But Deborah didn’t come that evening, nor the next day, nor the day after that. So Oliver made the journey into Perugia again, long before it was time for his next visit to the Credito Italiano. The only explanation was that the girl had not been Deborah at all. But he still felt she was, and was bewildered. He even wondered if his daughter was lying low because she’d been sent to spy on him.
‘Si, signore?’ The clerk in the reception of the hotel smiled at him, and in slow Italian Oliver made his query. He wrote down Deborah’s name on a piece of paper so that there could be no confusion. He remembered the date of the day he’d last sat at the café. From the photograph he had of her he described his daughter.
‘Momento, signore. Scusi.’ The clerk entered a small office to one side of the reception desk and returned some minutes later with a registration form. On it were Deborah’s name and signature, and the address of the flat in London. She had stayed one night only in the hotel.
‘Student,’ a girl who had accompanied the clerk from the office said. ‘She search a room in Perugia.’
‘A room?’
‘She ask.’ The girl shrugged. ‘I no have room.’
‘Thank you.’ Oliver smiled at both of them in turn. The clerk called after him in Italian. The girl had given Deborah the name of an agency, not twenty metres away, where rooms were rented to students. ‘Thank you,’ Oliver said again, but did not take the details of the agency. At the café he ordered a cappuccino.
Deborah had enrolled on a course – language or culture, or perhaps a combination. Perugia was famous for its courses; students came from all over the place. Sometimes they spent a year, or even longer, depending on the course they’d chosen. He knew that because now and again he dropped into conversation with one, and in return for a grappa or a cappuccino supplied some local information. Once he’d had lunch with a well-to-do young Iranian who’d clearly been grateful for his company.
‘Ecco, signore!’ The waitress who went off duty at eleven placed his coffee in front of him.
‘Grazie.’
‘Prego, signore.’
He lit a cigarette. Once he’d had a lighter and a silver cigarette case, given to him by a Mrs Dogsmith, whom he’d met in the Giardini Carducci. For a moment he saw again the slim, faintly embossed case, and the initials curling around one another at the bottom left-hand corner of the lighter. He’d sold both of them years ago.
A woman came out of the hotel and paused idly, glancing at the café tables. She was taller than Mrs Dogsmith and a great deal thinner. A widow or divorcee, Oliver guessed, but then a man came out of the hotel and took her arm.
‘Your mother gave you so much,’ Angelica’s irrational chatter lurched at him suddenly. ‘But still you had to steal from her.’
He felt himself broken into, set upon and violated, as he remembered feeling at the time. The unpleasant memory had come because of Deborah, because Deborah’s presence put him in mind of Angelica, naturally enough. More agreeably, he recalled that it was he who’d chosen that name for their daughter. ‘Deborah,’ he’d suggested, and Angelica had not resisted it.
Not wishing to think about Angelica, he watched the waddling movement of a pigeon on the pavement, and then listened to a conversation in Italian between a darkly suited man and his companion, a Woman in a striped tan dress. They were talking about swimwear; the man appeared to be the proprietor of a fashion shop. Young people in a group went by, and Oliver glanced swiftly from face to face, but his daughter was not among them. He ordered another cappuccino because in ten minutes or so the early-morning waitress would be going off duty.
It was a silliness of Angelica’s to say he’d stolen from his mother. He more than anyone had regretted the sad delusions that had beset his mother. It was he who had watched her becoming vague, he who had suffered when she left all she possessed to a Barnardo’s home. Angelica belonged to a later time; she’d hardly known his mother.
Slowly Oliver lit and smoked another cigarette, filling in time while he waited for the new waitress to arrive. As soon as he saw her he crumpled up the little slip that had accompanied his first cup of coffee, and placed on the table the money for the second. But this morning, when he’d gone only a few yards along the street, the waitress came hurrying after him, jabbering in Italian. He smiled and shook his head. She held out the money he’d left.
‘Oh! Mi dispiace!’ he apologized, paying her the extra.
*
‘Deborah.’
She heard her name and turned. A middle-aged man was smiling at her. She smiled back, thinking he was one of the tutors whom she couldn’t place.
‘Don’t you recognize me, Deborah?’
They were in the square. He had risen from the edge of a wooden stage that had been erected for some public meeting. The two girls Deborah was with were curious.
‘My dear,’ the man said, but seventeen years had passed since Deborah had caught her one glimpse of her father that Sunday afternoon. Neither features nor voice were familiar. ‘It’s really you!’ the man said.
Bewildered, Deborah shook her head.
‘I’m Oliver,’ Oliver said. ‘Your father.’
They sat outside, at the nearest café. She didn’t take off her sunglasses. She’d spoken to the girls she’d been with and they’d walked on. She had a class at two, she’d said.
‘Time at least for a coffee,’ Oliver said.
She had a look of him, even though she was more like Angelica. It had been a disappointment, the deduction that she hadn’t come here to seek him out. A disappointment that it was no more than a coincidence, her presence in Perugia.
‘You knew of course?’ he said. ‘You did have my address?’
She shook her head. She’d had no idea. She hadn’t even been aware that he was not in England.
‘But, Deborah, surely Angelica –’
‘No, she never did.’
Their coffee came. The waiter was young and unshaven, not neatly in a uniform like the girls at the café by the hotel. He glanced at Deborah with interest. Oliver thought he heard him making a sound with his lips, but he could not be sure.
‘I often think of you and your mother in that flat.’
Deborah realized he didn’t know Angelica had died, and found it difficult to break the news. She did so clumsily, or so she thought.
‘My God!’ he said.
Deborah dipped a finger into the foam of her coffee. She didn’t like the encounter; she wished it hadn’t taken place. She didn’t like sitting here with a man she didn’t know and didn’t want to know. ‘Apparently he’s my father,’ she’d said to her companions, momentarily enjoying the sophistication; but later, of course, all that would have to be explained.
‘Poor Angelica!’ he said.
Deborah wondered why nobody had warned her. Why hadn’t her grey-suited uncle or one of Angelica’s friends advised against this particular Italian city? Why hadn’t her mother mentioned it?
Presumably they hadn’t warned her because they didn’t know. Her mother hadn’t ever wanted to mention him; it wasn’t Angelica’s way to warn people against people.
‘She used to send me a photograph of you every summer,’ he said. ‘I wondered why none came these last two years. I never guessed.’
She nodded meaninglessly.
‘Why are you learning Italian, Deborah?’
‘I took my degree in the history of art. It’s necessary to improve my Italian now.’
‘You’re taking it up? The history of art?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘It’s lovely you’re here.’
‘Yes.’
She had chosen Perugia rather than Florence or Rome because the course was better. But if she’d known she wouldn’t have.