The Apartment in Rome

by Penny Feeny

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket but his fingers were sweaty and it slipped from his grasp, clattering onto the narrow pavement. As he stooped for it, he heard footsteps. He hoped, naturally, that they belonged to somebody pleasant and helpful, someone who could direct him to the nearest cab rank. He glanced behind him. All he could see was a dark form – or maybe two – probably male, probably younger and taller and stronger than he was. Should he stop, let them accost him? They’d be after his wallet, money and credit cards. No, dammit, they could make do with the mobile – he hated the bloody thing anyway.

  Leaving it for them, he began to run. The footsteps wavered and halted, but they must have been after greater booty. Within seconds they were pursuing him again, gaining on him. He didn’t feel a blow, but was aware of the ground rising to meet him, of crashing all at once into black oblivion.

  Gina was in bed when the call woke her. She groped for her phone and answered it in an automatic reflex. ‘Pronto.’

  ‘Leone,’ said the stranger.

  Befuddled, she began to envisage the arid desert of spaghetti westerns. With the shutters closed, the room around her – which she had not yet got used to – was a dark mysterious space filled with murky shapes. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said. ‘I have called because yours was the last number dialled.’

  ‘The last number dialled,’ she repeated. ‘Oh my God, Felix! Has something happened to him?’ It was rare for her to be the first to leave a social occasion. Usually Felix would be dragging her off the dance floor or away from the bar, telling her she’d had enough. And she would be disagreeing.

  ‘He has had a fall.’

  ‘A fall? That could be really bad for him! Dangerous, I mean. How is he? Has he broken anything?’

  ‘We think not. We think, if so, he would be in more pain. Presently he is sleeping.’

  ‘Where? Where are you?’

  ‘You are his wife?’ said Leone.

  If she had been less worried, she might have laughed. ‘We’re just good friends. He isn’t married,’ she added, remembering the demonstrations Felix had attended out of a sense of duty to the cause – though it was hard to foresee a prospect for civil partnerships in Italy. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Father Leone from the Madonna of All Mercy. Your friend lost his way and stumbled upon us.’

  A priest. God almighty. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You could take him to the hospital.’

  Felix hated hospitals, especially since he had become so dependent on the treatment they offered. Her job, as she saw it, was not to let him wallow. ‘You’d better give me your address and then I’ll come and fetch him.’

  Dawn was breaking when she arrived at the crypt and hammered on the door to be let in. Felix was wrapped in a blanket on a spindle-backed chair, looking shamefaced. And grey.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed to get yourself into such a state,’ she greeted him.

  ‘Isn’t that what I always say about you?’

  She rested her hand on his arm. ‘I’ll have to get you checked out.’

  ‘Just as well I’ve been taking the steroids,’ he muttered. ‘Could have been worse.’

  ‘How did it happen anyway?’

  ‘What, that I drank too much? Or got lost? You shouldn’t have abandoned me, you know.’

  ‘It was a disaster, wasn’t it? Is he always like that, the Farnon guy?’

  ‘Not really. He had a row with his partner last month and they’re temporarily estranged. So he’s a bit derailed, showing off his wild side.’

  ‘No kidding?’ She peered at bodies unfurling from thin foam mattresses. The priest was moving among them, his rosary clanking at his thigh. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Some sort of haven for lost souls,’ he said. ‘Extraordinary, really, that I should stumble upon it. But I did, literally.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I fell down the steps. I tripped over because I was running away from these fellows I thought were muggers. In point of fact they were trying to return my phone – I’d dropped it, you see. They raised me up like bloody Lazarus and brought me in here – though at the time I was convinced I’d arrived at the gates of hell. This creature in long black robes came gliding forward. The Grim Reaper, I was sure of it. In fact it was my saviour, Father Leone, who has patched me up.’ He waved towards the priest and flinched. ‘I’ll have to find some way of thanking him.’

  Gina pushed back the blanket and rolled up his sleeve. ‘You’re damn lucky your bones haven’t snapped, you’re covered in bruises. We need to get them seen to.’

  His voice dropped. ‘All I really want to do is sleep. You know how important it is for me to be in my own bed these days.’

  She laced her fingers in his. ‘Come on then. Never mind the priest; we can come back later. Didn’t I always promise I’d take good care of you? Repay you for what you did for me?’

  ‘When in particular?’

  There were countless times, it was true, in the past decade, when Felix had come to her aid. ‘Right at the beginning, remember? The clinic…’

  ‘Darling, it was the indefatigable Vicki who rescued you in your darkest hour; she hardly let me near you.’

  ‘I meant before, that day on the beach.’

  16

  Ten Years Earlier: June 1993

  Gina and Felix had struck a chord almost from their first meeting, although to other people the relationship appeared perverse. Her flatmate, Vicki, who was inclined to be bossy, too ready with her advice and opinions, declared, ‘I can’t understand why you’re hanging around so much with that Felix Raven. He’s far too old for you.’

  ‘Perhaps I like older men.’

  ‘And you yourself call him the Raven Queen!’

  ‘He’s promised to advance my education,’ said Gina. ‘He says my own fell short. And I don’t want to be thought an airhead because of the work I do. Plus he’s good fun, and that’s what I need right now.’

  Their friendship was cemented by the common strand of abandonment. Gina’s lover, Mitch, had called an end to three years of globe-trotting, of wild weekends in far-off cities which they never saw because they scarcely left their hotel bedroom. The previous year he had helped her move down from Milan to Rome and hinted that they should be looking for a place together. The sudden break-up had sent her reeling, she was so unprepared for it – although she’d pretended quite the opposite.

  In Felix’s case, his companion Maurizio, a charming boyish Sicilian, had returned to his roots. He’d gone home for his father’s funeral and announced he would not be coming back. ‘Under Mamma’s thumb,’ sighed Felix. ‘I should have guessed.’

  One sunny June morning he called on Gina, hooting outside in his small red Lancia that would not, after all, be driving to Siracusa for the summer. She’d gone out the night before with a group of people she didn’t know very well. They had hopped through a string of noisy bars, finding none satisfactory; she had developed a splitting headache. She leaned out of her window; he leaned out of his.

  ‘Let’s go for an adventure,’ he said.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Carpe diem!’

  ‘You’d better come up.’

  Suitcases gaped open on her floor, some half-filled with clothes. Felix skirted round them. She’d closed her shutters again so the room was dim.

  ‘It’s a glorious day, you know.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’d planned to go bargain hunting in Porta Portese as distraction therapy. But then I thought, no, bugger the market. What’s the point of haggling over more bric-a-brac that I don’t need? Why not head for the beach?’

  ‘The beach?’

  ‘Sure. It will do you good – the tang of sea air.’

  He hadn’t mentioned the suitcases. He hadn’t asked her how she was or why she had started a flurry of packing at two o’clock in the morning. She’d been tramping about in a torme
nt of indecision with armfuls of clothes until collapsing in a heap at 4 a.m. She was never good-humoured after a rough night, but Felix knew that she rarely refused an invitation, even when her head was pounding. He’d argue she could catch up on her missed sleep, lying in the sun.

  ‘How long will it take you to get ready?’ he said. ‘I’ll go for a coffee, shall I? Wait for you outside.’

  He hadn’t given her any option. Still, maybe he was right: a change of air could be a real tonic. Cities were always claustrophobic in summer, whereas even a small sea like the Mediterranean appeared to promise infinity. Gina kicked the cases out of her way, prowling the room with far less delicacy than Felix as she sought towels, bikini, sandals, sun cream. She filled a large straw basket with everything she thought she might need, including paracetamol and indigestion tablets, and pulled an equally large straw hat onto her head. She suspected she looked like a holiday advertisement and was quite prepared to snap at Felix, should he mock, but all he said was, ‘Not sure you’re going to fit into my car, darling.’

  The car was not air-conditioned. As they crawled towards Ostia with thousands of other Sunday sun-seekers, Felix’s idea seemed less attractive, less spontaneous. His complexion darkened with annoyance when the engine over-heated in the traffic jam for the second time and he had to top up the radiator with expensive rations of mineral water. As he climbed back into the driver’s seat, Gina exhaled a long sibilant whistle through her teeth.

  ‘Christ, what’s the matter now?’

  His agitation might have amused her if she’d been feeling better. ‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘what is the point of being here?’

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘perhaps you should have told me an hour back: Listen, Felix, you know you’d far prefer to go shopping for antique crystal than get your rocks off with a rentboy picked up at the seaside. Or you could have insisted we took the train. And don’t give me that hangover nonsense – you always have a hangover. You know why you get so sick all the time?’ Recently she had thrown up, spectacularly, over one of his Moroccan rugs. The dry cleaners had done their best, but the rug’s colours had shifted into a different spectrum and it had to spend much of the day over the railings, soaking up the fresh air. ‘You have a drink problem, that’s why.’

  ‘Fuck off. Who said anything about a hangover? Anyway, if we’d taken the train we’d have had miles to walk and it’s too hot for walking. But what I was trying to say was, well, I’m thinking of leaving.’

  ‘What, Rome?’

  ‘Italy.’

  ‘Why?’

  She was feeding the brim of the hat through her hands, revolving it on her lap; the straw felt dry and brittle. ‘I have to think of the future. I don’t know what’s going to happen to my career… I need to decide whether I should do something different altogether.’

  ‘Don’t I recollect an excited phone call? Weren’t you, a few weeks ago, limbering up for the contract of a lifetime?’

  ‘And was I completely trashed when I told you that?’

  He changed into third gear, easing his foot off the clutch as the queue gathered speed. ‘Jewellery, you said. Because you had the longest brass neck in the business.’

  Gina put her hands around her throat and squeezed. ‘Yeah, well, it’ll probably never happen. And I was so looking forward to it. Flaunting my baubles in the Trevi Fountain like Anita Ekberg.’

  He began to hum the Sinatra tune. Gritty gusts of hot air blew in through the windows along with blasts of music from competing car radios. A pair of drumsticks tapped vigorously on the membrane of her skull. She resisted the urge to scratch at a mosquito bite on her wrist – and to scream at Felix for dragging her out of bed. She said, ‘I might go back to England. Or America.’

  ‘America?’

  ‘My mother’s over there, remember.’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t stand your mother.’

  ‘In particular I can’t stand the man she’s married to, Mountebank Monty. But I think they’re splitting up.’

  ‘Talking of splits… this is about Mitch, isn’t it?’

  ‘Bastard. He never checked, you know, to see how I was. Out of sight, out of mind. We used to have these long conversations at crazy hours because we were in different time zones. Now I’m dead meat.’

  ‘You’re nothing of the sort.’ He took his right hand off the steering wheel and stroked her arm. ‘Please don’t go. I’d miss you if you left.’ Then he swung onto the coast road, bordered with low-lying sand dunes, and pointed through the windscreen and the heat-haze. ‘At last! Now to find somewhere to park.’

  Along the beach, oiled bodies were laid out in rows like seals basking. A parade of muscular beauty wandered up and down the shoreline. Few swimmers were tempted into the water, opaque and murky beneath a glittering surface. Gina settled their belongings around the chairs and umbrella they had hired and lay back, topless. Felix set off to the bar for a couple of beers. He was wearing a loose cotton shirt with the collar turned up to protect his northern skin from the sun, and a very small pair of swimming trunks. Most of the other men wore even scantier versions; the sheer mass of tanned and toned buttocks cresting the sun-loungers was eye-watering.

  Gina sat up again when he returned and took one of the proffered beers. They’d been opened by the bartender and Felix had carried them with such circumspection he hadn’t spilled a drop.

  ‘Thanks.’ She swallowed a mouthful, then tucked the bottle in the shade of her basket.

  Neither of them could see the other’s eyes behind their sunglasses. In fact nearly everyone on the beach was masked by dark lenses – a covert tool of inspection and examination.

  ‘Such a feast of flesh,’ he said. ‘Surely you can enjoy just looking?’

  ‘Not as much as you, evidently.’

  ‘I met Maurizio here, you know.’

  ‘Oh God, did you?’

  Two lean young men sauntered by, close enough to touch, their arms entwined, their profiles sharp against the light. One wore a gold crucifix, the other a silver. Maurizio had been a homespun unassuming type. It was hard to imagine him flirting in the manner of those on the beach.

  ‘Perhaps some of us are destined for the single life,’ Felix said, a trifle mournfully. ‘Or perhaps we get exhausted by our mistakes. So much easier, don’t you think, to divorce the two?’

  ‘What two?’

  ‘Sex and companionship.’ He tipped some more beer down his throat.

  ‘You’ve left out love,’ said Gina, picking up her detective novel. The words danced on the white page, undermining her concentration.

  He turned his head and looked along the rows of sun loungers as if searching for a familiar face. He moved his watch to admire the white strap mark it had left. He drank some more beer, wiping the neck of the bottle each time. He picked up the copy of Vogue Gina had brought and put it down again. He returned one or two bold stares with a faint lift of his chin. His long upper lip folded over his bottom one in a sly smile, giving him the look of a refined goat. ‘It doesn’t seem to me that you’re in the mood for a chat,’ he observed after a while.

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Touch and go, to be honest. But I’ve brought my medicine chest so I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I think I might take a walk along the shore. If you don’t mind?’

  ‘Of course not. You go along, bag yourself a hunky new set of cock and balls.’

  ‘Will I look pathetic if I keep my shirt on?’

  ‘Like you’re afraid of exposing yourself, you mean? Yes, you will.’

  Reluctantly he took it off and she slathered high protection suncream across his neck and back. She gave him a little push to send him on his way and then closed her book again. She was no more in the mood for reading than she was for gazing at nearly naked men. So many people were passing up and down the shore that the sea itself could only be glimpsed in patches. A couple of North Africans in vivid kaftans were walking at the
edge of the water. They were strung with ropes of carved wooden beads, leather belts and sprays of exotic plumage. They stood out among the sunbathers and were, for the most part, completely ignored as they tried to access one private stabilimento after another. A handful of young men were playing a ball game choreographed to display their physique rather than service the ball. There were no children squabbling, wheedling or wailing, in sight. Gina closed her eyes.

  ‘Ciao, carina.’ A young pretty woman was perching on Felix’s abandoned cushions.

  Gina peered through her sunglasses. ‘I’m with someone,’ she said.

  The woman, a girl really, with a bountiful mass of black hair, said, ‘Yes, I saw him.’ And it was all she needed to say, to point out that she knew perfectly well what kind of man Felix was, what kind of relationship he had with Gina.

  The woman was small and evenly bronzed. She wore white sandals, four triangles of tight white bikini and white-rimmed sunglasses. These, she took off. She had tigerish eyes flecked with gold, matching the bangles that clinked on her arms and the chain fastened around her ankle. ‘Stefania,’ she said, holding out her hand so that Gina could not ignore it.

  ‘I’m Gina.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘We met before, a brief introduction only. You don’t remember?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re a model, I think?’

  Gina couldn’t rid herself of the suspicion that the woman was lying, that she’d simply seen her photograph somewhere. Somehow that was more palatable than total blacked-out memory loss. ‘And you?’ she said politely.

  ‘I’m a swimming instructor.’ She flexed her biceps so they rippled in her upper arms. ‘There are too many people in this country who can’t swim. So I have plenty of work.’