“Magic,” Charlie told the boy with a laugh, and made a sweep with his arm that sent a dozen birds streaming aloft.
The boy's mouth fell open, and Charlie saw in the look of sudden enlightenment in his eyes that the child had taken the word literally, as a claim on Charlie's part to be the presiding genius here who had turned a bit of the local and familiar into something extraordinary, and for a moment Charlie actually felt a breath of what the child's belief had accorded him.
A girl of ten or eleven appeared, also skinny but more vigorously red-headed than the boy. She took him sternly by the hand.
“Kelvin,” she scolded in a whisper, "you know you're not allowed!” Fiercely protective, she cast a baleful look in the direction of the stranger who had been speaking to him. But the boy, suddenly defiant, broke away, and with arms outspread launched headlong into a flock of gulls, which lifted with excited shrieks and went flapping past his head. Glancing back a moment to make sure that he was the one who had been the actual cause of this commotion, he tilted his arms like outstretched wings and made another rush among the birds.
Charlie turned away, lightly amused. But he would think of this inconsequential moment afterwards as being for him the end of one thing and the beginning of another, though which element in it, if any, had been decisive he would never know: the translation of the park to another shore; the boy Kelvin's mistaken belief that, like a conjuror at a children's party, he had produced all this shifting light, all these plump white bodies, out of his sleeve; the sister's defiance of him as a dangerous stranger. Perhaps it was all these in odd collusion with one another, or in collusion with something in himself that had been waiting for just this concatenation of small events to touch it awake and open a way to the future. Or something else again that he had no possibility of bringing to consciousness. Some chemical change in him even more miraculous at one level, though ordinary and explicable at another, than the appearance overnight, out of nowhere as it were, of a thousand sea creatures so far from the sea.
Walking home he had no sense that anything momentous had occurred. He was aware only of his immediate mood; an amusement that continued to work on him, quiet but quickening, and a glimpse— for the moment it was no more than that — of how small the pressures might be that determine the sum of what is and what we feel, the fugitive deflections and instinctive blind gestures that might be the motor of change.
He did not know as yet that there was a change. Only that it was possible, and that the agents of it could be small. But that, for the moment, was enough.
Towards Midnight
What came to her ear was the hovering close by of mechanical wings, that had come, she thought, to carry her off. In her dream-state she felt only the relief it would be to pass the weight of her body, light as it now was, to some other agency.
The wings beat closer. She started awake, and the familiar objects of her upstairs sitting room, as if a second earlier she might have surprised them in a temporary absence, settled back into place.
The TV screen was dancing, white with static. It was after midnight. For a good hour and a half, it seemed, she herself had been absent. She reached for the remote. But the sound out of her dream persisted. It was the clatter of the filter boxes in the pool two levels below. A breeze must have sprung up. She stirred herself, gathered up her things.
But against the blue Tuscan night the cypress tops in the window were as still as if they were painted.
She stepped out on to her terrace and, half hidden in shadow, peered down through the darkness of pomegranate and bay. Someone was down there, swimming. All she could make out were the streamers of light at his shoulders, and when he came, too quickly, to the end of a length, the heap of silvery bubbles he left as he tucked over into the turn. Up and down he went, in a dozen powerful strokes, and the pool, which for so many weeks had lain heavy and still in the heat, under a mantle of olive florets, drowned midges, beetles paddling in clumsy circles, expanded and contracted like a living thing.
If Gianfranco was here, or one of her sons, Tommy or Jake, what a ruckus there'd be! They'd feel bound to go down and shout at the fellow. Chuck him out.
Well, she wasn't going to try that. She was alone in the house, a kilometre from the village. No neighbours in calling distance. But she felt no particular alarm. Only surprise, and a kind of delight at the unexpectedness of it, exhilaration in the presence of so much effort. As if she had got herself hooked up to some new chemical — neat starlight— that glowed in her veins and quickened her awareness of her own body, but as a thing alive and part again of the living scene.
With her elbows propped on the parapet of her terrace, she watched — hard to say for how long — and was taken out of herself, till at the end of a length like any other he did not tumble into a turn, but with his head streaming moonlight came to his feet, and in the same agile movement sprang on to his splayed hands, heaved himself up, and was out.
No one she recognised.
A sturdy peasant type, in a bathing-slip that might have been red.
She stepped back in case he glanced up and caught her there.
But he was too absorbed for that. Standing with his arms forced back hard behind him, fingers linked, he did half a dozen stretching exercises, dipping his head swiftly like a bird; then straightened and moved out of sight under the pergola.
The pool, meanwhile, had settled to clear moonlight again.
She felt let down, as if he had taken with him part of the night and what was vital to it. Was it over? Was that it?
She stood peering into the darkness of the pergola. He must have gone already, through one of the gaps in the fence. The fence had gaps, but there were so many brambles along its length, and the bank was so steep, that they hadn't bothered to have it mended. Was he really gone?
A gust of fragrance came on the air, then thinned and came again. So strong! Her lime tree.
Out of sight on the other side of the house, and taller now than the house itself, its scent was so overpowering on these warm May nights that in her mind she could actually see the great dark mass of it looming against the stars.
How good it is to be here, she thought, at just this moment. With the moon resting like that on the tip of a cypress, the air freighted with the scent of tiglio, the clear bright notes of the nightingale dropping so precisely into place, off in the dark. It was a moment, she thought, when all things were just as they should be. Not a degree lighter or heavier or louder or more intense.
Ah, her swimmer!
Wearing rough workman's trousers but still bare-chested, he moved to the edge of the pool and stood there towelling his hair with his T-shirt; then, rather dreamily, began to dry his chest.
He might have looked up then and seen her. She drew back. But something else had caught his attention.
He was gazing out over the wall of bay to the hills with their swathes of blue-black macchia. Looking, perhaps, for where the nightingale was dinning from its post in the olive grove, establishing, note on note, its claim to territory.
There, she could have told him. Further to the left. Down there.
He turned his head as if he had heard, but in the wrong direction. Then kneeling, laced his sneakers and, with the soaked T-shirt across his shoulders, ducked down beside the fence and was gone.
She continued to stand. Looking at the place where he had vanished, but with no sense of being left. Rather of remaining, of being here and in possession of all this. The place. The hour. Most of all, of herself.