4

Italy, 1975

Leaving Rome at midnight they settled into a four-berth couchette which they had to themselves, all the way through the ten-hour journey. A first-class compartment that would have been second class in most countries three decades before, but clean enough, apart from some dust. Marcia settled herself on one of the upper bunks, methodically arranging her paper sheet and pillow case. Within minutes Celia heard the rhythmic breathing and smiled. She preferred to sit back on a lower bunk and try to see whatever she could as they passed through stations that were fully lit. At one of them, an official walked out of his office onto an empty platform to eye the train up and down, then gave the all-clear with his whistle, as though hordes awaited to alight at 2 a.m. The train chugged its way south.

As they passed through the little towns of Campania and moved further down where steep hills took over, she had a Pirandellian experience as she gazed out at the blackness. A full moon, pale orange through the window, started to dance from the left of the window to the bottom right-hand side, then glided to centre stage, doing a little bow before dropping down, and finally sailing into the wings. This was a diva of a moon, taking all the attention it could get. Celia rubbed sleepy eyes and knew, that was it! they must now be on winding tracks that were alternately dipping and climbing. It wasn’t until about six o’clock that the mountains unfolded before her, their ancient beauty gradually becoming defined. And on the left was the Ionian Sea? It must be. Little sandy beaches, by the looks.

‘Are we there? asked Marcia, stretching, almighty yawns.

‘Another couple of hours yet. Get a look at the coast, Marse.’

‘Mmmm. How beautiful. It’ll be warm and welcoming, the water.’

‘No surf, but,’ said Celia, broad Aussie voice.

‘No sharks either.’

The coastal town where they got down from the train by impossibly steep steps, with suitcases that were heavier on arrival than departure, was quiet in the late August heat. A lonely fly buzzing around. Outside a storybook railway station they looked in vain all around the old-fashioned little square for their ‘taxi’, having been advised that the man who would pick them up was called Angelo and didn’t have what was obviously a taxi, it was more of a private hire service but the price had been arranged, and unless his wife or children were giving him a bad time, he’d be there. It had sounded like a shaky premise and their vague doubts were justified; in the event they never found Angelo. People stared at them with inquisitive faces and Celia, instead of throwing down the gauntlet, smiled and asked everyone who looked at her where Angelo was, to which they replied which Angelo? He who drives the taxi, said Celia but the townsfolk shook their heads in sympathy. But wait! A couple of young men in a beaten-up old car were going to Sanlorenzo soon and would give them a ride.

Against good judgement in Celia’s opinion – for wasn’t this mafia country, and weren’t those mountains in the distance the very ones where kidnapped people were taken and left for a lifetime’s wait while a ransom was being put together? – they accepted the offer. Marcia argued that these people didn’t even know who the two strange women were, little less be able to negotiate any ransom.

‘What about rape?’ asked Celia, in an interested kind of way.

‘What about it? We’re not exactly in the first flush of youth these days, or looking our best.’

‘It’s not about youth and beauty, Marcia,’ said Celia tartly, but capitulated.

They arrived unmolested an hour later in Sanlorenzo, the young men having chatted and flirted lightly with the two women all the way, then setting them down with courteous handshakes.

They took their time having a rest, over a cappuccino, then from the village square they walked to their destination, a hamlet just a kilometre away surrounded by undulating countryside of orchards and vineyards. By late morning they arrived at the house of Sandrina.

Standing in the doorway of the main house was a woman in an apron, who had obviously been observing their arrival up the winding path. Sandrina greeted them with a welcoming smile and in a deep slow voice greeted them in a brand of English – Hullo darling, how’re you going, all right? – that harked back to an Australia of the 1940s. Sandrina had conscientiously learnt her English in Perth as a young mother so that she could talk with her children in the language they came to prefer at that time. They returned to Italy after ten years in Australia for reasons of family bereavement, loyalty and an unforeseen inheritance so that they never had to consider migrating again. But Sandrina cherished memories of her life in that big sprawling city of Perth, where she had spent a happy young womanhood so long ago. Life there had been freewheeling and easier than Italy, at that time. She now sometimes offered a house she owned in the village to friends, and even to their friends, who came from Australia.

‘Didn’t Angelo pick you up?’ she asked, and heard their explanation with a rueful look, taking their bags and listening to the commentary, shaking her head and smiling.

‘My husband and I adapted to life here again as quickly as we had taken to Australia,’ she said to the attentive faces of the two younger women. ‘But you know, after all these years I still miss Perth sometimes. I liked eating fish and chips, believe it or not, and my kids were doing well.’ She helped them with their bags. ‘I’ll take you to our house in town if you like, in a few days. You’ll be able to see more things of interest there, historically. It’s my grandmother’s old house really.’

The sun was beating down and they had lunch in an enormous kitchen beneath an expansive, vaulted timber ceiling and talked at length about the aftermath of the war and how life was then.

‘Most of the villagers from here went either to Western Australia or to Argentina,’ Sandrina told them, ‘rather than the United States or Canada.’

Within a day the heat went out of the air; breezes from the sea and the mountains softly wafted towards them. Celia and Marcia took walks around the old property and looked at white cows, black hens, and breathed in the country smells of late summer. After a few days they were rested and restored. Sandrina’s husband, Mario, a grave and thoughtful man, loaded their bags into his old car and they all drove to the village, with Sandrina still wondering at Celia’s story about Angelo’s non-arrival. Mario had had an appointment elsewhere that day – the reason why he didn’t collect them himself – but he believed something must have happened; Angelo was usually dependable.

Their house in the village was of an originality and eccentricity not seen in any place they had ever lived but not uncommon here. Made of granite, it was joined to two-storey houses each side, and also to the houses behind it that faced onto another street. Up four steep steps made of stone – more like enormous building blocks – and they were at their front door. The whole effect was of groups of dwellings carved out of dense rock in situ, rather than blocks brought from elsewhere.

Immediately off the tiny main entrance and to the right, Sandrina opened another little green door that revealed a fairly modern lavatory (cistern at the top and a dangling chain, Celia noted) that had been hewn into the thick stone walls – the smallest w.c. imaginable, up two steps before you squatted on a spacious wooden seat, and with just enough head room. Good, plenty of loo paper. Opposite this green door in the entrance was a washbasin, child-size but adequate.

Another door (the third within this hall space that only accommodated two people) opened onto the main room, the only room on this level. It was a large, high-ceilinged, whitewashed, tile-floored room with a double bed, a green dresser in the corner, an old-fashioned chest of drawers and a sailor’s trunk near the bed. Between the bed and the green-painted timber window was a black steel (or was it iron?) spiral staircase leading down to the kitchen with bathroom and another toilet.

‘I’ve fallen in love with it already,’ said Celia, looking at Sandrina with a comical look of inevitability that made the older woman smile, pleased.

The third room in the house was on the upper floor – again a large white bedroom, this one containing a fireplace against one wall and a sink opposite, a bed, table and two chairs. The room could only be reached by a further six building blocks outside, so steep that you have to bend your back with the effort of raising knees towards the chin, holding onto the iron rail to hoist yourself up.

‘This can be your room, Marcia, if you two don’t want to share,’ said their hostess. ‘It’s the room my grandchildren use for their political meetings. They are in the Green movement; you can see they take their activities seriously.’ So saying she pointed to their manifesto pinned to the wall over the old wooden table, with its stern injunctions which Celia translated as they read:

Members may use this room as a Centre if they adhere to the following:

•Each member must contribute to the cleaning of the Centre

•Members must treat each other with respect and courtesy

•Rubbish must be placed in respective containers: paper, glass and plastic

•Members must contribute to the Centre by paying their dues every month

•Fascists are not welcome in this Centre

•The bed is not to be used for sex

Marcia raised her eyebrows at Sandrina and they all smiled ‘This is a serious movement, I can see that,’ she said.

The house’s simplicity and austerity spoke of another time when its occupants would have led lives of hardship: family gatherings supported by strong religious belief. Sandrina told them that there had been no toilets or bathrooms built into it forty years earlier – the family had to visit the slightly more prosperous house next door for these amenities.

This little white and green house was home for Celia and Marcia for two months. During the very warm days they kept the main door and windows closed to keep the interior cool. They took long walks, sometimes independently, talked, read and wrote letters, went to the weekly market and met their hosts in the town square where everyone talked, talked and talked. Nowhere had they seen tomatoes so red, drunk a lemon granita so fresh. Sandrina walked around the town greeting everyone with much handshaking and cheek-kissing, though people saw each other almost on a daily basis. There was no one Sandrina didn’t know; many of the villagers were related to her. ‘You have to be careful not to say anything careless; we all know each other’s business because half of us are family,’ she told them, with a short laugh. Weddings, baptisms, funerals and religious feasts rolled along one after the other and those who didn’t attend them sat around talking to someone about the celebrations and the families involved.

The village shop. which served largely as a meeting-place, sold food and other items such as screws, deodorant and a sink plunger (look them up in the dictionary, Celia!). Antoinette, the owner, was a woman with a face that registered either closed shop or open house, depending on her state of being. A dose of daily gossip seemed to massage her spirit a treat, Marcia said. There were seats outside under the eaves – not particularly comfortable, but elderly people sat there and chatted and observed everyone else. Situated halfway up the hill, and so halfway down to the piazza, the shop met at a junction where the cobbled streets stopped and looked about. From this point, one road wandered towards the countryside and inevitably the mountains which, though distant, snugly surrounded the little town. Another, busier road veered towards winding lanes full of villagers’ houses. Yet another went up towards the school, the six-bed hospital and the houses of those who lived on the top. And the last one led in a determined manner to the old town square, changing its mind and its character on the way with a nod to modernity by way of a smart pink house and pretty garden on the left, and further on to the right acknowledged one of the two cafés – or more of a restaurant. At this uplifted eating place you could dine al fresco in the warm evenings or enter its semi-dark cool interior to eat and at the same time watch some football on television with the waiter.

One day, Sandrina asked the two visitors: ‘Are you coming to the wedding?’

‘Well, actually we don’t know the bride or groom …’ said Marcia.

‘Doesn’t matter! You’ll be welcome – it starts at the church at eleven.’

On one side of the Piazza del Popolo the pharmacy squatted in a dependable way and Celia went over to buy a box of tissues.

‘Tissues? You mean a box of them, where you remove them from the top?’ asked the white-coated woman chemist, or dottoressa, as she was called, looking about in consternation.

Chatting in dialect seemed the most popular activity in Sanlorenzo – depending on the audience they used either the regional one or the village patois. For the sake of visitors, inhabitants switched to straight Italian. This was the sound, other than church bells, that more than anything broke the habitual silence of the village. The young people next door, siblings, talked continuously to each other, sometimes broke into mournful or strident song and occasionally argued, but mainly they had a lot to say about god-only-knows-what, said Celia. Marcia agreed: ‘They’re more garrulous than Mickey on his fourth whisky.’ Only one person in town had a motor scooter, and there were a few small cars, but other than this there was just one house in town where the silence was broken in the warm, early autumn languor of the afternoons. And how they broke it.

Marcia woke up suddenly, in her top-storey room, more of a lair really, to a mounting tide of violence across the way. Papa had come home drunk again. Bastardo! Bastardo! cried Maria, the wife, more angry than scared. Odd that it was the husband’s voice that sounded fearful as he roared back at her. Then came the smashing of plates, either flung across the room (at each other or at the walls?) or handfuls of them thrown onto the floor, the way the Greeks do it for celebration or for fun. But this wasn’t fun. So many minutes passed that it seemed to the wide-awake woman that there couldn’t possibly be any crockery left in that godforsaken house. Their racket rubbed at some old wound and she realised her eyes were wet and her heart thumping as if in some frightful anticipation. The man’s voice went quiet and then a lament started up from the teenage daughter, a wail that seemed to come down the centuries, until that too finally took on a diminuendo quality and finally all was desolate. The main force of it was over – midnight come and gone – and Marcia wondered if her worst fates were behind her now. As if to make up for the bedlam, a refined woman and her child who lived up the hill walked past, on their way home, speaking in murmurs to each other, as if saying: This is how we can be.

The night was still hot and Marcia tossed about on her bed, deciding she’d catch the bus the following day to the beach that looked so inviting from the train. Sandrina had told them she knew an American woman who lived close to the beach whom Celia and Marcia could visit any time as Pauline the American lived her life alla buona – that is, informally.

But Celia wasn’t interested in the beach, saying she wanted to see a couple of historical sites; she would instead borrow Sandrina’s car and visit a monastery nearby, with her camera. Nothing more had to be said: they knew they were due for some time apart and, no, Celia wasn’t bothered by the row across the way last night. Marcia tried to imagine a slumber that couldn’t be woken by such a din.

The bus timetable she’d heard about was, she had been told, at the bar which was also near the bus stop. So with a light heart Marcia swung off, bathing gear in a bag, to one of the three bars in town in search of the timetable.

‘Ah, no signora,’ said the young girl in careful English, ‘it’s not written down. But I can tell you, let’s see, today is Tuesday, and yes, the bus goes at 9.30. Is that right Giuseppe?’ She called to the kitchen interior. ‘Yes, signora, In forty-five minutes from now.’

‘Not at nine? I was told 9 am.’

‘No, no, signora, you still have forty-five minutes,’ said the girl. ‘Perhaps you’d like a coffee while you wait?’

‘Thank you, I will,’ smiled Marcia. ‘And a further thing, where is the bus stop, please?’

‘There,’ said the girl in some surprise, pointing across the road, preparing a coffee.

‘Ah. I see no sign, or – nothing written on the road.’

This made the girl laugh: ‘But signora! – why would there be anything written on the road? We know when the buses go, and from where.’

‘Oh I see. Thank you so much,’ said Marcia. ‘Very kind.’ And she sipped her coffee and gazed out at the street. Higgledy-piggledy buildings, many in total decay, others with makeshift repairs that had stayed that way. But more than a few abandoned by families after the war. One pictured them walking away. Unloved lower storeys, now boarded up with bricks. Earthquake damage wrought centuries ago and not helped by old age and bone-crushing poverty. All of this with a dash of modernity here and there: a burst of new hope and fresh building materials made for a collage, this patchwork of dwellings. And in the background the great shoulders of mountains given names by the townspeople, San Giovanni and Cosmolino towards the west, all fitting into each other, and presiding throughout the centuries over human folly below.

The bus arrived and she made herself understood to the driver that she wished to go to the beach area. At the tiny resort, if it could be called that, Marcia found the American woman Pauline easily, and was taken to the beach where there were a couple of trees near an old hut that was outfitted, despite the simplicity of the place, with a small second-hand refrigerator, a bench and three decrepit chairs. They chatted and ate watermelon and peaches before going for a swim. This was not such a wise idea, Marcia, a non-swimmer, thought – eating then going into the sea – but then, looking at the water, it wasn’t in any way formidable. And she didn’t intend to go out over her depth.

Pauline, an older woman who had lived in the area for many years, was an artist. She was well known by the local people and once they were settled with their towels, introduced the newcomer to a man called Fulvio. Marcia appraised him from behind her sunglasses – he’d be about, forty? Around her own age. He wasn’t alone, but accompanied by a beautiful large mastiff called Africa whom he clearly adored. It was obvious that Fulvio was very disturbed about an incident which Pauline said had happened the night before. Africa, on heat, had been attracted to a mongrel in the area who lost no time in having his way with her. Fulvio was incensed with the other dog’s owner when he’d found out the previous evening that Africa had escaped from the back yard and was innamorata with the lowly male.

‘It’s a disgrace, how dare you,’ he had roared to the mongrel’s owner who scratched his head, wondering at the fuss. ‘My beautiful Africa, ruined.’

‘How, ruined?’ said the astonished owner.

Pauline smilingly told this story to Marcia while Fulvio looked on.

‘You see, I found them coupling, and there was nothing I could do,’ he explained in precise English, mixed with Italian, to the sympathetic Marcia. ‘Africa is a finely-bred dog,’

‘Of course, one can see that. Let’s hope she isn’t pregnant,’ she murmured.

‘Exactly, that’s a fear,’ said Fulvio. It seemed to her that the bitch’s possible pregnancy was not the only issue here. She apprehended, looking at him, that he felt his pet had been sullied beyond salvation since she’d now had sex with a dog of a different and lower breed – no breed at all, really. Come to think of it, some people are like that about human beings, she thought. The two of them stood in the warm oily sea talking and she thought he was a very nice, ingenuous man. He explained that he was a trumpet player and demonstrated the mouth action required to get the necessary vibration going to make sounds. She tried to do it and they spluttered and laughed together in the welcoming water.

‘How I love the English language,’ he said in Italian, then in strongly-accented English. ‘I love eet.’ It occurred to her that he had an intensity about him that matched Celia’s.

Back on the beach Marcia made friends with Africa while Fulvio gazed deep into the dog’s eyes and said. ‘She’s so good – è buona, buona, buona,’ while Marcia laughed outright at his devotion. He laughed too. They talked about jazz and theatre, and he invited her to his house further down the beach while Pauline lazily swam up and down some distance away. Marcia was still intrigued by his reaction to the seduction and she ventured that if Africa had been his young sister who had lost her virginity he couldn’t have been more upset. He agreed that his response was exaggerated:

‘Perhaps I have been living too long without human company,’ he smiled.

Pauline declined the invitation to his place and Marcia, nodding, believed – it was just a feeling – that Fulvio and Pauline had explored anything that might be there between them some time ago and were now occasional beach friends.

So Fulvio, accompanied on his right by Africa who was panting and grinning like someone who knew the answers, swinging her tail as she swaggered, with Marcia on the other side, all walked along to his white house almost right on the beach. There the man and woman had a very satisfying afternoon – while Africa looked on from the doorway in an interested way for a while. After their exertions Marcia and Fulvio showered and he brewed them coffee before he accompanied her to the bus.

‘You were a long time – how was it?’ Celia asked idly, looking up from a magazine.

‘Lovely. Met some nice people.’

‘Oh? Who?’

‘Just that American woman Sandrina told us about. And someone else there who had a dog. Did you have a good look around the monastery?’

‘Yes, it’s most beautiful. I took some pictures I’ll show you. I’m glad I went.’ She reached for her nail varnish. ‘Oh, and I needed tissues so I went to the pharmacy.’

‘Ah, it was open finally. I peeked inside when I passed and it looked very dependable. Lots of polished wood, the way chemist shops used to look, with shelves of phials and things.’

‘And women pharmacists called dottoressa who in fact act like doctors, all serious attention to people who are sick. But they didn’t have any boxes, just these small packets.’ She recounted how the plump pharmacist in her white coat had looked fruitlessly through an enormous cardboard box which stood on the floor, rummaging through it with her bottom in the air like a badger cleaning out its burrow, but had to admit finally that they didn’t seem to have any. Celia did all the actions in this pantomime.

‘What a hoot,’ said Marcia, chuckling. ‘But an old lady came in quite distressed about her ear and the chemist gave her a proper examination while everyone waited patiently. She had all the equipment to examine ears. And such an air of expertise. Made a diagnosis. None of this: Best to get your doctor’s advice caper, as they tell you in Australia. No cringing deference.’

Marcia was doing some neck exercises while Celia finished her nails and held them up at arm’s length to assess her paintwork: ‘The beaches are stony around here aren’t they; did you cut your feet to ribbons getting to the water? Actually you look a bit different – distracted, or something. Pink. Are you all right?’

‘Well it’s been quite hot after all. Yes I’m fine. Cup of tea?’

‘Yes. Thanks,’ said Celia, regarding Marcia.

Celia, after seeing the monastery, had driven around the small town that wasn’t far from Sanlorenzo, but big enough to have a municipal park. Parks were not as common or as popular in this country, she noticed, as they were in England and Australia. The piazza was the main meeting and relaxing place, where you found out whatever was important. But this park was beautifully kept and she walked around it, noting the flowers, reading the names and looking up the translations. The entrance had an arresting Notice to Users of the Park with the following directives:

•It is forbidden to walk on the grass

•Do not lie on the seats

•Dogs must be on a lead and be muzzled

•Walk do not run

And on it went. How they love to make lists here, thought Celia. Surprising, actually: something you wouldn’t have expected in Italy. It may have been that it was the wrong hour or too hot for there were not many strollers about. Nevertheless there was a female warden here, amiable enough but in uniform, walking around, visible to any likely transgressors. Celia was glad Sanlorenzo didn’t have a park.

Back in the village that had become their own for these past weeks, she wandered down a road where a marketplace was set up, for it was Saturday. The usual array of produce she’d seen in many markets was there: vegetables and fish, and further along clothes, shoes, linen, crockery and jewellery. But a lot of this was of a humbler quality. Brown-skinned men from Africa gravely lined up their pendants, rings and bracelets, so that they were in perfectly straight rows for public viewing. Then they would sit back, patient as the mountains, to perhaps sell something. She sauntered up and down and bought a green necklace and then a pair of sandals that were made of cork and leather; they looked as though they could have been made by someone in an old stone cottage in the countryside.

She looked at her sandals from every angle and questioned the African man on their origin but his cheerful Italian, heavily accented yet musical, still didn’t make it clear to her.

Of the few bars in the village she went to the one she favoured, with the bigger trees and tables outside and a view of the church, where she had a lemon drink and examined her wares. Behind the church rose the mountains that thrilled her, and frightened her a little. She had been reading books on the Sicilian and Calabrian Mafia, the latter being called the ’ndrangheta, and she asked Sandrina about captives held in caves in the mountains. ‘Oh but that sort of thing doesn’t happen anymore,’ smiled Sandrina.

Walking to Sandrina’s car which she had left quite distant from the market, she passed by a small square of grass – you couldn’t call it a park – with a statue she’d not noticed before. There was no bench or seat of any kind around; it seemed that the monument didn’t expect to attract more than a passing glance. Approaching the sculpture to read the inscription, she saw that it was a relatively recent work; the subject, a young woman. She was naked with perfectly formed legs and breasts, quite modern-looking proportions, long hair flying in the wind, her right arm stretched out as if she were on a cross, the other arm bent and thrown over her head which was straining towards the sky. It was a posture of utter abandonment. On close inspection she saw that the inscription was a memorial to our fallen sons in WWII. She’d have to tell Marse about this to see if she could provide a meaning to such incongruity. Mickey would have some ideas on it.

Later, in the large kitchen – the best room in any house, in Celia’s view, she was washing lettuce three times in and out of water in the painstaking way that made Marcia smile. Since Marcia’s return from her jaunt the air was quiet between them.

‘Come and sit down, Cele. I’ll help with that later.’

Celia caught the tone, soft but insistent, and sat opposite her friend. It wasn’t often Marcia issued an order, proffered with a hint of cajoling so that the imperative was gentle.

‘I’m not very forthcoming at times.’ It sounded a little as if Marcia was making an apology and was saying something rehearsed.

‘No.’

‘It’s because I’m used to being secretive. I always have been.’

Celia nodded. ‘I know you are,’ she laughed. ‘I’m a bit like that myself.’

‘Yes, but not for the same reasons. Let me tell you something.’

And the light changed as Marcia talked about the lovers she used to take not too long before she met Celia and Mickey, how she was hooked on sex, or maybe not sex itself but on proving she was desirable, because she had been a homely-looking child.

‘So I had a busy time of it, in good old London. The pill by then had been invented, you’ll remember.’ Celia shrugged, pulling a face. ‘Anyway, I once did an estimate: I’d say that I slept with about three hundred men over two years.’

‘God Almighty!’ Celia considered this for a while. ‘That’s about … two and a half a week.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Nearly three different men each week for two years.’

‘I’ll be forced to go and buy some cigarettes if you carry on like this. There’s more. I started doing this again about a year ago, whenever I was out of London.’

‘Who with? With whom?’

‘Anyone who was nice to me.’

‘Mickey is nice to you.’

Marcia looked away. ‘Too nice.’ She started working her hands as if she was putting on hand cream, in a meditative sort of way, looking down, examining them. ‘I love Mickey, you know. And I love you. And sex is very often not about love, you must know this.’

Celia dismissed the idea. ‘I don’t know much about either.’

The sun began to fade and shadows were coming through the long windows.

‘I thought I knew you.’

‘That sounds like a reproach,’ said Marcia. ‘Are we talking about the same thing?’

‘No, no. You say you love me. Everyone knows I love you, would do anything for you.’

‘Yes, darling, but you and I couldn’t be intimate together in bed. It would be easy to have all sorts of romps, the three of us. But it would spoil everything in the end. And that’s not what loving people is about.’

‘Oh Marcia, for heaven’s sake. What kind of a conversation is this?’ She stared at a wall for clarification. ‘You seem to have come to all sorts of conclusions and not told me anything. You know I like to face up to things. I’ve always liked women, but never found one I liked quite enough. Whereas you liked men. It’s probably because you loved your father.’

‘Well let me tell you.’ Calm and steady, almost with a little smile Marcia said: ‘I hated my father. I rejoiced when he died.’

She got up and took a glass down and poured herself some water. ‘My father molested me when I was a child. Habitually. I’ve never told anyone before. That’s the main piece of intelligence I’ve always kept to myself.’

Celia waited a while as they looked at each other.

‘I see, Marse. When did it start, darling?’

‘I can’t remember when we were not doing it together!’

‘From the time you were a tiny tot?’

‘I think he fondled me from the time I was a toddler, or even before … but the main memory is from when I was six.’

Marcia nodded, getting the age right, blowing her nose, breathing deeply. When she was eight, she said, and began to understand about sin and going to hell it was already too late for confidences in her mother. And in any case her mother was too busy saying rosaries and doing novenas. She always told Marcia to say her prayers and God would help, whenever any little difficulty raised its head. But God wasn’t any help at all to Marcia, though she prayed very hard.

‘But Marcia, your father: I thought he was a dilettante scholar who was always helping you to look up things in the encyclopaedia.’

‘And so he did introduce me to the encyclopaedia. Critical all the time of my ignorance. Telling me I knew nothing, as well as being plain. The plainest kid in the town, he told me.’

They looked at each other across the kitchen table. ‘I had another vision of your childhood. I knew there were money problems, yes.’

‘He was a drinking man, with barely a good word to say to me. Except when he got a little bit drunk. Not rotten drunk, when he’d throw things, when he couldn’t contain his anger at the universe and would hit and punch mother until she fled to the church. But when he was in that state of semi-intoxication he became charming towards me and acted a bit like a real father.’ She talked slowly, deliberately. When he had just enough drink in him, he stopped deriding Marcia’s poor handwriting; desisted from scoffing at her arithmetic answers, left off telling her she was neither pretty nor clever. She found out later that her parents had stopped having sex when she was very young. Her mother couldn’t bear it. Marcia could picture the little shudder of revulsion from Mother, about to off-load her so-called responsibility onto her daughter.

He had a voice that was like velvet, James Baxter, when he was courting her. She knew from those days that a good voice was persuasive. Her mother’s voice – Mrs B. – she of the pursed mouth and sandy eyebrows, also spoke in the Yorkshire vernacular but with a hard, plaintive edge to it.

‘Why did they ever get married, I wonder?’

Marcia thought it was a mutual misunderstanding, or a folie à deux. He thought he could bring passion into her life, or more likely could bring her down by it, and she believed she could convert him to temperance. A determined churchgoer, she had been initially a little vague, it seemed, about Marcia’s place in her life. As if having given birth to a child whose existence she could hardly believe in and for whom she could not find any rationale, forced her to succumb early in her marriage to fits of the vapours and an increasing need to attend Mass with Holy Communion. She tried to convert her husband to her ways: that is, punctual, sober, quiet, reserved and respectable. With the heart of a medieval zealot she strove to win him over from drinking by the power of her prayer and piety.

Always on the verge of a close-lipped sniff, she wouldn’t, on the other hand, have anything to do with him. But she prayed for him each day, every week. This was bound to save him from his demons. Little wonder he lashed out at her now and then.

‘What I can’t forgive is the way he tricked my mother into colluding with him. The first time I remember. One day he told her that while she was out he was going to have a nap. I was to wake him so he wouldn’t oversleep. He said the alarm clock was broken; it was he who broke it intentionally. My mother was at evening devotions.’ Marcia made a quick hand-wringing gesture and stared at her palm, into her past as a small child. ‘So I duly went to wake him up at five o’clock. His pyjamas were open. It started in earnest from there. I shook him to wake him up and he feigned sleepiness but he’d been waiting for me. Look at our little toy, he said. And I did. I was interested.’

‘You were six.’

But Marcia wanted to please her father. And she could remember that it was from this time that she started having seriously secret times with Daddy, the times when he was nice to her, when he held her hand and guided it and told her she was his little girl. In these times together he told her she was clever and pretty to boot, and they mustn’t ever tell Mummy or anyone else the nice things they did together because you had to learn to keep a secret in this world.

Other kids might have had nightmares but for her the reality became Daddy, drunk, as she matured, coming in to her bedroom at night, just as any husband might. It became more routine as she got used to it. And he didn’t bother being nice anymore. Drunk or sober he was with her; in her bed, down in the shed or on the kitchen table.

‘I felt like a workhorse. Also rather confused; I didn’t know whether I had begun to like it or not.’ Marcia turned her face towards Celia. ‘At that age you don’t know about your wishes or your rights; you don’t know the word coercion. Or know about your place in life, or that your innocence has been taken.’

She stood up and got another glass of water, then one for Celia before sitting down again. ‘As I grew older my skinny ugliness started to change and my looks gradually improved. Finally I realised when I was about twenty-one that I did have good features that others didn’t: good teeth anyway, and they told me my skin was flawless.’ She looked back into her memory of the young Marcia. ‘I never had problems with acne like some of those poor kids. Strange, I was middle-class in my tastes; you know, took naturally to literature, classical music. But I wasn’t brave enough to express anything as a child, or to go against my father.’

‘No. You were a frightened, obedient little girl,’ said Celia. ‘Did you never tell your mother about it?’

‘Yes, when I turned thirteen, and I understood that I could get pregnant but didn’t know what to do or who to go to.’

‘And?’

‘And she told me not to tell anyone.’

Celia snorted, shaking her head.

‘And did he continue – after puberty?’

‘Oh yes, he took precautions some of the time,’ said Marcia with a bit of a laugh.

‘And, did he …?’

‘We did everything.’ And she actually did laugh, her friend noticed. But not a real one.

‘And – when did he die?’

‘When I was twenty-one. I came home one night from a Church Youth meeting and my mother said, quite without preamble: Your father is dead. He was found drunk and dead in a ditch. I don’t think she knew about being alliterative. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ I said. And she didn’t say anything much after that. Didn’t chide me for my blasphemy’

‘God, Marcia, this is making me bloody well sick.’

Marcia heaved a great sigh. ‘So you see, when I was a child I was more than interfered with or damaged, I was knowing. I sure knew a lot of men at the time you introduced me to Mickey. And it should shame me to say that it wasn’t altogether satisfactory with him.’ There was a short silence. ‘But oh, it was OK. Poor Mickey. He hasn’t much sexual vitality I suppose. But he’s a love. And has no idea about me,’ she added.

The hours had gone by and the sky was darkening. They had drunk their water. Celia stood up and got together some olives, wine glasses and a bottle, and sat down again.

‘What appals me about this, Marse,’ she said, ‘is that we know it’s not only ancient, this … this habit, this vice; it’s almost a commonplace custom, almost a right that goes back to antiquity.’

‘Oh yes, I know I was by no means the only little girl, or small child, on whom the father was asserting his demands.’ She absent-mindedly reached for an olive but didn’t eat it. ‘When I was about, oh, twenty-three, before I met you and Mick, I thought I was being terribly hip and glamorous in London, drinking, smoking, playing loud music, going to those dreadful parties, having regular sex with awful young men. Meeting you and Mickey with your comparative innocence, your sense of fun, your sensibilities, it has been like a blessing. I loved you both from the start, you see. And I still do.’

They reached for each other’s hand. Celia made a fist of their hands and pressed it to her face.

‘We’ve been too shy to say anything about love until today, Marse, but thank you for saying that, all of that. It’s too easy to misunderstood people,’ said Celia. ‘Lucky altogether really, the three of us knowing each other.’ By now they were eating and drinking, as if life had been able to return to normality.

Marcia sipped her wine. ‘Good friendship is love unfettered by physical demands. I can see how sex must become irrelevant when one becomes old, but friendship never does.’

‘My dear. How wretched you must have been, not confiding in anyone all this time.’

‘Shall we have another?’ asked Marcia, indicating her glass. ‘I bought some crackers and this cheese on the way home, fully matured, so it’ll play havoc with the breath.’

‘But that can be rectified,’ said Celia, reaching across to cut the cheese.

‘Everything can be rectified.’

‘Ah, no it can’t. This kind of stuff can’t be buried. Please don’t say it’s all right, that it’s in the past. That bastard infected your whole life with his vileness. Bad enough that men like him can penetrate the body of a child. But that your mother knew and still didn’t do anything about it.’

‘I think she let him know that she knew but she put it in religious terms – you know, that it was wrong and she was going to pray for him!’

‘Not bash him over the head with a saucepan or call the police, or take you away … something useful.’

‘She couldn’t afford to do that.’ And they sat there quietly.

‘The important thing that I started out to explain, is that I decided I was able to belong to myself, deep within my soul, where no one could reach. And that’s what I’ve been doing, all these years. I didn’t have help from my mother and I couldn’t tell anyone else about it. I took over his shame. But I had myself.’

Sitting on her bed later on, in her eyrie, feeling light and contented, she gazed down on the house of drunken violence, all quiet now, with one of their two kittens sitting on what was possibly a borrowed motorbike, all shiny and hardly ever ridden because, she suspected, they didn’t have the money for petrol. The kitten, squatting on the saddle, was scratching the black leather, eyes closed in rapture. Celia should get a photo of that. The young boy leaned over the balcony unperturbed and looked at the cat, making that lip-pursing sound that people all over the world make to animals. They were rough and uneducated that family, but they were not cruel to their cats. In Marcia’s eyes that was a mark in their favour.

In the street below with people strolling past, she thought that Celia was right: the show is the thing. How very well the people dressed here, even in this humble place: all spruced up and with their clothes nicely pressed, so many with brushed, abundant hair, even elderly men. Fulvio had very good hair and not too much of it on his body. It had been a very agreeable interlude, tantalising hors d’oeuvres – he sure knew what he was about – followed by the main course of good, juddering sex. She still hadn’t told Celia about this afternoon but quite likely Cele had guessed now with her uncanny intuition. It was an episode, that’s all. One of many that she’d tell no one because it hardly mattered; it had been good but it didn’t count for very much in the long run. She called to mind her years of experimentation, she supposed it was. To see if she was normal, whatever that may be.

It was evening: she’d have a shower and enjoy the solace of lying down here on clean white sheets, her mind doing a final flick back to her afternoon – where the state of the bed linen was the last thing on her mind. What had been on her mind then? Her need or his? His, more likely. She wanted to console him on the loss of his bitch’s honour. A good, sensitive man. She yawned and stretched and knew she’d not see him again or give him more than a passing thought when she got back to London.

Perhaps the interlude would pop into her mind when she was on the point of giving Mickey up, which was, as far as she could see, the only way she could continue loving him.

Celia, downstairs lying on her double bed, reviewed her own day which she hadn’t yet told Marcia about, but would. They liked to share daily trivia and pull it apart, laugh over it. God knows what Marse had got up to with someone else who had a dog. But Celia had enjoyed her own peculiar company; had tried to look down the centuries at the monastery, had wandered into the fusty old church and knelt down near the altar, had taken photographs of the monument and written some postcards.

At the post office – difficult to find because it looked from the outside like a warehouse and had no sign to declare its function – she entered the cool interior and nodded to the elderly women who were seated around the wall as though in a doctor’s waiting room. Celia, needing stamps, bowled up to the window in her Australian way, where there was just one person ahead of her. She was aware of a particular quality of silence over her shoulder while she waited, and began to wonder if those ladies were in fact in their own kind of queue sitting down? In tune with this thought a small woman appeared at her elbow and said politely: ‘Excuse me signora, I was here,’ to which Celia ceded immediately with apologies. Everyone smiled and understood that she didn’t know their ways, and now exhorted her to take a place in front of them. The woman at the window obligingly held out her hand for the postcards, to which Celia replied that she merely wanted a few stamps.

‘Oh we don’t have stamps, signora,’ said the woman.

‘You don’t have stamps.’ Celia said it more in sorrow than surprise.

‘But I do have my machine,’ (this said with a certain pride) ‘so I can frank your cards and send them off, if you want to leave them with me.’

Celia paid her money and departed, smiling her thanks to the patient old women on the way out, pondering whether human nature the world over was like this: once you had taken their point, they would overlook your mistake.

Here she was called voi for you as a mark of respect, rather than the Lei of Rome and northern Italy. And she remembered how Mussolini, who hated the French, nevertheless issued an edict, during his reign, that all Italians must use the form voi, the equivalent to the French vous; henceforth Lei was forbidden. This might have had the supporting rationale, in his mind, that Lei was too deferential? Perhaps he had been against any signs of class.

She looked around her at the hilly streets, many of them cobbled from centuries ago, knowing she could never capture on her little camera the way things looked here. The tattered buildings, on the outside that is, others with their makeshift repairs. An enormous earthquake had taken place in 1783, she’d been told; it took the whole of southern Italy and shook it almost to death (the way in her imagination that a monster shark or crocodile took a human body and thrashed it till it drowned) so that rivers changed their course and the topography of the country was altered forever.

Beside the road on a seat was an old woman who greeted her with a resigned air, as if nothing could ever surprise her again. Her features almost mirrored the town: a weathered and worn face with teeth missing; a bit of remedial work done. The houses behind the old lady had sustained a few daubs of mortar here, a stretch of iron railing there, a little outhouse tacked onto the front – a kitchen, or an outdoor loo. Successive generations had added their needs to the inherited building so that the subsequent impression was of one storey falling upon the other like misshapen blocks, to make a statement about their history, of being beaten about by everyone and everything, including World War II Allied forces who had put paid to anything that was left.

The next day Sandrina and Mario met them at the church to celebrate the feast of San Rocco with a Mass, followed by a grand procession through the town. On the way to the church, walking through one of the main streets in town Marcia touched Celia’s arm and nodded towards the ubiquitous washing, across the road, hanging from lines suspended between rooms and balconies above, unashamedly on show, the poor, modest smalls, centimetres above the heads of passers-by. Despite evidence like this of less-than-glamorous clothes and humble living quarters, they saw no one who was poorly dressed.

Celia pointed out the occasional small shop or door which had the key left in the lock. Sandrina had told them: ‘Stealing is practically non-existent here because we all know each other. You can’t get away with a thing!’

In the distance San Giovanni and Cosmolino were burnt: stricken and sullen from recent fierce bushfires.

The villagers, given the excuse, dolled up in their best for the feast day and there were not one but two priests at the fore, followed by altar boys in full regalia and a brass band, as before, blasting its way through hymns and old Calabrian airs. Everyone finished up in the Piazza del Popolo, a small-scale version of Rome’s vast public square where Mussolini had delivered his rants.

These were the two focal points in town: the church and the larger of the two squares. After the festivities in the late afternoon Celia spied her neighbour Cristina the elderly widow, who in her accustomed way was twittering at her. Celia heard the bird-like noises from above as she slowly walked up the steep road towards the house with some food. Looking up she saw that Cristina, in her nightdress from an afternoon nap, hair still tousled, was addressing her, making gestures of welcome, inviting the foreigner to come up and enjoy a cup of coffee. The older woman was still grieving for her husband who had died several years ago. When she met you in the street she picked at imaginary threads from the front of her bodice, as she spoke, straightened her spectacles and related her suffering from this or that malady and Dio mio, the medico never came when she needed him. Cristina wanted Celia to know that there was a funeral on the following day at the church at sixteen hours and Celia and her friend must come along.

‘But we don’t know the man, Cristina,’ said Celia, overwhelmed by the plethora of rituals. She normally didn’t attend the weddings or funerals of people she did know.

‘It makes no difference, cara, everyone will be there. He will be a splendid corpse.’

Earlier in the day Celia had seen the widow talking animatedly with a well-turned-out older gentleman and she caught a glimmer of the maiden who was once Cristina: full of guile, uttering the right phrases in a girlish way, making little flirting sounds that are part of a young woman’s conversational repertoire. Now Cristina’s mannerisms had descended into cheeps and flutterings. Celia had asked Sandrina over a cup of coffee recently about the widow, how unfortunate it was that Cristina appeared to have no one, and Sandrina said:

‘She complains constantly, yet she has everything.’

‘Everything?’

‘Consider it, put it on a tray.’ Celia looked at the kitchen table where they had had their coffee and cornetto from a tray.

Sandrina continued in a conversational way, almost smiling:

‘She has health, yet eats from morning to night – look at the size of her; she has family, children and grandchildren. Friends, money – what more can you possibly ask for, to make you happy?’

‘Love?’

‘Love! She had a husband, now he’s dead and she mourns him constantly but they quarrelled all the time.’

Celia weighed it up. ‘Some people, I suppose, are better than others at being happy.’

Clouds appeared from over the mountains bringing a wind, and she just made it inside before the deluge descended and washed the town hard for about an hour, before easing off. She wondered where you could buy an umbrella in a place where there was only a handful of food shops; for other goods most people relied on the Saturday moving market. As today was Wednesday Celia asked her favourite beautiful woman in the bar, the thin one with black hair and black eyes, where one could buy an umbrella. The woman directed her to the tobacconist’s, where else? ‘It’s Tuesday so he should be open, signora.’

Despite these vagaries, the lack of public phones or a bank, a post office that had no stamps, buses that had no printed timetables – for Marcia had told her about the bus stop that wasn’t there – and the pharmacy that was out of tissues, there was a hit-and-miss rhythm and civility to daily life. Tradition was served, art was served and family and religion above all were served.

On the second-last day in Sanlorenzo there was a strong earth tremor felt in the straits of Messina, not far from where they were, measuring five on the Richter scale. The townspeople talked about it in a matter-of-fact way, though not with any disrespect, the two women noticed. They went to the trattoria opposite the house with the pink garden, where they were served exquisite food by a large ungainly man who moved with great delicacy and had a shy manner. He placed everything they wanted in front of them, for he knew their needs by now. They passed on the wild boar in favour of grilled king prawns, and raised their glasses happily. As they left and stood on the cobbled street sniffing the air like dogs, Cristina spotted them and went into her choreography, extending the hands particularly to Celia, palms up, then made a sweeping to the side with her arms as though ushering her somewhere – upstairs to her house, or inviting her to dance. Celia knew that if they went upstairs she’d tell them all her woes again. Yet the widow was all smiles, as she did a little two-step with welcoming gestures, making soft murmuring noises of encouragement. It was a display of the utmost good will and Marcia smiled at the older woman while Celia explained that they had to start packing as they were leaving tomorrow. She hoped they would meet here again, another time.

‘If not here cara, then we will meet in Paradise,’ rejoined the widow.

‘The very place, Cristina.’

They were tired and went to bed thankfully, but the wild family across the road went into another bout of roaring, followed by a cacophony of metal being beaten with a heavy implement. Marcia reckoned it must make them feel they’re alive, with so little to amuse them, or worse, no means of knowing how to amuse themselves. But when it had all died down she heard the wife calling to her beloved cat in the sweetest accents, all trace of the raucous gone.