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‘Is he very serious and academic? I imagine he must be older than you.’

      ‘He’s eighteen years older, and he’s fiercely clever, of course, but he’s funny as well. He can always make me laugh.’ She paused. ‘Well, usually.’

      ‘Tell me his bad points,’ Hilary asked. ‘Does he try to control you?’

      ‘No, not really. I suppose we’ve never disagreed about anything before. Not anything major. His worst fault is that he is very slovenly to live with. He puts down cups of tea wherever he happens to be at the time and I spend my life clearing up his dirty socks and tattered old history magazines.’ She smiled fondly. He was always losing things because of his untidiness and she would find them in the most ridiculous places. His chequebook once turned up in a windowbox outside the sitting-room window after he’d been watering the plants. ‘Are you married?’ she asked Hilary, glancing down to see that her ring finger was bare.

      ‘I couldn’t be under any man’s thumb,’ she said. ‘I like my freedom too much so I doubt I’ll ever marry. I feel lucky to have been born in an era when women can earn a good salary doing an interesting job and they don’t need a man to look after them. Throughout history, women have never enjoyed as much freedom as now, have they?’

      ‘Actually, they were pretty free in Egypt in Cleopatra’s day,’ Diana told her. ‘Women could own properties and businesses. They were educated to as high a standard as men and could choose their own husbands. But if you cross the water to Rome in the same era, the women were the chattels of their fathers and husbands.’

      ‘Maybe that’s why you were attracted to Cleopatra?’ Hilary suggested. ‘Because you’re an independent sort? Anyway, that husband of yours will have to buck up his ideas. It’s hard on the phone, especially when the line can be so crackly. Why not write him a letter explaining why you had to take this opportunity and asking him to please try to understand? Tell him you love him but this is something you need to do. If he loves you, he’ll come round in the end.’

      Diana nodded. ‘That’s a good idea. I’ll do that.’

      ‘Don’t make the mistake of putting it in an Italian post box, though – they hardly ever empty them. We’ve got a courier service that goes daily to London and you can stick a letter in there. Ask Candy about it.’

      Diana handed back the pack of tissues. ‘Thank you for your advice. It sounds very wise.’

      She sat down at the typewriter and focused on typing up her notes for the day, then decided to go back to the sound stages and see what was being shot. On the way there, she noticed Helen on the grass swigging a bottle of Coke.

      ‘Are you having a break?’ she asked, sitting down.

      ‘They’re not filming today,’ Helen told her. ‘Elizabeth Taylor has her monthly and it’s written into her contract that she doesn’t have to work for the first three days of it.’

      ‘But that’s ridiculous!’ Diana exclaimed.

      ‘They keep a calendar where they mark the days so they can try to predict the next one.’

      Diana remembered someone at the script meeting asking if it was a red-letter day and guessed that’s what they had been referring to. ‘What if all the women on set did that?’ she asked. ‘I’d love three days off when I have my monthlies.’

      Helen nodded agreement. ‘Me too! The idea is that she has to look perfect on camera and she doesn’t believe she looks good enough at that time of the month. What does she think makeup is for? Between ourselves, it’s a running joke that her periods don’t follow a calendar month but seem to coincide with the morning after she’s been out partying.’

      ‘That’s so unprofessional! I’m amazed she gets away with it.’ Diana remembered that Helen herself had been the worse for wear the previous evening. ‘It was fun last night. Thank you so much for inviting me. I hope you are feeling alright today?’

      ‘Yeah!’ Helen grinned. ‘I had a great time. We met a bunch of Italian men and were dancing with them. Don’t you just love the way they’re so flirtatious? They’re much more fun than British men.’

      Diana thought of Ernesto and agreed. She was getting used to the way his eyes lingered on her figure and he touched her arm and chatted in an intimate fashion, as though they had known each other for ages. It was innocent flirtation and she rather enjoyed it.

      ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ she asked Helen.

      ‘No, but I’d love to find one. There are so many handsome men working here, I don’t know where to start. I wish I spoke better Italian because they are the cutest, but there’s an American cameraman I like, and one of the lighting guys.’ She sighed. ‘If only they’d hurry up and ask me out.’

      ‘I’m sure it won’t take long,’ Diana assured her. ‘You’re lovely and they won’t be able to resist you.’

      When she left Cinecittà that evening to go back to her pensione, there was a lone photographer hanging around at the gates.

      ‘Liz Taylor è lì oggi?’ he called through the open window of her studio car – ‘Is Liz Taylor there today?’

      Diana told him she wasn’t.

      ‘E domani?’

      ‘Non lo so.’

      On the drive into town, she thought what a boring job these men had, waiting around for the few moments in the day when Elizabeth Taylor was driven out of the studio gates, or walked from her car to a restaurant to eat dinner. What was it Helen had called them? Paparazzi. Strange word. It was similar to papatacci, a term Italians used to mean a small mosquito. Perhaps that’s where it came from. They buzzed around on their motor scooters trying to catch the rich and famous in the glare of the flashbulb, like a sting. It didn’t seem a particularly rewarding way of earning a living, but good luck to them.

       Chapter Nine

      The next time Scott contrived to bump into the beautiful Italian girl, he asked her name.

      ‘Gina,’ she said quickly, then blushed and tried to hurry past.

      Scott turned to walk alongside her, as if he were going in the same direction and it was the most natural thing in the world. She bowed her head, trying to stop anyone seeing her talking to this American boy. Instead of hitting on her directly, he chatted in a friendly fashion. He told her that he had only been in Rome for three months and didn’t know many people so he spent most evenings at home alone. He mentioned that he was a recent college graduate and that he had been a champion athlete. High jump was his best; he could high jump over five feet. Did she want him to demonstrate by jumping over a parked Vespa?

      ‘No, no,’ she giggled. ‘non è necessario.’

      He asked if she liked music, and when she said ‘Sì, certamente,’ he sang a short burst of an Elvis song that had just been released back home – ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love’. He could tell she was interested in him because she was laughing, despite her nervousness. Scott liked girls and had long ago realised that if you could make them laugh, you were halfway there. He’d watched other friends hitting on them too obviously and being brushed off or crushed by bitchy put-downs, and that’s when he decided that a slightly clownish approach would work best, by putting girls at their ease.

      He wasn’t bad-looking, in his own opinion. One ­ex-girlfriend had told him that he looked like a younger, handsomer version of John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately, that girl later dumped him for one of his best friends from the athletics team, but at least he still had the compliment to cherish. He’d been hurt at the time, but hadn’t been in love with her so it was

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