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self-contained as the other wives looked on, dumpy and slow-witted in comparison. School-friends too, even the cool complicated ones, would turn into cartoons around Alison Mayhew, flirting with her while she flirted back, engaging her in water fights, complimenting her on her terrible cooking – the violently scrambled eggs, the black pepper that was ash from a cigarette.
    She had once studied fashion in London but these days ran a village antiques shop, selling expensive rugs and chandeliers to genteel Oxford with great success. She still carried with her that aura of having been something-in-the-Sixties – Dexter had seen the photographs, the clippings from faded colour supplements – but with no apparent sadness or regret she had given this up for a resolutely respectable, secure, comfortable family life. Typically, it was as if she had sensed exactly the right moment to leave the party. Dexter suspected that she had occasional flings with the doctors, the lawyers, the people who spoke on the radio, but he found it hard to be angry with her. And always people said the same thing – that he had got it from her. No-one was specific about what ‘it’ was, but everyone seem to know; looks of course, energy and good health, but also a certain nonchalant self-confidence, the right to be at the centre of things, on the winning team.
    Even now, as she sat in her washed-out blue summer dress, fishing in her immense handbag for matches, it seemed as if the life of the Piazza revolved around her. Shrewd brown eyes in a heart-shaped face under expensively dishevelled black hair, her dress undone one button too far, an immaculate mess. She saw him approach and her face cracked with a wide smile.
    ‘Forty-five minutes late, young man. Where have you been?’
    ‘Over there watching you chat up the waiters.’
    ‘Don’t tell your father.’ She knocked the table with her hip as she stood and hugged him. ‘Where have you been though?’
    ‘Just preparing lessons.’ His hair was wet from the shower he had shared with Tove Angstrom, and as she brushed it from his forehead, her hand cupping the side of his face fondly, he realised that she was already a little drunk.
    ‘Very tousled. Who’s been tousling you? What mischief have you been up to?’
    ‘I told you, planning lessons.’
    She pouted sceptically. ‘And where did you get to last night? We waited at the restaurant.’
    ‘I’m sorry, I got delayed. College disco.’
    ‘A
disco
. Very 1977. What was that like?’
    ‘Two hundred drunk Scandinavian girls vogue-ing.’
    ‘“Vogue-ing”. I’m pleased to say that I have absolutely no idea what that is. Was it fun?’
    ‘It was hell.’
    She patted his knee. ‘You poor, poor thing.’
    ‘Where’s Dad?’
    ‘He’s had to go for one of his little lie-downs at the hotel. The heat, and his sandals were chafing. You know what your father’s like, he’s so
Welsh.’
    ‘So what have you been doing?’
    ‘Just wandering around the Forum. I thought it was beautiful, but Stephen was bored out of his skull. All that mess, columns just left lying around all over the place. I think he thinks they should bulldoze it all, put up a nice conservatory or something.’
    ‘You should visit the Palatine. It’s at the top of that hill …’
    ‘I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.’
    ‘Yes, who was emperor back then?’
    ‘Ha. Here, help me with this wine, don’t let me drink the wholebottle.’ She already had, pretty much, but he poured the last inch into a water glass and reached for her cigarettes. Alison tutted. ‘You know sometimes I think we took the whole liberal-parent thing a bit too far.’
    ‘I quite agree. You ruined me. Pass the matches.’
    ‘It’s not clever, you know. I know you think it makes you look like a film star, but it doesn’t, it looks awful.’
    ‘So why do you do it then?’
    ‘Because it makes me look sensational.’ She placed a cigarette