The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

Author:Shirley Hazzard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2011-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Gioconda spent the month of April on Capri. At Easter I saw her there when, for the long week-end, I too crossed to the islands. She was thinner – or seemed so, in grey trousers and a crimson pullover. The collar of a white shirt rising round her throat made her look at once younger and more womanly.

Gianni was coming down from Rome, reaching the island by the last boat on Good Friday. ‘Ii vaporetto dei cornuti,’ Gioconda remarked of it, as we watched the boat approaching from Naples. ‘The boat of the cuckolds. That’s what they call it in summer when the rich take houses here – this last boat on Friday that brings the husbands over to join their wives for the week-end.’

‘With us it would be the other way round. In the summer it’s assumed the husbands have been having adventures all week in town.’

‘That too.’ Gioconda pleated her ticket, then unfolded it. She was on her way to the port to meet Gianni, and we were waiting for the funicular to take her down. She was often nervous, now, when Gianni was coming; once he was there she became calm, imperturbably so. ‘But that’s of course. It’s the other way round that’s significant, humiliating, frightful.’

‘I don’t see it,’ I said; and she laughed and flicked at me with her ticket, and said, ‘If you don’t see that, you don’t see any’ thing.’

‘Truly, it always seems to me,’ I said, although I had not considered the matter before, ‘that women are rather more faithful than men wish them to be.’

‘You mean that a man will call a woman neurotic if she is faithful one moment beyond the time when he desires her love. When he himself has ceased to love.’

I had not meant this, and wondered if she were thinking of Gianni’s wife.

‘But there again he retains what matters to him – the initiative.’

After Gioconda had gone down to the port, I sat at one of the cafés in the piazza, rejoicing in liberty as I had done that December afternoon outside the Hotel Royal. I dwelt with almost physical pleasure on the evening that lay ahead to spend as I wished, with no need to be up early next day to meet the Colonel at the car. As I was enjoying these thoughts, the Colonel came out of the post office in a sports jacket and sat down at my table.

‘Enjoying the Isle of Capri, I see.’ He said it ‘Ca-pree’, as in the song. After a while he said, ‘You had better have dinner with me.’ He had this way of expressing himself in unfinished threats.

I submitted to everything, having, as I thought, no excuse for doing otherwise, and not at that time realizing that my own preference was a justification. I went to dinner with the Colonel, in a restaurant near the piazza. He talked at length, savagely – and stupidly, for it is stupidity that makes people cruel — about Naples, about

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