Two Women in Rome Read online

  Integrated into the article were two coloured illustrations. The first was a botanical painting of the narcissi in a typical habitat, plus a transverse section of its seed head with detailed labelling.

  The second illustration she recognised as the hill-top town of Palacrino. Narcissi bloomed in profusion on the slopes beneath the town, and foxes, mice and rabbits played around them. On the right of the painting a mountain, dotted with pines and ilex, dominated the skyline. The caption read: An enlarged detail from a copy of a fifteenth-century manuscript.

  She reached for her magnifying glass. Even with its help, the subtler details were hard to make out, but she willed herself to travel through its portal into the painted world where rabbits had green eyes and very white scuts. They seemed familiar, possibly because many fifteenth-century paintings employed the same iconography.

  The artist understood ‘atmospheric perspective’, which she and Gabriele Ricci had talked about, a device where the foreground was rendered in the vivid colours and the background bleached into near monochrome. ‘It’s a trick,’ he had said, ‘to hoodwink the onlooker into thinking they are looking into a hazy distance.’

  The magnifying glass revealed a tiny figure in a monk’s habit climbing towards a stone building on a rocky outcrop. Its detail was so vivid, so alive, that Lottie was transported into that painted world, listening to the scuffle of sandals on the rocks, the pant of breath forced from overtaxed lungs.

  Next, she focused on the crenellations and towers of the hill town. At a top window of a turret, a woman in a plain grey gown gazed towards the mountain. A pair of slender hands clasped the sill and every line of her body expressed longing and a deep despair.

  Lottie straightened up.

  She thought of the bewildered Virgin in The Annunciation and, behind in the distance, the monk and his companion scrambling up the mountain.

  She thought of the olive trees and the gold bar of sunlight striking them. And of the initials, EK.

  Lottie slid the magnifying glass back into its cover. The idiosyncrasies and leitmotifs of the copyist and of the artist who painted The Annunciation had become familiar, much as the submergence of her own emotions into these painted, background dramas had wrenched her responses into unfamiliar configurations.

  Puzzled and uneasy, she sat unmoving, with her hands in her lap, for some time, before checking her watch and summoning the porter.

  He arrived promptly, muttering he only had half an hour before he left, and she helped load up the trolley, keeping back only the notebook.

  In the basement, the lift opened opposite the steel doors into the archive proper. The porter pressed the button, they hissed open and, wheels spinning and creaking with a language of their own, he navigated the trolley inside.

  Lottie followed him into the hushed interior.

  The barrel-vaulted cellar ran the length of the building and was divided by archival shelving. The surface of the walls had been scraped back to the original dusky-red brick, which, since it was not an ideal material for an archive, had been treated and sealed. Pipes bisected the ceiling and bundled wires ran from sealed junction boxes. The atmosphere was suitably cool and hushed. Uplighters threw shadows up the walls and, except for a central area with chairs, a table and a lamp that threw a circular illumination, the light was crepuscular.

  The porter was opening up the designated shelving and Lottie walked down the central aisle to the arch set into the brick wall, which signalled the limit of the archive.

  Retracing her steps, she passed an unlabelled door guarding a set of shelving and stopped short. Had she heard something? A footstep?

  A few seconds later, a door closed. Soft enough but recognisable.

  ‘Is there anyone there?’ she called.

  No reply.

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ she asked the porter. ‘It sounded like a door somewhere.’

  ‘That’s the air conditioning, Signora.’

  The porter pulled back the sliding steel doors guarding Lottie’s section and she began the task of stowing the papers on its shelves.

  He tapped a tattoo on the trolley handle, which was distracting, and she told him that she could manage on her own.

  She lifted the first box on to the shelf and slotted it into place.

  Nina lived in a Trastevere apartment from the sixties to her death in 1978.

  She travelled around Italy.

  She fell in love with Leo and talked to Rex.

  Her last published work was on narcissi.

  ‘Who are you, Nina?’

  In part, the answer reposed in these archive boxes and a journal but even the most brilliant historians and archivists would never decode more than one degree of the past. The only thing possible was to build a bridge as carefully and scrupulously as possible – which was precisely what the cherishing of these papers attempted to do.

  What better place was there to stow the relicts of unquiet souls and rebels, alongside those who were contentedly dead after long lives, provided they were organised, housed and, against the odds, honoured?

  She put this to Gabriele Ricci later as they sat beside each other in the sushi restaurant.

  ‘It’s a constructive way to think about the archive,’ he said. ‘I like the idea of honouring.’

  ‘Nina Lawrence now occupies her space on the shelves.’

  ‘Ah.’

  The restaurant was just off the Piazza Navona and their table was by the window. Valerio made a toast. ‘This is to our good friend, Gabriele, who helps us so much with our work.’

  Gabriele gave a little speech in thanks and Lottie watched him. The customary black had been discarded in favour of dark blue trousers and a white shirt, which suited him much better. He was freshly shaved and wore an expensive watch that she had not seen before. The hermit had been put aside.

  He must have known that The Annunciation was a modern pastiche. Yet he had said nothing.

  He caught Lottie’s scrutiny and raised an eyebrow.

  Seated on the other side of him, Valerio’s wife – an older version of Mirella – was obviously taken with Gabriele and monopolised him as much as possible. He appeared to be enjoying the attention, conversed easily and, from time to time, laughed at Valerio’s witticisms.

  Lottie watched a family pass by the window. He, tall with brushed-back hair. She, slightly plump but fabulously turned out in a linen shift and big jewellery. Their children beautiful and feral looking.

  She turned to Gabriele. ‘You’re such an attractive people.’

  ‘But living here can be hard, too,’ he said in an echo of what Nina had written. ‘I hope I’m not stepping over the mark if I say that, when you come to Rome, to Italy, it’s vital to understand the levels on which we operate.’

  Was he teasing or being – just a touch – patronising?

  She gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Tell.’

  ‘OK, one example.’ There was a touch of satire and not a little relish – so that was all right, she thought. ‘You’re either statale, government worker, or non-statale. The statale enjoy legendary and eye-watering privileges. They’re a class apart. The nonstatale spend their lives scheming to become statale. The statale consider they have made the right decisions in life. The nonstatale point out that they occupy the high moral ground because they have set hours, limited opportunity for moonlighting and, unlike the despised but envied statale, pay taxes from source.’ The caricature was drily done.

  She was about to reply but his attention was reclaimed by Valerio’s wife, who landed a jewelled hand on Gabriele’s arm and demanded to know what was needed to be good at his kind of work.

  She sensed his impatience, but he was polite enough with his answer. ‘A sense of smell.’ The hand taxied an inch up Gabriele’s arm. He shifted and it was removed. ‘Parchments from Northern Europe can smell warm. Leathery. Parchments from Italy, say, have a sharper, cooler scent.’

  Paul sat on Lottie’s left; he and Amber Brierley (Nineteenth-Century
department) were wrangling amicably over which were the best areas of the city. He turned to Lottie. ‘Amber and I agree that the Janiculum Hill is a fantastic place to live.’ He sounded nostalgic. ‘In fact, I did once – when I first came to the archive. The pay was dire and, in those days, the Janiculum was cheap, and it had the best view over the Trastevere.’

  So the American general had been stingy?

  ‘It was a good experience.’ Paul sounded nostalgic. ‘Not least because I got fit climbing up there every day.’

  ‘Show me on the map.’ Lottie whipped out her phone and he pointed to where it rose on the opposite side of the river from the traditional seven hills.

  ‘It was a hell of a climb and the apartment had not a stick of furniture, not even a cooker. I slept on the floor. But it had wonderful views over the city.’ He smiled. ‘I used to find shards of red porphyry from Cleopatra’s kitchens.’

  ‘Normally, I wouldn’t put Cleopatra and a kitchen in the same sentence.’

  Paul laughed. ‘There were three kitchens sited on the hill and I’m pretty sure the porphyry came from them.’

  ‘Three!’

  ‘The slaves were ordered to produce food at six, eight and ten.’ Sweetly, Paul appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the attention of both women. ‘Caesar was a busy man. All that dotting about conquering, and she wanted to be able to give him a hot meal whenever he came home from the Senate of an evening.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Cleopatra was a fifties housewife?’

  Amber laughed.

  At the end of the meal, they said their goodbyes. Lottie exchanged glances with Gabriele.

  She wanted to confront him. You knew from the first that The Annunciation was not authentic. Did his behaviour constitute a betrayal? She thought it did.

  On the way home, she encountered a Great Roman Traffic Challenge.

  Overlooked by a Roman emperor who projected the Roman virtues of discipline and public order (although the emperor had probably been mad and debauched) and by a Church that offered an alternative promise of redemption, a Mexican stand-off between an SUV and a scooter was in train. Horns blared and traffic snarled.

  A radio blasted out gangster rap. A sweet, but almost sickly, smell of jasmine drifted from a plant running along a wall.

  The scooter won. The traffic snorted into life. Tom had explained to Lottie that the authorities tackled Rome’s chronic traffic problem by passing more and more laws to prevent double and triple parking and the blocking of entrances. These were robustly ignored.

  Did the city dignitaries who espoused good, logical intentions ever analyse the anarchy that reigned? Did it matter? Somehow, everything kept going.

  Lottie searched in her bag for her phone. She must text Tom. She must make it right.

  Tom arrived back from the Naples trip the following evening.

  Lottie had been ruthless and banished Concetta and, for once, she was in the kitchen preparing supper. She dropped everything and hugged him close.

  ‘It’s worth going away,’ he said.

  Her voice was muffled against his shoulder. ‘What were you doing exactly?’

  ‘Trying to impress on the Neapolitans that the British Council is their friend.’

  ‘And did you?’

  Tom bent over and kissed her. He seemed thoughtful. ‘You’ve just revealed that you’ve never been to Naples. They don’t take kindly to being told what to think.’ He kissed her again. ‘What did you do?’

  She shifted a little in his embrace. ‘Eating and working.’

  Tom eyed the large lasagne that Lottie lifted out of the oven. ‘You know you told me about women starving in order to become saints. Let me categorically assure you that you’ll never be one.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Rome

  16 April 1978

  REX AND I ARRANGED A MEETING.

  The Red Brigades have issued a sixth communiqué proclaiming that Moro has been found guilty and condemned to death.

  There have been eleven shootings in Venice in the past seventeen days.

  ‘Get yourself invited to the Palacrinos’, Rex ordered, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. ‘Say you have to check something out in the garden.’

  The goddess Fortune has been kind in one major respect: I love my work, my parallel universe, which is the garden. When I die, twine ivy around my coffin and scatter rose petals over it.

  I once said as much to Leo when we were still together, and pain swept across his features. I wished I had kept quiet.

  Looking back.

  Ours was not a conventional love affair. Obviously. We rarely touched, except for the time we did. But I look back on it, knowing that I will never be so happy again.

  It was slow to develop. In the beginning, we found friendship in a common interest in the land.

  I described the woeful condition of formal Italian gardens still languishing even now after the war. Private and public ones had been hit by high taxes and the need to concentrate on other priorities. Every cloud … he told me. True. The neglect gave me a living.

  The way we talked to each other began to change. They were normal exchanges about weather, plants, traffic. Yet other feelings and intentions surged underneath.

  This was dangerous, I told him, and he agreed.

  That was one of the many things about Leo. He understood without it being spelled out.

  When I first knew him, he was relatively free to meet me but, after joining the seminary in the autumn of ’76, his movements were curtailed. I was busy, too, travelling around the area and, once, to Bologna and Romagna. (Romagna is known for being the least biddable of the Italian regions and Rex wanted me to take soundings.)

  Our walks were important. Exercise is not so easy in a crowded city but, if you are prepared to tackle the spider’s web of lesser streets, rewarding. There was the Villa Borghese … when he stroked my hair. The Circo Massimo. Other parks. We chased down fountains. Not the gaudier ones of the Trevi or the Barcaccia, but the smaller ones and the street-corner fontanelle. If you search and have patience and good footwear then there are many. Plump-breasted women, dolphins, lions and amphorae emerging from the stone. Those gleaming animals and humans have nothing more laid on them than to ensure the water is directed in a shining arc and they are happy because nothing ever happens to them.

  He described what would make up his future: the rituals, the hierarchies, and who held the authority. It would be a life of personal silence and abnegation while carrying other people’s burdens.

  In return, I told him about my world, the one I could discuss.

  The impoverished prince who longs to bring his run-down villa back to glory but is running out of money. Meanwhile, his wife has run away with a wine producer from South Africa.

  The Palacrinos striving to re-organise their estate as a feudal operation and who revere the memory of Mussolini.

  And I told him, too, about the living things with which I work: the narcissi, the roses, the salvias and the alchemilla mollis.

  Leo replied that he preferred the plants that earned their keep. Like … he was obviously missing the farm … like an olive grown old in service.

  We discussed the parallels between his beliefs and mine. When the garden dies for the winter, I said, it mourns with dead vegetation but the seeds for the next generation are already set. Fertility, death and resurrection are a process.

  Leo grinned and said it wasn’t so very different.

  Sometimes when the heat is almost too much here, I summon childhood memories: the smell of wet earth after rain has swept in, the dry dust-laden scent of summer and the smell of frost-nipped fruit in late autumn. I think of Alba Bourbon roses rising from a bed of old-fashioned pinks and penstemons.

  I don’t mean anything by it and nostalgia is a dangerous state of mind.

  I told him that my clients often favour the English garden and ask me to order chrysanthemums, dahlias and peonies and to plan the vistas to go with them, which include
, say, a wisteria pergola, scrub oak, pines and olives.

  Did he really still wish to be a priest? I asked him once, so swamped by love for him that I feared I was out of control. He said he was unable to give me a proper answer, at least not the one I craved (which was that he was beginning to doubt the vocation).

  Your family are everything, I challenged him. He admitted they were. That surprised me. I had expected him to reply that, in the final analysis, it was faith that drove him.

  How could I protest? Up till now, I was ignorant of what it meant to be bound by familial fetters. If I ever considered myself as part of something bigger it was my work – those demands and loyalties. Thinking about it, of course, the demands of family and country could be said to mirror each other.

  I never imagined how raw my love for Leo would make me. How vulnerable, peeled of the protections that I had grown over the years. I worried about how transparent and fragile it made me. How woundable.

  On 16 March, a year ago, we ended up taking a train to Palacrino. I had been planning to do some research and told Leo I would be away for a couple of days.

  I observed the doubt, the longing and the temptation that burned behind his eyes. I wasn’t stupid. Leo was no saint, and in the darker regions of his appetites and desires, there would lurk the purely selfish impulse. And the sexual one.

  I remember his words, like I remember most of what he said.

  ‘I love you, Nina. I wish that I didn’t.’

  I was never going to tell him: Take that love and use it to develop your vocation, to understand temptation, to understand what the men and women to whom you minister undergo.

  I should have done but I was far too selfish to give up what belonged to me alone.

  The words ‘come too’ slipped from my tongue.

  On the train, we sat opposite each other and I asked him how his uncle was and he said Beppo was busy with a big corruption case. Nothing unusual. There was always something big going on. He smiled wryly as he added: ‘or being hushed up’.