If Only Read online

  When Letty says she doesn’t, he looks surprised, even a little offended. She doesn’t have the language to try to explain why not.

  The teacher divides them into two groups for a more general chat. Letty’s pleased to be with Heidi, who likes yoga. Alf likes football. Playing or watching? Letty asks, using the vocabulary they have just learned. Both, he says. She doesn’t know how to ask which team he supports, so she starts listing Premiership clubs.

  ‘Manchester United? Liverpool?’

  ‘Italiano!’ the teacher warns, seeing that she’s inadvertently put the two English people together again.

  ‘Lago Nero,’ Alf replies. ‘Blackpool.’ Then, in a whisper: ‘Sounds better in Italian.’

  Letty knows she’s meant to laugh, but she doesn’t. In her head, Letty can hear her mother saying, ‘The furthest I ever went as a child was bloody Blackpool!’

  She knows exactly what her mother would be saying about Alf now.

  ‘Men can be too good-looking. Makes them think that life is easy.’

  It’s one of Frances’s categorical statements that’s also a sideswipe at Letty’s father.

  Alf’s face is objectively handsome and he smiles a lot. His hair has lots of blond in it, but is more dark than fair.

  Letty feels colour spreading over her cheeks, as if Alf might be able to read her thoughts. She says, ‘Si chiamano i Tangerini, no?’ (They’re called the Tangerines, aren’t they?)

  He wasn’t expecting that.

  One of her attempts to be cool at school was to become very knowledgeable about football and, as she has an almost photographic memory for facts, she can remember all the nicknames of the clubs as well as the grounds they play in. She’s only done a pub quiz once, but the team she was in won because of it.

  Letty leaves the class just in front of Alf. She knows he’s behind her as she walks down the stairs and across the marble-floored lobby of the building, and she can feel that he wants to say something. Outside in the street, he catches her up, and asks, ‘Do you dance?’

  She stops.

  ‘You walk like a dancer,’ he says.

  ‘Italiano!’ she says, using the strict tone of the teacher, then smiling to show she’s joking. She sees him struggling to think of Italian words.

  ‘Sei ballerina?’ he asks.

  ‘No, I’m not a ballet dancer,’ she tells him.

  There’s a moment when they could fall into step and start a conversation, but she can see he’s lost his nerve and she doesn’t want to elaborate.

  Instead, she smiles and says, ‘A domani!’

  She walks smartly on. Looking back when she gets to the top of the street, on the pretext of checking before she crosses the road, she sees he has disappeared and wonders if he wasn’t going in her direction after all, or whether he has nipped down a side street to avoid the awkwardness of walking just behind or just in front of her.

  Letty’s surprised how familiar the layout of Rome feels, even though she hasn’t been here since she was eight years old. On that occasion, she and Frances and Ivo arrived on the airport train at Termini. Perhaps because it was her first trip to an Italian city – they’d always been to villas in Tuscany or Puglia before – or perhaps because she was at an age where she took everything in, she remembers being in the taxi to the hotel, feeling very low to the road as they bumped over cobblestones, swerved around buses, and accelerated away from traffic lights amid swarms of mopeds. It was night-time and she remembers craning to see the full height of the towering white Vittorio Emanuele monument, thinking that it looked like a model, not a real thing, and speeding past random floodlit columns and bits of temple that just stood beside the road as naturally as parked cars or newspaper stands.

  The lunchtime traffic is very heavy and the air is thick with exhaust. It’s not pleasant walking so she decides to get on a bus. In the crush of passengers, Letty is squashed up next to a young man in a shiny grey suit. His hair is slicked back and he smells strongly of cologne. He is talking to someone she can’t see who’s sitting down. As the bus stops suddenly, the standing passengers are catapulted forward, and she sees that the young man’s companion is a bride in a big white wedding dress. At the stop near the foot of the Campidoglio, the young man shouts at the other passengers to let them through, and Letty decides to get off too. The groom jumps the bride from bus to kerb. She is wearing trainers under the many layers of net skirting that have acquired a grey border from swishing along Rome’s grimy streets.

  The groom takes the bride’s hand. In his other hand he holds his mobile phone, filming their ascent of the wide, flat steps up to the square. He’s chatting all the time in Italian, too fast for Letty to understand. She tries to keep to the side of them, not wanting to appear in their video like a poorly dressed bridesmaid following on behind. There’s something gloriously unselfconscious about the couple in their finery, the way the bride keeps scolding him for the poor angle, the way he protests that his arm isn’t long enough! Mamma mia!

  At the top of the steps, the bride adjusts the flowers in her hair, using the phone as a mirror, and then she turns, smiles at Letty and asks, in Italian, if she will take a photo of them.

  ‘Certo!’

  They pose, first with Rome behind them and then the other way, with the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius as the background.

  The groom checks the photos, says thank you, shakes her hand.

  ‘Congratulations!’ says Letty, wishing she knew what you say in Italian. Is it Saluti? Or Auguri? Or is that just for toasts and birthdays?

  ‘You are English?’ the groom asks.

  ‘Yes. I hope you will be very happy!’

  The bride asks what she has said. The groom translates. The bride rushes to Letty and plants a kiss on both her cheeks. The groom shakes her hand again. They look so utterly delighted by the good wishes of a stranger that Letty wonders if it is a tradition, like first footing on New Year’s Eve in Scotland is. She smiles, then with a shrug says, ‘Ciao!’ and walks away, not looking back in case they decide to invite her for a drink or something. She wonders whether, if she stays in Rome long enough and becomes more fluent in the language, the Italian side of her will start to prevail over the English reserve that makes her feel embarrassed at this brush of intimacy with two strangers.

  How odd that she will be in their lives forever as the taker of the photo that will sit on the sideboard in their parents’ houses. She wonders if they will ever say, ‘Do you remember that an English girl took that?’ Or whether they will just see their smiles and remember how it felt to be newly married under a perfect blue sky with statues sculpted by Michelangelo looking down on them.

  A bride on a bus is somehow much more romantic than a bride in a white vintage Rolls-Royce.

  Letty decides that if she ever gets married she will use public transport too.

  Not that it’s likely. She has been in love twice. The first time, it was really more of a crush because she was only eleven. She had just gone to board at ballet school. Vadim, the Russian boy, was in his final year and he danced like no one she had ever seen. After the end-of-year performance, she’d hung around, trying to get up the courage to take this last chance of speaking to him. When he appeared, she knew she only had seconds alone with him, but found she had no idea what to say, even though she’d imagined the moment many times.

  ‘You are amazing!’ she blurted.

  He’d smiled right at her – modest, uncomprehending, amused, she couldn’t tell – but the image stayed with her for two years as she practised relentlessly, knowing that ultimately words did not matter, dancing would be their language, and she would make herself good enough to wear Aurora’s rose-pink tutu, or Odette’s white feathers, and be a worthy partner for his Prince.

  But then she’d got injured. After that she couldn’t bear to have anything to do with ballet.

  Letty’s first proper boyfriend was Josh. Maybe spending her entire adolescence in a world of fairy-tale princesses made her believ
e Josh would rescue her from the ordeal of life after ballet school. She was fifteen when he asked her to go out with him, and she was quickly enveloped in a blissful haze of wonder that this could be happening to her. When he betrayed her, it was as if her body and her mind shattered into nothingness. The still searingly painful memory blots out the warm sweetness of her encounter with the newlyweds, like a cloud passing over the sun.

  Letty blinks back tears of self-loathing that well automatically in her eyes if she ever allows herself to think about Josh and all the other mistakes she has made. If only she hadn’t been so naive, so trusting, so stupid. If only she could rewind those bits of her life where she has allowed herself to think ‘Why not?’ instead of sticking with her natural caution.

  4

  Thursday

  ALF

  Alf can’t sleep. At first light he gets up, washes and dresses as quietly as he can, and leaves. He’d like to go for a run to kick off the fidgety anxiety that’s made him toss and turn all night, but he’d have to come back and shower and risk waking the others up, and they’re usually pretty grumpy in the mornings, especially if they’ve drunk a lot the night before.

  The streets are empty except for the refuse men. The sudden loud shattering of a thousand bottles, as a recycling bin is lifted and emptied, startles awake the homeless man who always sleeps at the tram stop in the middle of Via Marmorata.

  Alf walks into the only bar that’s open this early, and stands at the counter stirring sugar into an espresso while he scrolls through his Instagram feed.

  His mum has posted a photo of his bedroom, except it’s painted pink, with two identical cots with frilly canopies and matching frilly curtains. The caption says: Almost ready! #twins #babies #excited.

  He’s happy for her and Gary after all this time, he really is, and he’s glad she’s feeling confident. He thinks it must be a good sign that she’s posted a photo, because normally she’s superstitious. His instinct would be to put a comment saying ‘Good Luck!’ but he doesn’t dare, in case having babies is like performing in competition and it’s bad luck to wish good luck. So he just ‘likes’ her post. And then he wonders if she’ll read something into that. Maybe the photo was meant as a kind of message to him that he’s not welcome back? Usually her posts are about the school rather than about her personally. Endless shots of her dancers holding up silver cups. He wonders if she boxed up his football trophies. His dancing trophies are displayed in the dance hall cabinet, alongside the photo of him and his mum dancing on the beach when he was a little boy. He can’t imagine her binning them. His football ones, yes, but his dance trophies are as much hers as they are his.

  Alf realizes suddenly that he’s not cross with her any more. Whenever he’s thought about her over the past months, his body has tensed with resentment. Now he just feels weary and a bit sad. He knows she didn’t mean to do what she did. At least, she did mean it, but she didn’t realize what the consequences would be. And he wishes that he hadn’t had to take sides, but at the time he hadn’t been given a choice.

  Mum’s due date must be quite soon now. On the spur of the moment, he decides he’ll ring her, wish her well. Why not? Somebody has to make the first move. He pulls her number out of his contacts, then realizes it’s only six thirty in the morning at home. If he rings now, he’ll wake her and she’ll think there’s something wrong.

  He puts his phone back in his pocket. He’s too old to be missing his mum.

  Alf orders un cornetto vuoto, which is what they call a croissant with no jam or custard in it. Icing sugar falls like a tiny smattering of snow over the shiny black counter as he eats it. He downs his espresso in one, pays, then orders another cornetto, which the bartender hands to him in a paper napkin. Alf crosses the road and gives the pastry to the homeless guy.

  Gina says that you shouldn’t give them money because they’ll only use it on drugs, but she doesn’t like it when he gives them food either.

  The guy accepts the offer with wary surprise. Alf has no idea how old he is. Could be Alf’s age, could be forty. His skin is burnished and etched with grime and the hardship of keeping alive. It’s an interesting face. Alf would like to take a photo. Sometimes he thinks the photos he posts of daily life in Rome are too pretty. There are so many homeless people in the city it seems wrong to ignore them, but he wouldn’t want to intrude on the little privacy that they have living on the streets.

  Today’s theme is food.

  The teacher asks them what they ate the previous evening. In Italian you say ‘I have eaten’, not ‘I ate’. Violetta gets it straight away. She’s very good at grammar. She says she had tagliatelle al ragu. There’s something about the way she hesitates and thinks before she says the name of the dish that makes Alf think that she probably didn’t. She doesn’t look like a pasta eater.

  Alf ate zucchini fritti. It was Mike’s turn to cook and he’s pretty good. Alf had never eaten a courgette before he came to Italy, and now he likes them a lot.

  The teacher announces that they are going to do a listening, which means gathering around the CD player and listening five times to the same conversation between two Italians. After the first time, they have to pair up and say what they’ve understood.

  ‘Niente!’ says Masakasu, laughing.

  Alf tells him that it’s a conversation about two people setting up a vegetarian restaurant. He seems to understand more than the rest of the class, probably because he’s been in the country longer. He’s used to hearing Italian spoken at speed. He’s done more shopping, read more menus, watched more adverts on television.

  By the fifth listening, he’s bored. He lolls in his chair, unable to concentrate. The teacher tells him to get a coffee in the break. Un espresso! she advises.

  Alf thinks it’s weird how the class members always sit in the same places in the cafe. It reminds him of the time he went on a coach tour of Devon with his mum and her sequence class, when he couldn’t understand why everyone always returned to the same seats they had randomly selected the day they left Blackpool.

  The boys always get something to eat; the girls don’t. Today, after a flurry of chat, Heidi stands up and walks over to the boys’ table. She says they are thinking of going out to lunch together and would the boys like to come? There is a restaurant around the corner from the school where they do a buffet for eight euros. You can eat as much as you want.

  When they return to the classroom, Heidi tells the teacher their plan excitedly, almost as if she’s expecting to get a gold star for practising today’s theme. She’s quite a needy person, Alf thinks. She wants to be everyone’s friend and she wants to be the teacher’s pet, but it’s useful to have someone like her in a class. If she were one of his beginners, he would pick her out to demonstrate a step with. She’d giggle and pretend not to be able to do it, but she’d give it a go and probably be quite good, though you can’t always tell from how pretty someone is whether they’ll be able to dance.

  The teacher is handing them yet another sheet of paper with sentences about the meaning of colours. The idea is to guess which colour goes with the description. It’s pretty obvious, because a lot of the words are almost the same as they are in English. Red is the colour of love and passion. White is the colour of purity, of angels, of brides. Passare la notte in bianco means not to have been able to sleep, which is very relevant to Alf today. Yellow is the colour of sunshine, but also, in Italy, of detective novels, he reads, fidgeting in his chair. He hates spending so long sitting down. Mr Marriot used to say there are seven different sorts of intelligence and everyone has a different way of learning. He thought Alf was a kinaesthetic learner, which means he learns better through physical activity than reading or listening. Sometimes he wonders whether that was his teacher’s way of reassuring him that he wasn’t thick.

  He doesn’t think Susanna has heard about the seven intelligences. Perhaps they’re not a thing in Italy? Even when she says they’re going to play a game, it’s still sitting down, taking it in t
urns to describe someone in the class and see if the others can guess who they are thinking of.

  ‘She has black hair and violet eyes,’ Alf volunteers.

  ‘Violetta!’ the others chorus.

  ‘Violetta è bella!’ adds Masakasu.

  Which makes Alf regret choosing her, because she’s clearly not someone who likes attention – unlike Heidi, who’s looking slightly put out.

  He wonders if her parents called her Violet because her eyes are such a deep blue? Aren’t all babies born with blue eyes? Or is that kittens? Perhaps she wears contact lenses to emphasize the depth of the colour? He doesn’t think so. She is not vain. She wears no make-up. She doesn’t even paint her toenails. The only adornment she has is a tiny tattoo of a heart with a knife through it, inked over the third and fourth metatarsals of her right foot. He wonders about the story of that tattoo. It must have been painful because the skin is very tender there.

  As if she knows what he’s thinking, Violetta slides her feet under her chair.

  Finally, the students are allowed to stand up and circulate freely, asking each other questions about the cultural significance of colours in their own countries. He wasn’t aware that they had cultural significance until he starts thinking about it. Blue is sad. Green is envy.

  When Alf approaches Violetta, she turns, looking in another direction, but by sidestepping across her back, like the sliding doors movement in the cha cha, he ends up facing her. But the only question he can think to ask is, ‘What’s your favourite colour?’

  He feels like he’s back at primary school. He wants to be able to ask why she’s here, what’s important to her, who she is.

  She thinks for a moment, before saying it’s black. She asks what his is.

  ‘Blu.’

  Normally he’s good at this, he thinks. He never has a problem chatting to people. But with her, he’s just inept. He hasn’t a clue how to make her interested in him, or even to make her smile. She’s as absent as a model in a monochrome photograph advertising some cool perfume.