I saw it out of the corner of my eye. The knife. Cartwheeling through the air. A breadknife. I had cut my finger on it earlier that week. It takes a while to get used to the knives in these rental properties. These upmarket villas’ knives tend to be sharper, more keen, than our ones at home. It always makes me think that I should get ours sharpened. One day I may get around to it.

I was clearing the breakfast plates when Julia threw the knife. Instinctively I turned my head away and raised an arm. The blade struck my forearm – blunt side, mercifully – and clattered to the tiles. Julia, hair awry and eyes still puffy with sleep, screamed. No words, just an inchoate, primal noise. She picked up a plate, still smeary with strawberry jam, and hurled that too. It thudded into the wall behind me then shattered on contact with the hard floor. I retreated to the safety of the downstairs bathroom, sat on the toilet and listened to the avalanche of breaking crockery and guttural expletives drowning out the chorusing cicadas from the nearby olive grove and the screech of the swifts overhead. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: sunburned, balding, paunchy. Depleted. From the other side of the door, the sound of metal and crockery raining down on terracotta continued. I tried not to think about the deposit or the inevitably awkward checkout conversation with the hosts. I had not seen Julia like this before. She was usually so house proud and fastidious even in holiday rentals where she would get up early before checkout to clean and tidy while I packed the bags.

*

The summer in Tuscany. A rented stone villa dripping with intensely pink-purple flowers – bougainvillea, maybe? Gently undulating gardens artfully landscaped with a meandering pebble path leading to a generous pool. Adjoining the main building, a vine-strewn pergola in the eaves of which a family of house martins have built their nest. The drive through the ancient olive grove to access the property; the trunks impossibly twisted and knuckle-barked. The view from the veranda looking out over the lushness of the Tuscan landscape. Nothing but dense green punctuated by terracotta-coloured hilltop towns; in the far distance, San Gimignano boasting its dozen towers signalling heavenward.  

It had been a mistake to have come here.

Not more than a couple of days in, insipid routine had settled upon us. Silent breakfasts. Long mornings of reading. The occasional swim. Desultory conversations about what trip to include in our day. A lunch in one of the hilltop towns. The piazzas soon indistinguishable from one another. The food unremarkable, or worse. A gelato, the outing’s predictable highlight. A silent drive back to the villa. Glasses of wine and a light meal beneath the pergola to the accompaniment of the cicadas and the scent of citronella candle smoke. Then to our separate bedrooms: her idea, she says she sleeps better and she needs this holiday to relax. To be honest, I prefer it too: sleeping together seems an absurd and unnecessary intimacy these days. A custom more honoured in its breach than observance.

I ponder the inevitability of our situation. Certainly, as I gaze around the piazzas, I see couples just like Julia and myself. Affluent, ageing, mute. Mutely antagonistic? Occasionally, I see couples in animated conversation, interested in each other’s talk, sometimes even laughing together. They are the exceptions, I think. Are they just lucky? Perhaps they are drunk?

*

Mornings and evenings, I sit in the shade of the pergola, a book in my lap and watch the house martins as Julia works through her Puzzler. Two weeks in to our month away, their trips to and from the nest are more frequent. I see them arriving at their lumpy, wattled nest with beaks a mess of insects. The nest erupts in the high-pitched keening of their young. They are attentive parents.

*

Of course, Julia and I have been happy. Very happy. Just not for some time. No parent should bury a son and it took a toll on both of us. I do blame myself, to an extent. So does Julia. I was emotionally distant – is that what it’s called? – and perhaps if that had not been the case Mark might not have felt so hopeless and alone. But maybe I overstate my influence on him. Is it odd of me to still think about the train driver? To wonder if he saw Mark’s face before the impact? Despite the desperate violence of his passing, it gives me satisfaction to know that his suffering is at end. What a terrible thing it was; it is over now.

We have a daughter, Louisa, but she lives on the other side of the world. I always wonder if that was a choice. Of course, it was a choice. But I mean was she choosing to get as far away from her home as she could? I cannot blame her. I suspect that Julia does. I love Louisa but I dread the Zoom calls. Always at the wrong time for either her or us. Both. Always lacking the warmth and ease we all crave. Disappointment and frustration the prevailing emotions as we bid our farewells.

I remember the day I felt her first slipping away from me. She questioned my ornithological expertise. I have always had an interest in birds. It is more than a passing interest although I am no obsessive. I was never one of the network of men – it is mostly men, I think – who would descend on some quarry in Suffolk on the rumoured sighting of a bee-eater. But I have a good knowledge of the major British bird species, know something of their habits and take small, passing pleasures in seeing specimens I recognise, and will look up those I encounter that are outside my sphere. I made sure that Mark and Louisa were schooled in the basics: identifying robins, blackbirds and the various tits and finches in the garden; spotting mallards, coots and moorhens in the park lake. Louisa must have been twelve or thirteen when, as we watched a large raptor – a buzzard was my best guess – wheeling effortlessly on the coastal thermals of the Pembrokeshire coast, she questioned whether I really knew very much at all. She asked the family to consider how they all deferred to my supposed knowledge, when really the only thing that was indisputable was the rest of the family’s utter ignorance – and, she inferred, disinterest – in birdlife. My showy pretence of outrage at her suggestion was intended to mask the nagging fear that perhaps she was correct; I am a dilettante, at best. Although I admit that birds of prey have never been my strongest suit, I still think the silhouetted fingers at its wingtips make a buzzard the most likely suspect.

*

On the second day of the holiday, after oversized gin and tonics and a shared bottle of wine, Julia and I swam together. We had thought only to bring one towel down to the pool and, in the unexpected intimacy of the sharing of it, we found ourselves on the sun lounger together. For a short time, the closeness felt freeing. Empowering. But we soon succumbed to feelings of awkwardness: of feeling we had exposed too much of our selves; of believing that there was something inappropriate about our actions; that we were engaged in something ultimately shameful. Our bodies felt heavy and clammy to the touch in the cooling evening air. We were no longer young. Afterwards, I rose and felt ashamed of my paunch and the thinness of my now-hairless legs. Julia’s breasts were splayed and white against the angry pink of her nascent suntan. Her stomach had the look of a flaccid party balloon. We have been physically distant since.

*

The anger and the violence are quite new. It is the menopause, I think. Or perhaps she has already been through that? The morning she threw the knife, we had been having breakfast under the pergola. I was watching the house martins. Intermittently, I would see one of the fledglings popping its head through the hole its nest, impatiently awaiting the arrival of food. I supposed they would soon fledge. Julia looked up from her Puzzler and angrily confronted me about an incident from fully fifteen years previously. She was apoplectic. It was as though she had just discovered the indiscretion. I tried to placate her. I tried to reason with her. She was out of control. It was as I tried to clear some of the breakfast things – tried to move the situation on – that she really lost it. That is when she came at me with the breadknife.

*

Aside from my failings as a father, I have not always been a good husband. I worked a lot. I was away a lot. Julia worked too but the responsibility of making a home and bringing up the children fell to her. We didn’t discuss it. I think that was how things were back then, for most.  

The affair was one of those things that seemed to happen to me almost without my realising it. Or that is how I remember it. She worked for me. She was pretty although no prettier than Julia at the time in question, I think. It seemed a matter of circumstance and convenience at the time. What surprises me most about it, looking back, is how I had the vigour and drive – the appetite – in the first place. On reflection, these last few years have aged me considerably. I seem to feel perpetually tired these days.

Of course, when it all came out Julia was angry and upset. I wonder why she didn’t kick me out? It would have seemed reasonable to me. It took a while for both of us to get back to something like normal. Clearly, Julia has not forgiven me. I do not blame her.

*

I rose early this morning, made a cup of tea and, still in my pyjamas, went to sit under the pergola. The sky was cloudless and, while the terracotta tiles retained the sharp chill of night, I felt a rising dread of another long, hot day in prospect. I am not good with the heat.  

Yesterday’s attack had passed unmentioned. After Julia’s rain of destruction was over, I caught the sound of her bare feet padding softly away and up the stairs. Her bedroom door closed with a quiet click and I heard the trickle of her shower water piping into the drains. I cleared the wreckage; mopped down the floors. I wondered if there was a credible story I could provide to the owners? After a couple of hours, Julia joined me under the pergola with her Puzzzler and we later drove out to lunch where there was talk of taking the train to Florence or Sienna in the coming days. We ate a gelato before the car journey back to the villa.

I shifted my feet across the tiles and sipped my tea. It was then I saw them. All three. The fledglings’ stiff dead bodies on the cold terracotta. One was spread flat to the floor, its wings extended as if in flight; another lay hunched, head tucked into its chest; the third was on its back with its thin feet tightly curled.  

Placing my teacup in its saucer, I ran my hand over my face and dug my fingers into my eyes. What was the reason for this? Clearly, no predator was to blame. Had they heedlessly followed one another out of the nest before their time? It seemed inexplicable to me. I decided to make a small grave for the corpses. After some ineffectual searching, I concluded there was no spade. The presence of the tiny, stiff bodies had become unbearable; I used a plastic dust pan and brush to scoop them up and manoeuvred them into the flip-top bin in the kitchen. I glimpsed them strewn across the shards of broken crockery, like innocent victims of some senseless atrocity, and regretted it all. The bin’s lid flipped shut again.

I saw the knife block next to the hob. It seemed so obvious, so clear to me: I took the carving knife – more suited to our purposes than a breadknife – and headed upstairs. I pushed open Julia’s bedroom door. She was lying on her side. My movements awoke her and she started up, pulling off her eye mask in irritation. Her eyes blazed. I perched on the edge of the bed. Julia hauled herself up on her pillows. In the space between us, I placed the carving knife. It looked strange there on the white cotton sheets: incongruous obviously but also somehow elegant and filled with magnificent potential. I looked at Julia, at the knife, and then back to her. A spark of understanding passed between us. It’s been so long.

About GC Perry

GC Perry has a number of stories in the Litro archive and has work featured in Strix, Neon, Flash International, Shooter, Open Pen, Prole and elsewhere. His stories have been shortlisted for the Fish, Oxford Flash Fiction and NFFD prizes. He lives in London.

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