“I was thinking exactly the same thing!” She took his hand, which gripped hers with a brief, muscular strength. “Monica Sawyer.”

“Then that’s out of the way.” He glanced at the old man behind the counter. “You were wanting a drink, Monica?”

“Damn right,” she said automatically and found the heat rushing to her cheeks again.

“Then damn right you shall have one. But not chardonnay, I beg you. It’s a French grape, not a bad one either, but when in Rome -”

She felt like giggling. Here she was, alone in a strange, foreign city, and a priest, a good-looking one at that, was flirting with her.

“Recommend something, Peter,” she said firmly.

“If it’s a white you’re after it would be a crime to leave without tasting a Greco di Tufo.”

The old man behind the counter raised his heavy, grey eyebrows. It seemed a gesture of approval.

“A what?”

“It’s from a grape which is, perhaps, the oldest in Italy. The Pelasgians brought it in from Thessaly way back before Christ. If my memory serves me right there are just a hundred or so small aziende-vineyards to you, Monica-east of Naples that still make it. When you drink a Greco you’re drinking what Virgil did while he was writing the Aeneid, as near as dammit. If you go to Pompeü, as you must, there’s a couple of lines of graffiti on the fresco there, two thousand years old if they’re a day. They go something like, ”You are truly cold, Bytis, made of ice, if last night not even Greco wine could warm you up.“ ”

Monica wondered about this, watching as the barman, unbidden as far she could see, poured a glass of the white the priest had merely waved at with a long finger. “Who the hell was Bytis?”

The Irishman shrugged. “A lover? What else? One who seems to have shirked his duties, in spite of the wine. Or perhaps because of it. Remember Macbeth. ”Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery; it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.“ ”

He cast a sudden, dark, regretful glance at the door. “There, you see. Too much of my youth spent wasting away in the stalls of the Abbey Theatre. It leaves one with a quotation for every occasion. To wit-”

Suddenly, he was very close and whispering in her ear. “Hamlet and the omens of change. ”The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.“ ”

It was a very hammy performance. She couldn’t help but laugh. The wine-clear, dry and quite unlike anything she’d ever tried before-helped. “You’ve done a lot of reading.”

“Not really. I’m merely a very ordinary priest who happened to have a lot of spare hours once upon a time,” he replied. “Ordinary as they come. Ask my little flock of sisters in Orvieto. Though Lord knows when they’ll see me again. To be frank I’m a little giddy at being released into the world like this. I’ve spent most of the day at the station trying to get a train. And the rest of it knocking on the doors of the few hostels I can afford trying to find accommodation. After which”-he raised his glass-“the Irish in me will out.”

Monica Sawyer was surprised to discover she’d finished her white. The Greco was good: sharp, individual, unexpected. She wanted another. She wanted something to eat too.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the priest’s balloon-like glass, which still had a smear of red running around the bottom, one he’d been sipping gingerly throughout their conversation as if he couldn’t quite afford another. “And why’s the thing so goddamn big?”

Peter closed his eyes for a moment and his face suffused with delight. “Amarone. A small pleasure I allow myself when in Rome. The stuff we have to drink at home-”

He wrinkled his nose.

“And that thing you’re drinking from?”

He swilled the smudge of red liquid around the base and held it in front of her face. She took the glass, accidentally brushing his warm fingers on the way, stuck her nose deep inside the rim and was amazed as an entire, enclosed universe of aromas rose through her nostrils and entered her head. It made her think of the flowery prose she read in Decanter magazine: a sudden rush of a warm, spicy summer breeze rising up off the Mediterranean and sweeping over a scrubby brush of parched wild thyme. Or something.

“This is a fine establishment,” the priest said, glancing at the barman. “Like any fine establishment, it will keep a selection of glasses according to the rank of wine. Amarone is in the pantheon. At nine euros a glass it bloody better be.”

“OK,” she said, slapping a hundred-euro note on the counter. “Is your Italian good enough for ”Line “em up, buster, the rich are paying‘? And food. I want food, Peter. Don’t you?”

He hesitated and, for one short, worrying moment, she felt she had lost him.

He pulled out a small, rather feminine purse and stared mournfully at the contents. “I’m still enough of an Irishman to feel uncomfortable about having a lady buy me drinks.”

She put her hand on the soft black arm of his priestly jacket. “Then consider it a tuition fee.”

“Done,” he said and rattled off some orders to the barman.

The wine came: Amarone, with a brief lecture about how the grapes were dried before being fermented, then something called Primitivo di Manduria, which, from what she gathered, was kind of the red equivalent of the Greco, an ancient grape still kept alive by a handful of small producers, this time in Puglia, the heel of Italy. And the food: bresaola, paper-thin slices of mountain-dried wild boar; a selection of salumi, some spicy, some mild; pale, translucent parings of pork fat, lardo di colonna; slivers of ripe, fruity Parmesan and a salad of buffalo mozzarella served with pomodorini di Pachino, tiny red tomatoes as sweet as cherries.

They ate and they drank and outside day turned to night through a steady, continuous veil of falling snow.

She didn’t know how much time she’d spent in the bar. She didn’t care. She was alone in Rome. She didn’t speak a word of the goddamn language. And Father O’Malley was such good company. The single most charming man she could remember meeting in years. He listened and when he spoke afterwards it was about the very subject she’d been discussing. He could talk about anything. Architecture. Literature. Politics. The pleasures of the table. Almost everything, it occurred to her, except religion. Perhaps Peter O’Malley had enough of that, trapped in servitude to his sisters back in Orvieto. Perhaps he felt abruptly and briefly free in this strange, small world of cold, white, impassable streets.

Monica Sawyer listened and she laughed, knowing she was getting more than a little drunk. She was used to the attention of men: tall, with a well-kempt head of long, chestnut hair, and a smart, articulated face, one people liked to look at. Back home, when Harvey was away, she didn’t hesitate to stray a little now and then. Finally she took his wrist, looked at his watch, then looked at him, with an expression she was sure did not amount to an invitation. That would be wrong. Improper. It wasn’t what she was feeling or planning. She simply wanted company and his was, at that moment, the best.

“Peter,” she said quietly, “I have to go. I don’t want this to sound wrong. Please believe that. I’m not in the habit of picking up men in strange bars. Certainly not priests. But we rented an apartment round the corner. For the next two weeks, would you believe. It’s as empty as the grave with just me rattling around in it. The TV doesn’t even have cable and I can’t understand a damn word of those Italian stations. If you need somewhere to stay, you can take the sofa or the floor. It’s up to you.”