“I think we should go travelling one more time,” said Emily Woods dreamily, while she gave an invigorating shove with her left hand to the swing in the canary’s cage. As a result it swayed wildly back and forth; all the tiny bells hanging off it jingled and rang, and the yellow bird took off all flustered from its perch.

“We have been at home such a long time,” she continued, putting down her tea cup, “that I can now imagine the shape of every tree and the contours of the hill outside the window without even needing to look.” She stared disdainfully at the delightful, gently undulating landscape of hills covered with large deciduous trees.

“Would you perhaps like another cup of tea, my dear?” answered Agatha with some unease and dragged her friend back, without her being quite aware of it, to familiar safe territory. Changes or even just the hint of them always had an effect on her like a blast of cold water and she needed a long time just to get used to them.

“Aren’t we a bit old now to be undertaking such long trips?” she added and filled Emily’s tea cup, which Emily was holding out silently towards her. “After all, it was only a couple of months ago that we spent that week in Little Cockington. Don’t you remember the lovely cream teas we had there, with the scones and strawberry jam?”

“Little Cockington!” Emily said disdainfully, while she crushed a chocolate biscuit between her fingers. “After Little Cockington we deserve another hundred years of travelling. That wasn’t a proper journey. No, I mean some genuine travel: Africa for example or South America or at least somewhere on the continent; and on top of that we would have to stay away for at least six weeks.”

“Yes but just remember what happened to poor old Uncle Eustace. He flew to Australia when he was seventy-six to visit his nieces: he suffered a stroke while surfing and never came back”, Agatha suggested anxiously.

“Oh Eustace was always a weakling,” Emily answered with that deep voice of hers, which when she had been headmistress of a large girls’ school had always terrified her pupils.

“A much better example would be Uncle Hilary. He did a bike tour of Belgium when he was ninety-two and it thoroughly agreed with him. He converted the cellar of his house into a gym, and continued to use it till well after his ninety-eighth birthday. If he hadn’t broken his neck mountain climbing in Wales, he would still be in great shape.” Emily emptied her third cup of tea and fell silent, full of sad reflection.

Agatha was drinking tea with small sips. Between each sip, she chewed absent-mindedly on her Scottish shortbread and looked anxiously at the tree-crowned hills outside the living-room window. Her heart started to beat faster, while images, thoughts and overflowing desires filled her soul – travelling, the act of leaving everything familiar behind, all these memories now discoloured by the dust of passing years - and then her thinking about them made those once luminous experiences glow with vibrant life again, evoking happiness, joy and a greater zest for life. It was almost as if these memories were forcing themselves back into her mind.

“We’re both old, Emily,” she said quietly. “Think about your poor eyesight. Why just recently there was that cyclist you didn’t see. You came within a hair’s breadth of being knocked over by him. And there’s your heart! How would your heart cope with the weather abroad and the different food? And look at me: my rheumatism has been especially bad this year…remember my right hand.” She lifted her delicate arm in front of the window so that the swollen bone on her wrist stood out against the incoming light. “I have no strength in this hand. I can’t even carry hand luggage, let alone a suitcase.” She fell silent and carefully pulled the cuff of her cardigan over the offending joint.

“Who said you’ll have to drag along a suitcase, Agatha? What complete nonsense! I can’t carry a suitcase either; I had a heart attack as you well know. All over the world they have porters for this sort of job. Or at the very least young men who have been brought up to be polite and helpful.”

Agatha looked at her friend with misgivings. On her part she wasn’t so sure that the youth of today would be scrambling to carry old ladies’ luggage or to protect them from the rigours and hardships of the world. Emily however was still the schoolmistress who still made her way in life with gravity through large crowds of people who to her may as well have been her students.

“All the same, we are old,” Agatha repeated with that gentle yet persistent tenacity, which sometimes brought a flush of anger into Emily’s plump cheeks. Emily placed her tea cup with some emphasis back down on the table, which made the canary flutter on its perch. She turned her face towards her friend and regarded her with a warning look from her sharp blue eyes, which once upon a time had made not just four hundred girls but the whole teaching staff tremble:

“Did you say we’re old, Agatha? How did you come to this absurd assumption? I am seventy-six and, as I recall, in three months’ you’ll be celebrating your seventy-fourth birthday – you are plainly still a greenhorn, not to mention the fact that you are never going to grow up properly anyway.” Agatha looked at her friend with that smile of resignation, reflecting both subordination and constancy, and said nothing.

"Old," Emily went on and she placed the empty cup on the tray, "you start getting old after eighty. But before that, you are elderly at worst - elderly but not old! "

She got to her feet ponderously. Ultimately Emily had come to weigh a solid eighty-five kilos, despite belonging to a weight watchers’ group; which was definitely too much when compared to her height of one metre sixty-five. Then she trudged determinedly down the passage which joined the living room and kitchen. Agatha rose too, picked up a small table brush and swept the crumbs from the place settings. In contrast to her friend, she was delicate and slender and had a certain girlish grace, which was however falling increasingly victim to the effects of rheumatism. Because of her looks, people had always wondered why she had never married, while just a glance at Emily’s appearance answered the same question immediately and decisively.

Emily wasn’t beautiful – she never had been and wasn’t even close to being so. However she radiated integrity and efficiency in such quantities that she came across as positive and cheerful, and it never even crossed anyone’s mind to find her ugly.

While the train rolled through the Po Valley, Emily slept under her green velvet hat, sunk into the corner of her seat and snoring gently. Agatha looked pensively out the window. She couldn’t believe that she and Emily were now actually on the continent and on Italian soil. The night ferry from Dover to Calais had been pleasant and up to now there had in reality been no difficulties with finding porters. While Agatha wrapped herself tighter in her cashmere scarf and watched the thin lines of poplars glide past, she thought with a shudder that they had almost travelled to Africa, then almost to India, then even almost to the Persian Gulf, where there almost certainly wasn’t going to be anything except heat and stench. But then, with the gift for diplomacy that had developed through their many years of living together, she had awoken Emily’s interest in Italy, in that country which, throughout her whole life, she could not put out of her mind. She had told stories about Rome and its countless fountains, until that background noise finally penetrated her stern schoolmistress’s temperament. And yet she still hesitated.

But at that point Agatha brought Marcus Aurelius into the reckoning. “Doesn’t that famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius stand in Rome, the one you told me about over and over again?” she innocently and quietly asked her. Emily had reacted in exactly the desired manner. She sat bolt upright in her chair and her eyes sparkled. “Marcus Aurelius,” she said in an animated voice, “the great prototype for every equestrian statue that followed. And of course Marcus Aurelius stands in Rome, and on the Capitoline Hill!”

After that everything else came easily. Agatha won the day. “And when we’ve seen Rome, wouldn’t it be nice to go to Venice for a couple more days?” she went on to ask fearlessly and then Emily knew all she needed to know. The unconditional affection and love for her friend of such long standing, usually masked by sternness, was awoken in her, and she smiled indulgently. She then answered, full of warmth and more softly than she usually spoke: “But of course my dear, we’ll go to Venice as well, if that’ll make you happy, for as long as you want, and we’ll also go out to the islands – Murano, Burano and Torcello. And then from Venice we’ll take a ship and go to Spain too for a couple of weeks.”

Agatha was very grateful and happy and in that moment she could have embraced her friend. How well they understood each other!…despite the occasional small skirmish, which was inevitable in this shared life of two women who no longer went out to work. And now she forgot the poplars and the groves of peach trees gliding past and she didn’t even look out the window, even now that the train was crossing the bridge that spanned the broad, tranquil Po, whose water hardly even seemed to be flowing. She sank into her cashmere shawl and into her memories: Gregory!

And with the monotonous turning of the wheels she was for a little while that young fleet-footed girl again, who had gone for a gondola ride with her beloved through the city of canals and who had led him laughing to the shore of the Island of Torcello, edged by tamarisk trees. Gregory had looked so good back then, and he was so young! It was when they were in Venice that he mentioned for the first time that he wanted to go to Canada to build this bridge – the awful bridge that cost him his life. The wedding was set for when he came home…Agatha shivered in her shawl.

No, now she didn’t want to think about it anymore. She wanted to draw out the precious hours of being together with the one person who mattered, like pearls from a jewellery box, and let them run through her fingers and through her heart during the long hours of this journey.

Agatha did not notice that they had left the Po valley behind them, and also long ago Florence and silver-green Tuscany, and now they journeyed through the Castelli Romani: Narni, Orte, and Terni. Emily’s snoring broke off abruptly; she woke, yawned discreetly, and said to Agatha sleepily: “Agatha, my dear, would you be so kind as to pour me a cup of tea from the thermos? My mouth’s quite dry.” Agatha dragged herself back to the present. Where had she put that confounded bottle? It wasn’t in the holdall, where it was supposed to be. Agatha fumbled anxiously in various handbags and even needlessly opened their hat boxes. At the same time she tried suppressing an uncomfortable memory. At home Emily had pressed the thermos of tea into her hand - that elixir, without which neither of them could possibly endure the journey. She did it so that Agatha would put it in the holdall.

But then the taxi arrived and you couldn’t keep him waiting. So Agatha, panic-stricken, had rashly stuffed the thermos into the large trunk. Yes, that’s what must have happened. So there was probably no point in suppressing that uncomfortable memory anymore, as Emily was now demanding her tea, in a louder voice and for a second time.

Agatha opened the trunk and a scent rose up from the clothes in there, which really should have been one of lavender or at worst Elizabeth Arden’s Blue Grass. But instead it was the strong and spicy smell of Earl Grey tea. With trembling hands she lifted a Shetland jacket and the lime-green skirt from Emily’s Sunday best outfit. Both were moist to outright wet and had taken on the blackish and obtrusive colour of stagnant tea.

Shaking, she removed one article of clothing after another: there was nothing that was not carrying the traces of Earl Grey tea soaked through like marble cake. Emily sat bolt upright in her seat, and her eyes had developed that piercing clarity, which was reserved in past times for major disciplinary hearings at her school. As Agatha now pulled out Emily’s white dinner dress, which bore on the chest an extremely unbecoming and out-of-place stain the size of a soldier’s badge, she threw herself down on the case with a shriek, pushed aside the unfortunate Agatha (who had broken out in a plaintive lament) and brought back to the surface at last the thermos flask, which was long empty except for an insignificant amount of leftover tea. Emily then drank it in melancholy silence, and Agatha didn’t have the courage to petition her for a few drops of the life-giving liquid, even though she was very thirsty and in need of consolation. Funnily enough, she could quite easily have extracted a whole bowlful from her new nightdress, but she wasn’t really bold enough to try that.

So she ended up only putting the ill-treated garments back into the case, and folded them up again, still with trembling hands, even though it was quite pointless, while Emily regarded the proceedings in grim silence. Neither of them saw the Roman aqueducts, which could be seen all across the Roman Campagna, like a light melancholy prelude heralding the Eternal City.

And while they were still concerning themselves with eradicating the last traces of tea from Agatha’s pink flowery hat, they rolled into Termini Station and were in Rome.

Wolves of all kinds on the Capitoline Hill

In a bewildered fashion they stuffed the scattered items of clothing back into the suitcase and gathered up all their bags and bits of luggage. Now it was clear that they were at a major disadvantage, as Agatha, because of her rheumatism, couldn’t carry anything either, and Emily was likewise very much hindered by her considerable short-sightedness and her weak heart.

But somehow in the end they managed to get hold of a porter, and he in turn didn’t have the heart to rip off the elderly English ladies, who were tripping around their luggage like two lost chickens, this of itself was a genuine Roman miracle.

Now they both sat up in their beds in their room in a friendly Pension, close to Santa Maria Maggiore. The majority of their holiday clothes had already been handed over to a dry cleaner, which had come back to them with an invoice written in red numbers. Finally they had ordered tea to have in their room, feeling sad and that it was all a bit pointless. Emily tugged in a pensive manner at her hair curlers, which lent a grotesque expression to her dignified face, and Agatha read her favourite book, “King Solomon’s Mines” by Rider Haggard, which she had brought with her as a secure reminder, as it were, of her English home.

It would have been a pleasant night, if at eleven o’clock, just as Emily and Agatha shut their eyes with a peaceful sigh, a guitar player hadn’t started strumming soulful love songs in a backyard somewhere, accompanying himself from time to time with schmaltzy wailing. And when finally, tired of his courtship display, his guitar fell silent towards one in the morning, Emily then began with exasperation to fluff up her pillow. It just didn’t come close to meeting British standards: it was small, it was stretched too long. Sooner for her a hard roll than a sleep-promoting, feather-light pillow.

As a direct result of her bedtime reading, poor Agatha dreamt for a while of Zulu wars and skirmishes until she finally woke up and in the glow of the small bedside lamp saw Emily, looking like Medusa with her head full of curlers, executing a relentless drumbeat with her fists on the impassive Roman pillow.

She felt like complaining, but then she remembered the spilled tea, and, with a soft sigh, decided to hold her tongue. The absence of sleep pounded in her temples and she looked on apathetically, as Emily worked her corpulent body (not yet tamed by Weight Watchers) out of bed, such that the wobbly Italian bedstead, designed for much more delicate body types, groaned and swayed. She stepped across to the wash-stand, resolutely seized all the available towels and twisted them accusingly into a pillow-like mass, which, once she had got back into bed groaning to herself, she shoved under her head.

The first Roman morning dawned; it was light, bright and noisy. All the noisy people from the evening before were back in service after their short night’s sleep, back on their feet again and full of vitality, ready to fill out their existence with noise and joie de vivre.

Emily and Agatha rose, a little morning-afterish and flabbergasted on account of the seething Italian daily life going on all around them. Still just as flabbergasted, blinking in the unaccustomed brightness, they found themselves standing two hours later in St Peter’s Square, that majestic Piazza, infused with breadth and beauty, whose colonnades seemed capable of embracing every other square in the whole world.

They entered St Peter’s Basilica, the infinitely high ceiling of which is like a starry heaven, covering over a small self-contained universe, a sumptuous cool world of marble, too spread-out and immense truly to be thought of as an interior space. Neither of them said much: This church surpassed all normal dimensions by so very much that they were perplexed and felt slightly overwhelmed. Agatha gripped Emily’s hand as if for protection and not to get lost in the loneliness of that mighty space - a small speck of dust in a universe bristling with gold and marble.

Once they stepped back out into the open and the balmy waves of humanity and traffic noise broke around them again, of one accord they took a taxi and drove to the Colosseum. A zebra crossing led across to the other side of the road, which Emily wanted to get to, with a view to getting a better overview of that historical amphitheatre. Unsuspecting and trusting they stepped on to the designated crossing: Emily with heavy steps like a Roman mercenary of old and Agatha tripping along lightly beside her, chatting away cheerfully and excitedly.

They hadn’t even reached the halfway point before two cars came racing along the wide street from the direction of the Arch of Constantine and zoomed past so close to their noses that the passing slipstream whistled in their ears.

They both froze and instinctively took each other’s hands: What an unheard-of lack of discipline! Surely the police would soon be on the trail of these criminals! While they were still on the lookout for a police car, a couple more cars sped past at nearly a hundred miles an hour, and came so close that they almost brushed against Emily’s considerable behind. They drove with a sovereign and habitual non-observance of the common precedence given to pedestrians, those poor creatures who at the very least in other European cities are not completely outlawed on zebra crossings.

Agatha gasped for breath: “It’s not fair, no it’s really, really not fair,” she said weakly. The words were ripped from her lips by the next car and went on to flap like an imaginary hood ornament on the sleek nose of an Alfa Romeo.

The righteous anger of the former teacher was awakened in Emily. She positioned herself in all her glory, legs akimbo, right across the zebra crossing, swung the umbrella she had brought with her (despite the cloudless Roman skies) threateningly against the onrushing traffic, and cried out “Stop you rascals” with all the authority of a head teacher.

She cried out with that piercing voice, which had never failed to achieve its desired effect in her schooldays, but what happened now had never happened before throughout her long and distinguished career: she was disobeyed.

Agatha dragged the furious Emily between the cars that whizzed past and finally across to the other side of the road, from where they threw resentful looks back at the Colosseum, which was dozing in sublime timelessness in the midst of the city’s traffic.

Slightly exhausted by the sights and events of the day, by all the things that were so horribly un-English and could only really be encountered on the continent, the two ladies made for a small café near their pension, to refresh themselves with a nice cup of tea.

However the tea was yet another disappointment. The tea bag, swimming dismally in the hot water, gave out hardly any colour, let alone flavour. In England you wouldn’t even administer tea like that to an infant with a stomach ache.

Emily and Agatha gazed out, in between small disapproving sips of that concoction (so unlike tea!), upon the graceful and peaceful square, which was bordered on one side by the eastern facade of Santa Maria Maggiore. They had no eyes for the grace and bold vision of the three part stone staircase - one of many in hilly Rome - which for centuries had plunged down with a broad sweeping movement from the Basilica like a waterfall, whose rushing you are supposed to be able to hear on bright moonlit nights.

No, they were just upset about the bad tea and then about the Frutta di Mare for dinner back at the hotel which was dripping with fat and garnished with all sorts of greasy cold vegetables. Outraged, Emily and Agatha then dragged themselves back to their room, where Agatha took refuge in King Solomon’s Mines and Emily crocheted a small piece of wool in the shape of a petal, which at some later stage - with hundreds of other such pieces all side-by-side - was intended to form a bedspread. Bearing in mind her shortsightedness, this was a heroic undertaking.

The next few days were spent quietly. They took, as it were, careful sips and sampled the continent in small doses, which suited them much better. One particular bright spot was an outing to the Aventine, where amongst so many gardens, they felt content and almost at home. They wandered among the beautiful stone pine trees, whose shimmering green canopies stretched almost to the hill’s summit. It was early summer and the rose garden of the Aventine was in full bloom. They sat happy and joyous among the roses, letting the hours slip through their fingers, and watched peacefully, as the sun sank behind the outline of all the houses of the Eternal City, while the ancient ruins in the depth of the hill slowly drank in the red of the roses and clung on to it as deep glowing phosphorescence ready for the approaching night.

When it got dark, they took a taxi and were taken to the Trevi Fountain, where they both climbed down to the basin of the fountain, along steps that had been soaked by curtains of water, so that they could dutifully throw their coins into the fountain, which would guarantee their return to the eternal Rome. They stood there for a while and looked uncertainly into the fountain bowl, the bottom of which glowed silver with the coins of so many other foolish travellers and pilgrims who hoped, in their child-like optimism and hope which defied their better judgement, to pin down a wavering, wind-blown and uncertain future through one poor tiny coin and to be able to make that future amenable to their own wishes.

That night they slept long and deeply and in the morning Emily announced that it was now high time that they visited the wonderful equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill, which they had been saving up to now, plus Michelangelo’s facade, the long staircase leading to the summit, and the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli which stood at the top. Once again they took a taxi which dropped them off at the foot of the Capitoline Hill. They climbed up slowly and painfully, and took a shuddering look back down the infinitely long and lofty staircase which led further up above them to the facade of the Aracoeli Church on their left in dazzling brightness. No, they couldn’t reach the top of these gruelling 124 steps, either on foot, or on their knees, like penitent pilgrims would have been obliged to do in earlier times.

So Emily and Agatha took a short breather. Above them the huge stone Dioskuri pair, Castor and Pollux, guarded the entrance to the Piazza del Campidoglio. Meanwhile Agatha caught sight of the wolf cage in between the blossoming oleanders and broke out into loud lamentations: “Look Emily, those poor poor animals...isn’t that terrible!”

Emily went over to Agatha’s side and, still panting softly from the unfamiliar exertions of climbing the staircase, they both observed with disgust and pity the skinny, shabby-looking wolves, prowling restlessly along the bars of the cage. The sight of captive wild animals, who had to live deprived of their natural habitat and their freedom of movement, was anathema to them.

And in addition Agatha, during her more active years, for around twenty years had been secretary to the Inspector General of the RSPCA: it was her vocation, so to speak, to be rebellious. It was a miracle that she didn’t sit herself straight down on the stone steps of the Capitoline and draw up a blazing protest letter to her former boss. It would probably however have been useless: the arm of the inspector of the RSPCA didn’t extend that far. And what could you really expect from a country in which, despite repeated appeals from Popes and many other sympathetic people, migrating songbirds from North and Central Europe are exterminated repeatedly and across a wide area every spring and autumn, and their small frail bodies - their songs forever silenced - are offered up on the menus of restaurants, to satisfy the thirst for profits of traders and the jaded palates of upmarket diners.

A well turned out, elderly gentleman had stopped next to the English women, and indicated towards the wolves: “Signore, this here is the Roman she-wolf, mother of Romulus and Remus....that was how the history della citta di Roma began.” He bowed slightly and went. But this reference to Rome’s foundation myth offered little comfort to Emily and Agatha.

They climbed the last few steps in silence, passed between the muscular stone calves of the twins Castor and Pollux and entered the splendid self-contained Piazza, whose floor was covered in a great star of wine-red marble. The perfect beauty and harmony of the Capitoline calmed their souls and in raptures they tripped around the equestrian statue of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius with its patina of shimmering green.

Emily planted herself in front of the horse’s nose, tipped her head back and narrowed her myopic eyes. “I can’t quite recognize his face,” she murmured. “That’s a crying shame as we are talking here about the only extant equestrian portrait remaining in Roman sculpture. Perhaps I could climb up on to the pedestal...and then get on the Emperor’s foot.”

Agatha wasn’t listening. She had sunk deep into one of her reveries. The golden light of that Roman morning seeped into her half-closed eyes, favourably tempered by the rays of the marble star at her feet.

A moaning sound summoned her back to reality. She opened her eyes wide in shock and saw Emily, as clumsy as a fat beetle, stuck on Marcus Aurelius’s foot. Her broad face was extremely red and her thick glasses wobbled on her nose:

“Agatha, I can’t get down.” Groaning, she lowered her foot into the void and then, discouraged, pulled it straight back again.

“Oh God, Emily, why did you climb up there in the first place?”

“I wanted to see the Emperor’s face, his actual portrait,” Emily replied meekly.

Enzo Marrone was passing the morning leaning against one of the warm sunlit columns on the edge of the piazza. He had his hands in his trouser pockets, his head leaning back nonchalantly, and his eyes half closed, chewing slowly on a piece of gum and otherwise doing nothing. It was the sort of morning he liked. He had watched idly chewing while this impossible foreigner had scrambled up the monument - Madonna Mia, what a crazy idea! Only tourists could resort to such stupidity and squander energy so pointlessly. He watched with a cold gaze, while Agatha made fruitless attempts to help her stuck friend abseil off the monument. Agatha reached out her hand and frantically grabbed a tuft of bronze horse-hair. At that same moment, the large diamond on her ring flashed in the sunlight, and Enzo stopped chewing. His eyes opened wide, he threw off the morning’s inertia and began thinking. Two wealthy foreign ladies apparently, and English too - that was as much as he needed to hear. One of them had placed her handbag on the statue’s plinth. Enzo sauntered closer. Taking the bag would be easy. But there was the ring flashing again....

An idea, a plan started to stir in Enzo’s mind: Why just slaughter the calf when with a little ingenuity he could have the cow as well?

He took his hands out his pockets, spat out the gum so that it flew in a wide arc down on to the star-adorned square where it stuck to the marble somewhere, and strode zealously across to the Marcus Aurelius memorial: “Permesso!”

12 Next

Don't Fall In Love With Marcus Aurelius

Not Little Cockington this time: but Rome instead!

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