David Malouf - The Complete Stories

What came to her ear was the hovering close by of mechanical wings, that had come, she thought, to carry her off. In her dream-state she felt only the relief it would be to pass the weight of her body, light as it now was, to some other agency.

The wings beat closer. She started awake, and the familiar objects of her upstairs sitting room, as if a second earlier she might have surprised them in a temporary absence, settled back into place.

The TV screen was dancing, white with static. It was after midnight. For a good hour and a half, it seemed, she herself had been absent. She reached for the remote. But the sound out of her dream persisted. It was the clatter of the filter boxes in the pool two levels below. A breeze must have sprung up. She stirred herself, gathered up her things.

But against the blue Tuscan night the cypress tops in the window were as still as if they were painted.

She stepped out on to her terrace and, half hidden in shadow, peered down through the darkness of pomegranate and bay. Someone was down there, swimming. All she could make out were the streamers of light at his shoulders, and when he came, too quickly, to the end of a length, the heap of silvery bubbles he left as he tucked over into the turn. Up and down he went, in a dozen powerful strokes, and the pool, which for so many weeks had lain heavy and still in the heat, under a mantle of olive florets, drowned midges, beetles paddling in clumsy circles, expanded and contracted like a living thing.

If Gianfranco was here, or one of her sons, Tommy or Jake, what a ruckus there'd be! They'd feel bound to go down and shout at the fellow. Chuck him out.

Well, she wasn't going to try that. She was alone in the house, a kilometre from the village. No neighbours in calling distance. But she felt no particular alarm. Only surprise, and a kind of delight at the unexpectedness of it, exhilaration in the presence of so much effort. As if she had got herself hooked up to some new chemical — neat starlight— that glowed in her veins and quickened her awareness of her own body, but as a thing alive and part again of the living scene.

With her elbows propped on the parapet of her terrace, she watched — hard to say for how long — and was taken out of herself, till at the end of a length like any other he did not tumble into a turn, but with his head streaming moonlight came to his feet, and in the same agile movement sprang on to his splayed hands, heaved himself up, and was out.

No one she recognised.

A sturdy peasant type, in a bathing-slip that might have been red.

She stepped back in case he glanced up and caught her there.

But he was too absorbed for that. Standing with his arms forced back hard behind him, fingers linked, he did half a dozen stretching exercises, dipping his head swiftly like a bird; then straightened and moved out of sight under the pergola.

The pool, meanwhile, had settled to clear moonlight again.

She felt let down, as if he had taken with him part of the night and what was vital to it. Was it over? Was that it?

She stood peering into the darkness of the pergola. He must have gone already, through one of the gaps in the fence. The fence had gaps, but there were so many brambles along its length, and the bank was so steep, that they hadn't bothered to have it mended. Was he really gone?

A gust of fragrance came on the air, then thinned and came again. So strong! Her lime tree.

Out of sight on the other side of the house, and taller now than the house itself, its scent was so overpowering on these warm May nights that in her mind she could actually see the great dark mass of it looming against the stars.

How good it is to be here, she thought, at just this moment. With the moon resting like that on the tip of a cypress, the air freighted with the scent of tiglio, the clear bright notes of the nightingale dropping so precisely into place, off in the dark. It was a moment, she thought, when all things were just as they should be. Not a degree lighter or heavier or louder or more intense.

Ah, her swimmer!

Wearing rough workman's trousers but still bare-chested, he moved to the edge of the pool and stood there towelling his hair with his T-shirt; then, rather dreamily, began to dry his chest.

He might have looked up then and seen her. She drew back. But something else had caught his attention.

He was gazing out over the wall of bay to the hills with their swathes of blue-black macchia. Looking, perhaps, for where the nightingale was dinning from its post in the olive grove, establishing, note on note, its claim to territory.

There, she could have told him. Further to the left. Down there.

He turned his head as if he had heard, but in the wrong direction. Then kneeling, laced his sneakers and, with the soaked T-shirt across his shoulders, ducked down beside the fence and was gone.

She continued to stand. Looking at the place where he had vanished, but with no sense of being left. Rather of remaining, of being here and in possession of all this. The place. The hour. Most of all, of herself.

The moon, which just a moment ago had been straw-coloured, when she looked at it now was paling, as if it had been subjected to immersion in some fast-working chemical. Again the scent of lime came to her, and with it the quickening sense of a whole world astir and on the move. Small nocturnal creatures, destructive in fact — but so what — were nosing in around the fleshy roots of her iris. A cat was on the prowl — or was it a fox? Other lives, intent on their interests. Invisibly close and companionable.

She felt settled, wonderfully so. And by a situation that on another occasion or in a different mood might have alarmed her. Why hadn't it? She did not know and did not need for the moment to ask. What she needed now was to tumble into her bed and sleep.

She was alone because she chose to be. Later it might not be possible, she knew that, but for the time being she could manage, and it was what she preferred. She had worked through her period of rage and hard words, but wasn't sure she could trust herself, just yet, with others.

Each night at seven she boiled herself an egg or heated a pan of soup, and at half past, right on the dot, Gianfranco rang. She was comfortably settled in her routine.

No, she told him, everything was fine, just fine. Marisa came to clean each morning. Corrado looked after the orto and the pool.

Gianfranco, she knew, was nodding, but what she could hear in his silence, even at this distance, was the terrible humming of anxiety in him, the fear that there was something — there was always something — that she was holding back. She raged up and down beside her kitchen cupboards, the receiver tight in her fist. But her voice when she spoke was soothing (or so she hoped).

“No, no,” she cooed. “Gianfranco! Darling! I'm perfectly okay, I promise I am. Stop fussing.”

She gave a little laugh that was meant to assure him that this, like all the other things he fretted over — the boys, his office, money, the house — was nothing, he was being silly.

He said goodnight, made her promise to ring if there was the slightest problem, the least change.

Then waited, as he always did, for her to reconsider and tell him the bad news. She refrained. And in fact there was none.

At last, on his third goodnight, he rang off.

She gave a subdued scream of a theatrical kind — seeing herself in a jokey, self-dramatising way helped to keep up her spirits — and sat down hard on a stool.

But it was over. She was alone again. Free. The whole night before her.

She thought sometimes that she would like it if Tommy was here; Jake, her second son, was mid-Atlantic somewhere on someone's yacht. There were afternoons when she found herself gazing out of her window and wishing she could just call down to the terrace, where, his mobile on the glass-topped table within easy reach, Tommy would be lazing on a daybed. She would get him to come up then and put on one of the Roy Orbison albums she liked to listen to only when he was here. Or wishing that she would look up, having caught a scent, and find him there in the doorway of her room, filling its space with his hungry presence.