‘Eh, contessa! Take a look at this fennel! Fresh from Sant’Erasmo, the genuine stuff.’

Even though she knows he’s trying to make a sale, Ada can’t help feeling flattered at the way he calls her ‘ contessa ’, without a trace of irony or obsequiousness, the way people did when titles were just a fact of life, a description like the colour of your hair or eyes. So she orders some of his overpriced fennel along with the salad leaves, apples and grapes. It is while Sebastiano is weighing out the fruit that Ada catches sight of the figure fixing her with his moronic leer from the other side of the canal, his cloak billowing about him.

‘What’s the matter?’ says Sebastiano, looking up from the makeshift counter of slatted wooden boxes piled high with potatoes and lemons and tomatoes. Following her fixed gaze, he turns to look. The dead-end alley opposite is empty except for some scaffolding whose protective tarpaulin screen is flapping in the stiff easterly wind.

‘Are you all right?’ he asks, looking at her with barely veiled anxiety.

A wherry full of plastic sacks of sand and cement comes up the canal, its temporary foredeck of planks supporting a battered wheelbarrow and a cement mixer lying on its side. Going to the Pagan house, as Ada still thinks of it, even though Maria Pagan has been dead a year or more. Now some foreigner has bought the property and is paying a fortune to have it done up…

‘Carry la Contessa Zulian’s shopping home for her,’ Sebastiano barks at his son, a gangling youth wearing a jacket inscribed Washington Redskins, a single gold earring and a baseball cap turned back to front. The boy scowls and mutters something under his breath to which Sebastiano responds with a guttural monosyllable. Father and son sway back and forth as their barge heaves at its moorings under the swell of the passing wherry, pinching the bald tyres which serve as fenders. Ada Zulian recalls seeing a motor vehicle, many years ago, when her parents took her to the Lido. Waving away the offers of help, she tells Sebastiano she’ll pay him next week and trudges off, listing slightly to port, a bulging blue-and-white striped plastic bag in each hand.