The man is already shaking his head. Hal takes a step back. Only now that he is about to be turned away does he realize how much he has been looking forward to the evening. Not merely as a means to making new contacts, but as a taste of another side of life in the city – the sort glimpsed occasionally through the windows of cars, and the better sort of restaurant. It would have been an experience. The thought of his apartment, cold and dark, depresses him. The long walk back, through the wet streets. He should have known that Fede’s scheme would be useless.
He tells himself that really, he wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway. He doesn’t need to experience that life: it isn’t the one he has sought in coming to Rome. And yet there has always been a part of him – a part he isn’t necessarily proud of – that has always been drawn towards the idea of a party. Perhaps it is because of his memories of the ones his mother used to throw in Sussex: the lawns thronged with guests and lights reflected in the dark waters of the harbour beyond. To be in the midst of this, with a glass of some watered-down punch in his hand, was to feel he had stepped into another, adult world. Funny, how one spent one’s childhood half-longing to be out of it.
‘What is the problem here?’
Hal glances up to see that a woman has appeared in the doorway alongside the man. She wears an emerald green gown, almost medieval in style, a silver stole about her neck. She is quite elderly, in her mid-seventies, perhaps, her face incredibly lined. But she has the bearing of a queen. Her hair is very dark, and if artifice is involved in keeping it this way it is well concealed.
The doorman turns to her, triumphant but obsequious. ‘This man, my Contessa, he is not who he says he is.’
Hal feels her gaze on him. Her eyes are amazing, he realizes, like liquid bronze. She studies him for a time without speaking.
‘Someone once told me,’ she says then, ‘that a party is only an event if there is at least one interesting gatecrasher in attendance.’ She raises her eyebrows, continuing to study him. ‘Are you a gatecrasher?’
He hesitates, deciding what to say. Is it a trick? Should he persist with the lie, or admit the truth? He wavers.
‘Well,’ she says, suddenly, ‘you certainly look interesting, all the same. Come, let us find you a drink.’ She turns, and he sees now that the fur stole falls all the way to the ground behind.
He follows her up the curved staircase, illuminated by further lighted sconces. They pass numerous closed doors, as might confront the hero in the world of a fairytale. The gown, the centuries-old bricks, the flames of the torches: modern Rome suddenly feels a long way away. From above them come the sounds of a party, voices and music, but distorted as though heard through water.
She calls back to him. ‘You are not Italian, are you?’
‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’ Half-Italian – but he won’t say that. The less you say, the fewer questions you invite. It is something to live by.
‘Even more interesting. Do you know how I guessed? It is not because of your Italian, I should add – it is almost perfect.’
‘No.’
‘Because of your suit, of course. I never make mistakes about tailoring. It is English-made, I think?’
‘Yes, it is.’ His father had it made up for him by his tailor.
‘Excellent. I like to be right. Now, tell me why you are here.’
‘My friend had an invitation. He thought I might want to come instead of him.’
‘No, Caro. I mean to ask why you are in Rome.’
‘Oh. For work.’
‘People do not come to Rome for work. There is always something more that drives them: love, escape, the hope of a new life. Which is it?’
Hal meets her eyes for as long as he is able, and then he has to look away. He felt for a second that she was seeing right into him, and that he was exposed. He understands, suddenly, that he won’t be able to get in without answering her question. He is reminded of the myth of the Sphinx at Thebes, asking her riddles, devouring those who answer wrongly.
‘Escape,’ he says. And it is true, he realizes. He had told himself Rome would be a new start, but it had been more about leaving the old behind. England had been too full of ghosts. The man he had been before the war was one of them; the spectre of his former happiness. And of all those who hadn’t come home – his friend, Morris, among them. Rome is full of ghosts, too – centuries of them. There is perhaps a stronger concentration of souls here than in any other place in the world: it is not the Eternal City for nothing. But the important thing is that they aren’t his ghosts.
She nods, slowly. And he wonders if he has made the exchange, given the thing demanded in return for entry. But no, her questions haven’t ended yet.
‘And what do you do here?’
‘I’m a journalist.’ As soon as he says it he decides he should have lied. People in her sort of position can be obsessive about privacy. She doesn’t seem disturbed by it, though.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Hal Jacobs. I doubt that you will have—’
But she is squinting at him, as though trying to work something out. Finally, she seems to have it. ‘Reviews,’ she says, triumphantly, ‘reviews of films.’
But no one read that column – that was the problem, as his editor at The Tiber had said.
‘Well, yes, I did write them. A couple of years ago now.’
‘They were brilliant,’ she says. ‘Molto molto acuto.’
‘Thank you,’ he says, surprised.
‘There was one you wrote of Giacomo Gaspari’s film, La Elegia. And I thought to myself, there are all these Italian critics failing to see its purpose, asking why anyone would want to look back to the war, that time of shame. And then there was an Englishman – you – who understood it absolutely. You wrote with such power.’
Elegy. Hal remembers the film viscerally, as though it is in some way seared into him.
‘After I read that,’ she says, ‘I thought: I must read everything this man has to write on film. You saw what others didn’t. But you stopped!’
Hal shrugs. ‘My editor thought my style was … too academic, not right for our readership.’ It had been replaced with an agony aunt column: ‘Gina Risponde . . .’ Roman housewives writing in to ask how to get their whites whiter, lonely men asking how to conceal a balding pate, young women eager to work in the capital asking whether it was really the immoral, dangerous place their parents spoke of.
The Contessa is shaking her head, as though over some great wrong. ‘But why would you work somewhere like …’ she seems to be searching for the name.
‘The Tiber?’
‘Yes. You should be writing for a national magazine.’
It must be nice, Hal thinks, to live in a world in which things are so easy. As though one might merely walk into the office of one of the bigger magazines and demand a job. There had been interviews. But nothing had come of it. And his work for The Tiber has – just about – allowed him to pay his rent, to feed himself.
‘I work there because they’ll have me.’
‘I wonder if they know how lucky they are.’ She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps when my film is made you can write a review of that. Only a good one, naturally.’
He remembers, now, Fede saying something about a film. ‘When will it be made?’
‘When