Sicilian Carousel: Adventures on an Italian Island

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AS I EXPLAINED to Deeds more than once during the course of our breakneck journey round Sicily in the little red coach, nobody has ever had better reasons than I for not visiting the island. I had let my visit go by default for many a year, and now with increasing age and laziness and the overriding fact — no, Fact, in uppercase — of Martine’s death, what on earth was the point? I could surely spare myself the kind of sentimental journey which would be quite out of place and out of context? Yes or no? Deeds only shook his head and tapped out his pipe against a wall. “If you say so,” he said politely, “but you seem to be enjoying it very much.” I was.

The bare fact of my arrival in Martine’s own private island had in some way exorcised the dismal fact of her disappearance from the scene — so much had it impoverished life in general, and not for me alone. Moreover, the luck was that I was able to talk a little about her, for though Deeds had not known her he had actually seen her quite often driving about Cairo, Alexandria, and lastly about Cyprus where I had helped her to build the ambitiously beautiful house which Piers had designed for her around a cruciform central room which both vowed was based on a Templar motif. But now they were both dead! In some of those long telephone conversations which somehow never succeeded in fully repairing our long-relinquished attachment to the Cyprus past, I could hear, or thought I could hear, the chatter of waves upon the beach of Naxos, the Sicilian Naxos where she had at last come to roost like a seabird, secure at last from politics and civil strife alike. Happy, too, in the possession of the Man That Never Was and her “blithe and beautiful” children.

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