So she drank some of the wine, and it dribbled on to her chin. She was not good at managing a bottle. But she liked the feeling of warmth it gave her. She was very tired.
“Si piace? Piace?”
“Do you like it,” interpreted Ciccio.
“Yes, very much. What is very much?” she asked of Ciccio.
“Molto.”
“Si, molto. Of course, I knew molto, from, music,” she added.
The women made noises, and smiled and nodded, and so the train pulsed on till they came to Rome. There was again, the wild scramble with luggage, a general leave taking, and then the masses of people on the station at Rome. Roma! Roma! What was it to Alvina but a name, and a crowded, excited station, and Ciccio running after the luggage, and the pair of them eating in a station restaurant?
Almost immediately after eating, they were in the train once more, with new fellow travellers, running south this time towards Naples. In a daze of increasing weariness Alvina watched the dreary, to her sordid-seeming Campagna that skirts the railway, the broken aqueduct trailing in the near distance over the stricken plain. She saw a tram-car, far out from everywhere, running up to cross the railway. She saw it was going to Frascati.
And slowly the hills approached—they passed the vines of the foothills, the reeds, and were among the mountains. Wonderful little towns perched fortified on rocks and peaks, mountains rose straight up off the level plain, like old topographical prints, rivers wandered in the wild, rocky places, it all seemed ancient and shaggy, savage still, under all its remote civilization, this region of the Alban Mountains south of Rome. So the train clambered up and down, and went round corners.
They had not far to go now. Alvina was almost too tired to care what it would be like. They were going to Ciccio’s native village. They were to stay in the house of his uncle, his mother’s brother. This uncle had been a model in London. He had built a house on the land left by Ciccio’s grandfather. He lived alone now, for his wife was dead and his children were abroad. Giuseppe was his son: Giuseppe of Battersea, in whose house Alvina had stayed.