Free The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk

true account of it would be hard to give. There are only two things to be said about it: that it is mechanically sound; and that in no part or article of it is his Dundee brogue compromised.
    We are introduced to everyone at the table. They are an assortment, of foreigners and locals and people from Sansepulcro, Piero’s home town. There are the couple wholive in the castle and the gay antiques dealer and the man from Milan who makes classical guitars by hand. There is Tiziana, the village beauty. There is a woman from Florida who has emigrated to Italy with her two children, and the woman’s sister, who lives in Chicago and has a holiday house in the valley. The two Americans are called Laurie and Suzanne. Laurie is small and neat and slim. Her sister is fat, with beautiful milk-white skin like a baby’s that sits in folds at her neck and her wrists. She wears her dark hair in curls, and is abundantly groomed and perfumed and painted. Laurie is a little wizened and anxious-looking. Her children, two girls of eight and thirteen, sit beside her and glance at her frequently. She tells me that she is divorced from their father, who did not oppose their move to Italy at first, but has now begun to say that he wants them back. At home he never saw them from one month to the next. Now that they are here, he has a certain power. She seems more afraid of him for being far away. Laurie and Suzanne are Jewish. They say they are the only Jews in the area. They shot the rest, Laurie says drily. They did it in the field right opposite my house. I can see the place from my kitchen window. Together they laugh. Suzanne says people here are always asking her if she knows about the Jewish cemetery. There is a Jewish cemetery in the village. She supposes they are just trying to be friendly, but it happens two or three times a week.
    The ciaccia comes: it is two triangular slices of pizza sandwiched together. Laurie’s daughters have theirs with Nutella inside. The younger one takes two delicate bites and pushes it away. Laurie rolls her eyes. Mangia come un uccello , she tells the table. Her Italian is a Jewish-American hybrid of Jim’s. The girl nods sadly. I eat like a bird, she says. She reveals that her name is Harley. Her father named her, after his motorbike. I notice that Laurie and Suzanne are exchanging significant looks. You’re doing it again, Suzanne says to her, sotto voce . Laurie opens her eyes wide. Am I? she mouths. Suzanne nods. You’re doing it again, she repeats. We talked about this earlierand now you’re doing it again. Laurie gives a little anxious placatory grimace and turns brightly away to talk to someone else.
    Jim admits that Tiziana is his girlfriend. They have been together for three years. She is down at the other end of the table, tossing her mane like a restless filly, flashing her eyes at him. He tells us that she is forty-three. She wants to move in with him. She wants to put an end to the tennis-watching, to the Brit-minding. She wants to marry him and have children. Jim sits with his hands clasped prayerfully around his glass. I’m not having any of that, he says. He shakes his head. Our relationship, he says ponderously, is as stale as an old piece of Tuscan bread.
    *
    It rains for ten days. Jim procures the key to the room under the house where the firewood is kept. He tells us that there were three Irish couples staying here just before we came. They were cold too. It seems they only stayed a week. They were hugely fat, he says, each pair bigger than the last. At the end of the week the cleaners found empty bottles everywhere, boxes of them to be taken away. I suppose they kept themselves warm that way, he says.
    The Italians, apparently, are distraught about the weather. They have never known its like before. It isn’t their tourists they’re worried about: it is their vineyards and their harvests. In the fields around our house, whole families work together on their land, hoeing their rows of