I swung round. Zina, in a pale green silk frock covered with scarlet tigers, was smiling at me from the doorway. I didn’t know what to say. The man looked more than twice her age.
She gave me a quick, angry shrug. ‘What does it matter? He is already a part of the past.’ She smiled.’ Shall we go?’
I realised then that it had never occurred to her that I should not come.
‘You look tired,’ she said as she took my hand. Her fingers were very cool.
‘It’s nothing,’ I answered. ‘Just the heat. What’s wrong with Roberto this morning?’
‘Roberto?’ An amused smile flickered across her lips. ‘I think perhaps he is a little jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ I stared at her.
For a moment she seemed about to burst out laughing. Then she said quickly, ‘Roberto is employed by my husband. He think he is my watch-dog and he does not approve of my taking handsome young Englishmen out to Santo Francisco.’ She held the door open for me. ‘Come,’ she said gaily. ‘I have arrange everything. We will have lunch at Portici and then we have an appointment to keep with your American friend at Pompeii. Remember?” She wrinkled her nose at me. ‘I think it will be very dull. I ask him only because you are so stupid with me yesterday. But it does not matter. We have all the night.’
Outside Roberto was just putting my suitcases in the boot. He went round to the door and held it open. Zina paused as she was getting in and said something to him in Italian. She spoke softly and very fast. His eyes flicked to my face and then he grinned at her rather sheepishly. He was like a small urchin that has been promised a sweet.
‘What did you say to Roberto?’ I asked as I subsided into the cream upholstery beside her.
She glanced at me quickly. ‘I say he will have the whole afternoon to sit in a cafe and drink and slap the waitress’s bottom.’ She laughed at the expression on my face. ‘Now I have shock you. You are so very, very English, you know.’ She slipped her hand under my arm and snuggled down into the leather. ‘Relax now, please. And remember, this is Italy. Do you think I do not know what a boy like Roberto wants? You forget I am born in the slums of Napoli.’
I didn’t say anything and the car slid out through the big wrought-iron lacework of the gates and swung south down the Via Posillipo towards Naples. It was wonderful to feel the cool air on my face. Heavy clouds were banked up across the sky. It was oppressively close and the ash-heap of Vesuvius stood out almost white against the louring black of the sky. ‘Did you see Vesuvius last night?’ I asked her.
She nodded. ‘For three nights it has been like that. From Santo Francisco we shall see it much more clearly.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps it is because of Vesuvio that the women of Napoli are like they are.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
She looked at me from under arched eyebrows. ‘Our passions are like that volcano,’ she said huskily.
I stared at the mountain rising so quiet and serene above the sea. ‘Do you think it will erupt again?’ I asked.
‘I do not know. You must talk to the scientists at osservatore. But I do not think they know very much. When you have seen Pompeii, you will understand how powerful that mountain is. It is unpredictable and terrible — like a woman with a love she must destroy in order to hold.’
We had lunch in a restaurant that had once been a private house. The tall, scrolled rooms were almost Regency in architecture. It was just near Herculaneum, that other Roman town that had been buried in the ash of Vesuvius.
After lunch we turned inland from Portici, through narrow, dusty streets where naked babies sucked their mothers’ breasts and old men lay like bundles of rags asleep in the dust. Then we were out on the autostrada roaring southwards with Vesuvius towering higher and higher above us to the left. Zina looked back several times and then ordered Roberto to stop. As we pulled in to the side of the road a big American car flashed by. I caught a glimpse of two people seated in the back of it, a man and a girl, and though they did not glance at us I had a feeling they were conscious of us. I turned to Zina. She was looking at me out of the corners of her eyes.
The by-roads connecting the villages pass either over or under the autostrada and not until Torre Annunziata is there a side road branching off the autostrada. There is a petrol station at the fork and the American car was there. I looked back as we shot past and saw it nosing out on to the autostrada.
Five minutes later we were in Pompeii. Hacket was waiting for us near the entrance to the ruins, his tiny hired Fiat almost lost in the crowd of coaches and souvenir stalls. Zina asked for the Ruggiero and we were passed straight through the turnstiles. But when we got to his office we found he was in Naples, lecturing at the University, so Zina showed us round herself.
Our progress was slow for Hacket was continually pausing to refer to his guide-book or to take a photograph. It was oppressively hot and my leg began to ache the way it often does in England before it rains.
It was the sunken streets that made it so hot. Most of them are still just twenty-foot deep cuttings lined with the stone facades of shops and villas exactly as they were two thousand years ago. Zina showed us all the important things and as we followed her round she told us story after story, building up in our minds a picture of a voluptuous, orgy-ridden life in a Roman seaside resort in the days before Christ was born. But though I saw the forum and the baths, the various theatres and the brothel with the penis sign outside and the indelicate pleasure murals above the cubicles, and the villa with the revolting picture at the entrance and the murals in the love room, it was the little things I remembered afterwards — the deep ruts worn in the stone-paved streets by the wheels of the chariots, the shop counters with the pots in which olive oil and other household necessities had been stored; the small bones still lying in the room where a child had been caught by the hot ash. It was an overall impression of a town suddenly halted in mid-flow of activity.
Walking through those narrow, rutted streets, the phallic symbol of good luck still clearly marked on the paving stones, the initials of lovers and of men in the cells of the prison still as clear as when they had been cut, it seemed as though only yesterday the Romans in their togas had been here in place of this motley crowd of camera-slung tourists speaking a dozen different languages.
But in the Terme Stabiane all these impressions were swept aside. After seeing the hot bath Zina took us back to the entrance to look at a mosaic. And it was there that we came face to face with Maxwell and Hilda Tucek. They didn’t seem to notice me as they went straight through into the dim cavern of the baths. But I knew then who the occupants of the big American car had been.
Zina turned to me. ‘Do you tell your friends to follow us?’ She was white with anger.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Then why are they here? Why do they follow us from Portici?’
‘I don’t know.’
She stared at me. I could see she didn’t believe me. Then she shrugged her shoulders. ‘I think we go now. I do not like to be followed about. Is that girl in love with you?’
‘No.’
She gave a quick, sneering laugh. ‘You do not know very much about women, eh?’ We went out and turned left towards the forum.
As we went back down the narrow, sloping street with the chariot ruts, she slipped her hand through my arm. ‘Do not worry about it, Dick. Roberto will get rid of them for us. My car is very fast and he is a good driver.’ She seemed to have recovered her spirits for she chatted gaily about the scene in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted. She seemed to have an almost frighteningly morbid interest in the scene and I remember the.way she laughed as she said, ‘It happen so suddenly that men and women were caught in bed together and when they excavated they find them still like that. Can you imagine yourself in bed with a girl and then suddenly the room is full of hot sifting ash, you are suffocated, and there you are, in the same position, when a digger uncover your love couch two thousand years later? That is immortality, eh?’