A boat trip, lunch and a visit to the catacombs came and went the following day and Nick treated it all with mute disinterest. He was supercilious when he did speak, either lofty or cryptic.
In front of the Duomo on that Monday evening, couples stroll hand in hand across the great white marble piazza, back and forth, before settling on one of the five similar restaurants with tables for two.
Nick and Astrid watch them with pointed absorption. Each of them affects a gaunt melancholy. They reach for their glasses of wine as soon as they are served. They take dutiful sips. They have ordered a pizza to share, though they have each admitted that neither is hungry.
On the cathedral steps, a tall man with hair pulled back behind his ears holds out his hand for a woman in a strappy dress. She has the poise of a dancer. As he pulls her into him, he uses his mobile phone to take a picture of the pair of them, in front of what was once the temple of Athena. A man in a wheelchair is parked at a table next to them. His friend hoists him up. The disabled man slumps. The friend does it again. The man slumps again and his glasses on a string fall off and hang about his chin.
Astrid misses the spa. The clients she got in there were the sort of women she liked: malleable, the behind-your-back type. Fortunately, she never had to deal with any of the Annie Lennox sort: opinionated and messianic. She enjoyed conversation in the half-hour slots during which she applied the colour. She could give vent to anything she needed to, shorten a few long faces and, after a day of it, leave feeling generally very satisfied and ready for a bit of male. She missed the company of women. Especially now, when they’d had a falling-out and she had no one to speak to.
Of course she didn’t discuss the entire ins and outs of their business! She hadn’t time for the whole kit and caboodle with the apprentices doing the rest of the foils when she moved on to the next client. No, she edited the story down to what he said (that was bad) and what she did (that was good). She reasoned, as ever, that if she was telling perfect strangers the ins and outs of their life, she ought to tell her mother. So, from time to time, they met for lunch. ‘I’ve never liked any of the men in your life, Astrid,’ her mother said to her once. ‘Well, I love him,’ Astrid had replied as they worked side by side, fork by fork, through the cheesecake, coming to a truce at the crust.
‘I don’t come on holiday to get drunk as a rule,’ Nick says when she proposes another bottle of wine.
‘Oh, wicked!’
‘I’ve never liked that expression used that way.’
They sit in silence. The friend hoists the man in the wheelchair once more.
As the white facades retreat into the night, she implores him,
‘Nick? Where are you?’
He doesn’t seem to hear; he makes no answer. She pays the bill to spite him and to relish, in that curiously feminine way, grievance added to grievance.
When they go to bed, he launches himself on to his right side, facing the wall. In the morning, when there is a light between the shutters, he wakes and goes into the bathroom. Windowless, it is dark in there. He stumbles about; he’s desperate for a pee. He reaches left and right for a light pull. He tries the light switch on the outside wall. He flicks it on and off, on and off, on and off. Nothing.
‘The fucking lights are broken,’ he says out loud.
He goes to open the shutters. He goes back across the floor to the bathroom. The bathroom is still impenetrably dark. Shit, he’ll have to call downstairs and ask whether it’s normal to have a power cut here.
‘Put the key card in the slot in the wall,’ says Astrid.
‘Which slot?’
‘The one right in front of you which says, in English and Italian and French, put your card in here to turn on bathroom lights. That one,’ she says facetiously.
‘Thank you!’
When she hears the lights ping and flutter and warble into action, she rolls over on to her stomach. ‘Some holiday this is.’ She can hear him shaving, showering, drying himself – the usual routine, but at speed – and her heart beats faster as she wonders why he is getting up at this hour, and then he’s got his clothes on in what seems like seconds.
‘I’ll see you up at breakfast, I assume,’ he says dourly before he leaves.
With the wardrobe shaking in the door’s wake, she sits up and looks in the mirror at her tired face in the morning light.
Up at the rooftop restaurant, where breakfast is served, on a buffet table laid with pristine white linen, there is a crushed almond granita circulating in a drinks machine and a bottle of prosecco in a silver bucket hinting at honeymooners. Some fat-bottomed tourists in khaki shorts are bending and exclaiming over the custard-topped pastries.
Outside on the terrace, the morning is spread out over the harbour, and there is a pink and violet tinge to the birdless sky. Nick is sitting at a table for two, gazing across to the modern port with its industrial area and docks. There is a noise coming from it which sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner.
But he is in Kent in 1987, in a field, sitting, waiting for her to come as he’d promised he would. The damp cold at his ankles, the sun on his crown, and a faint smell of sheep shit. The ghastly delay between one crow calling another. The rumble of the road.
Astrid sits down opposite him.
‘Are we to carry on with this argument all holiday, Nick?’
‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ He looks nobly pained.
From her seat, she can see the tops of the buildings, square and domed, baroque and rococo, everything adorned and embellished, everything poised for a perfect day; a ruffle on a sleeve, the flick of a lock of hair, the lifting of a baton.
‘Let’s have a nice day today,’ she says. ‘Let’s be friends again. It’s a lovely hot day for the time of year.’
He offers her a wan smile.
Making do with that, she turns to admire the far plains on the other side of the harbour. When she finishes her coffee, she catches him looking at her forlornly.
They go down to the bit of beach closest to the hotel. The hem of sand that gives on to the harbour is fringed with stones, cigarette butts and twigs from the pine trees behind. Sparkling in it are the soft gems of washed glass in all sorts of colours. Three or four old men sit in their trunks on towels on a wall; walnut-skinned, they waggle their toes, their hair silver as if the sun had taken a blowtorch to it. Three older women, large and dark, stand in bikinis and sun hats, making scornful noises, with their hands on their hips, knee-high in the water. A young black man is washing his arms. The seawater on his back is like marbles.
‘Have you seen this here?’ Nick says out of the side of his mouth, to Astrid. Beside him a young couple lie kissing.
She shrugs.
After only a few minutes of sitting there, at the end of Nick’s hotel towel are two terrier-like holes, the wet sand churned like toffee where his heels have dug. He is looking at the couple again, she sees. What’s wrong with him? She takes a look. The young couple are using each other’s bodies like furniture, with casual intimacy. The boy has the girl’s lower tummy as his headrest, lying at a right angle to her; he is smoking a cigarette while she talks.
Nick gets up. Shaking his towel with disregard for the irritation he causes, he rolls it briskly and stows it under his arm.
‘Going back to the room,’ he says. It takes him a couple of goes to get up the wall. He makes his way up round the Fountain of Arethusa, leaving Astrid behind, open-mouthed, her paperback in her hands.
She looks at the couple again, lying alongside each other, facing one other, touching fingertips to fingertips, soft as fruit in a bowl. She leans back on her hands and closes her eyes to feel the sun and thinks of him, of Nick, her last love. Your body is like a garden – I know its quarters, the brush at your upper chest, the soft moss on your lower back.
When she opens her eyes, the tears in them smart like sea-water; still she smiles as hard as she can.