The title came last. Everything that had happened between us, I realised, had folded itself down into a single night’s walk through the city, sleepless and heartsore, and so the song must be named accordingly. It was called ‘Serelight Fair’. I played until it was perfect and broad daylight was coming in at the window. Eventually I fell asleep.
* * *
She liked to walk through the park after work, so I waited all afternoon near the gate, leaning against the railings where the joggers and dog-walkers passed. I watched for a long time, occasionally thinking that I must have missed her, or imagining that she had walked right past but I had somehow failed to recognise her. Mostly I thought about nothing at all.
But when she appeared there was no mistaking her. She was in one of the short knitted dresses she wore with coloured tights, and she looked serious, gripping her shoulder bag close against her, with eyes forward, forehead creased and mouth pursed. I could never have missed her. She was the more strikingly herself for being a stranger again, another pedestrian on her way home to a life you could only guess at.
I hurried after her, calling her name. Heads turned, and she paused and waited, but her face gave nothing away. Other homebound workers stopped to watch me approach, and a couple of the males, seemingly by instinct, moved forward a step or two as if they might need to put themselves in between us: but they weren’t sure of what they were seeing, and as we came together they turned dubiously away.
We stood still in the flow of passers-by, chilly among bright flowerbeds. She looked drawn and polite, but then all the distance drained from her face and left only a question behind. In my head I heard an old country song from her record collection. I swear that I won’t make your exit slow, But won’t you break my heart before you go … I reached for her hand and she let me take it. She gave me a tired, convalescent smile, as though she knew what it was that I wanted to say.
She was determined I should see the house where she had grown up. It was in the south, an hour’s train journey out of the city through gentle yellow hills. In the middle of a hot afternoon we alighted at a market-town railway station and climbed into a taxi. As we were driven out of the town along narrow roads banked by groves in which olive-pickers were working, my nose started running and my eyes began to itch. I blew my nose loudly into my handkerchief and was ambushed by a sneezing fit. When I looked over at her, stricken, she burst out laughing. Over his shoulder, the taxi driver said something jocular that I didn’t catch.
The setting of her childhood and adolescence was a villa in the colonial style, built around a large central courtyard, with terracotta tile roofs and stucco walls the colour of baked earth. The first-floor windows opened to broad balconies. As we climbed out of the taxi, the front doors of the house opened, and for an instant it appeared she had brought me here to introduce me to her exaggerated, faintly parodic doppelgänger. The resemblance was strong, in spite of the older woman’s cream linen suit, her mass of orange hair, her cinched waist and billowing bosom. She wore heavy, precise make-up, with lips and eyebrows marked out in shapes identical to her daughter’s. They kissed three times on alternating cheeks and then the mother turned with stately poise to acknowledge me, holding out a hand, like something held in tongs, for me to shake. In the shadows of the hall behind her I glimpsed two pre-teenaged forms and heard sisterly whispers, but as we went in they fled with a slapping of sandalled feet.
Lunch was about to be served on the terrace, her mother said. I followed them through the cool house. Father would not be joining us for lunch, her mother added as we emerged into the light again at the rear of the house, since he had so much work to do.
The terrace looked across a silver-grey valley. All the olive trees I could see, her mother told me, belonged to the family. In the middle distance I made out the red rooftops of the town, stacked in the lee of a hill. A heavy wooden table in the centre of the terrace was already set with bread, cured meat, salad, wine and olive oil. I brushed my hand against hers, but something had annoyed her; as we sat down to eat, she rolled her eyes, letting her hair fall sulkily across her face as if she regretted coming here at all. Her mother carried on the conversation single-handed, telling me I would find it most interesting to be here at harvest time and, what’s more, I was especially fortunate because a Boy Singers Troupe was in town – I must make sure to see them perform because it was a fine old tradition and I must seldom have the opportunity … While she kept up a glassy monologue, the two girls, to whom I hadn’t been introduced, exchanged continual scandalised glances, nudging each other under the table and occasionally exploding into giggles.
Later, as I was unpacking in the guest room, the younger of the girls wandered in behind me. Turning, I found her gazing thoughtfully at my guitar; I wasn’t sure whether she had noticed I was here. Peering past me into my suitcase, she mentioned that her father wanted to see me in his study. I didn’t know where that was, but before I could formulate the question she ran a fingernail across the strings of the guitar and walked out.
‘Come in and close it,’ her father said, when at length I knocked on the right door.
He had a tall man’s stoop, and inclined his head as though to favour a slight deafness. He looked healthy and weatherbeaten in his open-necked shirt. His dark grey hair was receding but he wore it long at the back. I thought for a second that he was going to make some violent physical movement, but instead he pointed at a chair, and glared at his bookshelves as I sat down. The window behind him was open to the sunlight, tinted by the lemon trees in the garden, but the room was in shadow. Warm air drifted in, bringing faint melodies from the workers in the groves, and carrying unfamiliar pollens. A sneeze was gathering in my sinuses. He seated himself behind the desk.
‘We might as well,’ he said, ‘speak man to man.’ He gave a stony, protracted stare to the wall behind my head, challenging me to derive any ironies I wished from the statement, and let the silence swell. My eyes itched and my nose was starting to drip, but I cleared my throat to speak.
‘Quite clearly,’ he said, ‘all this is calculated to infuriate me.’ His diction was crisp. ‘I shan’t rise to it. As usual she’s determined to prove something or other. Let her do as she likes, and see the outcome.’
He tapped the desktop with a thick fingertip.
‘But you listen to me. If I should learn that you have in any way – taken advantage …’
His voice trailed off. He stared at me a while longer.
‘Do I make myself quite clear?’
I nodded, not knowing what I was agreeing to.
‘Don’t think,’ he said at last, ‘that I can’t find you. Wherever you go.’
I found myself thanking him, sniffing, wiping my nose, stammering assurances, as I made for the door. He had already turned his attention to some papers on his desk, and did not look up.
The next morning she took me out early to see the estate. We tramped down into the valley under a filmy sky, our breath clouding and our feet sending stones ahead of us along the hard track. She was cursing in exasperation with her father.
‘He can’t help himself, can he?’ she said. ‘It’s all about him, every time.’
In the groves the trunks looked like bodies frozen in motion. In the midst of struggling to escape, they had metamorphosed, and now they signalled their acceptance of the new life by sprouting silvery leaves and hard purple-black fruit. We passed gangs of workers as we descended the slope. In harvest time, she told me, her father employed more than a hundred labourers. They travelled down from the city for a few weeks’ work and received board and lodging in barns on the estate.
‘They’ve been out here since before dawn,’ she said.
We paused