Vittorio, silent and shy, led them along the corridor to where Giuseppina was making final adjustments to the bedroom. It was a large, lofty room, with walls of a spent green. The domed ceiling was white, and in one or two places flaking. The furniture, so heavily rooted as to appear a natural outcropping of the floor, was of dark wood, and the bed was so wide it was almost square. The coverlet was the same faded gold as the central square of carpet, which lay on a floor of worn red tiles. On one wall, over a bookcase, were two framed photographs of Greek heads, and above the bed hung a worn reproduction on wood of a painting by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The dark-green shutters were half closed against the morning sun; in the opening between them, at each of the two windows, was suspended a strip of Tuscan countryside.

The four of them stood in the middle of the room, like early guests at a party, trying to gauge affinities. Jonathan took the typewriter from Vittorio and put it on the floor by the bed.

“I hope you’ll be comfortable,” Vittorio said. “If you need anything, you will let me know?”

There was a murmur of thanks. Giuseppina, excused by the incomprehensible language, preceded him from the room.

Vittorio returned to his study and closed the door. He sat down at the desk, clasping his hands idly on the papers fanned out over the blotter, and waited for a feeling of imposition to overtake him. Apart from the occasional visits of his elder brother, Giacomo, who came from Rome on business connected with family property near Siena, he had not shared his house since Teresa’s death. In England, the privacy of his lodgings in the house of a retired Indian Army major had been scrupulously respected; the major, indeed, had relaxed this principle on only one occasion, when he crossed Vittorio’s threshold to press upon him a jar of hoarded chutney in celebration of the victory at El Alamein. Upon his return to Siena, Vittorio had entered the ordered seclusion of a celibate scholar. The greater part of each day was spent on his work—a third volume on aspects of classical Greek—and in the evenings he read. His social life was conducted almost exclusively in the café, where he could in the course of an hour or two meet everyone in the town whom he might wish to see. His friends were of his own condition—men of cultivated minds, distinguished manners, and diminished circumstances. The possibility of worldly success had never, by them, been entertained; they conjectured only as to the form their failure would take.