a single upstairs room, where shepherds had sought privacy from their animals. Efforts at conversion had been made. Electricity had been brought from the village; a kitchen, and a lavatory with a shower in it, had been fitted into the space below. But the conversion had an arrested air, reflecting a loss of interest on the part of Angelica who, years ago, had bought the place as it stood. At the time of the divorce she had made over to him the ramshackle habitation. She herself had visited it only once; soon after the divorce proceedings began she turned against the enterprise, and work on the conversion ceased. When Oliver returned on his own he found the corrugated roof still letting in rain, no water flowing from either the shower or the lavatory, the kitchen without a sink or a stove, and a cesspit not yet dug. He had come from England with his clothes and four ebony-framed pictures. ‘Well, anyway it’s somewhere to live,’ he said aloud, looking around the downstairs room, which smelt of concrete. He sighed none the less, for he was not deft with his hands.
The place was furnished now, though modestly. Two folding garden chairs did service in the downstairs room. There was a table with a fawn formica surface, and a pitch-pine bookcase. Faded rugs covered most of the concrete floor. The four heavily framed pictures – scenes of Suffolk landscape – adorned the rough stone walls to some effect. Across a corner there was a television set.
The cesspit remained undug, but in other directions Oliver had had a bit of luck. He’d met an Englishman on one of his visits to the Credito Italiano and had helped with a language difficulty. The man, in gratitude, insisted on buying Oliver a cup of coffee and Oliver, sensing a usefulness in this acquaintanceship, suggested that they drive together in the man’s car to Betona. In return for a summer’s lodging – a sleeping-bag on the concrete floor – the man replaced the damaged corrugated iron of the roof, completed the piping that brought water to the shower and the lavatory, and installed a sink and an antique gas stove that someone had thrown out, adapting the stove to receive bottled gas. He liked to work like this, to keep himself occupied, being in some kind of distress. Whenever Oliver paused in the story of his marriage his companion had a way of starting up about the business world he’d once belonged to, how failure had led to bankruptcy: finding the interruption of his own narration discourteous, Oliver did not listen. Every evening at six O’clock the man walked down to the village and returned with a litre of red wine and whatever groceries he thought necessary. Oliver explained that since he himself would not have made these purchases he did not consider that he should make a contribution to their cost. His visitor was his guest in the matter of accommodation; in fairness, it seemed to follow, he should be his visitor’s guest where the odd egg or glass of wine was concerned.
‘Angelica was never easy,’ Oliver explained, continuing the story of his marriage from one evening to the next. There was always jealousy.’ His sojourn in the Betona hills was temporary, he stated with confidence. But he did not add that, with his sights fixed on something better, he often dropped into conversation with lone English or American women in the rooms of the picture gallery or at the cafe next to the hotel. He didn’t bore his companion with this information because it didn’t appear to have much relevance. He did his best only to be interesting about Angelica, and considered he succeeded. It was a dispute in quite a different area that ended the relationship, as abruptly as it had begun. As well as hospitality, the visitor claimed a sum of money had been agreed upon, but while conceding that a cash payment had indeed been mooted, Oliver was adamant that he had not promised it. He did not greatly care for the man in the end, and was glad to see him go.
When Angelica died two years ago Deborah was twenty. The death was not a shock because her mother had been ill, and increasingly in pain, for many months: death was a mercy. Nonetheless, Deborah felt the loss acutely. Although earlier, in her adolescence, there had been arguments and occasionally rows, she’d known no companion as constant as her mother; and as soon as the death occurred she realized how patient with her and how fond of her Angelica had been. She’d been larky too, amused by unexpected things, given to laughter that Deborah found infectious. In her distress at the time of her mother’s death it never occurred to her that the man who’d come to the flat that Sunday afternoon might turn up at the funeral. In fact, he hadn’t.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Angelica had said before she died, meaning that there was provision for Deborah to undertake the post-graduate work she planned after she took her degree. ‘Don’t worry, darling.’
Deborah held her hand, ashamed when she remembered how years ago she’d been so touchy because Angelica once too often repeated that her marriage was a mistake. Her mother had never used the expression again.
‘I was a horrid child,’ Deborah cried forlornly before her mother died. ‘A horrid little bully.’
‘Darling, of course you weren’t.’
At the funeral people said how much they’d always liked her mother, how nice she’d been. They invited Deborah to visit them at any time, just to turn up when she was feeling low.
When Oliver stepped off the bus in the village the butcher’s shop was still open but he decided, after all, not to buy a pork chop, which was the choice he had contemplated when further considering the matter on the bus. A chop was suitable because, although it might cost as much as twenty thousand lire, it could be divided quite easily into two. But supposing it wasn’t necessary to offer a meal at all? Supposing Deborah arrived in the early afternoon, which was not unlikely? He bought the bread he needed instead, and a packet of soup, and cigarettes.
He wondered if Deborah had come with a message. He did not know that Angelica had died and wondered if she was hoping he might be persuaded to return to the flat in the square. It was not unlikely. As he ascended the track that led to his property, these thoughts drifted pleasurably through Oliver’s mind. ‘Deborah, I’ll have to think about that.’ He saw himself sitting with his daughter in what the man who’d set the place to rights had called the patio – a yard really, with two car seats the man had rescued from a dump somewhere, and an old tabletop laid across concrete blocks. ‘We’ll see,’ he heard himself saying, not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand.
He had taken his jacket off, and carried it over his arm.
In the upstairs room Oliver took his suit off and carefully placed it on a wire coat-hanger on the wall. He hung his tie over one linen shoulder, and changed his shirt. The trousers he put on were old corduroys, too heavy in the heat, but the best he could manage. In the kitchen he made tea and took it out to the patio, with the bread he’d Bought and his cigarettes. He waited for his daughter.
After Angelica’s death Deborah felt herself to be an orphan. Angelica’s brother and his wife, a well-meaning couple she hardly knew, fussed about her a bit; and so did Angelica’s friends. But Deborah had her own friends, and she didn’t need looking after. She inherited the flat in London and went there in the university holidays. She spent a weekend in Norfolk with her uncle and his wife, but did not do so again. Angelica’s brother was quite unlike her, a lumpish man who wore grey, uninteresting suits and had a pipe, and spectacles on a chain. His wife was wan and scatter-brained. They invited Deborah as a duty and were clearly thankful to find her independent.
Going through her mother’s possessions, Deborah discovered neither photographs of, nor letters from, her father. She did not know that photographs of herself, unaccompanied by any other form of communication, had been sent to her father every so often, as a record of her growing up. She did not know of the financial agreement that years ago had been entered into. It did not occur to her that no one might have informed the man who’d come that Sunday afternoon of Angelica’s death. It didn’t occur to her to find some way of doing so herself. None of this entered Deborah’s head because the shadowy figure who had smiled and lit a cigarette belonged as deeply in the grave as her mother did.
