History as filigree

A few pages in to Return to Valetto, the narrator Hugh Fisher is on a train from Rome to Orvieto and is being eyed suspiciously by an elderly Italian woman, who can see the photograph of himself with his daughter that he is using as a bookmark:

I looked up from my book and into her Old Testament face. Mia figlia, I said, my daughter. For good measure, I told her in Italian that I was a widower, that it had taken me the better part of five years to remove my wedding band, that Susan was getting her PhD in economics at Oxford … This information passed through her like a muscle relaxant as she returned to knitting a tiny mauve sock.

At this point I remembered what sort of writer Dominic Smith is: his style is an irresistible combination of sophisticated and engaging. Either the muscle relaxant or, more likely, the tiny mauve sock reminded me of how much I was likely to enjoy the company of this particular writer’s mind, and nothing in the subsequent pages was a disappointment. This passage is also a little masterpiece of technique: it gives us a snapshot of Hugh Fisher in one brief but vividly imagined and cinematic cameo.