“It would be nice,” she said, as if she meant to refuse. But she rose and took up her handbag and book. Vittorio called the waiter.

Opening the car door, he cleared away a week-old copy of La Stampa and helped her in. They left the shadow provided by “Punt e Mes” and moved patiently into the main street, which was choked with its afternoon tide of cars and scooters and incautious pedestrians.

“Was it a long drive to your brother’s house?” she asked.

“It only takes about twenty minutes by the Grosseto road,” he told her. “When I was a boy, of course, we were much more isolated. It was considered a real journey to Siena. People didn’t drop in—if they came at all, they stayed. And then, my father, as he got older, was more and more withdrawn from the world.”

“What did he do?”

“He was a classical scholar—a good one.” He smiled, not quite painlessly. “My name is the same as his, and I am always asked if I wrote his books. Giacomo—there were only the two of us—became an archaeologist, but it was understood that I should be a classicist; just as some families put one son into the Church. Though, as it happened, it was what I would have chosen.” How boring this must be, he thought, especially to the English, who don’t discuss themselves in this way. They had come to a standstill in the traffic, and, turning to confirm his dullness in her expression, he found her watching him, instead, with gentle concern. He smiled at her and added: “So you see, it didn’t matter after all.” He scarcely knew himself what he intended by the remark, except that all the obscure concessions of his life seemed with a deliberate, perverse extravagance to have brought him into her company.

They moved forward and were halted again, a little farther on, by a traffic light. “You will be leaving soon,” he said, with the air of making an announcement.

“Early next month,” she replied.

“That is sad.”

After a moment, she said: “Perhaps we’ll come to Italy again next year.”

“I meant, for me.” She doesn’t know, he decided.

“Yes, I know,” she said.

He thought, because at that moment he felt he could bear it, of how they would go away in a week or two; they would write him, together, one nice letter and perhaps a few post cards. The light changed to green, and he turned the corner into his own short street.

When he had parked the car, Isabel closed her window. Vittorio turned off the engine and, waiting for her to gather her things together, pulled his glasses out of his pocket and took up her book to examine its title. It was one of his own works.