‘Did any of you guys know Bradley Wyndham?’ he asked the hacks, and they all said they’d met him but didn’t know him well.
‘Believe it or not, he was teetotal,’ someone commented, incredulous. ‘A journalist who doesn’t drink is like a shark that doesn’t swim. He wrote some decent stories but he wasn’t one of us.’
‘Maybe he had a health problem,’ Scott suggested. ‘Or maybe he was religious.’ No one seemed to have any personal information about Bradley Wyndham or know why he had left Rome so abruptly.
One of the hacks, a man named Joe, started quoting his ‘best friend’ Truman Capote: ‘Truman said “I don’t care what anyone says about me, so long as it isn’t true.” Isn’t that hilarious? When you’re with Truman, you get the urge to take out your notebook and write down what he says because he comes out with the most amazing things from thin air.’
‘Yeah, but then he repeats them to anyone who’ll listen for the next ten years,’ another hack drawled. ‘He’s never minded quoting himself.’
Scott was sceptical about Joe’s friendship with Truman Capote. Surely the fêted New York writer would mix in more rarefied circles?
Sitting in the café the morning after their drinking session, Scott mused that maybe Rome wasn’t the right posting for him. There simply wasn’t anything he could write about. He wished he had been sent to Berlin, where a wall was being constructed to separate the Russian and American halves of the city and people were making daring last-minute dashes across before it was too late. Or the USSR, where Khrushchev was boasting of Soviet nuclear weaponry and the fact they’d taken the lead in the space race. Or Israel, where Adolf Eichmann was on trial for war crimes. Though at least he wasn’t in Vietnam, where the CIA-backed Southern Vietnamese were being pushed back by the Viet Cong. That all sounded a bit hairy. He didn’t fancy the danger and discomfort of a conflict zone.
At ten-thirty, the door of the building opposite opened and a stunning young Italian girl emerged, as she did every day at that time. It was the reason why Scott frequented that particular café, several streets away from his office. The girl had wave after wave of glossy-black hair and the prettiest face he’d ever seen: heart-shaped, with high cheekbones and melting chocolate eyes. She wore old-fashioned summer dresses in pale sherbet colours, tied with a sash round the waist and reaching modestly to well below her knees. Sometimes when the sun was behind her Scott could see the outline of her hips and legs through the fabric. Since he’d first set eyes on her, he’d been hopelessly smitten. His heart actually skipped a beat when she stepped out of her house each morning.
She was carrying a basket, and he knew that she was on her way to the market for provisions but that she would stop in a church to say mass. He’d followed her a few times and the routine was always the same.
She crossed the road and as she passed in front of the café, Scott called ‘Buongiorno, signorina bella!’
She nodded in his direction and gave a quick, nervous smile, without stopping.
He’d been greeting her most mornings for over a month now and was pleased that at least she now acknowledged him, although she hadn’t yet returned the greeting. What were the chances that one day she might agree to go on a date? He fantasised about sitting across a candlelit table, wooing her in his best Italian, and then managing to kiss her in a dark side street as he walked her home. That was as far as the fantasy would stretch. You’d never get a girl like that into bed without marrying her and he wasn’t prepared to go that far. But Scott liked a challenge and there was no doubt this girl presented a challenge.
He decided to make it his mission to get a date with her before the end of the summer. He was single. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring or any jewellery apart from a gold crucifix on a chain round her neck. What harm could it do? And if it came off, he’d have to get a photograph of the two of them to show his buddies back home; otherwise they’d never believe he could attract such a stunner.
Diana arrived in Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport on the 25th of September and collected her suitcase from a pile in the arrivals hall. She’d been told that someone would be there to meet her and that they’d be holding a card with her name on it, but she couldn’t see any such person. It was a scorching day and she wished she hadn’t worn her winter coat, but there hadn’t been room for it in her suitcase. She took it off and folded it over her arm. Several taxi drivers approached, competing for her attention, but she waved them away. Her driver was probably stuck in traffic and running late.
As she waited, the arguments of the past few weeks echoed around her head. Trevor was right: she must be a very self-centred person. She knew she was being a bad wife. She knew she was letting him down. Their discussions had got increasingly bitter as each became entrenched in their positions. She couldn’t contemplate turning down the opportunity to work on the film but Trevor had taken it personally, as if it meant she didn’t love him enough. She tried every argument but he simply reiterated that he couldn’t manage without her, that he’d miss her too much.
They had barely spoken since she booked her flight. He was so hurt he couldn’t even look at her, and she was terrified that she might have damaged her marriage irrevocably. Surely Trevor wouldn’t divorce her? They didn’t know any divorcees among their social set, or even at the university. What would she do if he decided to take that extraordinary step? She’d given up a secure, ordered life for the complete unknown, and it seemed emblematic of the chaos she could expect that no one had arrived to meet her at the airport. She stood amongst the taxi drivers in the bustling entrance hall wondering if she had just made the biggest mistake of her life.
After hanging around for half an hour, she changed some money at an exchange bureau. They told her she needed gettoni for the payphone so she purchased some and used them to call Walter Wanger’s office, trying several times before she worked out which bits of the code had to be included when you dialled. The phone rang out but no one answered. Stilling her anxiety, she decided to take a taxi to Cinecittà film studios. What else could she do, since she didn’t know the address of her pensione? She picked an older-looking driver, one who seemed less pushy than the others, and let him heft her suitcase into the trunk. Thank goodness she spoke passable Italian, learned on an extracurricular course she’d taken at university. She had always picked up languages easily while Trevor, despite his superior intellect, had no facility for them.
During the half-hour drive she wondered what could have gone wrong. Were they not expecting her that day? Had they changed their minds about hiring her? The driver pulled up outside the entrance to a single-storey peach-coloured building with the Cinecittà sign over the gate. Diana paid the driver and stood sweltering in the heat as an overweight guard in a dark suit telephoned Walter Wanger’s office, then tried another number in the production block. Diana’s stomach was in knots. What if this was all a huge mistake and they weren’t expecting her at all? Had she jeopardised her marriage over a misunderstanding?
A pony-tailed girl in white Capri pants came running across the grass towards them. ‘Diana?’ she called. ‘You must have thought we’d forgotten all about you. It’s the first day of shooting and everybody was on set to watch, including the driver we had asked to pick you up. I swear, you can never rely on Italians.’ She was American.
‘It’s fine,’ Diana said. ‘I’m here now.’
‘Let’s take your suitcase up to the production office and make everything official. You need to sign your contract and then I’ll show you around. My name’s Candy,’ she added as an afterthought.
Diana