The Villa in Italy. Elizabeth Edmondson

There was no point in fretting over her work; at the very thought of it, she began to cough. ‘Besides, in a house like the Villa Dante, I’d be surprised if there weren’t a piano. I’ve brought some music with me.’

      ‘It’s chilly,’ Jessica announced, dipping white toes into the tiny lapping waves. ‘About the same as Scarborough in July, though, and I’ve swum in that.’

      ‘You aren’t going to swim?’

      ‘I might, if the weather stays warm. Too cold for you, though, with that chest of yours, so don’t go getting any ideas. A paddle is your lot for the time being.’

      ‘I’ve got stockings on.’ Why hadn’t she put on slacks, like Jessica?

      ‘No one’s looking.’

      True. Delia hitched up her skirt and undid her suspenders. She rolled down her stockings and took them off, laying them carefully on a smooth rock, and went down to the water’s edge.

      ‘We’ll be all sandy and gritty and we’ve nothing to dry our feet on,’ she said, coming alive as the chill water swirled about her ankles. ‘This is bliss.’

      She looked down at her toes, distorted by the clear greenblue water, and wriggled them in the sandy shingle, disturbing a shoal of tiny fish as they fluttered past.

      ‘It’s odd,’ she said as they sat on a rock and dried their feet with Jessica’s handkerchief, ‘to be staying in a house with no hostess. I feel as though Beatrice Malaspina is going to come sweeping into the dining room, to ask if we slept all right and whether we have everything we need in our rooms.’

      ‘She’d better not. A ghost would be too much.’

      ‘I wonder who the house does belong to.’

      ‘You, perhaps. The mysterious Beatrice M might have left it to you in her will.’

      ‘Why should she?’

      They sat in companionable silence, listening to the birds’ joyful song from the nearby trees, and the mew of gulls out at sea.

      Delia lifted her face up to the sun. ‘I can’t believe how warm it is. So much for Benedetta and her shivers. Mind you, the guidebook is very doleful on the subject of Italian weather, which the author says is full of nasty surprises for unwary travellers. He advises warm underwear and thick coats until May, as the weather in most parts of Italy can be surprisingly inclement.’

      ‘Killjoy.’

      ‘He sounds like a man after my father’s heart—you know how he mistrusts warmth and sunshine, as leading to lax habits and taking the pep out of the muscles of mind and body. And also, they drink wine in Italy, how shocking!’

      ‘Felicity drinks. Last time I saw her, she was guzzling cocktails like nobody’s business. I suppose she caught the habit from Theo, he’s a great cocktail man.’

      The spell was broken; the mere thought of Theo, the mention of his name, took the pleasure out of the day. Delia stood up. ‘Let’s go back to the house, and sit on the terrace and just do nothing at all.’

      ‘We could look round the house.’

      ‘Later. There’s plenty of time. I shall go upstairs to change into a sundress, you find Benedetta and ask what we can sit on. I’ll look up the word for deckchair in the dictionary.’

      Benedetta was very doubtful about the deckchairs. It seemed that April was not only a month to go nowhere near the sea; it was also definitely not a month for sitting outside in the sun. Reluctantly, she instructed Pietro to bring out some comfortable chairs. She followed him with armfuls of cushions and several rugs.

      ‘I think she means us to swathe ourselves in these, like passengers on an Atlantic crossing,’ Delia said, taking a cushion and ignoring the rugs.

      Jessica pushed her sunglasses up on her forehead and lay back, letting her mind drift. It was extraordinary how easy it was here just to be, to simply exist, free from the endless round of repetitive, tedious memories of a past she longed to forget, but which refused to go away.

      ‘The wardrobes in the bedrooms are full of clothes,’ Delia said. ‘Did you notice?’

      ‘Perhaps Beatrice Malaspina was a dressy woman.’

      ‘They can’t all be hers, because they aren’t the same size.’

      ‘Family clothes. Or maybe she had to watch her weight.’

      ‘She might grow fatter and thinner, but she can hardly have grown or shrunk several inches. Heavenly evening dresses from the thirties, do you remember how glamorous they were?’

      ‘Oh, yes, and didn’t you long for the time when you could dress every evening? And then, of course, when it was our turn, it was all post-war austerity and clothes rationing.’

      ‘You’ve some lovely frocks now. That’s what comes of marrying a rich husband.’

      Jessica was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘Richie will have had to buy himself some new clothes. I never told you what I did before I left, did I?’

      It had surprised her, the visceral rage she felt for Richie at that point. Opening his large wardrobe she had hauled out all twenty-three of the Savile Row suits that were hanging there. She looked at them, lying in a heap on the bed, and then ran downstairs to his study for the large pair of scissors he kept on his desk. She cut two inches off sleeves and hem of every jacket and every pair of trousers. Pleased with her efforts, she made all his shirts short-sleeved, and hacked pieces out of his stack of starched collars.

      Getting into her stride, she threw away one of each pair of cufflinks, snipped the strings on his squash and tennis racquets and dented his golf clubs and skates with some hefty bangs of a hammer. More cutting work saw to his fishing rods and driving goggles, and then she carefully removed every photo he possessed of her—not that there were many of them, only the large studio shots in heavy silver frames designed to look good on the baby grand which no one ever played. The pictures and snapshots of them together she dealt with by removing herself from the photos, leaving him gazing at nothing but blank, jagged-edged shapes.

      He was beside himself with rage when he discovered the extent of her destructive efforts.

      ‘Grounds for divorce, don’t you agree?’ she shouted at him down the telephone before slamming the receiver down and then, swiftly, picking it up again to ask the operator how she could change her number. ‘I’ve been getting nuisance calls, you see.’

      ‘Goodness, you must have been in a temper,’ said Delia. ‘How very unlike you. I wish I’d been there, I can’t imagine you laying into his things like that.’

      ‘It was surprising, wasn’t it? But I enjoyed doing it. Very Freudian, I dare say. I wonder how he explained the sudden need for new suits to his tailors.’

      ‘I expect they’ve seen it all before.’

      ‘I can’t believe I ever lived in that house with Richie. It all seems far away and unreal.’

      ‘The Villa Dante has a timeless quality,’ Delia said, closing her eyes. ‘As though nothing exists except the present moment.’

       TWO

      Which wasn’t, as it turned out, a very long moment, for barely half an hour later, when Delia was just drifting into a pleasant doze of warmth and sunshine and fresh air, and Jessica was well into her book, there were sounds of arrival, of a revving car, of voices: Benedetta’s, Pietro’s, another Italian man and then, unmistakably, people speaking in English.

      ‘Oh, Lord,’ said Jessica, laying down her book and swinging her legs to the ground. ‘I think your fellow legatees are here.’

      Delia didn’t feel like greeting these people clad in a brief green