The bank’s discharge came up in the post on the twenty-ninth of December. One sheet, no heading, the account number, the words saldato ed estinto, and a stamp.
Two hundred and fourteen thousand euros that had been sitting on this hill since the April of 2019, and it goes off it in a franked envelope with a second-class stamp on it, and you stand in your own yard in the cold holding a piece of paper and feel nothing whatsoever. I had expected to feel something. I had been planning to feel something since the twenty-second of September.
What I did instead was walk down to the bottom of the meadow, which was not mine any more, and stand on somebody else’s grass looking at somebody else’s boathouse, which I was entitled to do in perpetuity by clause two.
Ettore found me there. He had a spirit level and a…
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