Selected Stories

There’s no one in the park until Harriet sits there beneath the chestnut trees in a corner. Far below her, as the town tails off again, a main road begins to wind through clumps of needle pines and umbrella pines to join, far out of sight, a motorway. ‘But weren’t we happy?’ she hears herself exclaim, a little shrill because she couldn’t help it. Yes, they were happy, he agreed at once, anxious to make that clear. Not happy enough was what he meant, and you could tell; something not quite right. She asked him and he didn’t know, genuine in his bewilderment.

When she feels cooler she walks on, down shaded, narrow streets to the central piazza of the town, where she rests again, with a cappuccino at a pavement table.

Italians and tourists move slowly in the unevenly paved square, women with shopping bags and dogs, men leaving the barber’s, the tourists in their summery clothes. The church of Santa Fabiola dominates the square, grey steps in front, a brick and stone façade. There is another café, across from the one Harriet has chosen, and a line of market stalls beside it. The town’s banks are in the square but not its shops. There’s a trattoria and a gelateria, their similar decoration connecting them, side by side. ‘Yes, they’re all one,’ her father said.

In this square her father lifted her high above his head and she looked down and saw his laughing, upturned face and she laughed too, because he joked so. Her mother stuttered out her schoolgirl French in the little hotels where they stayed on the journey out, and blushed with shame when no one understood. ‘Oh, this is pleasant!’ her mother murmured, a table away from where Harriet is now.

A priest comes down the steps of the church, looks about him, does not see whom he thought he might. A skinny dog goes limping by. The bell of Santa Fabiola chimes twelve o’clock and when it ceases another bell, farther away, begins. Clouds have covered the sun, but the air is as hot as ever. There’s still no breeze.

It was in the foyer of the Rembrandt Cinema that he said he didn’t think their love affair was working. It was then that she exclaimed, ‘But weren’t we happy?’ They didn’t quarrel. Not even afterwards, when she asked him why he had told her in a cinema foyer. He didn’t know, he said; it just seemed right in that moment, some fragment of a mood they shared. If it hadn’t been for their holiday’s being quite soon their relationship might have dragged on for a while. Much better that it shouldn’t, he said.

The fourteenth of February in London was quite as black, and cold, and as wintersome as it was at Allington, and was, perhaps, somewhat more melancholy in its coldness. She has read that bit before and couldn’t settle to it, and cannot now. She takes her dark glasses off: the clouds are not the pretty bundles she noticed before, white cottonwool as decoration is by Raphael or Perugino. The clouds that have come up so quickly are grey as lead, a sombre panoply pegged out against a blue that’s almost lost. The first drops fall when Harriet tries the doors of Santa Fabiola and finds them locked. They will remain so, a notice tersely states, until half-past two.

It had been finally arranged that the marriage should take place in London, she reads in the trattoria. There were certainly many reasons which would have made a marriage from Courcy Castle more convenient. The De Courcy family were all assembled at their country family residence, and could therefore have been present at the ceremony without cost or trouble. She isn’t hungry; she has ordered risotto, hoping it will be small, and mineral water without gas.

‘C’è del pane o della farina nel piatto? Non devo mangiare della farina

,’ a woman is saying, and the gaunt-faced waiter carefully listens, not understanding at first and then excitedly nodding. ‘Non c’è farina,’ he replies, pointing at items on the menu. The woman is from the pensione. She’s with a lanky young man who might be her son, and Harriet can’t identify the language they speak to one another.

‘Is fine?’ the same waiter asks Harriet as he passes, noticing that she has begun to eat her risotto. She nods and smiles and reads again. The rain outside is heavy now.