The antipasti is good – Parma ham, Milano salami, mozzarella cheese, artichoke hearts, stuffed eggs, small slabs of foie gras. The pasta is superb – soft, plump raviolis stuffed with lobster with a lobster bisque sauce. The half-bottle of Asti Spumante – too sweet but tolerable because cold – had been replaced by a 75-centilitre bottle of 2005 Canaletto Montepulciano d’Abruzzo which Jomier finds as good as any Italian wine he had ever tasted – indeed, better than most wines from anywhere else. Judith agrees. The food and the wine improve Jomier’s mood. He regains his confidence that the inclusive Christmas offer by the Hotel Palazzo Solaia is good value after all. He even manages to talk about Tilly and their trip to Venice without feeling tearful; indeed, it dovetails into a discussion about love and marriage and maturity or the lack of it or what one means by maturity. How can a man and a woman at the age at which Judith and Beresford and Jomier and Tilly first married expect to remain compatible with an immature choice? Was it not inevitable that the choice would be made for the wrong reasons – to satisfy the unconsciously absorbed ambitions of parents perhaps, or to escape from an unhappy home? Is it not likely that those couples who do remain married for forty or fifty years, do so at the cost of an arrested or perhaps distorted development? It was one thing for the Victorians and Edwardians, where wives were not expected to develop in any meaningful way, but even these marriages, as we now know, were not what they seemed, with men like Dickens having second families and women, at least among the Edwardian upper classes, having children by their lovers.

The turkey, which the chef at the Palazzo Solaia must have felt he should prepare for the English and American guests at the hotel, is less bland and more delicious than the traditional English Christmas turkey – with fresh herbs in the stuffing, a spice-impregnated bread sauce, brittle fried potatoes, fresh spinach and a sauce too noble to be designated gravy. The dolci, too, are up to the same standard: Jomier eats both a rum baba and, in place of Judith who declines a dessert, a slice of semifreddo ice-cream cake. Espressi. More San Pellegrino for Judith. A glass of Marsala for Jomier. Then they are drawn into a chain of cracker-pulling by the Germans, who are, it turns out, Bavarians, not Austrians or Swiss.

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Jomier lies on the king-sized bed in the Palazzo Solaia watching Judith’s legs rise in front of her torso and meet behind her neck as she practises her yoga on the carpeted floor. She is wearing a leotard. The black fabric clings to her body. Jomier finds Judith attractive in her leotard; he feels a faint tingling in his groin; but the Viagra is all used up.