“Yes, I agree.”
“Are you staying for a few days?”
“Oh, yes, it looks as if I’ll be staying the whole weekend.”
“How nice! Piero will be glad! Perhaps the two of you could go out for a meal or a drink the way you used to. I’m sure he’d love that.”
Nico wondered which was worse: that Miriam should pretend nothing was wrong now, or that she had always done so before.
“Yes, maybe,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes.”
“Or you could go the cinema. You always liked that.”
“Right,” Nico said. “It’s an idea.”
Maria put down the phone and walked up to Nico. “The taxi will be here in five minutes,” she said.
Nico had never appreciated a taxi so much in his life.
“What, are you going already?” Piero’s mother asked, frowning sadly.
“Afraid so,” Nico said. “It’s late and I haven’t even told my parents I’m coming.”
“What a pity,” Piero’s mother said. “I was hoping you might be able to have dinner with us.”
“Yes, I know. Another time, perhaps.”
“All right, but we’ll see you again while you’re here.”
“Of course, Miriam. I’ll be back tomorrow as early as I can, I promise. Keep well.”
“Thank you, darling. You, too.”
Miriam picked up her embroidery as if nothing had happened, and after a moment Nico followed Maria out of the room.
“Why don’t you wait here?” she asked at the door.
“No, thanks, I’ll go and wait at the gate. I like walking.”
“It’s up to you,” Maria said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Nico said, then went up to Maria, let her kiss him twice on the cheeks and walked out.
When he heard the door close behind him, he felt as though someone had stuck an oxygen mask over his face, and the air outside had never seemed so scented.
NICO GOT IN THE TAXI and gave his parents’ address, then sat close to the window looking out at the road rushing past, trying not to think about the strangest thing he had ever experienced in his life.
The car passed the big bend, and Nico remembered all the times he and Piero had passed it on mopeds, racing to see which of them could take it faster, the time he had skidded and smashed the moped into the low wall, all the times they had stopped here at dawn, returning from some night out, and leant over to look down at the town and smoke their last cigarettes, and the time Piero had fallen. Then he decided he didn’t really want to remember those things right now, and he started looking out again, concentrating on the road and the cars rushing past.
That afternoon, on the train, Nico had thought it might be nice to call home and announce his arrival, but then he had decided that he didn’t want to — that it would be amusing to turn up like that at the last moment, like the wandering, unpredictable son he had never been.
The taxi driver, who was all smiles, dropped him outside his house. There was a breeze now, and the air felt cooler. Nico slid a hand through the bars of the little gate and stretched until he found the button that released the lock. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him. That was something he always enjoyed doing, as if knowing that little secret made him automatically feel at home, especially as what he was doing was vaguely fraudulent.
Nico went through the gate, climbed the few steps leading to the front door and rang the bell. He heard some indistinct noises inside the house, and his mother’s muffled voice saying something as she came to the door.
When Nico’s mother opened the door, the sight of him almost took her breath away. She was wearing a stained apron with red and white stripes.
“Who? …”
She was licking her fingers, and she froze with her hand in mid-air and her mouth open. Nico wondered if she was simply surprised or also a little bit agitated.
“Hi, Mum, I’m your son. Remember me?”
Nico’s mother took a couple of seconds to reconnect and get her hand and everything else moving again. “Darling! What a surprise! What are you doing here?”
Behind his mother, Nico saw a man rush stark naked across the entrance hall and up the stairs.
Nico opened his eyes wide for a moment and looked anxiously at his mother. “Mum, why did Dad just run upstairs naked?”
Nico’s mother raised her eyebrows, turned round with feigned curiosity, then turned back to her son and gave him a lovely smile. “I imagine he was going up to get dressed, darling.”
It seemed to Nico that he didn’t have time for that.
“What shall I do?” he asked, pretending to smile questioningly. “Can I come in?”
“Oh, God, darling, I’m sorry! It’s just … you know …”
Nico left his jacket in the hall and followed his mother into the kitchen. She was making something strange in the wok — that strange, wonderful concave oriental pan that ought to have produced only exquisite delicacies, but didn’t seem to produce anything very much in the hands of Nico’s mother. Nico tried to remember when exactly it was that his mother had been seized by that obsession with all things oriental, but couldn’t really pin it down. All he knew was that overnight the house had started to fill with strange books with dark-blue paper and red ideograms, extravagant kitchen utensils and gardening tools, colourful leaflets with exotic names on them, batik sarongs and hemp skirts. Nico remembered talking about it to his sister.
“Do you think this oriental kick of Mum’s is normal?” he had asked her one day over the phone.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, all these books about the Orient and Zen and Japanese cooking, all that kind of thing.”
“What of it?”
“I don’t know, don’t you think it’s strange?”
“Nico, let her do what she wants,” his sister had said.
Nico wondered if his dad being naked in the living room had something to do with the same cultural revolution, or if he had started smoking dope.
“Mum,” Nico said, “do Dad and you smoke dope?”
For a moment Nico’s mother stopped what she was doing — stirring a dark mixture of sorry-looking vegetables in her wok — and looked at her son with a puzzled half-smile. “No, darling. Why? What makes you think that?”
“No reason. It’s been a long day. I’m sorry.”
She stroked his cheek. Nico was sitting on the high iron stool next to the ovens, as he had when he was a child, nibbling at pieces of food left over from his mother’s experiments.
“Don’t worry,” she said, then started stirring the vegetables again. “Will this be enough?” she asked after a while, pensively.
Silently, Nico lifted his eyebrows and pursed his lips.
“I don’t think it is,” she said. “I think I should add a little more spaghetti.”
Nico craned his neck to look in the wok and wondered which of those sorry-looking ingredients came under the admittedly vague heading of spaghetti.
His mother looked at Nico and stroked his face again. “What a nice surprise,” she said, then went back to stirring the spaghetti and the vegetables. “But what are you doing here?” she asked, and there was something slightly different, almost inquisitorial, in her tone.
“Piero has started acting like a monkey.”
“Mm,” said Nico’s mother. “How nice.”
Nico gave his mother a puzzled look. “Not really,” he said.
“Oh,” his mother said. Then she stopped for a moment. “I’m sorry, in what way?”
“Some time this summer he suddenly flipped and started acting like a monkey.”
“What do you mean, ‘like a monkey’?”
“Like a monkey: he crouches on the ground, grunts and smiles in a lopsided way like a chimpanzee.”
Nico’s mother looked at her son with her mouth open in surprise, and Nico caught himself thinking that it was her most genuine expression since she had opened the door. Then she started stirring the vegetables again.