PREVIEW:

The girls got out of the car and ran off, without saying goodbye to us. My mother, standing in the doorway, hugged them and smiled at me, lifting her chin as if to say Don’t worry.

Luigi started up the car before I could regret it or change my mind about accepting the invitation to spend a weekend on Ponza, in a house overlooking the port.

The ferry crossing from Formia was pleasant and Friday afternoon was hot. Hot and humid. And the air was heavy on Saturday and Sunday morning, before we left, as if it might rain, but it didn’t. We walked, ate, and swam. Luigi didn’t, he said the water was cold. Although that wasn’t true. He just preferred to listen to the chatter, sitting at one of the tables at the bar in the port.

On Sunday evening, when we got home, I put the girls to bed, flicked through the afternoon edition of Il Golfo, the photocopied bulletin for the two parishes, and smoked a cigarette.

If I didn’t see the news of Vittoria’s death, it was because I don’t read the obituaries and property ads before going to bed.

On Monday morning, while I was in my office trying to persuade the ironmonger and his wife not to sue after their son had come off worst in a fight, my secretary Cristina came into the room to tell me there was a woman on the phone, insisting on speaking to me. I stood up and excused myself to get some privacy.

It was Mara. Vittoria died yesterday morning, she said in a flat, calm tone, a courtesy call. I know she liked you, and you liked her.

She’d called their other friends too.

I couldn’t think of anything to ask her. I thought of myself, alive, in Ponza while Vittoria was dying in Scauri.

An accident, Mara explained. An accident in the bath, she repeated, her voice faltering after every syllable. I assured her I would go and see her and, without thanking me, she said She’s here at home, the funeral’s the day after tomorrow, before ending the call.

I went back into the office and carried on talking to the ironmonger and his wife, keeping my eyes on the keyhole which occasionally appeared in the door behind their heads, which were bobbing back and forth in the heat of their story. He was almost shouting, he seemed to have taken it badly that his son had been beaten up.

Lea, that lad threw a beer bottle at him, and thank God it didn’t hit him in the head, it would’ve killed him, but it just grazed him, see? Riccardo’s not a chicken, so he went over and punched him, and the other lad dodged, headbutted him, and broke his nose. It wasn’t an accident.

It wasn’t an accident, repeated Anna, the boy’s mother. You have to stop this kind of behaviour while you can, she added, turning around suddenly, annoyed, perhaps to see

what I was staring at past her head.

An accident in the bath, I thought, and I saw Vittoria again with her swaying walk, her intense eyes, neither light nor dark, the pale-blue sleeveless linen dress she wore. I saw her walking along the pavement, stopping in front of shop windows and shaking her head. What she felt about the

objects she saw there, I never knew. She used to enjoy talking about things you couldn’t, or shouldn’t, laugh at. People who cheated on each other. People who built two-family vaults at the top of the cemetery. People who tripped over. Wheelchair users blocked by architectural barriers. Can you

imagine? Nothing but barriers, for sure.

I knew that bathtub she died in, I’d been to Vittoria’s house many times. You couldn’t miss it because the front door, which gave onto a long corridor, was opposite the bathroom,

and at the far end there was the bath, under a window with yellow and green panes, an irregular chequered pattern of squares and rectangles, while the floor and walls were

shiny black tiles.

The house had been renovated in the early seventies, when Vittoria moved to Scauri to live with Mara. We all knew that bathtub, and of course we’d noticed it because of those black tiles. So Enrico told me, anyway. I’d asked him about it for some reason, perhaps when we had the work done on our

house. Enrico supplied bathroom fittings and tiles across the Sud Pontino area beyond Fondi, and he was my husband’s uncle. I was sure no one had ever lived in that house before, as far as I could remember.

Since Vittoria had come, it was always open. You came in through the garden and there’d be a cheery atmosphere on the patio, people chatting, dogs chasing each other, cats jumping on the tables and sharpening their claws on the trees. There was a peacock, too, Patrick.

From the first time I went there, that’s what it was always like. For me, and for everyone else, because before they even finished sorting out the house they had a party, for Mara’s birthday. I wasn’t there, I was told about it. Everyone had talked about it.

A little building, with a few fancy flourishes, but rundown, ground floor and first floor, with a lovely entrance, in Via Romanelli, and a little garden that had flourished over twenty years. Vittoria knew about herbs, she read about gardens and walked a lot, she could walk as far as the Redeemer, where the statue of Christ was. Reading about gardens was very unusual, too, according to the bookshop where Vittoria ordered her manuals. Unusual in the sense of strange. After all, we had vegetable patches and flower beds – gardens were for posh people’s houses. Or belonged to the council. General Nobile’s villa had a garden, and so did the municipal villa, a public garden with merry-go-rounds behind the Sayonara ice cream shop.

When they arrived no one asked too many questions, perhaps because no one realised they were going to stay. Vittoria started working in the pharmacy, Mara opened a cat and dog boarding and grooming business before anyone else had thought of it. I don’t even know whether it was a legal business, or what its tax situation was, but lots of people went there, out of curiosity or because, sooner or later, everyone needs someone to look after their dog or cat for a few days.

So I dropped in myself, in December 1974.

I’d argued with my mother and I didn’t want to ask her to look after my dog, Madama. Mum wouldn’t accept that the days were gone when dogs and cats were either strays you gave a bit of food from time to time – only a bit, you mustn’t let them get fond of you – and who risked getting run over every single day, or animated brooms or hoes: work tools. Dogs kept guard and cats caught mice, chickens laid eggs, cows provided milk and meat, pigs were slaughtered once a year, and my job was to wash the innards to be stuffed with sausage and salami meat. The idea of pets for company never crossed her mind. If it doesn’t talk, what sort of company’s that? Mum would protest curtly, sweeping the kitchen floor. I was a tool to her too and, as I was a girl, I was to be her walking stick in old age. An animated stick. She didn’t even want me to accept the scholarship after university. Lea, get to work, you’ve got to get yourself married.

Mum would have left Madama outside the house for those three days. I didn’t want to get married, I wanted to go on studying and run off for a couple of days to see Luigi, who was doing his military service, but I didn’t know where to leave the dog, so my best friend Alba suggested Mara’s pet boarding service. She’d never been there, but she’d heard about it on the train to Rome. That way you don’t need to worry, otherwise you’ll be thinking about Madama when you’re with Luigi. Alba’s always been a practical woman.

I liked Luigi, he called Madama a fake wolf, he was an army reserve officer in some far-flung place outside of Salerno, the Snake Pit.

The garden of the house where Mara and Vittoria lived wasn’t beautiful like it is now. The roof was yet to be a roof terrace, there were no railings, but you could see someone cared about it and had started looking after it on a daily basis. In a few months, everything was on the way to flourishing. The pet boarding and grooming business wasn’t fashionable, vets mostly looked after chickens and sheep, cows and pigs, occasionally rabbits. Rabbits are particularly delicate.

The Redeemer, where Vittoria picked plants and flowers which she later transplanted at sea level, was a peak of the Aurunci Mountains, Monte Altino, known as the Redeemer because of the statue of Christ.

It was clear they’d come to stay because the owner of the pharmacy, a very distinguished woman from Livorno, heard from a friend that Vittoria hadn’t rented but purchased the house in Via Romanelli, and that Mara wasn’t her daughter, even though Vittoria had registered the property in her name. The notary had said so one morning in Bar Italia while commenting on another inheritance case that had tickled him, concerning a house in Vindicio for which it had been complicated to find even one heir, a lovely house, and in the end the heir had turned it down in favour of a friend of the uncle who owned it. But what kind of friend, no one could say. The name Vindicio immediately brought to mind the name Formia, which immediately ignited a sense of local rivalry in the hearts of the people of Scauri against that town less than ten kilometres to the north. Perhaps that was why this juicy morsel of information about Mara not being the daughter had generated no gossip but had remained like karst. Water running under the town’s feet, like the Capo d’Acqua river, which had been buried, with only short sections visible from the Parco delle Trote as far as the sea. And in those short sections children collected tadpoles, sealing them in jam jars. Sometimes the tadpoles were set free into the stream and became frogs, but more often they died.

On the Madama day, a woman with dark hair just above her shoulders saw me outside the gate with an elderly dog and came over to me, smiling. With a quick, firm jerk of her head she freed her right eye from a lock of hair. Her sparkly eyes were neither light nor dark, and she wore a straw hat that had seen better days, loose trousers, and a white cable-knit jumper, and was clutching a pair of shears. My mother also worked the land, and had a certain elegance, but Vittoria looked like she had stepped out of the pages of Oggi, where I occasionally read articles about exiled royals. She looked like an Arabian princess on a Tuscan country estate. Except that behind her there was the shabby little building. An untidy garden and cracked plaster. It had belonged to the Nocellas, who owned all the land from the Via Appia to the railway before the business about the horse.

I wondered if it would be possible to leave her the dog for a couple of days, and how much it would cost. That’s what I said, without even a polite good morning.

Vittoria kept smiling and answered Come in and sit down, anyway. Would you like a glass of water, a coffee? A tamarind cordial?

Without waiting for an answer she laid a hand on my arm, then set off towards the front door, left the shears on a little metal table, and went inside, taking off her hat. Her hair was smartly cut but windswept. On the patio there was a table with two chairs. She turned in the doorway as if to focus on me, tilted her head. I looked away, blushing, examined my jumper in search of a stain.

A few minutes later she came out, accompanied by two girls, put her hat back on, and made a polite gesture, touching the brim with her fingertips, then went back to where I had found her. There was something martial about her. A martial courtesy, and something bobbing, billowy, a ship’s captain.

My grandfather would tip his hat as a sign of respect or farewell. After taking the oath, Luigi had sent me a photo in his officer’s uniform, with a peaked hat. You could tell he had blue eyes even in black and white. I’ve always liked blue eyes. I think the first thing I loved about Luigi was his blue-green eyes. Men usually doff their hats.