She laughed, and they went into a little bar on the Corso and had Punt e Mes. She speculated about Jason as they talked. What, in his solid English lineage, accounted for his full sensual lips and dark coloring—his head of thick black wavy hair and his deep brown eyes and swarthy skin? He was not at all like Tina. Had an early pilgrim father begot with an Indian or a slave and taken the child of such union into his own family? Or had some later Jowers female, when the family had become affluent in the nineteenth century, gone to Europe on the Grand Tour, become impregnated by some Spanish, Italian, or Rumanian nobleman, and returned in seclusion to the Cape, there to infiltrate into the family the genes that had produced Jason?

He was more Italianate, in a way, than Tina herself. She had the fine delicate features, light eyes, and height of the northern Italian, and the dark hair and sullen glower of southern women, who see the world as a hostile presence before which to be, at best, diffident. Her features were not perfect—eyes and mouth too small and forehead low—but she had a beautiful face with an intensity in her look as if she were always about to lunge, verbally or physically, into something. Her nerves were on the surface; not, like Jason’s, well embedded within centuries of settled living and family peace.

The aperitif relaxed her.

“There’s going to be a service for Mother at the Protestant Cemetery Thursday,” she said. “I’d like you to come if you’re here.”

“I will, Tina. She was terribly kind to Tim and me that time we were wandering around Apulia looking for Norman castles and got to your part of the Marche. She put us up at your place in the country for almost a week. She was a lovely lady.”

“She felt frustrated, I know that. I think if my father had been stronger with her, made her grow up and stopped protecting her, it would have been better for both of them. She wanted someone to tell her to stop, to make her work at her art, to make her be a real person and not just a wife.”

Tina was silent, thinking about her mother’s lover: Had he presented one more problem in her overloaded life? Instead of solving all the ambivalence had he so increased it and yet become so necessary that he made life and its choices finally too much? It would have been typical of her mother, she decided, to demand big and final decisions when all along she knew how impossible they were; had she demanded that Massimo leave his own family for her? Had she decided to leave her family for him? Was she mulling all this over in her mind when the car went off the road?

“I have to go now, Jason. Ciao.”