Acqua Alta

still dry. The sirens for acqua alta had sounded at three that morning, waking them all, but the tide had turned before the waters had seeped up through the chinks in the pavement. The full moon was only a few days away, and it had been raining heavily up north in Friuli, so there was a chance that the night would bring the first real flooding of the year.

At the top of the stairs, inside his home, he found what he wanted: warmth, the scent of a fresh-peeled tangerine, and the certainty that Paola and the children were at home. He hung his coat on one of the pegs beside the door and went into the living room. There he found Chiara, propped on her elbows at the table, holding a book open with one hand and stuffing peeled sections of tangerine into her mouth with the other. She looked up as he came in, smiled broadly, and held out a section of tangerine to him. ‘Ciao, Pap a .’

He came across the room, glad of the warmth, suddenly aware of how cold his feet were. He stood beside her and bent down far enough to allow her to pop a section of tangerine into his mouth. Then another, and another. While he chewed, she finished the peeled sections that lay on a dish beside her.

‘Papa, you hold the match,’ she said, reaching across the table and handing him a book of matches. Obedient, he peeled one off and lit it, holding the flame towards her. From, the pile on the table beside her, she selected a piece of tangerine peel and bent it until the two inner sides touched. As she did, a fine mist of oil shot out from the cracking skin and flared up in a blazing rocket of coloured flames. ‘Che bella’, Chiara said, eyes wide with delight that never seemed to diminish, no matter how many times they did this.

‘Are there any more?’ he asked.

‘No, Papa, that was the last one.’ He shrugged but not before a look of real sorrow flashed across her face. ‘I’m sorry I ate them all, Papa. There are some oranges. Do you want me to peel you one?’

‘No, angel, that’s all right. I’ll wait till dinner.’ He leaned to the right and tried to look into the kitchen. ‘Where’s Mamma?’

‘Oh, she’s in her study,’ Chiara said, turning back to her book. ‘And she’s in a really bad mood, so I don’t know when we’re going to eat.’

‘How do you know she’s in a bad mood?’ he asked.

She looked straight up at him and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, Papa, don’t be silly. You know what she’s like when she’s in one of her moods. Told Raffi she couldn’t help him with his homework, and she yelled at me because I didn’t take the rubbish downstairs this morning.’ She propped her chin on both fists and looked down at her book. ‘I hate it when she’s like that.’

‘Well, she’s been having a lot of trouble at the university, Chiara.’

She turned a page. ‘Oh, you always stick up for her. But she’s no fun when she’s like that.’

‘I’ll go and talk to her. Maybe that will help.’ Both of them knew the unlikelihood of this but, the optimists of the family, they smiled to each other at the possibility.

She slumped back down over her book, Brunetti bent and kissed the top of her head and switched on the overhead light as he left the room. At the end of the corridor, he stopped in front of the door to Paola’s study. Talking to her seldom helped, but listening to her sometimes did. He knocked.

‘Avanti,’ she called out, and he pushed back the door. The first thing he noticed, even before he saw Paola standing at the glass door that led to the terrace, was the chaos on her desk. Papers, books, magazines spilled across its surface; some open, some closed, some used to mark pages in others. Only the self-deceived or the vision-impaired would ever call Paola either neat or orderly, but this mess was pushed out way beyond even her very tolerant limits. She turned from the door and noticed the way he stared at her desk. ‘I’ve been looking for something,’ she explained.

‘The person who killed Edwin Drood?’ he asked, referring to an article she had spent three months writing the previous year. ‘I thought you found him.’

‘Don’t joke, Guido,’ she said, in that voice she used when humour was as welcome as the old boyfriend of the bride. ‘I’ve spent most of the afternoon trying to hunt down a quotation.’

‘What do you need it for?’

‘A class. I want to begin with the quotation, and I need to tell them where it comes from, so I’ve got to locate the source.’

‘Who is it?’

‘The Master,’ she said, in English, and Brunetti watched her go all misty-eyed, the way she always did when she talked about Henry James. Did it make sense, he wondered, to be jealous? Jealous of a man who, it seemed to him from what Paola had said about him, not only couldn’t decide what his nationality was, but couldn’t seem to decide what sex he was, either?

For twenty years, this had gone on. The Master had gone on their honeymoon with them, was in the hospital when both of their children were born, seemed to tag along on every holiday they had ever taken. Stout, phlegmatic, possessed of a prose style that proved impenetrable to Brunetti, no matter how many times he tried to read him in either English or Italian, Henry James appeared to be the other man in Paola’s life.

‘What’s the quotation?’

‘He said it in response to someone who asked him, late in his life, what he had learned by all his experience.’

Brunetti knew what he was meant to do. He did it. ‘What did he say?’

‘ “Be kind and then be kind and then be kind,” ‘ she said in English.

The temptation proved too strong for Brunetti. ‘With or without commas?’

She shot him a grim look. Obviously not the day for jokes, especially about the Master. In an attempt to worm out from under the weight of that look, he said, ‘Seems a strange quotation to begin a literature class.’

She weighed whether to take his remark about the commas as still standing or to address herself to his next. Luckily, for he did want to eat dinner that night, she picked up the second. ‘We begin with Whitman and Dickinson tomorrow, and I’m hoping that the quotation will serve to pacify a few of the more horrible students in the