Highlights

As soon as they were in the street they saw where the noise was coming from. Behind the hotel a large building had been demolished, and they looked down into the excavation where two mechanical diggers were shifting and levelling the rubble. Forward they rushed, from different sides, clanking and jolting, to scoop up dirt and twisted metal and broken Roman bricks; they seemed to bow to each other with their scoops. Then almost together came the bleeps, and the trundling erratic reverse. No one else was on the site, but the warning was sounded. It was piercing and implacable, with an echo that came back dead off the buildings like a knock. Colin laughed thinly at his continuing bad luck.

He marched Archie up the hill, to the high open-sided piazza on the Quirinal, where they had their first view across the whole city, with the dome of St Peter’s in the distance and the wide brown jumble of roofs below. Archie seemed to like that, and the twenty-foot-high naked statues of Castor and Pollux. Size was in general a mark of authenticity, for Archie. They pondered the colossal fig leaves of the two young gods, colossal absolutely, but proportionally on the small side, and Colin made a joke about ‘Pollux’s bollocks’, which Archie seemed to enjoy more than anything since they’d left London. Colin wished it was the sort of remark that came to him more easily. Harnessing the mood of childish hilarity, he hurried them along to the pair of neighbouring churches, where Archie would have his first taste of the two Bs.

His own first feeling, as the door of S. Andrea thumped softly shut behind them, muting the roar of the traffic, was, It’s still here. The mild light on grey marble, the cherubs and the gilding, the candle trays and parish notices, the one woman praying: it was all as it had been twenty years ago. The notices referred to a new famine and a new pope, but the mood was the same, the mid-morning vacancy of a church in Italy, with the rumble of lorries and whine of Vespas in the long hot street outside. He walked slowly around, tipped his head back to look up at the elliptical dome, with a dull protest from his neck. He smiled to encourage Archie, and also, in a way, himself. It wasn’t quite working for him, great though it was. He felt that if Archie would say something, smile, make even a tiny gesture of surrender, it probably would work: his own long-ago sense of discovery would revive.

He went over to Archie, who was still standing near the door, with his hands on his hips. Colin kept smiling purposefully, but Archie’s half-smile was that of someone not easily taken in.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ said Colin.

Archie glanced around. ‘It’s quite small, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Colin, and nodded enthusiastically.

A twinkle came into Archie’s eye. ‘I was just looking at you there, Mr Cardew. You’re getting quite a pot on you. We’re going to have to get you down to the gym when we get back; do some work on those abs before it’s too late.’

‘Oh, it already is too late, for that,’ said Colin.

‘Never too late,’ said Archie, with charm, and the way he had of seeming to allude to Colin’s fantasies, and play on them. He reachedout and squeezed his shoulder. ‘Let’s get on,’ he said, as if Colin had been dawdling intolerably. ‘We haven’t got long here, you know.’

Out in the street, Colin said, ‘We’ll just have a quick look in S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, shall we?’

‘S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane,’ said Archie, with a certain stoniness nder his mimicry. They bustled along the narrow pavement, Colin fiddling with his top shirt button, as he did when he was nervous and responsible. It was hard to talk because of the roar of buses and taxis. ‘God, this city’s polluted,’ said Archie.

‘I suppose it is,’ said Colin.

‘I can hardly breathe,’ said Archie.

As they drew close to the church, on its busy crossroads, Colin said, ‘We ought to cross over to see the facade properly. It is rather amazing.’ But Archie had already dropped behind, and when Colin turned round he was standing with his mouth pulled down and his fist rubbing at his left eye. ‘Are you all right?’ said Colin.

Archie was somewhat abstruse. He said it was his allergies, and also that he had a bit of grit in his eye.

‘Let me look at it,’ said Colin, and after a minute of blinking and squeezing, Archie let him look, with the child-like submission and bravery that anyone will show when they have something in their eye. ‘I can’t see anything,’ said Colin, keeping Archie’s head steady with one hand while he held his eye open with the thumb and forefinger of the other. It didn’t escape him that this was their most intimate moment in over a year.

After Colin let him go Archie carried on frowning and rolling his eyes. He was breathing noisily, as he did in his sleep. ‘I’ve got to have a drink of water,’ he said. ‘I’m so dry.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Colin, with a smirk that showed he wasn’t easily taken in either. They set off in search of a cafe, leaving the church unvisited.

‘Rome is so beautiful,’ said Archie airily, taking Colin’s arm for a moment. ‘What’s that over there?’

‘It’s the back of the post office,’ said Colin.

Next page: In the afternoon, Colin tried a different tack...