Leo catches up her hand. “Best of women,” he says. “And when I’ve only just got back as well. I truly don’t deserve you.” He turns to me. “Isn’t she wonderful, Bea?”

“Wonderful,” I agree and I force a mechanical smile. I am slightly horrified by the whole idea of this visit with Mussolini. Nothing that I have seen or heard at the villa has made me feel any more inclined towards the fascist cause. If anything, it has been the opposite. It’s a problem that I have had to deal with before – questioning the judgement of the adults around you is not an especially comfortable experience. The idea that my uncle could be wrong – dangerously wrong – about something so important is unsettling. I try to shake off the uneasy feeling that it gives me.

I look up and as I do so I catch an odd look – almost of displeasure – flicker over Sir Hugh’s face, his gaze moving between Filomena and my uncle.

“It’s decided then,” Frances says. “We were planning to leave tomorrow – will that be too soon?”

“Not at all!” Leo claps his hands. “We like to seize the day in this house.”

As he stands, I glance over at Filomena. The look in her eyes takes my breath away. It is a look of bone-deep sadness, a weariness that leaves her shoulders drooping, a tremble in her hands.

Half a second later the look is gone, and Filomena’s face is serene once more, her shoulders back, her chin lifted. I would almost think I had imagined it.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

I think it’s safe to say that everyone is relieved when my uncle and his new friends leave for Rome the next day.

Once more it feels as if the reins have been loosened, and over the following week the house fills up again as Filomena welcomes guests – more and more artists arriving in the build-up to the villa’s end of summer exhibition. There are new faces and some that I recognize from earlier in the summer. Everyone seems very busy.

Although as a playwright she won’t be presenting at the exhibition, Ursula has been caught up in her work as well, camped out in the summer house for days, and I’m surprised to find that I miss her. I go in search of her one morning, to discover her wild-eyed and dishevelled, hunched over her desk. The piles of paper in the room seem to have multiplied ten-fold, teetering precariously in corners, scattered across the floor, marked with the dirty rings from the bottoms of coffee cups.

She greets me without looking up. “Bea, hello. I think I’m finally getting somewhere,” she says feverishly, her fingers drumming on the typewriter.

“Do you need a break?” I ask. “I thought you might like a swim?”

“Oh, a swim,” she murmurs abstractedly. “Have fun.”