‘I’m okay, Signor Parson,’ she says, not trying very hard to hide the fact that she is tired and fed up. She also has problems with her joints in this weather. They have talked about it.
‘Where you like me to start?’ she asks.
‘The kitchen?’ he suggests. ‘Or upstairs? I don’t mind.’
He is trying to hold onto the feeling he had, a moment ago, of everything as the embodiment of something endless and eternal, of the eternal passing of time. For a moment he had felt it. Felt it.
‘Okay,’ Claudia says. ‘I start upstairs, okay?’
And that through its very impermanence.
Only something as paradoxical as that, he thinks, has any hope of…Of what?
He says, ‘Fine. Thank you, Claudia.’
He is still standing at the window.
Of helping.
For a moment he had felt it, and it had helped.
—
Cordelia arrives at four o’clock, just as it is getting dark. She is forty-three now. It seems incredible. ‘Hello, Dad,’ she says, when she has dismissed the taxi. He is waiting in the doorway, waiting to help her with her suitcase, which she does not let him do. In the sitting room they drink wine. He wishes now that he’d saved the fine Barbaresco to share with her. He tells her about the accident, what he can remember, that he was at Pomposa abbey. He thanks her, again, for coming to stay.
When he thanks her she just smiles, and stands up and looks at the books on the shelves. She is tall like her mother. ‘I’m reading Clark’s Sleepwalkers,’ he tells her, from the wing chair.
‘Oh, yeah? Interesting?’
‘Very,’ he says.
‘Tell me about it.’
He tries to explain, what he understands of it — how Europe stumbled into this near-death experience — and then says, when it’s obvious he isn’t making much sense, ‘I haven’t finished it, of course. I’m less than halfway through.’
‘M-hm.’
With donnish interest, he asks, ‘What are you reading?’
‘Bring Up the Bodies,’ she says. ‘Finally.’
‘She’s good on the politics,’ he tells her, like someone who would know.
‘I’m enjoying it,’ she says.
Then she starts to talk about something else: ‘How was it with Mum?’
The question is just perceptibly loaded.
‘Fine,’ he says vaguely. And then, with more emphasis, ‘It was very sweet of her to come. She was supposed to be in New York or something.’
‘I know.’
Somehow too solemnly, he says, ‘And thank you, Cordelia, as well. I know how much you’ve got on…’
‘That’s about the fourth time you’ve thanked me,’ she says. She is smiling. ‘You can stop now. I feel fully thanked.’
‘Okay,’ he laughs, as always hugely enjoying her manner.
He is somewhat in awe of her.
‘So it was fine with Mum?’ she asks, pressing on with that.
Joanna must have spoken to her, he thinks, phoned her from the airport and told her something.
‘It was fine,’ he says. And then again, trying not to sound so threatened, ‘It was fine.’
There is a short silence.
To end it, he asks after Simon. Says he read the poem she sent.
‘And?’ she wants to know. ‘What did you think?’
‘I was impressed,’ he says, and Cordelia looks pleased. That was his aim — to please her. He says, ‘He and his friend were out here in the spring, of course.’
‘Yes,’ Cordelia says, ‘I know.’
‘What was his friend’s name again?’
‘Ferdinand.’
‘That’s it. A very entertaining young man.’
‘Yes.’ The proposition seems to make her uneasy, slightly. ‘I suppose.’
‘I liked him.’ He is sort of staring off into the middle distance when he says that. ‘We had some very nice talks,’ he says, smiling at her.
‘You and Ferdinand?’
‘And Simon, of course.’
He asks, after a few moments, ‘Is, er, Ferdinand up at Oxford too?’ There is something strange and deliberate, she thinks, about the way he says the name. And, actually, about the way he keeps talking about Ferdinand.
‘Yes, he is,’ she says.
‘Same college? As Simon.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Simon’s at St John’s, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well,’ he says, a little wistfully. ‘It was fun to have them here for a few days. What do you want to do for dinner?’ he asks.
‘I thought we might go out.’
‘Now that’s an idea. Where?’
‘That place in Argenta?’
He knows the place she means — they have been going there for years. ‘Sure. That’d be very nice. I’ll phone them up. Reserve us a table.’
‘Do you want me to do it?’
‘No, I think I can manage,’ he says.
The phone is on a sideboard. Next to it is a tatty little notebook full of handwritten numbers. He turns the pages until he finds what he is looking for. Then he picks up the phone and very slowly and deliberately punches the number into it. While he waits for them to answer, holding the phone to his ear, he inspects his slumped, jumpered image in the dark window.
—
Over the next few days, Cordelia takes things in hand. She gets a man in to look at the damp patch at the foot of the stairs. She finds and installs an ultrasonic device that is supposed to dissuade mice from establishing themselves in the house. She sets Claudia to work on specific tasks, which Claudia seems to appreciate. Within a few days the whole house seems more orderly and hygienic, more inhabited somehow.
Together they look on the Internet at second-hand cars for sale in the area. They find something that she seems to think would be suitable for him — a five-year-old Toyota RAV4, automatic. The next day they drive to Ferrara to have a look at it and she haggles the price down a thousand euros and they take it back to Argenta, she driving the insurance company’s car and he driving his new Toyota. He finds it much easier to handle than the old Passat. And there is something about the way she makes it all seem so easy — on his own, he knows, he would have been terribly daunted by the task of sorting it all out. Somehow she makes it seem effortless. She makes the phone calls. She takes him through the Italian forms, telling him what to write and where to sign. She sorts out the insurance. Yes, he is slightly in awe of her. She has such vitality. She wins at Scrabble when they play, which they do once or twice on those winter evenings that start at four o’clock, when darkness falls outside, suddenly, taking you by surprise.
—
One afternoon Claudia’s son shows up in his IKEA van, to take her home. He arrives early, while she is still working her way through a load of ironing, and waits in the van.
‘There’s an IKEA van at the end of the driveway,’ Cordelia says, having seen it from an upstairs window. ‘Have you ordered something?’
‘No,’ he tells her. ‘That’s Claudia’s son. He works for them. He’s waiting for her.’
‘Shouldn’t we ask him in?’
‘We could. I suppose.’
From the window he watches her tap on the window of the van and say something to the Romanian, who then leaves the van, and follows her back to the house.
He hears her speaking to him in her fluent if English-accented Italian as she leads him into the kitchen.
After a while he joins them and says hello. He only stays for a minute, hovering awkwardly. Then he is back in the wing chair with The Sleepwalkers, though less able to absorb its ideas than ever.
When Claudia and her son have left, Cordelia finds him there, and they talk about them, the two Romanians. Very nice people, they decide.