It proved to be a veritable eyrie, large, bare, passably clean, and very well lighted. From the window she saw the hillside below the church of San Giuseppe, a huddle of red roofs and grey olive orchards melting into a blue haze of distance beyond the city walls, and the crowning heights of San Quirico. Leaning out over the sill of crumbling stone she looked down into the Vicolo as into a well.
The rent was very low, and the woman who had the room to let seemed a decent though a frowsy old soul, and so the matter was settled there and then, and Olive had left the house with the key of her new domain in her pocket.
She had bought a table and two chairs and a shelf for her books at a second-hand furniture shop near the Duomo, and had given her first lesson there two days later, and soon the quiet place seemed more like home to her than the stuffy flat in the Piazza Tolomei. What matter if she came to it breathless from climbing five flights of stairs? It was good to be high up above the stale odours of the streets. The window was always open. There were no woollen mats to be faded or waxen fruits to be melted by the sun’s heat. A little plaster bust of Dante stood on the table, and Olive kept the flowers her pupils gave her, pink oleander blossoms and white roses from the terrace gardens, in a jar of majolica ware, but otherwise the place was unadorned.
“It is like a convent,” Carmela said when she came there with Maria and her aunt for an English tea-drinking.
Signora Carosi had sipped a little tea and eaten a good many of the cakes Olive had bought from the pasticceria. “The situation is impossible,” she remarked, as she brushed the crumbs off her lap.
“The stairs are a drawback,” Olive admitted, not without malice, “but fortunately my pupils are all young and strong.”
“You are English. I always say that when I am asked how I can permit such things. ‘What would you? She teaches men grammar alone in an attic. I cannot help it. She is English.’”
Gemma had been asked to come too on this occasion, but she had excused herself. She so often had headaches when the others were going out, and they would leave her lying down in her room. When they came back she was always up and better, and yet she seemed feverish and strange. Then sometimes of a morning, when Maria and the aunt had gone out marketing, and Carmela, shapeless and dishevelled in her white cotton jacket, was dusting or ironing, the beautiful idle sister would come out of her room, dressed for the street and carrying a prayer-book. Carmela would remonstrate with her. “You are not going alone?”
“Only to mass.”
On the morning of the fifteenth of August she did not go with the others to the parish church at six o’clock, but she was up early, nevertheless. She wrote a letter, and presently, having sealed it, she dropped it out of the window. A boy who had been lingering about the piazza since dawn, and staring up at the close-shuttered fronts of the tall houses, picked it up and ran off with it. When Maria and Carmela came back with their aunt soon after seven they drank their black coffee in the kitchen before going to their rooms to rest. Carolina took Olive’s breakfast in to her on a tray when they were gone. The English girl had milk with her coffee and some slices of bread spread with rancid butter. Gemma lay in wait for the old woman and stopped her as she came from the kitchen.