by Kate Eberlen
‘There’s nothing Alf wouldn’t do for a tip!’ Gina jokes.
‘I waited for you outside the Forum today,’ Stuart says.
Is that a normal thing to do? Alf wonders. If he wanted to meet up, why didn’t he just text? Is he being paranoid, imagining that Stuart can sense the cheating?
‘Which exit?’ Alf asks.
‘There’s more than one exit?’ Gina asks.
‘Yeah, I often use the one on Via di San Gregorio,’ Alf tells them. ‘It’s better for the tram.’
‘Alf loves trams,’ Gina tells her father.
‘It’s coming from Blackpool,’ he says, grinning at Stuart, but inside he’s panicking.
He can’t deliver his speech with Stuart there staring at him.
He’s going to be flying back Saturday morning, to be there for Arsenal’s last home match on Sunday.
That’s three more nights, Alf thinks, not sure if Letty will wait that long.
16
Thursday
LETTY
When she wakes up, she wonders whether she dreamt it. She closes her eyes, trying to think herself back to the blissfully terrifying sensation of taking him inside her, her muscles slowly opening to him until she felt full of him, and his sigh, as if he had finally found the place he was supposed to be, and how he moved, so gently and slowly and with such control that she found herself begging for more, more, more, wanting him to go further into her body, into her mind, into her soul.
There’s something I have to sort out.
It has to be a girlfriend.
Letty’s desperate to know, but she doesn’t want to know. What is the point of knowing?
Live in the moment.
She and Alf exist in the present tense.
If she doesn’t ask him about his past, he will have no right to ask about hers.
In class, she wonders if anyone can tell from the way she looks, the involuntary smile that keeps creeping to her lips. She knows Heidi would, but her friend is on another long weekend, this time to Florence.
The theme of the lesson is where you live.
I live in an apartment.
He is there to meet her out of school. They run all the way back.
It’s on the tenth floor. Fortunately, there is a lift.
He stabs the 10 button again and again to make sure no one gets in with them, then pushes her against the mirror at the back, kissing her as the lift climbs, his hands under her vest, his crotch pressed against hers.
It has only one room.
The door slams behind them and they’re kissing each other, tearing at each other’s clothes.
And a wooden floor.
She pulls him down onto her.
E una vista meravigliosa.
The word can also mean miraculous. A miraculous view.
‘It’s like making love in the sky,’ Alf says afterwards.
At the restaurant – their restaurant – they order pasta with spicy Sardinian sausage, another quarto of the light white wine. Two tiny cups of espresso, barely a mouthful, but the perfect end to the meal.
The proprietor calls her ‘cara’, as if they have known each other for years. He shakes Alf’s hand like an old friend.
Back in the flat, they make love on the sofa, lying together after, with Alf stroking that place near the top of her arm with his finger that feels almost more intimate than all the things they have done together, but she can tell that he isn’t fully present.
‘Let’s go away together for the weekend!’ he suddenly says.
‘Where?’ she asks.
‘How about Florence?’
‘Heidi’s in Florence.’
‘Not there then. How would you feel about Naples again?’
‘We could go to Ischia!’ Letty says.
He looks up the Trenitalia site on his phone.
‘There’s a train at one o’clock tomorrow. If you come straight out of school, we can get that?’
‘I’m there,’ says Letty.
He taps the phone a few more times.
‘So that’s done,’ he says.
He looks at his watch and stands up. It’s his usual time to leave.
Letty braces herself. ‘Come on. Get dressed,’ he says. ‘We’re going out.’
‘Going out? Where?’
‘It’s a surprise!’
Half past six is too early to eat again, except maybe a gelato. It’s too far to come for an ice cream, she thinks, as they get off the tram at Termini. He guides her across the roads to Piazza della Repubblica, and stops outside a cinema. She tries not to be disappointed. Going to the cinema is what people do at the beginning of a relationship, isn’t it?
‘Surprise!’ he says, pointing.
On the poster she recognizes Vadim, the boy she had a crush on, now grown up and apparently dancing the principal role in the Royal Ballet’s live transmission of Manon. Letty hasn’t been to see a ballet since her accident. The prospect triggers a rush of conflicting emotions: excitement, nostalgia, regret.
‘It’s a good surprise, isn’t it?’ Alf says, as if picking up on her ambivalence.
Is it? Is she really going to deny herself a lifetime of watching ballet just because she can’t be on the stage with the dancers? She looks at Alf’s troubled face, sees how much it matters to him that he hasn’t made a mistake.
‘It’s a lovely surprise,’ she says.
‘I’ve never seen a ballet before,’ he says. ‘Except on television at Christmas.’
‘You picked a brilliant one to see live,’ she tells him. ‘It’s all about class and sexual exploitation, and not a tutu in sight!’ She realizes that’s exactly how she’s heard her mother describing Manon.
Frances often goes to the ballet by herself, although she never mentions it to Letty, for fear of being tactless. Frances loves any kind of theatre. She wanted to be on the stage herself, and met Ivo in a garden production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream during the Trinity term of the first year they were both at Oxford.
‘You could call it love at first sight,’ Frances always says, when she recounts their meeting. ‘Or you could say that, unlike the stuck-up cow who played Titania, I was prepared to put out, much good that it did me.’
Ivo was playing Oberon; Frances Puck.
Frances never fulfilled her acting ambition because of getting pregnant with Oscar in her final year.
‘Being an actress was far too precarious an existence,’ her mother said when Letty once asked her why she didn’t return to it. ‘One of us had to earn some money.’
For many years, her mother supported Ivo’s ambition to be an actor himself, but it never really happened for him. Eventually he became a drama teacher, which was great for Letty because he was always there for her in the school holidays.
Letty just manages to WhatsApp Frances before the lights go down. I’m watching RB Manon live in Rome. Are you there at ROH?
The ballet is set in the demi-monde of eighteenth-century Paris. The first act is about Manon, a beautiful innocent country girl, arriving in the city where she meets a young romantic poet called Des Grieux. In the sensual bedroom pas de deux, Manon and Des Grieux declare their love for one another. But Manon’s brother Lescaut is a crook and a social climber, who tries to buy his way into society by pimping Manon to a rich admirer, Monsieur GM. Manon, seduced by the luxury of wealth, agrees to become his mistress.
‘Wow!’ says Alf as the curtain comes down. ‘I didn’t see her doing that!’
‘It wouldn’t be a three-act ballet if they lived happily ever after,’ Letty says.
The screen is showing the auditorium of the Royal Opera House during the interval, where people in London are filing out to the bars. Letty looks at her phone.
‘Hey, my mother’s actually there!’ she tells him, seeing Frances’s text.
‘Tell her to go down to the front and wave to us,’ Alf suggests.
Letty doesn’t know if she can bear the humiliation of seeing her mother waving to all the cinemag
oers who are watching the transmission in hundreds of cinemas worldwide.
‘OK,’ she says, texting Frances with Alf’s idea, wondering whether she’ll be game.
Sure enough, after a couple of minutes, the small but distinctive figure of Frances walks determinedly down the left aisle and stands in front of the orchestra pit, waving not just one hand, but both. If she had a piece of cardboard, she’d probably write ‘Hello Letty!’ on it. Seeing her there, so small and faraway, and so very Frances, she feels a lump of homesickness in her throat.
‘That’s her!’ she says, pointing.
‘That is so cool. Your mother is one cool lady,’ Alf says.
Letty’s never thought of her like that. Embarrassing, over the top, yes. Cool, not so much. She knows Frances would enjoy the description.
She texts her: OK, we’ve seen you! You can stop now! Enjoy Act 2.
It’s surreal to see Frances checking her phone. Blowing a big kiss at the camera before returning to her seat.
In the second act, Des Grieux tries to win enough money to get Manon back by cheating at cards in a brothel, but as they return to their bedroom to pack and run away, the police arrive, and they are arrested and banished to the colonies.
‘I never knew ballet could be so sexy,’ Alf says when the lights come up again. ‘The dancers are on fire!’
‘I was at ballet school with Des Grieux,’ Letty tells him.
‘You know that guy?’
‘Well, not exactly.’
She tells him about her fleeting encounter with Vadim when she was just a pubescent girl. ‘I don’t think he even noticed me,’ she says.
‘He would now,’ Alf whispers as the lights go down again.
It’s a lovely compliment, because it’s so guileless and unplanned.
In the final act, the two lovers land in the penal colony of Louisiana where, as her past sins revisit her, and in the most challenging and emotional pas de deux, Manon dies in Des Grieux’s arms.
The performances by the two leads are so full of artistry and so moving, tears are rolling down Letty’s face by the final curtain. Even though there is no chance of the dancers in the Royal Opera House hearing their cheers, the entire audience in the Roman cinema rise as one to their feet and applaud.
Alf is silent on the walk to the tram.
‘What did you think?’ Letty asks him.
‘Didn’t the word passion originally mean suffering?’ he says.
And when she nods, he says, ‘It was the most beautiful and passionate thing I have ever seen.’
The tram is full of restaurant workers who have just finished their shift. It reeks of garlic and bodies that have been toiling in hot kitchens, and it’s so noisy that neither of them speak, but Letty can hear the haunting music of Manon’s theme going over and over in her head.
Back at her apartment, the lights of the city like a sparkling carpet below, they embrace, carefully and with agonizing tenderness, and she somehow knows that Alf is hearing the poignant music in his head too as skin on skin, stroking, kissing, their bodies synchronize in a slow sensual dance.
Afterwards, she lies naked in the moonlight, gazing at him gazing at her.
‘Quanto sei bella!’ he says.
She sits up, puts her finger on his lips.
‘Don’t . . .’
‘Why?’
She sighs. Will he feel the same once she has told him?
‘Someone else used to tell me how beautiful I was . . .’
If he runs away, better now than when she has further to fall, because she knows she is falling for him, and it is scaring her.
‘I told you that when I left ballet school, I went to the local school and there were these girls . . .’
‘. . . who bullied you.’
‘Yes. But there was this guy they all fancied, called Josh.’
Even now his name has a romantic ring for her. She used to say it into her mirror, watching how she looked when she spoke – casually (Oh, hi Josh!) or brightly (Hi Josh, how you doing?) or seriously romantically (I love you, Josh) – moving in close to see how she appeared when being kissed. Eyes open? Eyes closed? Impossible to tell, because she had to squint to see it.
‘He was two years above us, and he was really fit, and he started taking an interest in me. It felt like being picked out of the crowd by the one everyone fancies in a boyband. At first I thought it was some kind of trick. I mean, I was flat chested, immature, didn’t wear make-up or anything. But then he asked me out. I’d never been out with someone, and I had no idea what to say. Turns out all I had to do was listen because he spent the whole time talking about football – he was a Spurs fan. So, when I came home, I learned everything there was to know about Spurs, and the rest of the Premiership . . .’
Alf chuckles.
‘. . . and the next time he came out of school with me, I had a lot to talk about. He thought it was pretty cool. He got me fake ID and took me to the pub with his mates. He was like, this girl is really pretty, but she knows stats and stuff, so I suddenly had a kind of identity, I suppose.’
Alf smiles.
‘So, then there was this kind of courtship ritual. First he told me he adored me . . .’
Alf winces.
‘Then there was the tattoo. Frances went ape, but there was nothing she could do, which made it all the more exciting, obviously. And then we had sex. Frances and Ivo were out at work. My room is at the top of the house, so Marina couldn’t hear. Afterwards, it was so strange because I felt completely different, but nobody noticed . . .’
She glances down at Alf.
‘He said I was so beautiful he wanted to film me. And so, one weekend, in the flat where he lived with his mum, I let him.’
An anxious frown appears on Alf’s face, as if he knows what’s coming.
‘It felt amazing actually. I trusted him so much, like this was really love,’ Letty says, thinking that she might as well be totally honest. ‘So . . . he posted the film on the internet.’
The film wasn’t there on the Monday morning, when she checked his status and profile picture as soon as she woke up, as she did every day to confirm that he still loved her. But by lunchtime something had happened, because when she walked past the lockers, the cool girls started panting and calling, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ after her. And in the queue, she kept hearing the word ‘slut’ without realizing, for several minutes, that it was being directed at her. And then she turned on her phone . . .
‘Idiot!’ Alf says.
‘I know, but I was naive. I trusted him,’ Letty says sadly.
‘God, not you! Him! He’s the idiot!’ Alf sits up and holds her close, as if to hug away the damage.
Nobody’s called Josh an idiot before.
To Frances, Josh was a rapist.
Letty could hear her parents discussing it late into the night as she sat on the stairs down to the basement kitchen.
‘Nobody could say she wasn’t consenting,’ Ivo had argued, and Letty felt as if her heart would break with the shame of her father having to exist in a staffroom of teachers who’d seen it too.
‘In law, you’re not able to give consent at fifteen!’ Frances had screamed at him. She wanted to press charges.
‘But what good would it do?’ Ivo asked.
‘Never mind what good – what harm has it done to her?’
‘More if you make it into a big deal . . .’
‘How much bigger a deal can it be?’
Letty remembers thinking it was as if her whole life had become public property.
Idiot. The truth is, if you take away the permanence of posting it, it wasn’t that big a deal. It probably happened in Alf’s school too. It probably happened in every school in the country. Josh wasn’t an evil tormentor, but a seventeen-year-old boy showing off.
Maybe if someone had said ‘idiot’ then, it wouldn’t have got so out of hand.
‘So that’s when you got ill?’ Alf says.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Eating disor
der. I think I was literally trying to disappear.’
‘But you got better. You’re here,’ he says, kissing her forehead, then holding her close again.
‘I learned to eat. I learned that I control my food intake. It doesn’t control me.’
In therapy, she learned that recovery is a process, not something that’s ever finished.
‘And you got to Oxford, after all of that?’ Alf says.
She smiles. Comparatively, Oxford was the easy bit.
She’d felt safe there because of the structure and the meals at set times. For one happy year, she lived in Oxford’s cocoon, until she decided, bizarrely, to behave recklessly again.
But she doesn’t tell him that. She doesn’t know if there will ever be a time to tell him why she came to Rome.
In the middle of the night, she wakes with a start, aware of Alf getting out of bed, crouching to avoid hitting his head. When she hears the toilet in the downstairs bathroom flush, she drifts back off and wakes again, unsure whether five minutes or five hours have passed. The slivers of light around the blinds are grey, not bright silver as they are with the morning sun. Dawn, she thinks, stretching out her hand to find his, but the space is empty. A click. The front door.
Rushing down the ladder to pull up the blinds, she leans as far out of the window as she dares, and sees him walking away from the building.
In the still of the dawn, there is barely any traffic. If she called out, he would probably hear her. But what would she shout? Don’t go? Come back?
Was it too much information for him? He’s young. Younger than her, although he doesn’t seem it. Why would he want to take her on?
Alf is all about living in the moment. So why did she have to bring up the past?
She watches him disappearing from sight, turns sadly away from the window, and only then sees the postcard on the table.
The picture is a collage of sepia stills from Roman Holiday.
On the back, he has written: I didn’t want to wake you. I have to pack. Ci vediamo all’una! Don’t be late!
17
Friday
ALF
It’s too late and too early for the number three tram. In the grey dawn, Alf walks past Santa Croce in Gerusalemme and down the avenue towards San Giovanni in Laterano. Beyond the cathedral, a narrow street leads all the way to the Colosseum. He enjoys hearing the echo of his footsteps, the feeling of being the only person awake in the city.