and the oven-like warmth. I breathed in the new, foreign landscape: herbs and exhaust fumes, a dry wind. The suitcase tipped again and Joe turned.
‘Let me…’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, tetchily. ‘I can manage. I’m fine.’
We carried on, he striding ahead, the case bumping in my wake. I followed him past taxi ranks and car parks to the bay where the hire car was parked, small and dusty, one of a number of Fiats in a line beneath the twiggy shade of a row of lime trees. The windows had been wound down a couple of inches.
The doors to the car beside ours were wide open and a young girl was sitting in the passenger seat, her bare feet up on the dashboard, staring at the phone she held in one hand while picking at her teeth with the thumbnail of the other. She looked at us over the top of round, pink plastic sunglasses, then turned back to the screen.
‘It’s not much of a car,’ Joe said with a hint of apology in his voice – or perhaps it wasn’t apology, perhaps he wanted to convey that he was used to driving bigger, better vehicles.
‘It’s fine,’ I said.
‘It was all they had.’
‘It’s fine.’
Joe put my suitcase into the boot and I climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door, pulling it shut with a thunk, just loud enough for Joe to intimate that I was annoyed. Then I wished I hadn’t, because he would definitely have picked up on the fact that the almost-slam of the door had been deliberate. Or perhaps not. We had been apart for ten years; he would have forgotten how to read subtleties in my behaviour by now, wouldn’t he?
My heart gave a flutter of panic. Does he still know me? No! No! Of course he doesn’t! But what if he…? Stop it, Edie. Stop, for God’s sake!
Joe climbed into the car and started the engine.
‘Do you mind if I open the window?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t rather have the air conditioning on?’
‘The window’s fine.’
Was this how it was going to be between us? Stilted conversation and surly, monosyllabic answers?
I pressed the button and lowered the window. Warm air rushed in. I glanced at Joe. His face was as rigid as a mannequin’s. Fine. Good. Be like that.
We jolted over a speed bump and queued for the exit barrier. Joe was staring pointedly ahead, I rested my elbow on the door frame and my chin on my knuckles and looked through the side window. Crows were pecking amongst the dusty grass at the verges. We moved forwards painfully slowly.
‘Is this your first time in Sicily?’ Joe asked. He put on his sunglasses and pushed them up his nose. As I looked at him, I was struck once again by the whiteness of his hair. Last time I saw Joe, his hair had been black and wavy. Before we had Daniel, I used to wash it for him sometimes. He liked me to massage his head, my fingers slippery with conditioner, and afterwards, if the hair washing hadn’t led to sex, which it sometimes did, I’d rinse his hair with the shower head and then blow dry it for him. I’d known Joe’s head intimately, every lump and bump of it. I knew his hair; its texture and its whorls. In all the time we were together, I’d never found a single white hair on Joe’s head.
‘Edie?’ Joe asked again, definite irritation in his voice now. ‘I asked if you’d been to Sicily before?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I mean, no. No, I haven’t.’
We’d been planning to come to the island the year Daniel died; he was supposed to celebrate his sixth birthday here, in the villa where Joe used to spend his childhood holidays. Anna and Anna’s mother were going to be there and other relatives from the Italian side of the family who I’d never met. It was going to be a big celebration of a holiday. All kinds of treats and outings and parties had been planned: picnics and days on the beach and a visit to a nearby hilltop city to watch a festival. We never made it to Sicily that year, of course, and Joe’s grandmother had died soon after, and Joe and I divorced and all our plans had come to nothing.
‘What about Italy?’ Joe asked. ‘Have you ever been to Italy?’
‘Florence, once, with the school I work at.’
‘Right.’
‘It was an art trip, Fitz – Miss Fitzpatrick – the friend I live with, she arranged it. We travelled by coach.’
He didn’t respond.
‘We saw lots of statues.’
Nothing.
‘And churches.’
I’d been particularly taken by the tiny, hidden church of Santa Margherita de’ Cerchi where Dante met Beatrice. I’d gone there with a fifteen year old with a range of disorders who couldn’t cope with the organised tours the rest of the party were enjoying. I couldn’t cope with them either, excursions were far more pleasant when it was just the two of us. We’d discovered a basket beside Beatrice’s shrine filled with fascinating notes from people pleading for help with their love lives. Some were written in English: Oh, Beatrice, help me! He is my world but he doesn’t even notice me! … I know she prefers this other guy but he’s a dick, what shall I do? … We’d made up our own responses, matching broken heart to broken heart. Afterwards, we bought ice creams and sat on the wall beside the river. The girl, Keira, her name was, told me about how she wanted to do well in life to prove her mother wrong. ‘Wrong about what?’ I’d asked and she’d replied: ‘Me being too stupid to make anything of myself.’
I considered telling the story to Joe but decided against it.
We left the airport and joined a dual carriageway. Cars and mopeds zipped past us.
‘How far is it to the lawyer’s office?’ I asked.
‘About two hours,’ Joe replied.
Oh God! What are we going to talk about for two hours?
‘We should use the time to discuss what we’re going to do with the villa,’ Joe said, so promptly that I wondered if I’d inadvertently voiced my thoughts out loud: how else could he have known to answer my question? It used to happen when we were married; one of us would pre-empt the other’s unspoken question with a response, but surely that telepathy born of intimacy must have withered while we were apart? ‘Do you have any thoughts,’ Joe asked, ‘about what you want to do with your share?’
‘Of the villa?’
‘Yes,’ Joe said, and I heard the word ‘obviously’ even though he hadn’t actually said it.
‘If it was down to me,’ I replied, ‘a quick sale would be best. Do you want to sell it too?’
‘I do, yes.’
‘Okay. Good.’
Joe was still staring ahead and I couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. I licked my lips; my mouth was dry as dust. ‘I didn’t think you’d want to sell,’ I said, my casual tone disguising
