and around Drumgawnie were concerned, that visitors began to take an interest in the stones, drawing their cars up by the mill and the grain stores. English or French people they usually were, spring or summertime tourists who always called in at the shop to inquire the way. Mrs Mullally, who owned the shop, had thought of erecting a small sign but in the end had abandoned the notion on the grounds that one day, perhaps, a visitor might glance about her premises and purchase something. None ever had.

‘You have to cross the little stream,’ she informed a French couple in the early summer of 1968. ‘Continue on past where you’ve drawn your car in and then there’s rocks you can step on to see you over the bit of water. Go neither right nor left after that until you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass.’

In her bedroom Dolores Mullally, then aged twenty-two, watched from her window, the lacy half-curtain pulled back at the edge. She had heard the car coming to a halt by the mill, and minutes later foreign voices had become louder as the visitors approached the shop. She had pushed herself up from her bed and limped across to the window. The woman was wearing a black leather coat, a thin woman with a smiling, slanted face, strange-looking and beautiful. The man had a moustache and a slender pipe.

Dolores imagined these foreign people asking her mother about the standing stones, and her mother telling them, using the same expressions she always did. When her mother wasn’t there and Dolores gave the directions herself she never used expressions like ‘to see you over the bit of water’ or ‘you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass’. All that was her mother’s old-fashioned way of putting things. Dolores simply said that the visitors must cross the stream at a place they’d see and then keep straight on. Her father, no longer alive, had once carried her to see the standing stones and she hadn’t found them much to look at. But a visitor who had spent the whole afternoon examining them and had afterwards returned to the shop to verify the way to the Rossaphin road had stated that they were the most extraordinary stones of their kind in the whole of Europe. ‘I think he was maybe drunk,’ Dolores’s mother had commented, and her father had agreed.

As soon as they left the shop the Frenchman took the woman’s arm affectionately, both of them laughing at something or other. Dolores watched them walking on the left-hand side of the road, towards the mill and the towering grain stores. There had been prosperity in the place once, her father and her mother had said, at the time when the mill operated. Its owner had lived in the pink-distempered house with the fallen-in roof, a man called Mr Hackett, who had grown some special kind of plums in his garden.

The French couple stood for a moment by their car, a small, bright red vehicle, hired in Dublin, Dolores guessed. A group of English people and an American woman, returning from the stones some years ago, had been unable to start theirs and had telephoned the Dan Ryan car-hire organization from the shop. It was then, for the first time, that Dolores had realized it was possible for visitors from other countries to hire motorcars and to drive all over Ireland in them.

The Frenchman removed the pipe from his mouth and knocked it out on the edge of his shoe. He unlocked one of the car doors and took from it two pairs of short green gum-boots, which he and the woman put on. They stowed their shoes in the car and then the man put his arms about his companion. He bent her head backwards, leaning his body against her and pushing his lips on to hers, although Dolores could not quite see that detail of the embrace. He released the woman and she at once placed her hands, fingers splayed out, on his black hair, drawing his face down to hers again. After a moment they separated and set off, hand in hand, their arms stretched across the path they walked along. On either side of them nettles and docks grew in great profusion; daisy-heads and buttercups decorated the grass of the path; ragwort was everywhere. The afternoon was sunny, puffy little clouds were stationary in the sky. On the red roof of the car there was what appeared to be a shadow, small and rectangular and vividly black: it was an object, Dolores realized when she screwed her eyes up, not a shadow at all. Carelessly the two had left it there.

She dropped the edge of the half-curtain and limped back to her bed, where she had been reading Holster in the Dust by Tom K. Kane. She picked a cigarette from a packet of Afton Major, open on the candlewick counterpane. She lit it and inhaled. Because of her bad leg she lay down for an hour or so almost every afternoon, unless it was the time of year when the seed potatoes had to be put in on the slope at the back or the later time when the grown potatoes had to be gathered. Years ago, when Dolores was twelve, old Dr McDowell had suggested that a rest in the afternoon might be a relief. The leg, shrivelled to the bone as a result of infantile paralysis, necessitated the use of a crutch, although in making her way across her bedroom or the kitchen, or sometimes moving about in the shop, Dolores could manage without this aid, limping from one steadying surface to the next. The evening sun-rays reddened the canyon, she read. Dust was acrid in One-Draw’s nostrils and grimy on his cheeks. Her father had bought these yellow-backed books of the Wild West Library, which were closely printed on absorbent paper, a perpendicular line down the centre of each page, separating the prose as in a newspaper. Their soft covers were tattered now, creases running through horses and riders and gun-smoke, limp spines bent and split. Her father had bought one in Mackie’s the newsagent’s every Friday, making the journey to Rossaphin in the horse and cart, taking Dolores with him. He had brought to the town the carrots and cabbages he grew on the slope, turnips and potatoes when he had them, plums from the forgotten garden next door. A waste of time, Dolores’s mother had always maintained, because of the small profit there’d been, and when Mr Mullally died the practice had ceased and the horse had been sold. The cart was still in the yard at the back, its faded orange-painted wood just beginning to rot. Even though her father had died fourteen years ago, Dolores still missed those weekly journeys and the feeling of excitement their anticipation had engendered.

The shop, patronized by everyone in the neighbourhood, kept Mrs Mullally and her daughter going. The bus dropped off newspapers there, groceries and confectionery were stocked, and a rudimentary post office maintained. At the time of Drumgawnie’s greater prosperity Mrs Mullally’s father had run it profitably, with a public house as well. Dolores’s own father, once employed in Mr Hackett’s milling business, had married into the shop after the closing of the mill. In his lifetime it was still thought that Dolores’s affliction might miraculously right itself as she grew up, but this had not happened. He died in the kitchen armchair, having complained for several months of pains in the chest which Dr McDowell had not taken seriously. ‘Well, Mother of God, isn’t it the most surprising thing in three decades of practising medicine?’ Dolores remembered him saying in the kitchen, the body already covered with a bedsheet. ‘McDowell was drunk as a fish,’ her mother was afterwards to remark. ‘His breath would’ve knocked you down.’ Not used to that particular smell, Dolores had imagined it to be a variation of the disinfectant in Dr McDowell’s house in Rossaphin.

One-Draw slid from the saddle. His eyes were slits, measuring the distance. ‘Cassidy!’ he shouted. ‘Reach, Cassidy!’ There was no reply, no movement. Not a sound in the canyon.

Dolores folded down the corner of the page to keep her place. She lit another Afton Major. There was never any pain in her leg; it was just the ugliness of it, the difficult, unattractive movement, the crutch she hated so. She’d become used over the years to all the cumbersome arrangements that had to be made for her, the school bus coming specially to the crossroads to take her to the convent in Rossaphin, the Crowleys calling in on a Sunday to take her and her mother to Mass in their Ford. Once a year, three weeks before Christmas, she and her mother went for the day to shop in Rossaphin, driven on that occasion also by the Crowleys. They had a meal in Love’s Café and didn’t return to the crossroads until six o’clock. Her mother had to get special permission to close the post-office counter, which was something Father Deane was able to arrange, just as it was he who persuaded the Crowleys to be kind in the way they were.

Now and again, between one December and the next, Dolores managed to get in to Rossaphin on the bus, but the journey home again had to be arranged carefully and in advance, with the cooperation of one of the drivers who called regularly at the shop. Sheedy, who brought the bread, was no good because he came out in the morning, but the Mitchelstown Cheese man always passed through Rossaphin in the late afternoon and then came on to the crossroads, and Jimmy Reilly, who brought the bacon, came in the afternoon also. Having chosen a particular day and made the arrangement to meet one or other of the delivery men at a time and a place, Dolores usually had three hours or a bit more on her own. Her mother didn’t like it though; her mother worried in case the van men might forget. Neither of them ever had, but something once did go wrong with Jimmy Reilly’s engine and Dolores was left waiting outside the Provincial Bank until five o’clock when she should have been collected at two. A boy had come up to her with a message, and then Father Deane had appeared on his bicycle. He rang the bell of the bank and the manager’s wife had allowed Dolores to sit on a chair in the hall until the Crowleys arrived in their Ford. The tears were running down her mother’s cheeks when eventually she arrived back at the crossroads, and after that Dolores never again went into Rossaphin on her own.

She squashed her cigarette-butt on the ashtray that lay beside Holster in the Dust on the candlewick counterpane. The ashtray was made of glass, with green letters advertising 7-Up on it, a free gift from one of the delivery men. She’d easily finish Holster in the Dust tonight, Dolores considered, she’d even start Guns of the Apache Country. She’d read both of them before, but not recently.

She tidied the counterpane, brushing the wrinkles from it. She paused for a moment by the looking-glass on her dressing-table to smear fresh lipstick on to her lips and to run a comb through her long black hair. Her face was round, her chin a pleasant curve. Her father had told her that her eyes were like a dog’s he’d once owned, meaning it as a compliment. They were brown and serious, as if all the time Dolores was intent on thoughts she chose not to share with other people. But mostly what she thought about were the adventures of the Wild West Library.

‘Are you rested, pet?’ her mother inquired in the shop. ‘You didn’t smoke too much?’

‘Only two,’ Dolores lied.

‘You’re better off without, pet.’

Dolores nodded. ‘That’s a well-dressed pair went up to the stones.’

‘Did you see them? You should stay lying down, pet.’

‘I’ll look after the shop now.’

Her mother said that Mrs Connell hadn’t come in for her bread yet, nor Whelan for his Independent. ‘French those people said they were.’

She sliced a couple of rashers as she spoke and took them away on the palm of her hand, through the small store-room at the back of the shop, into the kitchen. In a moment the smell of frying would drift through the store-room, as it did every evening at this time, and soon afterwards Dolores would put up the wire shutter on the post-office counter and lock the drawer where the postal orders and the stamps and the registration book were kept. She’d take the key into the kitchen with her when eventually she went to sit down to her tea. She would hang it on a hook on the dresser, but the shop itself would remain open and anyone who came into it would rap on the counter for attention, knowing that that was expected.

‘Mademoiselle,’ the Frenchman said, and went on talking. Dolores couldn’t understand him. He wasn’t smiling any more, and his thin companion in her leather coat wasn’t smiling either. They were agitated: the man kept gesturing, moving his hands about; the woman frowned, muttering in French to herself. Dolores shook her head. ‘Je ne sais pas,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Peut-être ici.’

He looked around the shop. The woman looked also, on the counter, on the post-office counter, on the cartons that had arrived yesterday and had not yet been opened, on the floor.

‘I didn’t catch what you said,’ Dolores explained, but the woman continued to speak French.

‘Le sac. Le sac noir.’

‘The handbag of my friend,’ the man said. ‘We lose the handbag.’

‘Lose?’

‘I place it,’ the woman said. ‘It is that I place it.’

Dolores reached for her crutch. She lifted the flap of the counter and helped in the search. She called loudly to her mother and when her mother arrived, wiping her hands on her apron, she explained that a handbag had been lost, that it might have been left in the shop.

‘I would have noticed,’ Mrs Mullally said quickly.

‘Ah, oui, oui,’ the man agreed.

‘She was carrying a handbag,’ Mrs Mullally said, a defensive note entering her voice. ‘She definitely walked out of the shop with it. A square handbag, under her arm.’

Dolores tried to remember: had the woman had a handbag when they walked together to the car? Had she had it when they’d embraced? And then she did remember: the square dark shadow on the red roof, too vivid to be just a shadow.

‘She put it on top of the car,’ she said, and as she spoke she seemed to see what at the time had passed unnoticed: the woman’s arm raised in the moment just before the embrace, the handbag in her hand and then on the red metal that glittered in the sunlight. Dolores had been too intent on the embrace to have observed this properly, but she was certain it had happened.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, nodding to lend emphasis to her claim. ‘You put it on the roof of your car.’

‘You observe?’ the Frenchman asked.

‘I saw from a window upstairs.’

‘Ah, merci, mademoiselle. Merci beaucoup.’ It was the woman who spoke. The man said they were grateful, thanking Dolores in English.

She watched, leaning against the doorway of the shop. Her mother accompanied the French couple across the road and then disappeared from sight because of the incline down to the mill. Dolores had sensed her mother’s anxiety, the feeling there’d been in her mother’s mind that an accusation was being made. She thought of going upstairs to her bedroom to watch again from the window, and was about to do so when the smell of burning bacon wafted from the kitchen. Hurriedly, she shuffled through the shop and the store-room.

‘They never found it,’ her mother said, returning ten minutes later. ‘They moved the car to see if it had fallen off. They’d been up and down to the stones four times, they said, looking on the path in case she dropped it.’

‘She put it on the car, she couldn’t have dropped it.’

‘Ah, sure, you can’t watch them.’

‘So it’s gone, is it?’

‘They wrote down an address for me in case it would surface some day. She was down in the mouth, that woman.’

Dolores saw the beautiful, slanted face pulled further to one side, the mouth dragged into a corner of itself, tears threatening. The man would put his arm around the smartly clad shoulders, so very slight beneath the leather. He would comfort his lover and promise her another handbag because people like that, who could hire a motor-car, who could come all the way from France to see some stones in a field, wouldn’t have to bother about the expense.

‘Did you tell them to go to the gardai at Rossaphin?’

‘I didn’t mention the gardai to them.’ Mrs Mullally spoke firmly again, and Dolores knew that she hadn’t suggested the police because she didn’t want it to become known that a handbag had disappeared in this manner at the crossroads. ‘Sure, won’t they find the thing in their motor-car somewhere?’

Dolores nodded, silently agreeing that somehow or other this would be the outcome of the matter. When they had returned from the stones the woman must have taken the handbag from the roof without noticing what she was doing, and she must have bundled it into the car without noticing either. Dolores cut a piece of fried bread and dipped it into the little mound of salt on the side of her plate. She began to think about One-Draw Hagan and his enemy, Red Cassidy.

‘Only Henry Garvey was about,’ her mother continued, ‘driving in the old man’s heifers. He’d have been too far away to catch what was going on.’

Dolores nodded again. Perhaps when the lovers returned to the car there had been another embrace, which had driven everything from their minds – like in Travellin’ Saddles when Big Daunty found his Indian love and both of them went into a swoon, lost to the world. Colette Nervi, it said on the piece of paper the French lovers had given her mother. 10 rue St Just, Toulouse, France. They had insisted on giving her money also, so that she could send them a letter in case the handbag ever turned up.

Henry Garvey was a large, slow man of forty, known in the neighbourhood for his laziness and his easy-going nature. His uncle, Odd Garvey, had outlived both of Henry’s parents, and the two lived together in the farm-house which the whole Garvey family had once occupied. Odd Garvey, small and wizened in his old age, had never married – due to meanness, so it was locally said. He was reputed to be affected in the head, though this impression which he gave was perhaps no more than another reflection of a miserly nature. The farmhouse he occupied with his nephew was in need of considerable repair, its roof leaky, its walls wet with rising damp. Henry spent as little time as he could there, preferring to ride his mother’s ancient bicycle into Rossaphin every morning and to remain there until it was time to fetch the heifers in. He laid bets, and drank in a number of selected public houses while waiting for the afternoon’s racing to begin. He bet on greyhounds as well as horses, and had been known in one bar or another to offer odds on a variety of propositions, including the year of his uncle’s decease. A permanent smile split his sunburned face, the easy, lazy smile of a man who was never in a hurry. Sometimes in the evenings he rode back into Rossaphin again, to drink more stout and to talk about racehorses. His uncle owned the farmhouse and the heifers, Henry the fields and the brood of turkeys he fattened every year for Christmas. He received payment from his uncle for the grazing of the heifers and from two other farmers for the grass he let them have on an annual basis: with his turkey profits, this made him a living of a kind. His four sisters had long ago left the neighbourhood, only one of them remaining in Ireland.

‘There was foreign people over at the stones,’ he reported to his uncle on the evening the French couple had come. ‘Jabbering away.’

‘Did you approach them? Did you charge them a price for going over our fields?’

Henry vaguely wagged his head, and knowing that such a charge had not been made the old man continued to grumble, his empty gums squashing up baked beans before he swallowed them. Because he had difficulty with crusts, he tore pieces of bread from the centre of a slice and dipped the soft white lumps into the sauce that went with the beans. Mumbling through this food, he said that the number of people who nowadays crossed their land was a disgrace. It was a favourite mealtime topic: every day, whether there had been visitors to the standing stones or not, the old man urged Henry to protest to the police or the Board of Works, or somebody at the courthouse in Rossaphin. He was convinced that a substantial sum of money was owing to the Garvey family because no toll had ever been charged on the right of way to Drumgawnie Rath. Now, at eighty-six, he was too old to do anything about it. He hadn’t been to Mass for ten years, nor spoken to anyone except, his nephew for six. No one ever came to the farmhouse.

In Henry’s view the old man could have kept himself normal by picking up the groceries and the newspaper every day in Mrs Mullally’s shop. In a normal manner he could have whiled away his time with Mrs Mullally or the daughter instead of skulking behind the trees, looking out for visitors. But he wouldn’t enter the shop because he couldn’t bear to hand over money to anyone, so Henry had to see to everything like that. Not that he particularly minded. He had a basket which he hung from the handlebars of his bicycle and he actually enjoyed loitering in shops, Mrs Mullally’s or anyone else’s. He would light a cigarette and sometimes in Mullally’s might have a bottle of lemonade. He would lean his back against the counter and listen to the Mullally girl going on about the Wild West stories she read. She was a decent enough looking creature in her way, the only pity was the leg she was afflicted with.

‘Dressed up to the nines they were,’ Henry continued in the kitchen. ‘A useless type of person, I’d say.’

His uncle emitted a sucking noise. The footsteps made by the visitors wore the grass down. Another thing was, the Board of Works should be informed that cars were being left without charge on the piece of verge by the mill.

‘I don’t think it’s a matter for the Board of Works.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be? Didn’t the Board man come to see me in 1949? Wasn’t it the Board drew attention to the stones before any stranger knew they were there?’

‘If it’s anyone’s concern I’d say it was the County Council’s.’

‘Go into the courthouse in that case. Go into the head clerk and say we’re deprived of grass for the cattle due to footsteps wearing it down.’

Henry promised that he would do as he was asked. He always promised when the subject came up. He ate his beans and bread and drank several cups of tea. He didn’t say that there were other ways of charging for the use of the path through the fields. He didn’t explain that you could get what was owing to you if you were sharp with your eyes and used the intelligence you were born with.

Four years after the Frenchwoman’s mishap with her handbag Dolores became aware – in the late summer of 1972 – of Henry Garvey’s interest in her. During that July and August his manner changed. He no longer stood with his back to her, for instance, smiling through the open door at the roadway outside while she told him the plot of another Wild West novel. Instead he faced her, leaning an elbow on the counter. He even lifted his eyes to her face and scrutinized it. Now arid again his glance moved over her long dark hair and over her shoulders. Once she’d noticed him looking at her hands.

It had never occurred to Dolores, twenty-six now, that romance would come her way. One cold January day, ages ago, the Crowleys had driven her and her mother to the cinema in Ballyreddy, sixteen miles beyond Rossaphin, for the Sunday matinée. Father Deane had had a hand in the arrangement – had no doubt said that it would be an act of charity – and the Crowleys, seeking through his good offices a chance of heavenly life, had acceded easily to his wish. From Here to Eternity the film had been, and Dolores had never forgotten any of it, far richer in romance than anything in her father’s Wild West Library. But that was as close as she had so far come to the world of love and passion, and what neither the intercession of Father Deane nor the kindness of the Crowleys could achieve for her was a place among the Friday-night dancers in Rossaphin. Dolores had never been inside the Rossaphin dance-hall and she guessed she never would. There would be no point: she knew that and accepted it. Yet sometimes she dreamed that miraculously she danced beneath fairyland lights to the music she’d heard on the radio, and was sad for a moment after she woke up.

‘I had him backed both ways,’ Henry Garvey said towards the end of that August. ‘I was fortunate all right.’

He had been talking about the horse, Wonder Boy, a day or two before. It was running on some English race-course, destined to make him a fortune. He had told her about a greyhound called Trumpeter, which had won at Limerick, and another greyhound called Smasheroo. His uncle had died, nearly two years ago now, and she and her mother had gone to the funeral in Rossaphin, driven by the Crowleys. Afterwards they’d all had a cup of tea in Love’s Café and Mrs Mullally had taken the opportunity to purchase some oilcloth in Buckley’s.

Even though old Garvey had been poor company, it was apparent enough that Henry had become lonely in the farmhouse. He came more often to the shop and lingered there longer than he used to. And then, one morning when Dolores was in the middle of telling him the plot of Kid Kelly, she found him scrutinizing her even more closely than before. Her mother was present on that occasion and Dolores knew she had observed, and had understood, Henry Garvey’s interest. After he’d gone her mother was beside herself with delight, although she didn’t say a word. Dolores heard her humming in the kitchen, and her manner was so sprightly when Jimmy Reilly delivered the bacon in the afternoon that he asked her if she’d won the sweep.

‘D’you know what it is,’ Henry Garvey said at the beginning of September, ‘I’m uncertain what to do with myself.’

As he spoke, he pushed his cigarette packet across the counter at her. She was sitting on the black-topped stool which Father Deane had given her as a present, its legs cut down to just the right height. She could sit on it and lean on the counter, just like Henry Garvey was leaning now, on a level with him.

‘The old farmhouse above is shook,’ he said.

Her mother was not there. Her mother had taken to slipping out to the potato slope whenever Henry Garvey appeared, even if it was raining. Dolores knew that the news of the courtship had been passed on to the Crowleys and to the van men who called at the shop, to Father Deane and to all the people who came to the crossroads for their groceries. When she rested in the afternoons she could hear the excited tone of her mother’s voice in the shop below. She was never able to make out the words but she knew that the latest of Henry Garvey’s attentions was being retailed and exaggerated.

‘I’m wondering,’ he said at the beginning of September, ‘would I sell the old fellow’s heifers?’

She made a slight gesture with the hand that held the cigarette, a shrug of the fingers intended to imply that Henry Garvey was his own master, that he alone had the privilege of reaching a decision about his late uncle’s heifers.

‘I have the acres all right, but sure what use is the old house to me? Isn’t it falling down on account of the old fellow wouldn’t permit a bit of cement to be applied to it?’

Dolores, who had never seen the farmhouse, made the same gesture again.

‘And sure you could hardly call them heifers any more. Wouldn’t I be better without the trouble of those lassies?’

He turned his ample smile towards her, the red-brick flesh of his face screwed up into small bulges. She had only once seen him wearing a tie and that was at the funeral of his uncle. On Sundays he went to a later Mass than her mother and herself: she supposed he put the tie on for that also.

‘Another factor is,’ he continued, ‘I need a new bicycle.’

In the shop, and in the rooms above it and behind it, on the slope out at the back, he could take her father’s place. He could occupy the chair in which her father had so abruptly died. He could marry into the shop and the house just as her father had, and he would bring with him the rent for the grazing of his fields. Her father had brought nothing.

‘What I’m wondering is,’ he said, ‘could I learn to drive a car?’

She did not reply. She did not even make the same gesture again. She saw herself stepping out of the car he spoke of, the point of the crutch secure on the pavement. She saw herself limping beside him towards the cinema at Ballyreddy, up the steps and down the long passage with framed photographs of film stars on the walls. She saw herself in Rossaphin, not having to wait outside the Provincial Bank for Jimmy Reilly and his van, but going at her leisure in and out of the shops. On a Sunday, Mass would be attended when it was convenient, no need to fit in with the Crowleys. And would there be any harm in going, just once, into the dance-hall and standing there for a while, looking at the dancers and listening to the music?

‘I’m sure you could drive a car,’ she said. ‘If Sheedy can drive that bread van I’d say you could drive a car.’

‘The old bike was a good machine in its day, but the mudguards is overtaken by the rust.’

‘A car would be handy for you, Henry.’

‘There’s nothing I like better than talking about matters like that to you.’

He paid the compliment without looking at her, gazing as he used to out into the roadway. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, but no other man would ever come into this shop and say he liked talking to her about bicycles and cars. No other man would examine her hair arid her hands – or if he did he’d stop it in a hurry, like the new young conductor on the long-distance bus had when he’d realized she was crippled and misshapen.

Henry Garvey left the shop after he’d paid the compliment, and when her mother came in from the back Dolores told her he was considering buying a car. Her mother would have already said prayers, begging Our Lady to make it all right, begging that a crippled woman should not one day find herself alone at the crossroads. The paralysis had been a shock out of nowhere: the attentions of Henry Garvey were just as unexpected, a surprise that came surely from God.

‘A car?’ her mother said. ‘Ah, wouldn’t that be grand, pet?’

The crossroads was nearer to the town than the farmhouse was, the journey would be shorter, and easier without the stony track that led down to the farm. Often, lounging in the shop, he’d smelt a bit of cooking going on in the kitchen; he remembered Mullally in his day, selling stamps and weighing out potatoes. He liked it when she told him about Kid Kelly and One-Draw Hagan, and she appeared to be interested when he outlined his chances in a race. When an animal didn’t come in she appeared to be sympathetic.

‘That’s fixed so,’ he said to her on the day they arranged the marriage. ‘Sure, it’ll be suitable for the pair of us.’

He gave her a present, a necklace he’d found in the handbag he’d taken years ago as payment for all the strangers who had walked across the fields. There were little blue jewels in it: twenty-two of them, she told him, because she counted them. A week or so later he pushed the handbag itself across the counter at her. He’d found it with the necklace, he said, among his mother’s possessions. Tim Howley was teaching him to drive a car, he said.

Dolores knew when Henry Garvey gave her the necklace that Mrs Garvey had never possessed such a piece of jewellery. Her mother knew also, but did not say anything. It wasn’t until the handbag appeared that both of them guessed Henry Garvey had stolen the Frenchwoman’s property. They still did not say anything. In the drawer where the postal orders and the registration book were kept there remained the scrap of paper on which Colette Nervi had written down her address. It had been there for all the intervening time, together with the small sum of money for postage in case the handbag ever came to light. Mrs Mullally destroyed the scrap of paper after Dolores had received her presents, and looking in the drawer one day Dolores discovered that she had done so.

The wedding was to take place in June. Two girls Dolores had been at the convent with were to be bridesmaids, and one of Henry Garvey’s bar-room companions had agreed to act as best man. Everyone for miles around Drumgawnie was invited, all the shop’s customers, the same people who’d attended Mr Mullally’s funeral nineteen years ago, and Odd Garvey’s funeral. The Crowleys were invited, and some Rossaphin people, Jimmy Reilly and Sheedy the bread man. Some of the other van-drivers lived too far beyond the district but all of them, without exception, brought gifts for Dolores a week or so before the wedding-day.

Father Deane had a crutch painted white and asked Mrs Crowley to cover the arm-support in lace to match the wedding-dress. Dolores thought she’d never seen a crutch look so pretty, and wondered if it was a marriage tradition for crippled brides, but did not ask. Henry Garvey’s farmhouse was up for sale, the cattle had already been sold. Mrs Mullally had arranged to move out of her room, into the one that had always been Dolores’s. ‘The simplest thing,’ she said, not dwelling upon the subject.

‘I don’t know will he ever communicate the knack of it,’ Henry Garvey said, referring to Tim Howley’s efforts to teach him to drive a motor-car. The car had a way of jumping about with him, juddering and stalling before he even got it started. He had heavy feet, Tim Howley explained: a man driving a car needed to be sensitive with the clutch and the accelerator. ‘You’d think it would be easy,’ Henry said to Dolores, and she softly encouraged him, urging him to persevere. There would be nothing nicer, she continued in the same soft voice, than having a car. The white crutch was in her bedroom, in a corner by the dressing-table, waiting for the day in June. She had covered the lace on the arm-support with a piece of brown paper from the shop in case it got dirty.

On the night before the wedding Dolores wondered what else there had been in the handbag. Money would have been bet on a horse or a grey-hound, keys perhaps thrown away; somewhere in the unsold farmhouse there’d be a make-up compact. In a month’s time there was to be an auction of the furniture and the few remaining bits of farm machinery: before that happened she would find the compact and hide it carefully away. She would not keep her money in the black handbag, nor her cigarettes and matches; she would not be seen in the shops with it. She would be careful with the gifts of Henry Garvey in case, after all, the lovers from France had reported the loss to the police. Henry Garvey would not notice that the necklace was never seen at her neck because he was not the kind to notice things; nor was he the kind to realize that you had to be careful. She felt drowsily comforted by knowing what she must do, but when she turned the light out and attempted to sleep a chilliness possessed her: what if Henry Garvey rode over in the morning on his mother’s bicycle to say he’d made a mistake? What if he stood with his back to the counter the way he used to, gazing with his smile out into the roadway? He would not say that the folly of the marriage had at last been borne in upon him. He would not say that he had seen in his mind’s eye the ugliness of his bride’s body, the shrivelled limb distorting everything. He would not say it had suddenly occurred to him that the awkward, dragging movement when she walked without her crutch was more than he could look at for the remainder of his life. ‘I gave you stolen presents,’ he’d say instead. ‘I’m too ashamed to marry you.’ And then he’d mount the bicycle and ride away like one of the cowboys of the Wild West.

In the darkness she lit another cigarette, calming herself. If he’d rather, he could have this room on his own and she could share her mother’s. Being a bachelor for so long, that might be a preference he’d have. She’d hate it, in with her mother, but there was an empty back room, never used, which one day might be fixed up for her. There would be a bed and a wardrobe up at the farm, there might even be a length of linoleum going.

She turned the light on and read. She finished Silent Prairie and began one she hadn’t read for ages, King Cann Strikes Gold! by Chas. D. Wasser. Through a faint dawn the birds eventually began to sing. At half past six she heard her mother moving.

He made a cup of tea in the kitchen. No one would buy the place, the way the roof and the kitchen wall were. The wall would hardly last the winter, the crack had widened suddenly, nearly nine inches it must be now. The old furniture would fetch maybe a hundred pounds.

At the kitchen table he stirred sugar into his tea. He wondered if he’d ever manage the driving. And if he did, he wondered if Mrs Mullally would stand the price of a car. It was a matter he hadn’t mentioned yet, but with all the trouble he was going to over the learning wouldn’t she tumble to it that he had done his share? The three of them were in it together, with the farmhouse the way it was and the girl the way she was. It was only a pity there hadn’t been a ring in the handbag he’d taken as payment for the use of the path across his fields. Still and all, he’d got seven to one on Derby Joan with the money there’d been in the purse, which easily covered the cost of the ring he’d had to buy.

He drank his tea and then moved over to the sink to shave himself. They stocked razor-blades in the shop, which would be useful too.

In front of the altar she leant on the white crutch, wishing she could manage without it but knowing that the effort would be too much. Father Deane’s voice whispered at them, and she could sense the delight in it, the joy that he truly felt. Beside her, Henry Garvey was wearing a tie, as she had known he would. There was a carnation and a few shreds of fern in his buttonhole. He smelt of soap.

She had to kneel, which was always difficult, but in time the ceremony was over and she made her way down the aisle, careful on the tiles, one hand gripping the wooden cross-piece of the crutch, the other holding on to him. Hidden beneath her wedding-dress, the necklace that had been stolen from Colette Nervi was cool on the flesh of her neck, and in those moments on the aisle Dolores recalled the embrace. She saw the lovers as they had been that day, the woman’s leather coat, the man knocking out his pipe. Sunlight glimmered on the red, polished car, and enriched the green of the nettles and the docks. The woman’s fingers were splayed out on her lover’s dark head; the two faces were pressed into each other like the faces of the man and the woman in From Here to Eternity.

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.’

Cocktails at Doney’s

‘You’ve forgotten me,’ were the first words Mrs Faraday spoke to him in the Albergo San Lorenzo. She was a tall, black-haired woman, wearing a rust-red suede coat cut in an Italian style. She smiled. She had white, even teeth, and the shade of her lipstick appeared subtly to match the colour of her coat. Her accent was American, her voice soft, with a trace of huskiness. She was thirty-five, perhaps thirty-seven, certainly not older. ‘We met a long time ago,’ she said, smiling a little more. ‘I don’t know why I never forget a face.’

She was married to a man who managed a business in some town in America he’d never heard of. She was a beautiful woman, but he could remember neither her nor her husband. Her name meant nothing to him and when she prompted him with the information about her husband’s business he could not remember any better. Her eyes were brown, domiinating her classic features.

‘Of course,’ he lied politely.

She laughed, clearly guessing it was a lie. ‘Well, anyway,’ she said, ‘hullo to you.’

It was after dinner, almost ten o’clock. They had a drink in the bar since it seemed the natural thing to do. She had to do with fashion; she was in Florence for the Pitti Donna; she always came in February.

‘It’s nice to see you again. The people at these trade shows can be tacky.’

‘Don’t you go to the museums as well? The churches?’

‘Of course.’

When he asked if her husband accompanied her on her excursions to Florence she explained that the museums, the churches, and the Pitti Donna would tire her husband immensely. He was not a man for Europe, preferring local race-tracks.

‘And your wife? Is she here with you?’

‘I’m actually not married.’

He wished he had not met Mrs Faraday. He didn’t care for being approached in this manner, and her condemnation of the people at the trade exhibitions she spoke of seemed out of place since they were, after all, the people of her business world. And that she was married to a man who preferred race-tracks to culture was hardly of interest to a stranger. Before their conversation ended he was certain they had not ever met before.

‘I have to say good-night,’ he said, rising when she finished her drink. ‘I tend to get up early.’

‘Why, so do I!’

‘Good-night, Mrs Faraday.’

In his bedroom he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking about nothing in particular. Then he undressed and brushed his teeth. He examined his face in the slightly tarnished looking-glass above the wash-basin. He was fifty-seven, but according to this reflection older. His face would seem younger if he put on a bit of weight; chubbiness could be made to cover a multitude of sins. But he didn’t want that; he liked being thought of as beyond things.

He turned the looking-glass light out and got into bed. He read Our Mutual Friend and then lay for a moment in the darkness. He thought of Daphne and of Lucy – dark-haired, tiny Lucy who had said at first it didn’t matter, Daphne with her trusting eyes. He had blamed Daphne, not himself, and then had taken that back and asked to be forgiven; they were both of them to blame for the awful mistake of a marriage that should never have taken place, although later he had said that neither of them was, for how could they have guessed they were not suited in that way? It was with Lucy he had begun to know the truth; poor Lucy had suffered more.

He slept, and dreamed he was in Padua with a friend of another time, walking in the Botanical Gardens and explaining to his friend that the tourist guides he composed were short-lived in their usefulness because each reflected a city ephemerally caught. ‘You’re ashamed of your tourist guides,’ his friend of that time interrupted, Jeremy it was. ‘Why are the impotent so full of shame, my dear? Why is it?’ Then Rosie was in the dream and Jeremy was laughing, playfully, saying he’d been most amusingly led up the garden path. ‘He led me up it too, my God,’ Rosie cried out furiously. ‘All he could do was weep.’

Linger over the Giambologna birds in the Bargello, and the marble reliefs of Mino da Fiesole. But that’s enough for one day; you must return tomorrow.

He liked to lay down the law. He liked to take chances with the facts, and wait for letters of contradiction. At the height of the season there are twelve times as many strangers as natives in this dusty, littered city. Cascades of graffiti welcome them – the male sexual organ stylized to a Florentine simplicity, belligerent swastikas hammers and sickles in the streets of gentle Fra Angelico…

At lunchtime on the day after he had met her Mrs Faraday was in Doney’s with some other Americans. Seeing her in that smart setting, he was surprised that she stayed in the Albergo San Lorenzo rather than the Savoy or the Excelsior. The San Lorenzo’s grandeur all belonged to the past: the old hotel was threadbare now, its curtains creased, its telephones unresponsive. Not many Americans liked it.

‘Hi!’ she called across the restaurant, and smiled and waved a menu.

He nodded at her, not wishing to seem stand-offish. The people she was with were talking about the merchandise they had been inspecting at the Pitti Donna. Wisps of their conversation drifted from their table, references to profit margins and catching the imagination.

He ordered tagliatelle and the chef’s salad, and then looked through the Nazione. The body of the missing schoolgirl, Gabriella, had been found in a park in Florence. Youths who’d been terrorizing the neighbourhood of Santa Croce had been identified and arrested. Two German girls, hitchhiking in the south, had been made drunk and raped in a village shed. The Nazione suggested that Gabriella – a quiet girl – had by chance been a witness to drug-trafficking in the park.

‘I envy you your job,’ Mrs Faraday said, pausing at his table as he was finishing his tagliatelle. Her companions had gone on ahead of her. She smiled, as at an old friend, and then sat down. ‘I guess I want to lose those two.’

He offered her a glass of wine. She shook her head. ‘I’d love another cappuccino.’

The coffee was ordered. He folded the newspaper and placed it on the empty chair beside him. Mrs Faraday, as though she intended to stay a while, had hung her red suede coat over the back of the chair.

‘I envy you your job,’ she said again. ‘I’d love to travel all over.’

She was wearing pearls at her throat, above a black dress. Rings clustered her fingers, earrings made a jangling sound. Her nails were shaped and painted, her face as meticulously made up as it had been the night before.

‘Did you mind,’ she asked when the waiter had brought their coffee, ‘my wondering if you were married?’

He said he hadn’t minded.

‘Marriage is no great shakes.’

She lit a cigarette. She had only ever been married to the man she was married to now. She had had one child, a daughter who had died after a week. She had not been able to have other children.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

She looked at him closely, cigarette smoke curling between them. The tip of her tongue picked a shred of tobacco from the corner of her mouth. She said again that marriage was no great shakes. She added, as if to lend greater weight to this:

‘I lay awake last night thinking I’d like this city to devour me.’

He did not comment, not knowing what she meant. But quite without wishing to he couldn’t help thinking of this beautiful woman lying awake in her bedroom in the Albergo San Lorenzo. He imagined her staring into the darkness, the glow of her cigarette, the sound of her inhaling. She was looking for an affair, he supposed, and hoped she realized he wasn’t the man for that.

‘I wouldn’t mind living the balance of my life here. I like it better every year.’

‘Yes, it’s a remarkable city.’

‘There’s a place called the Palazzo Ricasoli where you can hire apartments. I’d settle there.’

‘I see.’

‘I could tell you a secret about the Palazzo Ricasoli.’

‘Mrs Faraday –’

‘I spent a naughty week there once.’

He drank some coffee in order to avoid speaking. He sighed without making a sound.

‘With a guy I met at the Pitti Donna. A countryman of yours. He came from somewhere called Horsham.’

‘I’ve never been to Horsham.’

‘Oh, my God, I’m embarrassing you!’

‘No, not at all.’

‘Gosh, I’m sorry! I really am! Please say it’s all right.’

‘I assure you, Mrs Faraday, I’m not easily shocked.’

‘I’m an awful shady lady embarrassing a nice Englishman! Please say you forgive me.’

‘There is absolutely nothing to forgive.’

‘It was a flop, if you want to know.’ She paused. ‘Say, what do you plan to write in your guidebook about Florence?’

‘Banalities mostly.’

‘Oh, come on!’

He shrugged.

‘I’ll tell you a nicer kind of secret. You have the cleverest face I’ve seen in years!’

Still he did not respond. She stubbed her cigarette out and immediately lit another. She took a map out of her handbag and unfolded it. She said:

‘Can you show me where Santo Spirito is?’

He pointed out the church and directed her to it, warning her against the motorists’ signs which pursued a roundabout one-way route.

‘You’re very kind.’ She smiled at him, lavishly exposing her dazzling, even teeth as if offering a reward for his help. ‘You’re a kind person,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’

He walked around the perimeter of the vast Cascine Park, past the fun-fair and the zoo and the race-track. It was pleasant in the February sunshine, the first green of spring colouring the twiggy hedges, birches delicate by the river. Lovers sprawled on the seats or in motor-cars, children carried balloons. Stalls sold meat and nuts, and Coca-Cola and 7-Up. Runners in training-suits jogged along the bicycle track. Ho fame a fat young man had scrawled on a piece of cardboard propped up in front of him, and slept while he waited for charity.

Rosie, when she’d been his friend, had said he wrote about Italian cities so that he could always be a stranger. Well, it was true, he thought in the Cascine Park, and in order to rid himself of a contemplation of his failed relationship with Rosie he allowed the beauty of Mrs Faraday again to invade his mind. Her beauty would have delighted him if her lipstick-stained cigarettes and her silly, repetitious chattering didn’t endlessly disfigure it. Her husband was a good man, she had explained, but a good man was not always what a woman wanted. And it had come to seem all of a piece that her daughter had lived for only a week, and all of a piece also that no other children had been born, since her marriage was not worthy of children. It was the Annunciations in Santo Spirito she wanted to see, she had explained, because she loved Annunciations.

‘Would it be wrong of me to invite you to dinner?’ She rose from a sofa in the hall of the Albergo San Lorenzo as soon as she saw him, making no effort to disguise the fact that she’d been waiting for him.’ ‘I’d really appreciate it if you’d accept.’

He wanted to reply that he would prefer to be left alone. He wanted to state firmly, once and for all, that he had never met her in the past, that she had no claims on him.

‘You choose somewhere,’ she commanded, with the arrogance of the beautiful.

In the restaurant she ate pasta without ceasing to talk, explaining to him that her boutique had been bought for her by her husband to keep her occupied and happy. It hadn’t worked, she said, implying that although her fashion shop had kept her busy it hadn’t brought her contentment. Her face, drained of all expression, was lovelier than he had so far seen it, so sad and fragile that it seemed not to belong to the voice that rattled on.

He looked away. The restaurant was decorated with modern paintings and was not completely full. A squat, elderly man sat on his own, conversing occasionally with waiters. A German couple spoke in whispers. Two men and a woman, talking rapidly in Italian, deplored the death of the school-girl, Gabriella.

‘It must have been extraordinary for the Virgin Mary,’ Mrs Faraday was saying. ‘One moment she’s reading a book and the next there’s a figure with wings swooping in on her.’ That only made sense, she suggested, when you thought of it as the Virgin’s dream. The angel was not really there, the Virgin herself was not really reading in such plush surroundings. ‘Later I guess she dreamed another angel came,’ Mrs Faraday continued, ‘to warn her of her death.’

He didn’t listen. The waiter brought them grilled salmon and salad, Mrs Faraday lit a cigarette. She said:

‘The guy I shacked up with in the Palazzo Ricasoli was no better than a gigolo. I guess I don’t know why I did that.’

He did not reply. She stubbed her cigarette out, appearing at last to notice that food had been placed in front of her. She asked him about the painters of the Florentine Renaissance, and the city’s aristocrats and patrons. She asked him why Savonarola had been burnt and he said Savonarola had made people feel afraid. She was silent for a moment, then leaned forward and put a hand on his arm.

‘Tell me more about yourself. Please.’

Her voice, eagerly insistent, irritated him more than before. He told her superficial things, about the other Italian cities for which he’d written guidebooks, about the hill towns of Tuscany, and the Cinque Terre. Because of his reticence she said when he ceased to speak:

‘I don’t entirely make you out.’ She added that he was nicer to talk to than anyone she could think of. She might be drunk; it was impossible to say.

‘My husband’s never heard of the Medicis nor any stuff like this. He’s never even heard of Masaccio, you appreciate that?’

‘Yes, you’ve made it clear the kind of man your husband is.’

‘I’ve ruined it, haven’t I, telling you about the Palazzo Ricasoli?’

‘Ruined what, Mrs Faraday?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’

They sat for some time longer, finishing the wine and having coffee. Once she reached across the table and put her hand on one of his. She repeated what she had said before, that he was kind.

‘It’s late,’ he said.

‘I know, honey, I know. And you get up early.’

He paid the bill, although she protested that it was she who had invited him. She would insist on their having dinner together again so that she might have her turn. She took his arm on the street.

‘Will you come with me to Maiano one day?’

‘Maiano?’

‘It isn’t far. They say it’s lovely to walk at Maiano.’

‘I’m really rather occupied, you know.’

‘Oh, God, I’m bothering you! I’m being a nuisance! Forget Maiano. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m just trying to say, Mrs Faraday, that I don’t think I can be much use to you.’

He was aware, to his embarrassment, that she was holding his hand. Her arm was entwined with his and the palms of their hands had somehow come together. Her fingers, playing with his now, kept time with her flattery.

‘You’ve got the politest voice I ever heard! Say you’ll meet me just once again? Just once? Cocktails tomorrow? Please.’

‘Look, Mrs Faraday –’

‘Say Doney’s at six. I’ll promise to say nothing if you like. We’ll listen to the music.’

Her palm was cool. A finger made a circular motion on one of his. Rosie had said he limped through life. In the end Jeremy had been sorry for him. Both of them were right; others had said worse. He was a crippled object of pity.

‘Well, all right.’

She thanked him in the Albergo San Lorenzo for listening to her, and for the dinner and the wine. ‘Every year I hope to meet someone nice in Florence,’ she said on the landing outside her bedroom, seeming to mean it. ‘This is the first time it has happened.’

She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then closed her door. In his looking-glass he examined the faint smear of lipstick and didn’t wipe it off. He woke in the night and lay there thinking about her, wondering if her lipstick was still on his cheek.

Waiting in Doney’s, he ordered a glass of chilled Orvieto wine. Someone on a tape, not Judy Garland, sang ‘Over the Rainbow’; later there was lightly played Strauss and some rhythms of the thirties. By seven o’clock Mrs Farady had not arrived. He left at a quarter to eight.

*

The next day he wandered through the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, thinking again about the beauty of Mrs Faraday. He had received no message from her, no note to explain or apologize for her absence in Doney’s. Had she simply forgotten? Or had someone better materialized? Some younger man she again hadn’t been able to resist, some guy who didn’t know any more about Masaccio than her good husband did? She was a woman who was always falling in love, which was what she called it, confusing love with sensuality. Was she, he wondered, what people referred to as a nymphomaniac? Was that what made her unhappy?

He imagined her with some man she’d picked up. He imagined her, satisfied because of the man’s attentions, tramping the halls of a gift market, noting which shade of green was to be the new season’s excitement. She would be different after her love-making, preoccupied with her business, no time for silliness and Annunciations. Yet it still was odd that she hadn’t left a message for him. She had not for a moment seemed as rude as that, or incapable of making up an excuse.

He left the cloisters and walked slowly across the piazza of Santa Maria Novella. In spite of what she’d said and the compliments she’d paid, had she guessed that he hadn’t listened properly to her, that he’d been fascinated by her appearance but not by her? Or had she simply guessed the truth about him?

That evening she was not in the bar of the hotel. He looked in at Doney’s, thinking he might have misunderstood about the day. He waited for a while, and then ate alone in the restaurant with the modern paintings.

‘We pack the clothes, signore. Is the carabinieri which can promote the inquiries for la signora. Mi displace, signore.’

He nodded at the heavily moustached receptionist and made his way to the bar. If she was with some lover she would have surfaced again by now: it was hard to believe that she would so messily leave a hotel bill unpaid, especially since sooner or later she would have to return for her clothes. When she had so dramatically spoken of wishing Florence to devour her she surely hadn’t meant something like this? He went back to the receptionist.

‘Did Mrs Faraday have her passport?’

‘Sì, signore. La signora have the passport.’

He couldn’t sleep that night. Her smile and her brown, languorous eyes invaded the blur he attempted to induce. She crossed and re-crossed her legs. She lifted another glass. Her ringed fingers stubbed another cigarette. Her earrings lightly jangled.

In the morning he asked again at the reception desk. The hotel bill wasn’t important, a different receptionist generously allowed. If someone had to leave Italy in a hurry, because maybe there was sickness, even a deathbed, then a hotel bill might be overlooked for just a little while.

‘La signora will post to us a cheque from the United States. This the carabinieri say.’

‘Yes, I should imagine so.’

He looked up in the telephone directory the flats she had mentioned. The Palazzo Ricasoli was in Via Mantellate. He walked to it, up Borgo San Lorenzo and Via San Gallo. ‘No,’ a porter in a glass kiosk said and directed him to the office. ‘No,’ a pretty girl in the office said, shaking her head. She turned and asked another girl. ‘No,’ this girl repeated.

He walked back through the city, to the American Consulate on the Lungarno Amerigo. He sat in the office of a tall, lean man called Humber, who listened with a detached air and then telephoned the police. After nearly twenty minutes he replaced the receiver. He was dressed entirely in brown – suit, shirt, tie, shoes, handkerchief. He was evenly tanned, another shade of the colour. He drawled when he spoke; he had an old-world manner.

‘They suggest she’s gone somewhere,’ he said. ‘On some kind of jaunt.’ He paused in order to allow a flicker of amusement to develop in his lean features. ‘They think maybe she ran up her hotel bill and skipped it.’

‘She’s a respectable proprietor of a fashion shop.’

‘The carabinieri say the respectable are always surprising them.’

‘Can you try to find out if she went back to the States? According to the hotel people, that was another theory of the carabinieri.’

Mr Humber shrugged. ‘Since you have told your tale I must try, of course, sir. Would six-thirty be an agreeable hour for you to return?’

He sat outside in the Piazza della Repubblica, eating tortellini and listening to the conversations. A deranged man had gone berserk in a school in Rome, taking children as hostages and killing a janitor; the mayor of Rome had intervened and the madman had given himself up. It was a terrible thing to have happened, the Italians were saying, as bad as the murder of Gabriella.

He paid for his tortellini and went away. He climbed up to the Belvedere, filling in time. Once he thought he saw her, but it was someone else in the same kind of red coat.

‘She’s not back home,’ Mr Humber said with his old-world lack of concern. ‘You’ve started something, sir. Faraday’s flying out.’

In a room in a police station he explained that Mrs Faraday had simply been a fellow-guest at the Albergo San Lorenzo. They had had dinner one evening, and Mrs Faraday had not appeared to be dispirited. She knew other people who had come from America, for the same trade exhibitions. He had seen her with them in a restaurant.

‘These people, sir, return already to the United States. They answer the American police at this time.’

He was five hours in the room at the police station and the next day he was summoned there again and asked the same questions. On his way out on this occasion he noticed a man who he thought might be her husband, a big blond-haired man, too worried even to glance at him. He was certain he had never met him, or even seen him before, as he’d been certain he’d never met Mrs Faraday before she’d come up to him in the hotel.

The police did not again seek to question him. His passport, which they had held for fifty-six Hours, was returned to him. By the end of that week the newspaper references to a missing American woman ceased. He did not see Mr Faraday again.

‘The Italian view,’ said Mr Humber almost a month later, ‘is that she went off on a sexual excursion and found it so much to her liking that she stayed where she was.’

‘I thought the Italian view was that she skipped the hotel. Or that someone had fallen ill.’

‘They revised their thinking somewhat. In the light of various matters.’

‘What matters?’

‘From what you said, Mrs Faraday was a gallivanting lady. Our Italian friends find some significance in that.’ Mr Humber silently drummed the surface of his desk. ‘You don’t agree, sir?’

He shook his head. ‘There was more to Mrs Faraday than that,’ he said.

‘Well, of course there was. The carabinieri are educated men, but they don’t go in for subtleties, you know.’

‘She’s not a vulgar woman. From what I said to the police they may imagine she is. Of course she’s in a vulgar business. They may have jumped too easily to conclusions.’

Mr Humber said he did not understand. ‘Vulgar?’ he repeated.

‘Like me, she deals in surface dross.’

‘You’re into fashion yourself, sir?’

‘No, I’m not. I write tourist guides.’

‘Well, that’s most interesting.’

Mr Humber flicked at the surface of his desk with a forefinger. It was clear that he wished his visitor would go. He turned a sheet of paper over.

‘I remind sightseers that pictures like Pietro Perugino’s Agony in the Garden are worth a second glance. I send them to the Boboli Gardens. That kind of thing.’

Mr Humber’s bland face twitched with simulated interest. Tourists were a nuisance to him. They lost their passports, they locked their ignition keys into their hired cars, they were stolen from and made a fuss. The city lived off them, but resented them as well. These thoughts were for a moment openly reflected in Mr Humber’s pale brown eyes and then were gone. Flicking at his desk again, he said:

‘I’m puzzled about one detail in all this. May I ask you, please?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Were you, you know, ah, seeing Mrs Faraday?’

‘Was I having an affair, you mean? No, I wasn’t.’

‘She was a beautiful woman. By all accounts – by yours, I mean – sir, she’d been most friendly.’

‘Yes, she was friendly.’

She was naïve for an American, and she was careless. She wasn’t fearful of strangers and foolishly she let her riches show. Vulnerability was an enticement.

‘I did not mean to pry, sir,’ Mr Humber apologized. ‘It’s simply that Mr Faraday’s detectives arrived a while ago and the more they can be told the better.’

‘They haven’t approached me.’

‘No doubt they conclude you cannot help them. Mr Faraday himself has returned to the States: a ransom note would be more likely sent to him there.’

‘So Mr Faraday doesn’t believe his wife went off on a sexual excursion?’

‘No one can ignore the facts, sir. There is indiscriminate kidnapping in Italy.’

‘Italians would have known her husband was well-to-do?’

‘I guess it’s surprising what can be ferreted out.’ Mr Humber examined the neat tips of his fingers. He rearranged tranquillity in his face. No matter how the facts he spoke of changed there was not going to be panic in the American Consulate. ‘There has been no demand, sir, but we have to bear in mind that kidnap attempts do often nowadays go wrong. In Italy as elsewhere.’

‘Does Mr Faraday think it has gone wrong?’

‘Faraday is naturally confused. And, of course, troubled.’

‘Of course.’ He nodded to emphasize his agreement. Her husband was the kind who would be troubled and confused, even though unhappiness had developed in the marriage. Clearly she’d given up on the marriage; more than anything, it was desperation that made her forthright. Without it, she might have been a different woman – and in that case, of course, there would not have been this passing relationship between them: her tiresomeness had cultivated that. ‘Tell me more about yourself,’ her voice echoed huskily, hungry for friendship. He had told her nothing – nothing of the shattered, destroyed relationships, and the regret and shame; nothing of the pathetic hope in hired rooms, or the anguish turning into bitterness. She had been given beauty, and he a lameness that people laughed at when they knew. Would her tiresomeness have dropped from her at once, like the shedding of a garment she had thought to be attractive, if he’d told her in the restaurant with the modern paintings? Would she, too, have angrily said he’d led her up the garden path?

‘There is our own investigation also,’ Mr Humber said, ‘besides that of Faraday’s detectives. Faraday, I assure you, has spared no expense; the carabinieri file is by no means closed. With such a concentration we’ll find what there is to find, sir.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do your best, Mr Humber.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He rose and Mr Humber rose also, holding out a brown, lean hand. He was glad they had met, Mr Humber said, even in such unhappy circumstances. Diplomacy was like oil in Mr Humber. It eased his movements and his words; his detachment floated in it, perfectly in place.

‘Goodbye, Mr Humber.’

Ignoring the lift, he walked down the stairs of the Consulate. He knew that she was dead. He imagined her lying naked in a wood, her even teeth ugly in a rictus, her white flesh as lifeless as the virgin modesty of the schoolgirl in the park. She hadn’t been like a nymphomaniac, or even a sophisticated woman, when she’d kissed his cheek good-night. Like a schoolgirl herself, she’d still been blind to the icy coldness that answered her naïveté. Inept and academic, words he had written about the city which had claimed her slipped through his mind. In the church of Santa Croce you walk on tombs, searching for Giotto’s Life of St Francis. In Savonarola’s own piazza the grey stone features do not forgive the tumbling hair of pretty police girls or the tourists’ easy ways. Injustice and harsh ambition had made her city what it was, the violence of greed for centuries had been its bloodstream; beneath its tinsel skin there was an iron heart. The Florentines, like true provincials, put work and money first. In the Piazza Signoria the pigeons breakfast off the excrement of the hackney horses: in Florence nothing is wasted.

He left the American Consulate and slowly walked along the quay. The sun was hot, the traffic noisy. He crossed the street and looked down into the green water of the Arno, wondering if the dark shroud of Mrs Faraday’s life had floated away through a night. In the galleries of the Uffizi he would move from Annunciation to Annunciation, Simone Martini’s, Baldovinetti’s, Lorenzo di Credi’s. and all the others. He would catch a glimpse of her red coat in Santa Trinità, but the face would again be someone else’s. She would call out from a gelateria, but the voice would be an echo in his memory.

He turned away from the river and at the same slow pace walked into the heart of the city. He sat outside a café in the Piazza della Repubblica, imagining her thoughts as she had lain in bed on that last night, smoking her cigarettes in the darkness. She had arrived at the happiest moment of love, when nothing was yet destroyed, when anticipation was a richness in itself. She’d thought about their walk in Maiano, how she’d bring the subject up again, how this time he’d say he’d be delighted. She’d thought about their being together in an apartment in the Palazzo Ricasoli, how this time it would be different. Already she had made up her mind: she would not ever return to the town where her husband managed a business. ‘I have never loved anyone like this,’ she whispered in the darkness.

In his hotel bedroom he shaved and had a bath and put on a suit that had just been pressed. In a way that had become a ceremony for him since the evening he had first waited for her there, he went at six o’clock to Doney’s. He watched the Americans drinking cocktails, knowing it was safe to be there because she would not suddenly arrive. He listened to the music she’d said she liked, and mourned her as a lover might.

Her Mother’s Daughter

Her mother considered it ill-bred to eat sweets on the street, and worse to eat fruit or ice-cream. Her mother was tidy, and required tidiness in others. She peeled an apple in a particular way, keeping the peel in one long piece, as though it were important to do so. Her mother rarely smiled.

Her father, now dead, had been a lexicographer: a small, abstracted man who would not have noticed the eating of food on the street, not even slices of meat or peas from their pods. Most of the time he hadn’t noticed Helena either. He died on her eighth birthday.

Her mother had always ruled the household. Tall and greyly dressed, she had achieved her position of command without resort to anger or dictatorial speech; she did not say much, and what she did say she never found necessary to repeat. A look informed the miscreant, indicating a button undone, an unwashed hand. Helena, possessing neither brother nor sister, was the only miscreant.

The house where she and her mother lived was in a south-western suburb of London. Next door on one side there was a fat widow, Mrs Archingford, who dyed her hair a garish shade of red. On the other an elderly couple were for ever bickering in their garden. Helena’s mother did not acknowledge the presence of Mrs Archingford, who arrived at the house next door when Helena was nine; but she had written a note to the elderly man to request him to keep his voice down, a plea that caused him to raise it even more.

Helena played mainly by herself. Beneath the heavy mahogany of the dining-room table she cut the hair of Samson while he slept, then closed her eyes while the table collapsed around her, its great ribbed legs and the polished surface from which all meals were eaten splintering into fragments. The multitude in the temple screamed, their robes wet with blood. Children died, women wept.

‘What are you doing, Helena?’ her mother questioned her. ‘Why are you muttering?’

Helena told a lie, saying she’d been singing, because she felt ashamed: her mother would not easily understand if she mentioned Delilah. She played outside on a narrow concrete path that ran between the rockery and the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden, where no one could see her from the windows. ‘Now, here’s a book,’ her mother said, finding her with snails arranged in a semicircle. Helena washed her hands, re-tied the ribbon in the hair, and sat in the sitting-room to read Teddy’s Button.

Few people visited the house, for Helena’s mother did not go in for friends. But once a year Helena was put in a taxi-cab which drove her to her grandparents on her father’s side, the only grandparents she knew about. They were a grinning couple who made a fuss of her, small like her father had been, always jumping up and down at the tea-table, passing plates of buttered bread to her and telling her that tea tasted nicer with sugar in it, pressing meringues and cake on her. Helena’s mother always put a bowl beside Helena’s bed on the nights there’d been a visit to the grandparents.

Her mother was the first teacher Helena had. In the dining-room they would sit together at the table with reading-books and copy-books and history and geography books. When she began to go to school she found herself far in advance of other children of her age, who because of that regarded her with considerable suspicion. ‘Our little genius,’ Miss Random used to say, meaning it cheerfully but making Helena uncomfortable because she knew she wasn’t clever in the least. ‘I don’t consider that woman can teach at all,’ her mother said after Helena had been at the school for six weeks and hadn’t learnt anything new. So the dining-room lessons began again, in conjunction with the efforts of Miss Random. ‘Pathetic, we have to say’: her mother invested this favourite opinion with an importance and a strength, condemning not just Miss Random but also the milkman who whistled while waiting on the doorstep, and Mrs Archingford’s attempt at stylish hair. Her mother employed a series of charwomen but was maddened by their chatter and ended by doing the housework herself, even though she found anything like that exceedingly irksome. She far preferred to sit in the dark study, continuing the work that had been cut short by death. In the lifetime of Helena’s father her mother had assisted in the study and Helena had imagined her parents endlessly finding words in books and dissecting them on paper. Before the death conversations at mealtimes usually had to do with words. ‘Fluxion?’ she remembered her father saying, and when she shrugged her mother tightened her lips, her glance lingering on the shrug long after its motion had ceased. ‘A most interesting derivation,’ her father had supplied, and then went on to speak about the Newtonian calculus. The words he liked to bring up at mealtimes had rare meanings, sometimes five or six, but these, though worthy of record, had often to be dismissed on what he called the journey to the centre of interest. ‘Fluxion, Helena, is the rate at which a flowing motion increases its magnitude. The Latin fluxionem. Now flux, Helena, is different. The familiar expression, to be in a state of flux, we know of course. But there is interestingly a variation: in mathematical terms, a drawn line is the flux of a point. You understand that, Helena? You place a dot with your pencil in your exercise-book, but you change your mind and continue the dot so that it becomes a line. With flux remember our pleasant word, flow. Remember our good friend, fluere. A flowing out, a flowing in. With fluxion, we have the notion of measuring, of calculation.’ Food became cold while he explained, but he did not notice. All that was her memory of him.