but all the more attractive for it—the lively mouth always on the verge of a smile; the glossy, curly black hair, cut short now, that framed the whole pretty picture. He shook his head. What did I do to get so lucky? he wondered contentedly, as he had so many times before.
“I love you,” he said.
He saw her smile, though her eyes were still closed. “Likewise,” she murmured.
“Good, I’m glad we’ve gotten that out of the way.” He looked at the menu again. “I’m having a problem figuring out what to order.”
“Hm?”
“It’s because of the difference in time zones.”
“Mm.”
He put down the menu and looked at her again. “I’m not boring you? Not keeping you awake?”
“No, not at all. I’m glued to every word. ‘It’s because of the difference in time zones.’”
“What is?”
She thought for a moment. “What you were talking about.”
He laughed. “The thing is, I think I’m hungry, but I don’t know what to get. It’s eight-thirty in the morning here, but our internal clocks still think it’s eleven-thirty at night. I don’t know whether to get breakfast or a midnight snack.”
“What would you get if you ordered breakfast?”
“Bacon and eggs, probably. It’s on the menu, probably for the English tourists. And coffee.”
“And what would you get for a midnight snack?”
He thought it over. “Coffee. And bacon and eggs.”
“That’s a pretty tough problem you have there, mister. I don’t see how I can help you with that one.”
They had finished their bacon and eggs and were on their third cups of coffee when Phil showed up, looking greatly refreshed and highly disreputable. It seemed to be a point of honor with him when he traveled, to look as if he’d been trekking through the Arabian desert for six months, so he had let his salt-and-pepper beard come in again. He’d also skipped his last few haircuts so that his thinning hair now hung in tendrils down the back of his neck. With his hitching gait—Phil habitually walked with one side a little higher than the other—he looked like a down-and-out sailor that had jumped ship a few years back and had never managed to get himself another berth.
To complete the travel-worn image, he was attired in his professional tour leader’s regalia: rumpled, faded, multi-pocketed khaki shorts; a tired T-shirt with sagging neckline; sockless sneakers; and an old, long-billed “On the Cheap” baseball cap. Phil’s first rule of travel for his excursion groups was “Never take more than can go in a backpack,” of which he made himself a living example. In his pack, as Gideon knew, were two duplicates of each item he was wearing (except for the sneakers, of which he had only a single extra pair), plus a waterproof windbreaker and a few toiletries, including a roll of toilet paper, without which he never traveled (rule two). That was it. As a result, Phil seemed to spend a lot of time searching out a convenient place and time to wash and dry his underwear, but he considered that a small price to pay.
“Finish up,” he said, slipping into an empty chair at their table, “The boat’s waiting. We’re off to Isola de Grazia.”
“Isola de Grazia?” Julie repeated. “You mean your family really has its own island?” Julie asked.
“Sure, what’s the big surprise? I told you that.”
“You said they ‘own this island, sort of,’” Gideon pointed out.
“Forgive me for using a figure of speech. What, is there a difference?”
“There’s a big difference,” Gideon said. ‘Sort of’ connotes ‘not exactly’ or ‘not really,’ doesn’t it? And what does it modify, ‘island’ or ‘owned’? ‘They sort of own an island.’ ‘They own sort of an island.’ Those are two entirely different referents, and either way—”
“You have to live with this all the time?” Phil asked Julie.
“It’s a trial,” she said. “But he has good points as well.”
“I’m only trying to introduce a little clarity into your thinking, my dear Filiberto.”
“And don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” Phil said, getting up with a yawn. “What do you say we go?”
The boat was a canopied launch with three rows of seats for a dozen people, but they had it to themselves. As soon as they boarded, the captain, a bony, gray-haired woman in a Greek fisherman’s cap and bib overalls, cast off, eased backward from the landing, and turned the bow toward the north. In ten minutes they had left Stresa and the busy ferry run behind, and were sliding over smooth, bright, blue water, with green mountains rising from either shore, and far ahead, over the Swiss border, the grim, granite, glacier-topped mountains of the Simplon Alps. The warm, fresh breeze felt like satin on their skin and the three of them sat quietly for a while, with their eyes closed and their faces turned into the breeze.
“Don’t tell me,” Gideon said when he opened his eyes.
They looked at him. “Tell you what?” Julie asked.
“Don’t tell me that that’s Isola de Grazia.”
He was gesturing at a solitary island a half-mile ahead. Roughly oval and about a quarter-mile long, the point nearest them was occupied by a pink-stuccoed villa, relatively modest in size but gracefully proportioned in the refined, austerely symmetrical Palladian style of the seventeenth century. A set of stone steps at the front of the house led up to a broad, central entrance portico with four tall, slender columns supporting a Greek-style pediment at roof level. Two elegant stories high, with chimney pots shaped like Grecian urns rising from the red tile roof, the building fronted a wide stone courtyard that extended to a quay at which two gleaming wooden launches were tied
