In the cool of the appartamento she lunches alone. With her frusta and Fontina she eats peppery radishes and drinks acqua minerale. Wine in the daytime makes her sleepy, and she is determined this afternoon to learn another thirty words and to do two exercises for the girl in the Informazioni. Le Chiavi del Regno by A.J. Cronin is open beside her, but for a moment she does not read it. A week ago, on the telephone to England, she described the four new villas of Signor Falconi to prospective tenants, Signora Falconi having asked her if she would. The Falconis had shown her the villas they had built near their fattoria in the hills, and she assured someone in Gloucester that any one of them would perfectly suit her requirements, which were sun and tranquillity and room enough for six.
Guilt once consumed her, Henrietta considers. She continued to be a secretary in the department for six years after her marriage but had given it up because she’d found it awkward, having to work not just for her husband but for his rivals and his enemies. He’d been pleased when she’d done so, and although she’d always intended to find a secretarial post outside the university she never had. She’d felt guilty about that, because she was contributing so little, a childless housewife.
‘I want to stay here.’ She says it aloud, pouring herself more acqua minerale, not eating for a moment. ‘Voglio stare qui.’ She has known the worst of last winter’s weather; she has watched spring coming; heat will not defeat her. How has she not guessed, through all those years of what seemed like a contented marriage, that solitude suits her better? It only seemed contented, she knows that now: she had talked herself into an artificial contentment, she had allowed herself to become a woman dulled by the monotony of a foolish man, his sprawling bigness and his sense of failure. It is bliss of a kind not to hear his laughter turned on for a television joke, not to look daily at his flamboyant ties and unpolished shoes. Quella mattina il diario si aprí alla data Ottobre 1917: how astonished he would be if he could see her now, childishly delighting in The Keys of the Kingdom in Italian.
It was her fault, she’d always believed, that they could not have children – yet something informs her now that it was probably more her husband’s, that she’d been wrong to feel inadequate. As a vacuum-cleaner sucks in whatever it touches, he had drawn her into a world that was not her own; she had existed on territory where it was natural to be blind – where it was natural, too, to feel she must dutifully console a husband because he was not a success professionally. ‘Born with a sense of duty,’ her father once said, when she was ten or so. ‘A good thing, Henrietta.’ She is not so sure: guilt and duty seem now to belong together, different names for a single quality.
Later that day she walks to the Church of San Biagio, among the meadows below the walls of the town. Boys are playing football in the shade, girls lie on the grass. She goes over her vocabulary in her mind, passing by the church. She walks on white, dusty roads, between rows of slender pines. Solivare is the word she has invented – to do with wandering alone. Piantare means to plant; piantamento is planting, piantagione plantation. Determinedly she taxes her atrophied memory: sulla via di casa and in modo da; un manovale and la briciola.
In the August of that year, when the heat is at its height, Signora Falconi approaches Henrietta in the macelleria. She speaks in Italian, for Henrietta’s Italian is better now than Signora Falconi’s rudimentary English. There is something, Signora Falconi reveals – a request that has not to do with reassuring a would-be tenant on the telephone. There is some other proposition that Signor Falconi and his wife would like to put to her.
‘Verrò,’ Henrietta agrees. ‘Verrò martedí coll’ autobus.’
The Falconis offer her coffee and a little grappa. Their four villas, clustered around their fattoria, are full of English tenants now. Every fortnight these tenants change, so dirty laundry must be gathered for the lavanderia, fresh sheets put on the beds, the villa cleaned. And the newcomers, when they arrive, must be shown where everything is, told about the windows and the shutters, warned about the mosquitoes and requested not to use too much water. They must have many other details explained to them, which the Falconis, up to now, have not quite succeeded in doing. There is a loggia in one of the villas that would be Henrietta’s, a single room with a balcony and a bathroom, an outside staircase. And the Falconis would pay just a little for the cleaning and the changing of the sheets, the many details explained. The Falconis are apologetic, fearing that Henrietta may consider the work too humble. They are anxious she should know that women to clean and change sheets are not easy to come by since they find employment in the hotels of the nearby spa, and that there is more than enough for Signora Falconi herself to do at the fattoria.
It is not the work Henrietta has imagined when anticipating her future, but her future in her appartamento is uncertain, for she cannot live for ever on strangers’ charity and one day the strangers will return.
‘Va bene,’ she says to the Falconis. ‘Lo faccio.’
She moves from the Piazza San Lucia. La governante Signora Falconi calls her, and the tenants of the villas become her temporary friends. Some take her out to II Marzucco, the hotel of the town. Others drive her to the sulphur baths or to the abbey at Monte Oliveto, where doves flutter through the cloisters, as white as the dusty roads she loves to walk on. On either side of the pink brick archway are the masterpieces of Luca della Robbia and sometimes the doves alight on them. This abbey on the hill of Oliveto is the most beautiful place she has ever visited: she owes a debt to the girl with the granny glasses.
In the evening she sits on her balcony, drinking a glass of vino nobile, hearing the English voices, and the voices of the Italians in and around the fattoria. But by October the English voices have dwindled and the only customers of the fattoria are the Italians who come traditionally for lunch on Sundays. Henrietta cleans the villas then. She scours the saucepans and puts away the cutlery and the bed linen. The Falconis seem concerned that she should be on her own so much and invite her to their meals occasionally, but she explains that her discovery of solitude has made her happy. Sometimes she watches them making soap and candles, learning how that is done.
The girl, walking up and down the sitting-room that once was Henrietta’s, is more matter-of-fact and assured than Henrietta remembers her, though her complexion has not improved. Her clothes – a black je sey and a black leather skirt – are of a better quality. There is a dusting of dandruff on the jersey, her long hair has been cut.
‘It’s the way things worked out,’ she says, which is something she has said repeatedly before, during the time they have had to spend together.
Henrietta does not reply, as she has not on the previous occasions. Upstairs, in blue-and-brown-striped pyjamas, purchased by herself three years ago, the man of whom each has had a share rests. He is out of danger, recovering in an orderly way.
‘As Roy himself said,’ the girl repeats also, ‘we live in a world of mistakes.’