Eighteen months or so after we arrived in San Ceterino, I found a job. Mark was unhappy about this, uncomprehending and despondent.
‘I don’t see why you need it,’ he complained.
I did not see why I needed it either. Nonetheless, I continued. My options were limited — I got the only job for which I was in any way qualified. I became an English tutor to businesspeople and would-be emigrants in San Ceterino. I have, over time, become rather fond of my gently determined pupils, with their ambitions for business expansion, or promotion, or a move to a different country. I find something charming in their dreams. Mark doesn’t agree. He calls them my waifs and strays, my hopeless ones. Once, on a particularly bad day, when it really seemed that he should not be left alone, I took him with me to my lessons. This was not a good experiment. Mark’s Italian is excellent, much better than mine. I can’t always follow what he’s saying. After those visits, two of my pupils requested that I should not come and see them again.
It would be ridiculous to attempt to contribute to the upkeep of the house. The housekeeper comes every morning; the fridge is filled with the bounty of the seasons whether I work or not. The wages I earn are meaningless when compared to the unfathomable depths of Mark’s money. And yet I do work. I save the money I earn. It has become a tangible record of achievement — a tiny heap of useful things done. And time passes. It seems to me sometimes that I have come to the end of my life. Time passes here in San Ceterino, but it changes very little.
Mark’s regret over the swimming-pool soup did not last long. Summer is his favourite season of the year — the town is full of young people with time on their hands. June melted into a blistering July and more young men and women traipsed up the hill to our house, escaping from the insistent irritation of the tourists and the demands of their parents, and hoping for the parties which Mark did not cease to provide. He was starting to look a little old, I thought, compared to these dewy-skinned young people. When he stared into the mirror and demanded my opinion of his faint crow’s feet I said I couldn’t see any lines at all. I wondered what he might be like in twenty or thirty years’ time — fifty or sixty years old and still bribing the young to keep him company? What was it he was looking for in these people? Was it simply that they were beautiful and easily dazzled, with a natural sympathy for those whose lives were as chaotic as their own? Or was he seeking a memory of himself in better times? Or, in some curious twist, a memory of Daisy, who would by now have been approaching her own teenage years?
‘Do you know who I miss?’ he asked me one evening in late July.
We were sitting in the pergola behind the apple orchard. He was drunk but placid. We had had a visit the previous day from several of his friends — they hadn’t made a mess, nor had they left him in an unbearable condition. My sister Anne had telephoned earlier in the evening with the news that Paul had been appointed a Junior Minister while she had risen another rung in the department dealing with the regulation of edible oils. Mark and I had already passed a pleasant half-hour in mocking them.
I knew who he missed, but I hadn’t expected him to talk about her so easily.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘Nicola.’ He said it looking away from me, towards the trees, with an expression of firm decision on his face.
‘Nicola?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My wife.’
This was not strictly an accurate description of their relationship. The divorce papers had arrived a couple of years earlier and he had signed them with all the appearance of disinterest and then spent the next four days insensible with drink.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘What do you think she’s doing now?’
‘I really don’t know, Mark.’
He nodded sagely.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘that we should have some more children. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’
I noticed myself breathing in and then out. I moved my thoughts around Mark while he sat, cow-eyed, looking at me. It must be the drink. He has these lapses occasionally — not quite a loss of function but more an intensification of certain parts of himself, a voicing of impulses which he normally knows are absurd. Had he only had alcohol or something else as well?
‘Mmmm,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think that would solve everything.’ He paused and took a sip of his drink. ‘Do you know why I married her? Because the moment I met her I thought, she will make a wonderful mother. And she has done. She was. She ought to be again.’
This was not the first time he had tried to explain to me why he had married Nicola. It is a subject he returns to often, each time proffering a different interpretation of the facts. I wonder if he even remembers his own feelings, after all this time.
‘I think,’ I began gently, ‘that Nicola might have moved on. You know, it’s been a long time since you last saw each other. She might not feel the same way any more.’
‘Hmmm.’ He took another sip of his drink, as though we were having a perfectly reasonable conversation. ‘I don’t think so. You see,’ he said, gesturing with his glass, sploshing some of the contents on to the baked earth beneath, ‘Nicola has a sort of loyalty to me which can never entirely vanish.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
Mark took this as permission to continue.
‘I can see why you’d think it, of course. After all, you and Jess never had that kind of relationship. In your case, you were the dog and she was the master, while with me and Nicola it was quite the other way around.’
I thought my silence might stop him pursuing this avenue.
‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘it was always like that between you two, wasn’t it? I always got the feeling that she didn’t love you so much as tolerate you. You would have forgiven her anything. But one little slip from you and all your usefulness to her was gone. Dogs have to be faithful, after all.’
‘I think that’s enough on this topic, Mark.’
But he was warming to his theme.
‘Of course you’ve always been like that, haven’t you, James? All you can ever do is follow someone round. Jess, and now me. I wouldn’t be surprised if before Jess you used to follow someone round at school. Or your sister! Did you go to Oxford just because your sister did? Honestly, it’s surprising Jess put up with you as long as she did.’
‘Mark! Stop this now please.’
He turned his face to me, hard and sneering. I was reminded of the way he’d been in Oxford the first time I’d met him, of the way he’d said ‘the paramour’.
He said, ‘Do you know what, James? All you ever are is a reflection of other people. With Jess you were loyal, with me you’re dissolute. What are you really? Nothing. You’re all shadows and mirrors. All you’ve got is the power to ingratiate yourself with whoever you’re around, to make them like you. But the thing is, James, it doesn’t work. We don’t like you, none of us do — I don’t and nor did Jess.’
He must have seen my face turn at that. A colour or a shading of the features. He has always been so good at picking up these little cues.
‘She talked about it with us in Oxford. She thought you were boring, James. She said so to the rest of us. She thought you were boring, and did you know, did she tell you, that she slept with a violinist in her orchestra the term she was a soloist? When she was playing that Sibelius? Did she tell you that? Because she told us.’