And, of course, as I drive upwards through Casoli to my eyrie my spirits lift with every metre of altitude gained. It’s always the way. There’s something about these visits to my native land from which the person of sensibility needs to recover. I don’t know what it is exactly. The boorishness? The whingeing fatalism about our bottomless decline? The ethical dereliction of the politics? My ruffled countrymen may well ask what’s so special about contemporary Italy, with its view of literacy that scarcely exceeds the ability to decipher a telephone directory and a politics with the moral vision of a nineteenth-century South American caudillo. And my reply is simple. What’s special about it is that it’s not mine. The great advantage of being an immigrant is that one never worries as much about a host country’s politics and social problems as about those of one’s native land, which even now seem paler and less significant. Perpetually foreign but persistently European, one simply cherry-picks one’s way through life, drifting hither and yon across frontiers at whim, feasting off the nice things on offer and ignoring the rest, just as people have always done. What else? For all its bathos, and in default of any serious alternative to this act of principled despair, lotus-eating is definitely the way forward.  

I peel off the road and down the short track leading to my house. The familiar roof comes into view and across the chasm to the right the bulking grey crag from behind which the distant sea furtively emerges like a satellite photo of an indiscreet act. But what is this? There is a flashy new Range Rover parked where the track forks to skirt my property en route to Marta’s shack. Walkers? They do sometimes leave their cars up here while they ramble around. On the other hand it’s not unknown for people to bring a car up here for less virtuous purposes and I scan the ground around it for dead Peroni cans, cigarette stubs and lust’s latex fall-out. Nothing. As I let myself through my barrier I wonder how young lovers up here before the invention of the motor car managed to escape their cavernous sooty farmhouses full of inquisitive children and eagle-eyed grandparents. Was the same recourse on offer in the horse-and-buggy era? How carnal could they have become in the lee of a looming equine backside, the black purse of its anus periodically disgorging hot wet mulch and its velvet ears swivelling back against the starlit sky like furry radar dishes? Surely they would have felt too much surveilled by that great brute witness? The close presence of a living, breathing creature periodically gusting ammonia and methane would hardly have been less inhibiting than the peeping Thomism of the parish priest himself.  

I drive in and stop beside my shuttered house. Off through the trees to my right runs the reassuring beechwood fence that demarcates my property and Marta’s. It is a fence with a history. I built it for protection against my eccentric neighbour and very nearly with my own blood when, owing to an accident with a nail gun caused by Marta distracting me, I found myself fixed to it like one of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, and no less eloquent of protest. Following that, my beautiful structure was torn down without permission when Piero Pacini was shooting a scene for his unfinished last film, and later replaced. Now I catch the murmur of voices from the other side. Marta!? Can it be? My expectations soar. Has the old slag returned at long last? I prepare myself to commiserate with her thumbscrew bruises and electrode burns and to welcome her home. With renewed cheerfulness I find my key to the door in the fence between us and hurriedly open it. And there, standing just outside Marta’s back door, is someone I instantly recognize and wish I didn’t: the weaselly house agent and amateur plane-spotter, Signor Benedetti. In deference to the hot weather he is jacketless in lightweight slacks and a designer version of one of those white short-sleeved work shirts affected by airline pilots and coach drivers, all epaulettes and breast pockets but tarted up with smoke-grey mother-of-pearl buttons and one of those obtrusively discreet monograms in white silk thread on the left-hand pocket. The entire shirt is a serious lapse of taste. On the other hand, not one of his woven hairs is out of place today. With him is a baggy pink man and a dumpy pink woman. Of Marta there is no sign and my expectations abruptly stall and nosedive. Benedetti is clearly both startled and disappointed to see me, making it mutual.  

‘Good day, ingegnere,’ I say. ‘This is a surprise. I hardly dared expect the pleasure of your renewed presence up here. Really, I had no idea house agents remained so emotionally attached to properties that have so long been off their books. I suppose you must be the fond parent who can never quite let go of his children even when they’re old enough to have passed into others’ hands for ready cash.’  

‘Signor Samper! Your exquisite fluency reminds me most pleasurably of the conversations we have enjoyed together these last few years. I’m sure you are feeling as well as you’re looking? Such youthful elegance! You wear your years as you do your clothes, with admirable lightness.’  

‘Be that as it may, Benedetti,’ I say, cutting to the chase in my ill-bred English fashion, ‘I find myself apprehensive lest your presence here with what I take to be clients indicates that you have some firm knowledge of my neighbour’s fate.’

‘These are indeed potential clients,’ he says, ignoring my implied question. ‘What is more, they are countrymen of yours. May I present Mr and Mrs Baritoni?’  

Baggy and Dumpy have meanwhile been standing there sweatily with the baffled smiles of Britons waiting for all this foreign babble to blow over. They have plainly not recognized Samper as any kind of kin, which is cheering.  

‘Apparently you’re English,’ I say to them in that language. Expressions of relief cross their glistening faces.

‘Oh, you too? That’s right,’ says Baggy. ‘But we’re not quite who he says we are. Not Baritoni but Barrington. I’m Chris, and this is Deirdre, my wife. I import motor mowers and she’s a dental assistant. Now you know all there is to know about us.’  

I can well believe it, but don’t say so. We Sampers don’t war gratuitously on flabby folk with estuarine vowels but neither are we prepared to soften up merely on the grounds of having a passport in common. More to the point, though, I’m not under any circumstances having them as neighbours and I’m really disappointed not to find old Marta. I introduce myself curtly.  

‘Gerald Samper. I live in the house on the other side of this fence. Might I ask what you’re doing here?’  

It is Dumpy who answers and I have the impression that, like Wanda Horowitz, she calls the shots in this ménage. ‘We’re looking to buy a house in this area and Mr Benedetti has been kindly showing us a few to give us some initial ideas. You know – a grasp of the market.’  

‘An odd way to go about it, given that this particular house is not for sale.’  

‘Oh, isn’t it?’  

‘Certainly not. Did he tell you it was? It’s lived in by a lady who happens to be away at the moment. Unless Benedetti knows to the contrary, that is.’ I turn to their tour escort and switch language. ‘Have you heard from Marta, then? Do you know what’s happened to her? Is this house on the market?’  

Some eighteen months ago this man and I had a run-in over my peculiar neighbour, and I like to think he received a severe warning from his cronies in the carabinieri for spreading vile rumours about her. At the time he unquestionably retired wounded and I really imagined we had seen the last of him up here, his rodent confidence assuredly having been dented. Evidently I was wrong.  

‘No, signore, I have heard nothing directly. True, it is possible this house is not for immediate sale. But as we were in the neighbourhood I thought I would give Mr and Mrs Baritoni an idea of the kind of house they might find in this area in places off the beaten track. I was sure my esteemed former client wouldn’t mind.’  

An unsettling thought strikes me and I revert to English. ‘Have you been inside?’  

‘We did have a little look round, yes,’ admits Baggy. ‘It needs a good deal of work but it’s got real possibilities.’  

‘No it hasn’t,’ I correct him. ‘It has absolutely no possibilities whatsoever since, as I say, it isn’t for sale. And anyway, I think it’s charming as it is.’ Even as I speak I’m conscious of the irony of hearing myself defending Marta’s rural slum after a history of slagging it off as a place suitable only for the commercial-scale cultivation of toadstools. It is, after all, the house whose bedroom the great Pacini used as a set when he wanted the interior of a dirt-poor fisherman’s cottage for his film. ‘It’s outrageous that Benedetti brought you here at all. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.’  

‘That wasn’t our fault,’ Dumpy says reasonably. ‘We’re new to the area. He’s just driving us around.’  

‘Certainly it’s not your fault.’ I turn back to Benedetti who is now looking uneasy, as well he might. ‘I understand you have been inside this house, ingegnere, which means you must still have the key. Which also suggests that if as a matter of course you retain the keys of all the houses you sell, you still have the key to mine, too. Is this true?’  

With a little start the house agent draws himself up, his honour impugned. For a moment he looks less weaselly and more like a goosed rooster. ‘Signor Samper, I must protest! I most certainly do not possess a key to your house. If I may say so, it is a suggestion quite unworthy of you.’  

‘On the contrary. I have a nasty suspicious mind and such a question is entirely worthy of me. So if you don’t have a key to this house, might I ask how you got in?’  

He looks me levelly in the eye. The rooster has vanished and the weasel returned. ‘The back door was unlocked.’

This is tricky. I’m sure it wasn’t, because I would definitely have re-locked it after my last look around. But I’m not so absolutely certain that I can make a direct accusation.  

‘Ingegnere, please allow me to be entirely clear,’ I say. ‘In my neighbour’s absence and at her request I am acting as her caretaker here. She has naturally given me permission to enter the house and check it from time to time. So far as I’m aware she has given no permission to anyone to conduct guided tours with busloads of foreigners. And besides, even if you did find the door open, am I to suppose you have acquired the habit of just walking into houses that are obviously lived in and full of other people’s belongings?’ I turn back to my countrymen, as Benedetti was pleased to call them. ‘I don’t suppose you saw how he got in, did you? I mean, was the back door unlocked?’  

Dumpy and Baggy look at each other, trying to remember. ‘No,’ they shake their heads. ‘We followed Mr Benedetti around the house from the drive but probably a bit more slowly because we were looking at the place. By the time we got here the door was already open. Is there a problem?’  

‘Not really. Or none that involves you. As I’ve just told him, I act as caretaker of this house and I’m just a bit unnerved to find people wandering around it when I wasn’t here.’  

Soon after this they leave, but not before Baggy confides in an aside: ‘This isn’t the first house we’ve seen with furniture and stuff, you know. Benedetti’s got a lot of keys.’

I’ll bet he has. A regular little housebreaker, our weaselly one. The whole episode has cast something of a pall over my own homecoming. I was going to invent some irresistible delicacy to go with the prosecco on my terrace but my heart’s no longer in it. Poor Marta. Of course, I realize the Voynovian bat is nothing to do with me, and she has certainly never asked me to take the least responsibility for her house, still less to act as caretaker. But I worry all the same. I simply don’t want anything awful to have happened to her and can’t rid myself of the suspicion that despite his protestations of ignorance Benedetti might actually know something. I mean, what else would give the little turd the confidence to come and show prospective buyers over her house? Later that afternoon I call the local carabinieri, with one of whom I have developed quite cordial relations since the previous imbroglio, and mention to Virgilio that as I’m not always here it would be much appreciated if he could arrange to have the odd patrol car drop by from time to time in order to check on Marta’s house, at least until she returns. I soon learn that, alas, the carabinieri seldom find themselves free to visit such isolated houses as ours in the course of duty and I would do better to engage a private security firm such as Metronotte to carry out regular patrols. However, Virgilio would gladly pass on the word and he is sure that occasionally a patrol car can come up to check on my neighbour’s house when things are quiet and they have a bit of time to spare. I thank him and ring off. My real reason for the call is that it will automatically have been recorded; and in case there ever is a break-in at either of our houses it will be an additional piece of evidence to flourish in the face of our insurance companies.

I go to bed glummish and vaguely apprehensive but wake seven hours later to a different world of morning sunshine and mountain silence that has been wheeled into place overnight by the celestial scene-shifters. I’m not clear how this happens. Solitude and fresh coffee anyway make me cheerful of a morning, and not being in a London flat is a further bonus. People like Derek are naturally metropolitan, of course. Like rats they live in cities at great ease. They scamper through their daily mazes with no obvious sign of boredom, amply rewarded by decent food and a good deep litter in which to pup. Not that that particular detail is much of a selling point with Derek; but there’s no doubt his monumental empress-sized bed covered in fabrics from Heal’s represents about as much comfort as anyone could reasonably expect when vertically separated by a mere nine feet from somebody else’s colonic irrigation. It’s the being so much on top of everyone – or beneath them in Derek’s frequent case – I find so hard to bear in cities. That and the constant din that wears me down so that merely going out to interview a leathery yachtswoman in her Hilton suite for an hour makes me feel, by the time I’m home again, as though I’ve run a marathon (Oh, rat-man!). No, give me the fluent silence of these hills where I can hear myself think, not to mention cook and sing.  

The next ten days or so I rise early and steadily compose a graceful and also disgraceful new short chapter to insert in Millie!, in between waxing operatic and breaking for exquisite little snacks. I even indulge in a limited amount of DIY: domestic tasks I generally perform for reasons of thrift that are somewhat more fun to have done than they are to do. That being said, I would be falsely modest if I pretended not to have a knack for them. People expect writers to be effete creatures whose skills in the world of practical activity go little beyond falling off bar stools in the Groucho Club. In extreme cases these skills may extend to changing a light bulb, but this nearly always means the writer is a lesbian. (Super-lesbians like Ernest Hemingway don’t really count as writers.) It is true that when it comes to the higher reaches of joinery and craftsmanship my own skills are merely those of the experienced amateur. But I’m neither afraid nor too proud to have a go, that’s the point.  

All of which means you won’t be surprised to learn that I have decided to change not only my own front door lock but that on Marta’s back door as well. The more odious the idea becomes of strangers wandering around her house at will in my absence, the more I feel protective of both our properties. Meeting Baggy and Dumpy has reminded me that I could have many worse neighbours than a frumpish composer from beyond the River Vltava. Which reminds me, I wonder if hers is also Smetana’s neck of the Bohemian woods? I still have no real idea where Voynovia is. I think it must be to the east of Ruritania: Hentzau and John Buchan country, but not quite as far as the thirty-nine steppes. I’m told the European Union’s latest expansionist pounce has recently brought even Voynovia within its shining bounds, although of course that still doesn’t mean it’s in Europe in any meaningful sense. After all, some of the more addled denizens of Brussels seriously consider Turkey as part of Europe despite Europe having for centuries repelled hordes of dervishes and janissaries who came in waves to bombard the walls of Vienna, seeking to expand their cruel empire. Even today an Austrian oath is Kruzitürken! And Turkey, mind you, a country of eighty million Muslims that only recently abjured torture and honour killing in order to qualify for EU membership, not because it thought them wrong. Think Osmin in Il seraglio. As Derek once remarked, the only good Ottoman is one you can lie on. I suppose by comparison Voynovia could easily come to feel as unassailably Old European as France. Anyway, so far as I’m concerned Marta’s real home is her slatternly castle here at Le Roccie rather than that of her family in the distant shadow of a mountain called Sluszic, and like any castle it deserves a good lock on its back door. So I go down to Viareggio where I buy something that looks more appropriate for a bank vault, with tungsten bars that simultaneously shoot upwards and downwards into sockets at the turn of a most peculiar key with raised pimples on it like a plucked turkey thigh.  

While I’m down there I find I’m in the mood for culinary adventure and drop by the butcher for some calves’ brains. Last night before falling asleep I dipped into one of my favourite bedside books, Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s Emergency Cuisine, written in the dark days of 1942 when heavily rationed Londoners had accustomed themselves to an unusual diet, and stray cats and dogs had all but vanished from the city’s streets. These dumb chums were pressed into service as extras in the general drama of the war effort, passing through a thousand trusty Radiation gas ovens while acting out their selfless, unauditioned parts which might accurately be described as casserole-playing. Dame Emmeline (as she later became in recognition of her bravery while working in the resistance to Woolton Pie) believed that austerity could be taken too far. From her house in Berkeley Square a stream of recipes poured forth, the less eccentric often being espoused by the Women’s Institute and published in popular magazines. She regularly netted the gardens in the middle of the square to produce, according to season, owl tartlets, pigeon strudel, a fudge of robins, blackbird pâté and, on one notable occasion, nightingale fritters. She discovered that the anti-aircraft battery gunners in Hyde Park were attracting rats with their National Loaf sandwiches and latrine pits, and it wasn’t long before she was trapping the rodents in sufficient quantities to bake the celebrated Pied Piper pies she then sold to Fortnum & Mason, donating the revenue to the Red Cross. The animals’ pelts Dame Emmeline cured with alum in her airing cupboard and turned into a cloak and mittens for her chauffeur, who was too old to be called up and was living in some discomfort in her vast Hispano-Suiza, up on blocks in a mews garage in Peckham for lack of petrol.  

This sterling and free-thinking spinster was unafraid to try anything, having inherited the scientific curiosity of her distant relative Frank Buckland, the nineteenth-century naturalist and experimental gourmet who had sampled nearly all the British vertebrates and lepidoptera. She agreed with him that while earwigs were foully bitter and bluebottles unspeakable, woodlice were a plausible alternative to potted shrimp. Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis was undoubtedly the first Englishwoman to prepare and use cockroach purée in any quantity, naming it ‘Victory Paste’. In her journal she herself described Victory Paste as having the flavour of ‘peanuts and vanilla, with a faint suggestion of sealing-wax; altogether agreeable’. It was a popular addition to servicemen’s wartime diet, especially in the Royal Navy where it became a staple as a sandwich filling for officers during action. Emergency Cuisine, first published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office in 1942, is a collector’s item these days, its rarity enhanced when most of the first edition was destroyed by an incendiary bomb strike on the Hackney warehouse in which it was awaiting distribution. I treasure my own copy as much for the breezy Tyrwhitt-Glamis style as for her inventive recipes and her popular cry of ‘Buns Against Huns!’.  

And so it is that while I’m down in Viareggio I buy calves’ brains and one or two other impulsive odds and ends. Then, deciding I may as well eat down here, I have a delicious light seafood lunch on the front and watch the world pass by. The restaurant overlooks the beach and in the noonday glare the women come and go, probably not talking of Michelangelo but of Botox and liposuction. Nor, to judge from their expressions, do their escorts appear to be earnestly discussing the Mammon of Unrighteousness or even the problematic orchestration in the second act of L’uomo magro. Their whole demeanour is that of males who wish quite soon to enact the ancient ritual of passing on their DNA and are wondering how much they need spend on their girl’s lunch to ensure it happening. No one seems to have done much swimming. The beachwear of all three sexes is outrageous, revealing acres of broiled flesh and graceless bulbosities creakingly restrained by wisps of designer nylon. It all reminds me uneasily that my own highly personal problem of packing more veal is going to have to be faced sooner or later. But still, time’s a-wasting; so with my calves’ brains in my cool-bag and some costly ironmongery to render both our homes Benedetti-proof in the boot of the car, I drive back up to Le Roccie with a sense of virtue and purposefulness.