Page 1 of The Women

One

Rome, Italy, April 2018

The light in Rome is like no other. Like yellow dust it falls over the restless queues that coil around the Colosseum, over the flaking ruins of the Forum, over the traffic cop who stands signalling in the middle of Piazza Venezia. It falls over the hordes on the Via del Corso, the tourists gasping at designer windows in the Via Condotti, over thepietonion the Piazza di Spagna, the hand-laid cobbles hidden now beneath a thousand feet; other feet, bare, cool themselves in the fountains at the Piazza del Popolo.

Only April, but my God, how hot it is today.

There are ghosts too, ghosts everywhere, retracing their steps through the three-pronged fork of the old artists’ quarter:Via Margutta, Via Ripetta, Via del Babuino; the ghosts of Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, names that melt in the mouth like the ice cream at Bar San Crispino, served gravely by men in gloves to gastronomes who, sun on their faces, Trevi Fountain at their backs, knees sagging in ecstasy, giggle in disbelief at the taste-bud-defying gelato, licking creamy trickles from their cardboard cups, wiping with greedy fingers at their chins.Try mine! Taste this! It’s like you’re eating actual strawberries …

The yellow light falls. Lands on lesser sights, lesser ruins, on the Santa Maria in Cosmedinchurch, where newly-weds Peter and Samantha Bridges and their baby, Emily, have taken their place in the chaotic queue. It is cooler here in the shade of the vaulted arches, beneath the towering minaret, where a human mass edges forward, fidgeting and twitching like children on a school trip.

‘So, the Mouth of Truth,’ Samantha reads from Peter’s tattered guidebook, once she’s sure he’s listening, ‘La Bocca della Verità, as it’s known locally, is a huge stone mask in the portico here, which is part of the Chiesa di Santa Maria in Cosmedin.’She looks up, checks her bearings. The multilingual din all around and the damp heat of the baby against her back make it hard to concentrate.

‘The square we’re standing in now,’ she perseveres, as a group of twenty or so Chinese sightseers presses in behind, ‘is the Piazza della Verità. It’s the site of the ancient cattle market, the Forum Boarium.’ Her arms are flattened against her sides, the guidebook almost in her face. She can smell traffic fumes and cigarette smoke, feel Rome’s greasy black dust coating her nostrils. She glances at Peter to check that he’s still paying attention and sees a bead of sweat trickle down the right side of his face. He is overheating. Poor man.

He nods briskly at her to continue. Coughs into his fist, wriggles the rucksack from his back and digs out the two-litre bottle of water.

‘The massive marble mask,’ she goes on, ‘is said to depict the face of the sea god Oceanus. Let’s see … ah, you’ll like this … historians aren’t sure what the original purpose was, but it was possibly used as a drain cover near the Temple of Hercules Victor, which had an oculus in the ceiling … that’s the round hole, isn’t it, like in the ceiling of the Pantheon?’

Peter has the bottle pressed to his lips. The water chugs. His Adam’s apple bobs. The plastic implodes with a loud crack. She should keep going, lay the historical information on thick. With Peter, it’s all about the credentials.

‘It’s thought,’ she reads, ‘that cattle merchants used the mask as a drain cover for the blood of cattle sacrificed to the god Hercules.’ She imagines the blood. A bestial red flood, gallons of it, running thickly down into the mask’s open mouth. The memory she has had so often since giving birth to Emily flashes: helping her father pull a calf for the very first time – the hooves in the amnion, the viscera clotting in the hay, steam rising in the pre-dawn chill of the barn. Her father had patted the cow’s sweating flank, nodded at her as she licked her calf clean.She’ll take it from here, he had said in his thick Yorkshire accent.All the bull does is leave his seed. It’s the mothers that do the rest.She thinks of her own primitive shock as her baby writhed out of her, their shared animal state; the pain, the blood, the strange lowing sound she made.

Peter is still glugging water. He has drunk almost a litre.

‘Save some for me,’ she says, one hand at her breast. ‘I need it for milk.’

‘I’m parched.’ Awkwardly he wedges the nearly empty bottle back in the rucksack. His forehead glistens. ‘Go on.’

‘That’s it really. In the seventeenth century, the mask was moved here. You put your hand in the mouth and legend has it that if you’re a truthful person, nothing happens. But if you’re a liar …’ She takes his hand, rubs the new wedding ring with the tip of her finger and fixes his deep brown eyes with hers. ‘If you’re a liar, darling – are you listening? – the mouth closes and takes your hand clean off.’

The crowd surges, pushing them forward. Peter flushes an even deeper crimson. He coughs once again. Too much red at lunch. Too many home-made tortellini. And he shouldn’t have had the tiramisu.

‘Superstition,’ he almost wheezes. ‘Hocus-pocus.’

‘Of course. But it’s amazing how many people will make a pilgrimage on nothing more than that.’ She gestures to the jostling bodies around them, their latest iPhones, their selfie sticks, to the stout Italian woman immediately in front whose son is poking his sister in the back. ‘These people aren’t here for the history, are they? They basically want to put their hand inside the mouth and see if it closes, even though they know it won’t. Ninety-nine per cent of their mind knows it won’t. But it’s the one per cent that brings them here, isn’t it? That tiny, illogical sliver of doubt.’ She smiles up at him, but he doesn’t meet her eye. ‘Superstition’s like suspicion, I suppose, in that sense. A feeling you can’t put into words. A one per cent of something you don’t quite know.’

The babbling rabble advances a pace, two. The tonal highs and lows of Mandarin quicken in the hot air. They are getting closer to the entrance, where two male officials stand sentry. Peter looks towards the square, where once cows were bought and sold and slaughtered. Blood gushing on the ground. Blood running thick into the stone mouth. Sacrifice.

‘We could go back to the apartment,’ he says, ‘if you think it’s nonsense.’

‘I didn’t say it was nonsense. I was talking about the power of superstition. Anyway, we’re here now.’

He pulls at his collar, wrinkles his nose. ‘It’s just … it’s just so touristy. A bit naff, isn’t it?’

‘We’re tourists. Tourismisnaff, essentially.’

‘Yes, but if we go back now, we could … take a nap.’ He raises an eyebrow but it doesn’t look convinced. Like a dodgy cheque; she’s not sure he can cash it.

‘You’ll be looking after Emily while I sleep, so I wouldn’t get too excited if I were you.’ She lifts her face to his, attempting with a peck on the lips to unravel her confusion: the urge to apologise still comes to her, but she knows she should not, that it is habit, nothing more. She and Peter are going to see this damn mouth if it’s the last thing they do. In their entire honeymoon, it’s the only sight she’s requested.

‘Giorgio!’ Immediately in front of them, the stout Italian woman smacks her annoying little boy over the back of the head. The boy bursts into tears.Mamma!is all Samantha can make out from the self-pitying wailing that follows. The boy is spoilt, she thinks. That’s why he behaves badly. Spoilt boys become selfish men.

The woman and her children go ahead. Peter pays one of the guides, his expression begrudging, harassed. They step out of the shade. Heat comes at them as if from an open oven door. A hard Roman sun shines on a large stone disc. This is it: the mask, the mouth of truth. It is smaller than she has imagined when she has pictured them both here. The bearded face is monstrous, the eyes wide and staring, a deep fissure scarring the right eye. The mouth itself is a grotesque silent scream into the void. For a moment, she falters. But steels herself.

Peter drains the water bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He looks, more than anything, appalled, though his colour is still high. The gargoyle is disconcerting, she admits. But the urge to put her hand inside the mouth is almost overwhelming. At the same time, she imagines the mythical severance, the bloody stump of her own wrist, the horror on the faces of the crowd as she staggers, bleeding, onto the street.

‘A gargantuan gargoyle,’ says Peter, but his expression is preoccupied, possibly due to his thwarted amorous intentions. In darker moments such as this, their relationship feels to her like a constant effort to appease him: to keep him fed, watered, sexually satisfied, conversationally engaged. Soothed. Emily has slept for most of the day, which means that when they return to the flat, she will wake up. And Samantha, desperate for sleep, will be faced with two sets of demands. Peter and Emily. Two children, in a sense.

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