by David Nobbs
'Well, if you don't want it . . .'
'I didn't say that, Lawrence. I don't need it, but I do want it. I accept your offer. Wait until "that girl" hears about this. Thanks, Lawrence.'
We shook hands and I went to the door. I should have left the room with calm dignity. What I did was wrong. I turned and I said to Lawrence, from the doorway of his irritatingly tidy living room, 'Young Mallard's a phoney. Young Mallard's a quack.'
'You're not well, Alan.'
I flapped my arms.
'Quack quack quack,' I said.
I don't have as many messages for the world as you might expect from a man who has studied the great philosophers for thirty-eight years, but here's one good piece of advice. If you are attempting to stand on your dignity, don't do duck impressions.
NINETEEN
'I've looked in bird books and stuff and they don't tell me the sort of thing I really want to know.'
We were sitting outside a restaurant in Trastevere, the oldest part of what it seems ridiculous to call modern Rome, since it is all old. All around us, in the narrow streets and alleys, there were crowded restaurants and bars. All around us, in the velvet night, there was the buzz of happy conversation. There was no sign of the aggression that is so near the surface in British cities.
'I mean, you know, it's nice to know what birds are and be able to say, "flippin' 'eck, that's a lesser spotted twigcruncher", but I'm not that bothered whether I know what they are or not.'
It was so typical of Ange that she should waffle on about bird life in the middle of a great ancient city, with not a bird in sight except on a plate. I had to fight with myself to remain calm, not to feel irritated. We had eaten a very typical Roman meal, a great array of antipasti followed by lamb cacciatora. I had insisted that she tried local specialities. It was the one demand I made upon her.
'I mean, it's enough for me that it's a bird and it's lovely, whatever it's called. It's the same with those buildings you've been showing me.'
We hadn't done much sight-seeing yet. We had only arrived that afternoon, but as we wandered from the hotel to find somewhere typical to eat, I had ventured a few remarks about the age and style of the buildings. I had talked about the mathematical principles that underpinned Renaissance architecture, about the joys of proportion. I had touched on this in Oxford, and now I had been testing her, to see if she remembered. I don't think she did. 'It's better than Romford, I'll give you that,' she had commented. Over our drinks – she had a beer, I a negroni – in the delightful Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, I had talked of Michelangelo and of Palladio, and his influence on the English country house. But now she was talking about birds.
'I mean, I don't need to know how many eggs they lay and what size the eggs are and what colour they are and that.'
She had said, in the plane, that she had cried when I had told her that I wasn't going to be giving the Ferdinand Brinsley Memorial Lecture after all. That had moved me deeply.
'I mean I'd really like to know what it feels like to be a bird. Do they see colour as the same colour as we do?'
I had booked the Rome trip without telling her, sprung it on her as a surprise when she came to stay the night in my rooms. She had squealed with delight and showered me with kisses.
Now it was as if she wasn't even noticing where she was. We were having a conversation that we could have had in Oxford.
I had to be careful not to get irritated with her. Our trip would fail completely if I showed even the slightest sign of irritation. And why should I? Her thoughts were fascinating, and I was not her teacher.
What saved the trip was that I had never been to Rome either, and the sheer majesty and history of it astonished me as much as it astonished her. And it did astonish her. The city gripped her. It was almost too vast, I realised, for her to comprehend. I decided to approach it through some of its smaller, less known treasures. There was a storm on the second day, and we sheltered in the art gallery of the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, a great palace and a beautiful, elegant, intimate gallery. I had been told by a colleague that, whatever we saw in Rome, we must see the portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velasquez. It was in a little room, accompanied only by a Bernini bust of the same man. 'I feel as though I bleeding well know him,' said Ange. 'Hi, Popey.' A couple looked round at her in horror, but I squeezed her arm and loved her more than ever.
It was the Caravaggio that she really liked: not his famous Rest during the Flight into Egypt, but the picture of a young woman next to it, the Maddalene Penitente, a girl sexy rather than beautiful, almost ugly in the sullen misery of her personal reformation – she had been a prostitute, as was shown by the clothes she was wearing.
'She's alive,' Ange said. 'I can feel her misery. I feel like that sometimes.'
Ange Penitente. I liked the thought. I even felt that it was not entirely irrelevant.
When we left the Palazzo, we walked to the Piazza Della Rotonda, and visited the Pantheon, the world's oldest building still in use. To my astonishment I found tears springing to my eyes at the thought of all the years that great building had seen, and Ange was in awe too. She gawped at the great pillars. Her eyes widened at the scale of the dome and the rain splashing down from the hole at its top, the oculus, which provided the only light. She couldn't believe that it had been built by the Emperor Hadrian in AD118–125. I held her tight and felt her shiver with excitement.
We hurried to a bar in the square, and sat there, snug under an awning, as the rain continued to ping off the cobbles. An itinerant immigrant was trying to sell umbrellas. He was protecting himself with one that had two bare spikes poking out. We laughed, and Ange said, 'Would you buy a used umbrella off that man?' Orientals in plastic macs scurried across the square, still taking photographs. Waiters brought ice buckets to remove surplus water from the top surfaces of the awnings.
Ange said, 'I can't get over that girl in that picture. What an artist. He seemed so much more now than all the others, know what I mean? What was his name again?'
I explained that he was really Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, that Caravaggio was the town he came from and he had come to be known simply by that name.
'Gordon bloody Bennett,' she said. 'If I was really famous I could be known as Romford!' She went silent for a moment, and then she said, 'I might have done something in my life if I hadn't been born in Romford.'
'You still can,' I said. 'It isn't a terminal condition.'
But I think she thought it was.
We would have to go to the Trevi Fountain, but I had another fountain in mind. I had spotted it in the guide book and knew that Ange would like it. It was the small, exquisite Fontana delle Tartarughe, the Fountain of the Tortoises, in the tiny Piazza Mattei. I came upon it as if by accident, though it was deliberate, of course. I was quite surprised to find myself so devious.
It was not a large fountain. Four bronze youths each rested one foot on the head of a dolphin. Above the youths was the bowl of the fountain, and, a hundred years later, four perfectly sculpted little tortoises had been added. In a city full of such vast fountains, I think it was their smallness that particularly appealed to me. It looked as if the youths were pushing the tortoises into the bowl to have a drink. I thought Ange would adore the tortoises, but on this occasion, as on others, I was naïve.
'What beautiful boys,' she said, and it was my turn to shiver.
Neither of us took a camera to Rome. We were almost the only tourists not to be snapping away. It was enough for us to look, and Ange did look. We both loved the gentle colours of the palaces and houses – the ochres and russets and burnt siennas, never anything brash or intrusive. I even grew used to the ever-present graffiti. Rather like Ange's tattoo, they spared us from the burden of perfection.
Ange's comments during those magical days in Rome were a mixture of the naïve and the shrewd, of the serious and the silly. I loved her so much that I loved them all.
As we stood in the crowds staring at the theatrical excesses of the
Trevi Fountain, I ventured a bit of historical detail – I had to be careful not to sound like an Oxford don. I explained that the site marked the terminal of the Aqua Virgo aqueduct built in 19BC, but the fountain itself was only completed in 1762.
'I know they had problems with their builders at number sixty-seven,' she said, 'but that's ridiculous.'
Later that day she described a tiny human tragedy with such economy and style that I wanted to kiss her there and then. Referring to a spectacularly unhelpful attendant in a museum cloakroom, she said, 'She doesn't smile cos nobody leaves her any money, and nobody leaves her any money cos she doesn't smile.'
I made a mistake on the third morning. I bought an English newspaper. I read of widespread outrage that our soldiers in Afghanistan were paid two pounds a day. I read of some snivelling footballer on £50,000 a week who was complaining that nobody loved him. I felt such anger at our society and its values, and I felt anger at myself for being so unpolitical, so academic, so craven. I looked at Ange and I knew that while it was permissible to spoil my holidays, I mustn't spoil hers. I forced my anger to subside, and put the paper in a bin.
I booked two guided tours, one to the Colosseum and Forum, the other to St Peter's and the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums. I booked them with an Irish outfit I'd found on the internet, and I did so purely in order to avoid the queues, but it was a good move. Ange was hugely impressed over my use of the internet, and the Irish girl who took us round was delightful. I could not have explained things to Ange without sounding like the lecturer I was. This girl brought everything to life, and turned me into a student.
She peopled the Forum with the ancient Romans and Ange was fascinated. The guide told us that there was a theory that Julius Caesar had arranged his death because he was suffering from arthritis and the medicine he took for it was causing him to lose his memory. He was a proud man who wanted to die in strength and not in weakness.
'Julius Caesar, President Kennedy, Princess Di,' whispered Ange. 'Some truths are too important ever to be known.'
I was astonished by her perception. Five minutes later she was laughing like a schoolgirl at the sight of a nun eating a huge pistachio ice cream. That was Ange.
I found the Forum and the Colosseum exciting, but also sobering. Here were the relics of a civilisation that had become decadent and crumbled. I thought about my morning newspaper and about our civilisation. It wasn't hard to feel depressed. Thank goodness Ange was there, to make such thought impermissible. On with the motley.
The Sistine Chapel is so famous, and so crowded, and it's such a performance to get to it, that when one is there it is extremely difficult to do justice to it. It's the ceiling that everybody comments on, but the walls are also covered with great paintings. There was far too much to absorb in the fifteen minutes that we were allowed. There was a man whose job it was to say 'S'ssh!' every twenty seconds all day every day, and another man with a gravelly voice calling out 'No photo' at intervals. It was all too much for Ange and she giggled. I understood but I hated it. She nudged me and whispered, 'One of life's great losers.'
'Who?' I asked.
'The man who designed the floor of the Sistine Chapel.'
It was a funny thought, I had to admit that, but we only had eleven minutes left to admire all this great art. It wasn't the time for jokes. I took great care to hide my irritation, though.
After the Sistine Chapel I found it difficult to respond to St Peter's Basilica. 'Enormous' was the only word that sprang to my mind. Our guide showed us the tombs of several Popes, and I could feel nothing.
Ange must have been feeling the same, because she said, 'I'm a bit poped out, know what I mean?' and I was able to say, 'Yes, Ange, I know exactly what you mean.'
We wandered back across the Tiber with its elegant, restrained stone bridges, and drifted as if pulled by a magnet into the more secular atmosphere of the Piazza Navona, one of the liveliest of all Rome's great . . . I was going to say 'squares', but none of them are square . . . piazzas. The streets of Rome can be rather dark and stern. Their beauty is severe – and then one turns a corner, and there is a piazza, full of sunlight and life. All the piazzas are beautiful, and they all have at least one fountain, and most of them have an obelisk as well. I had to admit to myself, though not to Ange, that even my beloved Oxford paled.
We sat outdoors in one of the many cafés, and I realised that I hadn't hidden my irritation in the Sistine Chapel quite well enough.
'You were a bit pissed off with me in the Sistine Chapel,' she said.
I didn't reply.
'I did like it,' she said. 'I thought it was fantastic. The Day of Judgment, wow. Cool.'
It was not the adjective I would have chosen, but I was pleased that she had been impressed.
'I only looked at one or two panels in the ceiling cos there was too much, know what I mean?' she said. 'I liked that one where God is just going to breathe life into Adam. That was fantastic. Well, they all were. And him up there for years and getting it just right so we can see it. It would have been a great achievement even if everything he'd painted turned out to be a load of bollocks. But, you know it's going to be fantastic and so when it is fantastic it's difficult to be excited. If we was there alone, Alan. Oh, Alan, if we'd been there alone.'
I squeezed her hand. She sipped her negroni. I'd managed to persuade her to try one. 'That geezer who kept going "S'ssh",' she said. 'I wonder what his job interview was like. "Would you please say 'S'ssh' for me?" "S'sssh." "Excellent. The job's yours."'
We walked slowly through the square, arm in arm in the fierce sun of early evening. Next day would be our last. Distant fear was beginning to corrupt my joy. We stood and looked at Bernini's great Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi, in which four great rivers, the Ganges, the Danube, the Nile and the River Plate, are represented by four giants. I explained the symbolism, trying hard once again not to sound donnish.
'I don't think things should need to be explained,' she said. 'I like art better when you don't have to explain nothink.'
Next day we wandered along the Via Condotti, past the great elegant shops of the famous designers, and it never occurred to me – oh dear, how hard it is to admit this – it never occurred to me to offer to buy her something beautiful, something elegant, as a memento of this great trip. And I thought my mother was mean. I'd been a bachelor too long, and I would remain a bachelor if I went on like that. It was rather like the story of the unfriendly woman in the museum cloakroom.
A cripple with one stunted leg and one stunted arm stood in the middle of this street of money. None of the elegant people could bear to look at him or give him some coins, and, to my shame, neither could I. I thought that Ange would rebuke me, but she said, 'I think the Catholic Church is rich enough to look after Rome's beggars without our help, don't you?' Straight to the heart of things, our Ange.
We sat on the Spanish Steps, looking at tourists showing too much of the wrong kind of flesh.
'Why do women with that fatty thing, not cholesterol, the other thing, sod it, I can't think of the word, oh yes, that's right, cellulite, wear such short shorts?' she asked.
I felt an exhilarating sense of fun at that moment, under that cloudless Roman sky.
'I don't know,' I said in a rather arch and indeed slightly triumphant tone. 'Why do women with that fatty thing, not cholesterol, the other thing, sod it, I can't think of the word, oh yes, that's right, cellulite, wear such short shorts?'
'It wasn't a riddle,' she said.
We leant on each other's shoulders and laughed and laughed at our silliness. When the laughter had died away, I felt ashamed of the tourists, especially the American and English ones. The elegance of the Romans was a constant rebuke.
We drifted towards the Piazza del Popolo with its two huge churches and its obelisk in scaffolding. We stopped for lunch. Ange had a pizza, I had spaghetti alla carbonara, and I made another mistake. Conscious with sudden pain of its being the last lunch of our trip, I said, 'I want to sh
ow you the world.'
