‘Yes, some Flight into Egypt!’ said Sydney. She gathered from the lightness of his manner in making the allusion that he was anxious not to appear unduly familiar with the National Gallery or the Uffizi, and wanted to ask him, ‘Haven’t you lectured on the Renaissance?’ But she knew how inexorably the Hotel would refuse to let him escape from all that he was, and had pity on his innocent holiday taste for incognito, foredoomed from its birth on the threshold of the Hotel. Everybody could see at once that he had lectured on and perhaps even taken people round the National Gallery. She looked disparagingly at the village with its toppling campanili.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that it’s rather too like a cruet.’

‘It may have inspired the cruet,’ he gravely amended. ‘Can you tell me why it is walled?’

She glanced suspiciously at him, but his limpid gaze held a curiosity.

‘Against the Saracens. They used to land along this coast and ravage the valleys, so they built the villages as high as possible and fortified them. I pity any Saracen that ever got into them, for they’re perfect honeycombs, and the people I think are cruel – in a leisurely sort of way.’

‘Ah!’ said he with an air of pleased receptivity. ‘It would be interesting to get in touch with local records.’

‘I don’t know whether there are any. Do you remember the Decameron lady who fished in the sea near here and was carried off by a pirate whom she liked from the first moment better than her husband?’

‘Husbands’ shares were not good in those days,’ he said tolerantly. ‘I ought by the way, to re-read my Decameron.’

She wanted to ask him whether the Decameron had really been dedicated to him by a friend. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ she said, suddenly smiling, ‘if the Saracens were to appear on the skyline, land and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted – down there – that there aren’t any more Saracens, but for all we know they may only be in abeyance. The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance. But I wonder,’ she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, ‘how many of us they would really care to take away?’

He did not know how she wished him to answer and risked: ‘It would be an embarrassing choice.’

She sighed flatly. The dust, panic and ecstasy with which she had filled for a moment the corridors of the Hotel subsided. Once more she saw her fellow-visitors as they were to remain – undesired, secure and null. ‘Not many,’ she said, and turning away from him seemed to be gazing down some distant, barred-away perspective of feminine loveliness. ‘Women must have deteriorated.’