'You should meet my ex-girlfriend, you'd have a lot to talk about.'
She laughed, a deep and husky laugh. Adam wondered if she was naturally blond. It was hard to tell from her complexion.
'Ah, see,' she exclaimed. 'You are doing it now.'
'What?'
'Watching. What were you thinking?'
'Nothing.'
'Liar.'
'Okay. I was wondering if your blond hair is natural.'
Chiara leaned across the desk and stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. 'I could prove it to you,' she said, 'but I don't know you well enough.'
There was something so matter-of-fact in her delivery that it stripped the statement of all flirtation.
This slightly bizarre exchange didn't color the rest of their conversation, even if the image it conjured up never quite left Adam's head. Chiara talked about a trip she had once made to Scotland. She liked the Scottish, she said, they were hill people, like the Italians. Hill Scots people were different. Hills had names, they had stories attached to them. Peaks and passes had been defended, battles had been fought in their valleys. You couldn't ignore hills, they seeped into your marrow, they became part of you.
Adam put forward a corresponding argument for the flat fen- lands of Cambridgeshire, his father's childhood home, but Chiara refused to allow anything to tarnish her theory, tossing his case out of court.
She told him about the rugged countryside near Perugia, where she'd grown up, and where she still had a house. She told him about the other houses they owned, the one in Florence and the one by the sea.
'And how do you feel about moving here?' Adam asked, nudging the conversation his way.
'It is what Maurizio wants, and it is not so far from town.'
'You have your doubts?' 'I have never felt happy here.'
'It's a beautiful place.'
'Yes, I know, of course.'
'Maybe you'll feel better about it when you've redone the top floor,' remarked Adam.
'Maybe.'
'Maria says you have plans.'
'Of course. It's not natural.' Her eyes flicked toward the ceiling. 'Do you think it's natural?'
'No.'
'It is like . . .'
'What?'
'Apparently it was her husband's wish.'
'Pah!'
It was a surprisingly eloquent utterance, as was the gesture that accompanied it—a dismissive flick of the hand.
'Benedetto was obsessed, everyone said it.
'Maybe he asked her not to.'
'That's what she says; before he died he made her promise. But he did not make Maurizio promise.'
'Have you ever been up there?'
'Only one time. When it happened.'
'You were here when it happened?'
'We all were, in the house by the farm.'
They had been celebrating, she explained, a big meal with lots of wine. Maybe a little too much wine, with hindsight—Emilio had a tendency to become belligerent when drunk. They had good cause to be happy, though. The Allies were at the gates of San
Casciano and they'd received word from the German officer in command of the villa that he intended to disregard his orders and pull back to the next German line of defense, just south of Florence.
This wasn't cowardice on his part. He knew that to make a stand at Villa Docci would quite possibly result in the destruction of a building he'd come to love. He was a good man, said Chiara, a very tall and very cultivated man from Hamburg, and it was sad that he hadn't outlived the war. She still remembered the tears in his eyes as he was leaving, when Emilio told him that he would always be a welcome guest in their home once the hostilities were over.
They had survived the German occupation and were all in high spirits when the sound of gunfire shattered the silence of the night. They knew that a small detail of men had been left behind to finalize the withdrawal from the villa, and their first thought was that these soldiers had been surprised by an advance party of Allied troops. On
