Marcus was astonished at the change in Georgina’s character. ‘She’s not the same any more,’ he said. ‘Georgina used to be so forceful, so … well, so firm. Now she’s … well, a bit … well, you know what I mean.’

It continued like that for at least a month. Then one morning Georgina came back from a short walk in the neighbouring coconut grove. She snapped at the chef and immediately after that was very sharp with one of the guests, who had told her that his coffee was cold.

Overhearing this, Marcus felt his heart leap with pleasure. She’s back, he thought. My ever-so-slightly irritable Georgina is back!

He looked out of the window. The wind, that warm wind from the west, had started again, making the coconut palms sway backwards and forwards against the sky, gently, but enough to dislodge the fruit, sending it earthwards.

Fabrizia

Fabrizia could not remember her mother very well. In fact, she was worried that such memories as she had, vague and ill-defined ones, were of the wrong person, and that the woman she was thinking of was actually an aunt who had left Italy to live in the United States and never returned.

‘Four is not too early to remember,’ said her father, Alessio. ‘Many people remember being four quite well. I do, for one. I remember travelling on the train all the way from Reggio Emilia to Milan and seeing a man with one leg standing near the entrance, begging. I remember that, you know. I think that you’ll be able to remember your mother if you try.’

She had tried, and had told her father that she remembered something – a beautiful woman with a smell of flowery soap, and he had said, ‘Yes! Yes! That’s her, my darling, that’s your mother.’

But she had seen a picture of the aunt, and the face in the picture and the face in the memory seemed to her to be one and the same person. She did not mention this to her father, though, because he was desperate that she should have a memory of her mother, his wife, who had died so unexpectedly and left him to raise their daughter. They had been a small family, just the two of them, but it did not matter. He lived for her, and told his friends that he would have died for her, willingly, several times over if necessary, to protect her from the dangers of the world.

‘Look what’s happened to Italy,’ he said. ‘All this lawlessness. I remember when this was the safest place in the world to be. Nothing ever happened in those days. Nothing.’

He was well off by the standards of Reggio Emilia, the town in which they lived. There was great wealth in Milan and Bologna, of course, and Parma too, with all its elegance. Reggio Emilia was much simpler than its well-known neighbours, but there was money to be made there too, and he had done well with the two shops that he owned in the centre of the town, in a street that led off the Piazza Cavour. One of these shops sold furniture and carpets, and the other was a dress shop that specialised in clothing for short, fat ladies.