The Invitation(64)

‘You have to keep moving – so that you do not become like un sarcofago. It happens in seconds, otherwise. I almost lost my wife like that. She was trying to take a photograph of it … imagine.’

He describes to Hal the Bedou tribes’ strong sense of honour and hospitality, and of their customs: the poetry they would recite in the evening, their great piousness.

‘There is a purity to a desert existence, to living according to its laws. But there is also a strength of mind and body required for that life. I was too weak.’ He gestures, ‘I missed the sea, I missed the green. But sometimes, now, the Contessa and I find we miss the desert, too. It is something that gets into the blood, a most rare and powerful drug. Who knows, maybe one day, we will return there, my wife and I. Our bodies are weaker but our minds, perhaps, have acquired the necessary resilience.’

When they have finished eating he takes Hal to the tent they have brought back with them and erected at one end of the courtyard. It is a long, low shape, a thick coarse cloth made from woven goat hair. Hal climbs inside the dark space and smells woodsmoke and incense and something else, too – something indefinable. A residue, perhaps, of the intense heat of the desert sun which has by some magic permeated into the fabric itself.

‘You have the best night’s sleep of your life in these,’ he tells Hal.

He used to be a keen aviator, too, but the war put paid to that. ‘I used to dream about building aeroplanes. When I was a boy it was my passion; all I could think about. I spent my days designing them. And then as a young man I gave up the engineering part – I had not the mathematical brain that was needed – and instead became rather good at flying the things. But to see my hobby become something that could kill … it destroyed my passion for it completely.’

Hal thinks of the fact that he hasn’t set foot in a sailing dinghy since 1938. ‘Will you ever fly again?’

‘Perhaps. But my eyesight is not how it was. I have other interests now: my garden, my fishing.’

The Conte and Contessa spent the war years in Switzerland, wanting, as the Conte explains, to distance themselves as far as possible from the disgrace of the country under Fascism.

‘From the mid-thirties we were exiles. We stayed with friends, we lived in one of the spa hotels for several years. For a while I thought we might not recognize the country when – if – we returned. And it is changed. We are all changed. But luckily there is enough of the old place, and of ourselves, left to recognize.’

He rises from his seat now and pours another round of grappa for everyone.

‘To new friends.’ He salutes Hal, Giulietta, Aubrey, Stella. ‘And to old.’ This last with a fond smile for Gaspari. ‘To the sea.’ He sweeps a hand across the blue. ‘To Italy.’ He has almost put down his glass when he remembers something. ‘And to love, of course. To the older kind,’ he toasts the Contessa and then, unmistakably, he raises his glass to Hal and then to Stella, ‘and to young.’

There is a strained silence.

‘Caro,’ the Contessa says, with a quick smile. ‘I explained it to you. Mrs Truss’ husband has had to travel to Milan. Hal is the journalist.’

‘Oh.’ He frowns.

‘I think you have had too much grappa, carissimo. You cannot drink as much as you used to.’

‘Ah yes,’ the Conte says, as though finally remembering his lines, and giving them all a winning smile. ‘Forgive an old man his confusion.’ He taps his forehead. ‘It is nothing but so much spider’s yarn up here.’

*

Later, when most of the guests have retreated to their own rooms, Hal finds the Contessa sitting out on the terrace alone, a glass of grappa in her hand. ‘Look at them,’ she says, and points.

At first he cannot see what it is she means. And then they begin to appear like retinal scratches: tiny filaments of light appearing from and dissolving into the dark.

‘Fireflies.’ This is the first time in his life he has seen them.

‘Sit with me,’ she says. ‘And have some more grappa.’ She pours a little into a second glass and passes it to him. They watch the strange show for several minutes in silence.

‘They are early this year – it has been warm. But soon,’ she sweeps a hand, ‘they will fill all of this. They will almost vanquish the dark.’

‘I’d like to see that.’

‘Perhaps one day you will return, join us here for a longer time.’

‘I’d like that.’

‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘You are Italian, are you not?’

‘My mother is.’

‘I knew it. You speak the language too beautifully for it to be otherwise. And that was why you chose Rome for your escape?’

‘Escape?’

‘That was what you told me at my party. The reason you gave.’

He remembers. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘But what is a young man like you doing all alone? Aubrey I think I understand – he seems, well, if not content, then certainly resigned to his aloneness. But I don’t think it is the same with you.’

From anyone else this questioning would be prying, impertinent. But from the Contessa it is curiously inoffensive. Perhaps, Hal thinks, it is the authority lent by age.

‘I was going to be married – in England.’