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By Root 2246 0

to the southern foothills of the Alps, to the town of Locarno and the village of Ascona. Prosper Cain was baffled and neither as precise nor as competent as he usually was. One night, in a hotel in Paris, Florence heard, or imagined she heard, muffled sobs from the hotel room next to hers. Having made enquiries about the clinic at Monte Verita, Major Cain had discovered that it was new, and austere, giving courses of sunbathing, mud-baths, water and a strictly vegetarian diet, with no eggs, milk or salt. He liked the idea of sunbathing—as a soldier he had made sure his men exercised outdoors, whatever the weather. But he was not sure that a woman expecting a child should deprive herself of milk, or nourishing beef teas. When they reached Locarno, Florence became Signora Colombino, her mother’s maiden name. A cottage was rented on the mountain slope, looking out over a meadow; a manservant was engaged, with a pony-carriage, and a string of young women were interviewed as housekeeper-companions. Florence and her father agreed that the best was a powerful, smiling girl called Amalia Fontana. Prosper visited the new clinic, and found a doctor, who agreed to care for the young Englishwoman, who had lost her husband who must never be mentioned. I have got into a second-rate novel, Prosper told himself in a moment of grim humour, and added that second-rate novels sprouted out of repeated real disasters. His daughter was monosyllabic, acquiescent and heavy-footed, although her pregnancy was not yet visible. When he tried to comfort her, anything he could say appeared to be a reproach.

“I wanted you to have everything,” he said once. “I wanted you to go to University, and be a free woman.”

“You see what has happened,” said Florence, with a grim little smile, and then flung her arms round him. “No one could have cared for me better,” she said. “We have all been very happy.”

But this genuine cry of love was also made bitter by their sense—both of them in very different ways—that the coming of Imogen had broken the circle, and left the ends flying. And the time came when he must go, precisely back to Imogen and her unborn child. He said “I’ll come back, soon. I’ll write. I think Griselda will come, in the vacation. You must tell me everything—”

“This is all my fault, you know, not yours,” said Florence. Prosper looked weary.

“Some of it is certainly your fault. But I did not pay attention.”

“I shall read and read and plan a thesis,” said Florence, who had brought boxes of history books.

They dined late, by candlelight, the first night in Ascona. Prosper looked across the table at his daughter, and handed her a small box.

“I always meant you to have this,” he said. “It is your mother’s wedding ring. You will need to wear a ring.”

The ring was slender, and gold, with finely worked clasped hands. Florence tried it: it fitted exactly.

“You are very like her,” said her father. “Here, in Italy, you look Italian.”

He began to say something clumsy and heartfelt about the ring protecting, or bringing luck. And then he remembered how Giulia had died, and would have taken it back, if he could. Florence turned it in the creamy light, and it shone.

“I shall take care of it,” she said. “You have been so good to me, when I have been so wilful and bad.”

But she did not read. The lethargy of pregnancy came over her, and she sat on her little terrace, staring out at the mountain, doing little. People came past. Respectable, black-shrouded Italian peasants, driving goats, or sheep. Strange nature-worshippers, bearded, smiling, spectacled, with walnut skins and bare shanks over homemade sandals under vaguely biblical tunics. Women in broidered robes with flowers in their hair. Travelling musicians, with lutes. Rapid purposeful priests. Fat curates. She could not understand much of Amalia’s accent, and came to see that the young woman had put on an Italian, over her patois, in which she could say simple, and necessary things, but could not make conversation.

She went up to the clinic, at first in a pony-trap and then on foot, where she