After Hannibal

The Partnership

The Greeks Have a Word for It

The Hide

Mooncranker’s Gift

The Big Day

Pascali’s Island

(published in the United States under the title
The Idol Hunter
)

The Rage of the Vulture

Stone Virgin

Sugar and Rum

Sacred Hunger

Morality Play

After Hannibal

Losing Nelson

The Songs of the Kings

The Ruby in Her Navel

Land of Marvels

The Quality of Mercy

They are called
strade vicinali
, neighborhood roads. They are not intended to join places, only to give access to scattered houses. Dusty in summer, muddy in winter, there are thousands of miles of them wandering over the face of rural Italy. When such a road has reached your door it has no necessary further existence; it may straggle along somewhere else or it may not. You can trace their courses on the survey maps kept in the offices of the local
comune
; but no map will tell you what you most need to know about them: whether they are passable or ruinous or have ceased altogether to exist in any sense but the notional. Their upkeep falls to those who depend on them, a fact that often leads to quarrels. The important thing, really, about roads like this, is not where they end but the lives they touch on the way.

From their landing window, broad and deep-silled, the Chapmans had a view which included a piece of the road, a narrow, yellowish ribbon rising and curving between terraced olives and a field of young maize. They had stopped on the way downstairs to look out.

“Oh, to be in England, now that Spring is there,” Harold Chapman declaimed. He was at his most exuberant in the mornings. “Not bally likely,” he added after a moment; “it was nine degrees centigrade in London when we left, and outlook variable. Seventeen here.” Figures had a talismanic importance for him; who commanded them commanded the world. One of the first things he had done on arrival was to hang his outdoor thermometer on the wall outside the kitchen. “Look at that sky,” he said. “Not a cloud in it.” He glanced at his wife Cecilia and smiled his usual tight smile, wrinkling his broad nose a little in the doggy kind of way she had always found attractive.

“It’s April,” she said.

Harold stared. “So it is. A shrewd observation, sweetheart. April 12, 1995.” He glanced at his watch. “Local time eight forty-three.”

“I was talking about the poem you just quoted from. It’s ‘Oh, to be in England now that April’s there.’ Not Spring.”

Harold thought briefly of disputing this. It was not that he believed Cecilia might be wrong; in matters of this sort she never was. Like all intensely competitive people he had learned to cede land that lay beyond hope of conquest and he had assigned the marginal territories of literature and art to his wife from the early days of their marriage. Indeed he was proud to have a wife who
possessed such exotic knowledge and expressed it in the accents of the privileged. Apart from anything else, it impressed the people he did business with. But to be caught out, to be corrected, that was a different matter. He glanced quickly at his wife’s face. Small-boned, softly molded, rather squeamish about the mouth, it bore the loving expression it always did when she felt she was making him a gift. She said, “Browning, the poet’s name.”

“Well, I know that much,” Harold lied, and smiled his tight smile again. “Spring, April, what the hell?”

They were dressed and ready for breakfast, but Harold had paused to admire the view, thus naturally requiring that Cecilia should pause too. He was given to the counting of blessings, which in practice meant the listing of assets, natural enough in one who had made quite a lot of money buying and selling them in the form of residential and office properties in Dockland London.

The view from their holiday villa in Umbria, recently acquired, came under the heading of asset, without a doubt, since a man in some measure possesses what he can see from his house and also of course it has a bearing on the market value of the property considered as a whole. Harold, partly to assuage the chagrin his blunder had occasioned him, found himself making—yet again—an inventory: there were the curve of the road, the ancient olives, the stiff green shoots of the half-grown maize. Above this the land rose in terraces of vines, bare still between their tall posts. Then the beautiful dipping line of the hills, half melted in the pale blue haze of morning, with the walls and towers of little towns nestling here and there among them, places whose names Harold did not know yet, but he knew that some of them had been old already when the
Romans came. Immediately below them there was a peach tree in first flower, the buds a deep rose color. The plot of ground marked out by Cecilia for her kitchen garden had been turned over for them by a man with a tractor from the nearby village. He had not asked for money yet; Harold was waiting to see if his charges were reasonable before asking him to do anything more. He had already ascertained the going rate for tractor work.

“My God, the peace of it,” he said.

“Heavenly, isn’t it?” Cecilia turned to him a face delicately glowing. “Darling, look at that patch the man turned over for us. It has dried from the deep brown it was at first. It is a reddish ocher now, the true Umbria color.” She suddenly felt the moment to be a prophetic one. “It is like us,” she said. “We will settle into our true colors here.”

These remarks seemed to Harold entirely typical of Cecilia, in that they composed a series, each approaching nearer to the top, the last going over it. Her enthusiasm had always impressed him and roused his irony and restored his sense of authority in more or less equal measure. “Well, we are not likely to dry out,” he said. “Not with all this wine around. I should have thought that the true color of Umbria was umber.”

“Umber is a pigment, not an earth color. It is just brown really, it has no—”

At this point the peace of the morning was disturbed by the sound of an engine no longer young, a clogged, catarrhal chugging. While they still watched, a tractor of antique design rounded the bend, came into view. Sitting up on it, stiffly heraldic, were an old man in a woolen hat of Phrygian shape, a scowling younger woman
of large proportions and a round-faced man in a cap, who appeared to be smiling slightly. They drew to a halt before the house and sat for some moments together while the tractor panted dark breaths from a sort of small chimney.

“It is the Checchetti family,” Cecilia said. “The ones who helped us with some of our things when we first came here. They are very … archetypal, aren’t they?”

Harold grunted. It was not the word he would have used himself. “They charged us plenty for the help,” he said. “We’d better go down and see what they want. I’d go on my own, but—” He had not learned much Italian as yet, though it was at the top of his list. Cecilia, on the other hand, spoke the language quite well. As a girl she had spent two years at a finishing school in Florence and before her marriage had often come back to visit friends made then.

The Checchetti got down from the tractor in order of authority, the father first, the son-in-law bringing up the rear. The old man was unkempt, his long-sleeved vest stained a rancid buttery color from the sweats of many summers, his woolen hat stuck through with bits of straw. The daughter, on the other hand, was got up for visiting, in a dress with a pattern of large red poppies, earrings in the form of copper hoops and hair frizzed out round her large head. The husband continued with his hapless smile, which was not really a smile at all but a sort of permanent relaxation of the features. His name was Bruno, Cecilia now remembered. She was on the point of asking them inside but for obscure reasons decided against it at the last moment.

The daughter began the conversation from some yards away, speaking volubly and with rapid gestures of the hands.

“What does she say?” Harold was impatient. He had been looking forward to his breakfast coffee.

“I don’t get it all—the accent is rather tricky. She is saying that life is difficult, money is short, the cost of everything keeps going up all the time, the olives have been damaged by these heavy rains.”

“Same thing in Britain.” Harold smiled his tight smile at the Checchetti daughter. “
Anche in Inghilterra
. Not the olives of course. Surely,” he said to Cecilia, “they can’t have come at this hour of the day just to talk about the cost of living.”

The old man muttered a few words, looking away from them toward the horizon.

“They are upset about something,” Cecilia said. “The father is saying that what Italy needs is a strong government so as to weed out all the crooks and perverts.”

The daughter made a gesture which might have signified impatience or agreement with her father’s words. She began speaking again, with more visible emotion now. Her bosom rose and fell, an alternation which her amplitude of form and the low cut of her dress rendered dramatic. Cecilia listened intently, trying at the same time to suppress her feeling that the Checchetti father and daughter were rather awful people, he with that foxy, feverish look, she with her beefy arms and heavy, ill-humored face. Bruno seemed less malignant but he was obviously far from bright. She felt guilty at feeling like this about them, as they were
contadini
, peasants, and therefore very authentic people and by definition admirable.

“What does she say?” It galled Harold to be left out of the conversation like this.