They implored the sky. Large drops fell sparsely on the gravel. And that was all. Where the sky had been dark, the stars came out.

“Let’s go in. There’s no use standing here.” Janet took Helena Palmer by the arm. They turned their backs on the fire. “How nice you look.”

Jimmy thought, walking behind them to the house, how nice they all looked—the women in smooth pale colors with summer-colored skin and shining hair. Robin tall and serious. Jimmy liked good looks, good taste, good will. He liked the way he had arranged life, including as much of these as possible.

“I like your villa,” Robin said. “A beauty.”

“We live on the other side, mostly,” Janet said. “It gives onto the garden. But of course this is the front.” A servant held a door, they passed through. “The façade is after a sketch by Sangallo. Then it got the usual going-over later on.”

They sat in a red-tiled, white-vaulted room, around a low table of drinks.

“So awful,” said Miss Helena Palmer.

Jimmy poured gin and tonic for her. “It touches on what I’m writing just now. The Italian sense of responsibility. Or absence of it. In our countries, a fire like that—you’d have the fire brigade out in a minute, the whole countryside would pitch in. Here, everything is personal—if it’s their family or their lover they might help out, but no civic responsibility whatever. Even if the pompieri were called, they wouldn’t show for hours. Look what happened in the flood—official negligence all over, the Premier didn’t even visit the city after the disaster. And if you ask a Florentine what he thinks of it all, he’ll shrug and say, ‘What do you expect?’ The point is, you must expect—you must demand—that the state and the communities take their responsibilities seriously. But no—here everything is personal.”

“Well at least that’s something,” his wife said. “We tend to load onto the community the things that should be personal. Isn’t one always hearing at home, ‘That’s not my problem’?”

“Oh come on. Every country has its version of that expression. Come on now. Come off it. Don’t they say in France ‘Ce n’est pas ma responsabilité’?”

“In England we say ‘That’s not my affair,’” Robin said. “In fact, after ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted,’ it’s our favorite expression.”

“All right then, what is it here?”

Jimmy twisted the stick round in his drink, his elbows on his widely spaced knees. He grinned, the man in the moon. “I’ll tell you what it is, the Italian version. It’s ‘Ci penso io’—‘Leave it to me.’ Those words, they’re the kiss of death. That’s the way the brush-off goes round here: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it. Leave it to me.’”