“Aspetti,” Barnaby shouted in phrase-book Italian, waving his thousand-lire note. “Quanto devo pagare?”

The waiter placed his hands together as if in prayer and turned up his eyes.

“Basta!”

“—lasci passare—”

“Se ne vada ora—”

“Non desidero parlarle.”

“Non l’ho fatto io—”

“Vattene!”

“Sciocchezze!”

The row between the lover and the countrymen was heating up. They now screamed into each other’s faces behind Barnaby’s back. The waiter indicated, with a multiple gesture, the heavens, the rain, his own defencelessness.

Barnaby thought: “After all, I’m the one with a raincoat.” Somebody crashed into his back and sent him spread-eagled across his table.

A scene of the utmost confusion followed accompanied by flashes of lightning, immediate thunderclaps and torrents of rain. Barnaby was winded and bruised. A piece of glass had cut the palm of his hand and his nose also bled. The combatants had disappeared but his waiter, now equipped with an enormous orange and blue umbrella, babbled over him and made ineffectual dabs at his hand. The other waiters, clustered beneath the awning, rendered a chorus to the action. “Poverino!” they exclaimed. “What a misfortune!”

Barnaby recovered an upright posture. With one hand he dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of his raincoat and clapped it to his face. In the other he extended to the waiter his bloodied and rain-sopped thousand-lire note.

“Here,” he said in his basic Italian. “Keep the change. I require a taxi.”