She is happy because she is alone. She is happy in the small appartamento lent to her by friends of her sister, who use it infrequently. She loves the town’s steep, cool streets, its quietness, the grey stone of its buildings, quarried from the hill it is built upon. She is happy because the nightmare is distant now, a picture she can illuminate in her mind and calmly survey. She sees her husband sprawling on the chair in the garden, the girl in her granny glasses, and her own weeping face in the bathroom looking-glass. Time shrinks the order of events: she packs her clothes into three suitcases; she is in her sister’s house in Hemel Hempstead. That was the worst of all, the passing of the days in Hemel Hempstead, the sympathy of her sister, her generous, patient brother-in-law, their children imagining she was ill. When she thinks of herself now she feels a child herself, not the Henrietta of the suburban sitting-room and the tray of drinks, with chiffontidily in her hair. Her father makes a swing for her because she has begged so, ropes tied to the bough of an apple tree. Her mother once was cross because she climbed that tree. She cries and her sister comforts her, a sunny afternoon when she got tar on her dress. She skates on an icy pond, a birthday treat before her birthday tea when she was nine. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said in Hemel Hempstead, and then there was the stroke of good fortune, people she did not even know who had an appartamento in a Tuscan hill town.
In the cantina of the Contucci family the wine matures in oaken barrels of immense diameter, the iron hoops that bind them stylishly painted red. She has been shown the cantina and the palace of the Contucci. She has looked across the slopes of terracotta roof-tiles to Monticchiello and Pienza. She has drunk the water of the nearby spa and has sat in the sun outside the cafe by the bank, whiling away a morning with an Italian dictionary. Frusta means whip, and it’s also the word for the bread she has with Fontina for lunch.
Her husband pays money into her bank account and she accepts it because she must. There are some investments her father left her: between the two sources there is enough to live on. But one day, when her Italian is good enough, she will reject the money her husband pays her. It is degrading to look for support from someone she no longer respects. And one day, too, she will revert to her maiden name, for why should she carry with her the name of a man who shrugged her off?
In the cool of the appartamento she lunches alone. With her frusta and Fontina she eats peppery radishes and drinks acqua minerale. Wine in the daytime makes her sleepy, and she is determined this afternoon to learn another thirty words and to do two exercises for the girl in the Informazioni. Le Chiavi del Regno by A.J. Cronin is open beside her, but for a moment she does not read it. A week ago, on the telephone to England, she described the four new villas of Signor Falconi to prospective tenants, Signora Falconi having asked her if she would. The Falconis had shown her the villas they had built near their fattoria in the hills, and she assured someone in Gloucester that any one of them would perfectly suit her requirements, which were sun and tranquillity and room enough for six.
Guilt once consumed her, Henrietta considers. She continued to be a secretary in the department for six years after her marriage but had given it up because she’d found it awkward, having to work not just for her husband but for his rivals and his enemies. He’d been pleased when she’d done so, and although she’d always intended to find a secretarial post outside the university she never had. She’d felt guilty about that, because she was contributing so little, a childless housewife.
‘I want to stay here.’ She says it aloud, pouring herself more acqua minerale, not eating for a moment. ‘Voglio stare qui.’ She has known the worst of last winter’s weather; she has watched spring coming; heat will not defeat her. How has she not guessed, through all those years of what seemed like a contented marriage, that solitude suits her better? It only seemed contented, she knows that now: she had talked herself into an artificial contentment, she had allowed herself to become a woman dulled by the monotony of a foolish man, his sprawling bigness and his sense of failure. It is bliss of a kind not to hear his laughter turned on for a television joke, not to look daily at his flamboyant ties and unpolished shoes. Quella mattina il diario si apri alla data Ottobre 1917: how astonished he would be if he could see her now, childishly delighting in The Keys of the Kingdom in Italian.
It was her fault, she’d always believed, that they could not have children – yet something informs her now that it was probably more her husband’s, that she’d been wrong to feel inadequate. As a vacuum-cleaner sucks in whatever it touches, he had drawn her into a world that was not her own; she had existed on territory where it was natural to be blind – where it was natural, too, to feel she must dutifully console a husband because he was not a success professionally. ‘Born with a sense of duty,’ her father once said, when she was ten or so. ‘A good thing, Henrietta.’ She is not so sure: guilt and duty seem now to belong together, different names for a single quality.
Later that day she walks to the Church of San Biagio, among the meadows below the walls of the town. Boys are playing football in the shade, girls lie on the grass. She goes over her vocabulary in her mind, passing by the church. She walks on white, dusty roads, between rows of slender pines. Solivare is the word she has invented – to do with wandering alone. Piantare means to plant; piantamento is planting, piantagione plantation. Determinedly she taxes her atrophied memory: sulla via di casa and in modo da; un manovale and la briciola.
In the August of that year, when the heat is at its height, Signora Falconi approaches Henrietta in the macelleria. She speaks in Italian, for Henrietta’s Italian is better now than Signora Falconi’s rudimentary English. There is something, Signora Falconi reveals – a request that has not to do with reassuring a would-be tenant on the telephone. There is some other proposition that Signor Falconi and his wife would like to put to her.
‘Verro,’ Henrietta agrees. ‘Verro martedi coll’ autobus.’
The Falconis offer her coffee and a little grappa. Their four villas, clustered around their fattoria, are full of English tenants now. Every fortnight these tenants change, so dirty laundry must be gathered for the lavanderia, fresh sheets put on the beds, the villa cleaned. And the newcomers, when they arrive, must be shown where everything is, told about the windows and the shutters, warned about the mosquitoes and requested not to use too much water. They must have many other details explained to them, which the Falconis, up to now, have not quite succeeded in doing. There is a loggia in one of the villas that would be Henrietta’s, a single room with a balcony and a bathroom, an outside staircase. And the Falconis would pay just a little for the cleaning and the changing of the sheets, the many details explained. The Falconis are apologetic, fearing that Henrietta may consider the work too humble. They are anxious she should know that women to clean and change sheets are not easy to come by since they find employment in the hotels of the nearby spa, and that there is more than enough for Signora Falconi herself to do at the fattoria.
It is not the work Henrietta has imagined when anticipating her future, but her future in her appartamento is uncertain, for she cannot live for ever on strangers’ charity and one day the strangers will return.
‘Va bene,’ she says to the Falconis. ‘Lo faccio.’
