‘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.’
‘For the therapies?’
‘No, I would have avoided that. Sand therapy, water therapy, sex therapy, image therapy, holistic counselling. I would have steered clear, I think.’
‘Being on your own’s a therapy too, of course. Although it’s nice to have a chat.’
She doesn’t listen; he goes on talking. On the island of Skyros tourists beat drums at sunset and welcome the dawn with song. Or they may simply swim and play, or discover the undiscovered self. The Pensione Cesarina - even the pensione transformed by the Germans and the Dutch - offers nothing like it. Nor would it offer enough to her parents any more. Her divided parents travel grandly now.
‘I see The Spanish Farm is still on the shelves.’ The old man has risen and hovers for a moment. ‘I doubt that anyone’s read it since I did in 1987.’
‘No, probably not.’
He says goodnight and changes it to goodbye because he has to make an early start. For a moment, it seems to Harriet, he hesitates, something about his stance suggesting that he’d like to be invited to stay, to be offered a cup of coffee or a drink. Then he goes, without saying anything else. Lonely in old age, she suddenly realizes, wondering why she didn’t notice that when he was talking to her. Lonely in spite of all he claims for solitude.
‘Goodbye,’ she calls after him, but he doesn’t hear. They were to come back here the summer of the separation; instead there were cancellations then too, and an empty fortnight.
‘Buona notte.’ The boy in the white jacket smiles tentatively from his cupboard as she passes through the hall. He’s new tonight; it was another boy before. She hasn’t realized that either.
She walks through the heat of the morning on the narrow road to the town, by the graveyard and the abandoned petrol pumps. A few cars pass her, coming from the pensione, for the road leads hardly anywhere else, petering out eventually. It would have been hotter on the island of Skyros.
Clouds have gathered in one part of the sky, behind her as she walks. The shade of clouds might make it cooler, she tells herself, but so far they are not close enough to the sun for that. The road widens and gradually the incline becomes less steep as she approaches the town. There’s a park with concrete seats and the first of the churches, its chosen saint Agnese of this town.
There’s no one in the park until Harriet sits there beneath the chestnut trees in a corner. Far below her, as the town tails off again, a main road begins to wind through clumps of needle pines and umbrella pines to join, far out of sight, a motorway. ‘But weren’t we happy?’ she hears herself exclaim, a little shrill because she couldn’t help it. Yes, they were happy, he agreed at once, anxious to make that clear. Not happy enough was what he meant, and you could tell; something not quite right. She asked him and he didn’t know, genuine in his bewilderment.
When she feels cooler she walks on, down shaded, narrow streets to the central piazza of the town, where she rests again, with a cappuccino at a pavement table.
Italians and tourists move slowly in the unevenly paved square, women with shopping bags and dogs, men leaving the barber’s, the tourists in their summery clothes. The church of Santa Fabiola dominates the square, grey steps in front, a brick and stone façade. There is another café, across from the one Harriet has chosen, and a line of market stalls beside it. The town’s banks are in the square but not its shops. There’s a trattoria and a gelateria, their similar decoration connecting them, side by side. ‘Yes, they’re all one,’ her father said.
In this square her father lifted her high above his head and she looked down and saw his laughing, upturned face and she laughed too, because he joked so. Her mother stuttered out her schoolgirl French in the little hotels where they stayed on the journey out, and blushed with shame when no one understood. ‘Oh, this is pleasant!’ her mother murmured, a table away from where Harriet is now.
A priest comes down the steps of the church, looks about him, does not see whom he thought he might. A skinny dog goes limping by. The bell of Santa Fabiola chimes twelve o’clock and when it ceases another bell, farther away, begins. Clouds have covered the sun, but the air is as hot as ever. There’s still no breeze.
It was in the foyer of the Rembrandt Cinema that he said he didn’t think their love affair was working. It was then that she exclaimed, ‘But weren’t we happy?’ They didn’t quarrel. Not even afterwards, when she asked him why he had told her in a cinema foyer. He didn’t know, he said; it just seemed right in that moment, some fragment of a mood they shared. If it hadn’t been for their holiday’s being quite soon their relationship might have dragged on for a while. Much better that it shouldn’t, he said.
The fourteenth of February in London was quite as black, and cold, and as wintersome as it was at Allington, and was, perhaps, somewhat more melancholy in its coldness. She has read that bit before and couldn’t settle to it, and cannot now. She takes her dark glasses off: the clouds are not the pretty bundles she noticed before, white cottonwool as decoration is by Raphael or Perugino. The clouds that have come up so quickly are grey as lead, a sombre panoply pegged out against a blue that’s almost lost. The first drops fall when Harriet tries the doors of Santa Fabiola and finds them locked. They will remain so, a notice tersely states, until half-past two.
It had been finally arranged that the marriage should take place in London, she reads in the trattoria. There were certainly many reasons which would have made a marriage from Courcy Castle more convenient. The De Courcy family were all assembled at their country family residence, and could therefore have been present at the ceremony without cost or trouble. She isn’t hungry; she has ordered risotto, hoping it will be small, and mineral water without gas.
‘C’è del pane o della farina nel piatto? Non devo mangiare della farina,’ a woman is saying, and the gaunt-faced waiter carefully listens, not understanding at first and then excitedly nodding. ‘Non c’è farina,’ he replies, pointing at items on the menu. The woman is from the pensione. She’s with a lanky young man who might be her son, and Harriet can’t identify the language they speak to one another.