‘Well, what about them, my dear?’ replied her mother, politely uninterested, taking up her basket and sitting down in her usual place near a shaded lamp. ‘This morning,’ the young girl went on, ‘when I was coming back in the car, I saw them on a peasant’s cart, just near the bridge.’

Giorgina’s slight voice broke sharply across the silence of the room. Signora Gron, who was glancing through a newspaper, set her lips in a smile of warning and glanced towards her husband, apparently hoping he had not heard.

‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed Martora. ‘Peasants robbing statues now. That’s wonderful – art collectors!’

‘And then what?’ enquired her father, encouraging the girl to go on.

‘So I told Berto to stop the car and go and ask …’

Signora Gron screwed up her nose a little; she always did this when anyone brought up unpleasant topics necessitating some sort of retreat. The affair of the two statues implied something else, something hidden, therefore something which would have to be hushed up.

‘Now, really – it was I who said they were to be taken away,’ she said, trying to close the subject. ‘I think they’re simply horrible.’

Her husband’s voice was heard from over by the fireplace, deep and tremulous with either old age or anxiety: ‘You what? But why did you have them taken away, dear? They were very old, found during some excavations …’

‘I didn’t express myself very well,’ said Signora Gron, trying to sound pleasant. (How stupid am I, she thought at the same time, that I couldn’t think of anything better to say?) ‘I did say I wanted them moved, but only in the vaguest terms – of course I was really only joking …’

‘But please listen, Mummy,’ the girl insisted. ‘Berto asked the peasant and he said that he’d found the dog down on the riverbank …’

She was suddenly silent, thinking that the rain had stopped. But in the silence they could hear its deep, unwavering hiss (depressing, too, though no one had really noticed).

‘Why ‘the dog’?’ enquired Fedri, without even turning his head. ‘Didn’t you say you saw them both?’

‘Goodness, what a pedant,’ retorted Giorgina laughing. ‘I only saw one, but probably they were both there.’

Fedri said: ‘I don’t see the logic of that.’ Martora laughed too.

‘Tell me, Giorgina,’ said Signora Gron, promptly taking advantage of the pause. ‘What book are you reading? Is it that last novel by Massin you were telling me about? I’d like to read it when you’ve finished it. If I don’t mention it right away you’d immediately lend it to your friends, and then we’d never see it again. I’m very fond of Massin, he’s so different, so strange … Today Frida promised me –’

But her husband broke in: ‘Giorgina,’ he said, ‘what did you do then? Presumably you asked the man’s name, at least? I’m sorry, Maria,’ he added, referring to the interruption.

‘You didn’t expect me to start arguing then and there in the middle of the road, I trust?’ she replied. ‘It was one of the Dall’Ocas. He said he knew nothing about it, he’d found the statue by the river.’