The beggar is plainly moved, and goes on looking curiously at Howard for some moments after he has walked on.
He threads his way through narrow alleys where the sun never penetrates. Fat women and bald-headed men standing in the doorways of tiny shops make jokes to him which he can’t quite understand, and shout ribaldries to each other about him — clapping him on the shoulder to indicate they’re not serious, and cutting slices of cheese and sausage for him to try.
In a quiet street beside a canal small children are playing. One of them comes tottering up to him, falls, and pitches a red plastic fire-engine at his feet. Gravely he stands the child up, and restores the fire-engine. Old ladies sitting on benches under the trees beam at him.
Near the railway station he finds shops with dusty windows full of strange rubber objects; bulging, pink, obscure. Long legs and pointed breasts wait in doorways. Lips and eyelashes smile at him.
He walks along the top of ancient city walls, passing secretly among the rooftops, through a world of slates and television aerials and caged birds at dormer windows; emerges upon high places where the whole city — roofs, towers, domes, and lives — is gathered at his feet, and the immense acreage of its noise comes up to him like the murmur of the sea.
And he stops at cafes, for a sit-down with a beer or an aperitif or a coffee, without so much as noticing the price, or whether it’s too near lunchtime.
After lunch (in a little restaurant with a vine shading the tables, where the proprietor comes out for a chat, and orders him a brandy on the house; 37.20, wine and service included; astonishing value) he lies down on his bed, and with delicious gradualness, watching the bars of sunlight stirring gently on the half-drawn curtains, falls asleep.
Even his dreams in this place are extraordinary.
He dreams he is sitting at the wheel of his car at the traffic lights, unable to drive off because he can’t decide whether to kiss Rose when he arrives, or whether to ask her for a cheese and chutney sandwich instead, or where to go for his holidays. His wife is standing at the window, looking out at the rain.
“But what do you feel yourself?” she keeps asking. “Do you want to go back to that place in Brittany again? Or shall we borrow the Waylands’ cottage? Or what?”
He can do nothing, though, because the stuffing is coming out of the armchair he is sitting in, and before anything else can happen he has to decide whether to get it recovered or buy a new one.
“But you must have some kind of idea what sort of chair you want to spend your holidays in!” says his wife.
By this time the light is red again. So nothing can be done for another year.
In the late afternoon, as he is walking past the Little Palace (*** Bramante 1512, chapel by Michelangelo, later additions by Bernini, Wren, Pugin, and van der Rohe), whistles begins to shrill, and policemen appear from nowhere to stop the traffic and hold back pedestrians from crossing the road. Howard peers over the shoulders of the people in front of him, trying to see what’s going on. Beyond the palace railings in the distance a handful of white-haired old men in some kind of grotesque medieval robes emerge from an archway. Two of them are wearing spectacles, and one a hearing aid. They form a group in the courtyard, some of them talking to each other, some walking up and down, one chatting to the policemen at the gate. Howard thinks to himself that he must write to his children tonight and tell them that he has seen his first angels. It’s just the kind of thing they like to put in their newsbooks at school. He wonders if he could get postcards of them.
Suddenly a police-car emerges from the archway in the palace, its blue light flashing, followed by a closed Cadillac with tinted windows and a pennant on the wing. The two cars swing out of the palace gates, and disappear down the avenue. The angels go back inside. The policemen controlling the pedestrians beckon them across the road.
Now that Howard has thought about his children, he misses them painfully. This is the worst time of day for the solitary traveller, when the light begins to mellow, and life slows down, and the evening looms ahead. This is the moment when it comes into his mind to ask himself what he’s doing in this place; to see the meaninglessness of his business there, and the hollowness of his enjoyments; to lose sight suddenly of what it is in the texture of life that has ever occupied his attention and led him forward.
But just before this happens, while the taste of melancholy on his tongue is strong enough to set off the sweetness of the place, and of his freedom to enjoy it, but not yet strong enough to overpower it, he sees the woman who is gazing at him from the balustrade of a terrace looking down on the street. For a moment they look straight into each other’s eyes. Hers are dark and serious, and accept his existence. She looks away. But he doesn’t hesitate. He runs straight up the stone steps leading to the terrace — it’s part of a small public garden — rounds the urn at the top, and comes face to face with her, with no idea at all inside his head as to what words will emerge from his mouth.
“I beg your pardon,” he says, “but when is lighting-up time here?”
~ ~ ~
“What?” says the woman, frowning. She has long dark hair over her shoulders, and thick dark eyebrows. She is a little alarmed.
“I feel like an ice-cream,” says Howard. He has just noticed people eating ice-cream on a cafe terrace across the street.
“I’m waiting for someone,” says the woman, looking round anxiously.
“Well, then, you could have coffee.”
“It gets dark at about eight,” she says, pulling nervously at her hair.
“You could watch out for them from across the street,” replies Howard.
“I suppose I could have coffee …” she suggests doubtfully.
“God, I did that well!” he cries, as they sit on the cafe terrace sipping vermouth. “Has anyone ever come up to you and introduced himself like that before?”
She shakes her head, looking at him curiously.
“No,” she says. “Not in those words, at any rate.”
He laughs.
“‘When is lighting-up time?’” he says. “That was an inspiration! It just came out! Honestly, I hadn’t the slightest idea what I was going to say as I walked up to you. It was just seeing you like that. I knew at once that I could do it. I knew at once that I could just walk up to you and we could start talking, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I knew you wanted me to talk to you. Perhaps you didn’t know that yourself. Perhaps you didn’t want me to talk to you. But I knew that you wanted me to talk to you whether you wanted me to or not! Do you see what I mean? And at once I could do it.”
She smiles slightly, and looks down at her hand as she runs a finger round the steel rim of the little marble-topped table. It is apparent to him that she has a difficult nature, at once placid and turbulent, bold and reserved. He tells her this.
“Ah,” she says.
“But the effect you have on me is extraordinary! I mean, that I should be sitting here telling you that you’ve got a passionate nature, within ten minutes of meeting you …! I don’t even know your name. Or perhaps I do. Let me guess. Is it … Rose?”
It is. Later he remembers something.