‘Then why are they here? Why do they follow us from Portici?’
‘I don’t know.’
She stared at me. I could see she didn’t believe me. Then she shrugged her shoulders. ‘I think we go now. I do not like to be followed about. Is that girl in love with you?’
‘No.’
She gave a quick, sneering laugh. ‘You do not know very much about women, eh?’ We went out and turned left towards the forum.
As we went back down the narrow, sloping street with the chariot ruts, she slipped her hand through my arm. ‘Do not worry about it, Dick. Roberto will get rid of them for us. My car is very fast and he is a good driver.’ She seemed to have recovered her spirits for she chatted gaily about the scene in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted. She seemed to have an almost frighteningly morbid interest in the scene and I remember the.way she laughed as she said, ‘It happen so suddenly that men and women were caught in bed together and when they excavated they find them still like that. Can you imagine yourself in bed with a girl and then suddenly the room is full of hot sifting ash, you are suffocated, and there you are, in the same position, when a digger uncover your love couch two thousand years later? That is immortality, eh?’
As we went out through the gates I looked back. There was nothing to be seen of Pompeii except the burnt grass of what looked like a rabbit warren. It was all below the level of the ground. Behind and above it the ash slopes of film of white dust. Dust rose behind us in a white cloud. The country on either side was flat, with vines and oranges. Away to the right the ugly tower of Pompeii’s modern church thrust its needle-like top over the trees. It reminded me of the campanili of the Lombardy Plain.
It was past five when we reached the villa by a dusty track that ran dead straight through flat, almost white earth planted with bush vines. The villa itself was perched on a sudden rise where some long-forgotten lava flow had abruptly ceased. It was the usual white stucco building with flat roof and balconies and some red tiling to relieve the monotony of the design. It was built with its shoulder to the mountain so that it faced straight out across the hard-baked flatness of the vineyards to the distant gleam of the sea and a glimpse of Capri. As the car stopped the heat closed in on us. There was no sun, but the air was heavy and stifling as though the sirocco were blowing in from the Sahara. I began to wish I hadn’t come.
Zina laughed at me and took my hand. ‘Wait till you have tasted the vino. You will not look so glum then.’ She glanced up at the mountain, which from where we were standing seemed crouched right over the villa. ‘To-night I think it will look as though you can light your cigarette from the glow of her.’
We went in then. It was very cool inside. Venetian blinds screened the windows from the sunless glare. It was like going into a cave. All the servants seemed there to greet us — an old man and an old woman with gnarled, wrinkled faces, a young man who smiled vacantly and a little girl who peeped at us shyly from around a door and pulled at her skirt which was much too short for her. I was shown to a room on the first floor. The old man brought up my bags. He pulled up the Venetian blinds and I found myself looking up to the summit of Vesuvius. A little circle of black vapour appeared for an instant, writhed upwards and then slowly dissolved, and as it dissolved another black puff appeared to replace it. ‘Le place il Lachrima Christi, signore?’ the old man asked. He had a soft, whining voice.