The Man Who Went Down With His Ship by Hugh Fleetwood

family. And I know Dario would like it and the girls, and—as I say, I’d love it. Truly. So do, please, think about it, and let me know what your decision is. And then maybe tomorrow, or the day after …’
    She was already, in her mind, selecting tiles for the bathroom and discussing with Maria what colour the kitchen should be.
    She had asked them to think about it. However, just as, both at the time and afterwards, Maria preferred not to reflect upon her motives for accepting, so, beforehand, she preferred not to reflect upon whether she should accept. And part of that faint sense of shame and foreboding she felt when she and Giuseppe did sit down over the kitchen table and say, rather stiffly to each other, ‘Well’, came from her knowledge that whatever there was to consider regarding this quite major change in their lives, she wasn’t going to. Of course they would go to the new house, she told herself—and saw that Giuseppe was telling himself—and of course they would take up their new jobs. They’d be mad not to, wouldn’t they? After all, when you looked at where they were living now, in this old dark apartment with its cracked walls and floors, its dampness in the winter and suffocating heat in the summer, its views only of other damp, dark apartments, and narrow, sunless streets, I mean, really, she thought, who in the world wouldn’t move and what is there to think about? Unless, perhaps, what colour the kitchen should be …
    The other thing, the greater thing, that made Maria and, she was sure, Giuseppe, feel that faint sense of shame and foreboding , as they had their brief and useless discussion about their future, was the idea that by accepting Amelia’s offer they were delivering themselves a little too thoroughly into the hands of the Cavalieri family and were, as a result, losing their freedom and putting themselves into some sort of danger.
    Still, she told herself, there’s probably nothing to worry about. If we do find ourselves becoming too involved, well, they’re only here for two or three months a year. And when you think of a new house, and the extra money, and a view …
    She hardly slept that night, and gave Amelia her answer first thing next morning.
    *
    Later, Maria was to think that if only she had realised that her sense of foreboding was justified as soon as it became so, she might have been able to pull back. But it became so so very soon and so obliquely that she didn’t, at the time, nor for some time thereafter, make the connection.
    ‘I mean,’ she would sometimes tell herself, ‘I was looking to the future, at all the summers to come. I wasn’t thinking about what was happening there and then. Besides, all the other events of that summer seemed totally separate from the issue of our acceptance. As in a way, I suppose, even now it could be claimed they were. So how, when I was in the thick of things, I could have been expected …
    ‘Though it’s possible,’ she would sometimes add, ‘that even if I had made the connection I might not have pulled back. Because I was so excited at the prospect of having a new house. And since by then it was too late anyway …’
    The first thing to occur in the post-acceptance part of that summer, as it became clear that whatever restrictions there were regarding the development of The Villa’s garden, they were going to be ignored by Amelia’s husband, was that Giuseppe, quiet and neat at the best of times, now became almost obsessively so. It was as if he were guarding his quietness and neatness, and were afraid of seeing them damaged. He let himself into the apartment so silently that half the time Maria didn’t know he was home. Having always changed after work into clothes that, though sober, were comfortably informal, he suddenly started to dress up, so that as he sat at the kitchen table eating his dinner, he looked as if he were at a wedding, or a first communion dinner. And from being a man of merely few words when he