On the way back from the beach, retracing my footsteps up the sandy path and planning how I would open a conversation about the villa’s future with Joe, I caught sight of movement in the shrubs. A small goat was moving through the olive trees on the lower slopes of the hill. The old man from the cottage, Irma’s husband Gabriele, was following it through the shadows, holding the end of its leash. He was hunched, moving slowly and carefully, none too steady on his legs. He was murmuring to the goat as they went, muttering a one-sided conversation in Italian. I could not catch a single word. I felt pity for the man, briefly, until I remembered what he had done.

But still, seeing him made me think. Life was short; you had to grab hold of it while you could.

26

It was late afternoon by the time I returned to the villa. I picked at crumbs of cheese inside the wax paper wrapper that we kept in the icebox of the old fridge – the insulation was enough to keep food fresh for a while – and ate the last olives from the jar.

‘Hey,’ Joe came up behind me and made me jump, as if I’d been caught doing something wrong. I swallowed the olives and made myself cough and had to pour myself some water.

‘Did Liuni come?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. He brought a chipper. We can shred whatever we cut and use it for mulch on the flower beds.’

Why? I wondered. What was the point of doing anything if the gardens were going to be left to run wild again in a few weeks anyway? Or had Joe’s mind been following the same lines of thought as mine? Perhaps, subliminally, he didn’t want to sell the villa either.

I waited for him to say something else, to give me some clue, but he didn’t. He opened the fridge door and looked inside.

‘There’s nothing to eat,’ he said.

‘No.’ I screwed up the cheese paper and put it into the bag we were using as a bin.

‘We could go to Eurospin,’ he said, ‘stock up and then eat at the pizzeria.’

‘We could.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘I don’t particularly want to see Vito Barsi again.’

‘We won’t have to talk to him.’

I shrugged.

‘He might be an idiot,’ said Joe, ‘but the pizzas at Vito’s are amazing.’

‘How do you know?’

He coloured slightly. ‘Valentina made me one.’

I stiffened. ‘Oh. Was that when you called in to see her?’

‘Yeah.’

‘That was nice of her.’

We stood in silence for a moment, in a kind of deadlock. ‘Well, I’m going to Vito’s,’ Joe said at last.

‘I suppose I’ll come with you,’ I said.

‘Don’t feel that you have to.’

‘It would be nice to see Francesco.’