"That's what Bony said. After the retreat out of Russia."

"He may go down in history as a great theoretician of the arts. Well, Mr Elton sir, under the ilexes let it be." Elton, though in civilian dress, sketched a salute and loped off across the piazza towards the Caffé Greco. John stood a while by Bernini's broken marble boat, listening to the water music. He tried to identify himself with the water, to be the water, to feel the small sick parcel of flesh that was himself liquefy joyfully, joyfully relish its own wetness and singing clarity. He sprang back with a start into nerve and bone to find a hand on his arm. James Clark, his doctor, with a smiling stranger. Clark said:

"Ye should be hame the noo, Master Keats. The nicht air -"

"Is nae halesome. Aye, I ken." The stranger looked puzzled with the very puzzlement of Lieutenant Elton. "I mean no mockery," John said. "Doctor Clark knows that his deliberate use of Scotch inspires confidence. Scotch engineers, Scotch doctors -"

"Scotch reviewers," said the stranger.

"Somehow I knew you understood English."

"This is Mr Keats," Clark said. "This is Signor Giovanni Gulielmi, man of letters and citizen of Rome."

"I know your work," said Gulielmi. "I know your Endymion well -"

"Ah, no, not that botched mawkery."

"Also your volume of this year. Would you call that too a botched mockery?"

"Mawkery," John corrected. "A neologism. The critics were always on to me for making up words. A real writer, they seemed to imply, would get all his words from Johnson's Dictionary. Sorry, I seem to start with a mockery and continue with a rebuke. You speak English excellent well, before God, with a right slight accent of the North. I would I had but a hundredth of that skill in the Tuscan."

"In, in," urged Clark, impelling John by the elbow. "Is Mr Severn already at home?"

"I let my keeper loose for the evening. He has gone to see the sculptures of a certain Mr Ewing."

"William Ewing," Gulielmi said. "He has a certain small talent. His figures are recognisably figures, one may say so much."

"I envy," John panted, climbing the marble stairway to the second floor of Number 26, "any man who can carve marble. To climb it," seeing old Mr Gibson come from the top floor, candle-lighted by his French valet, "is for me, in my present state," having just visited Mr O'Hara up there, "work enough. Your servant, sir."

"Evening, evening," old Mr Gibson growled, passing, candle proceeding.

"Easy, man, easy," said Clark, trying to pull John to a standstill by his coattail. "There's all the time in the world." Then he emended: "I' the worrrruld."

John led his visitors into the parlour. Light was fading. He looked panting for candles. Panting less, he sat with Clark and Gulielmi, their shadow selves sitting huge upon the walls. "Wine," he said.

"Tell me where the wine is," said Gulielmi, getting up. "Ah, I see it, I think."

"Your English is astonishingly good, signore."

"Not astonishingly. My maternal grandfather came from Manchester and was a staunch Stuart man. Disgusted and, indeed, disgraced by the failure of the rebellion of 1745, he exiled himself to Italy. He died recently, very old, in an apartment of the Castello on the lake of Bracciano. He was still brooding on the lost Stuart cause, execrating the puddingy Hanoverians, as he called them. My mother, his daughter, keeps my English alive, as does my work as a translator. Our friend Dr Clark has, I fear, little sympathy for the Pretenders. I, though an Anglo-Italian, am a better Scot than he." He smiled though, pouring the cheap golden Roman table wine, all that John and Severn could afford.

"A question of faith," Clark said. "My family is allied to the Knoxes, meaning the great Knox who preached against Mary our Jezebel mistress. As for the Hanoverians, I'll serve them. As for puddingy, your bonny prince was puddingy enough."

"You then, sir I will say and no longer signore, are of the Romish faith?" And then at once: "Oh, it seems I must spend all this evening in apology, for both stupidity and boorishness. Of course you are of the faith, and Romish is a stupid word. For my part, I belong to nothing. I recognise," looking at Clark, "that it might still my soul in face of we know what if I belonged to something. But it is too late, I think. Severn, if I may speak so without disloyalty, does not in his work in his work bear the best witness for the Christian creed. It does not help his art, shall I say. Too gentle-Jesus feathery where the iron groin should show through."

"Art," said Clark, "is no, not everything."

"Religious," Gulielmi said, wine up for sipping. "To be religious is to respond to the numinous. It does not have to be your Mr Severn's gentle Jesus. I have read your poems. You treat Apollo, may I say, as a living numen."

John turned big eyes on him that flashed in the candles. "He is not mocked," he said. "That god is not mocked. That god can punish."

"Punish may be, but no save," Clark said.

"Save, yes, that too," John said fiercely. "I will say that only he can save. This you should know, as he is also the god of healing. It was to that side of him I was first led. I was," he told Gulielmi, "once a small sawbones."

"I had heard that."

"I knew that I was to serve one god, but I had mistaken which of his aspects it was to be. Save, yes, save. What does it profit a man to become a saint in heaven? What does it profit them he leaves behind?

"He can intercede," Gulielmi said, with mock primness, "at the Throne of the Most High."

"Saints do not create goodness, they but exemplify it. As for those called by Apollo, they make truth, they make beauty. They create, and in creating create also themselves. Let us not talk of the Christian God's part in the everlasting making and remaking of the world."

"Ye're unco excited, man," in deliberate Scotch. "It will dae your stomach nae sort o' guid to be in that state."

"My stomach will do well enough," John said stiffly. "It is not my stomach I have to worry about."

"The trouble with the lungs is past. It is in the stomach, it is the stomach that must be watched."

"Dr Clark," John said firmly, "I took this to be a social visit. In the presence of Signor or Mr Gulielmi this talk of stomachs is to say the least unseemly."

I take to him, thought Gulielmi. He is a little man and no more than a boy, but he comports himself with Apollonian dignity. I take to the large eyes and the quivering nose and the big overlip, the strong chin, the hair that is both fire and cornfield. Can he live to be a poet? He cannot breathe well, but he looks well supplied of energy. He said: "I will be happy to hear of stomachs in a capacity not clinical. Are you eating well here in Rome?"

"Now well," John said. "Filthily before. But I threw our imported dinner out of that window two afternoons ago. Scrawny raw chicken and filthy macaroni and filthier rice pudding out on to the steps for the dogs to pounce on. So the point was well taken and the trattoria now sends up food we can eat. The action was better than any speech. It was done with a smile and the fellow with the basket smiled too."

"And your Italian, how is your Italian?"

"I read Dante with the help of Gary's translation. Reading is, however, not speaking."

"You must learn our Roman speech, it may amuse you."

"There's hardly time." It was said without self-pity. They heard boots on marble approaching. "Severn," said John. "Sabrina fair." The young man who entered, mouth open smilingly as to drink in cheerfully whatever the evening sent by way of company, was indeed fair though somewhat washed out, his good looks girlish enough. He was introduced to Gulielmi. He said, with an atrocious accent:

"Parla bene il signore la nostra lingua."