Two Women in Rome Page 6

  She had a strange feeling that Nina Lawrence was speaking directly to her. You are here. You must try to live properly. It will take effort. Patience. Mistakes. Understanding.

  Lottie read on.

  Ten years ago, when I arrived, I found it harder to settle here than other places. I couldn’t put my finger on it. My rooms in the Via della Luce were airy and appealing. They had good bones, lovely proportions and a plaster cornice, and were sparsely furnished, which I preferred.

  Maybe, it was the lift, in which I am convinced lives a hostile spirit. (Or the portiere’s inability to get it fixed?) Some days, it’s mysteriously locked and I am forced to obtain the key from the spiteful teenage girl in the basement. Once, she asked me to pay to ferry my shopping up. You can imagine my answer. Sometimes, it gets the bit between its teeth, spits out sparks and judders to a halt. Usually on the wrong floor.

  Perhaps, my unease reflected the political situation in the country.

  Leo calls it dietrologia. ‘It’s the theory,’ he says, ‘that behind all significant political events, acts of terror or even disaster, lies a shadowy network of puppet masters … politicians, secret services, business moguls, freemasons … pulling the strings for their own corrupt purposes.’

  Replacing the notebook and the documents in the correct order in the box, Lottie stowed it on the bench.

  Slicing tomatoes in the kitchen that evening, Lottie discussed Gabriele Ricci with Tom. ‘He wanted more money.’

  ‘He’s bluffing,’ said Tom, resting his chin on her shoulder. ‘It’s the way.’

  Lottie’s instinct was that Gabriele Ricci was not a man who went in for the theatre of negotiation. ‘He didn’t seem the type.’

  ‘If he’s Roman, he is.’

  She swivelled around and pressed her cheek against his. Tom was warm, firm and she loved the smell of him – and she wanted to imprint it all in her memory because she knew that you could never take anything good and nice for granted. ‘Strange man. He reacted badly to a church bell.’

  ‘Living in Rome is a tricky one,’ said Tom. ‘You end up half a libertine, half a priest.’

  ‘Do you favour one or the other?’

  ‘Guess.’

  Later in the evening, a text flashed up on her mobile: Your terms are acceptable. The projects are under way. Gabriele Ricci.

  Lottie rolled her eyes at Tom. ‘You were right.’

  ‘Of course.’ He was enjoying his small triumph.

  She was woken in the early hours by him calling out, ‘Clare.’

  Her cheeks stung as if they had been slapped.

  She lay flat on her back and gazed up at the dark ceiling, her emotions churning. Clare had lived and slept with Tom for a long time, and, in sleep, memory, which is at best disobedient, could be wilful.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Tom’s voice sounded through the dark.

  She turned her head. ‘You were calling out for Clare.’

  Tom put out his hand. ‘Was I? Oh crap. I’m sorry. I don’t know why.’

  They lay with his hand resting on her shoulder and listened to distant traffic. But there was unease between them and a phantom of his past lover.

  Tom said softly, ‘Lottie, I’m sorry. Very sorry. Do you believe me?’

  It had taken Lottie several wrong turnings, and periods of anguish, before she had learned that the mind took its time to absorb a loss, or a trauma, and that disturbances manifested themselves long after that loss had taken place.

  It would be the same for Tom.

  Then she remembered Peter and his questions. Is Tom real? Or the too-good-to-be-true real? Had she made a muddle by marrying Tom? ‘Tom, are you worrying about something? The bomb? Safety? Money?’

  He cradled her shoulder with a hand. ‘No.’

  Lottie punched the pillow and sat up. ‘Tom … tell me more about your work.’

  ‘You know the Council works to bring together different cultures.’

  ‘Are you being deliberately vanilla?’

  ‘OK. I’m killing myself to organise the annual Pontignano Conference, which brings together leaders from business, politics and academia. The point is to talk, which a lot of them will, interminably, and to find accommodations, which are few and far between. We are talking human beings here, not sensible animals. But from those small connections we can build.’

  She sensed an evasion, a practised one.

  Tom sounded sleepy. ‘Why don’t you come? Clare did once but she was bored.’

  Without warning, she was soaked in jealousy. She bent her legs up and hooked her arms around them. ‘Right.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Did Clare leave Rome?’

  A cat yowled in the courtyard. ‘She’s still here,’ he admitted. ‘She has a good job. So does her new partner.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘In the Vatican press office.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lottie closed her eyes briefly. ‘Thought you had to be a Catholic.’

  ‘She is. Technically. Lottie … I’ve upset you. But Clare has gone.’

  He was so full of remorse that she softened. She lay back down and entwined her fingers in his. ‘Is it OK etiquette to say that’s good?’

  ‘Excellent etiquette.’

  His grip tightened. ‘My turn. Any regrets?’

  Lottie made him wait for her answer. He had hurt her and it would take a little time to fade.

  True, deep understanding of each other would take years, many incidents, sharp exchanges, when, no doubt, the love between them would sour and thin and then, if they wished, renew itself. Inevitably, marriage changed the settings of an affair and there would be wounds and longueurs to weather. They might, at times and for long periods, take each other for granted.

  ‘Lottie?’ Tom propped himself up.

  She reached up and pulled him down and rolled on top of him. ‘You’re going to have to prove how sorry you are.’ She ran her hand down his bare flank, feeling his smooth skin under her fingers.

  At the end, it was her name that he muttered into her ear. Covered in sweat and sweetly satiated, she lay back on the pillows and fell instantly asleep.

  ‘Rome is divided into rioni and, if outside the old walls, quartiere and each comes with its own flavour,’ she had emailed Helena when she first came over to stay with Tom. ‘For instance, if you live in the Parioli, which is very up-market, you look down on everyone else. The city also has complicated politics. The Left distrusts the Christian Democrats and vice versa. It’s like untangling knotted string.’

  What Lottie had grasped was that the Roman city dweller, whatever their stripe, tended to unite in deep-rooted suspicion of incomers on the grounds that, if said incomers cooperated with each other, the Romans might lose some advantage. She had some sympathy.

  ‘We only occupy a small part, but Tom lives in a Renaissance palace,’ Lottie continued. ‘Very posh, very elegant. It’s built around a square with a courtyard. The entrance is a stone pediment with pillars (beautiful) leading into the courtyard, where there’s a fountain – a wide marble bowl at the centre of which are three plump women (they do a great service to womankind). Back in the day, it was used for washing clothes. Our apartment is on the first floor, opposite the entrance.’

  Within seconds of first setting eyes on the apartment that occupied half of the piano nobile, Lottie had taken to it. There were some downsides, such as the dreadful brown furniture, but she reckoned that could be sorted. But, as she also told Helena: ‘The sanitary arrangements are gross. I dream of a marble wet room and American plumbing.’

  The piano nobile was the floor where the original family would have lived, and its main rooms ran the width of the building, with views towards the Piazza Borghese or looking directly down into the courtyard. Its proportions were good and much of its original glory was evident in the plaster and stonework. The ceilings were high – ‘Trust me, a bonus in summer,’ Tom had said – and the windows spacious. Lottie loved to stand by them, looking over the city and watching the sky.

>   The view facing south encompassed the pink-tiled church, which had a bell tower with blue mosaics. Originally, the church, now renamed Santa Maria del Divino Amore, had been one of several dedicated to a Christian martyr who had taken three days to die after a botched beheading. Apparently, the saint had welcomed her suffering, a detail that haunted Lottie, who strove, and failed, to understand a mindset that welcomed living for days with a half-severed neck to prove a love of God.

  The palazzo housed a variety of people. Lottie hadn’t been there a week before she ran slap up against the running battle between the feminist collective on the ground floor (its members distinguishable by their short haircuts and lace-up shoes with ultra thick soles) and the aristocratic family occupying the other half of the piano nobile (distinguishable by their excessive makeup and gobsmacking pearl necklaces). They hated each other.

  The signora was not to worry, admonished Concetta whom Lottie had inherited. (Concetta referred to herself as the tuttofare: ‘I cook, clean, take care of you.’) She followed this up with: ‘They will be suspicious of you because you’re from Inghilterra.’

  ‘Will I ever be forgiven?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Concetta would not be drawn further.

  Concetta was an absolute monarch. For the last twenty years, she had worked for the inhabitants of the piano nobile and ruled her kingdom with relish, authority and no concessions. Lottie would have to tread carefully.

  ‘Did Concetta intend to reassure me?’ Lottie asked Tom later.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Tom.

  Before Lottie and Tom married, Concetta had made it clear she had been devoted to Clare and wore this loyalty like a scarf. She also had a habit of barging into rooms without knocking and, if thwarted, she lapsed into a dialect in which Clare’s name was thrown around.

  ‘I would like to go over the routines,’ Lottie laid before her on arriving back from honeymoon.

  ‘No need, Signora,’ Concetta had responded. ‘It is all arranged.’

  Plumpish, with glossy black hair that she scraped back, she had excellent skin and a wardrobe of multi-pocketed dresses that buttoned up the front. Almost a caricature but not and, certainly, a formidable presence. There was a voluptuousness about her, Lottie decided. A will to power that ran through her dealings with the domestic arrangements and ensured that everything she tackled was immaculate. Tom would not hear a word said against her. Concetta’s cooking was superb, he soothed a slightly ruffled Lottie, her ironing masterly and her negotiating skills legendary.

  The legendary negotiating skills were put to the test when Lottie embarked on her plumbing projects and relations between her and Signor Bramante, an obstructive neighbour, required smoothing over.

  ‘The poor man is frightened.’ Concetta issued her edict. ‘I will talk to him.’

  ‘Frightened of good plumbing? I’m sure that can’t be true.’

  ‘He’s afraid his peace will be shattered.’

  Lottie surveyed the ancient lavatory and unsanitary-looking shower with its dripping shower head. ‘His peace will certainly be shattered if there’s a flood.’

  ‘Does Concetta have a family?’ she asked Tom. ‘She never goes home until late.’

  ‘We’re her family,’ said Tom, meaning her employers.

  ‘But she must have someone?’

  ‘A daughter, I think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘All right, I know.’

  The subject was closed.

  The plumbing was completed within the week. ‘That must be a first,’ said an admiring Tom. The following day, there was a knock on the door. A thick-set foreman waved papers in Lottie’s face and declared he was under orders from the landlord to paint the palazzo.

  This was news to its inhabitants and heated confrontations erupted that could be heard across the courtyard. There were flat refusals to remove furniture and pots from the balconies or, in some cases, to move out. Then, there was the even bigger hurdle of the schedule where, tactlessly, the feminist collective had been placed second to the contessa.

  ‘It is impossible, Signora,’ reported Concetta with obvious relish. ‘There will be war.’

  ‘What’s to be done? Shall I go and talk to one of them? The landlord?’

  ‘Signora, you’re new here. You don’t know the ways. Not like Signorina Clare.’

  Lottie said tartly, ‘I’m aware of that.’

  Concetta leaned back against stove, planting her feet in their cracked leather lace-ups possessively on the tiles, and fanned herself. It was then Lottie realised that, from now on, in the domestic arena, cunning must be her second nature.

  ‘You must sort it, Concetta.’

  Which was precisely what Concetta had been angling for. ‘It’s very delicate,’ she said. ‘Very.’

  Assuming the posture of a one-woman negotiation team for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, Concetta departed. Hours later, she returned. ‘All is solved. The repairs for the contessa and the women will be done jointly.’

  An admiring Lottie could only ask, ‘How did you persuade the foreman?’

  Concetta’s dark eyes seethed with triumph. ‘I ask him where he lives, and all is solved.’

  ‘Not sure I follow.’

  ‘He lives near Gabriella,’ she explained patiently. ‘My third cousin, Signora, which means we are almost kin. It turns out that the poor man has a delicate stomach, which needs great care and attention. I said I would cook him lunch every day.’

  Tom and Lottie celebrated their four-month anniversary with dinner on the terrace.

  The plants in the recently acquired planters were putting on growth, the lavender was the star of the collection.

  Tom speared up the pasta that Concetta had prepared. ‘The plants are a success.’

  ‘I’ll log that.’ Lottie smiled at him.

  He put down his fork. ‘Have you forgiven me?’

  The easy intimacy of the moment was spoilt.

  ‘It’s not a question of forgiveness,’ she replied. ‘But I have to ask the question, Tom. Were you asking yourself if you felt you were with the wrong person?’

  He flashed back. ‘No, absolutely not.’

  ‘You called out in your sleep. From your unconscious. That must be significant?’

  ‘Or just habit.’

  ‘I understand, but it made me wonder.’ She turned her head away. ‘It was a slap in the face.’

  He frowned. ‘You have to trust me, Lottie, that’s all it was.’

  In the best of all possible worlds, she should have told him that she understood the waywardness and unpredictability of the unconscious and of how, at times, its manifestations meant little. But the hurt, or perhaps it was an insult, had hardened and she did not repair the small rupture.

  A shout from the courtyard below diverted them and they got up from their chairs.

  They looked down to see Sandra, one of the women from the collective, in the act of stringing up political posters along the scaffolding that had been put up for the painting and decorating.

  It had been scheduled for removal after the foreman sighed, ate his final Concetta feast and departed for his next – presumably lunchless – assignment. No one imagined for a second the timetable would hold and the scaffolding had remained, offering an irresistible platform for the raging political opinions corralled inside the palazzo.

  ‘Rome=Mafia=Taxes’ – Sandra’s posters were red rags to the bull of the Contessa Patuzzi, who had descended, with entourage, from the other section of the piano nobile and was now overwriting the wording of a despised poster with a marker pen.

  Titian haired and voluble, Sandra gave the contessa an earful. The magnificently deaf contessa and her pen carried on.

  Half the onlookers clapped.

  Sandra squared up to the contessa, during which manoeuvre black marker pen appeared on the contessa’s cheek. The contessa called for the police.

  The other half of the onlookers applauded.

  ‘The old tensions are still the
re. It’s not done yet,’ said Tom, more to himself than to Lottie.

  While they leaned over the balcony and watched the small but intense drama unfold, Lottie told Tom about Nina Lawrence and her political comments in her notebook. ‘Nineteen seventy-eight, when she died, was a bad time according to her, and she was worried by it. What is so striking, and so sad, is that she did not have any friends or family to claim her body.’

  ‘That is odd,’ said Tom. ‘Something must have gone wrong. What was her name again?’

  Still hissing at each other, the contessa and Sandra retreated to their respective lairs. Lottie found it funny – and not.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LOTTIE SLEPT BADLY AND WOKE EARLY. TOM WAS STILL out for the count, so she dressed, left a note and headed off through the velvety morning to a café in the Campo de’ Fiori. Here she drank two cappuccinos in quick succession and watched the light play over the market stalls.

  The day’s appointments logged in her online diary were sparse, except for a 12.30 meeting with a Signor Antonio, who might, or might not, be one of her new colleagues.

  She sent a couple of texts, including one to Gabriele Ricci to settle on the schedule for the work. What a hermit’s cave the book doctor’s was, and she looked up from her phone and marked the gaudy, noisy, attractive Roman life that was in such contrast.

  A shout. Many shouts. The flap of a restaurant awning unrolling. Piled-up vegetables. A flash of a scarlet jacket, a colour so fresh and joyous that she found herself smiling which made her think of the medieval painter with his trove of colour knowledge.

  What power he wielded, understanding as he did a colour’s significance and the subtleties of meaning conveyed by its different hues. A colour could move, or direct, an audience’s responses. It was… Lottie watched a stall holder in the market pile up tawny and plum-coloured dried fruits … unabashed psychological manipulation.