Experiencing the deep satisfaction of someone placing the final piece in an enormous jigsaw, Constance straightened. Hearing someone approach from the terrace, she wondered for a moment whether to stay and explain herself, but in the millisecond she had to run this scenario through her head, she realized that the truth would simply sound barking mad. She scurried to the door and had almost escaped when a man’s voice said, “Can I help you?” Constance popped her head back into the room to see a young man draped in a sheet like an ancient Roman senator in need of a tailor. “Sorry. Wrong room,” she said and closed the door quickly behind her.
By the time August opened his door to look up and down the empty hall, Constance had slipped back into her own suite. Alice appeared and asked what August was doing. He was in the middle of explaining about the mysterious old lady when it suddenly struck him that he may have been victim of some kind of scam. He suggested Alice check her backpack, which she did, but nothing appeared to be missing. She turned, poised to tease him about his paranoia when her eye caught the space on the floor where the tile was supposed to be missing. She rushed over to the newly replaced tile and popped it out of place with her toe.
“It came back,” she said, naturally astonished.
“What?” he said.
She picked up the tile in wonder. “This,” she said. “This is the tile you threw over the roof.”
His lips curled, but his eyes did most of the smiling.
“I know it can’t be,” she said, “but it is.”
And so began a long and frustrating debate in which Alice attempted to assert that the impossible was not only possible but had actually come to pass.
* * *
On the red-tiled terrace next door, Alec and Meg stood in silence watching the young musicians below sawing their way through more Haydn. Meg was accustomed to filling the space between Alec and herself with patter, banter, drivel, whatever she could come up with. In the division of labor that had developed between them over the years, this had been her job. But now she was quiet. She was not trying to force her husband’s hand or make him take the lead; she had simply run out of fuel. She had nothing to offer, except an awful premonition that there may not be a future for them, that the reserves of genuine forgiveness required to move forward were not available to either of them.
They heard movement on the terrace next to them. A young woman spoke. Her voice reminded Alec of someone, but he couldn’t place whom.
“I don’t care what you think,” said the voice. “I’m keeping it.”
The low rumble of a man’s voice replied, although they could not make out what he was saying. Then the young woman said, “For luck. I’m keeping it for…”
She suddenly stopped speaking. Meg and Alec both guessed, correctly, that this was because the source of the low rumble was now kissing her.
Alec looked down at the balustrade and saw his wife’s hand next to his.
“I don’t know that we could be happy again,” she said.
“I don’t want happiness,” he said and thought, but did not add, something that shocked him to the core with its fierce, utter, and unexpected certainty: I want you.
He knew, then, that he would always want her, that he would find a way back to her somehow. He let his little finger slide across the cold stone and touch hers. He was aware that she could feel it and was grateful that she did not retract.
Constance stood at the edge of her terrace. Music drifted up, melodious enough to be soothing. She closed her eyes and imagined Henry next to her. After a while she could feel him, the heat and press of his body next to hers. He had said to her once that people left but love remained. She felt, now, how right he was. Constance rested her head on Henry’s shoulder, certain she could feel him bearing her weight.
Not far from Constance and Henry, Alice and August stood in almost exactly the same position, and not far from them, Meg and Alec. Three couples, surrendering to stillness, listening to the notes and the silence between the notes, oblivious to each other yet connected—standing at the beginning, middle, and end of their loves.
Some of it was my work. Some of it was not. As Nikola Tesla, engineer, futurist, and mad scientist, often asserted, it’s all about energy, frequency, and vibration. The parameters around what can and cannot be achieved in the quantum realms are vast, the variables infinite. Sometimes there are consequences that I neither foresee nor plan with outcomes that surprise even me. They may crop up immediately. They may occur years later.…
Epilogue
THREE YEARS LATER
Alice broke from a dream that she had married the wrong man and kicked off her sheets in a panic. She tried to wake, but the delirium of her night world stitched itself around her, tight as a collar, deadly as an anchor, dragging her back down to the murky depths of sleep. Feverishly, she swiveled her head toward the slumbering hulk next to her. He emitted a sound, neither snore nor sigh, but something in between, and rolled over.
He was the wrong man. Springing out of bed, Alice took three paces backward. The boards beneath her creaked like a traitor. She looked for an escape, but the door was not where it was supposed to be. She took in the great splash of aureolin yellow at the end of the room, as well as the canvas on which it was painted, and suddenly, blessedly, awoke.
Adrenaline flooded the vacuum that fright vacated. She had not married the wrong man; she was in the wrong life. No, not the wrong life. A different life. A different life from the one she had just been living in the night world. She wiped her beaded brow with the back of her hand. Light delivered itself through the slats of the shutters like a hundred thrilling envelopes: Congratulations, you have won another morning.
In the striped brilliance of the day, she stitched her reality back together and could see that she belonged here. Those were her canvases, her paints, she assured herself; this was her studio, her husband. She went into her shoe box kitchen, held a paint-splattered glass under the tap, and turned the handle. The faucet protested with a squeal. Pipes thumped in the wall, and cool water gurgled into the glass.
The man from the bed entered and brushed his cheek across her bare shoulder in a bristly greeting. Gus knew in theory that a time would come when he would be able to walk into a room and not touch her, but he could not conceive of it. He knew, he had seen, how lovers grow used to each other, how passion wanes, but it was beyond his youthful comprehension that this could ever happen to them. He breathed her in, feeling her loveliness next to him, and gave thanks.
They could hear the din of tourists, two streets away, already climbing the 270 steps toward the hybrid edifice of Sacré-Cœur. Three years ago, when they had first moved to Paris, she had read to him how, when it rained, the white stone released a chemical that washed it clean, maintaining the sparkling white façade. Each morning as they listened to the pilgrims passing he recalled this factoid with immense satisfaction.
Alice turned to Gus and saw his lips begin to curl. In a moment he would smile; or maybe not. Sometimes his pre-smiles faded without blossoming, which made them all the more precious to her. They stood looking out the dirty window at a cascading landscape of gray rooftops and orange chimney pots. The stillness flowered so prettily between them that she chose not to spoil it with talk of her night world. She did not want to tell him how the darkness had once again taken her down into a different life with a different husband.
She finished her water and placed the glass in the sink, more forcefully than she had intended. The loud clunk of glass on porcelain suddenly ruptured a membrane to the previous evening, and she saw a dream beyond the dream about the different husband.
In this deeper dream, she was in a cellar, in Rome, sitting amid pallets piled high with tiles. She did not know how she knew she was in Rome; she just knew. She picked up a tile and looked down at it, thinking it was somehow familiar. The tile began to hum and vibrate. She had to hold tight to stop it falling from her lap. There was no aperture from which to make an utterance, but a voice rose rega
rdless from its blue glaze.
“I am going to tell you a long and unlikely tale,” the tile said.
Alice shared none of this with Gus; there was no time. She knew she must begin writing before the tale was lost. He watched curiously as she walked with great purpose to the flaking walnut table where she usually mixed her paints, cleared away her palette and brushes, grabbed a pencil and sketchpad, took a seat, and, possessed by something other than herself, began to write my story.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my Roman friends and guides who have shared their city with me over the years—Carla Vicenzino, Tia Architto, Stefano Casu, Jeanne-Marie Cilento, Paul McDonnell, Ute Leonhardt, Marco Pugini, Michela Noonan, and Clelia March-Doeve. Thanks to my volunteer editorial team, my wife, Klay Lamprell, and my sister, Helen Bateman. Thanks to the rest of my wonderful family and friends, in particular those whose names I have wantonly pilfered.
Thank you to the gang at Flatiron—Caroline Bleeke, Liz Keenan, Molly Fonseca, Patricia Cave, Karen Horton, and Sara Ensey for the superb edit, and especially publisher Amy Einhorn, who embraced the novel so wholeheartedly. Thanks, too, to Jane Palfreyman, who furnished this tale with its title and Wenona Byrne, who introduced it to the world.
And, finally, thank you to two people for their support and inspiration: one from the past—Mr. Joseph Castley, English Master extraordinaire, who taught me at Saint Ignatius’ College in Sydney, Australia, and one from the present—my agent and true believer, Margaret Connolly.
ALSO BY MARK LAMPRELL
The Full Ridiculous
COAUTHORED WITH KLAY LAMPRELL
Otto the True Blue Aussie Dog
Frankie and Finn
About the Author
MARK LAMPRELL works in film and television. He is the author of the novel The Full Ridiculous, and he cowrote the film Babe: Pig in the City. Mark has traveled to Rome for many years. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
1. New York, New York
2. London
3. Leonardo da Vinci
4. All Roads
5. Saint Christopher and the Vicolo del Polverone
6. Piazza della Madonna de Monti
7. Via dei Coronari
8. The Do-Good Sister of Via Margutta
9. Ponte Sant’Angelo
10. Via di San Simone
11. Hotel San Marco
12. Colosseo
13. Arco di Santa Margherita
14. The Spanish Steps
15. The Art of the Cappuccini
16. Santa Barbara dei Librai
17. Stazione di Roma Termini—Giovanni Paolo II
18. La Barbuta
19. Saint Barbara
20. Vaticano
21. Arco degli Acetari
22. Lungotevere Degli Altoviti
23. Il Piramide and the Dead Protestants
24. Ending in the Via Marguta
25. Un Culpo d’Aria
26. The Angel of Sadness
27. Leonardo Da Vinci Part Two
28. The Gravitational Pull of Blue Tiles
29. The Dream
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Mark Lamprell
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ONE SUMMER DAY IN ROME. Copyright © 2017 by Mark Lamprell. All rights reserved. For information, address Flatiron Books, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.flatironbooks.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-10553-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-10555-4 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250105554
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: August 2017
One Summer Day in Rome Page 21