Amused, he glances at Stella, and sees that she is looking at the woman oddly, almost fearfully.
They call Nina’s name, and the sounds ricochet about them before being absorbed into the stone. In these gloomier passageways the light has taken on a shifting, changeable quality, like dusk. Several times Hal thinks he sees something move in the shadows – only to look again and realize that it was a trick of the eye.
Suddenly, Stella stops.
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve just thought,’ she says. ‘I’ve stopped paying attention to the way we’ve come.’
‘So have I. We’ll ask someone.’
Around the next corner the street opens suddenly, like an exhalation, into a small courtyard, with a stone basin spouting a plume of water. The sudden space is a relief – but it is also a dead end. He is about to suggest they turn back when he hears something. He listens, concentrating on the tiny sound.
‘Do you hear that?’
She listens, intent. ‘Yes, I think so—’
A whimpering, coming from a dark corner of the courtyard. As they look, one of the shadows consolidates and becomes the little dog. She makes as though to run to them, but falters in her step. Stella rushes to her and lifts her into her arms, oblivious to the grimy paw-prints appearing on her shirt. Her relief is palpable. Hal watches as she examines the animal with exquisite care. ‘Her paw,’ she says, showing Hal.
It is a small cut, but smeared with grime. Hal picks her up and tucks her under one arm, and together they wash the wound in the fountain, the dog looking up at them pitifully. Then Stella unfastens the scarf from around her neck to tie about it.
Hal goes to stop her. ‘You don’t need to do that. We’ll find a napkin somewhere.’
‘No,’ Stella says. ‘I don’t like it much.’
He looks at the scarf wrapped about the animal’s paw and sees the word printed in the corner: Hermès. He thinks of the diamond bracelet around her wrist the first time they met, the pale fur about her shoulders. How different their worlds are, he thinks. And how far she has come from that teenager she described, walking barefoot in the dirt with her chickens, foraging for herbs. But then he remembers her catlike agility on the path yesterday, her knowledge of all the wildflowers. Perhaps that girl is there, still, if one is to look for her. And perhaps in the very act of sacrificing a silk scarf for a dog’s dirty paw, she is making herself known.
They leave the courtyard and begin trying to retrace their route, without much success. It is almost as though the city is determined to resist and frustrate their attempts to navigate it, presenting junctions where they had not noticed them before.
They wander into a street with a bar and a couple of trattorias.
‘We didn’t come here,’ she says. ‘I don’t recognize this at all.’
‘We’ll ask someone – see if they can point us in the right direction.’
But the owner of the trattoria frowns and shakes his head when Hal describes the palazzo.
‘You could stay,’ he says, hopefully, ‘and have a drink here first?’
Hal suspects that the man’s lack of geography is nothing more than good business sense. But perhaps it would make sense.
‘We could stop here for a bit,’ he tells Stella. ‘Recover our bearings. If we carry on walking we may find ourselves getting more lost.’
He watches her deciding. Finally, she nods.
He orders them a bottle of cold, straw-coloured wine. It costs far more than he would ever normally spend, and yet he thinks that it is probably one of the cheapest wines she will have tried in a while. Nina, who the bartender treats with the same care and deference as an infant child, is given her own dog bed and a bowl of water. She lies on her sheepskin like a reclining queen. Stella and Hal, meanwhile, are crammed in around a small table, their knees close, occasionally touching. This contact of skin troubles him. He wonders if it is the same for her too: he sees how her hand trembles as she raises it to her lips.
She laughs, nervously. ‘Have you noticed how we keep seeming to end up alone together? It is almost as though someone is conspiring for it to happen.’
He toys briefly with the idea of telling her that the Contessa’s sprained ankle no longer appears to be giving her any trouble whatsoever. But he decides not to. It is only a suspicion. Instead, he says: ‘How are you? I heard that you were exhausted, after your swim.’
She takes another sip of her wine. ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’
‘I saw the boat go after you,’ he says. ‘The funny thing was, you seemed to be all right then, too.’
Her eyes meet his for a second. Then she looks quickly away. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t.’
‘What?’
‘Please don’t pity me. I can take anything else, but not that. I don’t need it. And certainly not from you.’