Susan insisted on going back to her hotel before going to the Protestant Cemetery and I found a small, quiet piazza not far away 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 then an oversight on her itinerary for Rome, and my mention of him had been intrusive, a 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 stupid she was not. 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 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 holding a bunch of roses with a pretty American girl storming off away from me in a swirl of 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 whatever.

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