He looked at her with such bewilderment that she raised her hand and laid it for a moment on his shoulder before letting it fall, hopelessly, across her body. After that she lay perfectly still, with her eyes on his face. This submissiveness and the slow familiar movements of his hand only served to emphasize the constraint of their attitudes. Neither of them spoke; the stillness in the room was the passionless, critical silence of a sickroom. He lifted her hand aside and unfastened the belt of her dress as gently and carefully as if she had had a serious accident, and he was ministering to her.

VITTORIO

Vittorio stopped at Nannini’s on his way home, and bought a cake. It was almost four o’clock, and the town was coming to life again after the siesta. The shop was already full of people; it was divided into a café and a confectioner’s, and as he pondered the display of cakes Vittorio could hear behind him the clatter of cups and glasses at the bar, and the exchange of voices.

Leaning on the glass counter and waiting to be served, he began to feel foolish about the whole thing. He did not want a strange couple in his house. The idea would never have occurred to him had it not been for Francesco, his lawyer. It seemed to Vittorio that Francesco was interfering too much in his financial affairs. It was Francesco’s suggestion that he should let rooms for the summer, and it was Francesco who had found the English couple who might at this moment, Vittorio thought anxiously, be arriving at his house to be interviewed. He rapped on the counter, and when the girl came selected a green cake with a pattern of crystalized fruits. As he waited for it to be wrapped, he pulled out of his pocket for the third time the piece of paper Francesco had given him, and stared at the name: Jonathan Murray.

Holding the red and gold cakebox by its loop of string, he made his way out of the shop. The girl at the counter and the girl at the cassa smiled at him; so did the policeman, as he crossed the main street: “Buona sera, Professore.” The cake, he knew, had been observed and its purpose noted. The town, which had known what to expect of him for almost sixty years, could with a little application account for his slightest deviation from habit.