After breakfast the next morning he did not join us, nor did he arrive at the bathing place. My mother, I thought, became a little disconsolate, as if some flickering of doubt had crept into her mind, as if she’d begun to imagine that she was wrong in the explanation that had occurred to her. But if this doubt had indeed begun to haunt her it was soon dissipated.
‘This has been a sorrowful time for me,’ Monsieur Paillez said in the town that evening, appearing suddenly beside us as we left the pharmacy where one of my prescriptions had been renewed. ‘Since yesterday at midday it has been unhappy.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘From time to time this has to be.’
Monsieur Paillez had a mobile face. His expressions changed rapidly, his dark eyes conveying the mood that possessed him, even before the line of his lips did. His wife was mad, my mother had told me when I’d asked her the evening before, not quite understanding the exchanges with Signora Binelli. It was not easy for Monsieur Paillez, my mother had added.
He walked with us back to the hotel and then sat on the terrace, ordering the aperitifs for my mother and himself and an
‘You have returned to us!’ Signora Binelli cried as soon as she saw him sitting there.
‘Ah,
In English he had difficulty with his h’s, but only when they came at the beginning of a word. Sometimes he repeated what he’d just said, in order to set that right. He nodded after he’d agreed he had returned. He listened while Signora Binelli said everyone had missed him.
‘Monsieur Paillez is safely here again,’ she pointed out to her daughter when she arrived on the terrace. ‘He has not gone without farewells.’
‘Never,’ Monsieur Paillez protested. ‘Never would I be guilty.’
That evening – no doubt because of his low spirits – Monsieur Paillez sat with us for dinner. ‘I do not intrude?’ he said. ‘I would not wish to.’ My mother assured him he did not, and I do not believe she once observed the staring of Signora Binelli across the crowded dining-room, or Claudia’s pretence that she had not noticed.
‘Tell me what you like best to draw,’ Monsieur Paillez invited me, ‘here in San Pietro.’
I could not think what to reply – the rocks where we bathed? the waiters? the promenade when we sat outside a cafe? Claudia or Signora Binelli? So I said:
‘The smoke trees because they are so difficult.’ It was true. Try as I would, I could not adequately represent the misty foliage or catch the subtlety of its colours.
‘And no drawing of course,’ my mother said, ‘could ever convey the smoke trees’ evening scent.’
She laughed, and Monsieur Paillez laughed: at some time or another, although I could not guess when, his error in imagining that the smoke trees gave off a night-time perfume had become a joke between them. Sitting there not saying anything further, I received the impression that my mother had come to know Monsieur Paillez better than the moments after breakfast on the lawn, and the whiling away of their aperitifs, allowed. I experienced the bewildering feeling that their exchanges – even those in which I had taken part – conveyed more than the words were called upon to communicate.
‘My dear, go up,’ my mother said. ‘I’ll follow in a moment.’
I was a little shy, having to leave the dining-room on my own, which I had never done before. People always looked at my mother and myself when we did so together, some of them inclining their heads as a way of bidding us good-night, others actually saying ‘
Claudia clapped together the tips of her fingers, pleased that I spoke in Italian because she had taught me a few phrases. I had said good evening beautifully, she complimented, calling after me that certainly I had an ear.
‘That poor child,’ her mother tartly deplored as I pushed at the dining-room’s swing-doors. ‘What a thing for a child!’
That night I had a nightmare. My father and I were in the rector’s house in Linvik. The purpose of our being there was mysterious, but having eaten something with the rector we were taken to a small room which was full of the clocks he collected and repaired as a pastime. Here, while he and my father were in conversation, I stole a clock face, attempting to secrete it in my clothes. Then it seemed that I had stolen more than that: springs and cogs and wheels and hands had been lifted from the blue baize of the table and filled all my pockets. ‘I insist on the police,’ the rector said, and I was made to sit down on a chair to which my father tied me with a rope. But it was not the police who came, only the old man who delivered firewood to
‘Now, now,’ my mother said. ‘It’s only a nightmare.’
Her embrace protected me; her lips were cool on my cheek. The garlic in the veal escalope had made it rich, she said, and begged me to tell her the dream. But already it seemed silly to have been frightened by such absurdity, and although I told her about the woodseller’s punishment I was ashamed that in my dream I had not been able to recognize this for what it was.
Behind my mother as she bent over me there was an upright rectangle of light. It came from the open doorway of her bedroom: because of my delicate constitution we always had adjoining rooms in the hotels where we stayed. ‘Shall we have it like that tonight?’ she suggested, but I shook my head, and rejected also her suggestion that my bedside light should be left burning. It was cowardly to capitulate to the threat of fantasies: my father may once have said so, although if he had he would not have said it harshly, for that was not my father’s way.
I believe I slept for a while, impossible to gauge how long. I awoke abruptly and recalled at once the rector’s clock-room and the fear that had possessed me. Without my mother’s consoling presence, I did not wish to return
