Rose extract 1

We arrived in Narni late on a Sunday evening. Although the door to the Hotel Fina was locked the driver roused a servant who stumbled out with creased shirt tails, brought in our luggage and showed us to a bedroom that smelled of unwashed feet. Nora took away my cloak and bonnet, then I snuffed the candles and lay down. A man was shouting in the distance, perhaps the worse for drink. Instead of sleeping I rode through the night as if still in a carriage jolting over badly made roads across the plains of Italy. Eventually I heard a clock strike five and the rumble of a cart in the square outside and I fell asleep to the sound of women’s raised voices and the clash of a pail against stone.

I woke to a blade of sunlight sliced between the shutters – it was nearly mid-morning. Nora was standing over me with a breakfast tray and a letter from Mother which I didn’t read. None of the clothes in my portmanteau was fit to wear, being too crushed, so I put on my travelling dress again and said we would go out at once. In the lobby I struggled to make myself understood by the proprietress, who was dressed in black and whose mouth was pulled down at the ends, as if from despair, but when I showed her Henry’s address she drew us a rough map.

Narni was an ancient town built near the top of a hill and the Hotel Fina was at its centre, in a little square. What with the bunch of women round a fountain and the confusion of streets and shopfronts there was no telling which direction was the right one so we set off at random up a flight of steps and under an arch. The sun was very hot, the street oppressively narrow and our travelling clothes too heavy so we stopped under a shady porch while I consulted the map.

A cluster of children formed around us, I asked one of them for ‘Via del Monte, Signora Critelli?’, and he set off back the way we’d come. We followed him, recrossed the little square, and this time plunged down a steep street with the houses built so close on either side I could almost touch them. Washing of the most intimate nature hung from balconies or was suspended like dingy carnival flags from wall to wall. I was surprised to find Henry lodging in such a poor quarter.

Eventually the child paused in front of an open doorway where there was a smell of wet stone and flowers because someone had just watered a pot of narcissi. I hovered at the entrance, my resolve gone, wishing that I had never left England or that at the very least had sent Henry a note to let him know I was on my way. Now that I was here I wondered whether he would think it appropriate. I was also afraid of seeing him ill. What if he didn’t recognise me, or I him? Unlike Rosa, I never knew what to do in the face of sickness. I glanced at Nora but she raised an eyebrow as if to say: You got us into this; don’t expect any encouragement from me.

In the end I crept along the passage to a kitchen where a woman stood with her arms immersed in a wash bowl. She squinted at me through the droplets of water that trickled into her eyes.
‘Dr Henry Thewell?’ I asked.
She gaped, dried her face first on a towel then on her skirt, leaned her hand on the door frame and let fly a torrent of Italian which ended at last in a question.
I shook my head. ‘Non capisco. Inglese. Mi chiamo Mariella Ling-wood. Ma-ri-ella. I am engaged to be married to Dr Thewell. Dov’e Henry Thewell?’
I had learned from watching my father that it is better, in moments of crisis, to speak quietly rather than to shout. Certainly Signora Critelli calmed down; she went on talking but less rapidly, wiped her hands again, gestured that I should get out of the way and led me up a narrow flight of stairs to the first floor where she knocked sharply on a door, flung it wide and announced me with the words: ‘Signorina Inglese.’
I took a step further, and another.