CARAVAGGIO CAME DOWairs through darkness and into the kit. Some celery oable, some turnips whose roots were still muddy. The only light came from a fire Hana had retly started. She had her ba and had not heardhis steps into the room. His days at the villa had loosened his body and freed his tenseness, so he seemed bigger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silenovement remained. Otherwise there was an easy ineffi now, a sleepio his gestures.
He dragged out the chair so she would turn, realize he was in the room.
「Hello, David.」 He raised his arm. He felt that he had been is for too long.
「How is he?」 「Asleep. Talked himself out.」 「Is he what you thought he was?」 「He』s fine. We let him be.」 「I thought so. Kip and I are both sure he is English. Kip thinks the best people are etrics, he worked with one.」 「I think Kip is the etric myself. Where is he, anyway?」 「He』s plotting something oerrace, doesn』t wa there. Something for my birthday.」 Hana stood up from her crouch at the grate, wiping her hand on the opposite forearm.
「For your birthday I』m going to tell you a small story,」 he said.
She looked at him.
「Not about Patrick, okay?」 「A little about Patrick, mostly about you.」 「I still 』t listen to those stories, David.」 「Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you . You 』t hide him away in your heart.」 「Talk to me when the morphia wears off.」 She came up to him and put her arms around him, reached up and kissed his cheek. His embrace tightened around her, his stubble like sand against her skin. She loved that about him now; in the past he had always beeiculous. The parting in his hair like Yoreet at midnight, Patrick had said. Caravaggio had in the past moved like a god in her presenow, with his fad his trunk filled out and this greyness in him, he was a friendlier human.
Tonight dinner was being prepared by the sapper. Caravaggio was not looking forward to it. One meal in three was a loss as far as he was ed. Kip fouables and presehem barely cooked, just briefly boiled into a soup. It was to be another purist meal, not what Caravaggio wished for after a day such as this when he had been listening to the man upstairs. He opehe cupboard beh the sink. There, ed in damp cloth, was some dried meat, which Caravaggio cut and put into his pocket.
「I get you off the morphine, you know. I』m a good nurse.」 「You』re surrounded by madmen...」 「Yes, I think we are all mad.」 When Kip called them, they walked out of the kit and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.
It looked tgio like a string of small electridles found in dusty churches, ahought the sapper had gooo far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana』s birthday. Hana walked slowly forward with her hands over her face.
There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water. Her tennis shoes silent oone.
「I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,」 the sapper said.
They still didn』t uand. Caravaggio bent over the flutter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. He looked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.
「Forty-five,」 Kip said, 「the years so far of this tury. Where I e from, we celebrate the age as well as ourselves.」 Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the nigh