She had once studied fashion in London but these days ran a village antiques shop, selling expensive rugs and chandeliers to genteel Oxford with great success. She still carried with her that aura of having been something-in-the-Sixties — Dexter had seen the photographs, the clippings from faded colour supplements — but with no apparent sadness or regret she had given this up for a resolutely respectable, secure, comfortable family life. Typically, it was as if she had sensed exactly the right moment to leave the party. Dexter suspected that she had occasional flings with the doctors, the lawyers, the people who spoke on the radio, but he found it hard to be angry with her. And always people said the same thing — that he had got it from her. No-one was specific about what ‘it’ was, but everyone seem to know; looks of course, energy and good health, but also a certain nonchalant self-confidence, the right to be at the centre of things, on the winning team.
Even now, as she sat in her washed-out blue summer dress, fishing in her immense handbag for matches, it seemed as if the life of the Piazza revolved around her. Shrewd brown eyes in a heart-shaped face under a mess of expensively dishevelled black hair, her dress undone one button too far, an immaculate mess. She saw him approach and her face cracked with a wide smile.
‘Forty-five minutes late, young man. Where have you been?’
‘Over there watching you chat up the waiters.’
‘Don’t tell your father.’ She knocked the table with her hip as she stood and hugged him. ‘Where have you been though?’
‘Just preparing lessons.’ His hair was wet from the shower he had shared with Tove Angstrom, and as she brushed it from his forehead, her hand cupping the side of his face fondly, he realised that she was already a little drunk.
‘Very tousled. Who’s been tousling you? What mischief have you been up to?’
‘I told you, planning lessons.’
She pouted sceptically. ‘And where did you get to last night? We waited at the restaurant.’
‘I’m sorry, I got delayed. College disco.’
‘A disco. Very 1977. What was that like?’
‘Two hundred drunk Scandinavian girls vogue-ing.’
‘“Vogue-ing”. I’m pleased to say that I have absolutely no idea what that is. Was it fun?’
‘It was hell.’
She patted his knee. ‘You poor, poor thing.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s had to go for one of his little lie-downs at the hotel. The heat, and his sandals were chafing. You know what your father’s like, he’s so Welsh.’
‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Just wandering around the Forum. I thought it was beautiful, but Stephen was bored out of his skull. All that mess, columns just left lying around all over the place. I think he thinks they should bulldoze it all, put up a nice conservatory or something.’
‘You should visit the Palatine. It’s at the top of that hill. .’
‘I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.’
‘Yes, who was emperor back then?’
‘Ha. Here, help me with this wine, don’t let me drink the whole bottle.’ She already had, pretty much, but he poured the last inch into a water glass and reached for her cigarettes. Alison tutted. ‘You know sometimes I think we took the whole liberal-parent thing a bit too far.’
‘I quite agree. You ruined me. Pass the matches.’
‘It’s not clever, you know. I know you think it makes you look like a film star, but it doesn’t, it looks awful.’
‘So why do you do it then?’
‘Because it makes me look sensational.’ She placed a cigarette between her lips and he lit it with his match. ‘I’m giving up anyway. This is my last one. Now quickly, while your father’s not here—’ She shuffled closer, conspiratorially. ‘Tell me about your love-life.’
‘No!’
‘Come on, Dex! You know I’m forced to live vicariously through my children, and your sister’s such a virgin. .’
‘Are you drunk, old lady?’
‘How she got two children, I’ll never know. .’
‘You are drunk.’
‘I don’t drink, remember?’ When Dexter was twelve she had solemnly taken him into the kitchen one night and in a low voice instructed him how to make a dry martini, as if it were a solemn rite. ‘Come on then. Spill the beans, all the juicy details.’
‘I have nothing to say.’
‘No-one in Rome? No nice Catholic girl?’
‘Nope.’
‘Not a student, I hope.’
‘Of course not.’
‘What about back home? Who’s been writing you those long tear-stained letters we keep forwarding?’
‘None of your business.’
‘Don’t make me steam them open again, just tell me!’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
She sat back in her chair. ‘Well I’m disappointed in you. What about that nice girl who came to stay that time?’
‘What girl?’
‘Pretty, earnest, Northern. Got drunk and shouted at your father about the Sandinistas.’
‘That was Emma Morley.’
‘Emma Morley. I liked her. Your father liked her too, even if she did call him a bourgeois fascist.’ Dexter winced at the memory. ‘I don’t mind, at least she had a bit of fire, a bit of passion. Not like those silly sex-pots we usually find at the breakfast table. Yes Mrs Mayhew, no Mrs Mayhew.I can hear you, you know, tip-toeing to the guest room in the night. .’
‘You really are drunk, aren’t you?’
‘So what about this Emma?’
‘Emma’s just a friend.’
‘Is she now? Well I’m not so sure. In fact I think she likes you.’
‘Everyone likes me. It’s my curse.’
In his head it had sounded fine: raffish and self-mocking, but now they sat in silence and he felt foolish once again, like at those parties where his mother would allow him to sit with the grown-ups and he would show-off and let her down. She smiled at him indulgently, and squeezed his hand as it rested on the table.
‘Be nice, won’t you?’
‘I am nice, I’m always nice.’
‘But not too nice. I mean don’t make a religion out of it, niceness.’
‘I won’t.’ Uncomfortable now, he began to glance around the Piazza.
She nudged his arm. ‘So do you want another bottle of wine, or shall we go back to the hotel and see about your father’s bunions?’
They began to walk north through the back streets that run parallel to the Via del Corso towards the Piazza del Popolo, Dexter adjusting the route as he went to make it as scenic as possible, and he began to feel better, enjoying the satisfaction of knowing a city well. She hung woozily on his arm.
‘So how long are you planning to stay here then?’
‘I don’t know. ’Til October maybe.’
‘But then you will come home and settle down to something, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘I don’t mean live with us. I wouldn’t do that to you. But you know we’d help you out with a deposit on a flat.’
‘There isn’t any rush, is there?’
‘Well it’s been a whole year, Dexter. How much holiday do you need? It’s not as if you worked yourself ragged at University—’
‘I’m not on holiday, I’m working!’
‘What about journalism? Didn’t you talk about journalism?’
He had mentioned it in passing, but only as a distraction and alibi. It seemed that as he ambled through his late teens his possibilities had slowly begun to narrow. Certain cool-sounding jobs — heart surgeon, architect — were permanently closed to him now and journalism seemed about to go the same way. He wasn’t much of a writer, knew little about politics, spoke bad restaurant-French, lacked all training and qualifications, possessed only a passport and a vivid image of himself smoking beneath a ceiling fan in tropical countries, a battered Nikon and a bottle of whisky by his bedside.
Of course what he really wanted was to be a photographer. At sixteen he had completed a photo-project called ‘Texture’, full of black and white close-ups of tree bark and sea-shells which had apparently ‘blown’ his art teacher’s mind. Nothing that he had done since had given him as much satisfaction as ‘Texture’ and those high-contrast prints of frost on windows and the gravel in the driveway. Journalism would mean grappling with difficult stuff like words and ideas, but he thought he might have the makings of a decent photographer, if only because he felt he had a strong sense of when things looked right. At this stage in his life, his main criterion for choosing a career was that it should sound good in a bar, shouted into a girl’s ear, and there was no denying that ‘I’m a professional photographer’ was a fine sentence, almost up there with ‘I report from war zones’ or ‘actually, I make documentaries.’
