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'It's not quite a flat,' they said, 'more a sort of hut on top of an office building on Piazza di Spagna.'
'On Piazza di Spagna,' I said.
'Nothing works very well, but it's got a marble bath.'
They took me to see it. The building, five storeys high, was nearly opposite the Spanish Steps, and apparently contained commercial offices only, which meant, as I was to discover later, that no living being dwelt there during the night. We climbed five flights of solid stone, past impeccably kept office doors, and thence a short dusty stretch of wooden steps and emerged upon a roof. A very large roof, with a profusion of tangled greenery struggling out of a variety of semi-broken tubs and urns. The view was staggering: we were standing face to face, at almost touching distance from the over-life-sized head of Santa Maria Immaculata on the top of her great column in the square.
Where, I asked after I had ceased to be stunned, is the flat? And indeed part hidden by the creepers, the climbers and the urns, there stood a longish kind of shed cobbled together, it would seem, from tarred paper and packing-case wood. It had windows and a fragile front door. The inside was a pleasing surprise: an L-shaped studio of good size, white walls, superior garden furniture – bamboo and striped canvas, a (potentially) neat little Italian kitchen and the marble-bath.
Moving-day seems to have come upon me almost immediately. A waiter from the Inghilterra had laid on a handcart for my pile of books and the rest of my belongings, with a boy to push and haul the lot up to the threshold of my new abode. When at last we gained entry, the sight was not encouraging. It went beyond disorder. Nothing looked clean, nothing looked safe to sit, let alone to sleep on. I was and am addicted to a certain Spartan neatness: how could I move in here, how could I sleep in here? I could see no way of coping with the apparent mess and I panicked. There was a telephone. I called up everyone I could think of. Half had gone to the seaside – on that fine warm day; to those at home I wailed my plight: it was hopeless. No, no, they said, they'd come, they'd bring their brother-in-law, they'd bring their maid, get hold of the gardener, dig out an upholsterer, a carpenter, never mind if their workshops were closed. Within the hour we were a crowd. Scrubbing, rapid and efficient, soon got on indoors; what was spectacular was the work-space improvised on a corner of the historic roof – they cleared away some of the most obtrusive plants and set up a work-bench on which a mattress was being gutted and remade from scratch, pillows turned inside out; another man was hammering away on chair legs while I was hovering on the edge of a deck-chair bleating inanities. 'How can I ever thank you enough...' 'Do you think this can really be made all right?' Everyone else was soothing and high-spirited – goodness, how efficient (domestically) Italians can be, how helpful, how generous. Someone went down the five flights into the piazza and brought up a large jug of frothy ice-cold lemonade. And not long after sundown, there was a neat, clean, habitable living-space – studio? refuge? hut? – under the sky. The women were hanging up my clothes in cupboards that had acquired hangers and hooks, someone else was helping me fit books into a case a carpenter had knocked together... All done, they cried: you can move in, you have moved in, but before we must all go out now and have some dinner and celebrate.
Victorious, animated, we all trooped off down into evening Rome, had dinner, laughed a good deal, drank a good deal, reasonably so. The next thing I remember of that long day was being in bed, alone, flown with wine, drifting towards sleep in cool, smooth clean sheets, vaguely perturbed by the prospect of waking up in that empty silent building on my own in future nights, and then the last image floating through my mind of a large jagged piece of marble in that bathtub.
Quicksands, by Sybille Bedford, is out now in paperback
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