The waiter placed his hands together as if in prayer and turned up his eyes.

‘Basta!’

‘—lasci passare—’

‘Se ne vada ora—’

‘Non desidero parlarle.’

‘Non l’ho fatto io—’

‘Vattene!’

‘Sciocchezze!’

The row between the lover and the countrymen was heating up. They now screamed into each other’s faces behind Barnaby’s back. The waiter indicated, with a multiple gesture, the heavens, the rain, his own defencelessness.

Barnaby thought: After all, I’m the one with a raincoat. Somebody crashed into his back and sent him spread-eagled across his table.

A scene of the utmost confusion followed accompanied by flashes of lightning, immediate thunder-claps and torrents of rain. Barnaby was winded and bruised. A piece of glass had cut the palm of his hand and his nose also bled. The combatants had disappeared but his waiter, now equipped with an enormous orange-and-red umbrella, babbled over him and made ineffectual dabs at his hand. The other waiters, clustered beneath the awning, rendered a chorus to the action. ‘Poverino!’ they exclaimed. ‘What a misfortune!’

Barnaby recovered an upright posture. With one hand he dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of his raincoat and clapped it to his face. In the other he extended to the waiter his bloodied and rain-sopped thousand-lire note.

‘Here,’ he said in his basic Italian. ‘Keep the change. I require a taxi.’

The waiter ejaculated with evident pleasure. Barnaby sat down abruptly on a chair that had become a bird-bath. The waiter ludicrously inserted his umbrella into a socket in the middle of the table, said something incomprehensible, turned up the collar of his white jacket and bolted into the interior. To telephone, Barnaby hoped, for a taxi.

The Piazza Colonna was rain-possessed. A huge weight of water flooded the street and pavements and spurted off the roofs of cars as if another multiple Roman fountain had been born. Motorists stared through blurred glass and past jigging windscreen-wipers at the world outside. Except for isolated, scurrying wayfarers, the pavements were emptied. Barnaby Grant, huddled, alone and ridiculous under his orange-and-red umbrella, staunched his bloody nose. He attracted a certain incredulous attention. The waiter had disappeared and his comrades had got up among themselves one of those inscrutable Italian conversations that appear to be quarrels but very often end in backslaps and roars of laughter. Barnaby never could form the slightest notion of how long he had sat under the umbrella before he made his hideous discovery, before his left arm dangled from his shoulder and his left hand encountered—nothing.

As if it had a separate entity the hand explored, discovered only the leg of his chair, widened its search and found—nothing.

He remembered afterwards that he had been afraid to get into touch with his hand, to duck his head and look down and find a puddle of water, the iron foot of his chair-leg and again—nothing.