so right. Isn’t that marvellous? And there they are, flying across the Tuscan sky while below them everybody is just carrying on with their day-to-day business.
Somebody is cutting wood with a buzz-saw. The leaves of the vines rattle like dice. And so on.”
“I can just see it,” said Mary Contini.
Angus smiled. “Of course, angels are an intrinsically interesting subject. Especially if one has little else to do with one’s time. Like those early practitioners of angelology who speculated about the number of angels who could stand on the head of a pin.”
“I’ve always thought of angels as being rather big,” said Mary Contini.
“Exactly,” said Angus. “Mind you, there are an awful lot of them, I believe. The fourteenth-century cabalists said that there were precisely 301,655,722. Quite how they worked that out, I have no idea. But there we are.” He sighed. He enjoyed a conversation of this sort – but ever since Domenica had gone away, there seemed to be so few people with whom to have it. And here he was taking up this busy person’s time with talk of angels and the Tuscan countryside. “I must get on,” he said. “One cannot stand about all day and talk about angels. Or olive oil, for that matter.”
She laughed. “I am always happy to talk about either,” she said, and she nodded to him politely and moved on. He reached for a bottle of olive oil and placed it in his shopping basket.
Then, with his small collection of purchases selected, he made his way to the till, paid, and went out into the street.
He looked for Cyril, and saw that he was not there. He stopped, and stood quite still. Fumbling with the bag of purchases, he dropped it, and it fell onto the pavement, where the bottle of olive oil shattered. A slow green ooze trickled out of the crumpled bag. It soaked into his loaf of rosemary bread.
It trickled down into a crack in the pavement.
Somebody passing by hesitated, about to ask what was wrong, but walked on. Angus looked about him frantically. He had tied Cyril’s leash quite tightly – he always did. But even if Cyril had worked it loose, he would never leave the spot in which Angus had left him. He was good that way – it was something to do with his training in Lochboisdale, all those years ago. Cyril knew how to stay.
Angus saw a boy standing nearby. The boy was watching him; this boy with a pasty complexion and his shirt hanging out of his trousers was watching him. He walked over to him. The boy, suspicious, stiffened.
“My dog,” he said. “My dog. He was over there. Now . . .”
The boy sniffed. “A boy took it,” he said. “He untied him.”
Angus gasped. “He took him? Where? Did you see?”
The boy shrugged. “He got on a bus. One of they buses.”
The boy pointed to a red bus lumbering past.
“You didn’t see which one?”
“No,” said the boy. He looked down at the packet on the ground and then back up at Angus. “I’ve got to go.”
Angus nodded. Bending down, he picked up the oil-soaked bag and looked about him, hopelessly. Cyril had been stolen.
That was the only conclusion he could reach. His friend, his companion, had been stolen. He had lost him. He was gone.
He walked back to Drummond Place slowly, almost oblivious to his surroundings. Worlds could end in many ways, but, as Eliot had observed, it was usually in little ways, like this.
“I’m sorry,” Ling said. “We’re going to have to walk from here. I’ll find a boy to carry the suitcase.”
“There are always boys to do these things,” said Edward Hong to Domenica. “That’s the charming thing about the Far East. I gather that in Europe these days one has run out of boys.”
Domenica nodded. “Boys used to be willing to do little tasks,”
she said. “But no longer.”
Edward Hong looked wistful. “When I was a boy,” he said,
“I was a Scout. Baden-Powell was much admired in these lati-tudes, you know. And we were taught: always do at least one good deed every day. That’s what we believed in. And I did it.
I did a good deed every day. Do you think that happens today?”
“Alas, no,” said Domenica, as she prepared to get out of the car. “Most children have become very surly. That is because they are not taught to think about others any more. They are, quite simply, spoiled.”
“I fear that what you say is right,” said Edward Hong. “It is very sad.”
They stood outside the car and stretched their legs while Ling went off to the village. Domenica, her head shaded by a large, floppy sun hat – for even with cloud cover, she could feel the weight of the noonday sun – stood on the roadside and gazed out over the surrounding landscape. The village, which seemed to consist of twenty or so houses, straddled the road, which had now narrowed to a single track. The houses were small square buildings, each raised a couple of feet above the ground on wooden pillars. This, she knew, provided both protection from floodwaters and allowed the air to circulate in the heat. The roofs, which were made of palm thatch, were untidy in their
appearance, but everything else seemed neat and well-kept. A small group of children stood on the steps of the nearest house, staring at them, while a woman, wearing a red sarong, attended to some task on the veranda. On
