Names were pronounced and mispronounced to her by the Signora, and she smiled politely, repeating them like a lesson. She was led to the place laid for her next to Bernard and settled into it.

Her son’s name was Harold. He stepped forward into the circle of light to be introduced and stood silent while chairs were shuffled along the table to accommodate him. The three boys, now reseated, looked him over with courteous reserve, exercising that perception for affinities and failings with which public-school life had endowed them.

This boy had none of their diffident grace. Long-limbed and excruciatingly awkward, he was still, at their age, almost grotesquely adolescent. He was very brown, and dressed in khaki trousers and a blue shirt with rolled sleeves, and scratches on his arms were blotched with that purple antiseptic upon which British mothers place such reliance. His blond hair and eyebrows, sun-bleached to a startling fairness, contributed to a look of vacancy that really began at wide-spaced, wide-staring eyes. On his behalf, certainly, there would be no telegraphed confirmation of outstanding performance in examinations; rather, one imagined an education interspersed with letters from school principals, sympathetic and unyielding: “Harold’s gifts are not suited to the discipline of the school curriculum.”

Stumbling to his chair with an embarrassed acknowledgment of greetings, he sat down next to Dora. His mother was already embarked on an easy tide of conversation concerned with her journey. “So hot in Florence … a little tired, yes, but what a beautiful journey … light most of the way … Lovely country…”

Bernard was helping her to pasta. “Yes, it’s a journey one never tires of, that trip from Florence to Siena.”

“So much to see,” she went on. “That scenery, sometimes vast and sometimes almost in miniature, like a fairy tale … A great fortress quite near here, what would that be?”

“That was probably Monteriggioni,” replied Bernard. “It’s from the thirteenth century. But Tuscany is crowded with these hilltop fortresses and walled towns.”

“Tomorrow you will see another, just below the house,” the Signora told her. “Montacuto. It was ruined by Barbarossa.”

“So hard to associate violence with this countryside,” the new guest said, and sighed, comforted by antiquity.

“It isn’t all as remote as that,” the Signora said. “In the last war the front passed through here. The Germans were in this house.”

“You see how it is,” said Bernard, with a faint smile. “In this country everything has been done, as it were—even this landscape has been done to the point where one becomes a detail in a canvas. And they all know too much. In Italy one is almost too much at ease, too well understood; all summer here I feel that nothing new can happen, nothing can surprise or call our capacities into question; that none of us can add anything.”