I have stood in a small Italian town at the blue end of the day and watched the snow blush into a colour that snow, by all rights, should never attempt. It was an hour of no particular ambition, a winter afternoon quietly surrendering to evening, the sort of hour you pass through en route to somewhere with central heating. Then the light, as if bored with its own routine, performed a trick I have never managed to describe. The snow turned violet. The wall behind it was the pink of a sweet you are now far too old to buy, and above the roofline the sky held a green so implausible I could not name it without feeling I was making things up.
It took me a moment to notice what was absent, precisely because nothing was. The walls stood, the windows blinked, the snow lay solid and luminous; the whole town looked as if it had just been unwrapped. Everything was present except us. I stood, my breath manufacturing its own tiny climate, and waited for the scene to …
