I think of my father, who had to my knowledge never fired a gun, trying to use one of these useless weapons against a trained soldier. Was that how he went?
In the thick air inside the truck the smell of the supplies form a powerful, not entirely pleasant fug: a petroleum tang combined with the distinctive sweetish hum of meat that has spent too long in the warm. I pull Tino close to me, and press my nose to the top of his head. Normally, he might wriggle away from me: he feels he is getting too old for such embraces, I know. But since Papa’s death he has been different. He remains where he is, in my arms. Gradually, lulled by the heat and the sway of the truck, I let my eyes close.
I come groggily awake. Then I hear the thing that has woken me. I know this sound: I have heard them pass over, high above. I don’t understand the other sound, though. A high-pitched scream. Not human: the shriek of a machine.
As an idea surfaces – the possibility of what it might be – I am being hurled through space, and all behind me is white heat.
I am lying on my back. A hot bubble of silence surrounds me. I feel detached from myself, thrown loose. For a moment I wonder if this is dying. No, I realize, it is merely that I have come within touching distance of that veil that separates life from death.
‘Oh,’ Stella says, stopping on the track.
‘What?’
‘I think we’re nearly there.’
There, in front of them, San Fruttuoso has appeared through a brief gap in the trees. There is the pale expanse of beach far below, the fa?ade of the abbey gleaming like bone. The yacht is visible too, moored a hundred feet or so from the shore. The change that comes over her now is marked. The words are stopped up, the sadness and the energy … all seem to dissipate. She is combing her hair with her fingers and smoothing it behind her ears, drying the film of sweat from her brow. Before his eyes she is diminishing to a negative of the woman she was a moment before. His opportunity to comfort, to empathize, has passed.
As they pick their way down through the trees she stumbles, once, and he catches her arm to stop her fall. She thanks him, shortly, but these are the only words that pass between them.
When they are nearly at the beach, he tries. ‘Stella,’ he says, and then stops. He wants to show her how it has affected him, what she has told him of her past. He wants her to continue. But the words he finds are inadequate.
Gesture might be better. He could reach out, to touch her shoulder. But it would be imprudent. Since the night when they danced together he has avoided touching her at all costs. Especially now, since the dream of the night before. He lets his hand fall to his side, and feels his failure.
17
They discover the party in a restaurant beside one of the encircling arms of rock, perched above the water. The beach is surprisingly crowded: Italians lie or sit chatting and smoking on beds spread out across the sand, the women in brightly coloured swimming costumes and caps. A couple of children run shrieking in and out of the shallows, splashing one another. Behind all, rising solemn and pale, a memento mori, is the ancient fa?ade of the abbey. He wonders what it has seen in all the centuries it has stood here.
Stella sits next to her husband once more. The transformation is complete: she wears a sunhat, a silk scarf. Her face is obscured by the brim of the hat. She might as well have put on a mask, Hal thinks.
At the head of their table, the Contessa is cooling her injured ankle in a wine bucket of iced water. But when she goes to stand, Hal sees to his surprise that there is no apparent pain as the foot takes her weight.
‘Strange,’ Gaspari says, ‘to see it again like this – without the film crews here. You know, we got here, and discovered the whole place covered with seaweed – there had been a storm. It took four hours, perhaps more, to clear it all. And when the sun came out it stank.’
‘Lucky that you can’t transmit an odour through the screen – yet.’
Gaspari smiles. ‘Sometimes I worry we do too much of this in film: show the sanitized version of a place, a person. Whether we should be showing things as they really are, in all their ugliness and complexity.’
Hal looks surreptitiously at Earl Morgan and thinks of how he looks in the film. Compares that now to the ruin before him. The truth would make a depressing spectacle indeed.
‘To a lot of people,’ he says, ‘I think that’s what film is about – escaping the ugliness for a couple of hours.’
‘For you?’