by Kate Eberlen
Why not escape? There was still a month before Trinity term began. It had been invigorating reading Greek in Greece. Why not Latin in Italy? She didn’t want to ask her parents for money with all their financial worries, but there was the legacy that Marina had left each grandchild: five thousand pounds to be used for travel. She was sure her grandmother would approve. Maybe she could even take a class in Italian? Learn the language that Marina had spoken as a little girl but had to erase from her identity. Within seconds, the fleeting thought had become a plan, almost as if Marina was showing her the way.
Running downstairs, she found her parents in the kitchen. They had both clearly heard her footsteps because they were smiling artificially at her as she came through the door, the words of some interrupted argument hanging in the air, as obvious as if someone were trying secretly to fry bacon.
‘Would you mind if I went away for a while?’ Letty asked.
‘Away?’ said Frances.
‘I feel I need some space, a break from everything . . .’
‘Sounds like a very sensible idea!’ said Ivo immediately.
Frances shot him an exasperated glance.
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘I was thinking Rome.’
Part Three
May 2018
33
First week
ALF
Afterwards Alf will wonder why he didn’t just drop his backpack and run down the street with Letty, instead of staying to face the confrontation he had been dreading. In that moment of indecision, he lost her.
‘Someone’s in a hurry,’ says Stuart.
‘Gina, can we talk?’ Alf says.
‘About what?’
All his instincts are to keep this conversation until they are somewhere private, but in Italy, people are always having arguments in the street. Nobody’s looking, nobody’s bothered. They might as well do it here.
‘I’m sorry, Gina, I’m leaving . . .’
He prepared his speech as he sat on their bed waiting for her. Quick and clean. Don’t get into a fight.
‘For her?’ she asks, pointing down the street.
Did she see him kissing Letty? Is that why she kissed him so ostentatiously? Staking her claim?
‘I didn’t mean it to happen like this. Wanted to explain to you properly.’
Gina looks pointedly at his backpack.
‘I left you a note . . .’
It sounds so weak.
Unable to look at Gina, Alf glances at Stuart, but cannot quite read his expression. He looks almost as if he’s enjoying this. Alf wonders if he knew, or at least suspected. Has Stuart been following him?
‘You can’t leave me,’ Gina says. ‘Not after all I’ve given up for you.’ Her voice is quiet, like she’s trying to piece it all together.
‘I didn’t mean you to give anything up,’ Alf says.
‘So now you’re saying you didn’t ever want to be with me?’
‘Of course I wanted it,’ he says. ‘I just didn’t think it would be for . . .’
He doesn’t want to say the word. He feels like he’s going back on a promise, even though he never made a promise.
‘I just didn’t think it would be forever!’
‘But I lost everything because of you!’ Gina’s voice rises.
Suck it up, Alf thinks. She’s got every right to be angry.
‘I’ve lost stuff too,’ he says quietly.
‘Like what?’
‘My family . . .’
‘Your bitch of a mother!’ She’s suddenly on the attack.
Now Alf’s angry too. He should never have had to choose.
‘She was only trying to look out for me!’
‘She was trying to destroy me!’ Gina shouts.
‘Oh, get over yourself!’ he says. ‘You’re not the victim in this!’
That sounds like he thinks he was the victim, and he doesn’t mean that. But Gina can’t just rewrite history.
‘You . . . you . . . bloody bastard!’ Gina flails at him. ‘Well, go on, Mummy’s boy. Go back to your mummy. See if she still thinks the sun shines out of your arse!’
‘Gina . . .’
‘Go!’ She’s shouting now. ‘Just go!’
He doesn’t want to leave her hysterical.
‘I think you’d better go, Alf,’ Stuart says firmly, standing between them.
‘I’ll get you my share of the rent,’ Alf tells Gina.
‘It’s not about the bloody rent! The rent doesn’t matter!’ she screams at him.
‘It does to me.’
And then she’s sobbing and he hates it when she cries. But he forces himself to pick up his backpack and walk away.
He hears footsteps chasing him. Stuart grabs his arm, spins him round, then lets him go, laughing as he sees Alf automatically duck from his reach.
‘You’re not worth it, mate,’ Stuart says. ‘You struck gold with Gina and you threw it all away on that little tart.’
‘Don’t you dare call her that!’ Alf shouts.
There’s a leering smile on Stuart’s face that he’s never seen before. He can’t figure out what he ever liked about him.
‘Slut, cock-tease!’ Stuart goads him. ‘You’ll find out soon enough. Looks like an angel, behaves like a whore . . .’
The force of the blow sends Stuart reeling, clutching at his face.
‘Jesus!’ he says, sitting on the pavement, fear in his eyes.
Alf stares at his own fist in shock. He hasn’t hit another bloke since he was at primary school, doesn’t know where it came from.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
Stuart gets to his feet, brushes himself down.
As Alf turns, he shouts after him, ‘Don’t even think about coming back when she’s bored of you, you bastard!’
They were about to get the one o’clock train, so it has been less than an hour. Alf stands outside her building, pressing the number for her apartment. When she doesn’t answer, he waits, hoping to be able to slip into the building behind one of the other residents, convinced that if he can talk to her, he will make her understand. Eventually, the old man with the stick who they’d shared the lift with returns, smelling of a boozy lunch.
On the tenth floor, Alf gets out, knocks on the door of Letty’s loft.
‘Please talk to me, Lets. Please allow me to explain . . .’
He waits there, knocking again and again, until the next-door neighbour comes home from work, catching him with his ear pressed against the door. In two hours, the toilet has not flushed, the blinds have not been raised or lowered, and Alf has heard no footsteps. The ceiling fan is not on and it is a hot afternoon. He cannot sense her presence just a few feet away from him. Perhaps she did not come back here because she knew that this was the first place he would try to find her?
But where has she gone?
By the time he gets back to the school, it is closed for the weekend.
Alf gets the cash he needs from a Bancomat and takes the Metro to Piramide, walking the last few hundred metres to the apartment.
He takes a deep breath before climbing the four flights of stairs for the last time. Five minutes, he thinks, and then it will be over. He remembers thinking the same thing early this morning. Was it only this morning? It seems like much longer.
Gina isn’t there. The bed is still unmade. Perhaps she went straight to work from Stuart’s? Perhaps she called in sick, or handed in her notice? Alf sees the letter he wrote earlier, seemingly untouched. He screws it up, pockets it: no point leaving it now when they’ve already said all there is to be said. Stuart will take her back to London. He’ll look after her, Alf thinks, as he leaves the cash and his keys on the kitchen table.
As he walks to the tram stop, he realizes he’s now homeless in Rome. He still has enough money for a couple of weeks, more if he works. He takes the number three tram to Porta Maggiore, goes back to Letty’s apartment building again, then, when there is no reply to the entryphone, he tries the Sardinian restau
rant. The proprietor has not seen her.
When it gets dark, the lights do not come on in Letty’s tenth-floor loft.
Alf hauls his backpack to the tram and travels all the way around Rome to the other terminus at the Villa Giulia, staring out of the window in case he spots her. He sits on a park bench on the steps that lead up to the Villa Borghese in a kind of dazed limbo, then gets the last tram to Porta Maggiore. Her windows are still dark.
The one thing everyone always warns you about Rome is not to stay near Termini station, but it’s cheap and he needs somewhere to leave his stuff. It’s near the school. If he hasn’t found her by Monday, he wants to be there in the morning when she arrives.
There’s no air conditioning and each new hour he hears the desperate panting of a different man with the prostitute in the next-door room.
In the morning, he’s back at the apartment building. One or two of the residents are beginning to eye him warily.
Alf wanders round Rome, revisiting the places they went to as if searching for clues in a crazy treasure hunt, convincing himself each time that this will be the place she will be waiting for him.
He walks through the Villa Borghese, remembering her overtaking him recklessly on the Segway, her hair flying behind her. Yuri greets him enthusiastically and asks after la bella signorina. She has not been there.
He takes the bus to Tivoli, where he first put his hand on her waist and taught her salsa, and she trusted him when he said that people had probably been dancing here for centuries, even though he’d just made it up because he was so desperate to find a way of touching her. He stands in the caves at the top of the fountain, listening to the rushing water, where he first felt overwhelmed by his attraction to her, then ruined it by speaking clumsily.
In the dingy bus trundling back to Rome, he recalls the exact sensation when she said she’d felt something too, like he was levitating.
In the Piazza Navona, the accordionist is playing the same tune they waltzed to, when she followed his steps as if they had been dancing together for years, and a crowd gathered around them and clapped, and it had felt good that they were beautiful together in other people’s eyes.
Alf stares at the lines of tourists queuing for the Bocca della Verità, remembering how cold and dank the air felt when he put his hand in and asked it silently, ‘Is this for real? Is it even possible that she could love me back?’ and how stupidly happy he had been when his hand wasn’t bitten off.
Was it there that desire became inevitability? Or was it earlier than that? Was it sitting on the number three tram, or before, on the street outside the school, watching her ballerina walk, or even the first moment he brushed past her outside the director’s office – colpo di fulmine – that he felt the axis of his life shift?
Alf’s last hope is the Forum, the place where they first had a proper conversation. If she wants to see him, that is where she will have gone.
He sits on the steps near the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus, listening to a tour guide explain about the damnatio memoriae of Geta by his brother Caracalla.
The obliteration of memory. The destruction of all traces of a person, as if they never existed.
In the House of the Vestal Virgins, Alf takes a photograph of the empty pedestal.
On Monday morning, when she does not appear at the school, he is certain she has left Rome and he has wasted precious time with his searching, kidding himself that if he thought about her enough, she would somehow materialize in front of him.
Unfortunately, it’s the strict receptionist, Olivia, who looks up and says, ‘Prego?’
‘Sai dov’è Violetta?’
As far as he can understand from her rapid explanation, Violetta left a message on the answerphone. She’s not coming back. It’s strange because she’s paid for a month. Perhaps there has been a family emergency? They are writing to tell her that they will suspend the week she has already paid for.
Alf asks for a contact number.
They only have an email address.
Her email, then?
They’re not allowed to give out personal details.
Even though he produces his most winning smile, which would probably work on the giggly receptionist, Olivia is unmoved.
Alf returns to her apartment building one more time, remembering the bear of a caretaker, who is back at work after the weekend.
‘The English girl? Gone away! Friday afternoon!’
She asked him to call a taxi. To the station, he thinks. Or it could have been the airport. She had luggage with her.
Which? Alf demands. ‘È molto importante!’
The caretaker thinks it was the station.
At Termini, Alf looks up at the departure board, trying to decide. There is a train leaving for Florence in five minutes. He remembers Heidi was in Florence for the weekend, and she and Letty were friends. But the weekend is over now.
There is a train to Naples in one hour. They were going to go to Ischia, he thinks. Perhaps that is where she has gone? Perhaps she will be there waiting for him? Of course! It is so obvious to him now he doesn’t know why he didn’t think of it before.
With time to spare before the train leaves, Alf walks across the square to Feltrinelli, the international bookshop. The book he wants is there, in a long black line of Penguin Classics.
34
Second Week
LETTY
Milan has a different vibe from Rome. The roads are wider, the buildings more modern, the people generally taller, fairer. Someone of Alf’s height and colouring wouldn’t stand out here. A couple of times, Letty spots a man with blondish hair on a passing tram, or walking a few yards in front of her on a crowded street, and her heart races, and she’s not sure whether to hang back or confront him until the moment he turns, and she sees that it is someone else, not Alf at all, and there’s a torque in her chest, relief twisting against disappointment, that makes it difficult to breathe.
There’s absolutely no way he can be here, she tells herself, unless the attraction between them is so strong it is somehow telepathic and has drawn him to her. But that would be like believing in fairy tales.
Letty has chosen an anodyne chain hotel. Her room has the decor of countless other rooms all over Europe; the buffet breakfast she makes herself eat is the same as it would be in Berlin or Madrid. It’s not the sort of place that anyone stays for more than a night, but she has been here for three. Suspended in time. During the day, she goes to see places mentioned in her guidebook, checking behind her every few yards that she isn’t being followed, taking the backstreets, making it more difficult if anyone is looking for her. She walks for miles, deliberately exhausting herself because the only comfort she can find is in the oblivion of sleep. Each morning, she keeps her eyes closed as she wakes, trying to hold Alf’s presence with her, putting off the moment when she has to face the reality that he has not miraculously materialized through wanting him so much. And when she eventually opens her eyes, grief balloons in her chest, bringing convulsions of tears and snot and uncontrollable sobbing.
This morning she will visit the cathedral. She has been saving this most iconic landmark, seeing all the other sights first, because after the Duomo there will no longer be a valid reason to stay in Milan. She does not know where she will go next.
Her route takes her past the opera house, La Scala, where La Traviata is playing. She cannot decide whether it would comfort her or make her sad to buy a ticket for the evening’s performance. In her head, she can hear the duet ‘Un dì, felice, eterea’.
One day, happy and ethereal, you appeared in front of me and ever since, trembling, I have lived from love. Love that’s the mysterious heartbeat of the universe.
Croce e delizia.
Torture and delight.
I hate and I love, Letty thinks. All bound up in one.
For a moment, she allows herself to imagine seeing the opera one day with Alf, certain that he would think it as beautiful and passionate as Manon. And aft
erwards, making love, their bodies would move, flesh to flesh, soul to soul, in harmony, becoming something more beautiful than their individual selves, like two voices in a duet, transcendent, ethereal.
‘Prego?’ The box office attendant interrupts her daydream.
Watching the opera alone, she knows she would be transported to the last time she saw it – sitting next to Spencer, smelling his aftershave, keeping her muscles taut so that their thighs would not accidentally touch.
‘Mi dispiace. Niente.’
She hurries away across the piazza.
How did Spencer find her? However hard she tries to concentrate on the guidebook, or the paintings in the Pinacoteca, or the stories of the contestants on television gameshows she watches in her hotel room, it always comes back to that. She had just about persuaded herself that it was possible he had appeared at her home in Belsize Park because he is an estate agent who covers their area. Coincidence, bad luck, something like that. But his presence in Rome could not have been chance. To turn up unexpectedly in one place could be regarded as misfortune; to turn up in two looks suspicious, to misquote Oscar Wilde.
She thought she had escaped. But she had not.
And he knows Alf.
This is as inexplicable as it is terrifying.
Letty looks at her map and sees she needs to walk through an arcade to get to the Duomo. It’s a beautiful space, as ornate as a cathedral itself with marble mosaic floors and painted vaulted ceilings, but she does not stop to admire the architecture, because high-end shops selling sharp suits and expensive watches is Spencer’s territory. She hastens, not quite running because that would draw attention, and when she reaches the exit she feels as relieved as if she was trapped in a dangerous cave but found a way out into the air.
The piazza dazzles in the sunlight; little children are running around; there is a vendor with a huge bunch of helium balloons – pink, green, gold, silver circles – floating like an art installation against the intricate Gothic filigree of the Duomo facade. Above, the bluest of Italian blue skies makes her feel that nothing bad could happen to her here. Yet still she hurries towards the huge doors of the cathedral, as if to seek sanctuary there.