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Dutch, he said. But I’ve never seen her.”
    “It’s a very strange speech disorder,” said Isabel. “Very curious.”
    “It’s like echolalia,” said Eddie.
    Isabel looked at him in surprise. “What’s that?”
    Eddie wiped some crumbs of cheese off the cutting board. “My grandfather had it. He repeated everything you said to him. If you said, ‘I’ve been to town,’ he would say, ‘To town.’ Or if you said, ‘It’s raining hard,’ he’d say, ‘Raining hard.’ He was like an echo, you see.”
    “You see.”
    “Yes,” said Eddie. “That’s the idea.”
    “Strange,” said Isabel.
    “Strange,” echoed Eddie, and then laughed. “He wasn’t unhappy. I don’t think he knew that he was doing it.”
    Isabel wondered whether the man with the garden rake was unhappy; she thought that he probably was. But there was no time to speculate about that, as two customers had walked in the door and both, it seemed, wanted attention.
    CAT ARRIVED at half past eleven. The early part of the morning had been busy, but it had slackened off and the delicatessen was now quieter. Isabel looked at her niece, hoping to see some sign of how the medical consultation had gone.
    “Is everything all right?” she asked, lowering her voice so that Eddie should not hear.
    Cat shrugged. “Yes, fine.”
    Isabel smiled with relief. “So they were not worried about the spot?”
    “I don’t think so,” said Cat. “They sliced it out—it was pretty small. He injected novocaine so I felt nothing.”
    “And everything was fine?”
    “They’ve sent it off to the pathology lab,” said Cat.
    Isabel’s heart gave a lurch. “Oh …”
    “It’s standard procedure, Isabel,” said Cat. “You mustn’t worry. They have to do that if they take anything off. Just to be sure. He said that it looked fine to him but they just make sure.”
    “Of course.”
    Cat began to undo the strings of Isabel’s apron. “So why don’t you give me this and you go and sit down. I’ll bring you coffee. There’s yesterday’s
Repubblica
on the rack over there. You can practise your Italian.” Cat was given the newspaper by one of the staff from the Italian Consulate, who called in every day on the way back from work. She did not read it herself, butquite a number of the customers who dropped in for coffee read it, or pretended to read it. “One or two of them can’t read Italian,” Cat had said. “They’d like to, but they can’t. So they sit there pretending to read—it makes them look sophisticated, I suppose. Or so they hope.”
    Isabel did read Italian; if she had any difficulty with
La Repubblica
, it was with understanding the complexities of Italian politics. But that, she suspected, was the case with everybody’s politics. And it was not just a linguistic difference; she could never understand how American politics worked. It appeared that the Americans went to the polls every four years to elect a President who had wide powers. But then, once he was in office, he might find himself unable to do any of the things he had promised to do because he was blocked by other politicians who could veto his legislation. What was the point, then, of having an election in the first place? Did people not resent the fact that they spoke on a subject and then nothing could be done about it? But politics had always seemed an impenetrable mystery to her in her youth. She remembered what her mother had once said to her about some American politician to whom they were distantly related. “I don’t greatly care for him,” she said. “Pork barrel.”
    Isabel had thought, as a child, that this was a bit unkind. Presumably he could not help looking like a pork barrel. But then, much later, she had come to realise that this was how politics worked. The problem was, though, that politics might work, but government did not.
    She picked up
La Repubblica
and went to sit at the far table. A few minutes later, Eddie brought her a large cup of milky