If Only Read online

  There are now two messages from Frances. The first says simply, Well?

  The second, Are you OK?

  She texts back.

  Fine. I’ll call later.

  The apartment Letty has rented looks better in real life than the photos on Airbnb. One entire wall is glass with a far-reaching vista to the west. In the foreground stands a stretch of the ancient Aurelian wall, and beyond the cathedral of San Giovanni in Laterano.

  If Letty opens a window and cranes her neck to the right, she can see the dome of St Peter’s in the far distance, and to the left, the soft purply shadows of distant hills. But she’s tentative, standing a foot back from the glass, not quite trusting it as a barrier to the ten-storey drop to the street.

  Letty lies on the sofa and gazes at the sunset. Stripes of duck-egg blue and grey intersperse with shades of pink, from the fiery coral of the horizon to the palest candyfloss of the highest cloud.

  Finding herself in near darkness, she realizes she has been transfixed by the changing expanse of sky, lulled by the incessant hum of the city’s traffic, for almost an hour. She is suddenly aware of a low thump of bass, and the clatter and sizzle of cooking emanating from a neighbouring apartment. She likes the sensation of being alone, but with the knowledge there are people around her. Wafts of garlic remind her of the need to eat. She fries the chicken breast in olive oil, empties the bag of salad onto a plate, then squeezes lemon juice over it. She eats her meal slowly, chewing and swallowing methodically as she watches the last embers of light disappear from the sky. Then she washes up. Finally she calls her mother.

  ‘I’ve always hated the term empty nest,’ Frances declares, as if it’s a phrase Letty has greeted her with, when all she’s said is, ‘How are you?’

  ‘I never was that cooing, clucking sort of mother, was I? Although, of course, it was me who paid for all the feathering.’

  A lifetime in advertising has made Frances arch with words, as if she’s testing copy. Or maybe she was always like that, and that is why she chose it as a career. Letty’s never known.

  ‘I’ve spent all day trying to make the place look presentable,’ Frances goes on. ‘I’ve got a viewing tomorrow. Ivo’s done f-all, of course. So much bloody stuff. I’m honestly thinking of buying a new-build, all glass and nowhere to store anything. What do you think?’

  ‘Can’t see that working for Ivo,’ Letty says.

  ‘No,’ says Frances.

  Is her mother’s tone bitter or wistful? Would she actually like to live in a glass tower? Letty can’t tell.

  Her parents are selling the house that they have lived in all their marriage. It had been informally agreed that when Marina died, the house would be left to them. But it turns out that her grandmother never changed her will, and Letty’s father Ivo, Marina’s younger son, shied away from raising the subject with her. So the house, which has always been their family home, now half belongs to her father’s older brother, Rollo. Or what’s left of it after inheritance tax, as Frances often remarks. There must be quite a lot left, Letty thinks, because one-bedroom flats in the area are selling for over a million and their property is big enough to make five of those, but it does nevertheless seem terribly unfair that Frances has to leave the house on which she has paid all the expenses for years, including a new roof and underpinning.

  The constant tension between her parents is one of the reasons that Letty needed to escape.

  ‘Anyway,’ says Frances, with a prolonged sigh. ‘What’s it like where you are?’

  Her mother sounds so uncharacteristically defeated, Letty doesn’t dare tell her that she has a great glass window, with a view that makes her feel happy and free.

  ‘OK,’ she says.

  There’s a long pause.

  ‘I’ve just had supper,’ Letty finally says. ‘Chicken with lemon and a bag of salad. There’s a supermarket quite near.’

  ‘A bag of salad. In Italy! Who knew?’ Frances says. Then, slowing down: ‘Good you’ve found somewhere easy to shop.’

  The effort to keep the conversation going is suddenly too much for Letty.

  ‘I’ve got some homework to do,’ she says.

  ‘OK, I’ll let you go, then.’

  ‘OK, bye!’

  Letty tastes a familiar bittersweet cocktail of guilt and relief as she presses the end call button.

  2

  Tuesday

  ALF

  Alf wakes up before his flatmates. Usually he clears up the debris left over from their after-work drinking before brewing a pot of coffee. Now, as he closes the door carefully so as not to disturb anyone’s sleep, he feels guilty for leaving the stale smell of Peroni on the air.

  As he leaves Testaccio, he takes a photo of the Pyramid – so white and modern in shape you could believe it was built two years before, not two thousand – and posts it with the caption: Buon giorno! #Roma #Rome #ancient #modern.

  Within a couple of seconds, he has his first ‘like’ from Stuart. It’s eight thirty. Which is seven thirty UK time. So he’s probably having his breakfast before heading off to work, catching up on all the stuff that’s arrived overnight. Alf pictures him sitting at the table in the huge kitchen-diner that looks onto the golf course before snatching up his keys, asking Alexa to open the garage door, and giving the Porsche a rev before driving off in a swirl of exhaust.

  Alf decides to take the tram up the long hill to the Colosseum, because he doesn’t want to be late. He thinks she’s the sort of person who will get to class early. His mind runs through the things he knows about her. She is called Letty. Short for Violet. Violetta, the teacher calls her, which he likes the best. She is English but she doesn’t sound like the usual English person trying to speak Italian, and she doesn’t look like any English girl he knows. Her hair is dark and long and she uses it as a curtain to hide behind. The way she hurried out of the classroom has stayed with him, as if she had somewhere to go, but he knew she didn’t somehow. Or maybe she did. Maybe she is just shy, or maybe there is a reason she doesn’t want to be friendly. Maybe she has a jealous lover, or a partner.

  ‘Buon giorno! Ci vediamo dopo!’ Alf tests his Italian on one of the stallholders as he walks past the Forum.

  He’s on nodding terms with most of them now. They’ve watched him taking clients on tours. They give him a discount on bottles of water and throw in a free one for him. The other day when a restless American kid was clamouring for a plastic Roman helmet, Alf negotiated a free sword to go with it, and the tip the appreciative parents gave him was far more than the price they would have paid.

  ‘Parli bene Italiano!’ the stallholder replies.

  Alf knows he doesn’t speak Italian well. If he learned anything from yesterday’s lesson, it was that. But it’s the fact that Italians generally encourage any attempts to speak their language that made Alf decide he wanted to learn it properly. If he’s going to live here, he wants to be able to hold a conversation.

  If he’s going to live here . . . The original plan was to go travelling, but they kind of got stuck. There are worse places to be stuck, though, Alf thinks now, crossing the piazza in front of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

  Today Violetta is wearing a black vest with her slashed jeans. No bra. Her hair is braided in two plaits across her head then falls loose down her back.

  The teacher tells them to walk around the classroom greeting each other, seeing if they can remember everyone’s name, and then asking how they are.

  They all say they are well because they don’t know any other words. Until you can speak, you can’t express anything different or complex. It’s like babies, Alf thinks. They cry because they can’t tell you why they’re unhappy.

  The teacher tells them that today’s lesson will be about personal information.

  ‘How old are you?’ is a question that he’s not used since primary school, when it seemed to really matter who was five and who was only four and three quarters. With a September birthday, Alf was always oldest in his yea
r. People said it gave an advantage with sport and stuff.

  He’s paired with Angela, the Austrian woman, and he feels a bit awkward talking about age. He estimates she is in her late fifties – could be early sixties because she’s had Botox and fillers. You can always tell. He doesn’t understand why women do it. He thinks it ages them more than wrinkles.

  ‘Give me wrinkles any day,’ he once said to Gina, and she said, ‘Well, that’s a relief!’

  ‘Ho sessanta anni,’ Angela says.

  Alf doesn’t have the Italian to say, ‘You don’t look it!’

  And even if he did, he doesn’t think it would be appropriate, because it would make it sound like sixty is really old.

  Sixty is a difficult one for women to admit to, he’s noticed. Forty, too. Whatever they say about life beginning at forty, all his mum’s friends dread that age. Fifty doesn’t seem so much of a problem – a lot of women who come to his mother’s dance school have big fiftieth birthday parties. But sixty isn’t good. His gran, Cheryl, has been fifty-nine for several years.

  He’s observed that when women get to seventy, if they’re still in fairly good shape they quite like saying it, because they want to hear, ‘I can’t believe that!’

  And weirdly, the older they get, the prouder they seem to be of their age, especially since it’s often the ancient ones who can get around the dance floor really well because everyone learned to foxtrot in the 1950s.

  ‘Eighty-seven? You are kidding me!’

  He likes the feeling of making their day.

  He can’t stop glancing over to where Violetta is sitting with Masakasu. He thinks she is probably in her early twenties. He can’t work out why he wants her to acknowledge him so much. The only thing they have in common is that they’re English. It’s not like it’s his duty to befriend her. She’s probably from London: nobody in the North would call their child Violet. It would be like your great granny’s name or something.

  Angela is saying she thought Alf was older than nineteen. He knows this not because of her faltering Italian, but because everyone always says it.

  Even when he was a little boy, people were constantly praising him for being the man of the family, ruffling his hair, telling him he was doing a great job of looking after his mum. He remembers being terrified that he would be found out. Someone would see that he didn’t have a clue how to look after her, especially when she was crying in the kitchen after doing the washing and everything when he had gone to bed. Sometimes he came down and allowed her to give him a cuddle and kiss his hair as her tears made it wet. Mostly, though, he pretended not to see, creeping back up the stairs to his bedroom and lying awake agonizing about how to make her happy.

  It got better after she met Gary when he was ten, although he still remembers her saying, because he’s heard the story and the accompanying shrieks of laughter so many times, ‘You don’t mind me having another man in my life, Alfie?’

  And him confiding to her in a whisper, ‘I’m not really a man, you know.’

  At break, Alf orders a cappuccino and a cornetto filled with apricot jam that erupts over his fingers and drips onto his T-shirt as he takes a bite, causing Masakasu to roar with laughter. He glances in Violetta’s direction, but she isn’t looking at him, and when he comes out of the cloakroom with a wet patch down the front of his T-shirt, having removed the jam, it’s Heidi he bumps into. She’s in her late thirties, pretty in a Claudia Schiffer kind of way, and wearing a black leather jacket with tassels and shorts with patterned tights. He imagines she is used to being the sexiest woman in the room. She’s flirty in the entitled way that older women often are with him.

  ‘Now with a wet T-shirt,’ she says in English. ‘What, I ask, are you trying to do to us girls?’

  He smiles because she says vet instead of wet and vot instead of what. There’s something about her keenness to be friendly that makes him think she is a lonely person, although he cannot see why she would be.

  The teacher hands them worksheets about jobs.

  They have to match words with cartoon pictures of people working. Doctor, lawyer, teacher, labourer, waiter, cook. It’s all pretty obvious.

  The teacher asks them what they do.

  Jo from Norway says he’s a doctor.

  ‘Vero?’ asks the teacher. ‘Really?’ As if Jo has misunderstood the instruction and simply said the first word on the sheet.

  ‘Vero,’ he says.

  Then she asks Alf.

  ‘Sono avvocato,’ he says with a grin, choosing the next item on the list.

  The two Colombian girls giggle.

  ‘Dai!’ says the teacher.

  It’s a word that Italians use all the time. It’s like ‘C’mon!’

  Alf doesn’t know which job to go with. In Blackpool, he’s always helped his mum out at her dance classes, but he knows what sort of looks he’ll get if he says he’s a dance teacher. It’s ironic, he always thinks, that although he spent his adolescence being called gay because of his dancing, he was the first of his year to have a girlfriend, the first to have sex. Women like a man who can dance.

  He spent a year as a waiter in a pizzeria after school and at weekends. The summer before that he did the deckchairs on the beach. Since living in Rome, he has worked as someone who stands near a restaurant handing out flyers offering a 15 per cent discount, but he doesn’t know how to say that. He’s also promoted Segway tours. For a while he led the tours too, after Yuri, who owns the Segways, took a corner too quickly and broke his arm, which wasn’t a great advertisement. That was what gave Alf the idea of becoming a tour guide, but he’s unofficial, so he isn’t sure the teacher will approve of that. She’s quite strict. In the end, because it’s one of the words on the worksheet, he says he’s a waiter.

  Heidi works in a hotel as an events manager, which makes sense. The teacher moves on to Violetta.

  She says she is a student.

  She doesn’t look like a student. Alf wonders what the Italian word is for model.

  The Colombian girls are also students, as is Masakasu – a student of lyric opera, the Japanese boy elaborates, which is why he needs to learn good Italian pronunciation. To demonstrate, he stands up and gives them ‘Nessun Dorma’. He has that operatic way of singing where your face contorts with the effort of making such a loud noise, but it sounds brilliant. He’d be great on Britain’s Got Talent, Alf thinks. He gets out his mobile phone, holds it up to ask Masakasu’s permission. The Japanese boy nods, delighted, as he continues softly, then gets louder and louder until the final ‘Vincerò!’

  Everyone claps when he finishes the song, and they can hear applause coming from the classroom next door.

  Finally, the teacher puts a Post-it note with the name of a celebrity on each person’s forehead. They have to ask each other questions, using the language they have learned, to find out who they are.

  When the class finishes, Alf stays seated while the others are leaving as he posts the video of Masakasu singing, with the caption: Cool guy in my Italian class #opera #Rome #Roma #singer #BGT #Italy’sGotTalent?

  He shows it to Masakasu as they walk down the circular staircase together, and he says, ‘Cool guy!’ happily.

  Out in the street, Alf looks hopefully in both directions, but Violetta has vanished. The feeling of disappointment is like someone clutching his heart then letting go, although if he saw her in the distance walking up the street, he doesn’t know what he’d do.

  Alf’s phone buzzes in his pocket and keeps buzzing. The video is the most popular thing he’s ever posted. It must be the BGT hashtag. He resets the phone not to vibrate each time there’s a notification.

  3

  Wednesday

  LETTY

  There’s a border as bright as white neon around the edges of the blind when Letty wakes, telling her that it is already sunny outside. She is going to be late for class. Rolling from the middle to the side of the bed, she remembers just in time to duck rather than hit her head on the concrete beam.
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  The landlord was keen – a little too keen, she initially feared – to scamper up the ladder and show her the sleeping gallery. But it was the beams he was concerned about.

  ‘You stay alone?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe not so much a problem.’ He winked.

  She’d looked at the bed, and the ceiling, maybe a metre above. Was he saying that previous guests’ rearing throes of passion had been cut short by concussion?

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she told him, wanting him to go.

  ‘Everything necessary,’ he’d said, ducking expertly as he moved around the bed.

  After he left, she’d found a collection of condoms in a wooden box with the word LOVE stamped on it. She wondered if the apartment was his shag pad between Airbnb bookings.

  Now she pulls up the blinds on the vast window. The sky is a very pale blue, the saints atop San Giovanni in Laterano lit by the clarity of the morning sunshine. Letty finds herself thinking that she has found what she wanted, even though she didn’t really know what it was she was looking for.

  ‘What do you like doing in your free time?’ the teacher is saying when she arrives at class.

  ‘Violetta, che cosa fai nel tempo libero?’

  Hearing her name spoken in Italian, as Marina always did, makes Letty panic a little, feeling slightly fraudulent for not being better at the language.

  ‘Mi piace leggere,’ she says.

  And then she wishes she had come up with anything other than reading, because it makes her sound like a swot. It’s the first impression she gave when she arrived at her secondary school aged fourteen, when all the social hierarchies had already been established, and she never seemed to be able to move away from it, however hard she tried to make herself look like one of the cool ones.

  The teacher tells the class to ask each other questions about their hobbies.

  Jo, the Norwegian, likes cross-country skiing and skating.

  Does Letty like skating? he asks.