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  Her new friends smiled and nodded, soothing agreement. Her impressions mirrored their own early experiences. There’s much to compensate, they said. So there was.

  In their living quarters Celia occasionally had a feeling, notwithstanding the regular give-and-take, that there was something, every now and then, just a little out of true with their arrangement. Hard to determine but a niggling shift of loyalties. Mickey turned out to be irredeemably lazy; Celia attacked housework with a will and Marcia with her kind ways and mild manners kept things steady. Yes it worked, in a funny way. Threefold sex wasn’t ever part of the bargain but the unspoken thought was a small frisson in the offing. Unless of course it was Celia’s imagination.

  2

  Italy, 1974

  Life for Celia was a matter of stops and starts and changing aspirations. Her latest job had been cueing the actors from the box under the floor. This did not sound glamorous and nor was it. She was considering future paths. Movies were a big part of her life and she became driven by the possibility of finding an opening into films in Italy. Not acting in them but working behind the scenes.

  At a party one night a man she knew slightly approached her with a smile, eyeing her beautiful breasts. She started talking about set design which she had been given to do recently for a new play. He mentioned casually that he knew someone, a director in Italy, who might help her. After all, her work was promising, anyone could see that, he said, lowering his eyes again.

  ‘Oh yes?’ she replied, looking him over so frankly, as if he himself were a business proposition, that it brought, could it be? a slight flush to his face. Well no, he didn’t actually know this person, he hurried on, but could make enquiries. Perhaps they could go for a meal together and talk about it? She rejected the whole dubious offer outright. Later in the week she thought about it again and rang him.

  And so it came to pass that Celia was setting off to Italy, where the sun shone like mad in summer. And on the day she left, London burst into colour like Browning’s poem: the park nearby ablaze with soft green grass, blue skies and birdsong all around. She looked out of the window at the sheer urban beauty as she clipped her case shut and looked at Mickey.

  ‘Isn’t it a swine how that happens?’ he said, laughing at her outraged look.

  ‘Nature’s little joke.’

  ‘We’ll keep some grey skies in abeyance for you, darlin’.’

  ‘I’ll be too busy working under the Italian director to think about the weather.’

  ‘I’ll bet it’s under him!’ said Mickey, working his eyebrows like Groucho.

  ‘Must you be so predictable? That’s such a British thing to say. All foreigners are either lecherous or dishonest.’ She tried lifting her case. ‘Sometimes you’re so bourgeois, Mickey.’

  ‘It cuts me to the quick when you judge me so. Here, I’ll give you a hand with that.’

  And he took her case, doing a mock stagger at the weight.

  ‘Oh ta. Sorry to be so severe. I know you’ve a heart of gold inside that chest.’

  ‘Beating away just for you.’

  He handed her into the taxi and off she went, chin held as high as her hopes.

  Marcia had been working steadily but the season came to an end and she considered following Celia.

  ‘June in the Mediterranean,’ she said to Mickey. ‘Look at me, I need it. My face is turning grey.’

  ‘No, it’s a soft shade of white,’ he replied, lifting a hand to touch her cheek. He had neither the money nor the inclination to go to Italy. ‘But go and have a holiday with Cele. I might pop over to Dublin for a week. Some family business.’

  ‘What sort of business, Mick?’

  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand but she sat down and patted the seat beside her.

  ‘Tell me. We all seem to have our secrets. But tell me.’

  ‘Would you have a drink with me, then?’

  ‘Of course. And you’ll stop being so mysterious.’

  ‘You’re on.’ And they settled down with their drinks and clinked each other.

  With an unknown Italian person’s address and phone number firmly tucked away in her bag, and with boundless enthusiasm, Celia set off for Rome having only the rudiments of Italian language to hand.

  She never met the party whom she’d been referred to but found her way onto sets, into offices, and believed she was on her way to making a good living in the film industry, contributing to the things audiences never know or read about on the credits when they sit entranced at the end of a film. Celia would stay for at least a few years. Such was her optimism.

  Mickey had gone to Ireland for a short time on some sort of family business, whatever that might mean. Odd, how the three of them got on so well, generally, with barely a word from any of them about their families. Speaking for herself, thought Celia, there was almost nothing to tell. She didn’t really have a family.

  Well, that wasn’t strictly true. She wasn’t going to enlarge on the bare sketch she had given Marcia and Mickey. The main part, the happy times, were those of the beer garden at the back of the Woodbridge Hotel when she was about seven, the age you become aware. It was the music. A band dressed in Hawaiian shirts, playing those guitars that made such sensual, sliding tunes, the sweet rhythm a background to the guzzling of beer and inane talk of half-drunken relatives.

  The Salvos were there – and why not. Some of the money in pubs and at the races may as well go to a good cause. But Joe the family wit and Celia’s father, wasn’t thinking of anything but making a spectacle of this daft bugger with the tin tray held out for some coins. ‘I’m on your side,’ Joe had been shouting to his best mate, forming an alliance over a hazy argument, making everyone laugh. The joke escaped Celia’s young ears. Then Joe turned on the Salvo officer: ‘Whose side are you on?’ While everyone waited.

  After a bit the Salvo said: ‘I’m on the Lord’s side,’ which made them all howl with wild guffaws. And it wasn’t necessarily derision at the Salvo’s expense, Celia knew. They were just having a good time. You’d be unkind to call it low-life raillery. But that’s exactly what she called it later when she considered how her mother had squandered her beautiful voice, her brains, her very life to join forces with the funny and charming and ill-destined Joe, failed carpenter, in the seamy sub-culture of booze. Grace should have lived up to her name: kept playing the violin (a fact Celia discovered later), and followed the classical music she’d learned as a child. Celia often thought of her and wondered: how could she have strayed so far from her natural inclinations? It seemed this is what ‘love’ does to people.

  So it wasn’t true that Celia didn’t remember her mother: the quiet times when the daughter succeeded in having the mother sit with her and listen to José Iturbi playing Chopin that the child, now nine, knew was coming on the wireless.

  It was in her ninth year, when Celia was staying at Grandma’s place, that Joe and Grace went on a particularly dangerous binge, mixing the drinks with pills. When she and Grandma arrived home from the pictures there was a stillness about the place – no shouting or bursts of laughter, no loud radio – as if the house itself was holding its breath.

  ‘Wait here a minute, love,’ said Grandma. ‘I’ll just go and check that they’re home.’ And Celia knew that this was an odd thing for Grandma to say. She could go in whether her parents were home or not. But she did as she was told. When Grandma came out, white-faced, she led Celia without a word across the road to stay with neighbour Myrtle – auntie Myrt – for a few minutes. Celia later discovered Grandma had gone to use Mrs Hoi Poi’s phone, the only telephone in the street.

  From that moment on Celia stayed with Grandma until the old woman died six years later, and Celia was out on her own. It was a time when everything was kept under wraps.

  Before this, Grandma too had liked a drink. But now she was on the square, not laughing quite so much, but still good fun to be with.

  Only years later did Celia read in an old newspaper found under the lino, how
her parents had been found dead from alcohol, with their clothes on, apparently, and ‘no suspicious circumstances’. Her father had actually choked on his own vomit, lying on his back. Grace had passed out at some stage, woken up and taken some pills with another drink and lain down to sleep it off.

  What was the most disturbing part of their lives for Celia, on thinking of all this when she was older, was not that it was one of the most sordid ways for your parents to end their lives, but that when she remembered them half-sober, they often talked jokingly of Joe having lost his job again; of feeling hung-over again; of not having a sou in the bank; the conundrum of wasted lives and unnecessary deaths.

  Grandma, in the time she had left, encouraged Celia to work hard. ‘When you get the chance, learn something new; learn as many different things as you can,’ was her advice. And the girl discovered for herself the best friends of all – books. She also decided she’d have a good voice. Never having the money to take private lessons in elocution, she simply listened to the people on the wireless and copied their speech.

  All that had been about twenty years ago. Here she was and how could she not have fallen in love with Italy. The food! The broken, jagged ruins that had been there for hundreds of years. The quick glances and smiles; the rapid language, the unexpected sights and sounds – all of it made London seem lifeless. She sent a postcard to Marcia: Come and share this with me!

  Marcia was between work, Mickey was away so why not join Cele, do a trip over to the Continent. She had never been out of Britain at this point. She looked at the map, thought of Roberto Rossellini and Stromboli the smoking monster, and sent a message back: ‘Not just Rome – what about going south too?’ Celia wrote back: Dearest Marse, Yes, let’s! Still-active volcanoes, people who still want to live their lives in the shadow of ever-present danger! Sicily hadn’t been on Celia’s agenda, yet why on earth not? She had almost forgotten the scandal of Ingrid Bergman and Rossellini: the smouldering Stromboli off the north coast, metaphor of their passion, and Mt Etna in a surly mood on the east coast. They might even nip over from there to Calabria.

  Each responded to Italy in her own way. Marcia had always possessed that ability to draw into herself, in the way of those who live in cities of teeming crowds. She knew how to look agreeable but not participate, like other commuters on London’s public transport. Indeed most of the passengers don’t even necessarily bother to look agreeable, but simply withdraw into themselves, far from human contact, not apparently noticing armpits, breath, touch, but living in the head, one could say, like a Buddhist. Marcia must have learned this from a book or from a bygone conversation, because she had developed this knack well before knowing Celia. Whichever, she seemed to know that this spiritual privacy was necessary to any sense of autonomy. She had heard that it worked like that in China; it certainly did in London.

  But not in Rome. Here, people stared at the two foreigners: seemingly amused, or wondering about them, allowing their curiosity to show. Caught in the peak-hour crush in the metro, Marcia serenely gazed out of the window, with an inner composure that was not easily rattled. She was not cold, in that way that smacks of an English past, as Mickey and Celia liked to tease, for she had a habit, when talking, of literally reaching out to people and lightly touching those whom she knew and liked. It was a gesture to soften a comment, to make contact or cement the remark. Yet she was emotionally unreachable.

  Celia however didn’t withdraw; she either confronted or succumbed. A staring man in Rome would be asked why the scrutiny. This would cause him to look away with a brief apology, or else if he pre-empted her query with a smile, she’d smile in return. In the past few months she seemed to have become an Italian herself, as they strolled around the Eternal City. She took her friend around, walking by the Tiber under the trees, pointing out anything of interest including from a distance the Vatican, that meant everything to some, nothing to others. Marcia was interested in it all.

  The two women strolled around the back streets of Rome, arms linked, looking for the fortune-teller who, it was said, spoke English. After losing their way twice they eventually stumbled across the woman’s disordered keep, just off the Via del Tritone in a trellised courtyard.

  ‘So discreet it must be illegal,’ Celia said.

  The woman eyed them shrewdly, adjusted her head scarf and told them in sonorous tones that their lives were taking on a rare quality both together and with another. The years would not always be happy, though they would be out of the ordinary. A steady beat was hard to maintain in this life. Then she pronounced a fee that was double the understood rate.

  ‘Fraudulent old hag,’ Celia spluttered as they held each other up outside, laughing.

  They were marked by their head-swivelling demeanour as foreign: a man sitting at a table on the pavement made a lewd remark as they passed by, which Celia by now understood. Soon after, a nimble-fingered thief made off with Marcia’s little purse. He was so adroit that she didn’t realise it for a few hours. Celia was furious at these two events, happening as they did in swift sequence. She had been captivated by this city and here it was letting her down!

  ‘Well, nothing’s perfect,’ said Marcia.

  ‘It sure isn’t.’

  ‘There wasn’t much money in the purse, Cele. It’ll be a lesson for us.’

  Celia had an old school friend living in Rome whose family were in Calabria. They would be made welcome if they didn’t mind a simple life. It was tempting: they could go south, into the Calabrian countryside to savour rural Italian life. They would pick olives from centuries-old trees; walk up and down ancient streets in mountainous towns where through the ages donkeys and goats had been the main traffic. In the deep distant south they would get as far away from fashion as they could.

  As it happened this sojourn would one day become a reality for them, and prove to be more revealing than they might have imagined.

  3

  London, 1975

  Celia had been eight months in Rome, including the summer holiday with Marcia. Following their trip south Marcia returned to London while Celia looked for further set designing in Cinecittà. It was becoming increasingly difficult to find a long-term job, with talk of illegal foreigners working in cinema. She grew restless and homesick for London – where she was still a specialist in nothing, yet would be offered, and take on, any kind of theatre work.

  Some weeks after Marcia’s departure, she sat at her kitchen window one day and thought it out. What did she miss most, living in this incomparable city of Rome where the sun sparkled on the umbrella trees? She missed speaking her own language with friends. Not only that: she hankered sometimes for the culture of repartee and possibilities in the West End. The cut and thrust banter so different from the slick cinematic scene here, where she provided original sets for stuck-up little starlets who would be nonentities before the decade was out, and busy directors who accepted her designs as a matter of course. Italy took artistry and beauty as its deserved mistresses.

  Celia wasn’t by any means ignored: men liked her and frequently tried to bed her. There was a good-looking screen writer called Roberto whom she had been friendly with for some time. He had lived in Glasgow for several years and spoke his English with a trilled Scots cadence that made Celia smile. With him it was true she did enjoy a certain verbal sparring. One evening he asked her out for a drink after work. For an Italian, this meant exactly that, she’d found, then probably dinner. Then, who knows? What she liked about this city was that people didn’t go out to swill endless drinks where you ended up losing your appetite for food.

  They left the bar with him suggesting they find a place to eat, but she said she was ready to call it a day. He good-naturedly drove her home where he somehow charmed his way into her flat and immediately drew her to him and started kissing her with such ardour that she knew her face would be inflamed for the next twenty-four hours from his end-of-the-day stubble. She was aroused, but soon pulled away.

  ‘That’s enough, I didn’t
invite this, Roberto. Please, that’s enough.’ And she gave his chest a gentle but firm push. How had she got herself into this absurd situation? She wanted only to be alone, to pull apart her misapprehension, see where it had all gone astray. Somewhat to her surprise he was now cast into a slow anger.

  ‘You respond so far, then push me away. What is it? It seems to me you’re a fatally chaste woman, Celia.’ And he turned his back on her. He’s like a child, she thought.

  ‘No one dies of chastity, Roberto.’

  She stopped herself from clicking her tongue. It couldn’t be left like this; he was essentially a nice man.

  ‘Put it this way: I’m a rather difficult woman – I know that. Probably you could say, one of life’s onlookers, destined to be abstemious.’

  But he wasn’t stupid. ‘You’re not merely an onlooker; I’ve seen the involvement … the passion in your face when you hear music, watch films.’ Had he been observing her these past months?

  He went on: ‘Abstemious is hardly the word for you. Not in the way of drinking. Or eating. You have appetites like the rest of us. I think you should have the courage to say that you don’t like me, though your kissing suggests otherwise. Or else you are neurotically inclined to reject any man as soon as he takes an interest in you.’

  Now that was uncannily shrewd of him: she searched for the right answer.