“Oh, what does that mean?” she said, laughing at him. “You and your beret! What are they going to think of you in Lavenham?”

“That I am a distinguished foreign author and you are my secretary. And since I compose also at night—better at night—you must share my room with me.”

But in the room, which she thought charming, he looked around disconsolately and said, “What a place. Did you bring any cigarettes?”

“Why don’t we go for a walk and see the church and then we can get some cigarettes.”

“Why don’t we just stay here and think about the walk and imagine the place; I’m sure it’s better that way.”

“You always think things are better in your thoughts than they are in reality!”

“And you?”

“Of course not, or I’d turn into a cynic like you, and one of us has to stay cheerful.” As she said it, the thought came: Love should be better than it is.

“Do you know me?” He had an arrogant air, as if daring her. Cold, intellectual Gillo, whose very egoism made him exciting and desirable to her. He was never concerned with what he did or said to hurt her, but very much with hearing what he was. “Why am I so?” he’d ask Marguerite intensely, fascinated by himself as she and others saw him. It was in those moments he was closest to her.

“Yes, a little,” she answered.

“Then you know I’m only a buffoon.”

“You’d like to be.”

“Then if I’m not even that, I’m nothing. And that suits me best.”

She loved him in Lavenham. Sometimes as they lay together he’d say lines of poetry in Italian. These she sometimes understood. But not when he talked at length in his language.

“What do you say, Gillo, when you speak in Italian? Tell me.”

“I am just missing a part of my country, that part that is sun and light and of which this miserable England knows nothing.”

“I wish I knew your country; it is mine, too, in a way.”

“We shall see it together when this course is finished.”

“Italy!”

“Sun and light—for me it is essential. I cannot live without them. But not only in the real, physical sense. In the metaphysical sense, too. Now I am in exile, in this country of damnation where they say it is summer, but how can you tell? Italy, no . . . Italy is sun and light.”

In Italy I will love him better and he will love me, she thought. It would be her homecoming, as it was his. It was his promise to her of an opening toward light, of an Italy that was no longer the shady, misunderstood one of her childhood. After Lavenham, Italy was waiting for them both.

22. Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen