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mine. Every piece. I’ve given him notice to quit.’
    ‘But he belongs to Nemi,’ said Letizia.
    ‘Who belongs to Nemi?’ said Pietro.
    ‘The occupant. The Englishman. He has an ancestral claim.’
    Emilio Bernardini called for the brandy and liqueurs.
    ‘He has to quit,’ Maggie said. ‘My husband insists.’ She turned to Emilio. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘what Italians are like, of the old school. Very conservative. And really, I admire it.’
    ‘In our country it’s difficult to get rid of tenants,’ Emilio said, not anxious to take the landlady’s part against a tenant so near at hand. ‘Very difficult indeed.’
    ‘He pays no rent,’ Maggie said. ‘He has been a guest for a year and now his welcome is outworn.’
    ‘I’m not sure we can help you,’ Emilio said, as if reinforced by the rest of the company.
    ‘I thought we might, perhaps, get up a neighbourhood petition,’ said Maggie, prompt, too, with her ‘we’. She added, ‘My son and daughter-in-law, of course, will—’
    ‘It would make a scandal,’ Pietro said.
    ‘But he himself is quite a scandalous person,’ said Maggie. ‘I’m sure you must have heard—’
    ‘There is a secretary but no scandal. Miss Cowan knows her, don’t you, Nancy?’
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I know her,’ Nancy said. ‘I believe I met her in Rome one time at the house of some English friends. She had a job in Rome.’
    ‘Well,’ said Maggie, ‘before this secretary there were boys.’
    ‘It’s a Mediterranean custom and in Italy not a crime,’ the host said. ‘I sympathize with you, Marchesa, but a petition…’ he spread his hands…a petition to get a man out of his house because of boys.…The scandal would fall on us, definitely, as Pietro says.’
    ‘What does your lawyer say?’ said the psychologist.
    ‘Oh, he’s working on it,’ said Maggie, somewhat vaguely and without conveying much enthusiasm for her lawyer.
    ‘But Mr Mallindaine has a claim to Nemi,’ said Letizia. ‘His ancestry goes back to ancient times. He can prove it.’
    ‘You know him well?’ Maggie said.
    ‘No, I don’t know him at all, but I heard—’
    ‘Well, I,’ said Maggie bending her head sorrowfully, ‘know him well.’ Since the subject of Hubert had been discussed, she seemed to have been unexpectedly put in the position of asking an unwelcome favour; her looks seemed to have lost their sensational quality.
    In bed that night Emilio Bernardini said to Nancy, ‘She’s an animal.’
    ‘She looked stunning when she came in.’
    ‘Animals can look stupendous. I wonder what she really wanted to see me about. She rang me in the office this afternoon and said she’d like to see me. I asked her to dinner. I wonder if she just wanted to see what we’d done to her house.’
    ‘I think she wanted you to help her to get the other tenant out.’
    ‘He was probably her lover.’
    ‘No. No, he wasn’t. He likes boys.’
    ‘He could take women too, I suppose.’
    ‘No, they had a long relationship but there wasn’t any sex in it,’ Nancy said, lying beside him in the cool of the summer night, under the thin white sheet.
    ‘I don’t believe it. Who would believe it?’
    Nancy cast aside her half of the sheet and stretched her body. Her underdeveloped skinniness and boniness was, if it was not regarded as a defect, her considerable speciality; so that without her clothes she was changed, in Emilio’s view, from a nobody into a somebody. ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked her lover.
    ‘I’m admiring your non-figure,’ said Emilio. ‘You look so much as if you need a good dinner.’
    ‘I had a good dinner,’ she said. ‘Maybe I don’t look very lovable but I don’t care.’
    ‘How seldom one falls in love with the lovable!’ he said. ‘How seldom.…Hardly ever.’
    ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’ she said.
    ‘The traffic in the city improves and the cost of living seems to be very low.’

Chapter Five
    ‘A TYPICAL