The Rome Affair

by Karen Swan

  Laney shook her head as she tucked her knees up under her body, angling herself towards him. ‘I used to, but I think, really, I just get in the way. It’s work, after all, so Leo’s either at a game or at the training sessions, and at the dinner afterwards, I just can’t keep up with all the sport talk. I mean, I like basketball but—’

  Jay chuckled. ‘I hear you. There’s more to life than basketball and deals.’

  ‘I keep trying to tell him that!’ she laughed, grateful someone understood. She sipped some more of the wine; it was a good vintage. ‘Anyway, enough about him. How are things in the world of academia?’

  ‘Oh, you know . . . dusty.’

  She smiled. ‘And Barbara? I haven’t seen her in a while.’

  ‘Dusty too.’

  She laughed. ‘Poor Barbara!’

  He grinned. ‘She’s in Pasadena at the moment. Has been for the past few months, actually; she’s looking after her mother after she took a fall.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Is she recovering well?’

  ‘A little too well, by all accounts. Barbara’s been run off her feet.’

  ‘Poor thing. Have you been over to visit?’

  ‘My schedule barely accounts for sleep, much less tending to the mother-in-law.’

  ‘Well, on the bright side, I guess at least you’ve got job security. Leo always acts like his clients are going to desert him if he doesn’t satisfy their every whim.’

  Jay looked at her, putting down his glass. ‘Look at us. What a pair we are, huh? Both of us abandoned by our other halves; home alone; lonely . . .’ He stared at her with a sudden, bold directness, a silence lengthening between them as – in the pit of her stomach – Laney felt a splash of bile rear up, nausea gripping her throat. She tried to smile and pass off the intimation, even though she realized with perfect clarity, now, that he had made no mistake in coming here tonight.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I’m lonely, Jay—’ she said, still smiling, not letting the mask slip. If there was one thing she had learnt from her mother, it was to keep up appearances.

  But subtlety wasn’t on his radar. Nor defeat.

  ‘It could be the perfect remedy, don’t you think? Something fun, harmless . . .’ he said, his eyes on their reflections in the vast glass windows.

  Laney put down her glass, the smile sliding off her face. ‘I don’t think so, Jay.’ Her voice sounded funny – smaller, somehow. She wanted him to leave.

  He looked at her now. ‘Why not? It’s not the age difference, after all; you clearly like them older.’ He shrugged, implying with a single look that he was the other half to her equation: that he ‘liked them young’.

  ‘Because I love Leo.’

  ‘I love Barbara. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re both alone and lonely.’ He moved his hand off his thigh and onto her own.

  She tried to lift it off but the more she tried, the harder his fingers gripped her knee.

  ‘Please, Jay, don’t,’ she said in a quiet, pleading voice that had never worked with Jack, either. Knowing that to fight him was to escalate the situation, she let go of his hand.

  ‘Laney, Laney,’ he shushed, his hand beginning to move in sweeping strokes, as though she was a dog he could pet. ‘I never would have taken you for a prude. Not a free-living girl like you, always flirting with Leo’s friends—’

  ‘I don’t flirt with anyone.’

  ‘Let’s not pretend you’re the innocent,’ he smiled, but his eyes were cold, the evening’s earlier pretence already cast aside; they both knew how this was going to end. She was alone here, the nearest neighbours several hundred metres away; the sound of the sea would drown out her shouts. ‘No one’s buying it. You’ve been leading me on from the moment we met. You know perfectly well this was the date you gave me. You lured me here and now you’re trying to pretend you don’t want it?’

  Laney felt something deep inside her begin to close down as he shuffled over to her, breaching the gap between their bodies. She could see the reflection of them in the large glass door, Jay’s body leaning towards her—

  It was another moment before she saw Leo standing there too, spectral in the glass, his face ghostly, his bag gripped loosely in his hand, a coat thrown over his free arm. Was it really him? Leo? The man who had saved her from her old life – was he really back? Or was her mind playing tricks, willing it to be true, to make this stop?

  His reflected eyes met hers in the windows and for just a moment, time hung suspended; she saw them all like the toys on one of those baby mobiles, spinning silently in the air.

  And then they were real again. Jay knew nothing before the moment Leo’s fist connected with his jaw and he knew very little afterwards – of the way his feet dragged, tripping over themselves, as Leo hauled him to the door by the back of his jacket and threw him through it.

  ‘Oh Leo!’ Laney sobbed, throwing herself into his arms as he returned. ‘I couldn’t stop him. He wouldn’t listen.’ It was over. Thank God it was over.

  Leo said nothing, his body stiff, and she pulled back to look at him.

  ‘Leo?’

  One look at his face and she knew it wasn’t over.

  ‘Why are you lying to me?’ he roared. ‘I’ve known him since college! He’s my friend. He wouldn’t do this . . .’ He glared at her, his chest heaving, the top buttons of his shirt undone, his tie thrown on the ground somewhere between the front door and here. ‘What did you do, Laney? You must have done something to make him think—’

  ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Don’t give me that! I’ve seen you with those guys on the beach. Do you think I’m blind?’

  ‘Leo, they’re just friends,’ she cried, exasperated. ‘I have to talk to people when you’re not here. You’re never here! I’d go out of my mind! But I have never been unfaithful to you. There’s no one but you, you know that!’

  He shook his head, his hands on his hips. ‘No, you led him on. You flirted like you always do and you went too far.’

  Like she always did? The comment was like a slap. ‘This isn’t my fault,’ she said, more quietly, still pleading.

  But he wasn’t buying it. He couldn’t hear her. ‘What did you do?’ he repeated, eyebrows arched as though sceptical that she would ever tell him the truth.

  ‘I offered him a drink to be polite. Because he’s your friend and I knew you would want me to. Because I wanted to make you proud.’

  ‘Proud?’ he scoffed. ‘You think I’m proud of having a wife who entertains other men while I’m away? Who thinks that her money makes her unaccountable? You’re my wife! Mine!’ He walked towards her, grabbing her by the wrist. ‘Tell me what you did!’

  She stared back at him, the words as stoppered in her throat as if he’d rammed down a cork. He wasn’t going to believe her, because he never did. It was always the same conversation, the same old fight. This wasn’t new, but it wasn’t yet old.

  The feeling that had tingled on the sofa when she’d seen Leo watching them in the window bloomed again – shimmering like a mirage, growing in colour and strength. Life felt interrupted from its linear flow as though it was being forced into another lane, a train switching tracks, the actors on the stage suddenly picking up new scripts and playing fresh roles. This was who they were now.

  It was over.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Rome, July 2017

  Everyone had gone for the day when the ground rumbled and shifted again, shaking up through Cesca’s bones and making her cup rattle on its saucer. All the specialists in their hard hats and hi-vis vests had packed up; she had heard their cheery farewell shouts a short while ago as they departed, leaving the hole in the ground just as they had found it a few days earlier. It was still big, still there, and Elena’s initial ‘laissez faire’ demeanour was becoming more strained. It was an ‘eyesore!’, she exclaimed, fretting that all the exploratory digging work gave her headaches; she said she was tired of these ‘workers’ milling about her garden ‘like ant
s’.

  Cesca had been watching them all week from her office too, wandering over to the windows during her tea breaks and observing as they sent people down into the hole and then back up again. She wondered exactly how they were supposed to fill in something of that size. Was it a matter of simply trucking in replacement soil? Elena had mentioned they would fill it with mortar, but the sheer volume that would be required was staggering.

  Not that they appeared to be in a rush to close it up again. And was this why? Had they known it wasn’t done yet, that there would be aftershocks? Might it continue to grow? She held her breath, not daring to move anything other than her eyes, which were darting around the vaulted ceiling looking for cracks and falling plaster, and skimming the ground searching for fissures in the floor or any signs that the sinkhole had encroached too close to the palazzo after all, the building now made unstable and unsaveable. Should she turn and run?

  But everything was still again. The rumble had been only a few seconds long, not so much an earthquake as an earth-quiver. Moving hesitantly, she stepped towards the French doors and looked out. Perversely, everything looked unchanged – the sinkhole seemingly no bigger to her eye than it had been before. Deeper, then? Did the earth just continually fall away, layer by layer?

  She waited, but nothing else happened. No rumbling. No vibrations. She could almost think she’d imagined it.

  Curiosity got the better of her. No one was around – Elena was at a wedding in Florence for the weekend and, without his boss around, even starchy Alberto was taking things down a notch in this oppressive city heat. The weekend beckoned – Cesca’s own promised reward of Friday night drinks with Alé and the guys was only a tantalizing hour away now and she had been looking forward to it all day. It had been a long week, what with the vagaries of Elena’s unpredictable mood swings, the somewhat unsettling lunch with Christina, and the weariness that came from sifting a life story from photographs. Not to mention the time-consuming process of diligently following up on the facts that Elena had given her so far, a task that was as wide-ranging as putting in a request for a copy of her subject’s wedding certificate to checking the pedigree of the Olympic stallion that had sired her prize mare, Miss Midnight. She was being unnecessarily thorough, doubtless, but whether she was writing a coffee-table book or a legal paper, professional pride meant Cesca would never leave a stone unturned in her presentation of the truth.

  Though a wedge of sunlight still spilled into the furthest reach of the garden room, the courtyard was completely in shadow as she stepped outside and crept over to the edge of the sinkhole. Ducking below the tape, she peered in again. Her stomach dropped at the vision before her: crushed pipework and steel, snapped trees, layers of stone and earth and concrete tumbled together as if weightless, neon ropes dangling in the dusk and pooling at the bottom. There was something apocalyptic about the scene – it really could have been the aftermath of an earthquake or a war, a scar in this beautiful garden, a brutal reminder that nature couldn’t ever be tamed.

  She took a step back. It didn’t seem much different from when she’d seen it the other day and she didn’t want to linger on this wholly unnatural sight, like an open wound on an animal’s flank. It had a primordial menace to it. Elena was right – the sooner it was filled in, the better.

  She turned away, done for the day. It was time to meet her friends—

  ‘Hello?’

  She froze. The voice was distant. So far away, it could have been coming from the street on the far side of the thick palace walls. But that wasn’t possible. Because the voice had come from below her.

  ‘Is anyone there?’

  She ran back to the edge and peered over again, looking frantically beyond the big chunks of broken earth and concrete slabs, scanning for detail – a face, a boot, a hard hat; something human to put with the voice. Instead, she saw the tiniest movement of earth, as though a mole was about to break through and nose the air.

  She watched it, her heart pounding wildly, with no idea what to expect. If a fire-breathing dragon suddenly emerged, she wasn’t sure she would be surprised. Instead, it was a finger – dusty, muddy, the pink fingernail caked in red soil – wiggling the earth loose and making a small hole.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she gasped. There was someone down there, buried beneath a two-metre heap of earth. Unlike most of the soil, which was pale and dried out from the week’s exposure to the sun, this was darker, as though freshly dislodged. She realized now what she had heard – there had been a landslip.

  She couldn’t jump down there. It was too far, for one thing, and the ground was unstable; her weight could end up making the sinkhole deteriorate further. ‘Oh my God! Help!’ she shouted as the adrenaline hit, jumping to her feet and looking every which way for something, someone.

  Nothing.

  Not a damned—

  She saw a harness on the floor, laid out on the grass like a sunbather, the contraption connected to the rope by a carabiner-clip, ready to go to work on Monday morning. She looked down at the length of rope – it reached to the bottom of the sinkhole.

  There wasn’t time to think about it. She stepped into the harness, having to bunch up her long skirt into her knickers so that it looked ridiculously like a nappy. Snapping shut the clips, she pulled on the rope, checking it would hold. The rope quivered tightly, and she lowered herself off backwards. She didn’t know if she was doing it right, it was just the way she’d seen mountain climbers do it in films – weight back, feet flat – but it seemed to work. The rope had a sort of ratchet attached that kept her stable and even though the walls of the sinkhole curved away – inwards – almost immediately, leaving her dangling in open air, she didn’t fall.

  Hands trembling with panic – how much air did that person have? – she lowered herself slowly, almost flinching when her feet gently touched the soil a few moments later. Unclipping the harness from the rope – it was quicker than getting out of the harness – she stumbled over to where she had seen, or thought she’d seen, the finger. But where was it? Everything looked different down here; from this perspective one heap of mangled mess looked much like every other. Exposed wires, jagged-edged clay pipes, twisted metal rods thrust and jabbed at her and up close she saw the debris of centuries of Roman life – broken pots, carrier bags . . . And the smell – of seeping sewage, of fetid earth. She felt herself gag and heave but she couldn’t stop, couldn’t turn away.

  She heard something and turned to see tiny rivulets of earth and pebbles falling down a solid mass of earth. The one wiggling finger had now become four.

  ‘I’m here, I’m here!’ she cried in panicky Italian, running over, having to climb over the upended trunk of one of the orange trees, the branches scratching her bare legs. ‘Can you hear me?’ she cried, reaching the fingers and grasping them. They grasped back and, for a moment, all was still, their two hands touching. She squeezed harder, then released her grip. ‘I’m going to get you out of here,’ she shouted, hoping the person could hear.

  Apparently they did, because they formed their hand into a thumbs-up sign before withdrawing it from sight.

  Scrabbling her hands like a squirrel hiding a nut, she managed to dislodge and move the top layer of earth quickly – but it had slumped atop a heap of rubble, like a mudslide above a building site. ‘Oh God,’ she whispered, looking at the huge slabs, some of them bigger than her. Without the extra depth of the soil, the arm – surprisingly muscular – could push through an irregular crack between rough concrete boulders almost to the elbow, but the body it was attached to was stuck behind this perilous wall, as though entombed.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m coming,’ she said again, trying to sound braver than she felt. She ought to have gone for help first. Or called Guido or Matteo; they didn’t work far from here. She looked back up – only the uppermost level of the palace walls was visible from this depth, the sky a blushing peach, occasionally dotted by stray pigeons heading home to roost. How was she even supposed to get up from h
ere herself, anyway?

  Quickly, she texted her friends, asking them to get here as quickly as they could, before she turned back to the arm. ‘Can you breathe okay? Have you got enough air?’

  ‘Yes.’ The voice, though still distant, was certainly closer now. It was masculine – and it came back in English.

  ‘There are some big boulders here so it might take a while, but I won’t leave, I promise you. Help’s coming,’ she fibbed.

  ‘It is fine. There is room here to move.’

  Scrambling up the rocks at the side – fearful of sending the whole lot collapsing down on the man – she got her arms around one of the higher boulders and, with a grunt, managed to heave it off the top of the mudslip. It scraped the skin of her inner arms when she didn’t manage to move them out of the way quite fast enough, and sent a thick plume of dust into the air as it landed on the rubble, bouncing erratically on the rough surface.

  One down, she thought with satisfaction, looking back at the pile still to clear.

  She went again, using her full body weight, rocking and pushing the jagged slabs – anything to topple them – sometimes getting out of the way in time, at other times not quite. Within a few minutes, her legs were grazed and her skin coated in a grey dust shroud, but gradually the rock pile began to crumble, the debris falling to the new bottom of the hole, allowing air and light to peek through small pockets into the tomb. She glimpsed dark curls, now white with dust; proud eyes, now humbled; a t-shirt, now torn; strong muscles, now trapped and inert.

  ‘We’re nearly there,’ she said as cheerily as she could, hoping to sound optimistic as she scrambled back down the rubble. ‘There’s just this last bit to move.’

  But the worst had been saved till last. This final remaining slab was unlike the rest of the rockfall. Smooth on one side, it was a large section of the paved parterre which had fallen down into the sinkhole, slamming shut on the man like a door, rigid as a wall. She put her shoulder to the side of it, pushing hard, using all her weight, but the pile of debris and soil at the foot of it meant it didn’t budge. She tried again. Nothing. And again.