They all laughed. He went on, “This is the weekend, you see. There are lots of fires at weekends in this dry weather—not all this bad, naturally, but bad enough. Every Sunday you hear of an incendio somewhere in the vicinity. Picnickers leave campfires, drop cigarettes. And then there’s the hunting season—which opened last week, end of August.”

“I hate the hunting,” Janet said. She had lain in bed that morning listening to church bells through the sound of shots.

“Oh, those cars,” cried Marian. “Coming out here this evening, so many cars on the road, just festooned with dead animals and birds.”

“Please.” Jimmy touched her arm. “Lay off that. We’re having pheasant for dinner.”

“We are comfortable here, yes.” Janet turned her head to ask the servant for bread, illustrating her point. “The house is lovely, and the modern things all work besides. And plenty of water, which is almost never the case in these places.”

“I was going to ask,” Miss Palmer said, “supposing the fire brigade did come, how would they get water to put the fire out?”

“You beat it out,” Jimmy explained. Why won’t she let it drop? “You need as many men as you can get to act as beaters and to dig fire-breaks. You’d be amazed how quickly they can beat it out. I’ve seen them.”

“There’s a house,” Janet said. “On that hillside. Right at the top.”

Robin helped himself to the wine. “Perhaps it’s a chapel.”

“Would that make a difference?” Marian asked. “I mean, might it be uninhabited?”

No one answered. Somebody said, “This bread needs salt.”

“They never put salt in the bread in Tuscany.”

“And this is your own wine, is it?”

“The wine and the oil, both. And the vegetables. In fact, just about everything’s from our own land this evening.”

“All the lower part of that hillside is olive groves. Where the fire is.”

“I tell you, Janet, it could be put out almost instantly. All you need is enough people.”

There are five of us, Robin was thinking; six with the man who is waiting on us. Oh, but the clothes, the hair, the painted fingernails … the talk. People who talk like this don’t fight fires, everyone knows that.… And then, is it true—can one even get near such a fire as that?

I mustn’t be the one to say it, Miss Palmer began, or concluded, to herself. It was this spinster business again—a single woman was so vulnerable, likely to be dismissed as hysterical, deranged. It might even be true. In any case, in the end they probably wouldn’t let me go—the men would have to go alone. It would be like agitating for a war in which one was going to have a protected occupation.