One Day

CHAPTER TWO. Back to Life

SATURDAY 15 JULY 1989

Wolverhampton and Rome Girls’ Changing Rooms Stoke Park Comprehensive School Wolverhampton 15 July 1989

Ciao, Bella!

How are you? And how is Rome? The Eternal City is all very well, but I’ve been here in Wolverhampton for two days now and that’s felt pretty eternal (though I can reveal that the Pizza Hut here is excellent, just excellent).

Since I last saw you I have decided to take that job I was telling you about, with Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative and for the last four months we have been devising, rehearsing and touring with ‘Cruel Cargo’, an Arts Council-funded spectacular about the slave-trade told through the medium of story, folk song and some pretty shocking mime. I have enclosed a crudely photocopied leaflet so that you can see what a classy number it really is.

Cruel Cargo is a TIE piece (that’s Theatre-in-Education to you) aimed at 11–13-year-olds that takes the provocative view that slavery was a Bad Thing. I play Lydia, the, um, well, yes, the LEAD ROLE as a matter of fact, the spoilt and vain daughter of the wicked Sir Obadiah Grimm (can you tell from his name that he’s not very nice?) and in the show’s most powerful moment I come to realise that all my pretty things, all my dresses (indicate dress) and jewels (likewise) are bought with the blood of my fellow human beings (sob-sob) and that I feel dirty (stare at hands as if SEEING THE BLOOD) dirty to my SOOOOOOUUUUL. It’s very powerful stuff, though ruined last night by some kids throwing Maltesers at my head.

But seriously, actually, it’s not as bad as that, not in context, and I don’t know why I’m being cynical, defence-mechanism probably. We actually get a great response from the kids who see it, the ones that don’t throw stuff, and we do these workshops in schools that are just really exciting. It’s staggering how little these kids know about their cultural heritage, even the West Indian kids, about where they come from. I’ve enjoyed writing it too and it’s given me lots of ideas for other plays and stuff. So I think it’s worthwhile even if you think I’m wasting my time. I really, really think we can change things, Dexter. I mean they had loads of radical theatre in Germany in the Thirties and look what a difference that made. We’re going to banish colour prejudice from the West Midlands, even if we have to do it one child at a time.

There are four of us in the cast. Kwame is the Noble Slave and despite us playing mistress and servant we actually get along alright (though I asked him to get me a packet of crisps in this café the other day and he looked at me like I was OPPRESSING him or something). But he’s nice and serious about the work, though he did cry a lot in rehearsals, which I thought was a bit much. He’s a bit of a weeper, if you know what I mean. In the play there’s meant to be this powerful sexual tension between us, but once again life is failing to imitate art.

Then there’s Sid, who plays my wicked father Obadiah. I know your whole childhood was spent playing French cricket on a bloody great chamomile lawn and you never did anything as déclassé as watch the telly, but Sid used to be quite famous, on this cop show called City Beat and his disgust at being reduced to THIS shines through. He flatly refuses to mime, like it’s beneath him to be seen with an object that isn’t really there, and every other sentence begins ‘when I was on telly’ which is his way of saying ‘when I was happy’. Sid pees in washbasins and has these scary polyester trousers which you WIPE DOWN instead of washing and subsists on service station minced beef pasties, and me and Kwame think he’s secretly really racist, but apart from that he’s a lovely man, a lovely, lovely man.

And then there’s Candy, ah Candy. You’d like Candy, she’s exactly what she sounds like. She plays Cheeky Maid, a Plantation Owner and Sir William Wilberforce, and is very beautiful and spiritual and even though I don’t approve of the word, a complete bitch. She keeps asking me how old I am really and telling me I look tired or that if I got contact lenses I could actually be quite pretty, which I ADORE of course. She’s very keen to make it clear that she’s only doing this to get her Equity card and bide her time until she’s spotted by some Hollywood producer who presumably just happens to be passing through Dudley on a wet Tuesday afternoon on the lookout for hot TIE talent. Acting is rubbish, isn’t it? When we started STC (Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative) we were really keen to set up a progressive theatrical collective with none of that ego-fame-getting-on-the-telly-ego-showing-off bullshit, and just do really good, exciting original political devised work. That may all sound dopey to you, but that’s what we wanted to do. But the problem with democratic egalitarian collectives is that you have to listen to twots like Sid and Candy. I wouldn’t mind if she could act but her Geordie accent is unbelievable, like she’s had a stroke or something and she’s also got this thing about doing yoga warm-ups in her lingerie. There, that’s got your attention, hasn’t it? It’s the first time I’ve seen someone do the Sun Worship in hold-up stockings and a basque. That can’t be right, can it? Poor old Sid can barely chew his curried beef slice, keeps missing his mouth. When the time finally comes for her to put some clothes on and go on stage one of the kids usually wolf-whistles or something and in the mini-bus afterwards she always pretends to be really affronted and feminist about it. ‘I hate being judged on my looks all my life I’ve been judged on my exquisite face and firm young body,’ she says as she adjusts her suspender belt, like it’s a big POLITICAL issue, like we should be doing agit-prop street theatre about the plight of women cursed with great tits. Am I ranting? Are you in love with her yet? Maybe I’ll introduce you when you get back. I can see you now, giving her that look where you clench your jaw and play with your lips and ask about her careeeeeer. Maybe I won’t introduce you after all. .

Emma Morley turned the page face down as Gary Nutkin entered, skinny and anxious, and it was time for the pre-show pep-talk from the director and co-founder of Sledgehammer Theatre Co-operative. The unisex dressing room was not a dressing room at all, just the girls’ changing room at an inner-city comprehensive which, even at the weekend, still had that school smell she remembered: hormones, pink liquid soap, mildewed towels.

In the doorway, Gary Nutkin cleared his throat; pale and razor-burned, the top-button of his black shirt fastened tight, a man whose personal style icon was George Orwell. ‘Great crowd tonight, people! Nearly half full which isn’t bad considering!’ though considering what exactly he didn’t say, perhaps because he was distracted by Candy, performing pelvic rolls in a polka-dot all-in-one. ‘Let’s give ’em one hell of a show, folks. Let’s knock ’em dead!’

‘I’d like to knock ’em dead,’ growled Sid, watching Candy while picking at pastry crumbs. ‘Cricket bat with nails in, little bastards.’

‘Stay positive, Sid, will you please?’ implored Candy on a long, controlled out-breath.

Gary continued. ‘Remember, keep it fresh, stay connected, keep it lively, say the lines like it’s the first time and most importantly of all, don’t let the audience intimidate or goad you in any way. Interaction is great. Retaliation is not. Don’t let them rile you. Don’t give them that satisfaction. Fifteen minutes, please!’ and with that Gary closed the dressing room door on them, like a jailor.

Sid began his nightly warm-up now, a murmured incantation of I-hate-this-job-I-hate-this-job. Beyond him sat Kwame, topless and forlorn in tattered trousers, hands jammed in his armpits, head lolling back, meditating or trying not to cry perhaps. On Emma’s left, Candy sang songs from Les Miserables in a light, flat soprano, picking at the hammer toes she’d got from eighteen years of ballet. Emma turned back to her reflection in the cracked mirror, plumped up the puffed sleeves of her Empire line dress, removed her spectacles and gave a Jane Austen sigh.

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution.

The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankeillor Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small. ‘But you’ve got a double-first! What happened to your double-first?’ her mother asked daily, as if Emma’s degree was a super-power that she stubbornly refused to use. Her younger sister, Marianne, a happily married nurse with a new baby, would come round at nights just to gloat at mum and dad’s golden girl brought low.

But every now and then, there was Dexter Mayhew. In the last few warm days of the summer after graduation she had gone to stay at his family’s beautiful house in Oxfordshire; not a house, but a mansion to her eyes. Large, 1920s, with faded rugs and large abstract canvases and ice in the drinks. In the large, herb-scented garden they had spent a long, languid day between the swimming pool and tennis court, the first she’d ever seen that had not been built by the local council. Drinking gin and tonics in wicker chairs, looking at the view, she had thought of The Great Gatsby. Of course she had spoiled it; getting nervous and drinking too much at dinner, shouting at Dexter’s father — a mild, modest, perfectly reasonable man — about Nicaragua, while all the time Dexter regarded her with a look of affectionate disappointment, as if she were a puppy who had soiled a rug. Had she really sat at their table, eating their food and calling his father a fascist? That night she lay in the guest bedroom, dazed and remorseful, waiting for a knock on the door that clearly would never come; romantic hopes sacrificed for the Sandinistas, who were unlikely to be grateful.

They had met again in London in April, at their mutual friend Callum’s twenty-third birthday party, spending the whole of the next day in Kensington Gardens together, drinking wine from the bottle and talking. Clearly she had been forgiven, but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least, lying on the fresh spring grass, their hands almost touching as he told her about Lola, this incredible Spanish girl he’d met while ski-ing in the Pyrenees.

And then he was off travelling again, broadening his mind yet further. China had turned out to be too alien and ideological for Dexter’s taste, and he had instead embarked on a leisurely year-long tour of what the guide books called ‘Party Towns’. So they were pen pals now, Emma composing long, intense letters crammed with jokes and underlining, forced banter and barely concealed longing; two-thousand-word acts of love on air-mail paper. Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them. In return, Dexter sent her postcards with insufficient postage: ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Barcelona INSANE’, ‘Dublin ROCKS. Sick as DOG this morning.’ As a travel writer, he was no Bruce Chatwin, but still she would slip the postcards in the pocket of a heavy coat on long soulful walks on Ilkley Moor, searching for some hidden meaning in ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’.

‘Who’s this Dexter then?’ her mother asked, peering at the back of the postcards. ‘Your boyfriend, is he?’ Then, with a concerned look: ‘Have you ever thought about working for the Gas Board?’ Emma got a job pulling pints in the local pub, and time passed, and she felt her brain begin to soften like something forgotten at the back of the fridge.

Then Gary Nutkin had phoned, the skinny Trotskyist who had directed her in a stark, uncompromising production of Brecht’s Fears and Miseries of the Third Reich back in ’86, then kissed her for three stark, uncompromising hours at the last-night party. Shortly afterwards he had taken her to a Peter Greenaway double-bill, waiting until four hours in before reaching across and absent-mindedly placing his hand on her left breast as if adjusting a dimmer switch. They made Brechtian love that evening in a stale single bed beneath a poster for The Battle of Algiers, Gary taking care throughout to ensure that he was in no way objectifying her. Then nothing, not a word, until that late-night phone-call in May, and the hesitant words, softly spoken: ‘How would you like to join my theatre co-operative?’

Emma had no ambitions as an actress or any great love of theatre, except as a medium to convey words and ideas. And Sledgehammer was to be a new kind of progressive theatre co-op, with shared intentions, a shared zeal, a written manifesto and a commitment to changing young lives through art. Maybe there’d be some romance too, Emma thought, or at the very least some sex. She packed her rucksack, said goodbye to her sceptical mum and dad, and set out in the mini-bus as if heading out on some great cause, a sort of theatrical Spanish Civil War, funded by the Arts Council.

But three months later, what had happened to the warmth, the camaraderie, the sense of social value, of high ideals coupled with fun? They were meant to be a co-operative. That’s what was written on the side of the van, she had stencilled it there herself. I-hate-this-job-I-hate this-job, said Sid. Emma pressed her hands against her ears, and asked herself some fundamental questions.

Why am I here?

Am I really making a difference?

Why can’t she put some clothes on?

What is that smell?

Where do I want to be right now?

She wanted to be in Rome, with Dexter Mayhew. In bed.

‘Shaftes-bury Avenue.’

‘No, Shafts-bury. Three syllables.’

‘Lychester Square.’

‘Leicester Square, two syllables.’

‘Why not Lychester?’

‘No idea.’

‘But you are meant to be my teacher, you are meant to know.’

‘Sorry,’ Dexter shrugged.

‘Well I think it is stupid language,’ said Tove Angstrom, and punched him in the shoulder.

‘A stupid language. I couldn’t agree with you more. No need to hit me though.’

‘I apologise,’ said Tove, kissing his shoulder, then his neck and mouth, and Dexter was once again struck by how rewarding teaching could be.

They lay in a tangle of cushions on the terracotta floor of his tiny room, having given up on the single bed as inadequate for their needs. In the brochure for the Percy Shelley International School of English, the teachers’ accommodation had been described as ‘some comfortable with many mitigating features’ and this summed it up perfectly. His room in the Centro Storico was dull and institutional, but there was at least a balcony, a foot-wide sill overlooking a picturesque square that, in a very Roman way, also functioned as a car park. Each morning he was woken by the sound of office-workers breezily reversing their cars into each other.

But in the middle of this humid July afternoon, the only sound came from the wheels of tourist suitcases rumbling on the cobbles below, and they lay with the windows wide open, kissing lazily, her hair clinging to his face, thick and dark and smelling of some Danish shampoo: artificial pine and cigarette smoke. She reached across his chest for the packet on the floor, lit two cigarettes and passed him one, and he shuffled up onto the pillows, letting the cigarette dangle from his lip like Belmondo or someone in a Fellini film. He had never seen a Belmondo or Fellini film, but was familiar with the postcards: stylish, black and white. Dexter didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

They kissed again, and he wondered vaguely if there was some moral or ethical dimension to this situation. Of course the time to worry about the pros and cons of sleeping with a student would have been after the College party, while Tove was perching unsteadily on the edge of his bed and unzipping her knee-length boots. Even then, in the muddle of red wine and desire he had found himself wondering what Emma Morley would say. Even as Tove twirled her tongue in his ear, he had conducted his defence: she’s nineteen, an adult, and anyway I’m not a real teacher. Besides, Emma was a long way away at this moment, changing the world from a mini-bus on the ring road of a provincial town, and what was all this to do with Emma anyway? Tove’s knee-length boots sagged in the corner of the room now, in the hostel where overnight visitors were strictly forbidden.

He shifted his body to a cooler patch of terracotta, peering out of the window to try to gauge the time from the small square of vivid blue sky. The rhythm of Tove’s breathing was changing as she slipped into sleep, but he had an important appointment to keep. He dropped the last two inches of cigarette into a wine glass, and stretched for his wristwatch, which lay on an unread copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man.

‘Tove, I’ve got to go.’

She groaned in protest.

‘I’m meeting my parents, I’ve got to leave now.’

‘Can I come too?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t think so, Tove. Besides you’ve got a grammar test on Monday. Go and revise.’

‘You test me. Test me now.’

‘Okay, verbs. Present continuous.’

She coiled one leg around him, using the leverage to pull herself on top of him. ‘I am kissing, you are kissing, he is kissing, she is kissing. .’

He pulled himself up on his elbows. ‘Seriously, Tove. .’

‘Ten more minutes,’ she whispered in his ear, and he sank back to the floor. Why not, he thought? After all, I’m in Rome, it’s a beautiful day. I am twenty-four years old, financially secure, healthy. I ache and I am doing something that I shouldn’t be doing, and I am very, very lucky.

The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

And how is Rome? How is La Dolce Vita? (look it up). I imagine you right now at a café table, drinking one of those ‘cappuccinos’ we hear so much about, and wolf-whistling at everything. You’re probably wearing sunglasses to read this. Well take them off, you look ridiculous. Did you get the books I sent you? Primo Levi is a fine Italian writer. It’s to remind you that life isn’t all gelati and espadrilles. Life can’t always be like the opening of Betty Blue. And how is teaching? Please promise me you’re not sleeping with your students. That would just be so. . disappointing.

Must go now. Bottom of page looms, and in the other room I can hear the thrilling murmur of our audience as they throw chairs at each other. I finish this job in two weeks THANK GOD, then Gary Nutkin, our director, wants me to devise a show for infant schools about Apartheid. With PUPPETS for fuck’s sake. Six months in a Transit on the M6 with a Desmond Tutu marionette on my lap. I might give that one a miss. Besides, I’ve written this two-woman play about Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson called ‘Two Lives’ (either that or ‘Two Depressed Lesbians’). Maybe I’ll put that on in a pub-theatre somewhere. Once I’d explained to Candy who Virginia Woolf was, she said that she really, really wanted to play her, but only if she can take her top off, so that’s the casting sorted. I’ll be Emily Dickinson, and keep my top on. I’ll reserve you tickets.

In the meantime, I have to choose whether to sign-on in Leeds or sign-on in London. Choices, choices. I’ve been trying to fight moving to London — it’s so PREDICTABLE, moving to London — but my old flatmate Tilly Killick (remember her? Big red glasses, strident views, sideburns?) has a spare room in Clapton. She calls it her ‘box room’, which doesn’t bode well. What’s Clapton like? Are you coming back to London soon? Hey! Maybe we could be flatmates?

‘Flatmates?’ Emma hesitated, shook her head and groaned, then wrote ‘Just kidding!!!!’ She groaned again. ‘Just kidding’ was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word. Too late to scribble it out now, but how to sign off? ‘All the best’ was too formal, ‘tout mon amour’ too affected, ‘all my love’ too corny, and now Gary Nutkin was in the doorway once again.

‘Okay, places everyone!’ Sorrowfully he held the door open as if leading them to the firing squad, and quickly, before she could change her mind, she wrote—God I miss you, Dex — then her signature and a single kiss scratched deep into the pale blue air-mail paper.

In the Piazza della Rotunda, Dexter’s mother sat at a café table, a novel held loosely in one hand, her eyes closed and her head tilted back and to the side like a bird to catch the last of the afternoon sun. Rather than arrive straightaway, Dexter took a moment to sit amongst the tourists on the steps of the Pantheon and watch as the waiter approached and picked up her ashtray, startling her. They both laughed, and from the theatrical movement of her mouth and arms he could tell that she was speaking her terrible Italian, her hand on the waiter’s arm, patting it flirtatiously. With no apparent idea what had been said, the waiter nevertheless grinned and flirted back, then walked away, glancing over his shoulder at the beautiful English woman who had touched his arm and talked incomprehensibly.

Dexter saw all this and smiled. That old Freudian notion, first whispered at boarding school, that boys were meant to be in love with their mothers and hate their fathers, seemed perfectly plausible to him. Everyone he had ever met had been in love with Alison Mayhew, and the best of it was that he really liked his father too; as in so many things, he had all the luck.

Often, at dinner or in the large, lush garden of the Oxfordshire house, or on holidays in France as she slept in the sun, he would notice his father staring at her with his bloodhound eyes in dumb adoration. Fifteen years her elder, tall, long-faced and introverted, Stephen Mayhew seemed unable to believe this one remarkable piece of good fortune. At her frequent parties, if Dexter sat very quietly so as not to be sent to bed, he would watch as the men formed an obedient, devoted circle around her; intelligent, accomplished men, doctors and lawyers and people who spoke on the radio, reduced to moony teenage boys. He would watch as she danced to early Roxy Music albums, a cocktail glass in her hand, woozy and self-contained as the other wives looked on, dumpy and slow-witted in comparison. School-friends too, even the cool complicated ones, would turn into cartoons around Alison Mayhew, flirting with her while she flirted back, engaging her in water fights, complimenting her on her terrible cooking — the violently scrambled eggs, the black pepper that was ash from a cigarette.

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.’

‘Journalism’s a possibility.’

‘Or business. Weren’t you and Callum going to start up some business?’

‘We’re giving it some thought.’

‘All sounds a bit vague, just “business”.’

‘Like I said, we’re giving it some thought.’ In truth Callum, his old flatmate, had already started the business without him, something about computer refurbishment that Dexter didn’t have the energy to understand. They’d be millionaires by the time they were twenty-five, Callum insisted, but what would it sound like in a bar? ‘Actually, I refurbish computers.’ No, professional photography was his best bet. He decided to try saying it out loud.

‘Actually, I’m thinking about photography.’

‘Photography?’ His mother gave a maddening laugh.

‘Hey, I’m a good photographer!’

‘—when you remember to take your thumb off the lens.’

‘Aren’t you meant to be encouraging me?’

‘What kind of photographer? Glamour?’ She gave a throaty laugh. ‘Or are you going to continue your work on Texture!’ and they had to stop while she stood in the street laughing for some time, doubled over, holding onto his arm for support — ‘All those pictures of gravel!’ — until finally it was over, and she stood and straightened her face. ‘Dexter, I am so, so sorry. .’

‘I’m actually much better now.’

‘I know you are, I’m sorry. I apologise.’ They began to walk again. ‘You must do it, Dexter, if that’s what you want.’ She squeezed his arm with her elbow, but Dexter felt sulky. ‘We’ve always told you that you can be anything you want to be, if you work hard enough.’

‘It was just a thought,’ he said, petulantly. ‘I’m weighing up my options, that’s all.’

‘Well I hope so, because teaching’s a fine profession, but this isn’t really your vocation, is it? Teaching Beatles songs to moony Nordic girls.’

‘It’s hard work, Mum. Besides it gives me something to fall back on.’

‘Yes, well, sometimes I wonder if you have a little too much to fall back on.’ She was looking down as she spoke and the remark seemed to rebound off the flagstones. They walked a little further before he spoke.

‘And what does that mean?’

‘Oh, I just mean—’ She sighed, and rested her head against his shoulder. ‘I just mean that at some point you’ll have to get serious about life, that’s all. You’re young and healthy and you look nice enough, I suppose, in a low light. People seem to like you, you’re smart, or smart enough, not academically maybe, but you know what’s what. And you’ve had luck, so much luck, Dexter, and you’ve been protected from things, responsibility, money. But you’re an adult now, and one day things might not be this. .’ She looked around her, indicating the scenic little back street down which he had brought her. ‘. . this serene. It would be good if you were prepared for that. It would do you good to be better equipped.’

Dexter frowned. ‘What, a career you mean?’

‘Partly.’

‘You sound like Dad.’

‘Good God, in what way?’

‘A proper job, something to fall back on, something to get up for.’

‘Not just that, not just a job. A direction. A purpose. Some drive, some ambition. When I was your age I wanted to change the world.’

He sniffed ‘Hence the antiques shop,’ and she jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

‘That’s now, this was then. And don’t get smart with me.’ She took hold of his arm and they began walking slowly again. ‘I just want you to make me proud, that’s all. I mean I’m already proud of you, and your sister, but, well, you know what I mean. I’m a little drunk. Let’s change the subject. I wanted to talk to you about something else.’

‘What else?’

‘Oh — too late.’ They were in sight of the hotel now, three stars, smart but not ostentatious. Through the smoked plate glass window he could glimpse his father hunched in a lobby armchair, one long thin leg bent up to his knee, sock bunched up in his hand as he scrutinised the sole of his foot.

‘Good God, he’s picking his corns in the hotel lobby. A little bit of Swansea on the Via del Corso. Charming, just charming.’ Alison unlooped her arm and took her son’s hand in hers. ‘Take me for lunch tomorrow, will you? While your father sits in a darkened room and picks his corns. Let’s go out, just you and me, somewhere outside on a nice square. White tablecloths. Somewhere expensive, my treat. You can bring me some of your photographs of interesting pebbles.’

‘Okay,’ he said, sulkily. His mother was smiling but frowning too, squeezing his hand a little too hard, and he felt a sudden pang of anxiety. ‘Why?’

‘Because I want to talk to my handsome son and I’m a little too drunk right now, I think.’

‘What is it? Tell me now!’

‘It’s nothing, nothing.’

‘You’re not getting divorced, are you?’

She gave a low laugh. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, of course not.’ In the hotel lobby his father had seen them, and was standing and tugging on the ‘push to open’ door. ‘How could I ever leave a man who tucks his shirts into his underpants?’

‘So tell me, what is it?’

‘Nothing bad, sweetheart, nothing bad.’ Standing on the street she gave him a consoling smile and put her hand in the short hair at the back of his neck, pulling him down to her height so that their foreheads were touching. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing. Tomorrow. We’ll talk properly tomorrow.’