Would he, had he lived, have become a fellow traveller of the leftist writers and progressives? His late stories showed an increasing awareness of, and sensitivity to, the nuances of class and the economics of marriage, I thought. But he died at thirty-three: six years younger than I was at the time I was reading him.

‘I’ll do them. At least a draft,’ my mother said over lunch in her garden on Easter Monday.

She made a start right then, and posted me a handwritten draft of a story four days later, about a young woman working for a film company who found her lost love by inadvertently sending out a message in the subtitle of a silent film. It was called ‘If You Love Me, Tell Me’. A month later, she posted me about fifty pages of handwritten manuscript, with the title ‘Love’s Call’ written in bold capitals, in her beautiful copperplate.

My mother, I thought, was a better and far quicker translator than I would ever become.

I spent an entire Sunday on the joyous text she had produced, putting it on a disk. I had just replaced my electric typewriter with an Amstrad I inherited from Sara, who insisted that I enter the cyber age.

1995

I turned forty.

Lilla phoned with birthday greetings. She said a friend of hers in Venice was guest-editing an issue of a journal on postcolonial writing.

‘I want an essay from you. Or a translation.’

‘I don’t have anything.’

‘There was that story you wrote about Riccarda?’

I had almost forgotten. I had begun to write down all my memories of Riccarda a year after she died. I had thought I would try a sequence of prose poems, but what emerged instead was the story, in the plainest prose, of how we met at university and of the years I’d known her. Marco played a walk-on part. So did Marvi.

I had showed it only to Lilla, who felt I should do something with it, though she told me it was skeletal: too reticent, for example, about my passionate involvement with Riccarda and the long, lost months of loneliness that followed. I wanted to destroy it then, but instead I put away the typescript in the same old drawer in my bedside table and forgot about it.

I sent it back to her now, with some amendments and revisions. It was published as fiction.

1996