If Only Read online

  ‘Come on,’ Alf says, eager to get to show her what they have come to see.

  The Villa d’Este is a sixteenth-century villa built into the hillside.

  The plain stone walls of the outside give no indication of the splendours within. Each of the rooms has long windows at the level of treetops; the walls are covered with extraordinary paintings of Arcadian scenes, making it feel like there is nothing separating the interior from the gardens. One even has trompe-l’oeil windows opposite the real windows, with painted billowing curtains.

  ‘This would be a great place for a ball, wouldn’t it?’ Alf says.

  He dances an imaginary partner around the room, arms in ballroom hold. Even though he’s wearing shorts and a plain white T-shirt, his movement is as formal as if it were white tie and tails.

  ‘May I have the pleasure?’ he asks, bowing in front of Letty.

  ‘I don’t know how to!’

  ‘That’s OK. I can teach you.’

  ‘Truly, a man of many talents!’ She echoes the phrase he used in the Forum, but turns away from his invitation.

  There are steps leading down into the gardens.

  The elegant way Alf allows her through the door first speaks of the formality of dance training. She wonders why she didn’t immediately realize that he was a dancer when he recognized her as one. It now seems so obvious from his posture and the ease with which he carries himself.

  She’s conscious of her own feet, turned out as she walks down the stairs, abs pulled in, bottom tucked under.

  ‘So you’re a ballroom dancer?’ she says, as they wander through the formal terraced gardens. The air is loud with the many fountains. Alf and Letty appear to be the only visitors.

  ‘My grandparents own a dance hall,’ Alf tells her. ‘They were ballroom champions. My mum was a Ballroom and Latin champion. I didn’t have a lot of choice!’

  ‘Were you a champion?’ she asks.

  ‘I was, yes,’ he says.

  It’s the first time she’s seen him a little flummoxed, as if he realizes that he invited the question but wasn’t intending to show off.

  ‘Everyone wanted me to turn professional, but I had other ideas.’

  ‘What other ideas?’ Letty asks.

  He laughs, like she’s put him on the spot and he didn’t expect that.

  ‘Yeah, still trying to work that one out. Don’t get me wrong – I love dancing, but I didn’t want ballroom dancing to be my whole world.’

  He smiles at her, unaware of the emotion the phrase has triggered. The number of times she has said, ‘Dancing was my whole world’ or heard people saying, ‘Dancing was her whole world’ to explain her.

  Amid the constant splash of water, she hears herself saying, ‘I wanted to be a ballet dancer . . . but I snapped my cruciate ligament.’

  She looks up at him, sees the pain on his face.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says, and she knows that he means both for the injury and for reminding her of it.

  Ivo had taken her skating in the quad of Somerset House. It was always just the two of them during the school holidays because Frances was working. Usually, they didn’t stray very far from their area of North London. Tennis in Regent’s Park, kite-flying on Parliament Hill, matinees at the Everyman cinema. It was the first time that ice rinks at Christmas had been a thing in London. Letty had pleaded with him to go, assuming that since she was good at ballet, she’d be good at skating. Mistake. She’d actually heard the ligament snap as she thumped down onto the ice, and the pain was so acute she’d passed out.

  The next thing she remembers is Frances screaming at Ivo on the other side of the curtain around the bed in A&E where the doctor was examining her knee, swollen to double its size.

  ‘How could you?’

  And Ivo, protesting.

  ‘It’s not my fault. It’s nobody’s fault! This isn’t helping!’

  And Letty thinking, It is my fault. I have ruined my own life.

  ‘It recovered, but never well enough to go back on pointe. So that was it,’ Letty says with as much lightness as she is able to muster, because if she ever thinks about it, her knee aches and tears gather just behind her eyelids, as if the ghost of the thirteen-year-old lying in A&E still remains inside her, even though she has tried so hard to leave her in the past.

  ‘Don’t you dance now then?’ Alf asks.

  She thought he understood, but it turns out he didn’t.

  ‘Ballet is all about perfection,’ she says.

  ‘But what about dancing? Don’t you miss it? Dance is in me all the time.’

  She looks at the shape of his face, polished by the sunshine, and for some reason she thinks of something she read about sculpture: that the figure was always inside the marble; the sculptor simply set it free. Is dance like that? Is it an integral part of a body that is liberated by training? It’s never crossed her mind before. She always thought of dancing as the product of endless practice, and she’s suddenly confused, as if she’s never properly understood the thing that gave her identity.

  ‘You should try ballroom,’ he says. ‘Or salsa. Have you ever tried salsa?’

  ‘I don’t think I’d like it.’

  Frances tried it once, as one of her many ‘perfect solutions’ to the problem that she didn’t get enough exercise but hated going to a gym. Rowing on the Thames was another, as was swimming in the Ladies’ Pond. Frances would get tremendously enthusiastic, sign up for an entire course, buy all the kit and then find that she didn’t like the river in the rain, or the mud in the pond, or washing out her wetsuit, or, in the case of salsa classes, the company.

  ‘My mother says it’s speed dating men with sweaty palms.’

  Alf jokingly wipes his hands on his shorts.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we’re in this . . . place!’

  They’re standing on a flat terrace beside two long rectangular pools that guide the eye towards the ornate fountain built into the hillside. They are the only people there, like figures in the foreground of one of the wall paintings in the villa.

  ‘It’s not a church, is it?’ Alf says. ‘It’s a palace Cardinal D’Este built for weekend parties! People have probably been dancing here for hundreds of years!’

  She glances around again. No one is there to watch. It is such a magical setting it almost invites abandon. What’s to lose? Nervously, she allows him to take her in a loose hold, one hand clasping hers, the other on her waist. Though he gives a confident appearance, she can feel the slight tremble of his fingertips through her T-shirt.

  Alf counts the rhythm, stepping on the first three counts, holding on the fourth, talking her through the basic step. She gets it straight away.

  ‘Hold on!’ He drops the hold, leaving her feeling self-conscious again as he gets out his phone. ‘We need music.’

  He chooses a gentle Cuban track with the volume low, and offers his hand. She takes a step towards him, feels her body responding to his touch, swaying to the lazy beat, following his moves naturally, as if the ability to dance has lain dormant inside her for many years and has just awoken.

  ‘This is the most incongruous thing I’ve ever done!’ Letty whispers as he guides her into a spin, with the fountains dancing around them. No longer caring whether anyone is watching, she gives herself to the steps and the music, enjoying the sense of achievement as he smiles at her, and the freedom from any thought except dancing, as if nothing else in the world matters. When the song begins to fade, she wants to say, ‘Again! Again!’ like a child.

  Instead, she gives Alf a little curtsy as he drops his hold and they walk side by side, his arm trailing around her shoulder for one brief moment, drawing her towards him in a friendly squeeze before letting go.

  Letty’s aware of her accelerated heartbeat, the sheen of sweat sticking strands of hair to her forehead, the ground beneath her feet, the blood still dancing in
her veins as they climb the steps at the side of the main fountain.

  At the top, there are three grottos with pools to feed the flow. Inside the caves the air is dank. A single trailing fern hangs down like a stalactite. Outside, the bright sunshine makes diamonds of droplets thrown high by the jet below. The ferocious roar of the gushing water seems to fill the space. It feels almost elemental, as if the two of them have always been there, inside the earth, gazing out at the glittering ether.

  Letty glances up at Alf and he is already looking at her, his eyes as dark as deep brown glass. A slight shiver ripples through her body, because she thinks he is going to kiss her and she doesn’t know what she will do.

  ‘What’s your star sign?’ he says suddenly.

  It’s so not what she expected – Letty takes a step back, bewildered.

  ‘Do you believe in astrology?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  Whatever it was just now has vanished.

  As they walk back up towards the villa, Letty hears music like an old-fashioned fairground carousel.

  ‘It’s an organ powered by the water,’ Alf tells her. ‘Waltz.’

  They both stop to listen, but he doesn’t hold out his arms and offer to teach her, and she’s relieved. She’s feeling let down, although she doesn’t really know why.

  The main square is thronging with the people of the town taking their early evening passeggiata: young families pushing buggies, children playing games of tag while mothers on benches chat, couples at pavement tables toying with glasses of Aperol Spritz as bright and luminescent as Christmas tree baubles in the late-afternoon sunshine. It seems strange that all this quotidian life is going on just metres away from the peaceful paradise on the other side of the villa’s walls.

  It would be natural to suggest an aperitivo, but as the Rome bus passes them, they both start running towards the bus stop to catch it.

  As the bus rattles down the mountain again, they have nothing to say to each other. Alf seems deep in thought and fidgety.

  It’s only when they’re nearing sofa warehouse territory that he finally speaks.

  ‘What I said, back there,’ he begins. ‘I don’t believe in star signs . . .’

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if you did,’ Letty tells him, still staring out of the window.

  ‘No?’ he says, with a slight note of challenge in his voice. ‘It would matter to me. I’d think I was a dickhead!’

  Suddenly they’re both laughing.

  ‘It’s just my mum’s really big on them,’ he explains. ‘She says that some signs are air and some are water, and if you’re both water or air or something, you attract or you don’t. I’m not sure, one or the other . . . In that cave, it was like we were water, and looking out at the sky, it was like we were air, and I . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.’

  She thinks he is trying to describe the strange sensation that something bigger was happening, something not quite earthly, as if time had been suspended.

  ‘I felt it too,’ she says.

  And suddenly the tension is gone, and they both allow their heads to relax against the back of their seats, hands by their sides, little fingers almost touching.

  9

  Wednesday

  ALF

  ‘Listen,’ says Letty. ‘What can you hear?’

  Alf concentrates.

  ‘Nothing,’ he says.

  ‘Exactly!’

  They are only a couple of miles from the Forum but they are in the countryside. The bikes they have hired lie beside them on the grass.

  Alf’s never felt more like he could actually be in Ancient Rome. When Letty announced that the Via Appia Antica was today’s destination – as if meeting each afternoon was what they did now, as much part of the routine as school – he wasn’t expecting so many miles of perfectly preserved original road lined with cypress trees and dotted with Roman tombs. Some of the monuments are as big as temples, some much smaller, which are more affecting because they look so homely.

  ‘They’re little houses,’ he says, looking at the figures carved on the one that is nearest to them. ‘Where you can stay with your family forever.’

  ‘Romans used to come and visit their families, bringing offerings of wine and food,’ Letty tells him.

  ‘I like that idea,’ he says. ‘More fun than bunches of flowers that wilt and go brown. It makes death part of life, instead of hiding it away like we do. Why did we ever start burying people underground?’

  ‘It’s a Jewish thing originally, I think, then it became Christian. Jesus was buried, wasn’t he, before he rose from the dead?’ says Letty.

  Alf wasn’t even expecting an answer to his question, but he’s getting used to her being serious about stuff. If she doesn’t know the answer, she tries to work it out logically. When he’s with her, he feels his brain working harder.

  Gina doesn’t really talk about facts, only feelings. If they were having this conversation – which they wouldn’t be, because Gina’s not really interested in history – by now she definitely would have said something like, ‘You really know how to cheer a girl up!’ or, ‘Can we stop talking about death? It’s depressing me.’

  ‘Even now, Italians don’t bury people underground, do they?’ he says. ‘You see those cemeteries outside cities. I always think they look like little towns.’

  ‘You’re right,’ says Letty. ‘I hadn’t made that connection.’

  He loves the hit of excitement he gets when he inadvertently observes something that interests her.

  ‘My grandmother didn’t wanted to be buried,’ she says. ‘I wonder if that was why.’

  ‘She was Italian, wasn’t she?’ He remembers from the lesson about la famiglia.

  ‘Yes, but she only lived here when she was a very little girl. Her parents came to England in the thirties. Her father worked as a hotel manager. But when the war came, he was interned. All Italian men were.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Marina learned to speak with the most cut-glass English accent you’ve ever heard, because it was dangerous to be known as Italian in those days.’

  ‘Marina?’

  ‘That was her name. We call each other by our first names in our family. Marina didn’t like being called Granny. She was too elegant somehow.’

  With Cheryl, his gran, it was that she felt too young to have a kid running round the dance hall shouting for Granny.

  ‘Were you close to her?’ he asks.

  ‘Very,’ Letty says with a fond smile. ‘But not cuddly close like a typical Italian nonna. Marina held herself very upright. She was quite distant, in a way.’

  Like her granddaughter, Alf thinks.

  ‘We spent a lot of time together when I was growing up, because we all lived in the same house and my mother worked.’

  ‘That’s in London?’

  ‘Yes, Belsize Park. It’s an expensive area now, but it wasn’t when my grandparents bought the house,’ she adds, as if she’s trying to assure him that she’s not rich. ‘At the time it was all divided into little bedsits which had sitting tenants, apart from the basement. That’s how they could afford it.’

  He tries to imagine what such a house might look like, but he’s only been to London a couple of times. Gina’s dad lives in a gated estate of detached houses and he works in Hampstead, but Alf doesn’t think ordinary people live there. He’s seen Buckingham Palace and Big Ben, but otherwise his only points of reference are EastEnders and Mary Poppins.

  ‘My gran looked after me a lot too,’ he says, searching for something they have in common. ‘She wasn’t very cuddly either, come to think of it. She’s quite strict. “Longer strides! No skipping! Flower in a vase!”’ He imitates Cheryl’s barked instructions.

  ‘Flower in a vase?’ says Letty.

  ‘It means leaning back from your partner when you’re in hold. Here, I’ll show you.’

  He pulls her to her feet, positions her head looking left, away from him, then takes her in hold, for
cing her torso away from his with his arms. He’d love to teach her to quickstep. But not here, among the tombs. It would be too – what was her word? ‘Incongruous.’ He loves that she uses words he’s only ever read as naturally as girls he knows would say ‘random’. For a moment, they stand in hold, very formal. And then she glances at him, and starts giggling at the ridiculousness of the pose in this setting. He drops her arms and they sit down again.

  ‘We were close too,’ he says. ‘I only had one set of grandparents because my dad died before I was born. Motorbike accident.’

  ‘Oh, your poor mother!’

  ‘She was only sixteen. He didn’t even know she was pregnant. I don’t know if they would have stayed together. Mum says so, but she has to really, doesn’t she?’

  Letty is frowning, trying to process the information. He hopes she doesn’t think he’s looking for sympathy.

  ‘It must have been very strange for you.’

  ‘I didn’t really know any different, did I? I was so used to being called the man of the house that I didn’t even realize until I went to school that other kids had dads.’

  She smiles.

  ‘We lived in this flat above the dance hall, and I really liked it there, because I had my own bedroom in the eaves, and when it rained, I’d lie there listening to the rain on the roof and the music drifting up from classes. It was like my little space, you know? When Mum met Gary we moved into a proper house with him. My grandparents converted the flat into studios.’

  ‘Dancing really was your whole world,’ Letty says.

  ‘What about you? What did you do after you left ballet school?’ he asks.

  She twists a spike of grass around and around until eventually it breaks.

  ‘I went to the local comprehensive,’ she says. ‘It’s not a bad school, but it was so different from what I was used to. I’d been one in a year of twelve. Now there were more than two hundred in my year, and by the time I arrived, I was fourteen and I didn’t fit. And my dad teaches there, which made it worse. Teenage girls can be very unkind.’

  She looks at him with sad eyes.

  ‘I know about that,’ he tells her. ‘I was dumped by my first dance partner. She grew up quicker than I did. She was thirteen going on thirty.’