Rachel Does Rome Read online

  The clock of a nearby church starts striking. A flock of pigeons, startled by the noise, fly off from the flight of steps. Twelve o’clock; how did that happen? I feel a surge of mixed adrenaline and anxiety as I think of all the things we’ve got to see today; starting, of course, with the Coliseum.

  I’m about to suggest to the girls that we get a move on, when I see how relaxed they are; leaning back, legs outstretched, sun on their faces, watching the people go by. Well, when in Rome, I suppose. We can spare another ten minutes.

  And it is fun people-watching. There are crowds of Italian kids with Invicta backpacks on a school trip; a group of Japanese tourists, listening to a guide with an umbrella; American tourists, dressed in full hiking gear as if they’re about to climb the Matterhorn; and those three guys who are obviously English. One of them is wearing shorts; that’s the giveaway. The other two are in jeans and quilted navy jackets. Such clones. Jay had a jacket like that. In fact that one looks a bit like Jay. Same height, same blond hair, same Ryan Gosling-type profile –

  Oh God. It is Jay.

  ‘Shit.’ Stunned, I shrink down in my seat. ‘Guys – can we go? Now?’

  ‘What is it? Don’t tell me we’re hiding from your admirers as well,’ says Maggie.

  I’m about to explain, but it’s too late. Jay is looking straight in our direction, and now he’s seen me. He does a double take, and then smiles and leads his friends in our direction.

  ‘Rachel,’ he says, approaching our table. He doesn’t look or sound sleazy or smug or like a cheating bastard, as he should. He sounds nice, and normal – even a little embarrassed. ‘Small world! What brings you here?’

  Without meaning to, I’m standing up and actually receiving his kiss and hug. I don’t think he deserves a hug, but I also don’t want to look as if I’m sore and sulking.

  ‘I’m here for the weekend,’ I say. ‘Maggie and Lily, this is – Jay.’

  Jay introduces his friends: Henry, his blond clone, who looks posh and empty-headed, and Rob, the dark-haired one in shorts. We swap small talk about where we’re staying and for how long – the boys are in a nearby hotel until tomorrow evening, like us. I wonder if they’re other lawyers from his new firm. Jay and I used to work together, but he left last October – thank God.

  ‘Do you . . . sorry, I could be totally wrong,’ Rob says to Maggie, ‘but do you live in Fulham?’

  ‘I do! Why, do you?’

  ‘Yeah. I feel like I’ve seen you around. Do you go to the Nuffield gym?’

  ‘Yes, I used to! But I’ve joined a new one . . .’ They start swapping notes on Fulham gym facilities.

  ‘We should let you get on with your holiday,’ says Jay once they’ve finished their discussion of which place has the fluffiest towels and the cleanest machines. He adds, glancing at me, ‘Unless – where are you girls planning on going out tonight?’

  Maggie says, ‘We haven’t decided, do you have any tips?’

  ‘We heard about this – I suppose you’d call it a pop-up club, that’s happening in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. You need a password to get in.’

  ‘That sounds amazing,’ says Lily immediately.

  ‘I’m sure I could get you in, if you wanted,’ Jay says, looking at me enquiringly.

  I can’t help it; I am mildly flattered by this. And if he’s in Rome with the boys, on Valentine’s weekend, then he must have ended it with Tabitha or Tatiana or whatever her name was.

  But that’s irrelevant; I’m not single, and I’m not wasting an evening on Jay.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘We’ve got dinner plans with some other friends, and it might end up being a late one.’

  Jay seems to get the hint. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘It was great bumping into you. And nice to meet you, Maggie – Lily.’ He has a great memory for names. He went to charming bastard school.

  As soon as they’re gone, the girls turn to me.

  ‘Who was that?’ Maggie asks. ‘His friend was cute! I think I have seen him in my gym. Or maybe in Waitrose. Nice legs.’

  For a minute I consider telling them the whole story. About how Jay and I were ‘together’ – never boyfriend and girlfriend – in a gut-wrenching, on-and-off way for six months, until I found out he had an actual secret girlfriend. Which explained all the mystery illnesses, the weekends he ‘had to work’, and the real reason I couldn’t find him on Facebook.

  I should have keyed his car or something when I found out. But I didn’t want him to know how badly he’d hurt me, so to save face I went along with his fiction that we had been ‘friends’ and work buddies all along. I even sponsored his moustache for Movember – God help me.

  But it’s too pathetic to explain all of that so I say, ‘Oh, I had a thing with him. It didn’t end so well.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Maggie. ‘I’m sorry. When was that?’

  ‘It ended last September.’

  ‘Well, of course we won’t go out with them then,’ says Lily decisively. ‘We shouldn’t even have been talking to them.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I ask, feeling bad. The secret garden party rave did sound interesting. Typical Jay; he always found the best places to go out, damn him.

  ‘Of course! Hos before bros,’ Maggie says, which is so unexpected and un-Maggielike that we all start laughing.

  ‘Where are we going, girls?’ asks Lily, when we’ve subsided.

  ‘Oh.’ The encounter with Jay has thrown me completely off course and I can’t even remember what we were meant to be seeing first today. ‘I’m trying to think – I think it made sense for us to see the Forum first, and then the Coliseum. Let me check my guidebook.’ I rummage in my bag. ‘Shit! I left it back at the hotel.’

  The girls look at me mutely; I can tell they’re hoping I won’t suggest going back for it.

  ‘OK! We’ll wander,’ I say, reluctantly. ‘But tomorrow, can we definitely see the Coliseum?’

  ‘Of course!’ says Maggie. ‘I want to see it too.’

  ‘Shuffle me this way,’ Lily says, turning left down a side street. Ever since I told her about Carter saying this to me, she’s become very taken with this expression.

  ‘Any particular reason?’ I ask, as we trail after her.

  ‘Because it’s sunny?’

  Following her, I feel dubious. I want some sun too, but I don’t want to spend too long wandering aimlessly around these narrow streets, endless ochre and orange and pink facades punctuated by wooden shutters and souvenir shops. We could spend all day doing this and never see a single sight.

  ‘Oh!’ says Lily.

  We’ve come to the end of the street, which has opened up into a square dominated by a huge, round building of ancient reddish stone, with a facade of crumbling columns. It’s obviously been there for so many centuries it’s sunk several feet deep into the ground. A Latin inscription is set across the pediment. It looks like part of ancient Rome, dropped into the middle of a modern square. There are hardly any tourists looking at it; in fact nobody seems to be paying it any attention.

  ‘I know this sounds ridiculous,’ says Maggie, ‘but that looks old.’

  ‘Let’s have a shufti,’ says Lily.

  We go inside and I see from the holy water font that this is now a church, and bless myself automatically. The interior is dark, except for a column of light filtering down from a round hole at the top of the dome. We wander around, absorbing the hush and awe of the place, with its marble floor and mosaic walls. The silence is only broken by the shriek of a toddler breaking free from its parents before being instantly snatched up again.

  ‘This is the Pantheon,’ Maggie tells us in a whisper, having got hold of a leaflet. ‘It was built as a temple dedicated to all the gods during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, about two thousand years ago.’

  The Emperor Augustus. For a second I get a glimpse of what it would have been like: lit by candles probably, with softly moving robed figures and strange chants and incense rising up towards the domed roof. And two
thousand years later it’s still here, with people walking past with their iPhones and Prada bags and gluten allergies. After a while, we drift back out in unspoken accord towards the exit.

  ‘That was amazing . . . and it wasn’t even on my list,’ I say.

  Lily and Maggie don’t say anything but I know they’re thinking: there she goes again with her list.

  ‘I’m not wedded to the list, you know,’ I add, as we turn down a pedestrian side street lined with shops. ‘It’s just, I want to make sure we see Rome.’

  ‘But we are seeing Rome!’ Lily says, waving her arms around. ‘This is Rome!’

  I laugh, because she’s right. I’m in a lather to get out and see Rome, but we’re here. This is Rome. I take a moment to look around, absorbing everything; the buildings, the people, the special kind of light in the air, the smell of coffee from a nearby bar, the warmth of the sun on my face, the man walking past shouting into his mobile phone . . .

  Which reminds me: Oliver still hasn’t texted me back. Of course he’s probably mid-conference, or else his battery has died and he forgot to take his charger to Bristol. But couldn’t he borrow a charger? This is how it began with Jay; the cancelled plans, the silences, the texts I had to feed through an Enigma machine to decode. What if this whole conference is a cover story, and Oliver’s actually gone away for a romantic weekend with Laura? I tell myself not to be an idiot, but there’s a deep-seated fear there that’s very hard to shake. The sight of Jay has obviously rattled me.

  To distract myself, I stop to look in the window of the shop next door, where a very fitted raspberry-pink dress has caught my eye – except I don’t know where I would wear it. Maggie’s looking in the window of the shoe shop next door. She casts us both a hopeful look.

  ‘OK,’ Lily and I say together. We go inside and after a quick wander around, we sit down like two boyfriends, while Maggie tries on about twenty pairs of identical looking high-heeled ankle boots.

  ‘What happened to those suede boots you got at Christmas? Do you still have those?’ asks Lily, leaning forward. It’s as if she hopes that reminding Maggie about her other pair will end the shopping expedition.

  ‘You sound like my mum,’ says Maggie. ‘Just because I already have a pair doesn’t mean I don’t need more. Anyway, they’re already wrecked. I’m never buying suede boots again.’

  Lily leans back again, resigned. ‘Are you a shoe person?’ she asks me.

  I shake my head. ‘Not really. I have to be in the mood to go shopping. And I never understood the whole Carrie Bradshaw shoe fetish thing. Maybe it’s because I’m tall, but I’ve never been into heels. Are you?’

  ‘No,’ says Lily. She pokes out her foot, with its Nike trainer. ‘I wear these all the time now. They’re so comfortable. Once you get a taste of trainers, it’s hard to go back to normal shoes, let alone high heels.’

  ‘Don’t listen to them. They don’t understand,’ Maggie says to her boots. Ten minutes later, we’re walking out of the shop, complete with ankle boots, after many goodbyes and ‘Ciaos’ from the shop staff.

  I look at my watch. ‘Guys, if we’re going to see the Coliseum, I think we should probably head over there now.’

  They turn around reluctantly. ‘OK,’ says Maggie. ‘Which way is it?’

  ‘I can probably find directions on my phone,’ says Lily unenthusiastically.

  ‘Could we have lunch first, though?’ says Maggie. ‘I’m getting hungry already.’

  They both sound so forlorn, as if I’m making them do homework, that I laugh and shake my head. ‘OK, fine. Lunch first.’

  After more wandering, through crowded side streets, past the half-open doors of huge palazzos flanked with box trees, we come to another square, where a flower market is taking place: not just flowers, but an incredible array of fruit and vegetables. Even the leeks and lettuces look bigger, greener and glossier than they do at home. We make our way to a restaurant on the edge of the square, which I’ve realised is the Campo dei Fiori. So it counts as a sight.

  Maggie and I are happy to sit anywhere outside, but Lily insists on choosing the restaurant with the maximum amount of sunshine, and then the table with the same. While she roves off to look at what the other people are having, I check my phone one more time. Still nothing from Oliver. God damn. I am sure there’s some reasonable explanation, but still, it’s not great.

  A priest walks by us, his black soutane flapping in the breeze. Which automatically makes me think of how excited my granny would be that I’m so near the Vatican, and how she would expect me to go to a papal mass or something.

  Oddly enough, that’s something that Oliver understands; his family is Catholic too. In all other ways they couldn’t be more different from mine. They own a farm in Oxfordshire – two hundred acres or something – and have lived there for generations. Whereas I grew up in a grey, pebble-dash semi-detached house in Celbridge, County Kildare which has been our ancestral home since the late 1970s. And my dad is an electrician, and was unemployed for two years after the French electrical factory he worked for closed.

  In other respects, though, Oliver’s family isn’t what you’d expect. He was the first in his family to go to university – both his brothers went to agricultural college instead. Whereas my parents were always obsessed with school, homework, study and exam results. When I got into Trinity to study law, you would have thought I’d been made president. If I picture our families meeting each other – even being in the same room – my brain feels as if it’s going to explode.

  ‘I’m having spaghetti carbonara,’ says Lily. ‘And to drink, hm. Shall I have a glass of wine? I can’t decide.’

  ‘Let’s get a bottle of Prosecco,’ I say suddenly. To hell with Oliver. I am going to stop thinking and worrying about him, enjoy every minute of this weekend and really let my hair down. Though I generally wear it down anyway; ponytails get on my nerves.

  We order our bottle – from the waiter, who happens to be very, very handsome – and each get spaghetti carbonara as well, to counteract the booze. It still ends up being a very leisurely, boozy lunch.

  ‘This is the best,’ says Lily happily, twirling spaghetti on to her fork. ‘So delicious. If I lived in Italy, I really would be too fat to go on Valentino’s yacht.’

  ‘Oh God, not Valentino’s yacht again,’ says Maggie.

  ‘Have you been invited?’ I ask, bewildered. The other two start laughing.

  ‘It’s just this crazy thing Lily says. Tell her, Lil,’ says Maggie.

  Lily explains that she came across this saying in the autobiography of some celebrity’s daughter; a glamorous friend of her mother’s told the girl that she was too fat to go on Valentino’s yacht, and Lily was struck by the concept.

  ‘I used to use it as motivation, back in my stupid days. I probably am too fat for Valentino’s yacht now,’ Lily says. ‘I’ve put on weight since I moved to the States.’

  ‘A little, but I think it suits you,’ says Maggie. ‘It’s all gone in the right places. Sorry, that sounds sleazy. You know what I mean.’

  ‘I must say,’ says Lily, wiping her plate with bread, ‘it is nice not to worry about being thin for auditions.’

  ‘Do you miss acting at all?’ I ask her.

  ‘I do. Sometimes when I see people in cafés reading scripts I feel envious. But then I remind myself of all the other shit they have to go through, and I don’t mind so much. Soon I’ll be too old to play babes anyway. Maybe I’ll come back to it when I’m old enough to play moms.’

  ‘Moms and babes,’ I say. ‘How depressing.’

  ‘There are three parts for women in Hollywood. Babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy,’ says Lily, arching an eyebrow. It occurs to me that even if she’s not doing it at the moment, she’s an actress to her fingertips. Everything she does – her gestures, the way she says things – is a little bit more amped up than other people’s.

  Maggie has her new shoebox on her lap, and is gazing inside at her new purchase
s and stroking them lovingly.

  ‘Aren’t they gorgeous?’ she asks us. ‘Look at the stitching here. And the leather is so soft. They’d be twice the price in London.’

  ‘Did you ever want to work in fashion?’ I ask her.

  ‘Instead of doing microbiology? God, no. I mean, I love exercise but I wouldn’t want to be a professional athlete.’

  ‘I love kissing boys but I wouldn’t want to do it professionally,’ says Lily.

  We all laugh – I laugh much longer than the others and I realise that I’ve drunk most of the bottle of Prosecco by myself. To round off lunch in a healthy way, we order three tiramisus, coffee for the others – and a glass of red wine for me. ‘I should have worn my eating pants,’ I say.

  ‘What are your eating pants?’ asks Maggie.

  ‘They’re brilliant. They look quite smart but they’re elasticated – I always wear them for Christmas dinner,’ I confess.

  Our tiramisus arrive and before long we’re all moaning in ecstasy; they’re so sweet and damp and spongey . . . and boozy.

  ‘Good?’ asks the handsome waiter, pausing by our table.

  ‘Very good,’ says Lily. ‘Thanks. Hey, can I ask you a question?’ she says, as he’s about to leave.

  Maggie and I look at each other, wondering what Lily’s up to now. But she’s asking him about places to go out dancing this evening. He says that Rome is more geared to bars than nightclubs (or ‘dance bars’ as he calls them, which makes us all smile).

  ‘You could try La Maison – or Art Café in Villa Borghese,’ he suggests.

  ‘Oh,’ says Maggie. ‘Is that the temporary one, where you need a password?’

  His eyes widen. ‘No! You have been invited to that? You should go, for sure.’ Hmm. Maybe we should have taken Jay up on his offer after all – but never mind.

  ‘Isn’t he dreamy?’ Maggie sighs, when he’s left. ‘I’m so into foreign men these days, it’s like an illness.’

  ‘I’m sure you can meet foreign hotties online,’ says Lily.

  ‘I need to refresh my online photo portfolio,’ Maggie says. ‘I have no nice pictures of myself, I’m either all sweaty after a race or else I’m all red-eyed in a bar. And Leo is in every single one.’