472
DORIS LESSING
then he comes up and stands at the door laughing, and Judith
laughs, and the widow says: Children enjoy yourselves. And
off they go, walking down to the town eating ice cream. The
cat follows them. It won't let Judith out of its sight, like a dog.
When she swims miles out to sea, the cat hides under a beach–
hut until she comes back. Then she carries it back up the hill,
because that nasty little boy chases it.
Well.
I'm coming home
tomorrow thank God, to my dear old Billy, I was mad ever
to leave him. There is something about Judith and Italy that
has upset me, I don't know what. The point is, what on earth
can Judith and Luigi
talk
about? Nothing. How can they?
And of course it doesn't matter. So I tum out to be a prude
as well. See you next week."
It was my tum for a dose of the sun, so I didn't see Betty.
On my way back from Rome I stopped off in Judith's resort
and walked up through narrow streets to the upper town,
where, in the square with the vine-covered trattoria at the
comer, was a house with Rosticcheria written in black paint
on a cracked wooden board over a low door. There was a
door-curtain of red beads, and flies settled on the beads. I
opened the beads with my hands and looked in to a small dark
room with a stone counter. Loops of salami hung from metal
hooks. A glass bell covered some plates of cooked meats. There
were flies on the salami and on the glass bell. A few tins on
the wooden shelves, a couple of pale loaves, some wine casks
and an open case of sticky pale green grapes covered with
fruit flies, seemed to be the only stock. A single wooden table
with two chairs stood in a comer, and two workmen sat there,
eating lumps of sausage and bread. Through another bead
curtain at the back come a short, smoothly fat, slender limbed
woman with greying hair. I asked for Miss Castlewell, and her
face changed. She said in an offended, offhand way: "Miss
Castlewell left last week." She took a white cloth from under
the counter, and flicked at the flies on the glass bell. "I'm a
friend of hers," I said, and she said "Si," and put her hands
