Juggling the Stars (20 page)

‘Well. '

‘No, look, the only problem is I've gone and sublet my flat. Stupid of me I suppose, but now …'

Morris glanced at his watch. Three minutes before the train left.

‘Well, you could always stay with us in Verona. My mother would be delighted. Take her mind off things having a guest you know. She laps up new people,'

‘Thanks, okay, I'll think about it.' Morris let his voice fall with just a trace of disappointment. ‘It's just that I have a rather close friend with me.'

Gregorio laughed a tiddly laugh and shouted something to his friend in the room. Morris, instinctively, had used the word
amico
, rather than
amica
. And he was right. After some background laughter, Gregorio said, ‘Roberto here suggests I leave the keys to the house with him and he'll let you have them when you get here.'

‘Well … only if you're sure it's okay, I mean I don't want to …'

But Gregorio was sure. It was absolutely fine, and he gave Morris Roberto's address and phone number.

‘Friend from Verona?' Morris asked in passing.

‘Roberto? No, he lives here. They have a hotel.'

Good. Morris signed off. He should have asked about the exams of course, but time was ticking away. The next occasion would do just as well.

On the train he fought his way down the corridors looking for Massimina. It was packed with soldiers for some reason, all laughing and smoking out of the big open windows. There was nothing Morris hated more than soldiers, most especially slovenly ones, and he elbowed his way quite viciously along the corridor. Then having found the girl he plomped himself down in the seat opposite, breathless, all smiles.

‘Why so late? I …'

Only now he noticed she had used the moments in the ladies' room to do herself up again. Soft pink lipstick and a dreamy eyeshadow. Too attractive by half with all these soldiers about. But it did give one a certain status. He'd have to find her a different bra though. Something more subdued and natural.

‘My friend wasn't in, so I called Paola.'

‘Who?'

'Paola, your Paola, your sister.'

‘Oh,' Massimina relaxed. ‘I was getting worried. When the train started I nearly got off it. I mean, how was I to know you'd made it, really?'

Morris smiled never-mindishly and glanced round the compartment. Businessmen, students, a couple of peasanty women and a soldier. No one they were likely to get into dangerous conversations with.

‘So what did she say?'

‘Well, it seems your mother's gone off with Grandmother to the mountains, Selva di Valgardena. The doctors suggested it for convalescence, and Antonella and Bobo have gone too.'

‘Oh? So Paola's alone in the house then?' Massimina was dubious.

‘No, she's sleeping at a friend's place she said and just checking up on things at the house every now and then. That's why nobody answered yesterday. Lucky I caught her really.'

'That will be Giuseppina,' Massimina said. ‘Her friend.'

'That's right.' Morris noticed she looked rather down. ‘Homesick? Miss them?'

The train plunged into the first of the long tunnels through the Apennines. In the sudden complete darkness and roaring echo of the walls, Massimina leaned across the compartment slipped a hand between his knees and slithered it down to his thighs.

‘Not with you,' she said, and almost had to shout. ‘Not after last night.'

‘She gave me an address where you can write to Mamma direct,' Morris said. ‘Why don't we write her a nice long letter, see if we can't bring her round.'

They wrote the letter at the station in Terni where the train decided to stop for twenty minutes or so. They wrote it on sheets of lemon yellow notepaper with blue forget-me-nots climbing the left hand margin, which Massimina had bought in Rimini. Massimina said what she wanted to say, but even though he had only been in Italy a couple of years it was Morris who chose the elegant consolatory phrases. What it all amounted to was that they were very happy and would marry on her eighteenth birthday, for which they would like to have Mamma's consent. All doubts dissolved, they said. Morris signed his name too and wrote a note in his own hand saying how much he regretted that all this unpleasantness had come between them and wished the situation could return to normal as soon as possible. The curious thing was the sincerity and facility he felt: he could really see it all and really did his best to persuade his future mother-in-law. As if nothing had been decided at all …

The train pulled out of Terni towards two thirty and for the rest of the journey Morris hypnotized himself into a state of calm, gazing out of the window at brilliant yellow June corn broken by row after row of vines. If you didn't move your eyes to focus on any particular spot the effect of the shining green of the vine leaves against the golden carpet of grain became quite soporific and by the time the train pulled into Rome, shortly after four, his mind was completely empty, drained; and perfectly operational.

No sooner were they at the end of the platform than he sent her off to queue in the café, to pick up a couple of cappuccinos and a sandwich and find a table, while he went off to buy the stamps and post the letter. Taking the suitcases with him he found a tobacconist's just beyond the left luggage office, bought enough stamps to send an espresso, put them on the ransom letter now addressed in lettroset to Bobo and mailed the thing directly. The other letter he tore into the tiniest shreds before leaving it in a waste bin.

This was the evening of Friday, June 17th, a week almost to the hour since Massimina had left her home in the village of Quinzano, frazione di Verona, and six days before, according to the instructions in the ransom letter, the Trevisans would be required to place a mere 800 million lire in a holdall in the first class compartment of the 7:52 Milan-Palermo espresso. After which, as far as Morris was concerned, two possibilities offered themselves: on the boat, south and east to Greece, or on the ferry to Sardinia and a more relaxing time at Gregorio's house - returning to Verona at the beginning of autumn with all tracks well covered. Who knows, he might even accept a couple of hours' teaching a week for a while so as not to surprise anybody too much.

The night of the 17th was a halfway house then, with everything going swimmingly, so far as Morris could see. It was the morning after, Saturday, June 18th, that he was to wake up with a splitting headache and a fever burning its way well up into the hundreds, his body slippery and stale with sweat, his eyes dry and red, his ears singing like an untuned radio and his bowels ringing out alarms. Morris was ill.

It had been an evening of celebration. Morris had insisted that a first night in Rome was an occasion to live it up a little, so they found a slightly better pensione than usual in the side streets behind Piazza Quirinale. (Who cared if it meant leaving his passport this time? Nobody seemed to be checking where he was and he'd phone the police Monday to say he was in Rome, he'd changed his plans.) They were checked in and had the bags in their room before six o'clock and then set out at once to stroll and wine and dine.

They walked to Piazza Venezia in a balmy evening air. took a look at the decidedly ugly monument to Victor Emanuel II, then followed Via dei Fori Imperiali with the sun throwing long shadows in front of them on the warm tar and colouring the huge curved walls of the Colosseum ahead. He should have kept Giacomo's cameras perhaps, Morris thought; he'd always wanted to take good photographs; it was something he imagined he would be rather expert at.

(It was the unreality of those murders that amazed him. You realized the world was probably full of murderers, war-criminals, child molesters, who couldn't believe they'd really done it. The truth was, everybody was capable of doing it, only incapable of accepting they were capable. Every kitchen knife was a murder weapon and everybody had killed a thousand times over in their heads. It was just a question of bringing the two together, the desire, the opportunity. ‘Dad, it amazes me that with a strong character like yours you never killed anyone.' Unless he had? Skinny Binny had disappeared rather abruptly from his life, hadn't she? That was food for thought, dictaphone fodder.)

Morris bought a guidebook and after the Colosseum they doubled back to wander around what was open of the forum itself and the Palatine untill the paths were all closed at nine. Massimina chattered her continual amazement, which was tiresome, but not so much so that it could upset Morris's genuine enjoyment of the ancient city. He had always wanted to come and here it was, infinitely more impressive than the poor weatherbeaten English ruins that cowered in the city centres amongst the fluorescent lights of Co-ops and the stained concrete of the sixties building spree. No, here there was more of a oneness, a cohesion, something that drew together the raging traffic and the ruins sprouting with olives and orange trees, the long burning streets with their splendid names like banners from the past. Via San Teodoro, Via Botteghe Oscure.

Massimina chattered on and he didn't hear. He was learning perhaps what every husband no doubt learns after the first days of living together, that there is a time to listen and a time to close one's ears against all that is frivolous about femininity, all he could do without. But even while ignoring her, he realized he was enjoying her company, the promise of her physical proximity. The truth was perhaps that forced cohabitation was doing him a power of good (he was open to anything in the end). And then on the purely practical side, nobody questioned you when you were with somebody else nobody tried to approach you or bother you like they would if you were alone (although in a way in fact he felt more blissfully alone than ever - and never worried about it precisely because there was someone there). Plus she had the impression that he was an authority on everything, which in comparison with herself quite naturally he was, and she asked his opinion on everything they saw, whether it was Michelangelo or a shirt to buy, which Morris found rather enjoyable. Recognition at last. It would be amusing, he thought, to take the girl back to England and present her to his father, have her parade about with her most arrogant of arrogant bras and tell Daddy-0 in her broken English what a genius Morris was.

They sat in a restaurant spread out across the flagstones of Piazza Navona and ate torteliini with ham and cream, then veal with a side salad and finally ice-cream. The waiter was fast and dapper, the square full of young people, girls on bicycles, groups of young boys watching hungrily or dreamily, being watched in turn. The air had something definitely Latin and foreign about it, the smells, the temperature, a hint of anarchy, and Morris felt blissfully calm and secure. Who would ever find you out in such a city?

‘Perhaps we should live here,' he said, and almost added, ‘when your old mum pays up.'

‘Mmm,' Massimina said. ‘Let's.
'

And most probably she was thinking how much more scope there would be to show herself off here. And why not? Morris conceded generously. The glory of the whole -thing was precisely the show. He wasn't going to be possessive about the girl for God's sake, though she must learn not to sit quite so carelessly when she had short skirts on.

As they came back through Corso del Rinascimento some teenagers were dancing round a Vespa blaring music from a cassette player. Their bodies moved gracefully in the last of an inky twilight and staring streetlamps. Massimina had drunk too much wine and wanted to join in, but Morris drew a line here.

‘A disco then, Morri. Let's find a disco. You know I've never been to a real disco. Mamma never let me, she …'

Morris said he didn't like dancing. Despite nightfall the air was still very warm and this was one of the things that always made him feel delightfully far from home. He wanted to relax now, soak it up.

‘But how can you not like dancing? It's just moving your body. It's just fun. Go on, there must be millions of discos round here and …'

Morris was adamant.

‘I bet it's because you've never tried,' she said archly. ‘You spent all those years at university reading books and things and you never even tried.'

And when Morris was silent, ‘Go on, I'll show you. It's fun.'

As they went past the Pantheon and into Via Seminario, she said, ‘Morri?' Her voice was softer than before. ‘Morri, you haven't been out with many other girls, have you?'

It was precisely the kind of conversation to get right on his nerves and ruin a good day. He said nothing. Ignore it.

‘I mean, when you, we …' She tried to hug tight to him, but he hurried. ‘When we, when we did it the other day, together, I got the feeling it was the first time for you too and …'

‘And what?' he snapped. God damn.

‘I felt so happy, Morri. I mean, don't be angry, I'm so happy if you've never been with anybody before, it makes it so pure and right and …'

‘Well it wasn't the first time,' he said sharply. And she began to cry. They sat in a bar then in Piazza Quirinale and Morris drank two carafes of Frascati almost entirely on his own.

‘You're very cruel sometimes, Morrees,' she said when they were undressing at last in the pensions. The room was freshly whitewashed with a huge old double bed, a few items of recently - polished furniture, a crucifix over the bed, Madonna opposite, and the pleasure of a clean window complete with modern and operable blinds. A step up.

‘You're not easy to be with sometimes,' she said.

‘Sacrifice yourself then,' he said. His first damn day in Rome and she had to ruin it like this. ‘Or go home to Mamma if you like.'

‘Maybe I will,' she said.

What a farce.

‘Maybe I will,' she repeated.

Over somebody's very dead body.

And now he woke up sick as a dog. At first he thought it must be just the excess of wine the previous night. He climbed out of bed, shivering violently and hurried down the passageway to the communal lavatory. Diarrhoea. Very nice. What a moment for it too. Oh God, he looked in the mirror to find his face positively grey and glistening with sweat. His forearms were prickling with goosepimples. He washed his face and hurried back to bed, head swaying from side to side, unable to think, unable to balance himself. He mustn't vomit was all. Not here in the passageway so as to draw attention to himself.