Other voices, the same rooms

I’m not susceptible to ghosts, and never see or sense them; my partner, who is, reports a mildly inquisitive nocturnal presence in our house in Florence, a town where estate agents all acknowledge the likely presence of such infestations, it being so common there. Who our ghost is or was, I don’t know; I am told that he or she has what I would have thought a slightly alarming habit of sitting down heavily at the end of the bed: just a previous inhabitant, whose name is now long forgotten, observing these curiously un-Italian occupants sleeping in his house with emotions impossible to retrieve.

But all houses, in a sense, have ghosts, and not necessarily those of dead people, either. If we have bought our houses, we know a little about the people who lived there before, not just from meeting them, but from their inadequate grasp of plumbing necessities and horrible taste in wall- paper.