IT DAWNED ON ME a few days ago that this whole mad, happy-camping idea of Mr R’s was an elaborate plot — backed by my concerned parents — to remove me from temptation.
Almost a year after I sold my old family home, paid off my debts and moved in to Mr R’s house I had started to display signs of a regression to my bad old ways. Not just in failing to open my brown envelopes but also in finding myself inextricably drawn back to the shops, albeit the summer sales.
I can see now — from the relative safety of the Umbrian hills where we are encamped — that my need to feed my addiction to shopping had been making me behave in an increasingly devious and disgraceful manner.
Before we left London my obsession with finding the perfect sun dress had led me to trawl through every shop I could find within a three-mile radius of our house. I justified what purchases I made — and there were many — on the ground that a) they were bargains (something Mr R thoroughly approves of) and b) that my old summer wardrobe was packed in boxes with the rest of the spoils of my past in a storage depot near Croydon.
But once I arrived in Italy the contents of my suitcase suddenly seemed ridiculous, not just because in the baking heat all you need is a swimsuit and a sarong but also because I have seen the light (and I don’t mean the brilliant ball of orange in the sky).
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It all started with the dog-eared copy of Dante’s Inferno that Mr R leant me for a little light holiday reading. In the glare of my torch in our tent on our first night in Italy the opening words “midway through the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark wood, for the correct path had been lost” seemed to have been written just for me. Not because we were camped in a pitch-black olive grove a long way from the holiday of my fantasies but because I realised that the events of the last couple of years — and my descent to the status of nuovi poveri — could count as my own version of Dante’s hell.
Within two days of our arrival here — when I became engrossed in the story of St Francis — I could tell that Mr R was beginning to think that his plot to get me as far away from the summer sales as it was possible to get might have backfired.
The fervour with which I embraced what I now see as a kind of sackcloth-and-ashes existence (well, a tent without a marble bathroom and room service) was beginning to worry him and the rest of our little party (we are pitched close to the holiday home of a friend of Mr R’s).
Why, our visit to Italy has turned into such a religious experience for me that last Sunday I found myself — in the most modest of my six perfect sundresses — attending a mass in the big church in the nearby village of Collelunga. I am not sure if it was the strong smell of incense or the sound of several Latin phrases I remembered from my convent education but, anyway, I suddenly wondered whether it wasn’t too late to fulfil my girlhood ambition to become a white nun in Africa.
This last lunacy so unsettled Mr R that yesterday afternoon he drove me into the city of Todi and let me loose in the shops. And even though all I managed to buy were six Sacre Cuore church candles that were on special purchase in the Co-op, I felt so bad that tomorrow I am seriously considering entering the confessional and saying, in pidgin Italian, something like “Forgive me Father, for I have shopped . . . ”