Rachel Does Rome (5 page)

‘Does Oliver have any piercings in funny places?’ Maggie asks, reading my mind.

I shake my head, smiling. ‘No. No tattoos, beards or metalwork. Though he did recently
cut his own hair.’

‘What?’ the girls say.

‘Only because he didn’t have time to go to the barber’s and it was driving him crazy,’
I explain. ‘I think he thought, how hard can it be. If you’re used to cutting bones
and things, hair probably seems simple.’

‘Does it look OK?’ Maggie asks.

‘It’s fine – his hair’s wavy anyway so you don’t notice it. That’s when he’s pushed
for time. Most of the time he goes to Mr Topper’s beside the hospital.’

I’m sort of wishing now that I hadn’t mentioned it; it is a bit embarrassing, and
makes Oliver sound mad. Jay used to go to some place in Kensington where Kate Middleton
supposedly goes. I think that’s mad as well. But surely there’s some middle ground
between Kate Middleton’s hairdresser and Mr Topper’s?

Maggie’s tea has now reappeared; this time, it’s a cup of hot water, with a tea bag
floating on top.

‘Bit better,’ she says, frowning and pushing the tea bag down.

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.