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.