The cab was passing Clapham Common, a ghostly grey expanse of nothing, the leaves of the trees black in the weird yellow light from the street lamps. Tess stirred. Perhaps that was how she felt about Adam now, too. Memories that were distorted, that stretched too far back for there ever to be a clean slate between them, an honest friendship.
She heard his voice again, breaking into her thoughts, telling her that she was living in the past. ‘You’re right, I have been,’ Tess whispered to herself. ‘But at least I’ve got a past. And a future.’ She lifted her chin, staring out of the window, narrowing her eyes, determined not to cry again. It still hurt her so much when she remembered.
PART TWO
‘I’m only thinking of my pet theory about Miss Honey-church. Does it seem reasonable that she should play so wonderfully, and live so quietly? I suspect that one day she will be wonderful in both. The watertight compartments in her will break down, and music and life will mingle. Then we shall have her heroically good, heroically bad—too heroic, perhaps, to be good or bad.’
A Room with a View, E.M. Forster
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No one had told Tess about the jasmine in Rome. All over the city, just before June, it bloomed, sparkling white on green against the old rose-pink buildings, like fairy lights, gleaming in the moonlight of the quiet streets, throwing an invisible cloak of perfume over the city. Everywhere she went, the faint, sweet smell of jasmine hung in the air; sometimes they would turn a corner and it would hit them again, the wall of an old palazzo covered in it. The scent was intoxicating, it was almost spicy, not too heavy, absolutely delicious. It was not like anything else, anything at all, it was fresh and seductive; and she was transfixed by it.
And so, one Monday afternoon when the jasmine was just unfurling, a group of weary travellers arrived in Rome, led by none more weary than Tess herself. The minibus, which had met them at the airport and weaved through the afternoon traffic, along the ancient Appian Way, past the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, through the old ochre walls of the city, now disgorged its cargo onto a shady street in Trastevere. It was that most unwelcome time of day in European cities for the traveller, when evening has not yet arrived and the heat of the day is still immense. Coupled with the fumes and sweat, and the sun still beating down, it feels as if the cool of night-time will never come.
Limbs aching from the cramped bus and from lack of sleep, Tess clambered off first, waving each of her fellow passengers out as she counted them. ‘Eight, nine. Ten, including me.’ Someone tapped her arm. ‘Yes, Carolyn?’
‘Tess, dear. Is breakfast included at the hotel?’
On the relatively short journey from the airport Carolyn Tey had asked when they would arrive, how hot it would be, and whether she needed to dress for dinner. Tess clutched her copy of Orgoglio e Pregiudizio and counted to three. She said, calmly, ‘I’m sure it is, but why don’t we double-check once we’re inside. Now, if you’d like to follow me—’
‘Oh, dear, cobbles,’ said Carolyn. ‘I do hate walking on cobbles. I keep thinking I’m just about to fall over. Don’t you know what I mean?’ Tess nodded, trying to look interested. ‘I don’t mean you, dear,’ said Carolyn. ‘You’re much too young to worry about that sort of thing. Andrea, isn’t it funny, walking on cobbles?’
Andrea Marsh, who looked hugely offended at being identified as ‘old enough to worry about falling over on cobbles’ nodded coldly, and walked on, followed by Ron, who was fixing his cap firmly to his head. It looked like a relic from a driving club in the fifties.
‘Dear, dear, dear me,’ came a mellifluous voice from behind Tess. ‘How far, do you know, my dear, to l’hotel?’
‘It’s around the corner,’ said Tess, struggling to keep it together.
‘Oh, my,’ said Jacquetta Meluish, fanning herself. ‘Oh, these pretty streets, through which we walk.’ They were twenty metres from the bus. ‘We should, I daresay, stick together? Lest one of our gruppa become unencumbered.’
Jacquetta had not vouchsafed a word during the previous two-month course, but in the ninety minutes since their arrival on Italian soil had transformed into a living breathing expert on all things Italian. Tess looked wildly about her.
‘Albergo Watkins,’ Jan called, from the front. ‘Is that what it’s called? I thought it was supposed to have the moon or something in the title.’
They were gathered around the huge, panelled front door, which had two enormous disc handles attached to it. Stuck on the front was a chipped sign:
Albergo Watkins For stay pleasant
‘It’s only got one star,’ Andrea said suspiciously. ‘I thought we were staying in a four-star?’
‘Oh, no, no,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t think that’s a star. I think it’s…an…asterisk.’ She nodded, trying to convey an authority she did not feel. ‘It’s decorative. Not indicative. Ha-ha!’ She laughed semi-hysterically and knocked on the door. ‘Well, let’s see what they’ve done with Albergo di Luna, shall we?’
The door creaked open; they filed in, blinking in the sudden dark. Leonora and Diana were the last in. Looking at the man holding open the door, Tess blinked again.
‘Buona sera,’ she said. ‘Are you—’ she looked down—‘Signor Capelli?’
The man was not friendly. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Signor Capelli e…Kaput.’ He clapped his hands together, in a gesture of alarming finality. ‘Benvenuti. Well-come. Ladies.’ He spoke English slowly, with great emphasis. ‘To. Our Hotel. Ladies.’
Ron cleared his throat. ‘Er—hello. Excuse me.’
‘Ah. And Signore.’ The man bowed.
‘What happened to Albergo di Luna?’ Tess asked, feeling more and more as if she were in a strange modern play.
‘Caput.’
‘Yes, but—’ Tess said, wishing she were not being watched by the pupils of the Classical Civilization course. ‘I booked ten rooms—here—’ she batted her hand against a piece of paper—‘at the Albergo di Luna. Not at the Albergo Watkins, whatever this place is.’
‘Is the same.’
‘What?’ said Tess.
‘Nuovo…com’e si dice…It is new owner. New name.’
A large, fat fly flew right in front of Tess’s face; she brushed it away.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Diana Sayers. ‘I do so desperately need the loo, Tess. Could you ask—’
‘So do we have the rooms?’ Tess said, ignoring her with a stab of guilt.
With the illogicality she had forgotten about in Italy, the atmosphere suddenly changed. The man clapped his hands again, this time with a smile. ‘But of course!’ He clasped Tess’s fingers. ‘Welcome to new hotel!’
‘Er—’ said Tess. ‘Thanks!’
The ladies—and Ron—around her heaved a sigh of relief. The fly buzzed past Tess’s ear this time. She batted it again, trying not to get irritated. ‘Right, then. Let’s get the bags out of the van and sign in—and see our rooms, OK?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the man in soothing tones, as if these were dull, bourgeois concerns. ‘I show you rooms now, yes? And bags come in moments.’ Much to Tess’s secret delight, he now clapped his hands again, and at this command a youth appeared, incongruously attired in a too-large bellboy outfit, and scuttled out into the street.
‘I am Pompeo,’ announced the man, in much the same tones as Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. ‘Welcome, come with me, to our hotel.’
Two flights up, with the ladies and Ron trailing behind him, Pompeo flung open a door. Striding into a dark room, he stood in front of a shuttered window, and gestured towards it with the back of his hand.
‘And now,’ he said, like a magician with a rabbit in a hat. ‘Hello to Roma.’
He leaned over, and pushed the shutters open—the wooden slats swung away, and the light flooded in; a row of buildings beyond them, rose-coloured and slathered in jasmine, green and yellow rooves nestling in the afternoon sun; a white Baroque church in the distance, and there, just through a gap, the trees fringing the green Tiber river,
and next to it, the Castel Sant’ Angelo and the cypress trees, black in the afternoon sun. Tess leaned out and breathed in and the stress, the strain of the last few days seemed to melt away. She could smell the jasmine, she could even smell coffee, something sweet on the air. Outside on the street, two men were arguing, in Italian, and even that to her, now she was here, sounded sweet.
‘Is OK?’ Pompeo asked.
She turned around; she was smiling. ‘It is more than OK. It is lovely. Thank you.’
As Tess brushed her hair later that evening, looking in the mirror, she sang, quietly happy. She was here, and she was determined to enjoy herself. London seemed like a bad dream. Francesca’s beautiful face, her ravishable body, Adam’s expression; all gone. That miserable cab ride to Balham that had cost her thirty-five pounds; sleeping on the sofa in the tiny sitting room of her old flat, like a stranger, the dry papery toast Meena had made her for breakfast when she’d arrived back, to find this snivelling wreck of a girl in her bed. Tess’s misery hanging over her like the clouds outside on that grey morning—all gone. Her hangover, her confusion, her volatile sense of self-worth, which should never, ever again be linked to whether some man found her attractive or not!—all gone. She was in Rome! It was time to put all that behind her, to live a little, live her own life, instead of either living through Will, as she had done in London, or living the life of an eighty-year-old afraid of getting a chill as she had been doing since she moved back to Langford. The scent of jasmine came to her again, through the open window. She laid down her brush and stepped back, looking at herself. She touched some dark lipgloss to her lips and stared into the mirror. There were circles under her eyes, brown and smudged.
They were downstairs, waiting for her, a slice of middle England in the heart of Italy, and what she really wanted to do was run away from them. She wanted to wander by herself through the city, sit in a little restaurant with a pizza bianca, a glass of red wine and breathe out gently, then go to bed and sleep for hours, possibly days.
No, she told herself. That’s no good. You’re here, you made the decision to come here, now get on with it. But lurking in the back of her mind was the thought that had been there since she’d left Adam on Saturday night. That she had made a mistake in moving back to Langford, that she was trapped in a stasis of her own making, old before her time, unattractive, closed off to the world. The image of Francesca on the bed haunted her. She was so attractive, so sexy, she looked like a girl who knew what she wanted, knew how to fall in love, how to break hearts and how to inveigle her way into hotel rooms. Tess was not like that, she knew it, and though kissing Adam had woken her from her chintzy, tea-shop slumber, his almost instant rejection of her had sent her crashing back down to earth with a cold, hard bump.
Tess adjusted her pale blue linen dress and pulled her mushroom-coloured shawl over her shoulders, picked up her bag and turned back to face herself. The girl in the mirror watched impassively. Her dark blue eyes were grave. Outside, she could hear Ron saying, ‘Yes, nearly time to go, I did say I’d be here on time,’ rather loudly. It made her smile. The eyes smiled too. She nodded at her reflection, squared her shoulders and went out of the sunshine-filled room, shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
There were ten of them. Tess mentally divided them into two groups, Older and Younger, though she had read the Age Discrimination Act when she joined Langford College and knew thinking like this was illegal. The Older group consisted of Diana Sayers, Carolyn Tey, Andrea Marsh, Leonora Mortmain, Jan Allingham and Jacquetta Meluish (who had now told everyone that she’d studied at the British Institute in Florence when she was A Young Gel).
The Younger were the two girls—well, women—around Tess’s age, Liz from the deli and Claire Cobain. They were much less trouble than the Older. On the flight to Rome, Tess had found out that Liz had moved to Langford only nine months ago, having left her job as a theatrical agent. She was reading scripts freelance, as well as working at Jen’s Deli. Claire was on a sabbatical from work. She was reading Eat Pray Love and Men Who Can’t Love: How to Recognize a Commitmentphobic Man (she made copious notes in the back of her paperback edition).
And then there was Ron, the only man.
For their first meal in Italy, Tess had picked a little pizzeria not far from the hotel, in the heart of Trastevere. She didn’t expect it to be a late night, because Tuesday, their first full day in Rome, was going to be a long one: the Forum and the Colosseum. As they walked through the quiet backstreets in a little crocodile, Tess—still determined to enjoy herself—listened, with growing amusement, to the power play unfolding behind her.
‘I haven’t been to Rome for years and years,’ said Carolyn Tey happily, as she trotted next to Leonora Mortmain, who was walking slowly but surely, magnificently upright, with a stick. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
‘Of course, I’ve been here fairly recently,’ said Jacquetta unnecessarily. ‘John and I have some very old friends who live here.’ She sighed. ‘He’s a professor at the university, and she’s absolutely wonderful, a painter. She had an affair with Francis Bacon, you know.’
‘Really?’ said Diana Sayers, doubtfully. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Oh, yes! He was absolutely mad about her. Used to draw her. Naked.’
‘That is fascinating,’ said Leonora Mortmain neutrally.
‘I know,’ said Jacquetta. ‘But I haven’t seen them since…’ She trailed off. John had disappeared somehow, whether by design or accident, permanently or temporarily Tess didn’t know, and Jacquetta was rather mysterious about it.
‘I spent quite a lot of time in Rome when I was a student,’ said Ron, waiting till the last moment to stake his claim. ‘So of course I know it quite well.’ He looked nonchalantly around. ‘Very nice to be back.’
‘Well, for me there’s nothing like Rome in summer,’ said Jacquetta, firmly.
‘Me neither,’ said Carolyn, somewhat uncertainly.
‘I haven’t been to Rome since my honeymoon,’ said Jan, catching up with Tess. ‘So I must say this is extremely exciting! And I’m hungry. Tess, what’s on the menu for dinner tonight?’
‘Pizza,’ said Tess. ‘Proper Roman pizza.’
‘Oh,’ said Jan, trying to mask the disappointment in her voice. ‘How extremely nice.’
‘Trust me,’ said Tess, laughing. ‘You’ll love it. It’s not like any pizza you’ve had before.’
They were walking down a narrow cobbled street, flanked by two-and three-storey buildings in orange and ochre. Red geraniums in window boxes hung precariously from iron holders, the jasmine ran riot everywhere, its dark green leaves the colour of the shutters. People were coming alive for the evening, the shops were open again. Men stood on street corners, snugly buttoned up in padded Husky jackets, the Romans’ idea of what temperature constitutes warmth, and the Britons’, being two completely different things. They passed two men talking animatedly, one jabbing his index finger upwards, precisely and with great force, his mouth wide open as he described some great drama while his companion nodded in world-weary agreement.
A red Vespa had been left against a wall just past them; a young man, a cloud of black hair framing his handsome face, came out of a house and swung one leg over the machine. He looked at Tess, his dark eyes neither questioning nor rejecting, he just stared at her, and then rode off, veering away from an old lady carrying some blue plastic bags down towards them.
‘What’s down there?’ Jan asked Tess. ‘It seems to come to an end.’ Tess came to with a start and followed Jan’s pointing finger.
‘Down there? The Tiber,’ she said, happily. ‘We cross into the historic centre, it’s called the Centro Storico—there, across the Ponte Sisto. That’s how we’ll get to the Forum tomorrow.’
‘So we’re not in the centre?’ said Jan, sounding rather disapproving. ‘Oh.’
‘Yes, that’s a shame, I hope we don’t have to walk too much,’ said Carolyn. She turned to Jacquetta, who looked rather unsu
re.
‘We are much more centrally placed than if we’d stayed in an hotel by the Forum, or the train station,’ said a voice behind Tess. Leonora Mortmain waved her stick at them, and went on, ‘In fact, in Trastevere—literally, “across the Tever”, the Roman name for the Tiber, we are actually in one of the better areas.’
No one said anything to this, but Liz and Claire, the more polite rear of the crocodile, said, ‘Oh!’ and smiled in gratitude. The others did not.
‘Well,’ hissed Jan, stomping beside Tess, as they turned into a little piazza where there was an awning with the sign ‘La Primavera‘. ‘I still really have no idea what she’s doing here, Tess, do you?’
Tess smiled and nodded non-committally which, over the next few days, would become almost second nature to her. As the waiter appeared, a tall, genial man with a pointy beard, she said hello and uttered the phrase with which, again, she was to become extremely familiar.
‘Ho una prenotazione—per dieci persone.’
‘Yes,’ said the waiter, ushering them back outside, where there was a long table set; under a vine-covered awning. ‘A booking for ten persons. Is here.’
‘Oh, it’s so marvellous!’ said Jacquetta, clapping her hands. ‘Look at the dear little pots hanging above the oven! I’m in heaven!’
‘Where’s the loo, Tess dear?’ said Andrea.
The waiter smiled at Tess, almost sympathetically.
‘Jan, you go here, dear.’
‘No, I don’t mind, honestly, Diana. You go here. My hip is almost fully recovered and if I start to feel a twinge, I can just get up and move around.’
I Remember You Page 16
