How oft we saw the sun retire,
And burn the threshold of the night,
Fall from his ocean lane of fire,
And sleep beneath his pillar’d light!

– Tennyson, The Voyage.


Carlo stayed with Claudia at Tintamare for a week. Far from being an idle houseguest, he insisted upon cleaning, cooking and performing whatever household chores she would allow him to do. At first, this seemed to her to be a slight affront to her independence but she sensed that it was his way of showing her gratitude. It seemed too that, temporarily at least, he had nowhere else to go. He need not have tried too hard to impress her for she found his natural charm increasingly endearing and she was glad of the company but would never have told him so.

“He’s also a good fuck,” she added in a mid week e-mail home to an old girlfriend in Melbourne.

The house was in serious need of cleaning and maintenance. In her final years, Eleanora, Claudia’s grandmother, had obviously found the task of maintaining such a large house increasingly beyond her capabilities. It struck Claudia as strange that her grandmother seemed never to have employed a cook or a cleaner or a gardener. There was no mention of any of these in her carefully detailed accounts, yet to have done so would have been well within her means.

“There’s a lot I will never know about you…”

The statement or something like it often entered Claudia’s mind as she passed Eleanora’s enigmatic portrait on the conservatory wall. The mystery surrounding this single object in a house full of singular things, occupied Claudia most. Again, she had found no mention of the painting in any of her Grandmother’s insurance records or accounts and she had scanned those with Carlo’s assistance, back as far as 1950 when Eleanora had first bought the house. As far as she knew, Eleanora had not painted the picture herself; there was not a single shred of evidence that she had been artistically gifted or inclined. Music was her calling and her only outlet for creativity. So the mystery remained and the words upon the frame would echo in Claudia’s mind at odd times, like when she smelt the aroma of the sea breeze;

As though mine image in the glass should tarry when myself am gone…

She soon discovered that whatever Carlo’s other talents, his particular forte was cooking. In the course of their week together he made her a succession of traditional local dishes; each one more ambitious and mouthwatering than the last. She would often sit in the kitchen of an evening and watch him cook; delighting in his boyish charm and his easy smile, laughing at his appalling English, admiring his physique and casting long, self indulgent glances at his ass. They would dine out on the garden porch or on the balcony overlooking the bay while amorous geckos courted in the circle of light cast upon the white wall. Much later, after having extinguished the light and banished the geckos, they would sit together in one of the huge padded deck chairs; sipping Cointreau on ice and watching the distant lights of Agrigento. On the third night Carlo said to her,

“That music, I hear it again.”

“When?” Was her immediate reply.

“Oh, very, very late.” He followed this with a calculated silence until she asked,

“Why did you not tell me before?”

“You think I am pazo, crazy nut.”

“No…no, I don’t. But, the doors are all locked. No one can get into the house from the windows and here, we are very high up.”

“Fantasmi?”

She was silent.

“This very old house,” he continued, “and here in Italia, in Sicilia, strange things are.”

“Et in Arcadia ego,” she whispered.

“Scuzi?”

“Never mind.”

“I believe in fantasmi.”

“Certo.”

“Si, certo.”

She looked at him in the moonlight then settled back into his arms. He was serious.

“Don’t worry, we have ghosts back in Australia too I guess, but I have never seen one.”

“Not see, I hear.”

She took another sip of Cointreau. The burst of fiery orange liqueur relaxed her, refocusing her attention on the marvelously peaceful night scene before them. After several long moments his arms tightened around her as he playfully nibbled her ear then took in a long draught of air and with it; the sweet aroma of her skin. Their lips locked and they kissed tenderly for what seemed hours. Carlo could not imagine a more perfect scene; he was as content, at that moment, in Claudia’s arms as he had ever been at any time in his entire life.