‘Mi dispiace,’ a boy in a white jacket apologizes, having spilt some of a liqueur on a German woman’s arm. The woman laughs and says in English that it doesn’t matter. ’Non importa,’ her husband adds when the boy looks vacant, and the German woman laughs again.
‘Mais oui, I study the law,’ a long-legged girl is saying. ‘And Eloise is a stylist.’
These girls are Belgian: the questions of two Englishmen are answered. The Englishmen are young, both of them heavily built, casually turned out, one of them moustached.
‘Is stylist right? Is that what you say?’
‘Oh, yes.’ And both young men nod. When one suggests a liqueur on the terrace Eloise and her friend ask for cherry brandy. The boy in the white jacket goes to pour it in a cupboard off the hall, where the espresso machine is.
‘And you?’ Eloise enquires as the four pass through the room, through the french windows to the terrace.
‘Nev’s in business. I go down after wrecks.’ The voice that drifts back is slack, accented, confident. English or German or Dutch, these are the people who have made the Pensione Cesarina move with the times, different from the people of Harriet’s childhood.
A bearded man is surreptitiously sketching a couple on one of the sofas. The couple, both reading, are unaware. In the hall the American family is much in evidence, the mother with a baby in her arms pacing up and down, the father quietening two other children, a girl and a boy.
‘Good evening,’ someone interrupts Harriet’s observations, and the man in the linen suit asks if the chair next to hers is taken by anyone else. His tie tonight is brown and green, and Harriet notices that his craggy features are freckled with an old man’s blotches, that his hair is so scanty that whether it’s grey or white doesn’t register. What is subtle in his face is the washed-out blue of his eyes.
‘You travel alone, too,’ he remarks, openly seeking the companionship of the moment when Harriet has indicated that the chair beside her is not taken.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I can always pick out the English.’
He offers the theory that this is perhaps something the traveller acquires with age and with the experience of many journeys. “You’ll probably see,’ he adds.
The companion of the bearded man who is sketching the couple on the sofa leans forward and smiles over what she sees. In the hall the American father has persuaded his older children to go to bed. The mother still soothes her baby, still pacing up and down. The small man who so agitatedly glanced about the dining-room passes rapidly through the hall, carrying two cups of coffee.
‘They certainly feed you,’ Harriet’s companion remarks, ‘these days at the Cesarina.’
‘Yes.’
‘Quite scanty, the food was once.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘I mean, a longish time ago.’
‘The first summer I came here I was ten.’
He calculates, glancing at her face to guess her age. Before his own first time, he says, which was the spring of 1987. He has been coming since, he says, and asks if she has.
‘My parents separated.’
‘I’m sorry’
‘They’d been coming here all their married lives. They were fond of this place.’
‘Some people fall for it. Others not at all.’
‘My brother found it boring.’
‘A child might easily.’
‘I never did.’
‘Interesting, those two chaps picking up the girls. I wonder if they’ll ever cope with coach tours at the Cesarina.’
He talks. Harriet doesn’t listen. This love affair had once, like the other affairs before it, felt like the exorcism of the disappointment that so drearily coloured her life when her parents went their separate ways. There were no quarrels when her parents separated, no bitterness, no drama. They told their children gently, neither blamed the other. Both — for years apparently — had been involved with other people. Both said the separation was a happier outcome than staying together for the sake of the family. They used those words, and Harriet has never forgotten them. Her brother shrugged the disappointment off, but for Harriet it did not begin to go away until the first of her love affairs. And always, when a love affair ended, there had been no exorcism after all.
‘I’m off tomorrow,’ the old man says.
She nods. In the hall the baby in the American mother’s arms is sleeping at last. The mother smiles at someone Harriet can’t see and then moves towards the wide stone staircase. The couple on the sofa, still unaware that they’ve been sketched, stand up and go away. The agitated little man bustles through the hall again.
‘Sorry to go,’ Harriet’s companion finishes something he has been saying, then tells her about his journey: by train because he doesn’t care for flying. Lunch in Milan, dinner in Zurich, on neither occasion leaving the railway station. The eleven-o’clock sleeper from Zurich.
‘We used to drive out when I came with my parents.’
‘I haven’t ever done that. And of course won’t ever now.’
‘I liked it.’
At the time it didn’t seem unreal or artificial. Their smiling faces didn’t, nor the pleasure they seemed to take in poky French hotels where only the food was good, nor their chattering to one another in the front of the car, their badinage and arguments. Yet retrospect insisted that reality was elsewhere; that reality was surreptitious lunches with two other people, and afternoon rooms, and guile; that reality was a web of lies until one of them found out, it didn’t matter which; that reality was when there had to be something better than what the family offered.
‘So this time you have come alone?’
He may have said it twice, she isn’t sure. Something about his expression suggests he has.
‘Yes.’
He speaks of solitude. It offers a quality that is hard to define; much more than the cliché of getting to know yourself. He himself has been on his own for many years and has discovered consolation in that very circumstance, which is an irony of a kind, he supposes.
‘I was to go somewhere else.’ She doesn’t know why she makes this revelation. Politeness, perhaps. On other evenings, after dinner, she has seen this man in conversation with whomever he has chosen to sit beside. He is polite himself. He sounds more interested than inquisitive.
‘You changed your mind?’
‘A friendship fell apart.’
‘Ah.’
‘I should be on an island in the sun.’
‘And where is that, if I may ask?’
‘Skyros it’s called. Renowned for its therapies.’
‘Therapies?’
‘They’re a fashion.’
‘For the ill, is this? If I may say so, you don’t look ill.’
‘No, I’m not ill.’ Unable to keep the men she loves in love with her. But of course not ill.
‘In fact, you look supremely healthy’. He smiles. His teeth are still his own. ‘If I may say so.’
‘I’m not so sure that I like islands in the sun. But even so I wanted to go there.’