Selected Stories

Not wanting to be inside, Harriet walks in the garden and among the vines, her shoes drenched. From the town comes the chiming of bells: six o’clock at Santa Fabiola, six o’clock a minute later somewhere else. While she stands alone among the dripping vines she cannot make a connection that she knows is there. There is a blankness in her thoughts, a density that feels like muddle also, until she realizes: the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape, glimpsed through arches, has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time.

In the dining-room the table where the man with the garish shirts sat has been joined to a family table to allow for a party of seven. There is a different woman where the smart Frenchwoman sat, and no one at the table of the old man. The woman who was explaining in the trattoria that she must not eat food containing flour is given consommé instead of ravioli. New faces are dotted everywhere.

‘Buona sera,’ the rust-haired waitress greets Harriet, and the waitress with glasses brings her salad.

‘Grazie,’ Harriet murmurs.

‘Prego, signora.’

She pours her wine, breaks off a crust of bread. It’s noisy in the dining-room now, dishes clattering, the babble of voices. It felt like noise in the foyer of the Rembrandt Cinema when he told her: the uproar of shock, although in fact it was quite silent there. Bright, harsh colours flashed through her consciousness, as if some rush of blood exploded in a kaleidoscope of distress. For a moment in the foyer of the cinema she closed her eyes, as she had when they told her they weren’t to be a family any more.

She might have sent them postcards, but she hasn’t. She might have reported that breakfast at the pensione is more than coffee and rolls since the Germans and the Dutch and the Swiss have begun to come: cheese and cold meats, fruit and cereals, fresh sponge cake, a buffet on the terrace. Each morning she has sat there reading The Small House at Allington , wondering if they would like to know of the breakfast-time improvement. She wondered today if it would interest them to learn that the abandoned petrol pumps are still there on the road to the town, or that she sat in the deserted park beneath the chestnut trees. She thought of sending him a postcard too, but in the end she didn’t. His predecessor it was who encouraged her to bring long novels on holiday, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The Mill on the Floss

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It’s beef tonight, with spinach. And afterwards Harriet has dolce, remembering this sodden yellow raisin cake from the past. She won’t taste that again; as mysteriously as she knows she has cheated without meaning to in her love affairs, she knows she won’t come back, alone or with someone else. Coming back has been done, a private journey that chance suggested. Tomorrow she’ll be gone.

In the room with the bookcases and the Giotto reproductions she watches while people drink their grappa or their Stock, or ask the white-jacketed boy for more coffee, or pick up conversations with one another. The Belgian girls have got to know the young Englishman who goes down after wrecks and Nev who’s in the business world. All four pass through the room on their way to the terrace, the girls with white cardigans draped on their shoulders because it isn’t as warm as it was last night. ‘That man drew us!’ a voice cries, and the couple who were sketched last night gaze down at their hardly recognizable selves in the pensione’s comment book.

He backed away, as others have, when she asked too much of love, when she tried to change the circumstances that are the past by imposing a brighter present, and constancy in the future above all else. She has been the victim of herself: with vivid clarity she knows that now and wonders why she does and why she didn’t before. Nothing tells her when she ponders the solitude of her stay in the Pensione Cesarina, and she senses that nothing ever will.

She sees again the brown-and-green striped tie of the old man who talked about being on your own, and the freckles that are blotches on his forehead. She sees herself walking in the morning heat past the graveyard and the rusted petrol pumps. She sees herself seeking the shade of the chestnut trees in the park, and crossing the piazza to the trattoria when the first raindrops fell. She hears the swish of the cleaner’s mop in the church of Santa Fabiola, she hears the tourists’ whisper. The fingers of the praying woman flutter on her beads, the candles flare. The story of Santa Fabiola is lost in the shadows that were once the people of her life, the family tomb reeks odourlessly of death. Rain has sweetened the breathless air, the angel comes mysteriously also.

Widows