I calculated she could manage without it for a week. In return, I decided to pay three pounds into the charity box, which was then a considerable sum and, therefore, a conscience appeaser.

Lips tight, Ianthe set about preparing my wardrobe between working and running the house. Scrupulous as ever, she washed all my clothes by hand and dried them over the clothes-horse in the kitchen.

The day before I left, she set up the ironing-board. A ham-bone boiled on the stove, and the kitchen grew steamy with starch and stock. The radio played softly. Every so often, she dipped her hand into a jug of water, and shook drops over the ironing-board. The iron bit into the material with a hiss. When she had finished, she folded each garment with exquisite neatness.

I watched dreamily. She was wearing her everyday flat shoes, polished to within an inch of their lives, and there was a careful darn in her stocking, but her hair had escaped its coil and a frown puckered her forehead. Every so often, she glanced up at me, the movement emphasizing her extreme thinness. I knew what she was thinking. She will get ideas above her station. My mother had been so careful not to raise my expectations.

‘Rose,’ she cut sharply into my reverie, ‘don’t just sit there, let down that dress. And don’t look like that.’

She was not taking her defeat lightly, nor did I expect her to, and my victory was too precarious to jeopardize. I pulled out the sewing-box and set about the dress, which had already been rehemmed twice. I cut and snipped and eventually the remaining spare inch of material, which was of a much darker colour, had been tacked into place. I held up the dress. ‘It’ll look awful.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers.’ Ianthe was at her most maddening, but her eyes were cloudy with distress. This was final proof, if she needed it, that I was growing beyond her reach.

So, there I was: a creature in a seersucker dress with an obviously let-down hem, from a cool, wet island, without a history of my own, bewitched by a city that had almost too much.

There they were: the great fontane of the Trevi and the Barcaccia, or the more playful ones, like the Fontana delle Tartarughe with its bronze tortoises, which I found tucked behind the ghetto, and at street corners the intimate fontanelle. Plump women reclined with their breasts displayed, sea gods grasped tridents, nymphs crouching at their feet, while dolphins, seahorses, lions and amphorae emerged from bronze and stone. Creatures of myth and legend had been summoned from the four quarters of the world.

Those sleek, gleaming men, women and animals had nothing to do but ensure that water was tossed from shell and mouth, and how happy they seemed to me as they guarded the arcs of water in the sun. But I also figured, with a little help from Keats, that they were happy because nothing ever happened to them.

Our hotel was in the via Elisabetta, on a corner, and its top storey almost collided with its opposite neighbour’s. It was a simple place, with hard beds, white cotton covers and a tiny niche in each bedroom that housed a plastic statue of the Virgin, which we had been warned not to touch. ‘I dare you, I dare you,’ cried Marty, my roommate. Marty was going to be beautiful. She came from a better-off family and her wardrobe was extensive. She was contemptuous of me and, because I feared her, I accepted her dare and hung the door key off the Virgin’s plaster hand.

Later that night, I lay and listened to the traffic snarl past and waited for Marty to go to sleep. When I was sure that she had, I slid from under the rough sheets, crept over to the Virgin and removed the key. Mother of God, forgive me. I knew not what I did. Where had I read that? In the half-light, jeering Marty slept, almost like an angel.

The via Elisabetta ran through the Trastevere district from San Pietro in Montorio, past the piazza Santa Maria and down to the river. The Trasterine reputedly have loud, hoarse voices, drink lots of coffee, eat maritozzi for breakfast and spaghetti cacio e pepe for supper. (I had done my research.) It was an area that traditionally had absorbed foreigners and nonconformists. From ancient times, it had understood diversity and the quirks of different peoples.

Ecco.

It was a serpentine street, coiling down to the river Tiber but, by the end of the second day, if you had blindfolded me, I could have led you to the laundry, or to the shop that sold pictures of Christ, heart exposed, surrounded by roses, lilies and flowers of the field. I puzzled over the cards, which seemed to me intemperately vulgar, and as to why Christ had appeared to have had open-heart surgery.

Walking south from San Pietro, the first stop had to be for a café ristretto at Nono’s to brace you for the walk to the river. (In penance, Marty treated me to one.) Long before you saw the water, you sensed its flow and heard its ancient sounds, but before it came into sight, the via Elisabetta widened and flared into a modest square, flanked by the pinky terracotta-coloured buildings. In the centre of the square was a fountain: a stone youth with a drawn sword guarded a woman in flowing robes, who wore a crown and balanced a pot on her shoulder from which the water gushed. The pot had a pattern of bees engraved into it.

Here, I discovered the Café Nannini, run by the family. In the morning, Signora Nannini presided over a magical machine that produced an elixir called coffee, which was nothing like the coffee I knew but was topped by foam over which lay a drift of chocolate. In the afternoon, Signor Nannini took over. In halting Italian, I asked him about the fountain in the middle of the square, which seemed rather ornate for such a modest square. ‘Why the bees?’

‘Barberini bees. A Barberini gave the money for the fountain to be built. A long time ago.’

‘E la donna?’

‘She is the wife of the king of the gods. A woman who suffered because her husband liked the pretty girls.’

I remembered the frozen stone face. ‘Wasn’t being wife to the king of the gods enough?’

‘It is nature.’

Lucy Honeychurch and Jane Eyre did not help me in this matter. Hoping for enlightenment, I inspected the face again, but I did not find any.

‘Rosie,’ said Nathan, as I dumped my book bag on the sofa in the sitting room that evening. It fell over, spilling its contents. ‘Rosie, we must talk.’

He had his back to me and was gazing out of the french windows into the garden. He had not changed out of his office suit, his third favourite one in dark grey with the faintest red stripe running through the material. The cut flattered him, and I urged him to wear it more often.

Nathan sometimes issued imperatives. They meant nothing. I was late, tired, my feet were wet and it had been a trying day. ‘Sorry I’m late. Minty was ill and I had to cope. I expect you’re hungry. I’ll just change my shoes.’

‘Now…’ He sounded strained, my energetic, thrusting, ambitious husband.

I went over to him, slid my arms around him and laid my cheek on his shoulder. ‘All right. Go on.’

Then, he turned round and pushed me away. He looked me straight in the eye. At least he did that. His were alight with an excitement and dread I could not place. ‘This is not a good talk.’

Chapter Five

I couldn’t explain it – I never could when he did it: Nathan went absent. He simply folded his mind into a secret place and disappeared inside himself. It was a habit of his, and it was particularly noticeable when he was nerving himself for a confrontation at work.

‘Not one of the children?’ I demanded, with the flash of fear that always lay waiting.

‘No, nothing to do with them.’ Nathan appeared to be in need of something to do with his hands, and he stuffed them into his pockets. It was the gesture he had used when he demanded that I marry him. Then, his pockets had practically disintegrated from tension and imperatives – ‘Say yes. Now.’

He began to speak, thought better of it, and tried again. ‘Rosie, we’ve been happy, haven’t we?’

Words can be spoken, they can be written in Gothic script, they can be sung, and we all agree to agree on what they mean. Yet their real meaning is in how they are said.

‘Haven’t we?’ With astonishment, I realized that Nathan had pronounced those words with finality. Alarm and bewilderment began to grate in my stomach. I replied. ‘Yes, we have.’

‘First of all, I want to say that I have been happy with you. Very, very happy. Despite my not being your first choice, so to speak.’

‘Nathan…’

‘Let’s establish it, I have been happy. Despite… everything,’ he muttered.

‘What are you talking about?’ I stared at him, and comprehension crept in. ‘You’re not on about that again? I can’t believe you’re still going on about a love affair that… Everyone has a love affair before they get married. You can’t possibly imagine… or think…’

‘Only because you do.’

‘I don’t. I promise I don’t.’

‘Oh, come on, Rosie. We know each other well enough. The truth?’

I swallowed. ‘I suppose I do, very occasionally, think about Hal, in a remote way, but only to remind me of how happy I am and how much I love you. Occasionally, I think, what if, but only if we’ve had a row. It’s harmless, foolish stuff. Why are you bringing this up? What’s happened?’

He grabbed my arm, and his fingers bit into the flesh. ‘No regrets?’

I smiled up at him, tender and committed. ‘You know there are not.’ ‘You silly,’ I added. ‘You know how grateful I am, what you mean to me. The children, the house. Our life. Us.’ I touched his lips with a finger, outlining their shape, gently, softly. ‘Why don’t you go and have a bath, Nathan, and I’ll get supper?’