Selected Stories

She nods. In the hall the baby in the American mother’s arms is sleeping at last. The mother smiles at someone Harriet can’t see and then moves towards the wide stone staircase. The couple on the sofa, still unaware that they’ve been sketched, stand up and go away. The agitated little man bustles through the hall again.

‘Sorry to go,’ Harriet’s companion finishes something he has been saying, then tells her about his journey: by train because he doesn’t care for flying. Lunch in Milan, dinner in Zurich, on neither occasion leaving the railway station. The eleven-o’clock sleeper from Zurich.

‘We used to drive out when I came with my parents.’

‘I haven’t ever done that. And of course won’t ever now.’

‘I liked it.’

At the time it didn’t seem unreal or artificial. Their smiling faces didn’t, nor the pleasure they seemed to take in poky French hotels where only the food was good, nor their chattering to one another in the front of the car, their badinage and arguments. Yet retrospect insisted that reality was elsewhere; that reality was surreptitious lunches with two other people, and afternoon rooms, and guile; that reality was a web of lies until one of them found out, it didn’t matter which; that reality was when there had to be something better than what the family offered.

‘So this time you have come alone?’

He may have said it twice, she isn’t sure. Something about his expression suggests he has.

‘Yes.’

He speaks of solitude. It offers a quality that is hard to define; much more than the cliché of getting to know yourself. He himself has been on his own for many years and has discovered consolation in that very circumstance, which is an irony of a kind, he supposes.

‘I was to go somewhere else.’ She doesn’t know why she makes this revelation. Politeness, perhaps. On other evenings, after dinner, she has seen this man in conversation with whomever he has chosen to sit beside. He is polite himself. He sounds more interested than inquisitive.

‘You changed your mind?’

‘A friendship fell apart.’

‘Ah.’

‘I should be on an island in the sun.’

‘And where is that, if I may ask?’

‘Skyros it’s called. Renowned for its therapies.’

‘Therapies?’

‘They’re a fashion.’

‘For the ill, is this? If I may say so, you don’t look ill.’

‘No, I’m not ill.’ Unable to keep the men she loves in love with her. But of course not ill.

‘In fact, you look supremely healthy.’ He smiles. His teeth are still his own. ‘If I may say so.’

‘I’m not so sure that I like islands in the sun. But even so I wanted to go there.’

‘For the therapies?’

‘No, I would have avoided that. Sand therapy, water therapy, sex therapy, image therapy, holistic counselling. I would have steered clear, I think.’

‘Being on your own’s a therapy too, of course. Although it’s nice to have a chat.’

She doesn’t listen; he goes on talking. On the island of Skyros tourists beat drums at sunset and welcome the dawn with song. Or they may simply swim and play, or discover the undiscovered self. The Pensione Cesarina - even the pensione transformed by the Germans and the Dutch - offers nothing like it. Nor would it offer enough to her parents any more. Her divided parents travel grandly now.

‘I see The Spanish Farm

is still on the shelves.’ The old man has risen and hovers for a moment. ‘I doubt that anyone’s read it since I did in 1987.’

‘No, probably not.’

He says goodnight and changes it to goodbye because he has to make an early start. For a moment, it seems to Harriet, he hesitates, something about his stance suggesting that he’d like to be invited to stay, to be offered a cup of coffee or a drink. Then he goes, without saying anything else. Lonely in old age, she suddenly realizes, wondering why she didn’t notice that when he was talking to her. Lonely in spite of all he claims for solitude.

‘Goodbye,’ she calls after him, but he doesn’t hear. They were to come back here the summer of the separation; instead there were cancellations then too, and an empty fortnight.

‘Buona notte.’ The boy in the white jacket smiles tentatively from his cupboard as she passes through the hall. He’s new tonight; it was another boy before. She hasn’t realized that either.

She walks through the heat of the morning on the narrow road to the town, by the graveyard and the abandoned petrol pumps. A few cars pass her, coming from the pensione, for the road leads hardly anywhere else, petering out eventually. It would have been hotter on the island of Skyros.

Clouds have gathered in one part of the sky, behind her as she walks. The shade of clouds might make it cooler, she tells herself, but so far they are not close enough to the sun for that. The road widens and gradually the incline becomes less steep as she approaches the town. There’s a park with concrete seats and the first of the churches, its chosen saint Agnese of this town.