Читать книгу The Invitation: Escape with this epic, page-turning summer holiday read - Lucy Foley, Lucy Foley - Страница 9

He walks all the way from his apartment. He likes walking: there is always something new to see in this city. It seems to shift and grow, revealing glimpses of other lives, other times. There are layers of history here, times at which the barrier between the present and past appears tissue-thin. He might rip at it and reveal another age entirely: Roman, Medieval, Renaissance. This reminder that the present and his place in it are just as transient has a strong appeal. Beside so much history, one’s own past becomes rather insignificant.

Of course, there is a more recent time that must be banished from conversation and thought. The war meant humiliation, tragedy. It meant hardship and poverty too. People want prosperity now, they want nice clothes, food on the table, things. It is the same in England. There was the jubilation over the victory, the hailing of the returned heroes. And then there was the great forgetting.

The address is a little way beyond the Roman Forum, and Hal skirts the edge of it. The stones at this time are in silhouette, backlit by the lights of the city. At this time they appear older yet: as though placed by the very first men.

The place turns out to be a red-brick medieval tower, soaring several storeys above the surrounding rooftops. He has seen it before and wondered about it. He had guessed an embassy, a department of state affairs, the temple of some strange sect, even. Never had he imagined that it might be a private residence.

Torches have been lit in brackets about the entrance, and Hal can see several gleaming motor cars circling like carp, disclosing guests in their evening finery. There are bow ties and tails, full-length gowns. He is not prepared for this. His suit is well-made but old and worn with use, faded at the elbows of the jacket and frayed at the pockets of the trousers. He has lost weight, too, since he last wore it, thanks to his poor diet of coffee and the occasional sandwich. He can’t afford to eat properly. When he first wore it he had been much broader about the chest and shoulders. Now he feels almost like a boy borrowing his father’s clothes.

All day it has been threatening rain, but there have been several grey days like this without a drop, so he hasn’t bothered with an umbrella or raincoat. But only twenty yards or so from the entrance the heavens finally open, like a bad joke. There is no warning, only the sudden chaos of the downpour, rain smoking across the pavement towards him. Instantly his hair, shirt and suit are drenched. If he appeared bedraggled before he must seem now like something that has crawled its way out of the Tiber. He swears. A woman, emerging from one of the sleek cars, darts an alarmed glance in his direction and hurries in through the doorway.

At the entrance he feels the doorman’s gaze irradiate his person, find him wanting. ‘Cognome, per favore?’

‘Fiori.’

The man looks at his list, frowns. ‘E nome?’

‘Federico.’

He knows even before the man looks back up at him that it has not worked. ‘You are not he,’ the doorman says, with evident pleasure. ‘I know that man. He works for the Ministero. It is my job to remember faces. You are not he.’

Hal hesitates, wondering if there is any use in arguing with the man. After all, if he is confident that he knows Federico by sight … But it is worth a try. ‘Ma, ho un invito . . .’ He fishes the card from his pocket.

The man is already shaking his head. Hal takes a step back. Only now that he is about to be turned away does he realize how much he has been looking forward to the evening. Not merely as a means to making new contacts, but as a taste of another side of life in the city – the sort glimpsed occasionally through the windows of cars, and the better sort of restaurant. It would have been an experience. The thought of his apartment, cold and dark, depresses him. The long walk back, through the wet streets. He should have known that Fede’s scheme would be useless.

He tells himself that really, he wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway. He doesn’t need to experience that life: it isn’t the one he has sought in coming to Rome. And yet there has always been a part of him – a part he isn’t necessarily proud of – that has always been drawn towards the idea of a party. Perhaps it is because of his memories of the ones his mother used to throw in Sussex: the lawns thronged with guests and lights reflected in the dark waters of the harbour beyond. To be in the midst of this, with a glass of some watered-down punch in his hand, was to feel he had stepped into another, adult world. Funny, how one spent one’s childhood half-longing to be out of it.

‘What is the problem here?’

Hal glances up to see that a woman has appeared in the doorway alongside the man. She wears an emerald green gown, almost medieval in style, a silver stole about her neck. She is quite elderly, in her mid-seventies, perhaps, her face incredibly lined. But she has the bearing of a queen. Her hair is very dark, and if artifice is involved in keeping it this way it is well concealed.

The doorman turns to her, triumphant but obsequious. ‘This man, my Contessa, he is not who he says he is.’

Hal feels her gaze on him. Her eyes are amazing, he realizes, like liquid bronze. She studies him for a time without speaking.

‘Someone once told me,’ she says then, ‘that a party is only an event if there is at least one interesting gatecrasher in attendance.’ She raises her eyebrows, continuing to study him. ‘Are you a gatecrasher?’

He hesitates, deciding what to say. Is it a trick? Should he persist with the lie, or admit the truth? He wavers.

‘Well,’ she says, suddenly, ‘you certainly look interesting, all the same. Come, let us find you a drink.’ She turns, and he sees now that the fur stole falls all the way to the ground behind.

He follows her up the curved staircase, illuminated by further lighted sconces. They pass numerous closed doors, as might confront the hero in the world of a fairytale. The gown, the centuries-old bricks, the flames of the torches: modern Rome suddenly feels a long way away. From above them come the sounds of a party, voices and music, but distorted as though heard through water.

She calls back to him. ‘You are not Italian, are you?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’ Half-Italian – but he won’t say that. The less you say, the fewer questions you invite. It is something to live by.

‘Even more interesting. Do you know how I guessed? It is not because of your Italian, I should add – it is almost perfect.’

‘No.’

‘Because of your suit, of course. I never make mistakes about tailoring. It is English-made, I think?’

‘Yes, it is.’ His father had it made up for him by his tailor.

‘Excellent. I like to be right. Now, tell me why you are here.’

‘My friend had an invitation. He thought I might want to come instead of him.’

‘No, Caro. I mean to ask why you are in Rome.’

‘Oh. For work.’

‘People do not come to Rome for work. There is always something more that drives them: love, escape, the hope of a new life. Which is it?’

Hal meets her eyes for as long as he is able, and then he has to look away. He felt for a second that she was seeing right into him, and that he was exposed. He understands, suddenly, that he won’t be able to get in without answering her question. He is reminded of the myth of the Sphinx at Thebes, asking her riddles, devouring those who answer wrongly.

‘Escape,’ he says. And it is true, he realizes. He had told himself Rome would be a new start, but it had been more about leaving the old behind. England had been too full of ghosts. The man he had been before the war was one of them; the spectre of his former happiness. And of all those who hadn’t come home – his friend, Morris, among them. Rome is full of ghosts, too – centuries of them. There is perhaps a stronger concentration of souls here than in any other place in the world: it is not the Eternal City for nothing. But the important thing is that they aren’t his ghosts.

She nods, slowly. And he wonders if he has made the exchange, given the thing demanded in return for entry. But no, her questions haven’t ended yet.

‘And what do you do here?’

‘I’m a journalist.’ As soon as he says it he decides he should have lied. People in her sort of position can be obsessive about privacy. She doesn’t seem disturbed by it, though.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Hal Jacobs. I doubt that you will have—’

But she is squinting at him, as though trying to work something out. Finally, she seems to have it. ‘Reviews,’ she says, triumphantly, ‘reviews of films.’

But no one read that column – that was the problem, as his editor at The Tiber had said.

‘Well, yes, I did write them. A couple of years ago now.’

‘They were brilliant,’ she says. ‘Molto molto acuto.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, surprised.

‘There was one you wrote of Giacomo Gaspari’s film, La Elegia. And I thought to myself, there are all these Italian critics failing to see its purpose, asking why anyone would want to look back to the war, that time of shame. And then there was an Englishman – you – who understood it absolutely. You wrote with such power.’

Elegy. Hal remembers the film viscerally, as though it is in some way seared into him.

‘After I read that,’ she says, ‘I thought: I must read everything this man has to write on film. You saw what others didn’t. But you stopped!’

Hal shrugs. ‘My editor thought my style was … too academic, not right for our readership.’ It had been replaced with an agony aunt column: ‘Gina Risponde . . .’ Roman housewives writing in to ask how to get their whites whiter, lonely men asking how to conceal a balding pate, young women eager to work in the capital asking whether it was really the immoral, dangerous place their parents spoke of.

The Contessa is shaking her head, as though over some great wrong. ‘But why would you work somewhere like …’ she seems to be searching for the name.

‘The Tiber?’

‘Yes. You should be writing for a national magazine.’

It must be nice, Hal thinks, to live in a world in which things are so easy. As though one might merely walk into the office of one of the bigger magazines and demand a job. There had been interviews. But nothing had come of it. And his work for The Tiber has – just about – allowed him to pay his rent, to feed himself.

‘I work there because they’ll have me.’

‘I wonder if they know how lucky they are.’ She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps when my film is made you can write a review of that. Only a good one, naturally.’

He remembers, now, Fede saying something about a film. ‘When will it be made?’

‘When I can afford it. It is why I am throwing this party – to try and persuade others they want to see it made too.’

‘Ah.’

‘I need to use all my powers of charm.’ She smiles, suddenly. ‘Do you think I can do it?’

He says, honestly, ‘Yes, I do.’ Because she does have it, a charisma beside which the charms of youth or beauty are so much blown thistledown.

She laughs. ‘I am suddenly delighted to have you at my party, Hal Jacobs.’ And then she beckons, with one beringed hand. ‘Please, follow me.’

Now they are reaching the top of the staircase where the final door stands open to reveal a seething crowd. As Hal steps into the room, his first thought is that he is surrounded by people of extraordinary beauty. But as the illusion thins, he realizes that this is not the case. There is ugliness here. But the gorgeous clothes and jewels and the very air itself – performed with scent and wine and expensive cigarettes – do a clever job of hiding the flaws.

As the Contessa steps toward the crowd, the energies of the room extend themselves toward her. Heads turn and several guests begin to make their way in her direction, as though drawn on invisible wires. She looks back at Hal.

‘I’m afraid that I am about to be busy,’ she says to him.

‘Of course. Please, go to your real guests.’

She smiles. ‘Hal Jacobs,’ she says. ‘I will remember.’ And then, before he can ask exactly what she means by this, she winks. ‘Enjoy my party.’ Then she walks into the crowd and is enveloped by it, lost from view.

Hal wanders through the throng, picking up a flute of spumante from a waiter and sipping it as he goes. One of the things that strikes him is the number of different nationalities in attendance. A few years ago, he was in the minority as an Englishman. Holidaymakers were only allowed to take £35 out of the country with them. Most stayed at home. Now, they are returning – and perhaps in greater numbers than before. He isn’t sure how he feels about this.

The thing that unifies this crowd, across nationalities, is the same thing that gave that initial impression of beauty. They are all of a type.

He attempts to catch the eye of the guests that pass him, but every gaze slides over him and then on, in search of more important fare. Several times, he launches himself forward into a group, tries to enter the conversation. He just needs that one opening, then he feels certain he will be able to make things stick. And yet it does not come. Mostly he is ignored. It is something that happens in increments: a guest steps slightly in front of him, or a comment he attempts to make is ignored, or the circle simply disperses so that he is left standing on his own. At first Hal can’t decide whether it is intentional or not. But on a couple of occasions he is quite actively frozen out. One man turns to give him a terrible stare, and Hal is so bemused by the impression of something like hatred, that he takes a step back. Apparently this set do not take well to newcomers. He is a cuckoo in the nest, and they know it. Usually, though it would be arrogance to admit it, Hal is used to being looked at by women. He has always been lucky in that respect. But here he is not given a second glance. Here something more than good looks is being searched out, something in which he is lacking. He is less than invisible.

Eventually, tired of the repeated humiliation and the noise and hot crush of bodies, he makes for the doors visible at the far end of the room, open onto a fire escape. He will finish his drink, he thinks, have a cigarette, and then go back in and make another attempt, buoyed by the alcohol. He will not leave here empty-handed; he merely needs a little time to regroup.

Outside he discovers a flight of stairs leading up, not down, to the roof of the tower itself. Curious, he climbs them. He is astonished to discover himself in the midst of a roof garden. Rome, in all its lamplit, undulating glory, is spread beneath him on all sides. He can see the dark blank of the Roman Forum, a few of the ancient stones made dimly visible by reflected lamplight; the marble bombast of the Altare della Patria with its winged riders like cut-outs against the starlit sky. Then, a little further away, the graceful cupola of St Peter’s, and further domes and spires unknown to him. A network of lamplit streets, some teeming with ant-like forms, others quiet, sleeping. He has never seen Rome like this.

For a vertiginous moment, he feels that he is floating above it all. Then the ground reforms itself beneath him; he begins to look around. There are palms and shrubs, the smell of the earth after the rain. He gropes for the word for it: petrichor.

He hears running water and discovers a fountain in which a stone caryatid, palely nude, pours water from her jug. Nearby, a bird caws, and with a great flustered commotion takes wing into the night. He peers after the black shape, surprisingly large. A parrot? An eagle? A phoenix? Any of these seem possible, here.

He appears to be quite alone. Clearly the opportunities presented by the crush inside are too good for the other guests to miss. He looks toward Trastevere. Somewhere down there he has gone to sleep every night since his arrival in the city, utterly ignorant of the fact that such wonders existed only a few miles away.

‘Hello.’

He turns towards the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out – the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress. Now he sees the fiery bud of a cigarette flare as she inhales. He is struck by the strange notion that she was not there before, that she has just alighted here like some magical winged creature.

‘Sorry,’ she says, and leans forward so her face is caught by the light spilling from the interior. His breath catches. He had somehow known from the voice that she would be beautiful, but had not been quite prepared for what has been revealed. And something strange: he feels the fact of it go through him like a sudden coldness.

She has sat back again now, and immediately he finds himself hoping for another look at her face. There is an intonation that he can’t quite place. American, but something else to it, too. Perhaps, he thinks, it is the accent of one who has lived in this rarefied sphere for a lifetime.

‘I’m Hal,’ he says, to fill the silence.

‘Hello, Hal,’ she says. A slender white arm appears then, and he sees the wink of diamonds about the fine bones of the wrist. ‘I’m Stella.’

He takes her hand, and finds it surprisingly warm in his.

She stands then, and comes to stand beside him at the rail. Now he can detect the scent of her: smoky, complex – a fragrance and something hers alone.

‘Look at it,’ she says. She is looking out at the city, leaning forward hungrily. ‘Don’t you wish,’ she says, ‘that you could dive in and swim in it?’ She really looks as though she might, he thinks – plunge off the side and into the night, like a white feather falling through the blackness.

For a few moments they gaze down in silence. The sounds of the nighttime city float up to them: the blare of a car horn, a woman’s laughter, a faraway trickle of music.

‘Do you know the city?’ he asks.

‘We had a tour … the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon …’

He is so struck by her use of ‘we’ that he can’t at first catch hold of what she is saying. She is still going, counting the sights off on her fingers: ‘St Peter’s, the Spanish Steps …’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’ve done the tourist trail.’

She frowns. ‘You don’t think that’s a good thing?’

‘It isn’t that,’ he says. ‘They’re wonders in their own right. But there’s more than that to this city.’

‘You know it well?’

‘I live here.’

‘I suppose there is a side to the city that I won’t ever see.’ She says it with an odd kind of sadness, as though she feels this loss.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose so. You’d never find my favourite things in a guide.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, such as the fact that the best time to see the Forum is at night, when there’s no one else there. And I know a bar where they play the best jazz outside of New Orleans. But I suppose you’re rather spoiled for choice, being an American.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever listened to jazz before. Not live. What else?’

‘A garden … almost completely hidden behind a high wall, a secret place. Unless you know how to find it.’ He catches himself. He sounds like a braggart. It isn’t like him.

‘You would show me?’ She says it in a rush, as if she has dared herself to ask it.

He is surprised. ‘Yes, if you’d like.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

He knows that it would be a bad idea. He should go back in there and make himself known to the great and important. This might be his only chance to mix with these people, to establish some sort of connection with them. And there is something about this situation that strikes him as perilous. He has spent the last few years keeping a careful guard upon himself, living within self-imposed limits. He should politely decline. Except he finds that he can’t quite bring himself to do so.

‘OK.’

‘Good.’

She doesn’t know anything about me, he thinks, and yet she is coming with me, a complete stranger, into the night of a foreign city.

‘Do you need to tell anyone?’ he asks her, remembering the we.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m alone.’

They make their way back down the steps and into the warm fog of cigarette smoke, the press of bodies. She attracts admiring glances, he notices, from both the men and women.

Near the door, his eyes meet the Contessa’s. He thinks he sees her look quickly to Stella and then back again. For a moment she frowns, as if working something out. And then she turns back to her companion.

*

Outside in the street her pale head and outfit glitter through the darkness as though summoning all of the light to them. She shields her face with one hand as the headlamps of a passing car strafe across her. The driver, a man, cranes for a view of her through the window. His look is greedy and Hal feels something close to hatred for him, this complete stranger.

She turns to him, awaiting his move. Suddenly he fears that nothing he can come up with will be enough.

They walk through the Forum, the dark stones standing sentinel. He points out the remains of the Temple of Saturn, of which only the ribs of the front portico remain. The Basilica Julia. He shows her – he is thankful for the moonlight that allows it – the detail that has always fascinated him more than anything else: the marks where the bored audiences of the trials held there had scratched games into the stone. She has seemed interested by it all, but suddenly he sees her shiver, pulling her wrap around herself.

‘You’re cold?’

‘No.’ She glances across at him. ‘Do you mind if we go somewhere else?’

‘Of course – why? Don’t you like it?’

‘Yes – no. I do, but this quiet … it does something to you.’ She takes a cigarette from a tin in her little reticule, and her lighter, and he sees that her fingers are trembling as she tries to trip the flame into life.

‘Here.’ He takes it from her and does it himself.

‘Thanks.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t mind. Somewhere – different.’

He takes her to a bar he knows, in a certain secret square. The place is full, even at this hour. She steps before him into the warmth of the place. As he follows he sees the glances of the other customers: lecherous, envious, reverential. With her outfit and her pale blonde hair she could be a movie star. But not a Monroe. There is something less immediate, more foreign about her appeal.

As soon as she has seated herself one of the waiters is hovering, ready to take her order.

‘What are you having?’ she asks.

‘Oh, I thought I’d have a beer. But please, have anything you’d like.’ If he has the cheap beer, he thinks, he can afford to buy her a couple of the more expensive offerings. But, to his surprise, she says: ‘I’ll have the same as you.’

In the corner, a small jazz trio – double bass, sax, trumpet – are playing a number so rough and fervent that one can feel the vibrations of it in one’s chest. He watches her as she listens, her head on one side, her eyes half-closed.

When the beers arrive, the sight of her sipping hers, sitting in her finery, with that diamond bracelet about her wrist, is so incongruous that it makes him smile. She looks at him, venturing a smile of her own.

‘What is it?’

‘You look as though you should be drinking champagne.’

‘I hate it,’ she says. ‘I never learned to like it.’ She takes another sip. ‘I like this, though.’

‘Good. It’s Italian. I always have it here.’ He doesn’t say: because it is the only one I can afford.

‘How long have you lived in Rome? For a while?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘For a few years.’

‘And where were you before?’

‘London.’

‘Ah. And why did you come to Rome?’

What was it the Contessa had said? There is always something more . . . love, escape, the hope of a new life.

‘I came here to write,’ he says, and is immediately surprised at himself. He hasn’t admitted this to anyone, not even Fede. Why did he say it, and to a stranger? But perhaps it is the very fact that she is a stranger.

‘Write what?’

‘A novel, I suppose.’ Next he will have to admit that he hasn’t written anything beyond the first paragraph. He must deflect attention from himself. ‘And you,’ he says quickly, ‘you’re here on holiday?’

‘Yes.’ He waits for an elaboration: how long she is visiting, where she is staying, who she is staying with – he remembers the ‘we’. He has learned this – that if you wait long enough, the interviewee will feel uncomfortable or bored enough to fill the gap. But she says nothing. She is a little too good at this game, he thinks. All he knows of her is her first name, and her nationality. And there is a question over even that, because there is that accent, that slippage revealing some foreign note beneath.

‘Where is home?’ he asks.

‘Home?’ She looks thrown, for a second.

‘Yes. Where do you come from?’

Funny, but the question seems to give her pause. It fits, he thinks, with his idea of some ethereal creature who comes from nowhere and might vanish back into the darkness in a moment. ‘I live in New York,’ she says.

‘And is this your first visit to Europe?’

‘Oh, no. But I haven’t—’ he sees her catch herself. Then, slowly, as if carefully choosing her words: ‘I haven’t travelled to Europe for a while.’

The war, he thinks, probably. It has taken a while for Americans to start coming back.

She takes another sip, and as she does he sees something he had not noticed before. It gives him a shock. On her left hand, two of the fingers are completely missing: the smallest and the ring. The trauma is clearly an old one, the skin healed over the knuckles, but ridged with scar tissue. It is a strange thing, this violent absence, because she seems to him so complete and unblemished. Without warning she puts down the bottle and catches him looking.

‘An accident,’ she says, ‘when I was a child.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I don’t actually remember.’

She does, he thinks, watching her. And it did hurt a great deal. Now, as never before, he understands Fede’s curiosity about his own background. The reticence is tantalizing.

Now she is checking her watch, and he guesses what is coming next. ‘It’s getting late,’ she says.

‘I haven’t shown you the garden,’ he says, before she can say that she needs to leave. He has no idea what he is going to show her, now. But this doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she stays. That the evening, the strange enchantment of it, is prolonged. The thought of his apartment, dark and empty, is suddenly more than unappealing – it is something almost fearful.

To his relief, she agrees. He shows her the entrance to the garden, a slender door in an unremarkable wall of old brick. Fede told him about this place. No one knows who it belongs to, he explained, or who cares for it. So few people know of it that it is a true sanctuary.

There are clementine and orange trees growing here, now burdened with ripe fruit. Among them are statues: putti, faceless goddesses wound about with ivy: some so enmeshed in it that they look half-consumed by it. And then on the wall behind them the really special thing. A gorgeous fresco of fruit trees, like a reflection of the garden itself, and pale nightingales and a sky of midnight blue. Only a few of the details are visible in the moonlight, but he hears her catch her breath at the sight. He thinks, suddenly, that he would like to take her here in the daytime, so that she can see the colours. The background is a blue that looks particularly antique, not of the modern world, a colour lost to time. Fede claims that the painting is a Roman original. It could be ancient, it looks it. But it could be a medieval imitation and still be older than the relics of many cities.

He gestures back towards the real clementine trees. ‘Would you like one?’

‘Yes please.’

When he passes the fruit to her their fingers touch for an instant, and the contact is like a heated brand. It causes everything to shift for him. He hasn’t felt it, this specific kind of excitement, for such a long time. He had thought that he might not again. And now here … with her, with someone he has only just met. It makes no sense.

He watches as she removes the peel in a single strand. ‘I’ve never managed to do that.’

For the first time, she smiles.

The flesh is cold from the air, and incredibly sweet. But what he would like, he thinks suddenly, watching her eat hers, is to taste the juice on her mouth. The thought is another flare of warmth. When he looks up at her she is watching him. And he thanks God that she has no way of knowing what he is thinking.

‘Where are we?’ she asks. ‘I’ve lost my bearings.’

‘The Aventine hill. It’s one of my favourite places.’ There’s a stateliness to it, a solitude. ‘The Forum is back that way,’ he points. ‘And across the river is where I live – Trastevere.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘Some parts are rather grand – but I’m afraid I don’t live in one of those. It has … character, I suppose. Sometimes the streets are so narrow you feel the walls might actually be moving in towards you. In a way, it’s where real people live. The real Rome. I mean, for those that can’t afford an Aventine villa, or an apartment near the Spanish Steps.’ He catches again the gleam of diamonds and thinks she is probably from that small club of people who can.

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘Really?’

She nods.

He sees her take it in: the narrowness of the cobbled streets, the shuttered houses with the washing strung between, the cat that slinks its way through the shadows. The recent rain gleams underfoot like spilled ink.

‘I like it.’ She can’t mean it. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Not far from here, actually.’

‘Will you show me?’

Perhaps he is mistaking her meaning … and yet he doesn’t think so. All he can think to say is, ‘Are you sure?’

For a second, she appears to waver. But then she gathers herself. ‘Yes.’ He has the distinct impression that this is some dare she has set herself. He can’t believe that it is normal for her. And yet the whole evening feels as though it is under some kind of enchantment – an evening in which ‘normal’ has been forgotten.

‘It’s very small,’ he says. He doesn’t take anyone back there: it is a hovel. ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere else …’ He is thinking. A hotel? Not her hotel, but perhaps another, anonymous …

‘No,’ she says. ‘Take me there.’

He has another moment of doubt. She seems … how to put it? A little fraught. The confidence of her manner isn’t fooling him. Perhaps the sensible, the gentlemanly thing, would be to suggest that he accompany her back to her hotel and leave her at the reception. But it is beyond him. He is filled with longing, half-blinded by it. That feeling part, so long anaesthetized, has come briefly to life.

They say nothing else to one another as he leads her through the few remaining streets, and they walk a couple of feet apart, as though some invisible force dictates it.

His apartment is in a worse state than he had remembered: the espresso pot has leaked a treacly stain onto the small table; the bed is barely made. He sees it through new eyes. How it is at once almost empty and yet disarrayed. The exposed light bulb, the meagre rail of clothes, the detritus of his life piled variously about. He has lived in it for years as one might live in a hotel room for a week.

But she is intrigued, rather than appalled. He sees her drift towards the makeshift desk with the portable Underwood. Holding, not a page from the novel, but the beginnings of an article for The Tiber, a horribly unfunny sketch about an Englishman coming to terms with the concept of risotto. Imagine a rice pudding, only . . .

She will see it, and know that the novel is a pipe dream. She will think him pitiable. He rushes into the space, to block her off.

‘Do you want …’ he looks at the espresso maker, wondering how quickly he can clean and heat it, ‘… a coffee, perhaps?’

‘No, thank you. I wonder …’

‘What?’

‘Do you have something stronger?’

He has whisky, which she agrees to. He makes them up – explains that he doesn’t have an icebox. She doesn’t mind. He watches as she drinks hers steadily. She puts it down, emptied, and looks at him.

He looks on, hardly breathing, as her hands go to the buttons at her neck, and begin to unfasten them. Her movements appear assured, her expression fixed, but then he sees that her fingers are trembling so badly that each is a struggle. This makes him want her all the more.

‘I haven’t done this before,’ she says, as though it needed saying.

‘Neither have I.’ It isn’t strictly true – he has been to bed with women on the first night of knowing them. But not like this, somehow. Never has the whole of him been alive to it in this way.

She is shrugging the dress from her shoulders, and now she stands before him in her slip and underthings, nude to the waist. He sees how soft her skin looks; how some foreign sun has tanned it in places, and left it milk-white in others. He sees the small, taut indentation of her navel, the dusky nipples.

He is freeing himself from his clothes as quickly as he is able, and she moves back towards the rumpled bed, watching him, all the time.

He realizes, with something almost like amusement, that they have not kissed one another and yet here they are, two naked strangers. It would take so little to shatter this moment, to tip it over into absurdity. His mind is too full to make sense of all of it. And then she reaches her arm out to him, and he steps towards her, and feels her hands on him, her hands moving downward, and his mind empties of all thought.

Afterwards, he goes to pour them each another drink. She lies in the bed and watches him, the sheets pulled up about her. He brings the glasses back to her, and they drink in silence for a few minutes. He wonders if she, like him, has suddenly been reminded of the strangeness of the situation, of the fact that they know nothing about one another.

‘Is that where you write?’

He follows her gaze to the makeshift desk, the typewriter, and realizes that what she must be seeing is a romantic image – a false one. He drains the glass, feels it burn through the centre of him. And perhaps it is the work of the whisky, perhaps it is his knowledge that they may never meet again, but he feels a sudden compelling need for honesty. ‘I have a confession. I’m not a writer. I thought I was, once.’ She has turned her head on the pillow to look at him. He coughs, continues. ‘I had a collection of short stories published. Not in a big way, you know – but it was something.’

In 1938, just out of university. It was a very small press, and the print run had been a few hundred copies. And yet, nevertheless, here it was: him, a published author, at the age of twenty-one. The sole review had been good if not absolutely effusive. That was enough. There was time for improvement. He had his whole life ahead of him. His mother had been overjoyed. His father, a Brigadier, a hero of the Great War, had been … what? A little bemused. All well and good for Hal to have this hobby before doing the thing, the real job, that would mark him out as a man. Hal knew, though, that this was the thing he wanted to do for ever. He feared it, because he wanted it so badly.

‘I’ve lost it now,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it any longer.’

There is no answer at first, and he wonders if she might have fallen asleep. But then she says, ‘What happened?’

‘The war,’ he says, because it is an accepted cliché these days – and also partially true.

It was something that had changed, in him. Every time he tried to write he felt the words coloured by this change, as though it infected everything. As though it could be read in every sentence: this man is a coward; is a fraud.

He won’t see her again. ‘Someone died,’ he says, ‘a friend. He wrote, too. After that, I haven’t felt like I deserved to be doing it … not when he never will.’ The liberation, of saying it aloud.

She doesn’t ask for him to explain further, and he is relieved, because he feels only a hair’s breadth away from telling her the whole thing, which he might regret.

‘You won’t have lost it. Once you’re a writer, it’s in you, somewhere.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘My father was one.’

‘Would I have heard of him?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Tell me about him.’ But no answer comes, and when he looks down at her, he sees that her eyes are closed.