'A literary fairy tale?' she queried again.

I answered yes to that too, but I wasn't sure that she believed me. I had no idea how conversant she was with Czechoslovakian literature.

By the time we got down to the town again, it was five o'clock. I asked Beate if she wanted to have dinner with me at the hotel. I praised the food and the view and said they had an excellent wine from Piedmont. She thanked me but excused herself, saying she had something to do.

'Tomorrow we could go to Pogerola,' she suggested.

I nodded. 'Then we can bathe in the waterfall,' I said.

She pinched my arm tenderly and laughed.

We arranged to meet in front of the cathedral at ten- thirty. It would be Easter Sunday.

I sat up pondering my meeting with Beate until far into the night. It had been an extraordinary meeting, the sort that only happens once or twice in a lifetime.

She might possibly be the same sort of age as Maria when I'd known her. Maria had been ten years older than me, and now I was the elder. I might be fifteen or twenty years Beate's senior, but I carried my years well. It was fright- ening. I was forty-eight, but those final eight years didn't show. 'A bit older,' she'd said. I'd never been embarra.s.sed that Maria was ten years older than me, and she'd never been concerned that I was much younger.

I couldn't believe that Beate was acting as a decoy for a hired a.s.sa.s.sin - or that she was an a.s.sa.s.sin herself. But if she had been, she might well have behaved just as she did this afternoon. She'd been in Amalfi exactly as long as me.

Perhaps I was easy meat. Tomorrow we'd walk up to the valley and over the mountains to Pogerola. The excursion was her idea, she'd been through the Valley of the Mills to Pogerola before. She hadn't wanted to have dinner with me because there was something she had to do. Perhaps, I thought, she had to make a few phone calls, and presumably there would be men with earphones all over Valle dei Mulini next morning. I could see them in my mind's eye, I could imagine them taking up their positions amongst the ruins of the old paper mills. I could already hear Beate's laughter and I'd long since conjured up a picture of the wad of notes that would change hands. I had a hyperactive imagination.

I glanced up at the portrait of Ibsen. Mightn't the truth just as easily be that Beate and I were two shipwrecked souls clinging together? I thought of Fru Linde and the lawyer Krogstad. They were practically part of the fabric of this room. I was convinced that Beate had something dark in her past as well. Was the idea of a future together so unthink- able? She was living in a bed-sit in the town and was a painter. She didn't know that I was very rich, that was one of the last things I'd tell her.

She was sitting on the cathedral steps at half past ten the next morning. She was wearing her yellow dress again, and I thought that perhaps we even resembled one another in something as mundane as our att.i.tude to clothes. While I was on my travels, I always wore my clothes for as long as possible before putting them out for washing. But maybe the explanation was simply that she particularly liked her yellow dress. I did too. And it was Easter, and for all I knew she might have washed it since yesterday afternoon, it might have been one of the things she'd had to attend to. How- ever, her white sandals had been replaced by a pair of stout trainers. We were going walking.

She rose from the steps and came to meet me. First, we climbed back up all the steps again and stood outside the door listening to the singing from the Easter ma.s.s. Beate was solemn and impish at the same time.

We found the alleys that led out of town and, as we ascended the steep hillsides between the lemon groves, she told me she'd never met a man she'd felt so in tune with as me. I returned her almost startling admission and added that, apart from a few short-lived relationships, I hadn't been really fond of anyone since I'd been quite young. I said with a glint in my eye that I'd been waiting for her. Again our conversation was punctuated with irony and hyperbole, but today there was an underlying earnestness to it. I felt sure that Beate really did care for me, and I'd told her I was leaving Amalfi on Wednesday.

I enquired whether it was quite by chance that she'd turned to me for a light the day before. She gave a mis- chievous smile, but nodded innocently. And had she followed me up to the Valle dei Mulini? She shook her head but said that she'd guessed I was going for a walk and that it wasn't very difficult to work out which direction I'd take as there was only one valley to walk in. So, I said, it was fortuitous that she'd asked if I had a match, but not that she'd walked the same way as me afterwards?

'I suppose not,' she replied enigmatically.

I wanted to get to the bottom of it, and now not simply because I was thinking of Luigi. 'We hadn't even talked to each other,' I pointed out, 'we'd barely exchanged a glance.'

At first she laughed, and then she gave me a completely different version. 'You may be an observant man, but you don't seem to know much about yourself,' she said. 'Well, for a start, you came into the pizzeria with the Corriere della Sera under your arm, so you were presumably an Italian, and perhaps even something as rare in these parts as an intellectual. Then you sat down and glanced at me. Your look didn't say much, but it did at least tell me you weren't gay. You ordered pizza and beer, so perhaps you were a tourist after all, but you obviously spoke Italian. You squinted in my direction again, but I think this time you only looked at my feet and took in my white sandals. I attached importance to this detail because not all men look at a woman's feet, but you did. You let your gaze dwell on my feet, you examined my sandals, so you had to be a sensuous person. Then you opened your newspaper at the culture section, and so, perhaps, you were a man interested in culture.

'Once again you looked at me, it was just for an instant, but it was a fixed and level glance. Perhaps you don't remember, but I returned your gaze on that occasion.

However briefly, it was the first time you and I looked into each other's eyes, it was our first intimacy, because looking into a person's eyes without averting your own - as one usually does when eyes accidentally meet - can be very intimate. It was a reciprocated look. This time I suspected you of trying to guess my age, but I may be wrong there.

'I'd finished my lasagne and was trying to light my cigarette with a lighter that had run out of gas. You noticed that, but not, I think, that I'd registered your interest. It all took just long enough, perhaps five seconds, so that if you'd had a lighter on you, you'd almost certainly have come across to my table and given me a light, at least if you were the kind of person I took you for. Instead, I was the one who got up and went over to you and asked if you'd got a match. You understood my Italian, but you marked me down as a foreigner because of my accent. You said you didn't smoke, but in a couple of moments you'd picked up a lighter from the neighbouring table and lit my cigarette.

You weren't the type just to refer me to the next table, you took responsibility yourself, or rather, you had nothing against lighting my cigarette, you were pleased I'd turned to you. You showed by the way you did it, that it most certainly wasn't the first time you'd lit a woman's cigarette.

'When I thanked you, a shadow fell across your face telling me you were in difficulties of some sort, that you were close to seeking someone to confide in and that that other person might as well be me. I turned and went back to my table, it only took a moment, but I felt your eyes on my back, although that might have been purely my imagination.

When you'd paid your bill and got up to go, you gave me an almost sorrowful look and waved, and the way you waved told me that you thought we'd almost certainly never see each other again. I'd been sketching you on my pad because I really liked your face, but you weren't observant enough to notice you were my model. But still I smiled at you with an exaggerated openness. I wanted my look to tell you that our lives are strange; and so you left, but it was as if you took away with you something that you'd glimpsed in my eyes.

The way you walked out of the pizzeria told me you were going to the Valle dei Mulini, and of course I could have been wrong, but as it turned out I wasn't. I thought that if I got another chance, you were someone I'd like to get to know better.'

I halted on the narrow footpath and clapped my hands a couple of times. 'Bravo!' I exclaimed. I felt naked and exposed and it felt good, it felt good to be seen and known, it was like coming home. It had been a very long time indeed since I'd had anyone to come home to.

'First you told me you asked me for a match by chance,' I said, 'but now you say you realised I had none.'

She laughed at this small contribution. It was a token that I'd weighed every word she'd uttered. 'Well, it was pure chance that my lighter was empty, but you were no chance person, you were like an open book, a book I'd already begun to read.'

Or she'd been well briefed beforehand, I thought. But I quickly dismissed the idea.

It was for other reasons I said: 'Have you got other lighters?'

She didn't know what I meant. 'Do you always go round with one lighter that works and another that's empty?'

She looked up at me and gave me a little slap. I probably deserved it.

We walked slowly on. The more two people have to say to one another, the more slowly they walk. She went on talking about her watercolours and the exhibition. She told me now that she'd ill.u.s.trated a couple of children's books plus a de luxe edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Over the past few years she'd also begun to write.

I was taken aback. I was startled that it was only now she owned up to being a writer, but as she had spoken the last few words with a certain reticence, I decided to refrain from comment just then. Many people feel a bit shy about ad- mitting they're trying to write. Perhaps it was bashfulness that had prevented her from mentioning it the day before.

I told her I'd come to Amalfi from the Bologna Book Fair. I studied her carefully, but she gave no special reaction to my information. I'd have to stop thinking about Luigi.

'So you publish children's books as well?' she asked. I merely nodded. I placed a hand on her head and stroked her hair. She made no comment.

By the time we'd got up to the Via Paradiso half an hour later, we could see that some large, black clouds had begun rolling in across the valley from the encircling mountains. It was sultry. We heard the church bells begin to ring down in Amalfi. A second later the bells of Pontone began to sound as well, and from the ridge on the other side of the valley, those of Pogerola. It was noon on Easter Sunday.

We heard the first growl of thunder, and Beate took my hand. I asked if she wanted to turn back, but she was absolutely set on continuing. She has an appointment with people further up the valley, I thought, and knew that I was imagining things. From the time I'd left Bologna I'd already stage-managed my own death in twenty or thirty different ways. But Beate wasn't part of any conspiracy. I'd high hopes she might be the one to save me from all inventive- ness. I'd begun to antic.i.p.ate that she might even be able to teach me to live like a human being.

We weren't far from the waterfall we'd pa.s.sed the previous day, when the skies suddenly opened. Beate pointed to the ruins of an old paper mill, and we dashed in to try and find some shelter. We crept as far inside the ruins of the mill as we could. She was laughing like a small child, and her laughter echoed dully. There were a mere three or four square metres of roof above our heads, but the floor we sat on was dry.

Soon we were caught up in the worst thunderstorm I'd ever known, or perhaps I should say the best, because we soon agreed that we liked thunderstorms. They were virile.

The storm lasted more than two hours. The rain tipped down continuously, but we stayed dry. I said it was back in the Stone Age and we were cavemen. 'There's neither past nor future,' I said, 'everything is here and now.' My voice had a.s.sumed a hollow ring. She had nestled into the crook of my arm, and again she asked what my novel was about. I had time to tell her now, she insisted. I let her talk me over. I chose one of the synopses I'd had for sale before Writers'

Aid had collapsed. It was a family tragedy. I had the synopsis in my head, and now I fleshed it out. In rough terms the story ran along these lines:

Just after the war, in an old patrician villa in the small Danish town of Silkeborg, there lived a well-to-do family by the name of Kjaergaard. They had just engaged a new servant girl in the house. Her name was Lotte, and that was her only name because she was an orphan of not more than sixteen or seventeen years of age. The girl was said to be extremely beautiful, so it wasn't sur- prising that the Kjaergaard's only son couldn't keep his eyes off her while she was hard at work for his demanding family. He constantly followed her about the house and, even though he was quite a young boy, he managed to seduce her in the wash-house one day while she was boiling clothes. It only happened once, but Lotte became pregnant.

In the years that followed, a number of different accounts of what had actually happened in the wash-house that fateful afternoon did the rounds. It was whispered that the boy - or Morten, to give him his proper name - had raped the girl as she stood pounding the clothes, but the Kjaergaard family steadfastly maintained that it was Lotte who'd behaved improperly, and that she was the one who'd seduced the boy. Enough witnesses could testify to the way she would giggle and simper and generally behave wantonly in the boy's presence.

The family now made confidential arrangements for the maid to take up a new position with a family in a remote part of the country.

But when, a few months later, Lotte gave birth to a son, they made sure they kept the child as he had the family's n.o.ble blood in his veins. Although the Kjaergaard clan was well endowed with worldly wealth, it certainly had no superfluity of heirs, and not a drop of the eminent family's blood was to go to waste. Lotte protested as best she could and wept bitterly when the boy was taken away from her only a few weeks after his birth, but both materially and morally she was considered unfit to look after the child. And, after all, the boy had no father.

Naturally, Morten wanted nothing to do with the baby. He was in any case too young to claim paternity and for their part, his parents were far too old to adopt the child as one of their own children. But Morten had an uncle, who'd long been blighted by a childless marriage, so he and his wife now a.s.sumed parental re- sponsibility for the little boy, who was christened Carsten.

Gradually, as Carsten grew up, he would occasionally wonder at the age his mother and father must have been when he was born.

His mother must have been nearing fifty, but it never occurred to him that Stine and Jakob, as they were called, weren't his biological parents. On his birthdays he always got a card from 'Cousin Morten', and up to the time of his confirmation, a small Christmas gift sent by post, but of course it never struck him that his eighteen- year-elder cousin was really his true father. It was a well-kept family secret to which he was never privy.

Jakob was captain of a large merchant ship, and when Carsten was small he was sometimes allowed to accompany his father out into the wide world. He became deeply attached to both his parents and, being an only child, they worshipped him above everything else, but when he was in his last year at school, both Stine and Jakob died in a matter of a few months. Suddenly Carsten was alone in the world - and without family, for all four of his grand- parents were now dead. By this I mean that as Jakob lay dying, he told his son the old story of the maidservant in the wash-house and cousin Morten, who in reality was his true father.

By this time Carsten had little contact with his cousin. They hadn't set eyes on each other for many years, but when Carsten began to study for his M.A. at the University of Arhus there came a time when he was completely stuck for money. In his desperation he approached Morten who obviously knew that Carsten was his real son, but who also took it for granted that he was the only person in the world who did, as Stine and Jakob were now dead.

Morten had become a highly respected medical consultant at Arhus's hospital. He'd married the lovely Malene, the daughter of a Supreme Court judge in Copenhagen, and they had two nice daughters who both sang in the church choir, and Morten had no intention of initiating his cousin into his spotless bourgeois existence - he knew too much about the boy's chequered family background.

Without letting on what he knew, Carsten asked his cousin for a loan, or preferably an allowance of five or ten thousand kroner, because he knew that his cousin was a wealthy man. But Morten flatly refused Carsten's request; he brushed aside the young student's humble entreaty for a little help in a tight spot. He poured him a gla.s.s of malt whisky, made some witticisms about the old days and put five hundred kroner into his hand before packing him off with a few general plat.i.tudes about advancement being the reward of study. What proved so fateful was that Carsten - who already had feelings of near hatred for his real father because of his years of dissimulation - now rounded on his cousin, looked him straight in the eye and said: 'Don't you think it's disgraceful to refuse your own son a loan of a few thousand kroner? Perhaps next time I ought to speak to Malene ...' Morten started, but Carsten had already turned his back, merely remarking as he left: 'We'll say no more about it now!'

After several disrupted years of study, Carsten met Kristine who, from then on, became practically the sole object of his attention. He only rang Morten and Malene a couple of times in the following years, and on both occasions it was Morten who answered the phone. One thing was certain: Carsten would never again ask his cousin for money. Nevertheless, he received cheques from him once or twice, and when he and Kristine were married they got a cheque for five thousand kroner from cousin Morten and Malene, Maren and Mathilde. This was not enough to mollify Carsten's bitterness towards his biological father, and by the time they got married he had decided to adopt Kristine's surname. Her family had accepted him with open arms.