Roses for Mr Keats

I told Susan that Keats was buried in Rome. It was a line of course, factually true but nevertheless a line. She was already captivated by what she supposed was the romance of the eternal city that she was headed for when I met her on the train from Naples on a sweet spring morning and I thought something to do with poets would help her fall for me. It seemed to work. Over and over she made much of Keats’ name with her soft, shiny, pouting lips when I bought her coffee in the station bar, turning his name this way and that. She quoted him wrongly and got him mixed up with Shelley but I let her go on just to hear her voice and see her eyes moisten and her mouth move around words that excited her.

“We must go see his grave,” she declared with a firmer, less attractive mouth. I wanted to tell her that she should say ‘go to see’, not ‘go see’, but I knew that would be rude and might kill off the prospect of an interesting few days in Rome with a pretty American girl so I said nothing. I think I may have said it to myself though; I know I did, and it bothered me.

Instead of correcting Susan with the pretty mouth I tried to edge my plan along a bit. “... and take flowers”, I said as a suggestion, and her mouth went soft and wet again. I concluded that I was good at this game, better than I thought I would be.

“Roses. It must be roses”, Susan affirmed. Now she was back to her determined, business-like manner with dry, hard lips. I played along hoping to find the key to keeping her lips soft and red and mollitious. “And we will go at sunset. This evening.”  They were back again, the luscious, moist lips.

So it had been decided and declared and there was to be no more discussion. I bought roses from a flower seller near the restaurant where we had lunch right off Piazza Navona. Ecco Bomba it was called. We ate in the room out the back and I got to impress her a bit speaking Italian with Enzo.

Susan insisted on going back to her hotel before making the trip out to the Protestant Cemetery where Keats, or what’s left of him, lies quite dead. I found a small, quiet piazza not far away where I waited and had a beer at a shaded table outside a café. I know Keats, and it was refreshing to sit quietly and remember him correctly, to imagine nightingales and draughts of vintage that were undiluted by stray thoughts from Shelley and Byron: then Susan came back, ready to take on this delicate pilgrimage with the brute force needed for a military assault.

She had showered and changed and prettified herself but the glamour she brought to the proposed expedition was all wrong. She was beautiful, there was no doubting it. But it seemed to me that Keats was nothing more than an oversight on her itinerary for Rome, and my mention of him had been intrusive, drawing attention to an embarrassing slip-up on her part that had to be rectified and we were going to rectify it straight away, and with roses. Roses I had bought.

The thought of this insensate woman trampling the grave of Keats suddenly appalled me. I began to tactfully suggest that it might be a bit late for the trek out to the cemetery, she might be tired after the trip from Naples, but Susan was having nothing of it. Aesthetically insensate she may well have been but she wasn’t stupid. She wanted to know why I had changed my mind. Was it something she had said or done? Did I not want to be with her? Rebuke and invective tumbled out of that mouth that had not long before seemed so soft and seductive. Her lips faded from red to grey in seconds, the colour transferring across from her mouth to her previously pallid cheeks.

I was soon left on my own in the piazza that was now filling up with people, on my own and holding a bunch of roses with a pretty American girl storming off away from me in a swirl of stiff skirts. It didn’t take long to realise that this was a fairly good outcome, that Keats had been spared at least one indignity thanks to me, and that I was free to enjoy the night as I pleased.

I sat on in the warmth of the late afternoon sunshine in the little piazza, the roses sitting in front of me on the table. I had another beer and waited till the next pretty girl came along and I gave her the flowers and told her they were from John Keats, and left.