to Sicily. It would be a relaxed trip; they wouldn’t have to meet any deadlines other than their flights home. He knew Jack had never felt particularly comfortable behind the wheel of a car, especially driving on the wrong side of the road, so if Edward promised to do all the driving, how about it?
Jack sounded a little apologetic when he wrote back. He was by that time in his late sixties, some twenty years Edward’s senior. He said the older he got the more phobic he’d become about flying, to such a degree that he hadn’t set foot in an airplane in years. As a matter of fact he didn’t fancy sea travel much either, especially in the spring, when gales were blowing and channel crossings were dodgy. The truth was he hardly left London anymore, let alone England. Edward would think he’d turned into an old fuddy-duddy, and he’d probably be right. He read a great deal now that he had the time to do it, he went to the new exhibitions and attended some of the major sales, and he had permanent seats for the opera and ballet. He would really hate to miss any of the spring season at Covent Garden. He thanked Edward for wanting to include him, it sounded like a wonderful trip, but he was afraid his travels were confined to adventures of the mind and spirit these days, sorry if that sounded a bit trite. All he could think of when he imagined leaving England was the discomfort the time change would wreak upon his bodily functions and the sleepless nights he’d spend tossing in strange beds. Europe had changed. The last time he’d been in Paris the waiters had all been Spanish and everyone was drinking Coca-Cola. England had changed too, he supposed, everyone was telling him so, but at least his little corner of it — his flat overlooking the river, Putney Bridge and the high street, the heath, the little restaurants where he had dinner now and then — still felt like home. If Edward were thinking of stopping off in London, now ...
After Jack turned him down Edward decided it was probably for the best that he wouldn’t have to make compromises for anyone else’s agenda anyway. A little solitude was the price you paid for being able to stop where you wanted and stay as long as you liked — or so he persuaded himself when he set out on his holiday alone. He landed in Rome in mid-morning, took a train directly to Naples, spent a single night in a hotel and started off toward Paestum in a hired car the next day before the sun had even appeared over the horizon. Warm spring air fanned his face through the open window of the car. He had the road virtually to himself.
Those temples, when he came upon them, presented a scene that looked almost surrealistic — two ancient edifices standing in the middle of a patch of goat pasture silhouetted against the morning sky, their still-erect columns casting long shadows on the dew-jewelled grass. There was no one in the little tourist office at that hour, but in any case there weren’t any fences or barriers to keep him out. He got out of the car and picked his way through little heaps of rubble and fallen stone, aware of a growing feeling of delight, that same lifting of the heart that he remembered from his first trip to Italy, when as a young man he had set out by himself to walk the streets of Florence. He approached the temple of Poseidon now with an odd sense of being welcome, as though the men who had built the place still lingered in spirit and were pleased to have him drop in and look around. A small brown bird swooped and landed on a cornice where it had a nest, another creature making itself at home in these solemn temples built five hundred years before the birth of Christ. What wonderful things man has created from the raw materials the planet provides, Edward thought, artifacts that challenge the inventiveness and perfections of nature herself. He would have been hard pressed to think of something in nature as moving and beautiful as these ancient temples.
By the time he began to make his way slowly back to the car a feeling of hollowness had begun to come over him, a kind of heartsickness. He wished he could have shared what he’d just seen and felt with another soul, someone who would have found what he’d just been looking at as extraordinary and wonderful as he had himself. He shouldn’t have come to a place like this alone. His earlier sense of elation had almost entirely evaporated by the time he drove away. Maybe he was always going to be on his own; maybe the kind of union with another human being he’d been searching for as long as he could remember existed only in childhood memories and dreams.
He crossed the Straits of Messina on the car ferry, spent a night at a bougainvillea-draped pensione overlooking the sea at Naxos, and the next day began travelling southward down the coast. He stayed in small hotels and pensiones, taking his coffee each morning on a terrace or balcony in air fragrant with the scent of orange blossoms, but in spite of the beauty of the Sicilian countryside and the archeological wonders he explored, his mood didn’t seem to lighten. The timelessness of those relics of another civilization made him increasingly aware of his own mortality, his own brief allotment of years. He was already more than halfway through his life, and his future held what — more exquisite paintings, still finer furniture, rarer objets d’art? All those things would continue to exist long after he’d disappeared from the face of the earth, which was well and good and as it should be, but what did his own existence amount to? What about the now of Edward Cooper?
He set his course back toward the centre of the island to see the final site on his itinerary, the mosaic floors of the Villa del Casale near Piazza Armerina. When he arrived he saw that a busload of German tourists had just gone in ahead of him, so he hung back and waited until they and their guide had done the circuit. By the time he finished his own tour it was past noon and the sun was straight overhead and scorching. He was tired and hungry. He’d seen so many photographs of those mosaics over the years that his eye had become jaded; the battling titans and bikini-clad maidens with their barbells had seemed hackneyed to him. He began to wonder why he’d wanted to come to Sicily so much in the first place, what he was doing on the island at all.
He climbed into the stifling car, rolled down all the windows and made his way toward the nearby town, looking out for a restaurant recommended in his guidebook. La Trattoria dei Gemelli turned out to be an old house stuccoed in faded ochre, set back from the road among cypresses and oleanders, blending into the landscape as though it had grown there. Gemelli. Human twins, Edward wondered, or the zodiacal ones? A stone walkway and a short flight of steps beside the house led down to tables set up on a tree-shaded terrazzo that overlooked the dreaming sun-drenched countryside. A lovely spot. Maybe a good meal and a bottle of wine would restore his spirits.
A handsome woman of perhaps Edward’s own age came out to greet him, narrow-waisted and full-bosomed, her smooth dark hair rolled into a chignon at the back of her head. Her unhurried walk seemed to invite one’s attention while at the same time implying complete indifference to it. She asked Edward in limpid Italian to choose his own table, drew out his chair, strolled back inside to reappear moments later carrying a tray with a moisture-beaded bottle of white wine, another of minerale, and a hand-written menu. He followed her graceful figure with his eyes as she crossed the flagstones and disappeared again through the doorway before he turned his head to look around the terrazzo.
A frail-looking elderly man sitting at a table a few yards away appeared to have been watching him.
“Buongiorno,” Edward said, nodding.
“Good day to you,” the man said in English. “Isn’t she a lovely sight?”
Edward smiled and nodded in agreement. “Indeed she is. Beautiful.”
“You’re American?”
“Canadian,” Edward replied, to keep it simple. “And you?”
“English, originally. I’ve been here a long time now. I fought up through Italy with the British army during the war, and after it was over I came back and stayed.”
“I’d say you made a good decision.”
A man came out of the restaurant just then and started towards Edward’s table. The brilliance of the sun behind him put his features momentarily in shadow, but its rays lit up the red-gold hair that surrounded his head like a halo. Edward had read about the fair-haired Siciliani, inheritors of the genes of the Normans who had conquered the island during the eleventh century, and it crossed his mind that this might be one of them. As he came closer and Edward was able to see the man’s face more clearly, he gasped out loud. The hand holding his water glass froze halfway to his lips.
He couldn’t believe his eyes. He knew these beautiful features as