and unhappy tax exiles, and Isabel had met these people at drinks parties. They had little to say, and there was little to be said about them. And on one occasion, visiting the house of one of these bridge couples, she had been seized with a sudden existential horror. The house had white carpets and white furniture and, most significantly, no books. And they sat on the terrace, which was just above a small private beach, and looked out towards the ocean, and nothing was said, because nobody could think of anything to speak about.
“Beaches,” said Isabel to Cat.
“Beaches?”
“I was thinking about Italy, and the weather, and beaches came into my mind.” She looked at Cat. “And I suddenly remembered going to the Bahamas and meeting some people who lived on a beach.”
“Beach people?”
Isabel laughed. “Not in that sense. Not people who had a tent or whatever and let their hair get full of salt and all the rest.
No, these people had a house on a beach and sat on a marble 7 2
A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h terrace, which must have cost heaven knows what to import, and they looked out at the sea. And there were no books in their house, not a single book. Not one.
“He had lived in England and had left the country because he couldn’t bear to pay taxes to a socialist government, or to any government, I suspect. And there they were on their Caribbean island, sitting on their terrace, with their heads full of nothing very much.
“They had a daughter, who was a young teenager when I saw her. She was as empty-headed as the parents and although they tried to do something about her education, nothing much got in. So they withdrew her from her expensive school in England and brought her back to the island. She took up with a local boy whom the parents wouldn’t let into the house, with its white carpets and all the rest. They tried to stop her, but they couldn’t. She had a baby, and the baby had nothing much in its head either. But they didn’t want their daughter’s baby, and I later heard that they just pretended that the baby didn’t exist.
It crawled around on the white carpets, but they didn’t really see it.”
Cat looked at Isabel. She was used to her relative’s musings, but this one surprised her. Usually Isabel’s stories had a clear moral point, but she was not sure what the moral point of this one was. Emptiness, perhaps; or the need for a purpose in life; or the immorality of tax havens. Or even babies and white carpets.
“Salvatore was quite charming,” said Cat. “He took us all out for a meal at a restaurant in the hills. It was one of the places where they give you very little choice but just bring course after course.”
F R I E N D S, L OV E R S, C H O C O L AT E
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“They’re generous people, the Italians,” Isabel remarked.
“And his father was very kind, too,” went on Cat. “We went to their house and met all the relatives. Aunts, uncles, and so on. Crowds of them.”
“I see,” said Isabel. There was still the question of Salvatore’s father’s occupation. “And did you find out what the family business was?”
“I asked,” said Cat. “I asked one of the uncles. We were sitting under the pergola in the garden, having lunch —a large table with about twenty people at it. I asked Salvatore’s uncle.”
“And?” She imagined the uncle saying that he was not sure what his brother did; or that he had forgotten. One could not forget such a thing, just as one could not forget one’s address, as a Russian once claimed to Isabel when she asked him where he lived. He was frightened, poor man; those were times when one might not want one’s address in a foreigner’s address book, but it might have been better for him to say so, rather than to claim that he had forgotten it.
“He said it was shoes.”
Isabel was silent. Shoes. Italian shoes: elegant, beautifully designed, but always, always too small for Isabel’s feet. My Scottish-American feet, she thought, so much larger than Italian feet.
Cat smiled at her; she had dispelled the suspicions which her aunt had expressed over Salvatore’s family business. Perhaps it had been embarrassment over shoes, which were, after all, somewhat prosaic items.
“And what else did you do?” asked Isabel at last. “Apart from these lunch parties with Salvatore and the Salvatore family.
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“We went to see Etna.”
“Lawrence wrote that in his curious snake poem. You know the one, where a snake comes to his water trough, and he’s in his pyjamas for the heat, and he throws a rock at the snake. Auden never threw rocks at snakes, and that’s the crucial difference, isn’t it: writers who would throw rocks at snakes and those who wouldn’t. Hemingway would, wouldn’t he?” She smiled at Cat, who was shading her eyes against the afternoon sun, and looking at her with what Isabel always described as her patient look.
“I digress. I know,” Isabel went on. “But I always think of Etna smoking. And of Lawrence in his pyjamas.”
Cat took control of the conversation. Isabel could talk for hours about anything, unless stopped. “That was with a cousin of Salvatore’s, Tomasso. He’s from Palermo. They live in a large Baroque palazzo. He’s fun. He took me to all sorts of places I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.”
Isabel sat quite still. When Cat talked like this, about men being fun, it meant that she was interested in them, as she had been interested in Toby, with his crushed-strawberry trousers and his tedious skiing talk; as she had been interested in Geoff, the army officer who drank too much at parties and engaged in childish pranks, such as gluing people’s hats to the hatstand; as she had been interested in Henry, and David, and perhaps others.
“Tomasso’s a rally driver,” said Cat. “He drives an old Bugatti. It’s a beautiful car—red and silver.”
