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,
