‘Oh. Right. Now, Carolyn, where are you sitting?’
Tess had to agree with Jan; she, too, had no idea what Leonora Mortmain was doing here. Though her name had been on the list since February, Tess had never really thought that she would actually come. She wasn’t someone you could imagine in any other setting than that of Langford, with her black clothes, slow gait, imperious bearing, cold stare. Yet here she was, in a backstreet pizzeria in Trastevere, sitting next to Tess (though Tess knew that was because no one else would sit next to her), gnarled, beringed hands clutching her ebony cane, expression set, her mouth almost exactly a straight line.
Tess realized two things: that she had never really had a conversation with Leonora Mortmain, not since she was a teenager, and that she was much older than she’d thought, close up, as it were. She was so incongruous, here, even amongst this gathering. As the fluster of sitting down eased and the group arranged itself, she turned to the old lady and smiled, in a ‘well, here we are!’ way, but Mrs Mortmain blinked slowly, looked down and then up, totally ignoring her. With a heavy heart, Tess wondered ignobly if she’d have to sit next to her for every meal. It was going to be a long week if that were the case.
After they had ordered the meal (and after Jacquetta had asked for an Italian menu rather than an English one, saying she actually found it easier to understand the original than the translation) and after the wine had been put on the tables, the mood relaxed somewhat. No one was sure who was to play what role yet, as is always the way with holidays; and though Tess was their leader, she was young enough to be their daughter.
Diana, who had earlier snapped at Andrea about the room allocation, turned to her and said, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, Andrea—did you ever make that trip to Norfolk Lavender when you were visiting your sister?’
And Andrea, very much mollified, said, ‘Oh, thanks for remembering, Diana. Well, no—’ turning to Tess’s end of the table with what could only be described as a snarl. ‘It was when the campaign was keeping me so busy, so I rather had to rush back.’
‘What a shame,’ said Diana, loudly.
Ignoring this, Leonora Mortmain turned slowly and said to Tess, ‘Was your mother a fan of Thomas Hardy?’
‘Um, I don’t know,’ said Tess, alarmed. ‘Why?’
‘Your name,’ said the old woman slowly. ‘I should have thought that was obvious from my question. Excuse me.’ She moved her glass away from her neighbour’s and took a sip, oblivious to her—it was Jan—look of scorn.
‘Oh,’ said Tess, enlightened. ‘Well, I’m called Tessa, not Tess. I hate Tess of the D’Urbervilles, actually.’
‘Really?’ Leonora swivelled towards her.
‘Yes,’ said Tess. ‘Total drip, if you ask me.’
‘A drip?’ said Leonora, as if she’d never heard the word before. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean I never liked her. I don’t know why schoolgirls are always swooning about her and her horrible life. It’s like Melanie versus Scarlett in Gone with the Wind. Who wants to be Melanie?’
‘That novel,’ Leonora told her sternly, ‘is not a book with which I am familiar.’
Tess sighed inwardly. If Leonora Mortmain thought Gone with the Wind was a bit fresh, she’d better not ask her what she thought of Lace, let alone Life with my Sister Madonna, which she and Francesca had recently devoured. ‘I mean that I don’t want to be like her. Girls shouldn’t want to be like her,’ she said. ‘They should want to be like—’ she searched for inspiration—‘Well, like Jane Eyre. She was independent, she fought for herself in a time when that was almost impossible. Well, perhaps you’d want to be a bit cheerier than Jane Eyre, she did get married in grey, after all.’ Leonora eyed her with something approaching alarm. ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles—’ she dropped her hands to her lap—‘she just lets things happen to her,’ she said.
‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ Leonora Mortmain nodded. ‘I do,’ she added quietly. ‘How interesting.’ She had large hands for such a small woman. Her long fingers played with the bread in front of her, squashing it into the oilcloth covering the table. ‘You say that a woman should live for herself, not in the shadow of others.’
Tess looked at her. ‘Yes,’ she said, wondering what she meant. ‘Though I admit, sometimes it’s hard to know whether you’re doing the right thing in going for it, or simply being pig-headed, whether you’ll ruin everything.’
‘What does your friend Adam think about that?’ asked Leonora Mortmain.
Tess was genuinely startled. She put her wine glass down on the table and held it steady, as if a tremor had just disturbed them. ‘Adam?’ she said. ‘No idea, why should it m-matter what Adam thinks?’
The old woman was watching her, and there was something indefinable in her eyes. Tess heard herself, and realized she must have sounded rude. ‘Well,’ Leonora Mortmain said. ‘It must be interesting, for the pair of you, having grown up together, with the same passion for the Classics. You may recall I gave your friend a scholarship to that effect.’
‘Oh. Yes, of course,’ said Tess warily, thankful again that it hadn’t been her who’d been so blessed, for Leonora Mortmain’s behaviour towards Adam had been bizarre. She had closely followed—and had never been pleased with—his progress through the excellent public school he had been sent to and when, after his mother died, Adam had given up on university she had been actively rude to him. She had written to him, angrily severing all ties. Tess remembered one afternoon that summer at Adam’s house, the clutter of Philippa’s uncleared life around them, lying on the floor naked together, breathing heavily. She had pulled a shower of papers onto the floor with them, one of which was this letter. He had told her what was in it, smiling ruefully, and they had laughed at the spitefulness, the pointlessness of it: what business was it of hers? He’d lost his mother! Why should he care what old Mrs Mortmain thought?
‘My point,’ Leonora Mortmain was saying, ‘is that you, with your ability, have risen further than Adam, with his. And given his gift for the Classics, it seems a little strange. He has never left Langford, and you have. He has never done anything which—’
Tess interrupted her. ‘Mrs Mortmain, I’m afraid—’ She saw Adam’s kind face, his ruffled hair, his tall frame as he ambled beside her, and she couldn’t bear it. ‘He is my best friend,’ she said. The old woman lowered her lids and looked at her. There was a pause.
‘Again, I see what you mean,’ said Leonora Mortmain. ‘You are rather like me. I have thought that before.’ Her hands fiddled in her handbag with the little book she always carried around, a slim old volume in faded buttercup cloth.
Tess looked at the book, to see what it was, but Mrs Mortmain snapped her bag shut in a fury. ‘Like me?’ Tess said, collecting herself, trying not to sound horrified. When she and her sister had been little, they used to play a game: who is most like Mrs Mortmain. It was designed to scare the other one as much as possible. If Stephanie could hear this conversation now, she’d laugh her socks off.
Tess was horrified, but merely said, ‘Oh! Oh, really.’
‘Yes,’ Leonora Mortmain said calmly, but she did not elaborate further. One hand was still clutching the cane; with the other, she smoothed her red paper napkin over her lap, as if it were finest linen. ‘Did you know his mother? Philippa?’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Tess, surprised. ‘I grew up next door to her.’
‘You went to school with her, did you not?’ Leonora Mortmain licked her lips, her eyes focused on something far away in her mind. ‘Ah, yes, you did.’
Tess looked at her. ‘No, Mrs Mortmain—I grew up with her son. Adam is my age.’
‘I know that,’ Leonora Mortmain said crossly, as if Tess had just insulted her. ‘Of course I know that. Please—give me some more water, if you would.’
Somewhere, a church bell rang, a twanging, strange sound, and the first of the pizzas arrived, scented with thyme and oregano, and the party relaxed after the rigours of the day. And then someo
ne cleared their throat, loudly.
‘Well, cheers, everyone,’ said Ron, half-standing up, a little awkwardly. ‘Here’s to—the holiday!’ and they all—apart from Leonora Mortmain—raised their glasses, and so the moment passed.
But later that night, as Tess was lying awake in bed with the shutters a little open, watching the black shadow of the trees play out against the silver light on the wall, she remembered the conversation. How strange Mrs Mortmain was. She, Tess, reminded her of herself! How awful. She pressed her hand to her heart, it must be indigestion, she told herself. OK, it was awkward between them, but she would never, ever stand by and listen while anyone was rude about Adam. Especially Leonora Mortmain. He was her oldest friend. And there, in the darkness, she closed her eyes and thought of him, how much she loved him and wanted to protect him. And suddenly everything else that had been worrying her seemed many, many miles away. Which it was. And a good time to put it all behind her. Which it was. Finally, in that strange room in a strange Roman hotel, Tess slept.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On that first morning in Rome, as she led her group across the Ponte Sisto, the bridge that led from Trastevere into the heart of the city, Tess thought of Mr Eager in A Room with A View, quoting the Punch cartoon. ‘What did we see in Rome?’ an American child asks her father. ‘Oh, yeah. Guess Rome was where we saw the yellow dawg.’
It was a hot, cloudless day. Listless Senegalese men spread fake designer bags out on rugs, or threw spinning holographic circles up into the air and caught them, mesmerizing a small group of Italian children. The river sliding slowly by below the bridge was a soupy grey colour, fringed with trees, shredded plastic bags caught in the branches and rustling in the wind. In the distance, she could see black pines and the white marble of St Peter’s and across the bridge lay the heart of the greatest empire ever, and to her the most beautiful city on earth.
She had spent a happy month here when she was at university, and she still remembered it well; she wanted the others to love it as much as she did. But she was too busy making sure Jan and Carolyn weren’t too far ahead, and that Leonora Mortmain hadn’t fallen too far behind, that they were going in the right direction, that everything was in place, this first morning of her first teaching holiday.
‘Up there is the Vatican. And the Castel Sant’ Angelo,’ she said, pointing upstream. ‘That’s where Tosca threw herself off.’
‘Oh!’ squawked Jan. ‘How horrible!’ She shuddered.
‘It didn’t really happen,’ said Jacquetta graciously. ‘Don’t worry.’
They were over the other side of the bridge. Tess clapped her hands. ‘We’re heading into the centre now, and going through the old Jewish Ghetto. The streets are pretty confusing, so we need to stick together,’ she told them, feeling like a nursery school teacher. ‘No wandering off and looking in windows at anything. We’ll never find each other. OK?’
‘Yes,’ they all chorused. ‘Right, let’s go.’
They were walking towards a ruined stack of white marble pillars at the end of the road, the remains of the Teatro di Marcello. ‘This is what I love about Rome,’ Tess said. ‘You can walk along a normal street and right slap bang in the middle is a theatre built by Julius Caesar.’
‘Wow,’ breathed Liz, standing next to her. ‘That’s amazing.’
It was amazing, Tess thought. She patted Liz on the arm, and cut behind the theatre, the rest of the group following her in the sunshine as they threaded their way towards the Capitoline Hill.
There are people who say the Forum is the greatest archaeological site there is, and Tess was one of them. For her, it wasn’t that it was the best-preserved—it wasn’t, as anyone who’s been there could tell you. A great deal of imagination is required to put yourself there, in the shoes (or sandals) of a young senator in Imperial Rome, hurrying along the Via Sacra on his way to the Curia, the Senate House through the busy Forum, its streets stuffed with the booksellers and soldiers, slaves carrying litters, merchants of all kinds hawking their wares, the food stalls bursting with delicacies from all corners of the empire. Today though, the pillars of the great temples are often all but demolished, grass grows over the house where the Vestal Virgins lived, stones lie randomly about, hardly anything is marked, tourists stand around in bemusement, not quite sure what they should be looking at but—but…
‘If you apply a little imagination,’ Tess told her group, gathered at the Rostra at the far end of the Forum, ‘you can see it all. Here,’ she said, looking around her and smiling, because she was so glad to be there, ‘is where Mark Antony spoke about Julius Caesar, after he’d been stabbed to death by his own colleagues, on his way to the Senate House. Close your eyes.’ She did the same. ‘Just close your eyes and imagine.’
She could see it in her mind’s eye, as clearly as she ever could. She opened her eyes again; they were looking at her, slightly bemused.
‘I think I’ve got something in my contact lens,’ Andrea said, after a pause.
‘OK,’ said Tess, climbing off the stone on which she had been standing.
‘I can imagine it,’ Claire said, eagerly. ‘Only—it’s a bit like Gladiator.’
‘That’s fine!’ said Tess, pleased. ‘Better than nothing.’
‘I can too, then,’ said Ron.
‘These weren’t ruins,’ Tess said. ‘These were temples to wealth and prosperity. Like sky-scrapers in New York. Or stately homes in Britain.’ She put up her hand to shield her face from the sun, which was rising higher in the sky. ‘Come over here…’
They walked behind the temple of the Vestal Virgins, overgrown with wild pink roses, to the edge of the Forum, where the Colosseum rose up in the distance.
‘Look at the Arch of Titus. It shows the slaves carrying the huge menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem. No one knows what happened to it, it was the holiest object in the temple and it was vast, ten feet wide—and where is it now?’
‘Where is it now?’ Diana repeated blankly.
‘Don’t know,’ Tess said softly. They breathed in, in awe. ‘No one does. It disappeared when Rome was sacked by the Goths. But it must be somewhere.’
‘It’s hidden in the Vatican,’ said Ron, nodding definitely. ‘Read a book about it a couple of years ago.’
‘Wow,’ said Jan. ‘Really?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Ron, as Andrea looked at him in admiration and Leonora Mortmain turned away in annoyance. ‘If you knew some of the stuff those people had nicked over the years…Oh, yeah.’
‘Someone’s been reading too much Da Vinci Code,’ said Diana, not unkindly.
‘No smoke without fire, Diana,’ Ron said snappishly, jumping off the edge of the mound of grass on which he was standing, next to the great arch. ‘No smoke without fire.’
It was in the Campo dei Fiori that it happened. At the north end, where they were sitting having coffee and tea, weary from a day’s traipsing around a city in a way that no twenty-mile run could match. Leonora Mortmain looked exhausted, and sat quietly in the shade, her wide-brimmed hat hiding her face, a cup of tea by her side. Even Jacquetta was a little subdued, though she still managed to tell several people who were listening that Giovanni, a very dear friend of her and John, had lived on the other side of the Campo. The fruit and vegetable stalls that crowd into the square in the early morning were packed up and gone, a few desultory oranges and strips of wet lettuce on the ground the only sign that it had been there.
Drinking her lemonade, suddenly Tess remembered that the eastern side of the square had some ruins of another theatre, the Theatre of Pompey, which was where Julius Caesar had been stabbed in 44BC. She couldn’t recall exactly where they were though, or even if they were visible to the naked eye these days. Looking at the dishevelled and tired group, she knew she couldn’t ask them to wander over there on the off chance.
‘I’m just going to look for something,’ she said, getting up, the blister on her foot throbbing as she did. ‘I’ll only be a minute. Stay here.’
> They all nodded mutely, like children, and Tess walked swiftly through the busy square, filled with tourists, Italians lounging having coffee, walking their dogs, the queue outside the bakery as long as ever. She turned off, onto a little square which was called the Piazza del Biscione. She was sure the foundations of the theatre were here.
Suddenly, there was chaos. She was flung by what seemed like a huge force, against a wall, and felt a sharp scraping pain on her right arm as she did. She looked up, totally disorientated, as a moped sped past her, followed by a dark-haired man running after it, shouting and swearing.
‘Aspetta! Aspetta! Uno ladro, aiuto!’
He bumped into her as she stood up, and ricocheted off her, so that she fell against the wall again, crying out in pain. The moped had disappeared. An Italian lady appeared from the square, also running, out of breath. She shook her fist at the young man and they both shouted at each other, asking questions. He scratched his head, she waved her hand in the direction the bike had taken. A crowd of idle onlookers gathered. Tess gripped her arm and stood up, leaning against the wall and wincing, and the man turned to her and much to her surprise, said in an American accent, ‘Hey. Are you OK?’
‘Yes,’ Tess said. ‘Just my arm—ouch.’
He took her hand and twisted her arm towards him, while the woman looked on.
‘What happened?’ Tess said, screwing up her face as he brushed grit off her arm. The skin was torn, the graze was long, grey and bloody.
‘Some guys on a moped, they stole this woman’s purse,’ he said. ‘I was trying to catch them, till you got in my way.’
‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ said Tess, feeling as if it was her fault. She winced as he gripped her upper arm.
‘You haven’t broken anything, but your shoulder’s gonna hurt tomorrow.’ He patted her arm, and smiled down at her briefly. ‘I’m Peter, by the way.’
I Remember You Page 17
