‘That’s what Emilio told me. Davide’s been there for twenty years or so.’ Then, before he could speak, she said, ‘Emilio calls me every summer to ask if I’d like to use it. He says he hates it to sit empty all the time.’
‘You think he’s serious?’ Brunetti asked, always uncomfortable about being indebted to her family in any way.
‘I read books, not minds, Guido. I can’t say he’s begged me to go, but he’s asked if I’d like to go out with you and the kids more times than I can remember. And each time I say we’re busy, he says he’s going to ask me again. And he does.’
‘It sounds like he wants us all to go.’
Paola closed her eyes and returned her head to the back of the sofa for long enough to take a deep sigh, then leaned forward and said, ‘I suppose it wouldn’t help if I recited the words of the wedding ceremony to you?’
‘About being united as one heart and one spirit?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Yes.’
‘If I remember correctly, there was nothing in the ceremony about the husband’s being able to go and spend time in a house that’s offered to his wife,’ Brunetti said. The subject had always so troubled him that he could speak of it only in jest.
‘Guido,’ she began in the voice he identified as the one she used to address his social insecurities. ‘We also have a legal contract – even if we forget for a moment the poetic words in the ceremony – to joint property. To joint everything. So please stop fretting about accepting Emilio’s offer.’ She looked at her watch and, changing the subject, asked, ‘I think we’d have a better chance of survival if we ate on the terrace, don’t you?’
The children were eating with their grandparents, making it easier for Paola to decide it was too hot to cook, so their meal was an insalata caprese with olive oil they’d brought home from Tuscany in the autumn. Brunetti grumbled that it was impossible to find decent bread in the city any more, while Paola poked aimlessly at the leaves of basilico she’d picked from the pot on the terrace. Finally she set down her fork, saying, ‘I’ve never known this to happen, but it’s too hot to eat.’ She looked across at his plate, where the slices of mozzarella di bufala lay sweating in shallow pools of oil.
Then, more decisively, she asked, ‘Do you want me to call Emilio?’ When he failed to answer, she said, ‘You don’t have to listen.’ She pushed her chair back and went inside the apartment, leaving Brunetti to his grumbling and his unwanted lunch.
After a few moments, Brunetti heard her voice from the open window of her study. He stacked the plates and took them to the kitchen, left them on the counter and went back to their bedroom to retrieve his copy of Pliny’s Natural History, a book he had been wanting to read for ages.
He was just coming to the end of the fawning dedication to the Emperor Vespasian, embarrassed that a writer he so admired could be such a lickspittle, when Paola came back into the living room and sat opposite him. ‘Everything’s arranged,’ she said. ‘Emilio will call Davide and tell him you’ll be there either tomorrow or Thursday and will stay for a few weeks. He said everything you’ll need is in the house. Davide’s daughter will put fresh sheets on the bed and see that there’s enough food in the kitchen.’ Brunetti, who thought that what he would most need in the kitchen was Paola, refrained from saying it for fear that she would howl at hearing such a thing.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Stay here in my home, with our children, and go about the business of my life.’
‘And that is?’
‘Reading the books I put off all year for the summer, preparing my classes for next term, listening to my children and talking to them, feeding them, visiting my parents, reading.’ She smiled, as if at the simplicity of the list.
‘Couldn’t you do all that on Sant’Erasmo?’
‘Most of it, I suppose, though that would require that we persuade the kids to come.’
‘You think they wouldn’t want to?’ Brunetti asked. Considering what he knew about Sant’Erasmo, he realized the kids would be isolated at the end of an island where they knew no one, with two choices for entertainment: swimming or rowing. And stuck in a house with only the company of their parents. Before Paola could reply, therefore, he said, ‘Maybe it’s better I go there alone.’
Without waiting for her answer, he returned his attention to Pliny, held up the book and read aloud to her what Pliny had written to the Emperor:
‘I am well aware, that, placed as you are in the highest station, and gifted with the most splendid eloquence and the most accomplished mind, even those who come to pay their respects to you, do it with a kind of veneration.’
He looked up from the page to see her response and saw her, standing at the door, mouth agape, and so he moved to a previous paragraph.
‘Nor has the extent of your prosperity produced any change in you, except that it has given you the power of doing good to the utmost of your wishes. And whilst all these circumstances increase the veneration which other persons feel for you, with respect to myself, they have made me so bold, as to wish to become more familiar.’
This time, he looked at her and raised his eyebrows in inquiry, having decided to spare her the cringing servility of Pliny’s next line: ‘What a fertility of genius do you possess.’
When she had recovered from her surprise, Paola asked, ‘Is this the preface to your letter to Patta, asking for time off?’
5
The next morning, Brunetti was careful to arrive at the Questura at nine. When he entered her office, Signorina Elettra stared at him in astonishment. Before he could try to explain, she said, ‘Pucetti said you were in the hospital. That you’d had problems with your heart.’ She raised a hand towards him, and he wondered if she was going to ask if she could put it into the wound in his side to be sure he was still alive. Instead, she pulled it back and waved at the telephone, saying, ‘I’ve called them at least four times, but each time I get a different answer: that you’re in Cardiologia, Gerontologia, or that there’s no record of you, or that you were there but you’d been sent home.’
‘The last one is right,’ he said evenly, hoping to calm her with his tone.
‘Pucetti said you were taken there in an ambulance,’ she insisted, as if his being sent home could weigh nothing in the face of this.
‘Yes, I was,’ Brunetti conceded. ‘But it was all a mistake.’ Slowly, then, with some repetitions and going-backs, Brunetti told her the story, minimizing Pucetti’s contribution and making it sound as though it had been his fault to misinterpret the young man’s behaviour and thus exaggerate his own response, with the unhappy result that he had landed in the hospital and caused the staff unnecessary concern about the consequences to his heart.