False River, page 7
‘They’re excited about you coming.’
‘Why?’
‘You have a real job.’ She started laughing. ‘And you’re Latvian. They think both things make you super-exotic.’
In the morning they got up early to escape before their hosts staggered back. It was July and Rome shimmered, over-ripe and crumbling in the sun, moussy clouds suspended in a pale sky. By eight-thirty the Trevi Fountain was already encircled, people perched on its bony rim, posing for selfies or tossing coins into the pale green water. Martin and Leonora spent the day wandering the streets, sluggish and overwhelmed by the heat of the city and its volume of sights.
Most of the time he was happy to observe the outside of things, in passing, rather than pay entry fees or scrutinise information panels. He was here to see Leonora, to clasp her sticky hand, to feel her nearby. They spent two hours sheltered behind trellis on a tiny piazza near the Colosseum, ordering too much food. Leonora told him more about the Thompsons. They were older than Martin and Leonora — fifteen years older, maybe twenty. They had a grown son, not in Rome, who sounded like a spoiled wastrel. Craig was Henry VIII and Terri was Zsa Zsa Gabor, sort of.
‘Maybe they’ll decide to stay out at the coast,’ Martin said.
‘Not Craig. He works every Saturday afternoon, so he has to be back. Terri won’t stay away without him.’
The work, she said, involved leading field trips of American ingénues in sundresses and flip-flops around dank Baroque churches. It was an extra-credit outing that Craig offered to students on his course, and Terri didn’t like it. Last week, apparently, she’d threatened to start smoking again, to punish Craig for his neglect.
When they stood up at last, the seat cushions stuck to the backs of their legs. Leonora was wearing a dress that tied on her shoulders, and leather sandals he’d never seen before. She drank sparkling water, and said she preferred it now, that it felt more refreshing in the heat. She looked tanned, pink-cheeked, happy. Martin wondered why he hadn’t visited earlier.
Maybe he’d wanted to test things, to see what living apart felt like — something longer than the two or three nights he spent in Brussels every week. Their longest separation before this had been a week the previous November, when Leonora told him she’d met someone else, that she’d been seeing someone else, a visiting lecturer at work called Anthony. It was all over, she said, and a terrible mistake for which she was really, really sorry. The word ‘affair’ was never mentioned, and that was probably a good thing. ‘Affair’ sounded romantic and important and French, when the truth was tawdry and English.
And now it was July and they were in Rome on a Saturday afternoon, high on exhaust fumes and gelato. The sun was too hot and the city, with its clamour and showy looks, conspired against thoughts of other places or other times. Last November didn’t exist here. He and Leonora never spoke of it and at some point, he thought, the trauma of the incident itself would disappear from their memory, leaving only the faintest of scars.
At the apartment Terri was home.
‘Out here!’ she called, before they’d shuffled off their shoes at the front door. ‘Drinky-drinks?’
‘Please!’ Leonora called, re-twisting her fair hair, wisps sticking to the sweat of her neck. She leaned towards Martin, close enough for him to feel the heat of her cheeks, and bent over to unstrap her sandals.
Terri bustled into the kitchen to fetch wine and glasses, her pushed-up sunglasses like insect eyes bulging above her forehead. She was petite and fair-haired, wearing flowing palazzo pants and a white camisole. Maybe she was forty or fifty or sixty: it was impossible to tell.
‘So thrilled to meet you!’ She kissed Martin three times and clasped his hands as well, staring at him with wide blue eyes. ‘A real Latvian! Not what I expected.’
‘What were you expecting?’ he asked. He wasn’t sure he was a real Latvian anymore. He’d lived in England since he was two.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Terri. Her stare was beginning to feel manic. She was still clinging to his hands. ‘A Viking perhaps. Or a Russian. Really, I have no idea. What do Latvians look like?’
Martin didn’t need to answer because Terri was laughing, and asking Leonora to hand her olives and cheese from the fridge.
‘Bought anything?’ Terri wanted to know, wrinkling her nose when all Leonora could think of was a notebook from the Florentine stationery shop near the Pantheon. ‘You aren’t much of a shopper, are you? Saving for a loft conversion, you two, I expect. Planning a family.’
Martin pincered some water glasses and carried them out to the terrace. Out here you could barely hear the traffic, even though the street and its ranks of shops lay directly below. But he could still hear Terri talking.
‘You have to tell them,’ she was saying to Leonora. ‘When you’re ready, you’re ready. They’ll never realise it themselves. And you — you’re well over thirty now.’
She was thirty-two, Leonora. They’d been married for two years, together for five. Too much to throw away, as her father, Jack, had said when he drove over to broker the peace deal last November. They were about to buy the house in High Wycombe, a house that already had plans approved by Council for a loft conversion.
Martin wondered how Terri could look at him and not see Latvian, or Viking, or Russian: all she could see was loft conversion. Was he so obvious? So dull? So English?
It was after five now, the heat a heavy curtain drooping around the terrace. They sprawled on chairs around the outside table, sipping their drinks. Leonora mixed sparkling water with her rosé and listed the places they’d walked that day.
‘It’s really a good thing, you not buying too much,’ Terri told them, refilling her glass, splashing wine on her stack of shining magazines. ‘I know I buy far too much stuff. I just can’t resist it. Then when I get it home, there’s no room. No room at all. Our place — you should visit us when we’re all back! — our place is near the Portobello Road. Georgian. Belonged to my aunt. Lots of floors, but not what you’d call grand scale. Pocket-sized terrace at the very top. Nothing like this. And where to put everything? That’s my problem.’
Martin’s view was of orange roof-tops and metal fire-escapes, secluded roof-gardens and a jumble of aerials. The trees sprouting from the Villa Borghese ridge were shaped like stalky mushrooms. He remembered them from the Italian paintings in Leonora’s books. They seemed more fake in real life.
Terri was talking about some Japanese tidying system she’d embraced, urging Leonora to adopt it as well.
‘You pick up each thing in your house and ask: Does this bring me joy? If the answer is no, you get rid of it.’
‘What about dishwashing liquid?’ Leonora asked. ‘I don’t think it brings me much joy, but we still need to have it.’
‘So it does bring you joy, really,’ said Terri. ‘It helps you with an essential task. Without it you’d be lost.’
‘Martin has a whole container of rubber bands,’ Leonora said. ‘He says one day they might come in handy. But there are hundreds of them. Why would we ever need so many?’
Martin swigged his drink and said nothing, resisting implication in the conversation. Terri was clucking her tongue. She sloshed more wine into Leonora’s glass, and Leonora didn’t protest.
‘I doubt they bring anyone joy,’ Terri advised. ‘Really, when you go home, look through everything. Pick things up one at a time. Not each rubber band, obviously. That would be ridiculous. The whole container. And ask: Do you bring me joy?’
‘I could do it with my books,’ said Leonora, sounding doubtful, and Martin looked at her: she couldn’t be serious. There weren’t enough hours in the day to interrogate all of her books. And what had the books done to provoke such rejection, such abrupt renunciation? ‘Maybe Martin could look at his records. He has a massive collection of LPs.’
‘So retro! I love it,’ said Terri. ‘But do they bring you joy?’
‘I’ll get us some more wine,’ he said, and made his escape. There were eight bottles in the fridge, one of which he’d bought himself in Brussels airport. In this apartment, wine didn’t have much of a chance, he suspected, to slip in the joyful rankings.
He pulled out the bottle he’d contributed and closed the fridge. A postcard from Magaluf stuck to the door slipped free of its magnet and danced its way to the terracotta tiles. Martin bent down to peel it off the floor, aware that Craig Thompson had just arrived, slamming the front door and shouting his hellos. When Craig strode into the kitchen, Martin was scrambling to re-pin the postcard, his hands slick from the bottle of wine.
Craig was sandy-haired and red-nosed, curling grey chest hairs visible where his shirt was unbuttoned. He looked hearty and confident, the kind of man described as virile, Martin supposed. They shook hands, and Craig nodded at the postcard.
‘Latest missive from the son and heir,’ he said, frowning. He wore a pale shirt, sleeves rolled up, and beige cargo pants, as though he’d been out on safari. ‘Not much to say for himself, as per usual.’
‘It fell on the ground,’ Martin tried to explain.
‘On holiday in Spain, as you can see. On holiday from what? you might ask. He does nothing.’
The postcard slid again. Craig, still casting dark looks, made no attempt to right it. Martin resisted the impulse to clamp a hand on it.
‘Does he stay with you at all?’ Martin couldn’t remember their son’s name.
‘He lives with us. God forbid he move out. You know, get a job and a life.’
‘Here in Rome, I meant.’
Craig shook his head.
‘We won’t have him. It’s bad enough here with one sponger. I don’t need another one.’
Martin’s stomach turned. Is that how Craig saw Leonora — as a sponger? But Craig was the one who’d invited her to stay, in the spare room on the apartment’s road side — noisy, bright — and it was only for a few weeks. Well, a month.
‘I’m talking about Terri!’ said Craig, almost wheezing with laughter. ‘You should have seen your face!’
Martin tried to smile. This was the banter Leonora had mentioned. It had never been Martin’s thing. He could just about manage it with colleagues, but most of them were scientists, and not very skilled at it either.
Craig swooped on the bottle of wine and stomped out to the terrace, brandishing it like a trophy. Harry, that was the son’s name. Prince Harry, Craig was calling him now, denouncing the offending postcard.
‘He spends his days wrapped in a duvet watching children’s television,’ he told the terrace at large. Leonora made sympathetic noises. ‘He’s twenty-two years old and has no ambition. Now, just compare him with the young ladies I was teaching today.’
‘Teaching? Is that what you call it?’ Terri caught Martin’s eye and smiled. More banter, he suspected. He was too tired for it. He and Leonora had walked for hours today.
‘They were alert, inquisitive, diligent.’
‘Braless, you mean.’
‘They don’t have to do this extra seminar on a Saturday …’
‘Seminar!’ Terri snorted.
‘But they choose to, because they want to take the opportunity of being in Rome to acquire more knowledge.’
Carnal knowledge, Martin thought of adding, in the spirit of banter, but Terri wasn’t smiling anymore.
‘Some of the students are really excited to be in the Old World,’ Leonora said, emptying the last of the sparkling water into her glass.
‘Is that what’s exciting them?’ Terri asked. ‘I thought it was my husband’s chest hair, on full display. It looks like someone’s performed open-heart surgery on an old teddy bear. Fuzzy stuffing everywhere.’
Leonora laughed, and Martin joined in, a beat too late.
‘In life, some of us go above and beyond.’ Craig looked solemn, clasping his wine glass with both hands. Martin wondered if this was his teaching face. ‘And some of us, like our darling son, Crown Prince Haroldo, go below and … beneath.’
‘Beneath isn’t the opposite of beyond,’ Terri told him. ‘I’m glad you’re not teaching English to these poor girls.’
‘Maybe he just needs a bit more time, to work out what he really wants to do.’ Leonora grinned like a plucky nurse in wartime, squeezing the hand of a gassed soldier.
‘What were you doing at his age?’ Craig asked Martin.
‘Still studying,’ said Martin. He didn’t want to say it was the first year of a PhD in pharmaceutical science. He didn’t want to make Harry look any worse.
‘There you are,’ Terri said, and Martin nodded.
‘Last year when the Olympics were on,’ said Craig, ‘the ones in Rio that everyone said would be terrible, but they weren’t — they were really quite good.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin.
‘So Harry, our idle son, is watching the bloody thing day and night. Everything — triathlon, discus, beach volleyball, these little Korean women shooting guns and looking like spies, the lot. And do you know what he said?’
‘No,’ said Martin.
‘He said, “Look at all these people my age and what they’ve achieved. And look at me — I can’t do anything. I may as well just give up trying.” That’s what he said! These young athletes, they weren’t an inspiration to him. They were just another excuse.’
‘We were watching the gymnastics,’ Terri said.
‘Gymnastics. Sailing. Hockey. It doesn’t matter. Same story, across the board. Young people out there achieving things. And there’s Harry Dolittle, on the sofa, bleating about—’
‘We watched a lot of the Latvian competitors at the Olympics,’ Leonora said, catching Martin’s eye. ‘Because Martin was born in Latvia. So we were … interested. In it.’
‘I said to him,’ Terri said, talking to Craig, ‘he doesn’t look Latvian.’
‘What does a Latvian look like, you bloody stupid woman?’
‘And he doesn’t speak like a Latvian. He doesn’t have a Latvian name either.’ Terri sounded deflated. Martin knew he’d disappointed her in some way, by not being exotic enough, or eastern, or northern.
‘It is Latvian,’ Leonora reassured her. ‘It’s just pronounced a bit differently, with an S on the end. Like Mar-teens.’
Actually, his real name was an illuminated medieval manuscript, Mārtiņš. It appeared on his birth certificate and in old letters from his grandmother, but he’d abandoned the fussy decorative elements long ago, or his father had on his behalf. His mother died, electrocuted by a microwave, when he was very small; he didn’t remember her. He and his father, Juris, moved from Riga to Milton Keynes, where Juris worked in various factories. His last job before he died — cancer of the pancreas, the week Martin turned twenty-three — was on the canning line for Coca-Cola.
There was nothing of this, Martin’s personal history, that he wanted to share with the Thompsons. Even Leonora only knew the facts of his life second-hand; she’d met no members of his family. His life with her, his career, the places he’d lived in the south of the county: all of these existed after his parents and grandparents, after Latvia. If it weren’t for his last name, these days he could pass for English.
Terri was talking about his last name now.
‘Leonora was explaining just the other day about your surname, how it’s not a real name at all. The Germans foisted it on your ancestors. It’s like your slave name, in a sense — is that right?’
‘Not slaves, no.’
‘Kunta Kinte!’ said Craig, on his way to the kitchen with the empty bottles.
‘Liepa is a linden tree,’ Leonora said. ‘A lot of Latvians are named for elements of nature, like trees or plants. Or birds.’
‘Fascinating,’ said Terri, and held her glass to her mouth, though all the wine was gone.
‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull!’ roared Craig from inside. ‘Shall we go out for din-dins now? Before we’re all plastered?’
‘We don’t want to impose,’ Martin said quickly. ‘I mean, we can go out by ourselves if you and Craig would like some privacy.’
Terri waved him away, mock-grimacing as though he was being absurd. Really, thought Martin, he was being English, trying to get what he wanted by saying the opposite of what he felt.
Dinner was pizza on Via della Croce, and questions about titanium dioxide. This was Martin’s line of work, and usually people had no interest in it. They had no idea it existed, in fact, unless they spent too much time on the internet reading alarmist news items about cancer. This was why Martin was spending so much time in Brussels these days, helping to plead the case to over-zealous regulators prodded into action by the French government.
‘So what you’re saying,’ said Craig, leaning back in his white plastic chair, ‘is that it’s in everything. Absolutely everything.’
‘Like your chair,’ said Martin. ‘The white paint on the walls inside. Our dinner plates. The paper used for the menu.’
‘Absolutely bloody everything. Incredible.’
Their table was on the pavement, jammed close to a table of chain smokers. The fluorescent yo-yo sellers were out in force, and the rose sellers, and the Splat sellers. At least the Slinky sellers weren’t here, because they needed stairs to demonstrate their goods, and the knock-off-bag sellers must have gathered up their black bed sheets and faded into the night.
‘Sun cream,’ said Leonora. She was drinking more than usual — much more. ‘Polyester.’
‘I don’t wear polyester,’ Terri said. She’d moved her chair back far enough to inhale the second-hand smoke. ‘But I do slather myself with the old SPF. And those doughnuts we had in the States, the ones dusted with icing sugar …’
‘That’s right. Not icing sugar, titanium dioxide.’ Martin was tired. The week had been long, and this weekend — was it still only Saturday?
‘Maybe this is why we’re all dying of cancer,’ said Terri with a knowing nod.
‘It’s safe, really. Really, it is.’
‘That’s what they said about atomic power and, you know, asbestos. And that other thing.’
‘Smoking?’ Leonora asked, her tone arch, and Craig burst out laughing.
