The Collected Stories

read to me from Kidnapped. I drew the faces of the waiters and the hall-porters, and the facade of the Villa Parco, and the white-painted chairs among the smoke trees. A visitor at the hotel would take one of these iron chairs and carry-it to a secluded place and later idly leave it there. Or a tete-a-tete would occur, two of the chairs drawn away in the same manner and then vacated, two empty glasses left on a table. After lunch we rested, then swam again, and again visited the town. ‘We must complete our postcard,’ my mother would say on the way in to dinner or during the meal itself, and afterwards we would do so before dropping the postcard into the letter-box in the hall. Sometimes I made a drawing on it for my father, a caricature of a face or the outline of a shell we’d found, and from my mother there would always be a reference to my health.

That pattern of our holiday, established during our first summer at San Pietro, remained to influence the subsequent years. We always left Linvik on a Tuesday and stayed, en route, at the Hotel Kronberg in Hamburg and the Belvedere in Milan: we always remained for July and August at San Pietro. But on the later occasions there were differences also: my mother was no longer nervous about her English; the staff at the Villa Parco remembered us and welcomed us with increasing warmth; some of the other visitors, familiar from previous years, would greet us when we arrived. This pleased my mother but, for myself, I preferred the novelty of strangers. I liked to watch the laden taxis draw up, the emergence of a man and woman or a family, an elderly person of either sex issuing orders to a younger companion, or the arrival of a solitary figure, always the most interesting from the point of view of speculation. Monsieur Paillez was one of these: he appeared at the Villa Parco for the first time during our third summer, to be assessed by us, and no doubt by other regulars as well, when he strolled down the terrace steps late one afternoon, a thin, tall, dark-haired man in a linen suit. He sat not far from where we were and a moment later a waiter brought him a tray of tea. He smoked while he drank it, taking no interest either in his surroundings or the other people in the garden.

‘A town called Linvik,’ my mother said, and two ladies in the garden listened while she described it. The ladies were Italian, Signora Binelli and her daughter Claudia. They came from Genoa, they told my mother, which was a city renowned for its trade associations and its cuisine. They spoke of formidable grey stone and formidable palaces, stirring in the false impression that the palaces had been carved out of the side of an immense grey mountain. A passenger lift went up and down all day long between the heights of Genoa and its depths, making its passage through the mountain rock. This information the Italian ladies repeated, remarking that the lift was a great deal larger and more powerful than the one that conveyed us from the garden of the Villa Parco to the bathing place. The palaces of Genoa were built of rectangular blocks and decoratively finished, they said, and the earlier imprecision was adjusted in my mind.

Signora Binelli was very stout. She had smooth white skin, very tight, that seemed to labour under as much strain as her silk dresses did. She knew, my mother murmured once as we walked away from the two Italian ladies, not to wear over-bright clothes. There was always some black in them – in the oak leaves that patterned dark maroon or green, behind swirls of blue or brown. The Italians knew about being fat, my mother said.

Signora Binelli’s daughter, Claudia, was not at all like that. She was a film star we were told, and certainly she presented that appearance, many of her fingers displaying jewelled rings, her huge red lips perpetually parted to display a glistening flash of snowy teeth. Her eyes were huge also, shown off to best effect by the dark saucers beneath them. Her clothes were more colourful than Signora Binelli’s, but discreetly so. My mother said Claudia had taste.

‘Buon giorno,’ Monsieur Paillez greeted my mother and these ladies one morning in the garden, inclining his head as he went on his way to the lift. We sat at one of the tables, shaded by its vast blue-and-grey umbrella. Claudia’s swimming bag hung from the arm of her chair; sunglasses obscured her magnificent eyes. A yellow-backed book, Itinerario Svizzero, was on the table beside the ashtray; she smoked a cigarette. Signora Binelli wore a wide-brimmed white hat that protected the skin of her face from the sunshine. The sleeves of her dark dress were buttoned at her wrists; her shoulders and much of her neck were covered.

‘Paillez,’ Signora Binelli said. ‘Is it in France a name to know? Count Paillez?’ Bewildered by these questions, my mother only smiled in reply. Claudia removed the cigarette from between her lips. She did not think Monsieur Paillez was a count, she said. She had not heard that in the hotel.

‘We do not have counts in my country,’ my mother contributed.

‘In Italian we say conte,’ Signora Binelli explained. ‘So also contessa.’

‘I take my swim,’ Claudia said.

My mother said we would take ours soon. In prescribing this form of exercise for me Dr Edlund had reminded my mother that it must not be indulged in while food was in the early stages of digestion: we always permitted two hours at least for my breakfast of tea and brioche to settle itself before I entered the sea. Others, I noticed, were not so meticulous about such matters, but I had become used to being different where health was concerned. A day would come, Dr Edlund had confidently assured me, when I would look back on all this mollycoddling with amusement – and with gratitude also, he hastily added, for I would be the stronger for it. He was not telling the truth, as doctors sometimes cannot. My life was confined to childhood, was what he’d told my mother and my father: it would not reach beyond it. ‘We do not speak much of this,’ my father had said in a moment when he did not know I could hear. My grandmother had come to Linvik for a few days: it was she he told, and he’d been wise enough to keep the news from her until her departure was quite imminent. Care and attention saw to it that my childhood continued to advance without mishap, my father said, but even so my grandmother hugged me tearfully before she went, pressing me so tightly into her arms that I thought my end would come there and then. That was some time before my mother and I spent our first summer at San Pietro al Mare. I was eleven the summer Monsieur Paillez arrived at the Villa Parco.

‘Well, we might go now,’ my mother said, and we gathered up our things and descended the slope of the lawn to the lift that took us to the bathing place. Signora Binelli, in search of deeper shade, had moved to a table beneath the trees.

There is very little I have since liked better than swimming among the rocks at San Pietro. The water was of a tranquillity and a clear blueness that made it seem more like a lake than the sea. The rocks were washed white, like smooth, curved bones that blissfully held your body when you lay on them. Two small bathing huts – in blue- and-grey canvas similar to the lawn umbrellas – became a world, my mother’s and mine, safely holding our belongings while we swam or floated.

‘T’amuses-tu?’ Monsieur Paillez slipped by me, his overarm strokes hardly rippling the surface. ‘Ti’ diverti?’ And finally translating into the language I had become familiar with: ‘You enjoy yourself?’

‘Oh yes, of course. Yes, thank you.’

‘C’est bon,’ he called back, over his shoulder. ‘We are here to enjoy ourselves, eh?’

An attendant supplied my mother with inflated cushions to lie on, but I myself preferred the bonelike rock. Claudia had made a personal territory of a narrow little cape, spreading on it her towels and various possessions