The Hotel Punta Tragara enjoys a beetling view of the Faraglioni rocks at the south-eastern tip of the Isle of Capri. That stiffest of architects, Le Corbusier, lent a hand in its design. Quaid isn’t sure he likes it, but its stucco is almost as red as the pueblo at Taos, which is why he has chosen it for a surprise holiday for Lily. Capri is one of the islands he imagines they’ll be filming on if their series ever gets off the ground, so their coming here is a salute to their past and their future. They are standing on the terrace of their room, looking out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, named after the Tyrsenoi, or Etruscans, whose creative energy Lawrence so admired. But that’s just a coincidence. They aren’t following Lawrence around the globe. ‘It’s just,’ said Quaid, ‘that the little bastard went everywhere.’
Quaid has brought Lily to Capri to celebrate their first anniversary. Just the two of them. For this is said to be an island for romance. For risky romance at that. It was hereabouts, on the Faraglioni rocks below, that the sirens sang.
‘Sing to me, Lily,’ he said.
‘I can do a passable Gracie Fields.’
‘Then don’t sing to me.’ The snob he was.
‘Is it really a year already since we met?’ Lily marvels.
‘Not met. Kissed.’
They will always argue about the date ‘they’ began. To Lily it was the moment of her setting eyes on him. To Quaid it was the moment they touched. But they kiss again, anyway, Quaid enfolding her so possessively and not letting her go for so long that a group of sightseers in the little square outside the hotel look up and applaud. They are gathered for a plein-air poetry event. A couple of Neapolitan poets who are over for an arts festival sponsored by an amaretto bottler are giving free readings from their work all over the island. Quaid is envious. If he weren’t up here holding Lily he’d like to be down there reading with them. Could there be a grander arena for a recitation? Capri is the posing capital of southern Europe, but even the fashion models pause from their loping llama promenades to listen. When Quaid remembers the scene decades later the models will all have Donald Duck mouths. But this was a more innocent time, before ugliness mistook itself for beauty. Softly and mellifluously the poets’ words drift out like soft-bellied birds over the gulf. Quaid and Lily, locked in an embrace, oblivious to the great basin of heaving blue water, could be effigies embalmed in poetry – Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura.
‘Buon compleanno, più affascinante delle donne,’ Quaid says, raising a glass to her. ‘We are One.’
Lily appreciates the conceit. They met and they were born.
Quaid wants to go on toasting. ‘To us,’ he says, ‘and the extraordinary fortune we’ve enjoyed from whenever we date our waking.’
Quaid’s second-favourite poem. And now good-morrow to our waking souls …
Lily puts a finger to his lips. ‘Hush,’ she warns, citing her second-favourite poem, ‘’Twere profanation of our joys / To tell the laity our love.’
‘These aren’t any old laity,’ Quaid says. ‘These are Italians.’
Lily hasn’t the heart to tell him they are Americans.
And the evening and the morning were the First Day …
… which is where, if we had a grain of narrative decency, we would leave them.
But it takes decency in the principals of a tale to beget decency in the teller, and Quaid and Lily are poised to throw decency to the wind.