Two Women in Rome

by Elizabeth Buchan

  He knew what she was talking about. ‘You were right. It was a dreadful old thing.’

  ‘But it was generous of you.’

  ‘My second nature,’ he said, and Lottie laughed.

  ‘Tom, I’m sorry about this morning. Please forgive my outburst.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too.’

  They finished the conversation with matters between them not exactly back to normal but satisfactory.

  The following morning, on the way to work, Lottie asked for a kilo of pork loin at the butcher and arranged for it to be picked up by Concetta.

  ‘Eccola.’ The butcher wrapped the parcel and labelled it. He shot an appreciative look at Lottie, who had a new dress on, and asked what she was going to do with the pork. ‘Ah, you must cook for four hours,’ he said when she told him.

  ‘Rubbish,’ called out the woman behind Lottie. ‘At least six.’

  An argument erupted with not a few in the queue turning into ardent partisans. Yes. No. How dare you. Lottie watched and listened, intrigued by how confident in themselves this random group of Romans were. Alive. Opinionated. Feet on the ground.

  She emerged into the warm street. This city was something. A glorious fusion of beauty, luxury and ease, married with scornfulness, style and an old, old history. And, yet, of the moment.

  If she were willing to build a marriage … if she immersed herself in this new setting … there was more than a chance that the melancholy that lurked in her would retreat to backstage.

  In the office, she unlocked Nina’s notebook, placed it on her desk and readied herself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rome

  27 April 1978

  THE VATICAN SQUARE MILE HAS A DIFFERENT FEEL TO THE complex city outside of it.

  Any noise is subdued. No one runs. The gardens are cleaner. No laundry flaps out of windows. No graffiti.

  The Vatican pharmacy is always crowded and, so too, is Annona, the well-stocked supermarket. Here the goods are exempt from most taxes and a tessera pass, which permits shopping there, is prized more than gold dust. Naturally, a black market thrives in them.

  Annona’s biggest seller is gossip. A lot can be overheard when queuing up to pay. Financial scandals. Sexual scandals. Church politics.

  I have not been there very often. It is not an ideal rendezvous for the simple reason everyone is watching everyone else and jealously guarding their privileges.

  But I did meet Rex there in June of 1977.

  I found him scanning the fruit juices as arranged. If he picked up a carton of orange juice, I was not to approach. If an apple, it was clear.

  He placed an apple juice in his basket.

  We stood a few feet apart. I scrutinised the cheeses that I was not able to buy because I was not in possession of the worth-its-weightin-gold tessera. I moved past him and, in a classic manoeuvre, dropped a piece of paper into his basket.

  At the end of the aisle, I glanced back to see him shifting the carton of apple juice over it.

  The paper gave Rex the details of where I would be that evening.

  Leo wished to introduce me to his uncle and Rex wanted the contact. It was a bad idea all round, but I had to go through with it.

  As I calculated might happen, Beppo had confronted Leo about me and insisted on a meeting.

  Leo and I talked it over long and earnestly – I, pretending I did not want the meeting, but knowing I had to meet him because of Rex.

  In the end, I told Leo that I would do my best to persuade his uncle that we were friends and I wanted to consult him because I was thinking of becoming Catholic.

  His face cleared.

  I booked a table at the Eau Vive, one of the chain of well-known restaurants that stretch through the Catholic world. I had been curious to eat there.

  The Roman branch is close to the Pantheon and occupies two floors in a sixteenth-century palazzo. It is frequented by diplomats, priests, prelates and Vatican personnel and their families who wish for pasta-free dining as the cuisine is mainly French.

  I chose my clothes carefully for the encounter, thinking well-off socialite needing to find a purpose in life. Hair in chignon. Big earrings. Dress with a swooping neckline, but not too tight, and strappy high heels. A bag that suggested designer. It was a disguise intended to nudge Beppo into seeing a woman with too much money and time, and too lightweight, to be a threat to his nephew’s future.

  Nowhere but in Rome is it possible to buy a simple dress, a bag, a pair of shoes and achieve a transformation. Argue with me if you like, but Roman – Italian – clothes possess innate witchery. Wearing them is to acknowledge the importance of the bella figura and a belief in life-enhancing elegance and form. Beauty is a moral duty.

  When I arrived at the restaurant, Rex was sequestered at the back of the room. I did not look at him, nor he at me, as I was ushered to the table.

  Leo’s uncle was already there and rose to greet me. He took my hand and gave a little bow. I knew that my preparations had done the trick because I was an almost exact copy of the soignée, discreetly jewelled women at the other tables and he had clocked it.

  Wearing a dark suit with an insignia badge in the lapel, he was in his late twenties, of medium height and, at first glance, a benign aspect. On second glance, I suspected he was watchful, possessed of hidden energy and a ruthlessness. Unlike my beloved Leo, Beppo had traded in youthful illusion for realpolitik. His name did not suit him.

  Wary, but polite, we introduced ourselves. I asked where Leo was and he lied convincingly that his nephew had some last-minute family duties and sent his apologies.

  I made no comment. The message had been conveyed. Leo was controlled by his uncle.

  We regarded each other over the table and I asked him what I should call him and he replied that his friends and family called him Beppo and he would be honoured if I did too.

  I almost choked on my wine.

  During the excellent meal, I asked him about the girls who were serving, some of whom were in the traditional garb of their countries. I’ll say this for him: he was worldly, knowledgeable and amusing. Apparently, the girls hailed from all over the world and took temporary vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, but they were not nuns.

  I envied them. They exuded a serenity and calm that, I imagined, was explained partly because they were safe and fed. At 9 p.m., as was the custom, the girls gathered around the statue of the Virgin and sang ‘Ave Maria’. Some priests and a couple of professed nuns in grey habits who were also dining got to their feet and joined in.

  Over dessert, I launched a reconnaissance of Beppo’s views. It was so nice to see that not all traditions have been abandoned, I said.

  His gaze slid over my face, a scrutiny that I disliked but I knew how to deal with. Then he relaxed and exerted himself to be charming and said it wasn’t wise to be stuck in the past but, yes, sometimes it was too hastily abandoned.

  I gave him the benefit of my best smile – not too confident but inviting confidences – and said that if you believed in something then one must stick to one’s guns. (Sometimes, I surprise myself with what I find possible to say.)

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Rex make for the exit while remarking that I believed Beppo came from a big family.

  He explained that he was brought up on a farm – olives, goats, vines – in a family of six brothers and sisters. It could never have been said that they were well off, but, unlike many others, they didn’t starve.

  He was impressing on me how far he had come from that rural upbringing.

  I said I believed he worked on legal matters in the Vatican which suggested he was a lawyer, and he said he was, specialising in compliance with Catholic doctrine.

  And some financial matters, too, he added.

  Intriguing. (The talk circulating at the moment was of opaque accounting at the Vatican and of Vatican cash – allegedly – being handed out to fund the building of luxury apartments in London.)

  I remarked that he must
have been highly ambitious. He agreed he had been, still was, and told me how the local priest had arranged for his education. His parents had been wary until the priest suggested that he finished his education in Rome, whereupon they changed their minds.

  I could picture it. The eldest brother, who – apparently – was a fool, would take over the farm, and it was obvious there was history between the brothers. The other siblings needed to make their way, political unrest and poverty were deepening and the communists were causing trouble. Rome, he said, looked even more desirable.

  He looked down at a packet of cigarettes lying between them and said that unrest such as he had just described left its mark. Either you went under or you went.

  The story, dropped easily from his lips – which suggested it had been told more than once – was designed to convey that he was ambitious but also principled.

  So … woven into the power plays of his family were obvious rivalries, and the younger brother had set out to prove he was the equal of the older, plus a mover and shaker with influence to boot.

  I asked if he had married and he replied there had been no time, but he had devoted his energies to his many nephews and nieces.

  By the coffee stage, I had him more or less pinned down as a man with fierce right-wing political views.

  I dabbed my lips with the napkin. Any second now, the business of the evening would commence.

  He went in carefully, saying that he believed his nephew and I had become extremely good friends. I concurred and offered up the information that Leo had been helping me with problems of belief.

  He was regretful, he said, but in the future Leo would be expected to concentrate on his studies and he would have to give up certain aspects of his life.

  I plucked at my discarded napkin and asked if that was a warning.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  He managed the feat of saying it bluntly and, yet, silkily smooth.

  His gaze travelled over the frock and the jewellery, and I knew that I had succeeded and he had made an error of judgement in concluding that I was an unmarried woman hungry for sex, and only that.

  It was, he suggested, time for me to move on before the situation became complicated.

  This was exactly what I had expected, but it angered me – which I should not have allowed, although I managed to hide it. Still, I could not stop myself suggesting that it was up to Leo. It was his life, his future.

  He gave me a look: You know better than that.

  Patiently, he explained that Leo was young and inexperienced. He was not saying – he cleared his throat – friendship with me was not useful and, of course, some experience was a good thing. But friendship could change and it could give Leo unnecessary problems at a moment when he needed a clear head. And a clean heart for his vocation.

  He leaned over the table towards me and appealed to my sense of what was right and kind. ‘You see,’ he said in that awful way, ‘he will go far.’

  I made the equation. The worldly uncle reckoned that it was OK for Leo to have a sexual experience, but not an emotional one.

  Plus, he was grooming Leo to rise through the Church ranks, where those occupying the higher echelons were often powerful figures who dictated Vatican politics and strategy. They had a finger on foreign affairs, a diplomatic say-so, and influence on governments.

  I stared at the unobtrusive insignia in the buttonhole of his dark suit, frustrated that I could not quite make it out.

  ‘I think we understand what we are talking about,’ he said.

  ‘And if I choose not to understand?’

  Underlying the silky reply was a threat. ‘Then, steps would be taken.’

  I let a silence elapse. I hated his casual betrayal of Leo and, at that moment, I hated him too. Above all, I longed to let this urbane, seemingly charming man stew in his terrible ambitions.

  I smiled gently and understandingly – the woman of the world – and told him that I agreed Leo was very talented and he would go far.

  I rose to my feet, filled with shame for the way Leo had been discussed and bartered and that I had been part of the transaction.

  He leapt to his feet and said if I ever cared to repeat the evening, it would be his pleasure.

  It took all my self-control, all my training, not to turn on my heel. Instead, I inclined my head and said that I would be delighted to think about it.

  He held on to my hand for longer than he should have done. ‘You see, there are bigger interests than you, than my nephew, than I.’

  I caught the hardness, the inflexibility, the drive that lay behind the urbanity and I hated him.

  If Beppo had known, it was too late.

  We had been together in Palacrino that magical March weekend and it was far, far too late.

  When we returned from Palacrino, Leo wrote me a letter he never should have written.

  I love you and I’m consumed as if by fire. What I can do about it I don’t know, but I am mad with it.

  Do we think alike?

  The handwriting was rushed and rapid.

  The answer is we do on most things. I know little about you and I know you keep hidden from me parts of your life, but I can say with certainty that you hold the key to who I am. It has never happened to me before and when I consider how often we fail to understand others, I find it astonishing.

  I cried thinking of what it would have cost Leo to write it. Breaking every rule in the life he had agreed to follow. How typically generous of him to do so.

  Unwisely, I wrote back, but I was wise enough not to send it. It would never have got past the sentries in Leo’s life and might have reached his mentor uncle. Also, it would have added to the burden on Leo’s conscience.

  I had once read a letter from an eighteenth-century woman. I think she was French but what she wrote is how I felt.

  I owe you everything. Love, tenderness, a lesson in how to feel. I never knew that I could walk through my life filled with such beauty and feeling. A new sun rises for me every day. Since I have met you, and loved you, my life has become dearer, the sounds and scents of the world more precious.

  I copied it into the letter that was never sent and added my own words.

  You will think me narcissistic, but I want you to know everything. The light and the dark of my mind and soul. I crave the same from you.

  The memories I carry are like the change in my purse. The one of us drinking coffee together was lovely, but of a lower denomination. The one of Leo turning to me for the first time, his face blazing with passion, is of much higher denomination. And the memory of us that one time, together, in the hotel room comes highest of all.

  And the memory I have of myself. Weeping with joy, with discovery, with lust and tenderness and with the knowledge that we had indulged in what is forbidden and, yet, regretted not one step.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LOTTIE RAISED HER HEAD FROM THE JOURNAL.

  How slow she had been.

  Vatican legal matters. Compliance. Financial affairs.

  Opening her laptop she typed in the name ‘Beppo’ and, within seconds, read that it was a diminutive of ‘Giuseppe’.

  Giuseppe Antonio, the man who visited her office, was almost certainly Leo’s uncle. He must have heard The Annunciation had been found in the Nina Lawrence papers that had been retrieved from storage, realised that they contained clues in them to an old scandal, and wanted to protect the reputation of his nephew, who might, or might not, be a notable Church figure.

  Furthermore, Antonio was a friend of Valerio Gianni, whom it was said had big, meaty connections in the Vatican – Giuseppe Antonio obviously being one of them.

  Nevertheless, if Lottie was correct, there was something corrupt and cruel about the desire to keep Nina Lawrence’s history quiet.

  The entente cordiale struck between her and Concetta was holding and Concetta had invited Lottie to visit her daughter with her.

  Orietta lived twenty-five kilometres or so from Rome’s city centre in Ge
nzano, where the spring infiorata was about to take place. ‘It’s the tradition …’ Concetta explained. ‘Very old. The bigger one is later but this one is for the schoolchildren.’

  She bustled between table and stove in the kitchen and, every so often, Lottie was forced to edge out of her way.

  Since The Affair of the Lamp, a colonisation of the kitchen had taken place. A crucifix now occupied the shelf above the pans and a mirror framed in candy-pink plastic adorned (hardly the correct term) the wall adjacent to the fridge.

  Concetta tipped a heap of plump and glossy early broad beans into an earthenware bowl.

  ‘Infiorata?’

  ‘A carpet of flowers is laid along the main street and everybody comes to look and to have a good time.’

  Lottie looked up the infiorata. Themes were allotted for each year: ‘Botticelli Paintings’, ‘Roman Emperors’, ‘Mythic Monsters’. She showed Concetta the photographs on her laptop. ‘This year it’s Dragons.’ Concetta fanned herself with an oven glove. ‘For the children, you know? They draw the designs with chalk on the road. Then they work with the flowers. Very difficult. Very hard. But good for them.’

  Would Nina have known about the infiorata? So far in the journal, Lottie had not come across references to it, but Genzano was close enough to Rome for an easy outing. It was a not unreasonable assumption that Nina might have visited. With that in mind, Lottie offered to drive Concetta over to Genzano on the appropriate date.

  The weather was shifting into a higher gear and the bright blue sky was suggestive of the high, hard heat of summer to come when she said goodbye to Tom and got into the car. Negotiating Roman traffic was tricky at the best of times, and Lottie, subjected to Concetta’s distracting running commentary on other drivers, only just managed to avoid a couple of collisions.

  Even so, being out of the city and the Espatriati was unexpectedly liberating and fun, and her grip on the wheel gradually relaxed.