Roman Nights by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online

not at all to do with the health of great-aunt and the bambini.
    To visit Rome on a Sunday is suicide. Particularly if you are Charles in a rage. More particularly if you are Charles in a rage and your Alfa Romeo is still having its brakes fixed. There are nine motor repair shops in Parassio, and I could only hope that he’d forgotten which one he’d left it at.
    He didn’t come back that night, and I was at work all day on the Monday, with a wrecked stove and a temper. Jacko and I have an arrangement, because the Rome shops shut that day. I work, and he goes to the Spanish Steps and picks up new subjects for his photography. By November, the German blondes and sultry Philadelphians have disappeared, but the Rampa and every other staircase in Rome is thick with homesick students reading their letters. Jacko merely looks at the postmarks and addresses them in the language of origin. One day, someone will smash Jacko’s camera. One day, someone will smash Jacko if he is not very, very careful.
    I was packing the plates when Maurice came to pay one of his state visits to his seigneurial property. In the weeks since he brought us to Italy, Maurice had become quite knowledgeable about the observatory. He sat and talked while I went on boxing them, each plate in its transparent envelope with a card giving the date and exposure and atmospheric conditions obtaining. There were plates for every day: the Zodiac Trust would expect a full record to process. I even included the plates we had spoiled. There would be a few from Saturday night, for example, to explain away.
    There was nearly another that moment. ‘You ought to know, darling,’ said Maurice. ‘Timothy has lent Charles the old Maserati. He really can’t take dud brakes to Naples.’
    I released a plate and cased it, unfractured. Then I said, ‘No. Maurice. No gossip this morning.’
    ‘I can guess what it was, anyway,’ said Maurice, quite undisturbed. ‘He offered to marry you. I do sympathize, I do really, darling. I’m like Timothy; I’m militantly Fem Lib at heart. I should never marry a man unless he was poor but brilliant. Look at darling Di’s mother. Eight starring vehicles with Rock Hudson, and she never saw Minicucci again after she got him to the altar.’
    ‘Really, Maurice,’ I said. I checked the supplies in the fridge. All fine photographic stock comes from America. Because the Roman heat plays hell with the emulsion, the bulk supplies go straight into the stockroom meat safe, and from there to the fridge in the darkroom. Maurice, looking particularly elegant with the white mink combed, and his hands crossed on the Malacca cane under his Thai silk stock tie, was more than a little in my way. ‘She had Di, didn’t she?’ I said.
    ‘Oh, but that was before,’ Maurice said. ‘Didn’t you know? A breech delivery six weeks after the wedding, and she couldn’t have another thing, poor darling; not even free range for the test tube. She died of overeating; you wouldn’t believe what she looked like. A Givenchy Pekinese sitting on two fake fur pouffes. Di loves your Johnson.’
    ‘I thought he was your Johnson now,’ I said. He had brought me some Alemagna Tintin chocolate and eaten most of it himself because I hadn’t a light for his cigar: Charles and I were out of matches. In any case, I was damned if I was going to stop before I was ready. Jacko had put away his porn pictures, but the tube from the nitrogen cylinder had been left partly unhooked: it ran all the way around to the sink, where there were instructions in green felt pen all over the wall beside the Intermittent Gaseous Burst Valve, including a poem using three four-letter words and an Italian one I hadn’t heard of before. I rubbed it out, for the honour of the team, and rehooked the tubing and checked the lists for the evening’s work.
    Maurice said, ‘I’m sure, darling, he’d paint you for nothing; I can see he adores tall, busy girls. You don’t even know who he is.