Sold As Seen

The estate agent’s photographs had been taken, Ivy decided, by someone who loved the house very much and had never once been inside it.

In the photographs, Villa Rosa glowed. Peach walls, green shutters, bougainvillea spilling over the gate like a dropped scarf. In real life the walls were the colour of a plaster that had given up, two of the shutters were missing, and the bougainvillea had eaten the gate entirely and was making a determined start on the post box.

“It has character,” said Signor Bassi, the agent, who had driven her up the hill from the harbour in a small white car with no suspension and a great deal of faith.

“It has a hole in the roof.”

“Character,” he agreed, beaming, “and a very good view of the sky.”

Ivy had not seen her grandmother’s house since she was nine. She remembered it only in pieces: cold tiles under bare feet, the smell of oranges and floor polish, Nonna Rosa singing in the kitchen in a language Ivy’s mother had refused to teach her. She had expected to feel something, walking through the gate. Grief, perhaps. Or guilt, which she had been carrying around like hand luggage since the funeral.

What she felt, mostly, was the sun. It came over the wall like a warm hand on the back of her neck, and somewhere beyond the shutters the sea was making the quiet, silvery sound it made in her memories, and for a moment she forgot about the debts and the flight home and the hole in the roof.

Then a man’s voice said, from directly above her, “If you are the buyer, you are standing on my tomatoes.”