If Only Page 9

  He remembers how vicious Sadie could be, and how her gang used to taunt other girls for wearing glasses, or being fat, or, worst of all, being prettier than them, which would have been Letty’s crime. At that age, some girls still look like children, while some are fully grown women. The teachers used to refer to Sadie’s crew as the Pink Ladies, even before they did Grease for the Christmas show. He’d never really understood that, because they were always having anti-bullying days and Sadie and her mates were classic bullies, but the name gave them the status they were looking for. Sometimes he thought the teachers were a bit afraid of them too.

  ‘But you found another partner?’ Letty asks.

  ‘It’s easier for boys. There aren’t that many of us,’ he says.

  ‘That used to be true in ballet too, but there are a lot of boys now.’

  ‘Since Billy Elliot?’

  ‘Maybe. But there have also been several really fit and definitely heterosexual stars, so being a ballet dancer doesn’t automatically mean you’re gay any more. Not that it ever did, or that there’s anything wrong with being gay, obviously. My brother’s gay,’ she adds, so hurriedly that he wonders whether she thinks he is.

  ‘I didn’t know you have a brother,’ he says.

  ‘He’s much older than me,’ she says. ‘My mother says that Oscar’s the reckless-passion child and I’m the biological-clock child.’

  Alf doesn’t know how to react. Her mother sounds very different from his. He doesn’t want to say that she sounds like a piece of work, because people always stick up for their relatives. Even now, he’d never let anyone say anything negative about his mum.

  ‘I auditioned for Billy Elliot,’ he says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Not that I knew ballet or anything. But I looked the part. I could dance. But when they offered it to me, it meant living away from home to do the training. I couldn’t leave Mum by herself.’

  Although, as it turned out, they moved in with Gary soon after that, so she probably would have been all right without him.

  ‘Do you ever regret not doing it?’ Letty asks.

  ‘The way I see it, I liked my life in Blackpool and I don’t know if I would have liked the Billy Elliot School. So no point regretting it,’ he says.

  It was his mum who had all the regrets, he thinks – probably because she felt guilty.

  Every time he succeeded at anything after, like captaining the school football team or winning ballroom or Latin titles, his mum always had to say that he wouldn’t have been able to do that if he’d gone to the Billy Elliot School. And if the film was ever on television, she’d always wonder what happened to the other Billies who’d been in the musical. You never heard of them, did you? she’d say.

  He wonders if she ever feels guilty now. She’s probably too busy to think about him at all.

  Letty’s still plucking at the grass, deep in her own thoughts.

  ‘Did they teach Latin at your school?’ he asks, trying to move away from reflection.

  Letty looks up, startled.

  ‘God, no!’ she says, then, after a long pause, ‘Actually, I got ill. I had to go into hospital for a while. My uncle came after work twice a week and taught me. So I’m kind of home-schooled. Or, more accurately, hospital-schooled.’

  ‘Is your uncle a teacher?’

  ‘No, he’s a lawyer.’

  He imagines a rather formal man in a dark suit sitting by a hospital bed, both of them bent over books.

  ‘That’s why you are like you are!’ he exclaims.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asks.

  ‘I mean, you’re so precise, a bit like a lawyer . . .’ He stops. The only lawyers he knows are in television dramas, so what’s he talking about?

  Letty frowns for a moment, and then her face relaxes.

  ‘I suppose you’re right,’ she says. ‘Rollo does analyse everything in rather a lawyerly way. I must have picked some of that up. You’re very thoughtful,’ she tells Alf.

  ‘You’re well now?’ Alf asks.

  ‘I’m well now,’ she says, still looking at the grass, and then she looks up and smiles at him. ‘Thanks for asking.’

  But there’s something in the way she says it that makes him think she’s really saying, ‘Thanks for not asking.’

  ‘Shall we push on?’ he suggests, picking up her bike and holding it for her before getting on his own.

  She leads the way, her hair blowing behind her. Her long legs and arms are bare today – she’s wearing shorts and a white T-shirt. She tilts her head back to get the sun on her face. It’s an expansive gesture of happiness, as if the pedalling has set her free. When she is in motion, she is truly gorgeous, he thinks. When she is still, it’s like she’s shackled by invisible chains, a prisoner in her own beautiful body.

  ‘This was such a cool idea,’ he shouts.

  ‘I know!’ she shouts back.

  The bus back into town is crowded, so they strap-hang facing each other, and each time the bus stops and his body is flung against hers then back, he looks into her eyes, her mouth so close to his that he can breathe her breath. He badly wants to kiss her but he knows he cannot, must not must not must not.

  They alight near the route of the number three tram, and he waits with her at the stop.

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ he says.

  ‘Your turn to choose,’ she says, and his lungs feel like they’re filled with pure joy. Then she says, not quite looking directly at him, ‘Do you have any plans for this evening, by the way?’

  It’s so unexpected he panics, and speaks too quickly.

  ‘It’s my turn to cook.’

  He could text Gina and say some clients have invited him for dinner, which sometimes happens, and would they mind if he did his turn another day? It’s not like his cooking is something they’re all looking forward to. But the moment has gone.

  ‘Can you cook?’ Letty asks, perfectly pleasantly, but looking into the distance as if she’ll conjure up a tram if she stares hard enough.

  ‘I’m learning. I do a pretty good carbonara. How about you?’

  ‘Not really,’ she says.

  Is something happening here? Or is he imagining it because he wants it so much? She’s on her own and likes having company, and it’s probably nothing more than that. She just doesn’t give out the normal clues. He’s never been in this position before. He’s tempted to say, like a contestant on Love Island, ‘I feel this connection with you. I’d like to know what you feel about me?’ But nobody talks like that in real life. Or maybe they do. But not him, and definitely not Letty. He doubts she’s even heard of Love Island.

  10

  Thursday

  LETTY

  ‘Have you seen Roman Holiday?’ Alf says, when she catches him up at what has become their meeting place on the corner two streets up from the school.

  ‘Ages ago,’ says Letty.

  ‘So, we’re going to do my Roman Holiday tour.’

  ‘Didn’t they see Rome on a Vespa?’ she asks, not sure whether she’ll feel safe in the crazy traffic.

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,’ says Alf. ‘Because I don’t have a moped.’

  ‘That’s a relief!’

  As they set off walking, he says, ‘It’s the one thing I promised Mum. Couldn’t do that to her twice.’

  His father, Letty remembers. It’s rather sweet that a grown-up would admit to honouring a promise to his mum. She thinks about all the things she promised Frances she wouldn’t do when she was a teenager, how she got a kick out of doing the opposite, and how self-destructive most of the betrayals turned out to be.

  Alf hands her a postcard with Saluti da Roma written on it, surrounded by about a dozen miniature views of Rome, including all the famous sites.

  ‘How many of these have you seen?’ he wants to know.

  ‘Only the Forum, the Colosseum, St Peter’s . . . oh, and the Spanish Steps.’

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘The rest are walkable, once we get dow
n into the centre.’

  ‘Do you always give out postcards with your tours?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s that little bit extra. Like a free gift,’ he says, quite serious about his work. ‘People really like them, but nobody sends them now because of Instagram.’

  ‘You do Instagram,’ she says.

  ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t remember how great it was to get a postcard from my gran when they were doing competitions abroad,’ he says. ‘I think it’s what made me want to travel.’

  Normally he seems so mature, as if he has everything under control, but just sometimes you get glimpses of how he must have been. She sees a little boy with curly fair hair looking up at postcards stuck to the wooden joists of his bedroom under the roof.

  ‘Did your grandparents compete in Italy?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘There’s a fair number of Italian dancers though. Do you remember Flavia and Vincent on Strictly? And now there’s Giovanni.’

  ‘I don’t really follow Strictly,’ she says, adding quickly, in case he thinks she’s a snob about reality television, ‘Frances does.’

  ‘Frances?’

  ‘My mother. She’s always saying she wants to learn ballroom dancing. Strictly must have been good for your business?’

  ‘You’d think. In January, sure, when everyone’s followed the programme and it’s their New Year’s resolution to learn. By February the weather’s bad, and weekday nights there’s usually some big new crime series on television. Then it starts to tail off.’

  Letty thinks of Frances and her enthusiasms. She’d buy the shoes and the dress, and then they would disappear into a drawer with the wetsuit and the swimming goggles.

  They get off the bus at Piazza Venezia, then walk through the backstreets to the Pantheon.

  With Alf, Letty sees aspects of Rome she knows she’d never notice alone. On the Via del Corso, she would go to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj and study all the paintings, but she would walk past the official AS Roma football club shop, where you can buy merchandise and tickets for the matches, which is an equally important part of the culture of the city. She would marvel at the structure of the Pantheon, but not know about the statue of an elephant by Bernini in the square behind it, which, according to Alf, is beloved of Romans. On her own, Letty wouldn’t go into Rome’s most famous gelateria Giolitti, where they stop for an ice cream. Sitting in a tea room with gilded mirrors on the walls, she can imagine people eating dishes of gelato in the fifties, wearing proper tea dresses and slingback shoes, attended by the same waiters in waistcoats, who bring little glasses of iced water with their coffees, which, she knows from Marina, is the proper way to serve an espresso.

  On her own, Letty would never venture into a little shop whose walls are covered with dozens of wall clocks painted with different designs and mottos, all ticking frenetically. Alf takes a short video on his phone.

  The writing on one of the clocks says Carpe Diem.

  ‘It means seize the day,’ she tells Alf when he asks for a translation. ‘It comes from a poem by the poet Horace.’

  ‘And what’s “seize the day” supposed to mean?’ he asks.

  She remembers the phrase from her first Latin textbook, the one Rollo had also learned from at school, where the outdated translation was ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’.

  Today, she thinks the closest phrase might be ‘Have fun while you can’.

  ‘Live in the moment?’ Alf offers.

  ‘Yes, that’s much better,’ she says, pleased with his more contemporary translation.

  It occurs to her that living in the moment is what she is doing right now, and maybe it is the reason she finds herself increasingly craving Alf’s company. Alone, she tends to worry about the future, or ruminate on the mistakes she has made in the past. She came to Rome to try to sort her head out, imagining that with enough time to think, a solution would emerge. But when she is on her own, she tends to panic that nothing is becoming clearer, that she’s somehow running out of time. When she is with Alf, she simply experiences the beauty of the places they see, the feeling of sunshine on her skin, or wind rushing past her face, the taste of food.

  She hears the accordion player before they reach the Piazza Navona. He’s standing outside one of the restaurants in the far corner where tourists are eating lunch, but the tune drifts down the long piazza: the drinking song from La Traviata.

  ‘Viennese waltz,’ says Alf suddenly. ‘Shall we dance?’

  And before she has a chance to reply, he takes her into hold, pushing off with his right thigh against hers, so that she has no choice but to follow him. They waltz around and around, with her feet somehow following his, her hair flying out behind her, the golden stone palazzi racing around like images in a magic lantern against the constant luminous blue of the sky. Her feet skip across the cobblestones, knowing he is strong enough to hold her if she trips. As they twirl and twirl, surprise becomes pleasure, fear becomes trust, and her body fills with such elation that when the music finally ends and she collapses against Alf’s chest, breathless, giddy and laughing, she wants to tell him that this was the best moment of her life.

  She’s suddenly aware that an audience has gathered. People are filming them on their phones. For a second she’s alarmed that something so intensely personal has become public property, but it’s cancelled out by the undiluted joy that she feels. Together they take a bow.

  Then, just as suddenly as he took her in his arms, Alf lets her go and they walk on, side by side, as if nothing has happened. But she is very aware of her hand dangling next to his, like two strands of a broken live cable sparking towards each other with crackling flashes of electricity, just too far away to make a connection.

  ‘When I’m dancing I know who I am,’ Alf says. ‘Other times, I’m not sure if I’m anything at all.’

  The confession feels like something precious he has given her. She does not want to devalue it with platitudes. So she says nothing. And then worries that she should have said something, but has left it too late.

  In the Campo de’ Fiori, the market stalls of flowers and fruit are packing up for the day. They sit at a cafe table drinking acqua frizzante.

  At the foot of the statue in the centre of the square, a lone guitarist is strumming ‘Every Breath You Take’ with a backing track.

  ‘Tango,’ says Alf.

  ‘I’ve never known why people think this song is romantic,’ Letty says. ‘It’s about a stalker.’

  ‘I’ve danced to it many times, but never really listened to the words,’ Alf says.

  ‘What’s your favourite dance?’ she asks.

  ‘The one I’m best at is probably quickstep,’ he replies. ‘But there’s nothing quite like a Viennese.’ He stares so emphatically into her eyes that she feels her cheeks flushing. A week ago, she thought him arrogant, and felt uncomfortable when he looked at her. Now, she has to look away because she’s scared of betraying what she’s beginning to feel.

  ‘I loved it,’ she says simply, taking a sip of her water.

  ‘Next time,’ he says, ‘try to allow yourself to lean back. I won’t let you fall. It looks better when our torsos make a kind of V shape.’

  ‘Flower in a vase.’

  ‘Correct!’ he says, glancing at his watch.

  She wonders if they are done for the day. They usually part around this time.

  She makes herself not ask. She is living in the moment and the moment is now, not what happens later. It’s as easy to spoil the present by thinking about the future as it is about the past. She will not ask him about the dinner he cooked for his flatmates yesterday evening. She does not want to know if he has a girlfriend. But it’s hard to imagine that someone as attractive as him isn’t in some sort of relationship.

  ‘Two more sites,’ Alf says, scraping his chair back across the cobbles, just as a man with a bucket of roses approaches their table. ‘We shouldn’t have to queue too long at this time of day.’

  The on
ly scene Letty remembers well from Roman Holiday is when Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck visit the Bocca della Verità. Situated in the portico of a church, it’s a huge round carving of a face with an open mouth. Gregory Peck tells Audrey Hepburn about the legend that if you have lied, your hand will be bitten off when you put it in the mouth. Audrey, who plays a princess pretending to be an ordinary person, hesitates, her hand wavering, before she dares him back. Gregory puts his hand in and screams as if it has been taken, but he is only joking.

  She was a princess. He was a journalist. They were both lying to each other. What started as an undercover sting had become an impossible love. Their worlds were too different.

  Letty wonders if the film would still work today when a princess can marry anyone she likes, although a journalist would probably be the last person she’d choose.

  ‘You first,’ says Alf.

  It’s strange how powerful superstition can be, and how Letty’s hand trembles as Audrey’s did as it approaches the mouth, even though she isn’t much of a liar. Her rational self knows very well that it is only the decorative end of a Roman drain, but she still finds herself asking it silently, as if it’s an oracle, Am I kidding myself that something is happening here?

  When all she can feel is the coolness of the air inside, her heart skips a beat with the most ludicrous rush of optimism. She withdraws her hand.

  What is she thinking?

  At the Vittorio Emanuele monument, they take the lift up to the terrace between the two giant four-horsed chariots. The 360-degree view is breathtaking.

  ‘It’s good to wait until the sun is going down,’ Alf tells her, ‘when the city turns from gold to rose.’

  Letty scours the skyline, trying to see the building where she is living, finding first the statues on top of San Giovanni in Laterano, and then locating it in the far distance.

  ‘Wow,’ Alf says. ‘That’s a tall building for Rome.’

  ‘How about you?’ she asks.

  He points towards Testaccio.

  ‘We have an interior apartment,’ he says. ‘No view.’