Mick has followed his every move.

“What do you need plasters for?”

“Nothing. I’m getting them to show a little solidarity with you.”

His friend turns and looks at his mountain of medicines and says, half seriously and half in jest, through clenched teeth, “Oh, go fuck yourself, will you?”

Fred Ballinger’s face breaks out in a sardonic smile.

12

Fred and Mick are walking in a scenic valley, through a meadow. To the right it gives way to a stretch of woodland, and to the left it flanks a village in Alto Adige, across the border in Italy.

They are chatting away.

“Why do you think we keep coming here, year after year?” Fred asks.

“Because we like coming back to the places that have made us happy.”

Fred chuckles. “This is the scriptwriter talking.”

“If only! It’s John Cheever.”

“Do you remember Gilda?”

“You mean ‘Gilda’ the film?”

“No, Gilda Black. That girl we both fell in love with.”

“Gilda Black?”

“Gilda Black.”

Mick laughs. “The things you bring up! That must have been a hundred years ago.”

“To me it seems like yesterday. I’d have given twenty years of my life to have gone to bed with her.”

“Then you’d have been a fool. Gilda Black wasn’t worth twenty years of anyone’s life. Not even a single day.”

Fred is suddenly extremely disappointed and also a little uneasy. “And how would you know? Did you go to bed with her?”

Mick starts to stammer, knowing he has put his foot in it. “What’s that? What did you say?”

“You heard me very well. Sixty years ago you swore you hadn’t gone to bed with her out of respect for my love for her. Now you’re telling me something different.”

“Look, there’s something I have to confess to you.”

“Oh, bravo, let’s hear it!”

“The real tragedy – and believe me, it really is a tragedy – is that I can’t remember if I went to bed with Gilda Black or not.”

“Are you serious?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I swear.”

“O.K., well, that changes everything.”

“In what sense?”

“If you had been certain you’d gone to bed with her, our friendship would be over. But now, well, let’s say . . . I can live with the doubt.”

“And anyway, if I did go to bed with her and I can’t remember now it means she wasn’t worth your twenty years of life. Don’t you think?”

“Yes, you’re right. So between the two of us, we can draw a line under Gilda Black?”

“Good. Have the kids left?”

“Your son likes to do things in style. Polynesia.”

“I know. He spends money like water, that one. I wonder who he got it from.”

“Not from you, that’s for sure.”

Mick laughs. Silence. All of a sudden, Fred loses his patience. He sighs.

Mick notices. “What’s up? You’re not still thinking about Gilda Black, are you?”

“No, I’m thinking about the things that, as time passes, we can no longer remember. I can’t remember my parents anymore – how they looked, how they spoke. Last night I was looking at Lena as she was sleeping and I was thinking about all those little things, thousands of things, I did for her as a father. And I did them for her with the precise intention that, when she was grown up, she’d remember them. But as time passes, she won’t remember a thing.”