This is it, he said. Go find a bedroom while I prepare lunch, and he held up a canvas bag brimming with supplies.
There was nothing now between them and three days of holiday.
Kid took off across the beach, the shingle hot on her bare feet, Ulysses not far behind. She’d never swum in the sea before, certainly nowhere where the fish were as striped as her. Waist height in the water now. Not even one bit cold! was her shout.
Kid held her nose and ducked under and came up spluttering. Again, she said.
I’ll be here, he said.
Under she went.
Under he went.
They broke the surface together with a leap.
Massimo calling out that lunch was ready.
I don’t need lunch, said kid.
Yeah you do, said Ulysses. Come on, and they waded through the shallows back to the towels.
Everyone look at the camera! shouted Massimo, as he set the timer and ran back into position.
（Click.） Caught forever.
From left, Old Cress stands next to Massimo with Ulysses on the right. Their arms are around one another. Kid is standing in front of Massimo holding Claude. Claude has opted for the full wingspan look. Behind them is a glimpse of the terrace. Pots of geraniums, a trestle table with the remains of spaghetti al pomodoro and potatoes and baccalà. And two bottles of the crisp white ansonica wine native to the island. One of the bottles is a good two thirds full. Above them a grapevine casts abundant shade and clusters of grapes hang low. The kid is wearing her swimming costume and sunglasses. They are the best things she has ever owned. The costume is still damp from a swim and will chafe her bum by evening. It will be uncomfortable but worth it. Cress wears a light blue shirt and desert shorts. His feet are bare and he’s conscious of the length of his toenails. Apart from that blip, he feels whole and courageous. He knows he’s making up for lost time. Massimo sports an outfit of matching navy. Bermuda shorts in a cotton–linen mix in a similar shade of blue to his ironed, short-sleeved shirt. Before his friends arrived, he’d felt shy about his hair and the weight that had accumulated around his middle. But Ulysses told him he looked so distinguished – You’re a good-looking fella, Mass, were the words he used – and sometimes that’s all you need to restore a little height. Massimo will not grow his hair long again. Ulysses wears white shorts that stop just above his knee. His knees are good, and the fall of the hem only accentuates that fact. He wears a white vest not dissimilar to the way Marlon Brando wore his in A Streetcar Named Desire. Ulysses hasn’t seen the film. The vest is a tight fit due to shrinkage. His smile is as disarming as ever. His eyebrows sit at an upward slant on account of the sun, and the tips of his ears are reddening.
It would be the first of many photographs taken over the years on Giglio. It would hang on the wall in the living room between two windows where white curtains billow on a salt-drenched breeze. Through the windows the eucalypts throw off a keen scent.
They have been on the island approximately twenty-six hours and thirty-seven minutes. Not long, but Cress would’ve broken that down and calculated a thousand moments because Cress was like that.
Nearing their last day, a little twist of Cress occurred and not before time.
Massimo had just made a pot of coffee and was asking Ulysses if he had any idea yet what he wanted to do with the downstairs flat, when Cress staggered out onto the terrace and said, I know what we’re gonna do with the downstairs flat.
Extraordinary, said Massimo. Does this happen a lot?
Quite a lot, said the kid.
Cress took a sip of water and stumbled to a chair. I had a vision, he said and proceeded to describe exactly what had happened to him only moments before.
I’d just finished my coffee – it was delicious by the way, Massimo, he said, interrupting his own story – and I’d settled down on that lovely armchair to make a start on the novel I’d brought from England. Fiction being uncharted territory for me, as you all know. （Cress took another sip of water.） He said, I opened the novel and began to read. And it was as if a large celestial index finger reached across the sky and pointed directly at me, Alfred Cresswell. Like Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, when God points and gives life to – in this case – an idea.
And? said Ulysses.
Cress held up his copy of A Room with a View. The precedent has been set, Temps. （He flicked through the pages.） And I quote, ‘And a cockney besides!’
（PAUSE.）
Besides what? said Ulysses.
A cockney landlady at the Bertolini.
What’s the Bertolini?
A pensione, said Cress. A boarding house. Mostly for English people. Awful ones, mind. And, if I’m honest, the food ain’t much cop, but still.