He went to the bathroom, washed his hands, and came back, aware of how hungry he was and how happy to be home with them.
'You look like you were in the sun today,' Paola said, pouring him a glass of Cabernet.
He took a sip. 'Is this the stuff that student of yours makes?' he asked, raising the glass and studying the colour.
'Yes. Do you like it?'
'Yes. How much did we buy?'
'Two cases.'
'Good,' he said and started to eat his pasta.
'You look like you were in the sun today,' Paola repeated.
Chewing, he swallowed, and said, ‘I was out on Burano.'
'Papa, can I go out with you the next time you go?' Chiara interrupted.
'Chiara, I'm talking to your father,' Paola said.
'Can't I talk to him at the same time?' she asked with every evidence of offended pride. 'When I'm finished.'
'But we're talking about the same thing, aren't we?' Chiara asked, smart enough to remove any sound of resentment from her voice.
Paola looked at her plate then set her fork very carefully beside her unfinished lasagne.
‘I asked your father,' she began, and Brunetti was aware of her referring to him as 'your father'. Beneath that linguistic distance, he suspected, lay some other.
Chiara started to speak, but Raffi gave her a sharp kick under the table, and her head swung towards him. He pressed his lips together and narrowed his eyes at her, and she stopped.
Silence fell, then lay, on the table. 'Yes,' Brunetti said, clearing his throat and then continuing. ‘I went out to Burano to talk to someone, but he wasn't there. I tried to eat at da Romano, but there were no tables.' He finished his lasagne and looked across at Paola. 'Is there any more? It's delicious’ he added.
'What else is there, Mamma?' Chiara demanded, appetite overcoming Raffi's warning.
'Beef stew with peppers’ Paola said.
"The one with potatoes?' Raffi asked, his voice rich with feigned enthusiasm.
'Yes’ Paola said, getting to her feet and starting to stack the plates. The lasagne, to Brunetti's diappointment, proved to be much like the Messiah: there was no second coming.
With Paola busy at the stove, Chiara waved a hand to get Brunetti's attention, then tilted her head to one side, gaped her mouth open and stuck out her tongue. She crossed her eyes and tilted her head to the other side, then turned it into a metronome, shaking it quickly back and forth, her tongue lolling slackly from her mouth.
From her place at the stove, where she was busy serving the stew, Paola said, 'If you think this beef will give you Mad Cow Disease, Chiara, perhaps you'd prefer not to eat any.'
Instantly, Chiara's head was motionless, her hands folded neatly in front of her. 'Oh, no, Mamma,' she said with oily piety, 'I'm very hungry, and you know it's one of my favourites.'
'Everything's your favourite’ Raffi said.
She stuck her tongue out again, but this time her head remained motionless.
Paola turned back to the table, placing a dish in front of Chiara, then Raffi. She set another in front of Brunetti and then served herself. She sat down.
'What did you do at school today?' Brunetti asked the children jointly, hoping that one of them would answer. As he ate, his attention drifted from the chunks of stewed beef to the cubes of carrot, the small slices of onion. Raffi was saying something about his Greek instructor. When he paused, Brunetti looked across at Paola and asked, 'Did you put Barbera in this?'
She nodded, and he smiled, pleased he'd got it right. 'Wonderful,' he said, spearing another piece of beef. Raffi concluded his story about the Greek teacher, and Chiara cleared the table. 'Little plates,' Paola told her when she was done.
Paola went to the counter and removed the round top from the porcelain cake dish she had inherited from her Great-Aunt Ugolina in Parma. Inside it, as Brunetti had hardly dared hope, was her apple cake, the one with lemon and orange juice and enough Grand Marnier to permeate the whole thing and linger on the tongue for ever.
'Your mother is a saint,' he said to the children.
'A saint,' repeated Raffi.
'A saint,' intoned Chiara as an investment towards a second helping.
After dinner, Brunetti took a bottle of Calvados, intent on maintaining the apple theme introduced by the cake, and went out on to the terrace. He set the bottle down, then went back into the kitchen for two glasses and, he hoped, his wife. When he suggested to Chiara that she do the dishes, she made no objection.
'Come on’ he said to Paola and returned to the terrace.
He poured the two glasses, sat, put his feet up on the railing, and looked off at the clouds drifting in the far distance. When Paola sat down in the other chair, he nodded towards the clouds and asked, 'You think it'll rain?'
‘I hope so. I read today that there are fires in the mountains up above Belluno.'
'Arson?' he asked.
'Probably’ she answered. 'How else can they build on it?' It was a peculiarity of the law that undeveloped land upon which the construction of houses was forbidden lost that protection as soon as the trees on it ceased to exist. And what more efficient means of removing trees than fire?
Neither of them much wanted to follow up this subject, and so Brunetti asked, 'What's wrong?'
One of the things Brunetti had always loved about Paola was what he persisted, in the face of all her objections to the term, in thinking of as the masculinity of her mind, and so she did not bother to feign confusion. Instead, she said, ‘I find your interest in Elettra strange. And I suppose if I were to think about it a bit longer, I'd probably find it offensive.'
It was Brunetti who echoed, innocently, 'Offensive?'
'Only if I thought about it much longer. At the moment, I find it only strange, worthy of comment, unusual.'
'Why?' he asked, setting his glass on the table and pouring some more Calvados.
She turned and looked at him, her face a study in open confusion. But she did not repeat his question; she attempted to answer it. 'Because you have thought about little except her for the last week, and because I assume your trip to Burano today had something to do with her.'
Other qualities he had always admired in Paola were the fact that she was not a snoop and that jealousy was not part of her makeup. 'Are you jealous?' he asked before he had time to think.
Her mouth dropped open and she stared at him with eyes that might as well have been stuck out on stalks, so absolute was her attention. She turned away from him and said, addressing her remarks to the campanile of San Polo, 'He wants to know if I'm jealous.' When the campanile did not respond, she turned her eyes in the direction of San Marco.
As they sat, the silence lengthening between them, the tension of the scene drifted away as if the mere mention of the word 'jealousy' had sufficed to chase it off.
The half-hour struck, and Brunetti finally said, "There's no need for it, you know, Paola. There's nothing I want from her.'
'You want her safety.'
"That's for her, not from her,' he insisted.
She turned towards him then and asked, without any trace of her usual fierceness, 'You really believe this, don't you, that you don't want anything from her?'
'Of course,' he insisted.
She turned away from him again, studying the clouds, higher now and moving off towards the mainland.
'What's wrong?' he finally asked into her expanding silence.
'Nothing's really wrong. It's just that we're at one of those points where the difference between men and women becomes evident.'
'What difference?' he asked.
'The capacity of self-deceit,' she said, but corrected herself and said, 'Or rather, the things about which we choose to deceive ourselves.'
'Like what?' he asked, striving for neutrality.