Marco often appeared in my dreams. We’d always kept in touch. I liked the reminder of other choices I could have made, other lives that could have been mine, even though – especially once Caleb was born – I’d never been disappointed with this one. It was something I’d never been able to explain to Stephen. Of course, Stephen was a cheater, so that didn’t matter. With a cynicism it took me a failed marriage to equal, Marco always loved archaeology more than people. The great passion of his life was pottery – his father had owned a homewares store. ‘History is never really over,’ Marco said. ‘The people who know moments best have simply left it behind.’ More than once on a dig, I saw him magically transform an artefact into a plate, simply by resting a sandwich on it. Every age co-existed for Marco. For him, Mussolini, Nero and Julius Caesar were all contemporaries. Our Rome was all Romes. And every plate, dish and tray, whether gold or fine china or cardboard, was interesting for what it revealed about the people who made and used and disposed of it. Possibly the disposal more than anything else – it was once objects were discarded that they joined the archaeological record.

On that long-ago dig, Marco had been ordered to stop work (carefully brushing a pile of broken ceramic dishes, wondering if they belonged to a commercial kitchen or a private home), because, nearby, I’d uncovered the desiccated skeleton of a very young child. How horrifying that felt, the discovery of bones beneath the skin of the earth. I’d disturbed an ancient secret not intended for my eyes. Brushing dust from the skull, I had self-consciously touched my own face, my eye sockets firm beneath my warm, living skin. Digging into the earth was digging into my own past, my own future, where I myself would be only bones. Every skull was a memento mori, a reminder we too would die. Not even every plate is always just a plate. Claire’s collection of Franklin Mint royal occasion collectors’ plates, for example, would make Marco laugh. What would future archaeologists make of those? What of all the royal wedding memorabilia that burned, with ordinary crockery, in the fires? What would eventually happen to my own collection?

Burned land was a reminder that what we called history still remained just beneath the surface of things, at one with the land, a living, breathing thing. As Marco said, the past travels with us.

Neighbours have always been rivals, even among the gods, I thought, waking. Insomnia was a frequent visitor in my life but exhaustion had won out. I needed the toilet. There’d be one in the hall.

The hall?

Rome vanished. I was in Australia. In a hospital.

My eyelids flew open. Sunrays spilled through venetian blinds. I was in a vinyl chair at Caleb’s bedside. Caleb was asleep, his head tipped to one side, a pillow holding it there. Beneath a white bandage, his black hair hung over one of his closed eyes. In the twilight world of sleep, he was haunted. He frowned.