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The Invitation: Escape with this epic, page-turning summer holiday read
Lucy Foley


‘The perfect summer read… Gorgeously compelling’ Good Housekeeping‘Full of mystery and long-reaching shadows of the past . . . richly drawn and compelling’ Rosanna LeyIt’s 1951. In Europe’s post-war wreckage, the glittering Italian Riviera draws an eclectic cast of characters; lured by the glamour but seeking an escape.Amongst them, two outcasts: Hal, an English journalist who’s living on his charm; and Stella, an enigmatic society beauty, bound to a profiteering husband. When Hal receives a mysterious invitation from a wealthy Contessa, he finds himself aboard a yacht headed for Cannes film festival.Scratch the beautiful surface, and the post-war scars of his new companions are quick to show. Then there’s Stella, whose secrets run deeper than anyone’s — stretching back into the violence of Franco’s Spain. And as Hal gets drawn closer, a love affair begins that will endanger everyone…The Invitation is an epic love story that will transport you from the glamour of the Italian Riviera, to the darkness of war-torn Spain. Perfect for fans of Kate Morton and Victoria Hislop.






















Copyright (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)









Harper

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

Copyright © Lost and Found Books Ltd 2016

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017

Cover photographs © Joseph Leombruno/Condé Nast via Getty Images (woman), Joana Kruse/Arcangel (building), Shutterstock (boat)

Lucy Foley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007575398

Ebook Edition © May 2017 ISBN: 9780007575381

Version 2017-11-20




Dedication (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)


To my darling mother, Sue, and father, Patrick:

chief friend-maker and historian!


Table of Contents

Cover (#u7545fd8f-c15f-5ba7-a46b-1b36ab0eb9d8)

Title Page (#ufa02b9d5-6867-5010-b3bd-c6011289294b)

Copyright (#ue776894b-c9e7-58cb-a7c0-0194ee149972)

Dedication (#u02421184-a7a0-5cfb-a49d-f373b65c7640)

Prologue (#uebd46c90-7af9-57ef-b6be-5d0be8e533f6)

Part One (#u1a642236-e1b7-5a84-b9ac-338ffe239d9d)

Chapter 1 (#ubcb0408c-5b1e-500b-99b8-941bd9b8a7c8)

Chapter 2 (#u19feae8c-f2b6-5501-baaf-f445a0a0ecdd)

Chapter 3 (#udccb13bc-3899-5bec-b3ca-130106582721)

Chapter 4 (#uf897f2ba-9e86-532c-952d-bc3b6b226219)



Chapter 5 (#ua3eec68b-eac8-57bb-91e3-d9166863480a)



Chapter 6 (#u79dae022-5040-5665-8844-2a7bdfb9c6b1)



Part Two (#uc63c433f-981b-5083-9b05-1cb17ae16b74)



Chapter 7 (#u7e3f3129-5a11-51a0-bd60-add2ac976ae3)



Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part Three (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part Four (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part Five (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)



Part Six (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)



Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)



Read on to Enjoy an Extract From Lucy Foley’s Sweeping New Historical Novel (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)



Also by Lucy Foley (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




PROLOGUE (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)

Essaouira, Morocco, 1955


Essaouira feels like the end of the world. It takes several hours in a bus or car from Marrakech, along a bone-jarring route that is more track than road. Once here the sweep of the Atlantic confronts you, buffeted by the omnipresent wind. Forbidding and grey as an old schoolmistress.

The town itself is governed by this sea: salt-sprayed and windblown, a straggling stretch of white and blue. From the roof terrace of my building you can see the wide boulevards that surround the souks. Then the smaller, serpentine passages within them, hedged on either side by riotous piles of wares. But the market here is a much less fractious place than that of Marrakech, where the stallholders wheedle and heckle. Perhaps it is that the pace of life is slower than it is there – than it is, really, in any other place I have visited in my life. There are a few other Western expats here, like me. Most are exiles in some respect, though the causes are perhaps too diverse for generalization: McCarthyism, bankruptcy, broken marriages. The long shadow of the bomb.

On the other side of my terrace, the view is straight out across the Atlantic. I like to be up to watch the blue-hulled fishing boats setting out in the young hours and then, at dusk, heading home laden with the day’s catch. It lends a rhythm to the day. I know the moods of the sea now almost as well as those fishermen, and there are many. I like to watch the weather travelling in from the outer reaches: the approach of the occasional storm.

Sometimes I find myself panicking, because I realize that I cannot remember her face. I feel that she is slipping from me. I have to wilfully summon her back, through those fragments of her that are most vivid. The scent of her skin warmed by the sun, a smell like ripened wheat. I remember the way her eyes looked when she told me of everything she had lost.

On the rare days of calm I used to imagine her emerging from the depths like Venus, carried towards me on the sea foam. Or not carried perhaps, that was not her way. Striding out of it, then, shaking seawater from her sleek head. But, of course, it is the wrong sea. Thank God for that. If I had spent these years gazing out upon that other sea, I think I would have gone mad.

I wonder sometimes if I have gone a little mad. The majoun, of which I have become partial, has no doubt not helped. Sometimes when I have taken it I experience hallucinations, in which I am absolutely convinced that the thing I am seeing is real. Sometimes these occur days, even a week, after my last fix of the stuff. At least it doesn’t affect the writing. Perhaps it helps.

That spring was the start of everything, for me. Before then, I might have been half-asleep, drifting through life. Before then I had not known the true capacity of the human heart.

I remember it all with such peculiar clarity.

Though I know that now is the time to do this, or never at all, I cannot deny my dread of returning to that spring. Because what happened was my fault, you see.



PART ONE (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)





1 (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)

Rome, November 1951


Now the city is at its loveliest. The crowds of summer and autumn have gone, the air has a new freshness, the light has that pale-gold quality unique to this time of year. There have been several weeks of this weather now, without a drop of rain.

When the city is like this, Hal does not mind being poor. To live in such a place is in itself a form of richness. He is self-sufficient. He has a job, he has no dependants, he has somewhere to sleep at night. A small bedsit in downmarket Trastevere, fine, but it is enough to call home. So different from the life he would have had in England that he might be living on another planet. This suits him perfectly.

Hal has been here for five years now. His father, he knows, thinks that he is treading water. If his son is going to do something as trifling as journalism he should at least have continued working for the English broadsheet. And here he is, a freelancer, writing whimsical pieces for a local paper. His mother is more supportive. Rome, after all, is the city of her birth. He learned his Italian from her. Half the stories she read to him as a child were in her mother tongue; the most beautiful language in the world. Now he uses it so regularly that it is beginning to feel like his first language; the English left behind, a part of his old life.

When he arrives at the place Fede is already waiting for him, drinking what appears to be his second espresso. He grins. ‘Hal! I like this place. I can see why you come here. So many beautiful women.’ He nods to the group in the corner. None of them can be much older than eighteen, but they are dressed in mimicry of the movie stars they no doubt admire: rouged cheeks, cinched waists. One draws on a cigarette self-consciously, blowing a thin plume of smoke over her shoulder in what must be a gesture borrowed from a picture. Her friend carefully outlines her mouth with red lipstick. They are the inheritors of the economic miracle, Hal thinks, modelling themselves on the film stars and fashion models in the pages of the new glossy magazines. They might be a different species altogether from the black-clad matrons glimpsed in Trastevere hanging out their washing, heading to church, looking exactly as they might have done in centuries past. This is Rome, is Italy, all over: the modern and the timeless coexisting in uneasy, spectacular conjunction.

‘They’re not women,’ he says to Fede, watching as the trio explodes into sudden laughter. ‘They’re girls. They’re schoolgirls playing truant.’

‘That’s how I like them.’ Fede pinches the air between thumb and forefinger. ‘Tender as the finest vitello. Look, she’s making eyes at you.’

Hal glances back. Fede is right – one of them is looking at him. Even this look of hers is modern in its boldness. She is beautiful, in the way that green, unblemished things are. Hal can at least see that, but he can’t feel it. It is like this with all beauty for him now. He looks away. ‘You’re vile,’ he says to Fede, teasing. ‘I don’t know why I bother with you.’

Fede raises an eyebrow. ‘Because we help each other out. That’s why.’

Hal’s espresso comes and he knocks it back. ‘Well. Do you have anything for me?’

Fede throws up his hands. ‘Nothing at the moment, my friend. It’s slow at this time of year.’

The biggest and most interesting of Hal’s interviews tend to come through Fede, who works in the city’s nascent institute for culture.

‘Oh.’ Hal finds it hard to disguise his disappointment. There are slim pickings on the interview front all round. His editor at The Tiber has made it quite clear that another whimsical ‘expat in the city’ piece won’t cut it – and he can’t afford to lose this job.

‘But …’ Fede says, thoughtfully, ‘there is a party.’

‘A party?’

‘Yes. A contessa is throwing one for her rich friends. Trying to attract investment for a film, I heard. I have an invitation, but cannot go. It is next month – I must be in Puglia by then, for Christmas.’ He glances at Hal, sidewise. ‘Unless you are returning to your family, too?’ One evening, when he’d had too much to drink, Hal made the mistake of telling him about Suze, about the engagement. Ever since, Fede has been unremittingly curious about Hal’s former life in England.

‘No,’ Hal says. ‘I’ll be staying here.’ He knows his mother, in particular, will be disappointed. But he doesn’t want to face her worry for him, his father’s pointed questions about when he is going to make something of himself.

‘OK then. Well, I thought you could go instead of me.’

It could be interesting, Hal thinks. ‘How would I get in?’

‘Well,’ Fede says, patiently, ‘you could pretend to be me. I think we do not look all that different.’

Hal chooses not to point out the obvious. Fede is half a foot shorter, with a broken nose and brown eyes where Hal’s are blue. The only similarity is their dark hair.

Now Fede is expounding his idea. ‘And think of all those rich women, looking for a little excitement.’ He winks. ‘Trust me, amico, it’s the best Christmas present I could give you.’

He fishes a card from his bag. Hal takes it, turns it over in his hand, studies the embossed gold lettering. And he thinks: Why not? What, after all, does he have to lose?




December


He walks all the way from his apartment. He likes walking: there is always something new to see in this city. It seems to shift and grow, revealing glimpses of other lives, other times. There are layers of history here, times at which the barrier between the present and past appears tissue-thin. He might rip at it and reveal another age entirely: Roman, Medieval, Renaissance. This reminder that the present and his place in it are just as transient has a strong appeal. Beside so much history, one’s own past becomes rather insignificant.

Of course, there is a more recent time that must be banished from conversation and thought. The war meant humiliation, tragedy. It meant hardship and poverty too. People want prosperity now, they want nice clothes, food on the table, things. It is the same in England. There was the jubilation over the victory, the hailing of the returned heroes. And then there was the great forgetting.

The address is a little way beyond the Roman Forum, and Hal skirts the edge of it. The stones at this time are in silhouette, backlit by the lights of the city. At this time they appear older yet: as though placed by the very first men.

The place turns out to be a red-brick medieval tower, soaring several storeys above the surrounding rooftops. He has seen it before and wondered about it. He had guessed an embassy, a department of state affairs, the temple of some strange sect, even. Never had he imagined that it might be a private residence.

Torches have been lit in brackets about the entrance, and Hal can see several gleaming motor cars circling like carp, disclosing guests in their evening finery. There are bow ties and tails, full-length gowns. He is not prepared for this. His suit is well-made but old and worn with use, faded at the elbows of the jacket and frayed at the pockets of the trousers. He has lost weight, too, since he last wore it, thanks to his poor diet of coffee and the occasional sandwich. He can’t afford to eat properly. When he first wore it he had been much broader about the chest and shoulders. Now he feels almost like a boy borrowing his father’s clothes.

All day it has been threatening rain, but there have been several grey days like this without a drop, so he hasn’t bothered with an umbrella or raincoat. But only twenty yards or so from the entrance the heavens finally open, like a bad joke. There is no warning, only the sudden chaos of the downpour, rain smoking across the pavement towards him. Instantly his hair, shirt and suit are drenched. If he appeared bedraggled before he must seem now like something that has crawled its way out of the Tiber. He swears. A woman, emerging from one of the sleek cars, darts an alarmed glance in his direction and hurries in through the doorway.

At the entrance he feels the doorman’s gaze irradiate his person, find him wanting. ‘Cognome, per favore?’

‘Fiori.’

The man looks at his list, frowns. ‘E nome?’

‘Federico.’

He knows even before the man looks back up at him that it has not worked. ‘You are not he,’ the doorman says, with evident pleasure. ‘I know that man. He works for the Ministero. It is my job to remember faces. You are not he.’

Hal hesitates, wondering if there is any use in arguing with the man. After all, if he is confident that he knows Federico by sight … But it is worth a try. ‘Ma, ho un invito . . .’ He fishes the card from his pocket.

The man is already shaking his head. Hal takes a step back. Only now that he is about to be turned away does he realize how much he has been looking forward to the evening. Not merely as a means to making new contacts, but as a taste of another side of life in the city – the sort glimpsed occasionally through the windows of cars, and the better sort of restaurant. It would have been an experience. The thought of his apartment, cold and dark, depresses him. The long walk back, through the wet streets. He should have known that Fede’s scheme would be useless.

He tells himself that really, he wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway. He doesn’t need to experience that life: it isn’t the one he has sought in coming to Rome. And yet there has always been a part of him – a part he isn’t necessarily proud of – that has always been drawn towards the idea of a party. Perhaps it is because of his memories of the ones his mother used to throw in Sussex: the lawns thronged with guests and lights reflected in the dark waters of the harbour beyond. To be in the midst of this, with a glass of some watered-down punch in his hand, was to feel he had stepped into another, adult world. Funny, how one spent one’s childhood half-longing to be out of it.

‘What is the problem here?’

Hal glances up to see that a woman has appeared in the doorway alongside the man. She wears an emerald green gown, almost medieval in style, a silver stole about her neck. She is quite elderly, in her mid-seventies, perhaps, her face incredibly lined. But she has the bearing of a queen. Her hair is very dark, and if artifice is involved in keeping it this way it is well concealed.

The doorman turns to her, triumphant but obsequious. ‘This man, my Contessa, he is not who he says he is.’

Hal feels her gaze on him. Her eyes are amazing, he realizes, like liquid bronze. She studies him for a time without speaking.

‘Someone once told me,’ she says then, ‘that a party is only an event if there is at least one interesting gatecrasher in attendance.’ She raises her eyebrows, continuing to study him. ‘Are you a gatecrasher?’

He hesitates, deciding what to say. Is it a trick? Should he persist with the lie, or admit the truth? He wavers.

‘Well,’ she says, suddenly, ‘you certainly look interesting, all the same. Come, let us find you a drink.’ She turns, and he sees now that the fur stole falls all the way to the ground behind.

He follows her up the curved staircase, illuminated by further lighted sconces. They pass numerous closed doors, as might confront the hero in the world of a fairytale. The gown, the centuries-old bricks, the flames of the torches: modern Rome suddenly feels a long way away. From above them come the sounds of a party, voices and music, but distorted as though heard through water.

She calls back to him. ‘You are not Italian, are you?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m not.’ Half-Italian – but he won’t say that. The less you say, the fewer questions you invite. It is something to live by.

‘Even more interesting. Do you know how I guessed? It is not because of your Italian, I should add – it is almost perfect.’

‘No.’

‘Because of your suit, of course. I never make mistakes about tailoring. It is English-made, I think?’

‘Yes, it is.’ His father had it made up for him by his tailor.

‘Excellent. I like to be right. Now, tell me why you are here.’

‘My friend had an invitation. He thought I might want to come instead of him.’

‘No, Caro. I mean to ask why you are in Rome.’

‘Oh. For work.’

‘People do not come to Rome for work. There is always something more that drives them: love, escape, the hope of a new life. Which is it?’

Hal meets her eyes for as long as he is able, and then he has to look away. He felt for a second that she was seeing right into him, and that he was exposed. He understands, suddenly, that he won’t be able to get in without answering her question. He is reminded of the myth of the Sphinx at Thebes, asking her riddles, devouring those who answer wrongly.

‘Escape,’ he says. And it is true, he realizes. He had told himself Rome would be a new start, but it had been more about leaving the old behind. England had been too full of ghosts. The man he had been before the war was one of them; the spectre of his former happiness. And of all those who hadn’t come home – his friend, Morris, among them. Rome is full of ghosts, too – centuries of them. There is perhaps a stronger concentration of souls here than in any other place in the world: it is not the Eternal City for nothing. But the important thing is that they aren’t his ghosts.

She nods, slowly. And he wonders if he has made the exchange, given the thing demanded in return for entry. But no, her questions haven’t ended yet.

‘And what do you do here?’

‘I’m a journalist.’ As soon as he says it he decides he should have lied. People in her sort of position can be obsessive about privacy. She doesn’t seem disturbed by it, though.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Hal Jacobs. I doubt that you will have—’

But she is squinting at him, as though trying to work something out. Finally, she seems to have it. ‘Reviews,’ she says, triumphantly, ‘reviews of films.’

But no one read that column – that was the problem, as his editor at The Tiber had said.

‘Well, yes, I did write them. A couple of years ago now.’

‘They were brilliant,’ she says. ‘Molto molto acuto.’

‘Thank you,’ he says, surprised.

‘There was one you wrote of Giacomo Gaspari’s film, La Elegia. And I thought to myself, there are all these Italian critics failing to see its purpose, asking why anyone would want to look back to the war, that time of shame. And then there was an Englishman – you – who understood it absolutely. You wrote with such power.’

Elegy. Hal remembers the film viscerally, as though it is in some way seared into him.

‘After I read that,’ she says, ‘I thought: I must read everything this man has to write on film. You saw what others didn’t. But you stopped!’

Hal shrugs. ‘My editor thought my style was … too academic, not right for our readership.’ It had been replaced with an agony aunt column: ‘Gina Risponde . . .’ Roman housewives writing in to ask how to get their whites whiter, lonely men asking how to conceal a balding pate, young women eager to work in the capital asking whether it was really the immoral, dangerous place their parents spoke of.

The Contessa is shaking her head, as though over some great wrong. ‘But why would you work somewhere like …’ she seems to be searching for the name.

‘The Tiber?’

‘Yes. You should be writing for a national magazine.’

It must be nice, Hal thinks, to live in a world in which things are so easy. As though one might merely walk into the office of one of the bigger magazines and demand a job. There had been interviews. But nothing had come of it. And his work for The Tiber has – just about – allowed him to pay his rent, to feed himself.

‘I work there because they’ll have me.’

‘I wonder if they know how lucky they are.’ She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps when my film is made you can write a review of that. Only a good one, naturally.’

He remembers, now, Fede saying something about a film. ‘When will it be made?’

‘When I can afford it. It is why I am throwing this party – to try and persuade others they want to see it made too.’

‘Ah.’

‘I need to use all my powers of charm.’ She smiles, suddenly. ‘Do you think I can do it?’

He says, honestly, ‘Yes, I do.’ Because she does have it, a charisma beside which the charms of youth or beauty are so much blown thistledown.

She laughs. ‘I am suddenly delighted to have you at my party, Hal Jacobs.’ And then she beckons, with one beringed hand. ‘Please, follow me.’

Now they are reaching the top of the staircase where the final door stands open to reveal a seething crowd. As Hal steps into the room, his first thought is that he is surrounded by people of extraordinary beauty. But as the illusion thins, he realizes that this is not the case. There is ugliness here. But the gorgeous clothes and jewels and the very air itself – performed with scent and wine and expensive cigarettes – do a clever job of hiding the flaws.

As the Contessa steps toward the crowd, the energies of the room extend themselves toward her. Heads turn and several guests begin to make their way in her direction, as though drawn on invisible wires. She looks back at Hal.

‘I’m afraid that I am about to be busy,’ she says to him.

‘Of course. Please, go to your real guests.’

She smiles. ‘Hal Jacobs,’ she says. ‘I will remember.’ And then, before he can ask exactly what she means by this, she winks. ‘Enjoy my party.’ Then she walks into the crowd and is enveloped by it, lost from view.

Hal wanders through the throng, picking up a flute of spumante from a waiter and sipping it as he goes. One of the things that strikes him is the number of different nationalities in attendance. A few years ago, he was in the minority as an Englishman. Holidaymakers were only allowed to take £35 out of the country with them. Most stayed at home. Now, they are returning – and perhaps in greater numbers than before. He isn’t sure how he feels about this.

The thing that unifies this crowd, across nationalities, is the same thing that gave that initial impression of beauty. They are all of a type.

He attempts to catch the eye of the guests that pass him, but every gaze slides over him and then on, in search of more important fare. Several times, he launches himself forward into a group, tries to enter the conversation. He just needs that one opening, then he feels certain he will be able to make things stick. And yet it does not come. Mostly he is ignored. It is something that happens in increments: a guest steps slightly in front of him, or a comment he attempts to make is ignored, or the circle simply disperses so that he is left standing on his own. At first Hal can’t decide whether it is intentional or not. But on a couple of occasions he is quite actively frozen out. One man turns to give him a terrible stare, and Hal is so bemused by the impression of something like hatred, that he takes a step back. Apparently this set do not take well to newcomers. He is a cuckoo in the nest, and they know it. Usually, though it would be arrogance to admit it, Hal is used to being looked at by women. He has always been lucky in that respect. But here he is not given a second glance. Here something more than good looks is being searched out, something in which he is lacking. He is less than invisible.

Eventually, tired of the repeated humiliation and the noise and hot crush of bodies, he makes for the doors visible at the far end of the room, open onto a fire escape. He will finish his drink, he thinks, have a cigarette, and then go back in and make another attempt, buoyed by the alcohol. He will not leave here empty-handed; he merely needs a little time to regroup.

Outside he discovers a flight of stairs leading up, not down, to the roof of the tower itself. Curious, he climbs them. He is astonished to discover himself in the midst of a roof garden. Rome, in all its lamplit, undulating glory, is spread beneath him on all sides. He can see the dark blank of the Roman Forum, a few of the ancient stones made dimly visible by reflected lamplight; the marble bombast of the Altare della Patria with its winged riders like cut-outs against the starlit sky. Then, a little further away, the graceful cupola of St Peter’s, and further domes and spires unknown to him. A network of lamplit streets, some teeming with ant-like forms, others quiet, sleeping. He has never seen Rome like this.

For a vertiginous moment, he feels that he is floating above it all. Then the ground reforms itself beneath him; he begins to look around. There are palms and shrubs, the smell of the earth after the rain. He gropes for the word for it: petrichor.

He hears running water and discovers a fountain in which a stone caryatid, palely nude, pours water from her jug. Nearby, a bird caws, and with a great flustered commotion takes wing into the night. He peers after the black shape, surprisingly large. A parrot? An eagle? A phoenix? Any of these seem possible, here.

He appears to be quite alone. Clearly the opportunities presented by the crush inside are too good for the other guests to miss. He looks toward Trastevere. Somewhere down there he has gone to sleep every night since his arrival in the city, utterly ignorant of the fact that such wonders existed only a few miles away.

‘Hello.’

He turns towards the voice. It is as though the darkness itself has spoken. But when he looks closer he can make her out – the very pale blonde hair first, gleaming in what little light there is, then the shimmering stuff of her dress. Now he sees the fiery bud of a cigarette flare as she inhales. He is struck by the strange notion that she was not there before, that she has just alighted here like some magical winged creature.

‘Sorry,’ she says, and leans forward so her face is caught by the light spilling from the interior. His breath catches. He had somehow known from the voice that she would be beautiful, but had not been quite prepared for what has been revealed. And something strange: he feels the fact of it go through him like a sudden coldness.

She has sat back again now, and immediately he finds himself hoping for another look at her face. There is an intonation that he can’t quite place. American, but something else to it, too. Perhaps, he thinks, it is the accent of one who has lived in this rarefied sphere for a lifetime.

‘I’m Hal,’ he says, to fill the silence.

‘Hello, Hal,’ she says. A slender white arm appears then, and he sees the wink of diamonds about the fine bones of the wrist. ‘I’m Stella.’

He takes her hand, and finds it surprisingly warm in his.

She stands then, and comes to stand beside him at the rail. Now he can detect the scent of her: smoky, complex – a fragrance and something hers alone.

‘Look at it,’ she says. She is looking out at the city, leaning forward hungrily. ‘Don’t you wish,’ she says, ‘that you could dive in and swim in it?’ She really looks as though she might, he thinks – plunge off the side and into the night, like a white feather falling through the blackness.

For a few moments they gaze down in silence. The sounds of the nighttime city float up to them: the blare of a car horn, a woman’s laughter, a faraway trickle of music.

‘Do you know the city?’ he asks.

‘We had a tour … the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon …’

He is so struck by her use of ‘we’ that he can’t at first catch hold of what she is saying. She is still going, counting the sights off on her fingers: ‘St Peter’s, the Spanish Steps …’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you’ve done the tourist trail.’

She frowns. ‘You don’t think that’s a good thing?’

‘It isn’t that,’ he says. ‘They’re wonders in their own right. But there’s more than that to this city.’

‘You know it well?’

‘I live here.’

‘I suppose there is a side to the city that I won’t ever see.’ She says it with an odd kind of sadness, as though she feels this loss.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I suppose so. You’d never find my favourite things in a guide.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, such as the fact that the best time to see the Forum is at night, when there’s no one else there. And I know a bar where they play the best jazz outside of New Orleans. But I suppose you’re rather spoiled for choice, being an American.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever listened to jazz before. Not live. What else?’

‘A garden … almost completely hidden behind a high wall, a secret place. Unless you know how to find it.’ He catches himself. He sounds like a braggart. It isn’t like him.

‘You would show me?’ She says it in a rush, as if she has dared herself to ask it.

He is surprised. ‘Yes, if you’d like.’

‘Now?’

‘Why not?’

He knows that it would be a bad idea. He should go back in there and make himself known to the great and important. This might be his only chance to mix with these people, to establish some sort of connection with them. And there is something about this situation that strikes him as perilous. He has spent the last few years keeping a careful guard upon himself, living within self-imposed limits. He should politely decline. Except he finds that he can’t quite bring himself to do so.

‘OK.’

‘Good.’

She doesn’t know anything about me, he thinks, and yet she is coming with me, a complete stranger, into the night of a foreign city.

‘Do you need to tell anyone?’ he asks her, remembering the we.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m alone.’

They make their way back down the steps and into the warm fog of cigarette smoke, the press of bodies. She attracts admiring glances, he notices, from both the men and women.

Near the door, his eyes meet the Contessa’s. He thinks he sees her look quickly to Stella and then back again. For a moment she frowns, as if working something out. And then she turns back to her companion.

*

Outside in the street her pale head and outfit glitter through the darkness as though summoning all of the light to them. She shields her face with one hand as the headlamps of a passing car strafe across her. The driver, a man, cranes for a view of her through the window. His look is greedy and Hal feels something close to hatred for him, this complete stranger.

She turns to him, awaiting his move. Suddenly he fears that nothing he can come up with will be enough.

They walk through the Forum, the dark stones standing sentinel. He points out the remains of the Temple of Saturn, of which only the ribs of the front portico remain. The Basilica Julia. He shows her – he is thankful for the moonlight that allows it – the detail that has always fascinated him more than anything else: the marks where the bored audiences of the trials held there had scratched games into the stone. She has seemed interested by it all, but suddenly he sees her shiver, pulling her wrap around herself.

‘You’re cold?’

‘No.’ She glances across at him. ‘Do you mind if we go somewhere else?’

‘Of course – why? Don’t you like it?’

‘Yes – no. I do, but this quiet … it does something to you.’ She takes a cigarette from a tin in her little reticule, and her lighter, and he sees that her fingers are trembling as she tries to trip the flame into life.

‘Here.’ He takes it from her and does it himself.

‘Thanks.’

‘Where do you want to go?’

‘I don’t mind. Somewhere – different.’

He takes her to a bar he knows, in a certain secret square. The place is full, even at this hour. She steps before him into the warmth of the place. As he follows he sees the glances of the other customers: lecherous, envious, reverential. With her outfit and her pale blonde hair she could be a movie star. But not a Monroe. There is something less immediate, more foreign about her appeal.

As soon as she has seated herself one of the waiters is hovering, ready to take her order.

‘What are you having?’ she asks.

‘Oh, I thought I’d have a beer. But please, have anything you’d like.’ If he has the cheap beer, he thinks, he can afford to buy her a couple of the more expensive offerings. But, to his surprise, she says: ‘I’ll have the same as you.’

In the corner, a small jazz trio – double bass, sax, trumpet – are playing a number so rough and fervent that one can feel the vibrations of it in one’s chest. He watches her as she listens, her head on one side, her eyes half-closed.

When the beers arrive, the sight of her sipping hers, sitting in her finery, with that diamond bracelet about her wrist, is so incongruous that it makes him smile. She looks at him, venturing a smile of her own.

‘What is it?’

‘You look as though you should be drinking champagne.’

‘I hate it,’ she says. ‘I never learned to like it.’ She takes another sip. ‘I like this, though.’

‘Good. It’s Italian. I always have it here.’ He doesn’t say: because it is the only one I can afford.

‘How long have you lived in Rome? For a while?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘For a few years.’

‘And where were you before?’

‘London.’

‘Ah. And why did you come to Rome?’

What was it the Contessa had said? There is always something more . . . love, escape, the hope of a new life.

‘I came here to write,’ he says, and is immediately surprised at himself. He hasn’t admitted this to anyone, not even Fede. Why did he say it, and to a stranger? But perhaps it is the very fact that she is a stranger.

‘Write what?’

‘A novel, I suppose.’ Next he will have to admit that he hasn’t written anything beyond the first paragraph. He must deflect attention from himself. ‘And you,’ he says quickly, ‘you’re here on holiday?’

‘Yes.’ He waits for an elaboration: how long she is visiting, where she is staying, who she is staying with – he remembers the ‘we’. He has learned this – that if you wait long enough, the interviewee will feel uncomfortable or bored enough to fill the gap. But she says nothing. She is a little too good at this game, he thinks. All he knows of her is her first name, and her nationality. And there is a question over even that, because there is that accent, that slippage revealing some foreign note beneath.

‘Where is home?’ he asks.

‘Home?’ She looks thrown, for a second.

‘Yes. Where do you come from?’

Funny, but the question seems to give her pause. It fits, he thinks, with his idea of some ethereal creature who comes from nowhere and might vanish back into the darkness in a moment. ‘I live in New York,’ she says.

‘And is this your first visit to Europe?’

‘Oh, no. But I haven’t—’ he sees her catch herself. Then, slowly, as if carefully choosing her words: ‘I haven’t travelled to Europe for a while.’

The war, he thinks, probably. It has taken a while for Americans to start coming back.

She takes another sip, and as she does he sees something he had not noticed before. It gives him a shock. On her left hand, two of the fingers are completely missing: the smallest and the ring. The trauma is clearly an old one, the skin healed over the knuckles, but ridged with scar tissue. It is a strange thing, this violent absence, because she seems to him so complete and unblemished. Without warning she puts down the bottle and catches him looking.

‘An accident,’ she says, ‘when I was a child.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I don’t actually remember.’

She does, he thinks, watching her. And it did hurt a great deal. Now, as never before, he understands Fede’s curiosity about his own background. The reticence is tantalizing.

Now she is checking her watch, and he guesses what is coming next. ‘It’s getting late,’ she says.

‘I haven’t shown you the garden,’ he says, before she can say that she needs to leave. He has no idea what he is going to show her, now. But this doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she stays. That the evening, the strange enchantment of it, is prolonged. The thought of his apartment, dark and empty, is suddenly more than unappealing – it is something almost fearful.

To his relief, she agrees. He shows her the entrance to the garden, a slender door in an unremarkable wall of old brick. Fede told him about this place. No one knows who it belongs to, he explained, or who cares for it. So few people know of it that it is a true sanctuary.

There are clementine and orange trees growing here, now burdened with ripe fruit. Among them are statues: putti, faceless goddesses wound about with ivy: some so enmeshed in it that they look half-consumed by it. And then on the wall behind them the really special thing. A gorgeous fresco of fruit trees, like a reflection of the garden itself, and pale nightingales and a sky of midnight blue. Only a few of the details are visible in the moonlight, but he hears her catch her breath at the sight. He thinks, suddenly, that he would like to take her here in the daytime, so that she can see the colours. The background is a blue that looks particularly antique, not of the modern world, a colour lost to time. Fede claims that the painting is a Roman original. It could be ancient, it looks it. But it could be a medieval imitation and still be older than the relics of many cities.

He gestures back towards the real clementine trees. ‘Would you like one?’

‘Yes please.’

When he passes the fruit to her their fingers touch for an instant, and the contact is like a heated brand. It causes everything to shift for him. He hasn’t felt it, this specific kind of excitement, for such a long time. He had thought that he might not again. And now here … with her, with someone he has only just met. It makes no sense.

He watches as she removes the peel in a single strand. ‘I’ve never managed to do that.’

For the first time, she smiles.

The flesh is cold from the air, and incredibly sweet. But what he would like, he thinks suddenly, watching her eat hers, is to taste the juice on her mouth. The thought is another flare of warmth. When he looks up at her she is watching him. And he thanks God that she has no way of knowing what he is thinking.

‘Where are we?’ she asks. ‘I’ve lost my bearings.’

‘The Aventine hill. It’s one of my favourite places.’ There’s a stateliness to it, a solitude. ‘The Forum is back that way,’ he points. ‘And across the river is where I live – Trastevere.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘Some parts are rather grand – but I’m afraid I don’t live in one of those. It has … character, I suppose. Sometimes the streets are so narrow you feel the walls might actually be moving in towards you. In a way, it’s where real people live. The real Rome. I mean, for those that can’t afford an Aventine villa, or an apartment near the Spanish Steps.’ He catches again the gleam of diamonds and thinks she is probably from that small club of people who can.

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘Really?’

She nods.

He sees her take it in: the narrowness of the cobbled streets, the shuttered houses with the washing strung between, the cat that slinks its way through the shadows. The recent rain gleams underfoot like spilled ink.

‘I like it.’ She can’t mean it. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Not far from here, actually.’

‘Will you show me?’

Perhaps he is mistaking her meaning … and yet he doesn’t think so. All he can think to say is, ‘Are you sure?’

For a second, she appears to waver. But then she gathers herself. ‘Yes.’ He has the distinct impression that this is some dare she has set herself. He can’t believe that it is normal for her. And yet the whole evening feels as though it is under some kind of enchantment – an evening in which ‘normal’ has been forgotten.

‘It’s very small,’ he says. He doesn’t take anyone back there: it is a hovel. ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere else …’ He is thinking. A hotel? Not her hotel, but perhaps another, anonymous …

‘No,’ she says. ‘Take me there.’

He has another moment of doubt. She seems … how to put it? A little fraught. The confidence of her manner isn’t fooling him. Perhaps the sensible, the gentlemanly thing, would be to suggest that he accompany her back to her hotel and leave her at the reception. But it is beyond him. He is filled with longing, half-blinded by it. That feeling part, so long anaesthetized, has come briefly to life.

They say nothing else to one another as he leads her through the few remaining streets, and they walk a couple of feet apart, as though some invisible force dictates it.

His apartment is in a worse state than he had remembered: the espresso pot has leaked a treacly stain onto the small table; the bed is barely made. He sees it through new eyes. How it is at once almost empty and yet disarrayed. The exposed light bulb, the meagre rail of clothes, the detritus of his life piled variously about. He has lived in it for years as one might live in a hotel room for a week.

But she is intrigued, rather than appalled. He sees her drift towards the makeshift desk with the portable Underwood. Holding, not a page from the novel, but the beginnings of an article for The Tiber, a horribly unfunny sketch about an Englishman coming to terms with the concept of risotto. Imagine a rice pudding, only . . .

She will see it, and know that the novel is a pipe dream. She will think him pitiable. He rushes into the space, to block her off.

‘Do you want …’ he looks at the espresso maker, wondering how quickly he can clean and heat it, ‘… a coffee, perhaps?’

‘No, thank you. I wonder …’

‘What?’

‘Do you have something stronger?’

He has whisky, which she agrees to. He makes them up – explains that he doesn’t have an icebox. She doesn’t mind. He watches as she drinks hers steadily. She puts it down, emptied, and looks at him.

He looks on, hardly breathing, as her hands go to the buttons at her neck, and begin to unfasten them. Her movements appear assured, her expression fixed, but then he sees that her fingers are trembling so badly that each is a struggle. This makes him want her all the more.

‘I haven’t done this before,’ she says, as though it needed saying.

‘Neither have I.’ It isn’t strictly true – he has been to bed with women on the first night of knowing them. But not like this, somehow. Never has the whole of him been alive to it in this way.

She is shrugging the dress from her shoulders, and now she stands before him in her slip and underthings, nude to the waist. He sees how soft her skin looks; how some foreign sun has tanned it in places, and left it milk-white in others. He sees the small, taut indentation of her navel, the dusky nipples.

He is freeing himself from his clothes as quickly as he is able, and she moves back towards the rumpled bed, watching him, all the time.

He realizes, with something almost like amusement, that they have not kissed one another and yet here they are, two naked strangers. It would take so little to shatter this moment, to tip it over into absurdity. His mind is too full to make sense of all of it. And then she reaches her arm out to him, and he steps towards her, and feels her hands on him, her hands moving downward, and his mind empties of all thought.

Afterwards, he goes to pour them each another drink. She lies in the bed and watches him, the sheets pulled up about her. He brings the glasses back to her, and they drink in silence for a few minutes. He wonders if she, like him, has suddenly been reminded of the strangeness of the situation, of the fact that they know nothing about one another.

‘Is that where you write?’

He follows her gaze to the makeshift desk, the typewriter, and realizes that what she must be seeing is a romantic image – a false one. He drains the glass, feels it burn through the centre of him. And perhaps it is the work of the whisky, perhaps it is his knowledge that they may never meet again, but he feels a sudden compelling need for honesty. ‘I have a confession. I’m not a writer. I thought I was, once.’ She has turned her head on the pillow to look at him. He coughs, continues. ‘I had a collection of short stories published. Not in a big way, you know – but it was something.’

In 1938, just out of university. It was a very small press, and the print run had been a few hundred copies. And yet, nevertheless, here it was: him, a published author, at the age of twenty-one. The sole review had been good if not absolutely effusive. That was enough. There was time for improvement. He had his whole life ahead of him. His mother had been overjoyed. His father, a Brigadier, a hero of the Great War, had been … what? A little bemused. All well and good for Hal to have this hobby before doing the thing, the real job, that would mark him out as a man. Hal knew, though, that this was the thing he wanted to do for ever. He feared it, because he wanted it so badly.

‘I’ve lost it now,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it any longer.’

There is no answer at first, and he wonders if she might have fallen asleep. But then she says, ‘What happened?’

‘The war,’ he says, because it is an accepted cliché these days – and also partially true.

It was something that had changed, in him. Every time he tried to write he felt the words coloured by this change, as though it infected everything. As though it could be read in every sentence: this man is a coward; is a fraud.

He won’t see her again. ‘Someone died,’ he says, ‘a friend. He wrote, too. After that, I haven’t felt like I deserved to be doing it … not when he never will.’ The liberation, of saying it aloud.

She doesn’t ask for him to explain further, and he is relieved, because he feels only a hair’s breadth away from telling her the whole thing, which he might regret.

‘You won’t have lost it. Once you’re a writer, it’s in you, somewhere.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘My father was one.’

‘Would I have heard of him?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘Tell me about him.’ But no answer comes, and when he looks down at her, he sees that her eyes are closed.




2 (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)


That morning, watching her readying herself to leave, his body had been alive with remembered sensation. In the unforgiving early light he had seen with some surprise that she was a little older than he had thought: several years his senior, perhaps.

She was pale, anxious, altered. She had hardly looked at him, even when he spoke to her, asked her if he could get her anything, walk her to her hotel. When she had sat and rolled on her stockings she had ripped the heel of one in her haste to be dressed and gone.

The last thing she had said before she left was: ‘You won’t …’

‘What?’

‘You won’t tell anyone about this?’

‘No. Will you?’

‘No.’ She had said it with some force, and he had wondered if he should be offended.

Then she had left, and his apartment had become once again the small, untidy, unremarkable place it had been before. He had lain in the tangled sheets, with the warmth of the new memory upon his skin.

She will be back in America now, no doubt. Undoubtedly she is no longer in Rome. But he keeps imagining he sees her. Through a café window, in the Borghese gardens, buying groceries at the Campo de’ Fiori market.

Those few whispered sentences, in the moments before sleep, had been the frankest conversation he could remember having with anyone in a long time. Perhaps since before the war. That had been one of the problems, with Suze. Every time he had tried to talk she had seemed so uneasy, or, worse, bored – that he hadn’t wanted to say any more. So he’d never managed to tell her about what he had done; about his guilt. Perhaps she had guessed that there was something she wouldn’t want to know, and this was why she had been so resistant to being told. She had wanted to see him, as everyone did, as the returned hero. If you had returned alive, whole, you had had a Good War; you were heroic. This thing he wanted to tell her would not fit with that image.

Stella: he realizes he never even found out her last name. Yet he doubts that she would have told him, had he asked. It was all part of it, the sense that she was holding some vital part of herself back. It had intrigued him, this reticence, because he recognized it in himself. And then, in bed, she had briefly come apart, and he thought he had caught a glimpse of that hidden person.

He would like to talk to her again, to see her once more. But no doubt the peculiar magic of it had been due to them being strangers.

He can’t even remember her face. Had she been so beautiful as all that? Usually, he has a good recall of detail. He can recall what she had been wearing, but when he thinks of her face, the impression he is left with is like the after- effect of staring too long at a lamp.

There is one thing, though, one inarguable fact. For the first time in years – years of insomnia or fitful, disturbed sleep – he had a full night’s rest, and did not dream.

He learns that the Contessa has got the funding for her picture. Fede tells him it is some American industrialist, keen to cloak himself in culture perhaps. Filming has apparently already begun, somewhere on the coast, and in a studio near Rome. Not Cinecittà, though, but a tiny set-up owned by the Contessa herself. An interesting name: il Mondo Illuminato. The Illuminated World.

On a whim, he takes a detour one morning past the building that had housed the party. But the whole place is shut up, looking almost as though it has remained thus for the last five hundred years. Perhaps he should not be surprised. The whole night had felt hardly real.




3 (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)

March 1953


An early spring day, almost warm. He walks to work along the river, squinting against the light that flashes off the water. The city looks as glorious as he has ever seen it, wreathed in gold, and yet as ever he feels as if he is looking at it through a pane of glass; one step removed. Perhaps it is time to move again, he thinks. Perhaps he should have gone further afield in the first place: out of Europe. America. Australia. Money, though: that is a problem. North Africa could be more feasible. Somewhere out of the way, where he might live on very little and make a last attempt at the wretched writing. The war novel: the one meant to make some sense of it all. The problem, he thinks, is that one has to have made sense of something in one’s own mind before committing it to paper.

As soon as he enters the office, he is stopped by Arlo, the post boy.

‘A woman called, and asked for you.’

‘She did? What was her name?’

‘Um.’ Arlo checks the note. ‘No name.’ And then defensively, ‘She said she was a friend – I didn’t think to ask.’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s staying at a hotel …’ Arlo searches for the name, raises his eyebrows when he finds it. ‘The Hassler.’

He wonders. It could be her, he thinks. He cannot think of anyone else he knows who could afford to stay at the Hassler, after all. He feels a thrill of something like anticipation.

‘This way, sir.’

Hal follows the man into the drawing room. His first thought is that it is precisely the sort of atmosphere his father, the Brigadier, would be drawn to. It reminds him powerfully, in fact, of the Cavalry and Guards club, where his father would stay while in London. From the windows the Spanish Steps are visible, thronged with life. The room is not crowded, but he searches in vain for a glimpse of blonde.

The waiter is leading him now toward a table in the opposite corner. When he sees its occupant, seated with her back to him, Hal is about to tell the man that he has made a mistake. This cannot be the person he is meeting. But then she turns.

‘Ah,’ she smiles, and raises one eyebrow. ‘You came, I’m so pleased. I did not know if you would be interested in keeping an appointment you were actually invited to.’

‘Contessa.’ He takes the seat opposite her.

‘I thought I would keep my invitation mysterious enough to intrigue you.’

‘It certainly did.’

‘You guessed that it came from me?’

‘Ah – no, I did not.’

She peers at him, and smiles. ‘You hoped that it was someone else?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Well,’ she says. ‘I have an offer of work for you.’

‘You do?’

Her smile broadens. ‘Ah, but you’re interested now!’

‘What is it, exactly?’ As if he is in a position to turn down anything. But he did not live with his father for so many years without learning something of how to conduct business.

Before she can speak the waiter has appeared to take their order.

‘Bring us some of that gnocchi,’ she tells him. ‘The one that Alessandro makes for me.’

The man nods, and disappears.

‘So,’ she says. ‘To business.’

‘Of course.’

‘My film, The Sea Captain, is being released this spring.’

‘Congratulations – I heard that you had funding for it. I didn’t realize it was finished.’

‘Thank you.’

The gnocchi arrives now. Hal has only eaten the dish alla Romana – doughy shapes submerged in sauce and baked. These are delicate morsels, scattered with oil and thin leaves of shaved truffle. They are delicious – and Hal notices that the Contessa, despite her extreme slenderness, is enjoying them with the same relish as he.

‘Who directed the film?’ Hal asks.

The Contessa smiles. ‘Giacomo Gaspari.’

‘Goodness.’ Hal is impressed. ‘It must be something.’

She nods and says, without preamble, ‘It is. Quite brilliant – which I can say, because I’m not the one responsible for that. It will be screening at the festival, at Cannes.’

‘That’s wonderful.’

‘I hoped that you might come with us.’

‘To Cannes?’

‘Yes – but on the journey there, too. I’ve planned a trip first. A tour, along the coast where it was filmed, to publicize it. And to make the people of Liguria feel that they are involved, that it is their film. It is what they do in Hollywood: why should we not do it here?’ She smiles at Hal. ‘I thought you could cover it.’

‘For The Tiber?’

‘No,’ the Contessa says, with a note of triumph. ‘For Tempo.’

Tempo is in the big league – Italy’s answer to the American Life. ‘But how? I don’t know anyone there.’

‘Ah, but I do. They asked me if I knew of a writer who would do it – and I suggested you.’

Hal can’t help asking. ‘Why?’

‘I like the way you write.’ Seeing his expression, she smiles. ‘I told you I would not forget. Luckily, the editor at Tempo agrees with me that you are the right man for the job.’

‘When?’

‘The film festival is next month. But you would be needed for the two weeks before it, too.’

‘Well,’ Hal says, trying to process it all. ‘I suppose it depends …’

‘On the fee? I’m afraid the one they’ve offered is rather small.’ She names the sum: it is still far more than The Tiber pay for an article. ‘But I thought I would help. Because you would be doing me a personal favour, too.’ She takes a fountain pen from her reticule and scribbles on the menu. She turns it towards him, and says, with genuine regret, ‘I’m sorry it can’t be higher. I have a budget, you know …’

Hal stares at it, absorbing the significance of the extra nought. With it, he could travel to one of the wild, liminal places he has been thinking of: certainly North Africa, Australia even.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I could do it for that.’ To do anything other than accept, considering the sum in question, would be idiocy.

‘Excellent. I will put you in touch with the man I spoke to there.’ She takes up her fountain pen again, and passes the menu back to him. There written next to the primi piatti, is an address: Il Palazzo Mezzaluna, vicino a Tellaro, Liguria. He has not been to Liguria: has only a vague idea of brightly coloured houses beside an equally luminous sea – glimpsed, perhaps, on a postcard.

‘You will need to be there,’ she says, ‘in three weeks’ time.’

‘I shall,’ he says, quickly. ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’

The smile she gives him is enigmatic. He feels a sudden trepidation. He has learned to distrust things that seem too good to be true.




4 (#u9fc75a6f-85fc-5e53-8db7-46c3ada2381e)

Liguria, April 1953


His first impressions of Liguria are snatched through a smeared train window. These are visions at once exotic and banal: washing strewn from the windows of red-tiled, green-shuttered houses, road intersections revealing a chaos of vehicles. Palm trees, tawdry-looking railway hotels. The occasional teal promise of the sea. The sea. At the first glimpse of it he finds himself gripping the seat rest, hard. Sometimes it has this effect on him.

This whole mission still has about it an air of unreality. If he hadn’t had that slightly stilted meeting with the editor at Tempo – who seemed as bemused as he did as to why he had been chosen – he might have reason to believe it was all the Contessa’s little joke.

‘Keep it light,’ the man had said. ‘What do the stars eat and drink, what do they wear? What is Giulietta Castiglione reading, ah, what does Earl Morgan do to relax? Stories of cocktails in Portofino, of sun on private beaches. Of … of a sea the colour of the sapphires our leading lady wears to supper.’ Hal had tried not to smile. ‘Nothing too worthy. Our readers want escapism. Niente di troppo difficile. Capisci?’

‘Si,’ Hal had said. ‘I understand.’

La Spezia is no great beauty, though there is a muscular impressiveness to the place, the harbour flanked with merchant vessels and passenger ferries. Not so long ago there would have been warships marshalled here. To Hal they are almost conspicuous in their absence. The enemy’s own destroyers and submarines, sliding beneath the surface black and deadly.

He catches the passenger ferry, and realizes that it is the first time he has been afloat in years. Again, he reminds himself, it is all different. The tilt and shift of the boat much more pronounced; so close to the water that he can feel the salt spray on his cheek. He concentrates on the sights. Here, finally, is the fabled beauty: the land rising smokily beyond the coast, the clouds banked white behind. A castle, rose-gold in the afternoon sun.

He looks at his fellow travellers. Poverty still pinches some faces tight, clothes are a decade or more out of date. Marshall Aid, it seems, has not lessened the struggle by much for them. In the relative prosperity of the capital it is easy to forget – to feel, sometimes, like a poor relation.

At Lerici, a little way down the coast, all the passengers disembark. Hal hasn’t yet worked out this part of the journey, but according to the map the place should be only a few miles by water. Hal goes to the skipper, who lounges against the stern with a cigarette and scowls at him through the smoke.

‘Il Palazzo Mezzaluna?’

The man takes a lazy drag, squinting as though he hasn’t understood. Hal repeats himself. As comprehension dawns, his question is met with a short, derisive bark of a laugh, a shake of the head.

‘No,’ the man says. ‘It isn’t on my route. It is a private residence.’

‘Yes,’ Hal says. ‘But for a little extra?’

‘No, signor. I am finished for the day.’ But as Hal turns to leave him he shouts something, gesturing to several small crafts heaped with fishing gear. A group of sunburned men sit near them, sharing an impromptu picnic of bread and shellfish, shucking them with their knives and sucking the morsels from the shells.

Hal approaches them and asks his question. One of the men shrugs and stands, brushing breadcrumbs from himself. He leads the way over to his boat and moves a few items around – nets, a can of oil, a box of bait and a rod – to make room for Hal and his bag. Hal clambers in, aware of the ambivalent gaze of the men who remain, eating their oysters. What do they make of him, this Englishman in his tired suit, climbing in beside the fishing tackle?

The man starts his engine and they putter out of the harbour, pitching dangerously as they cross the wake of a larger boat. Then back out into the navy blue of the open sea, rounding the nub of the headland. The little boat speeds across the water, sending up a fine salt spray. After only fifteen minutes or so the man points to the shore.

‘Èlà!’

In the distance: a semicircular opening in the dark mass of trees, separated from the water by a silvery thread of sand. And nestling among the trees, dead centre, an enormous building. A grand hotel, one might presume, seeing it from afar. As they draw closer Hal is better able to make it out. A palace, in the Belle Époque style. The façade is a coral pink that anywhere else in the world would look ridiculous … and yet here, drenched in the evening sun, is something like magnificent. A white jetty stretches out like a piece of bleached driftwood into the blue depths. A figure waits, watching their approach.

Hal steps onto the jetty, heaving his bag after him. The waiting figure is a liveried member of staff who strides toward Hal, hand outstretched for his luggage. Against the spotless white of his uniform the leather case looks small and battered.

‘Good evening, sir.’

Hal goes back to the fisherman, pays him, quickly. The man seems a little bemused, as though he had never expected his shabby passenger to be welcome in such a place. With a shake of his head, as though to clear it, he fires his engine and is gone.

It is evening now, Hal realizes, the light like blue glass. Before them rises a shallow stone staircase flanked by a line of pine trees. Each is topped by a fluid dark abstract of foliage, like a child’s drawing of a cloud. Their resiny scent fills the warm air. The man leads the way, moving so briskly that Hal has to jog a little to keep up. They move past a series of gardens, each, Hal sees, is different from the last. ‘The Japanese garden,’ the man says, as they pass the first: and in the manmade pools Hal glimpses an iridescent carp, sliding fatly among trailing pondweed. There are ornamental bridges, gravel raked into intricate patterns about carefully shaped hillocks of moss. Then the Moroccan garden, filled with bright blooms that spill from urns painted a luminous blue. The Italian garden: a stately formal arrangement of dark shrubs and classical statues. As Hal and his guide pass, a flock of white doves take wing. It is itself like a film set, Hal thinks, hardly real.

Inside, the house is a cool space, reminiscent of an art gallery. A couple of line drawings that might be Picasso – his eye isn’t good enough at this distance to be certain. A cuboid nude that could be Henry Moore.

The room that he is shown to is white, high-ceilinged.

‘You can change here for the evening,’ the man tells him. ‘Drinks are at seven thirty.’ Hal looks down at his travelling suit. Change into what, exactly? The suit is crumpled, but it is by far the smartest thing he owns. He wore it because it is the smartest thing he owns. And so he sits down on the bed, looks about himself. The window has a view out towards the back of the house, where a great stone terrace leads down into further manicured gardens, showing now as a dark emerald green. A space hewn by the twin forces of wealth and will out of the natural gorse. At the far end is a line of tall cypresses. In the weakening light they are black sentinels, funereal in aspect. Suddenly he catches a shimmer of gold, which resolves itself into the hair of a woman. She wears what appears to be a long black dress, camouflaged against the trees behind her so that only her face and arms can be made out. An unnameable excitement runs through him. He goes to turn out the light in the room, so he can make the scene out better, but when he looks back she has disappeared.

At eight o’clock the open window discloses the unmistakable sounds of musical instruments being tuned: the squawk of violins, the throb of a double bass. Hal showers in the gilded bathroom, sloughing off the crust of salt, and glances quickly in the mirror. His clothes are more creased than ever. But his face betrays little of his tiredness. He knows that he is lucky, to look like this. His face is his passport.

When he returns downstairs the gardens have been transformed: lit now by a host of lanterns and filled with guests. Some of the guests are from a similar crowd to the party in Rome; they have that same lustre of wealth, of lives lived on the grand scale. But he sees, too, children dressed as if for the beach, dark-haired girls in simple sundresses, men in casual trousers and unbuttoned shirts. Along one wall of the house a line of elderly men sit and talk with great intensity: all wear battered caps in various sun-faded hues, sandals on hoary feet. The women who Hal presumes are their wives look on censoriously from a few metres away and they, too, wear an unofficial uniform: floral-patterned smocks and woollen cardigans. Hal’s suit no longer seems such a faux pas. But he is aware that he belongs to neither tribe: not that of the dinner jackets, or that of the summer slacks. He is an anomaly.

‘Hal.’

He turns, and finds the Contessa. She is wearing a tangerine linen dress than could almost be a monk’s tabard, with a large hood pulled up over her hair. It is one of the more eccentric outfits Hal has ever seen.

‘I’m so pleased,’ she says. ‘I worried that you would change your mind.’

Hal thinks that she can have no concept of a journalist’s living, if she imagined he might have been able to turn her offer down.

‘I wanted to know something,’ he says, because he has been wondering. ‘How are we travelling to Cannes?’

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘but you will find out tomorrow morning.’

‘All these people are coming too?’ He gestures toward the crowd.

She laughs. ‘Oh, no. No. I have invited them all for the evening.’ She counts off the different groups on her fingers. ‘There are friends, the film crowd, your colleagues from the press’ – she gestures towards a passing photographer – ‘and some of the people from the village near here. They come often – especially the children and their parents – to swim off my jetty, and walk in the grounds. It is why I make such an effort with the gardens. And they appreciate a good party, like all sensible Italians. Wait until the dancing starts. But first I will introduce you to the other guests. Come.’ She beckons with one hand.

The man she leads him to first is etiolated-looking, with blond hair so pale that it is almost white, receding on either side of the head severely. A thin face, with all of the bones visible beneath the skin. He is dressed in a wine-coloured suit – beautifully made, but with the unfortunate effect of making his complexion sallower still.

The Contessa moves into English. It is the first time Hal has heard her use it, and he is surprised by her fluency. ‘Hal Jacobs, meet Aubrey Boyd, who will be taking the pictures to accompany your article. This man is the only true challenger to Beaton’s crown, in my opinion. He is a simply splendid photographer – makes one look like a goddess. He has a way of making all one’s little wrinkles disappear. How do you do it?’ The Contessa is impressively wrinkled even for one of her advanced years. A life well-lived, Hal thinks, much of it in the full glare of the sun.

Aubrey Boyd raises one thin eyebrow. ‘I cannot reveal my magic.’ And then, quickly, ‘Though none was needed in your case.’

‘He did the most wonderful series on American heiresses, didn’t you, Aubrey? Posing like so many Cleopatras and Anne Boleyns. And let me tell you,’ she says to Hal, conspiratorially, ‘none of them will ever look like that again in their lives. I know that your pictures will look fabulous in Tempo.’

‘Yes,’ Aubrey says, a little dubiously. Hal has the impression that he sees the magazine as somewhat beneath him.

Next the Contessa is introducing him to Signor Gaspari, the director, hailed in recent years as a god of Italian cinema. The man cannot be taller than five foot five, the hunch of his shoulders robbing him of a couple of inches. Something about the way he stands suggests a body that has been put through more than its fair share of suffering.

‘My dear friend,’ the Contessa says, as she stoops to embrace him. ‘Meet our young journalist, Hal.’

‘I loved your last film,’ Hal says.

‘Thank you,’ Gaspari says, solemnly, without any visible sign of pleasure.

Hal remembers it vividly. The war-torn city, beautiful in decay. And that protagonist, the solitary man, wandering through it. His aloneness all the more profound for the hubbub of crowds surrounding him. The atmosphere of the film, the exquisite sadness of it. He tells Gaspari this.

‘You have understood my intention well,’ Gaspari says.

‘I wondered,’ Hal says, ‘whether you might have meant it as a lament for Rome – for the country? To what was lost in the war?’

Gaspari smiles – but it is a melancholy, downturned smile. He shakes his head. ‘Nothing so lofty as that, I’m afraid,’ he says. ‘My intentions were … much more human. The loss was one of the heart.’

Hal senses there is a story here – one he is intrigued to hear.

‘Another drink, Giacomo?’ the Contessa asks, as a waiter passes by with a tray.

‘Oh no,’ Gaspari waves a hand. ‘Thank you, but I must be returning to my room now. I wanted to come for a little while, but I am no good at parties. And Nina needs to go to bed.’ He glances down, and Hal follows his gaze to where a tiny dachshund sits, quite still, the black beads of her eyes trained on her master. Then Gaspari nods to them both and moves away, the dog trotting at his heels.

‘A wonderful man,’ the Contessa says. ‘A great friend, and a genius. Some, I know, think he is a little odd. But genius is often partnered with strangeness.’

‘He looks …’ Hal tries to think how to put it. ‘Is he well?’

‘He suffered greatly,’ the Contessa says, ‘during the war.’

Hal waits for her to continue, but she does not. She has turned towards another man, who is approaching them across the grass. He is elegant in fine, pale linen, with leonine hair swept back from his brow. A fingerprint of grey at each temple. He is not particularly tall, but there is something about him suggestive of stature. A trick of the eye, Hal thinks. A confidence trick. He smiles, revealing white teeth. Even Hal can see that he is handsome, in that American way. And somehow ageless – in spite of the grey.

‘Mr Truss.’ The Contessa’s smile is not the same one she gave Signor Gaspari. It is the smile of a diplomat, measured out in a precise quantity.

‘It’s a wonderful party, Contessa. I must congratulate you.’

‘Thank you. Hal, meet Frank Truss – who has been very supportive of the film. Frank Truss, meet Hal Jacobs, the journalist who will be joining us.’

‘Hal,’ Truss puts out a hand. Hal takes it, and feels the coolness of the man’s grasp, and also the strength of it. ‘Who do you work for?’

Without knowing why, Hal feels put on his guard, as though the man has challenged him in some indefinable way. ‘I don’t work for anyone in particular,’ he says. ‘But this piece is for Tempo magazine.’

‘Ah. Well.’ He flashes his white smile. ‘I don’t know it. But, clearly, I will have to make sure to watch what I say.’

‘I’m not that sort of journalist,’ Hal says. It sounds more hostile than he had intended.

‘Well, good. I’m sure you’re the right man for the job. Great to have you on board.’

He speaks, thinks Hal, as though the whole trip were of his own devising. Odd, but there is something about him – his statesmanlike bearing perhaps, his air of entitled ease – that reminds Hal of his father. A man who expects deference. And if he is anything like Hal’s father, it is an unpleasant experience for those that fail to show it.

As Truss moves away, the Contessa turns to him, confidentially.

‘He’s the money behind the film,’ she says.

‘Oh yes?’

‘A powerful man.’ She lowers her tone. ‘He has other business in Italy – industry, I understand. And … It is also possible that he may have certain connections here one would rather not look too closely at. I, certainly, am not going to look too closely at them. Perhaps investing in the arts looks good for him. But he describes himself as a man of culture: so that is how I will view him. And I like his wife, which helps.’

‘His wife?’

‘Yes,’ the Contessa searches the crowd. ‘Though I can’t see her here. Never mind, there will be plenty of time for us all to get acquainted. But – ah – there is our leading lady!’

It is a face known to Hal because of the number of times he has seen it in newsprint and celluloid form. Giulietta Castiglione. Her outfit is surprisingly modest, a sprigged peasant dress, cut high at the neck. Her small feet are bare, more likely a careful choice than real bohemian artlessness. She has black hair, a great thick fall of it – the longest strands of which reach almost to her waist. There is a hum of interest about her. All the men – old and young – are transfixed. From the elderly women emanates a cloud of disapproval.

They say she has already turned down marriage proposals from some of the biggest names in Hollywood and in Cinecittà. And she was engaged, for a period of precisely one week, to her co-star in the film that made her name in America: A Holiday of Sorts.

Hal caught A Holiday in a Roman cinema, dubbed into Italian. It was a blowsy comedy: an American ambassador falls in love with a Neapolitan nun – played, with improbably ripe sensuality, by Giulietta. It should have been the sort of film one might watch to while away a rainy afternoon and then instantly forget. But there had been something about the actress: the combination of knowing and girlish naiveté, the curves of her body at odds with that virginally youthful face. She had been disturbing, unforgettable.

In the flesh, her charisma is more tangible, and more complex. Hal, watching her dip her head coyly in answer to a question from one man, and then throw her head back and laugh in answer to another, quickly begins to realize that she had not been playing a part so much as a dilute version of herself.

‘Well,’ the Contessa says, ‘quite something, is she not?’ And then, ‘Wait until you see her in the film.’

Hal wonders how this sensual presence will translate itself into Gaspari’s work. The two seem as contradictory as fire and water. But perhaps this will be what makes the combination work.

Despite himself, he is beginning to look forward to the trip. Before he had thought only about the money, how it would make everything easier for him. But he sees now that here is the promise of an experience out of the ordinary, one that will help him forget himself. And the chance to be in the presence of a great storyteller; for that is what Signor Gaspari is. To learn from him, perhaps.

At some point the Contessa is drawn into conversation with another guest, and Hal is free to roam on his own. The drinks keep coming and Hal, who for a long while hasn’t been able to afford the luxury of getting drunk, takes advantage of them. By his fifth – every one so necessary at the time – the evening has melted into a syrup of sensation. He wanders through the grounds, meeting guests and forgetting them instantly.

Later, the dancing begins, and Hal finds himself thrust into the fray. The poor girl whose hand he has commandeered trips and squeals, to no avail, as he spins her around and around and around, and the lantern lights become a vortex of flame about them.

In the small hours he wanders down to the gardens. Peacocks strut about freely, disturbed from their sleep by the din of the party. He sits down upon a miniature stone house, blinking in an attempt to clear his head, and observes one of the males. The bird preens himself, his plumage gleaming in the lantern-light, tail feathers rustling importantly. And yet for all the beauty of his feathers, Hal sees that the creature’s feet are scaled and ugly, like a common chicken’s. This suddenly strikes him as philosophically significant.

‘You think you’re special,’ he tells the bird, labouring over the words, ‘but you aren’t. We’re all just chickens, underneath it all, however much effort we put into not revealing it.’

Later, he remembers the woman he saw in the gardens behind the house, at dusk. Though it was several hours ago he has some drunken idea that she will still be there; that he only has to go and look for her. So he makes his way round to the back of the house, and towards the dark line of cypresses, his way illuminated now only by the silver light of the moon. Of course, she is not there. Perhaps she was a figment of his imagination.

As he turns to make his way back to the house – he must go to bed, he knows, or wake up here covered in pine needles – he sees something gleaming dully upon the ground. He stoops, and finds an earring – a stud of some large, cut stone, the colour indiscernible in the gloom. He puts it in his pocket. So she was real, after all.





5 (#ulink_ab94c51f-ac05-54ee-9060-cc0de8f9e436)


He wakes with a start, and stares about in confusion at the unfamiliar room. He knows that he is not in Rome, because there his view is of the tired brickwork of the building opposite. Here he can see only lancing blue. Everything hurts him: the strength of the light, the whiteness of the room … He shuts his eyes, and opens them again, hoping that the pain this time will have lessened, but there is no change. Shakily he climbs out of the bed and sways his way across to the bathroom. Now he is remembering, but in a series of dislocated images: a peacock, the Contessa’s monk-like robe, that final drink. A man with white teeth bared in a smile.

His face in the mirror betrays little of the night’s excess. ‘It’s strange,’ Suze told him, once, ‘but you somehow look even better when you’re tired. It’s almost unnerving.’ But he does feel terrible. What would help, he feels, would be to bathe his head with cool water. He splashes his face with water from the tap, but he can’t seem to get it cold enough. He thinks: the sea.

It is still early enough that most of the guests won’t yet be about. Certainly, no one is visible as he makes his way downstairs and down through the gardens. And yet as he nears the end of the path he glimpses movement at the far end of the jetty, and stops. A golden head emerges, then the rest of her. She wears a black bathing suit, high at the neck but generously cut away at the shoulders. He watches her move up the jetty toward him and feels a nudge of recognition. A famous actress, perhaps. After all, anything is possible in this place.

She stoops and picks up her wrap, which lies strewn across the boards, and ties it with a quick, careless movement about her waist. Hal watches, standing completely still as if under some sort of spell.

She has nearly reached the path. For the first time he sees her face properly, and only now does he recognize her.

She looks different from the last time he saw her – still beautiful, of course, but before everything about her had seemed polished to a high sheen. Wet, her hair appears darker than before. Her legs are pale and bare.

He watches as she loops her wrap around the back of her head with her other hand – the left – to rub it dry. Then she glances up toward the house and sees him. He sees how she goes still, like an animal freezing before taking flight. He hurries his pace towards her, as though she might flee from him.

But she stays in her spot on the path, clutching the towel to herself.

‘It’s you,’ he says, as he walks toward her.

‘Yes,’ she says, quietly, ‘it’s me.’ He has somehow managed to forget the exact sound of her voice – the oddness hidden beneath the American accent, as though the latter has only been lacquered over the top.

She is not pleased to see him. He can see it in her face – the dismay, even something like fear. Her gaze moves up towards the house as though she is aware of an audience watching. Involuntarily he finds himself turning to look, but sees no one there.

‘I assumed I wouldn’t see you again,’ he says.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks, as though he hasn’t spoken. Her voice is low, almost a whisper.

He stalls. ‘I’m the journalist,’ he adds, feeling suddenly put on the defensive. ‘I’m writing a piece for Tempo.’

‘Journalist? I thought you were a writer.’

‘I am.’ He tries not to sound too defensive. ‘It’s a form of writing, like any other.’

She doesn’t reply. He is unnerved by the fixity of her gaze. She is studying him as though trying to convince herself he is really there. Then, remembering herself, she looks away, gives a shake of her head. And when she looks back at him her expression is a blank. Hal has the distinct impression of a blind being drawn hurriedly down.

‘Well,’ she says, running her hand through her damp hair, ‘I see.’ And then, with visible effort, ‘And how have you been?’ There is an impersonal civility to her tone. This is not the woman he remembers. Then she had been reticent, but not false.

‘I didn’t see you at the party last night,’ he says.

‘Oh. I wasn’t feeling well.’

And then he thinks. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

‘What was?’

‘Last night. At the end of the garden, by the trees … wearing that black dress.’

Her face is a blank. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I was in bed.’

He remembers now the emerald stud in his suit pocket. ‘I found something – an earring.’

‘Not mine,’ she says, brusque. And then, politely, ‘Did you enjoy it? The party?’

‘I don’t remember that much of it, to be honest.’

‘Ah,’ she nods. ‘And who did you meet?’

‘Aubrey Boyd, Signor Gaspari. Another man, an American – Truss, that was his name. Do you know—’

But she cuts him off. ‘The water’s cold,’ she says, and draws the towel tighter about herself. ‘I have to go and change into something warmer.’ Still she avoids his gaze. ‘I’ll see you later, perhaps. At breakfast.’

‘All right,’ Hal says. ‘I meant to ask—’

But she has already moved beyond him – carefully, so that a good couple of feet of air remain between them – and is striding purposefully toward the house. He watches her all the way up the path, the wrap snickering away from her in the breeze.

He walks down to the jetty, where her wet footprints form a trail on the bleached wood, yet to dry in the sun. He shrugs off his shorts and shirt and, without giving himself time to think about it, dives from the end. Only too late does he realize that he does not know how shallow it is, but he is lucky – when he rights himself his feet don’t touch the bottom. And frigid; very much a spring sea, without weeks of warmth behind it. A sting against the flesh, but gradually becoming bearable. He has swum in the Solent in April; it is nothing compared to that. He has known greater cold, too, cold that steals the breath and binds fast and deadly to the flesh. But he will not think of that.

He lets it surround his aching head; rolls onto his back and kicks away from the shore. The water is still about him. It seems to cradle him, to buoy him up. This is the sea of his boyhood: of childhood trips to the Sussex coast.

They had gone to the beach together: Hal and his parents. East Head had been the favourite, a white spit of land crested with soft dunes. Water, warm in the summer shallows but cold where the bottom shelved into the main channel. It was where he learned to swim – a good place for it, because it was so benign. No, he thinks now. That’s not quite right. Not all benign. The treachery of memory. At the far end of the spit the calm surface hid a secret current, straight out towards France. A woman had been swept into the open sea one summer. A child the next year – and her father had saved her, only to drown himself. He was never allowed to swim at that end of the beach, and there was a flag there, to warn of it. But every summer someone disregarded the warning.

Ah, but those long, drowsy, salty days on the beach eating sandwiches gritty with sand. His mother glamorous in her headscarf and wrapper, her toenails painted with dark varnish. His father still dapper, but running slightly to fat. Never quite her match.

What he would give to return to that place. Not childhood, precisely, but that place of simple pleasures, of unknowingness. That is the problem with home: it reminds him of what he was, what was lost. And the sea has been changed for him forever now.

He pushes harder, driving himself through the water, thinking of nothing but the movement, the labour of his muscles.

Pausing briefly to look back at the shore, he realizes that he has already come some way. He is almost as far from the jetty as he is from the finger of land that curves round in front of the bay. He might as well swim to it, see what is on the other side.

It is further than he had realized, and the sea becomes rougher further out. But finally he reaches and rounds the small spit of land. Revealed on the other side is a yacht, moored a little way off the coast at anchor. It is clear from the relative size of the men visible on deck that the boat is huge. There are two masts, each appearing as tall – perhaps taller – than the boat is long. The hull is dark blue. It seems designed for crossing oceans at great speed. Now Hal understands. This is how they will be making their way to Cannes.

Swimming back is a little harder. The jetty appears very small, a great distance away. His muscles ache. He isn’t worried, but he is bored of it now, fatigued. Perhaps the tide is against him too, for it all feels more difficult. Does the Mediterranean have a tide? He isn’t certain. His hangover intrudes as it did not on the outward leg, his head beginning to ache as though his brain has swollen too large for the skull.

The last forty metres or so are most difficult of all. It feels as though something has wrapped itself around his legs. There is some sort of current, he realizes, one that must have helped him on the way out. Now it is tugging at him, pulling him away from the shore. His muscles ache with the effort and occasionally he swallows a mouthful of briny water. You are meant to swim sideways with a current, he thinks – but if he were to do that he would be taken past the headland and into open sea. For the first time since he learned to swim, he feels something like alarm: a sense of real danger. He does not seem to be getting any closer to the shore, and yet the effort merely to stay in one spot is extraordinary. Will he call for help? Would there be any use in it? He squints up through the sweat and the water fogging his vision, and cannot see anyone in the garden. But just as he decides that he must do it, no matter the humiliation, his final effort propels him further than before. The current’s hold on him seems to slacken, as though an invisible hand has instantly released him. His movements become easy again, he is moving forward. Though he feels his tiredness through his whole body it is difficult to believe now in the danger of a few seconds before.

When he finally pulls himself from the water, his arms are weak, his legs shake. Unable to think of anything else to do, unable to quite make sense of what has happened to him, he lies prone on the warm wood and waits for the sun to dry him.




Her


My hands are still trembling. It took great determination not to run from him: to remain for a few minutes, instead, and talk as civilly as I could manage. I knew that we might be seen from the house. For that reason, I had to act as normally as I could.

I cannot believe it is him. I worked hard afterwards, to put that night in Rome from my mind. Forgetting is something I am adept at. I had almost been able to convince myself that it hadn’t really happened. Not because the memory of it was abhorrent. The opposite, in fact. This was what made it dangerous.

When I get back to the room, to my relief, Frank is in the dressing room, the door closed. He calls to me, through the door.

‘Did you have a good swim?’

I stop. Is there something in his tone? Does he know? Could he somehow know about Rome, and have orchestrated this?… I am being absurd. If he had known, I would have found out long before now.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes. A little cold, but refreshing.’

‘Good.’

I hadn’t swum far. Enough to feel my muscles ache. Off at an angle, to avoid the current the Contessa had warned of: an undertow along this stretch of coast that has been known to sweep swimmers out to sea. The English poet, Shelley, drowned only a little way along the coast from here: it is not so benign as it appears.

I find myself moving, despite my better judgement, to the balcony. I am drawn there in the way one is often compelled to do the destructive thing: to press the bruise.

The view is out to sea and in the broad blue I can make him out. His dark head, the occasional glimpse of a limb, the churned water like a scar about him. It is difficult to tell at first in which direction he is swimming. And then I realize that he is trying for the shore, but is making no progress. Is he in trouble? Frank, I know, has a pair of binoculars. I go to the smallest of his travelling cases and open it. My pulse is thudding in my ears. Because how will I explain myself if he finds me, rooting through his luggage?

I find them in their leather pouch and return to the balcony. I can see, now, that he is in trouble. Some invisible force is preventing him from making any headway, and he appears to be tiring. I understand now: it is the current. I should have warned him. What can I do? If I were brave, I would run from the room, sound the alarm, no matter the attention it would draw to myself. I am a coward …

Such a coward that I am going to let him drown in front of me? I must do something.

But I see that something has changed. He is gaining on the jetty. He has forced himself through the current somehow. The relief leaves me weak.

‘What’s so interesting out there?’

I turn and find Frank framed in the doorway, watching me. He is the picture of relaxed elegance in his powder-blue suit. But he is never quite relaxed – it is the key to his success. If one knows what to look for, one can see the animal alertness beneath the languor.

‘Oh,’ I say, moving in towards him. ‘I was trying to see across to Portovenere.’

‘Can you?’ He moves towards me, his hand outstretched for the binoculars.

‘No,’ I say. I’m not certain. I didn’t even look. Rather than handing them to him, I place the binoculars on the dressing table and step toward him.

‘Please,’ I say. ‘The clasp of my swimsuit – I can’t seem to unfasten it.’

There is something that very few people understand about him. He has been described on numerous occasions as a man of unusual self-possession. But what isn’t known is that he is also bound by certain potent appetites. I step out of the swimsuit, knowing that his eyes are on me. On the skin I have revealed, tightening in the spring breeze from the balcony. This is one of the few times in which I feel the balance shift towards me, in which I become powerful.

By the time he steps out onto the balcony, and I after him, there is no sign of the man I knew in Rome. I could almost bring myself to believe – tohope – that he had disappeared.

*




Hal


Showered and dressed, Hal is summoned to breakfast. The terrace in front of the house, which the night before had supported the band and the bar, is now set with a table bearing breakfast fare. A whole salmon glistens – rather raw and naked-looking in the strong light – beside dishes of charcuterie and cheese, a cornucopia of fruit: strawberries, oranges, grapes; a basket of burnished brioche loaves and other delicacies. There is champagne, but Hal gives this a wide berth. He loads his plate with food, feeling hollowed with hunger after his swim. As he lifts his fork to his mouth it shakes slightly; his body still electric with adrenaline.

Signor Gaspari is there, his little dog on his lap, and next to him sits the photographer, Aubrey Boyd. Hal gestures to the seat next to Aubrey.

‘May I?’

‘By all means.’ Aubrey’s plate, balanced on his lap, bears five segments of grapefruit, fanned out in a bloom-like pattern. He probes one with a fork, speculatively.

‘Not hungry?’

‘Oh, I can never take much in the morning – and I intend to wear a thirty-two until I die.’ Aubrey appraises Hal. ‘You certainly seemed to enjoy yourself last night.’

‘Yes,’ he says, queasily remembering the final drink. Something about a chicken.

Aubrey Boyd watches him, amused. ‘I saw you disappear off into the gardens late on. So I think you missed Giulietta Castiglione dancing in little more than her bathing suit. Spontaneous, apparently. That little white dress simply happened to disappear at some point and then – pouf – there was a great deal more of Giulietta. I got some excellent shots.’ He sips his water. ‘You’ll get to meet her properly on the trip, of course. I’ll introduce you – I took the promotional shots for A Holiday.’

‘Thank you,’ Hal says. ‘In fact,’ he says, with careful disinterest, ‘there was someone else, too. I met her this morning – though I didn’t see her last night.’ He decides not to mention the previous encounter. ‘I wonder if you know her?’

‘Describe her to me.’

‘Her name’s Stella. I don’t know her surname. She’s blonde …’ he is about to say beautiful, but stops himself in time. ‘Short hair,’ he says, instead. ‘American.’

Aubrey frowns. And then he seems to think of something. ‘An odd accent, though?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh yes,’ Aubrey says, slowly – with something slightly cruel in his look. ‘In that case I think you have met Mrs Truss.’

It takes several seconds for Hal to digest this. ‘Mrs Truss? She’s …’

‘That American investor’s wife? Yes, old chap.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I don’t know her first name, but I rather think it must be her, from your account. Ever so glamorous. Hair the colour of money. She’s quite something, is she not?’

Suddenly, certain elements fall into place. Her reticence in telling him anything about herself, her haste in leaving the following morning. Her horror at seeing him on the jetty.

‘Oh,’ Aubrey says. ‘Why – there she is now.’

Hal looks up. There she is indeed, looking quite different to the person of a couple of hours earlier. A white shirtdress, heeled sandals, her hair combed. She is well suited to him, the elegant man appearing behind her in his blue suit. They are a matched pair, he realizes: they make more sense together than apart. His hand at her back – a caress, or possibly a steer.

So he was the one-time adventure, the penniless young man in his garret. He thinks of the smallness and shabbiness of the studio, and wonders if that was part of the thrill. He should have known, then, seeing the wealth she wore about her. Hair the colour of money, indeed.

He watches her, compelled in spite of himself. He thinks that his eyes would be drawn to her even if he did not know her: there is something innately watchable about her; the unique grace with which she moves. It does not appear affected. But who is he to tell? He knows even less of her than he thought.

He watches her husband too. He had decided he did not like the man, but perhaps he should pity him. Hal has made him that old-fashioned word: a cuckold. Except that he is not a figure that invites pity.

The Contessa has appeared now and is greeting them, offering them both champagne. Stella is shaking her head, but he – Truss – takes one for them both and hands her a glass. He is steering her towards the end of the table now, nearer to Hal. She glances up and catches sight of Hal watching her. Good: he rather wants her to see, to see that he understands now what she is. She looks quickly away.

She finds a seat at the furthest possible distance away, says something to her husband – her husband – and sits down. But Truss does not appear to be happy with her choice. He is gesturing to the patch of shade thrown by the parasol, only a few feet from Hal. She shakes her head. And Hal watches as the man takes her by the arm, and half-lifts her out of the seat. He isn’t quite able to believe what he is seeing. To anyone glancing over, it would look as though he is merely helping her from her chair. But to Hal, who has watched the whole interaction, it is something different. He sees the firmness of the grip about her upper arm, the expression on her face: vacillating between humiliation and fear.

He feels in some way that she has let him down. Being married to a man like Truss, a rich man’s wife, makes her ordinary. There are women like her on the Via Condotti every day, stepping from cars, trailed by their hapless spouses. Sweeping past the doorman at Bulgari, trying on, no doubt, the biggest, ugliest, costliest baubles they think they can get away with. And then to Caffè Greco, to compare these new spoils with the others of their species sitting about them. He has never paid these women, or their husbands, any heed before. They have been so far outside his own sphere, and his Rome, that they might as well have been from another planet. If he had thought of them, well, it might have been with something approaching contempt. He can see, now, reflected in the morning sun, the wink of gems at earlobes and wrist. He supposes that at least she has managed to find herself a wealthy man who is not fifty years her senior, balding and fat. Perhaps by the standards of such women she has landed a coup, even if he is a bully.

And yet … she didn’t seem the sort, to be bought off with trinkets. He would have credited her with more intelligence, a greater sense of self-worth.

He catches himself. One evening – and a few brief moments this morning – that is the sum total of how long he has known her. He knows nothing about her. It is nothing but the work of that pernicious thing that once served him so well in his writing: the overactive imagination. She had told him so little about herself that he couldn’t have known anything about her. And it is a relief that he has found out the truth. Now she will take up no more room in his thoughts.





6 (#ulink_487d2272-ffc8-50e6-ac51-709ab630e2c3)

Her


I am sure that when people see me, they see someone weak. And they would be right: I am. I wasn’t always, though.

I hadn’t thought about the girl I used to be for a long time. I hadn’t spoken her language, the old language, or even thought in it. Maybe I dreamed in it sometimes, but if I did I tried to forget that as soon as I woke. And then, a year ago, something happened that made me remember her.

I suppose I need to go back to the beginning.

To Spain, 1936.

To a town, cradled in the lee of the surrounding hills. It has been there since medieval times, under the sun. Red roofs and cobblestones, green fountains and moss, scent of coffee and aniseed.

It is there that I think I left her, the girl that I was. Or perhaps somewhere on the road to Madrid.

The last good memory.

June. A very hot night, too hot to sleep indoors, though the farmhouse was built to keep the warmth out. So my father – Papa – makes a makeshift tent for us, of old canvas and furniture. A gauze net over the opening, to keep the bugs out. An oil lamp for light, blown out once we have bedded down. Papa, my little brother Tino and me. We lie there with the dark surrounding us.

I didn’t know how alive the night could be before now. Deprived of all other senses, in our soft cocoon, it is cacophonous. We lie there listening, as my father names the sounds for us: the fluted exclamation of an owl, the frog music, low and guttural. Then, through the opening to the dark garden, the biggest miracle of all. Living pinpricks of light, much closer than the stars, but seeming for a moment to borrow their brilliance. Las luciérnagas. The fireflies.

They remind me a little of Papa. When you find yourself in the spotlight of his interest, there is no greater feeling. And then without warning, it will blink off – he will have made his way on to something else. He is a man of great passions, though most are fleeting. Our education was one. He removed us from school, claiming that our heads were being filled with religious dogma, announced that he would teach us himself. At first, he was wonderfully dedicated to it. He spent hours with us in his study, a generous – if sometimes impatient – tutor. As with his views about many things, his idea of what children should learn was a little eccentric. As a result, I got a good grounding in Greek philosophers, Spanish literature and German political theorists, speak English well and French passably, but know almost nothing in the way of basic arithmetic. Then, one day, the lessons stopped. He needed to focus on the second book: he needed us out of the study, actually … out of the house, making as little noise as possible. They never resumed.

The garden was another. Papa didn’t think of it, after a while, though he had grand plans for it at one stage. Once, when my aunt and uncle came to visit from Madrid, they helped to clear the weeds that had grown over the vegetable beds. They always seemed to enjoy spending time with Tino and me – they have no children of their own. My uncle, Tío Salvador, cut canes for beans and made bird-scarers for our fig tree. Tía Aída showed us how far apart to plant the potatoes, carrots, lettuces. All the while my father sat in his study, hammering away so hard at his typewriter we could hear the clack of the keys outside, above the chatter of the crickets.

The passions that remain steadfast: his writing, his politics, his country. He is a great man, Papa. His first book, about the struggle for a modern Spain, made his a name to conjure with. It has been read by the people that matter, as Uncle Salvador said, even if wasn’t a bestseller. Besides, the next book – more ambitious, more polemic – will be the one to make his name.

We love him helplessly. At times, desperately.

Often, he is away from home. He will go to Madrid to give lectures. Or he will go on his crusades: to poor peasant farmers in Estremadura, to industrial workers in the Basque country, explaining the concept of Socialism. It is not so bad. We always know he will return. I am fifteen now, nearly a woman. Besides, even when Papa is here I do most of the work about the house. He isn’t lazy, he simply doesn’t see the need for such things. While he is working on his second book – which he has nearly finished – he would quite happily live on hunks of stale bread, and let the house fall down around us.

I have always looked after Tino, too. My mother died giving birth to him. She was English, and extremely clever: my father met her studying at Cambridge. She had been told that she probably wouldn’t be able to have another child, after me. But she had been determined, as she was about many things. I thought I might never be able to forgive the baby for it, that I might hate him. But when I saw him for the first time – truly saw him, with his solemn dark eyes and pale silk of hair – it was as though he had reached out with his little fist and taken hold of my heart. From then on, it was his. I knew that I would fight like a lioness to keep him safe from harm.

Tino is a dreamer. He will spend hours drawing in his sketchbook, fantastical diagrams that seem to bear no relation to anything glimpsed in life. Except I asked him, once, what they were and he told me: ‘the bees’. As I looked, I began to understand. He had watched them move from flower to flower, and had tried to replicate the various paths of their flight with his crayons: a different hue for each bee. So what looked like nothing more than a great tangle of colour was actually something strangely logical, and oddly beautiful. That is a fitting description of his character, I think.

While other six-year-old boys might be pulling the wings off flies, Tino is content to watch his bees for hours, learning their secrets. On any given day, if you were to look from the windows of the kitchen, you would be able to see the top of his head above the stone wall that separates the main part of the garden from the hives. There are six hives in total, producing far more honey than we would ever be able to eat ourselves. They were another fleeting interest of Papa’s. Luckily, Tino’s love for the bees has far outlasted his.

To my eyes the movements of the insects appear aimless. But Tino has explained to me that the bees are organized, incredibly so. There are patterns to their movements, varying from season to season, that he is learning to read. He has told me about the queen, the female workers, the male drones. How they build and clean their hive, how they make, dry and store the honey, how they could make a new queen, if they needed one, in a special cell in the honeycomb. The ordinary worker-bee larva becomes something extraordinary, becomes a mother. Just sometimes I think that if we could make ourselves a new mother – or if we could make me into a real adult – things might be easier for us.

That evening, when we camped in the garden, above all of the other nighttime sounds I remember that of Tino’s breathing, fast with the wonder of it all. I felt his hand reach for mine, and I took it, and held it tight.

‘Can you see them?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

We watched them, the dancing points of light, for so long that even when I closed my eyes I could see them there, imprinted somewhere behind my eyelids.

That, then, is the last good memory. It has taken me a while to bring myself to remember past that point.




July 1936


It is a few weeks later, a July morning. I discover Papa listening to the radio. When I ask him if he wants me to make him a coffee – he drinks several cups a day, thick and black in the Turkish style – he makes a quieting motion with one hand. I listen with him, to see what it is that has him so excited.

There has been an incident, in Morocco, the announcer says. A young soldier has led some soldiers into an uprising there. They are trying to make their way to Spain. This is not the thing that frightens me; the man on the radio insists that it will be snuffed out within twenty-four hours – if that. The frightening thing is my father’s face, when he turns to look at me.

‘It’s coming,’ he says. ‘I knew it would happen. I’ve been saying it for the last year. But they’ve become complacent.’

‘But the man says—’

‘He says what they think people want to hear.’

‘Hear what?’ We turn, and see Tino, trailed by his elderly cat, Señor Bombón.

My father is, I think, about to tell him – but I get there first. ‘Nothing, Tino,’ I say now. ‘It’s nothing.’ For what is the point in a six-year-old worrying over something that does not concern him, that will be over before it has even begun? Especially a child who has terrible nightmares already: whose imagination is an overly fertile place. Even innocuous-sounding phrases – a chance mention by my father of ‘the trees in the distance’ turned those trees into one of his great fears. When he woke up screaming one night and I went to ask what the matter was, all he would say, as he clung to me, was: ‘los árboles, los árboles’. Sometimes, still, he wets the bed – a thing that we have to keep a secret from Papa, because Tino can’t bear the shame of him finding out.

Now, when he looks unconvinced, I say: ‘I’ve been wondering, something, Tino. About the bees. Perhaps you could explain it to me?’

It is a low trick, perhaps, but it works.

How long, though, will I be able to hide it from him? Because the thing is not crushed. Not in twenty-four hours, not in forty-eight. It spreads to the mainland. It moves through the country like a forest fire, snatching new fuel to feast upon. Seville, Cordoba, Saragossa, Papa tells me: all have fallen to these men they call the rebels. There are soldiers, trained marksmen, marching from their barracks to massacre unarmed townspeople. Besides the Spanish soldiers – known for their skill in the fine art of killing – there are the Moorish soldiers, known too for their talent, but also for their absolute lack of mercy.

Often, now, we hear the roar of aircraft above us. Tino will run out into the garden and watch them with a kind of wonder. And there is something awesome in them: in their speed and deadly grace. They are German, Papa says: Adolf Hitler is sending them to help the rebels. Mussolini, of Italy, is sending tanks and soldiers.

We are not their target, yet. Some other small town is, perhaps – or one of the big cities. How long before that changes?

Even as I understood the danger, there was a part of me that didn’t believe it would come. Or that even if it did it would only sear us a little, it couldn’t change us. The thing we had, our happiness, was too sacred. The arrogance of imagining that I was unchangeable. That what we had was stronger, somehow, than this thing that had engulfed the whole country. That was a hard lesson to learn.



PART TWO (#ulink_1a2081ae-8bed-5d6d-a40d-ac2db481cf68)





7 (#ulink_31bb71ef-21f0-5615-b94f-12ad461b449b)

Liguria, 1953


Appearing around the dark finger of land is a yacht: the same one Hal saw on his swim. Her navy blue hull gleams, the line of her prow is as sharp as a shark’s tooth. There are gilt fittings all about, sheening in the sunlight like newly minted coins. The twin masts appear, from this perspective, to pierce the sky. Even Hal, who knows so little about boats, can recognize that she is a beautiful work of construction.

‘She is quite something, is she not?’

He turns to find Frank Truss beside him. Hal nods.

‘I own a schooner,’ Truss says. ‘She’s in the States at present, of course. Southampton. Need to get her transferred over here some time. Sixty foot – a beautiful creature.’

‘Goodness,’ Hal says. ‘I used to own a Firefly.’

Truss frowns. Hal has the distinct impression that he doesn’t like to admit ignorance on any point. Finally, he says: ‘It’s a yacht?’

‘It’s a small wooden dinghy,’ Hal says, and steps away.

Aubrey Boyd wants to take a photograph. He gestures to Hal. ‘You, dear fellow, if you wouldn’t mind. Yes, you have exactly the look.’

‘I don’t think it would be right,’ Hal says. ‘I’m the journalist. Surely it should be Giulietta, or Gaspari …’

‘Not for this one,’ Aubrey Boyd tells him. ‘Anyway, why so shy? Are you afraid that the camera will steal your soul? It’s only a little fun.’ As though the matter is decided, he attaches the flashbulb and frames the scene. Hal steps forward reluctantly and stands before the sea, the yacht behind him. The other guests observe – perhaps trying to understand the supposed perfection of the fit.

Then Aubrey finds his next subject. ‘Mrs Truss, if you wouldn’t mind.’

She smiles, politely, and tries to demur. Hal catches sight of Giulietta Castiglione, whose expression is unforgettable. She is not used to being passed over.

Aubrey is not to be deterred. ‘Please, Mrs Truss. Your blonde hair, with his dark. You look so picturesque together. The perfect contrast …’ He turns to Truss. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, of course.’

Truss nods his acquiescence.

Still, she does not step forward. Then Truss reaches over and takes her by the wrist. ‘Come on, Kitten. Do as the man asks.’ Like an errant child, she is guided to stand beside Hal. She stops a foot away, near enough that he can make out the fine gold hairs on her bare forearms, but far enough that there is no chance of any part of them touching.

Aubrey raises his camera. ‘A little closer together, if you wouldn’t mind.’ He laughs. ‘Anyone would think you two were the married couple.’

Giulietta’s co-star – the man who plays the sea captain of the film’s title – arrives moments before they set sail. Hal doesn’t recognize him immediately. He knows from somewhere the great golden head, the exaggeratedly handsome features, but can’t place them. Only when Aubrey Boyd whispers the name does he understand. Earl Morgan. He can’t believe he didn’t know him. But then there is a marked difference between the figure standing here and the heroic one he has viewed onscreen.

There is something off about the man, though Hal cannot quite work it out until he steps nearer. Up close, Morgan looks terrible. The boyishly handsome looks are marred, as though in a state of decay. There is a loose, febrile look to his skin. His eyes, his most famous feature, are still very blue, but the whites are pinkish-yellow, as though pickled.

He puts up a hand, smiling slowly as he looks about himself. Hal thinks that even now he appears to be playing a part: the star greeting his audience. ‘Hi.’ There is a resounding silence. ‘Sorry I couldn’t make it for the party,’ he says. ‘I had to catch up on some sleep, you know how it is.’

‘Mr Morgan.’ The Contessa smiles graciously at him. ‘You look well rested.’

Morgan nods. ‘Indeed I am. It seems this Italian air is the thing for me.’

Hal tries to decide whether he is imagining the slur to Morgan’s speech. He turns to Aubrey, and whispers. ‘He seems a little … well, drunk.’

‘Dear chap,’ Aubrey says, ‘he’s drunk all the time. It would be far more remarkable if he were sober. They say he’s spent the last couple of years in a spa, trying to dry out – though it’s clear he’s still soused in the stuff. He’s one of the Contessa’s little projects. I suppose we all are, in a way.’

Before Hal can ask exactly what he means, Aubrey has made his way over to Morgan, to ask if he may take a photograph.

They set sail. It is a mere few kilometres across the Gulf of the Poets to Portovenere, their first stop, but the commotion with which their departure occurs would be better suited to a ship taking off on a great voyage. The Contessa’s household staff come to see them off: some standing on the jetty, others amidst the terraces. The house soars behind, nestled in its dark bank of trees. But gradually it, too, is diminished – becomes a cottage, a child’s doll’s house.

Then there is only the water and the wind. The guests look at one another, unsure of what to do, whether to speak, like actors who have suddenly forgotten their lines. All except for Truss, who is reading the papers in one of the seats on the foredeck.

Hal glances at Stella. She stands a little distance from the group, and her gaze is turned from them. If they are all upon the stage, he thinks, she is the one waiting in the wings, hidden in its dark recesses. He remembers again how she had been in Rome. Quiet, but self-possessed. Her quietness has a different quality now; she is subdued. He looks away. He watches, instead, as Earl Morgan staggers over to the other chair and sits down. The actor turns toward the sea, until perhaps he thinks no one can see him. Then his smile – his whole face, in fact, appears to collapse in on itself. It is a horrible sight, as though the man is coming apart at the seams. Presently, loud snores are heard from his direction, and the hand that had been holding his drink slackens, allowing the empty glass to roll gently back towards them, the slice of lemon flopping onto the deck like a tiny, dead fish.




Portovenere


The water in the Gulf of the Poets is calm, protected from the violence of the sea without by a long sea barrier at the mouth. In the distance the shadows of vast ships cluster about La Spezia harbour, vessels of heavy industry and war.

‘Not worth a visit, in my opinion,’ Aubrey Boyd pronounces, looking back at it, ‘unless you have a fetish for the industrial.’

‘I was there yesterday,’ Hal says. ‘Briefly.’

‘Oh, gracious.’ Aubrey lifts his eyebrows. ‘You are intrepid.’

All come up on deck for a better sighting of the town, even those who have seen it before.

‘It is my favourite,’ Signor Gaspari says, quietly. ‘The Victorians flocked to the Cinque Terre, but Portovenere was the one they forgot.’ He looks at Hal, and gives his downturned smile. ‘I hope people continue to forget.’

Hal can make out a vivid strip of houses, each painted a different colour: ochre, sepia, rust red, dusky pink and, occasionally, a slice of blue: the colours of earth and sky. They are like the bright spines of so many books crammed together onto a bookshelf; a quiet spectacle. Aubrey Boyd gives a soft cry of delight, and reaches for his camera.

Above the town is the great grey mass of an old castle: ruined and yet from this distance retaining something of majesty. For Genoese ships, Gaspari explains, it would have been a welcome sight: the first glimpse of home. On the other side is an uninhabited island, a steep green nub of land emerging from the water like the backbone of some sleeping sea creature.

As they motor towards the harbour a boat arrives with men clamouring to give their assistance. Roberto, the Contessa’s skipper, solemnly tells their would-be guides that his men have everything under control. Reluctantly they manoeuvre further away. But when they catch sight of Giulietta in her black sundress there are whoops and cheers, ardent declarations. And suddenly two cameras appear with huge mounted flashbulbs. Giulietta tosses her head and turns away – but this has the effect, Hal notices, of displaying her profile to its best advantage.

Aubrey turns to Hal. ‘Prepare yourself for a great deal more of this. They are like cockroaches, these men – they follow some scent only discernible to them. And nowhere breeds them in greater numbers than Italy.’

‘Before supper,’ the Contessa announces to the party, once they have moored, ‘we will have a screening of the film. The audience at Cannes are getting a preview, but those on this boat will be the first to experience Signor Gaspari’s creation.’ She turns to the director, who inclines his head modestly.

As they are taken across on the tender, Hal turns to Gaspari. ‘So no one has seen it yet, apart from you? Even the actors?’

He shakes his head. ‘No. It keeps it purer, this way.’ He lowers his voice. ‘Free from ego, from meddling. Though there was some pressure, this time, to share the rushes.’ And Hal is certain that his gaze moves momentarily toward Truss.

They are led through the marina to the ruins of the old Genoese fort. Flaming torches illuminate the arches and pilasters in all their ravaged grandeur. From within, the place no longer looks formidable, Hal thinks, but vulnerable: spreadeagled before the wind and rain that have for centuries been feasting upon it, picking the old bones clean. As they make their way up he glimpses a forlorn window in a fragment of wall, offering an unnecessary aperture onto the sea beyond. They are ushered into the still-intact part of the castle, where a projector and chairs have been set up. They wait as a young man threads the machine with nervous hands and Hal, watching him, wonders if it is the first time he has ever done it. But after a couple of false starts, the wall opposite flickers into life, where a piece of canvas has been stretched across it.

The first shot fills the screen and suddenly Hal understands the significance of where they are sitting. The view is from the battlements of the same fort, but by some artistry of set design the arches appear intact, restored to their former glory.

Earl Morgan appears on the screen, looking out to sea, costumed in a sixteenth-century naval commander’s outfit. Hal wonders how much make-up it took to hide the decay of the man. He looks implausibly youthful and heroic. Cut to a view of him at the helm of a great galleon, then a battle scene with an Ottoman ship, which almost makes Hal smile, because it is so artful, so synchronized: rather like a ballroom dance. Even when men fall dying to the boards. Was there once a time when war would have looked like that? Unlikely. But the alternative would make unpalatable viewing.

The battle won, the galleon is making for home. Another shot of Morgan, picturesquely windblown, looking out to sea. The next shot is of the water. And there is a person in the water, flailing. Drowning. It has an unprecedented effect on Hal. Instantly, he feels as though he has been drenched in cold water. He stares at the image, trying to make sense of it. It is almost exactly as he has dreamed it, as though it has spilled onto the screen from his own mind. He stands. All he can think is that he has to get outside. He pushes past the knees that block his route. He isn’t sure whether he manages to apologize aloud, or whether the words form only inside his head. He lunges through the open doorway. In the courtyard he breathes great lungfuls of the cooling air, and feels the tightness in his chest begin to dissipate.

For days and even weeks afterwards, though he knew it was impossible, he kept thinking he glimpsed something in the water. It was always, of course, a trick of light and shadow – and of his own imagination. But to lose someone that way – there was a lack of certainty about it.

‘Are you all right, Mr Jacobs?’

Hal looks up and sees Signor Gaspari. All he can feel now is humiliation. The horror is passed, though he can still feel his heartbeat through his whole body. The speed with which it took hold of him, the power of it, was astounding.

‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I drank too much last night. I thought I’d step outside for a moment to get some air.’ It is unprofessional, but it is better than admitting anything of the truth.

‘Ah,’ Gaspari smiles his sad smile. ‘I’m pleased to hear it wasn’t my film that was so objectionable.’

‘No. I’m so sorry. It must have looked very rude.’

As he stands his legs feel insubstantial, as though he is not quite in contact with the earth. It will pass, he thinks, with an effort of will. The important thing is to get back inside, and pretend none of it ever happened.

*

He is able to catch up quickly enough. He can only have been outside for a matter of minutes, though he felt that he re-entered the room a different man.

The figure in the water turns out to be a woman, who the captain has rescued and brought aboard the ship. She is played by Giulietta Castiglione: black-eyed, wild-haired, relentlessly seductive. Against his better judgement, the captain begins to fall for her. The atmosphere on board the galleon is powerfully evoked: the claustrophobic, gossipy watchfulness of the men. Hal recognizes it. It was exactly the same on board Lionheart. As Perkins, one of the other ratings, had put it, ‘You can’t break wind in this place without the news finding its way onto every deck.’

The superstition, too, is familiar. There had been rituals and old wives’ tales and lucky charms – all the way up through the ranks. He’d seen a lieutenant-commander take a small piece of silver out of his pocket – a locket, perhaps – and run his thumb absent-mindedly over it before a strike. Morris, Hal’s best friend on the cruiser, had one of the little white gloves his wife had worn on their wedding day. Somehow, despite all the grime one came into contact with on board, he had managed to keep it spotlessly clean. Suze had given Hal a silk scarf, which he would take out from time to time. Yet every time he looked at it he was reminded simply of how far away she was in every respect.

Upon return to Genoa, the captain defies the scandalized reaction of society – and his harridan of a fiancée – to follow his heart and marry his new love. Together, they embark upon a ship travelling to the newly discovered Americas.

The possibility of beginning again, somewhere new. As the credits roll, Hal realizes that he is sitting far forward in his seat, his face tilted up towards the screen as though he is literally trying to drink it in. He sits back. And watches, unable to look away, as Truss bends his head towards Stella and murmurs something into her ear. She nods, and Truss smiles. For a terrible second, Hal thinks that he is about to watch him kiss her. Just in time the Contessa begins to applaud, the rest of them following suit.

‘Well,’ she says, standing, and bidding Gaspari to take a bow. ‘Is it not a triumph?’

It is. Somewhat more of a Hollywood offering than Elegy, but still with those elements that characterize Gaspari’s work: scenes of a haunting, melancholy beauty, and the rawness of the performance demanded from the leads. Earl Morgan, Hal thinks, brings impressive credibility to the sea captain: a man wrung out by war, but trying to hold everything together for his men.

But there is optimism in it. Elegy had been a leave-taking. A mourning of something – or someone – lost. The Sea Captain is the opposite. Though it is a film set centuries ago, it is about the future, about hope. It will appeal, Hal thinks, to audiences everywhere who are tired of looking back.

He feels the curious glances of the others as they leave. To his relief no questions are asked about his sudden disappearance. He is still shaken by how quickly it all took hold of him. Nothing for so long and now this. His life in Rome, he realizes, was static, was safe.

They have dinner on the ramparts above the sea. A woman has been brought to serenade them, but the wind and the echoes upon the stones distort her voice. What should be exquisite melodies are transformed, at times, into the shrieks of a banshee.

All of the heat of the day was in the sun. Now, with the wind up, it is much cooler, and the singer shivers in her thin ballgown until Truss moves to place his jacket about her shoulders. She thanks him with a lingering smile and Hal cannot help but watch, fascinated. This, then, is the charm of the man at work.

He can hear the sea, far beneath them, sucking and gnawing against the stone. It is open water, that side, not the serene calm of the harbour. ‘There is bad weather coming soon,’ the skipper, Roberto, had told Hal, with a kind of morose pleasure. Already the waves sound louder, hungrier than they have yet.

They take their seats for supper, and Hal finds himself placed between Stella and Giulietta Castiglione.

He tries, first, to engage Giulietta in conversation, but she resists every attempt to be drawn out. Finally, when she begins to study her reflection in the back of the spoon, he gives up, and turns to his left.

‘How are you?’ he asks Stella, with faultless formality.

‘Well, thank you.’ She gives him a quick, polite smile.

‘Good.’

Then she says, in a barely audible murmur, ‘I’m sorry.’

He thinks he understands all that she means to encompass by it. But it is not enough, somehow. He wants to make her uncomfortable, he realizes, make her see that this is equally awkward for him. He wants to provoke her. ‘I’m simply confused,’ he murmurs, ‘because it was you—’

‘Mr Jacobs.’ She looks up at him, and he sees something in her expression that unnerves him: fear. ‘Please,’ she says. And then, through her teeth, ‘People are looking.’

He glances up and finds the Contessa’s gaze on them, her expression unreadable. Truss though, is turned away, speaking to the singer. His hand rests on the back of the chair, the picture of ease. But this doesn’t mean anything. Hal has already decided that he is the sort of man who notices everything.

He looks for something innocuous to say. If Stella chose, he realizes, she could merely turn her head and start a conversation with Signor Gaspari on her other side, cutting him off. And though he decided only a few hours ago that he would avoid all but the most necessary interaction with her he finds that he wants to keep her attention. ‘It’s a fascinating place,’ he says, gesturing around them. ‘Don’t you think?’

He expects her to simply agree but he can see her considering the question, turning it over. Then she says, ‘I’m not sure that it is, actually. It feels full of … of death.’

‘Well,’ he says, curious, ‘there’s a great weight of history here. But surely that is part of its charm.’

She appears not to have heard him. ‘These stones – they’re like a skeleton that has been left out in the open, that has suffered the indignity of not being given the burial it deserves.’ There is something like real pain in her voice. He stares at her. Now she is the one not playing by the rules.

‘Stella,’ he says, and then quickly corrects himself. ‘Mrs Truss, this castle was built centuries ago. The people who once lived here have been dead – and buried – for hundreds of years. These are nothing more than stones.’

But she does not seem to be listening. ‘How long do you think it takes,’ she asks him, ‘before the dead are forgotten entirely?’ She sounds intent now, almost angry. He wonders briefly if she has had too much to drink – but her wine glass appears untouched.

‘I’m not sure,’ he says, cautiously. ‘But probably as long as there is someone living to remember them.’

He looks at her, hoping that it is enough.

It isn’t. ‘But don’t you think there are some things that should never be forgotten? Even as time softens the marks?’

I don’t know what you want from me, he thinks.

‘What can you two be talking about?’ Hal looks up to find Truss regarding them across the table. At his words the other guests turn to look, too. He smiles at Hal. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Jacobs – is my wife giving you a hard time already?’ Now he looks at Stella, who has not raised her head. ‘She gets carried away, sometimes – don’t you, Kitten?’

Silence.

‘Well, Kitten?’

She nods. Truss gives a little mock toast with his glass and turns back to Gloria. Stella takes a long sip of her wine. Then she turns to Hal. ‘Forgive me,’ she says – shortly, bitterly, as though it was he who chastised her in front of all present. Before he can think of something to say to her, she has turned away.

The evening seems to have fractured, after this. The guests sit in silence, the plates have been cleared away, the wine bottles emptied. The wind has picked up, and Aubrey Boyd shivers miserably in his thin blazer. A faint-hearted soul might call an end to the dinner now. But the Contessa is not that.

She speaks fearlessly into the silence. ‘Some of you,’ with a nod to Gaspari, ‘already know this, but I thought it might be interesting for those who don’t. The film is based on a strange legend in my family. My ancestor was the sea captain played so superbly by our leading man here,’ she turns to Earl Morgan, but his eyes are glassy with drink, and he seems barely to register her comment. Undeterred, she takes something from the pocket of her jacket. Hal tries to get a closer look at it. A little pot, made from ivory – with some sort of design carved into it.

‘This,’ she holds it up, ‘belonged to him.’

She passes it to Earl Morgan, who studies the pattern for a few seconds disinterestedly, and then hands it on. Now Stella has been passed the pot by Gaspari. Hal watches her examining it, with quiet focus. She turns it over and around in her hands. And then, with an audible pop, she prises the thing open.

‘Ah,’ the Contessa says, pleased, ‘you have discovered its secret. I was wondering when someone was going to do that.’

The others crane to see. Stella holds it up, so that the inside is visible. A dial of some sort, with spokes of alternating red and green, encircled by a gold band.

‘A compass,’ Aubrey says, peering over her shoulder.

‘Broken,’ she says. ‘The arrow …’ she watches it for a few seconds, tilting it back and forth, ‘it keeps going round and round.’

‘Yes,’ the Contessa says. ‘A shame. But perhaps only to be expected, considering its great age.’

Finally, it has come to Hal, and he has a chance to study it himself. There had been a large bronze compass mounted on the captain’s bridge of the battlecruiser, which he had got to see only after they had been decommissioned. Funny, how little the design has changed. It has a peculiar weight in his hand, and a surprising warmth that he assumes must come from the touch of the others before him. North, he presumes, is the point marked by a fleur-de-lys.

He turns it toward the Contessa, and points to the flower. ‘Why this?’

‘The three petals,’ she says, ‘represent religious faith, wisdom, and chivalry. The essential tenets of any nobleman, that kept him on his proper course.’

Hal watches as the needle tracks a stuttering circle, driven by some unknown force. He is at once unnerved by it, and oddly compelled.

The silence now has a different quality. Hal realizes now that a kind of magic has been performed. The Contessa has drawn them together in the telling of it, salvaging the supper by introducing this new, strange element. As conversation resumes around the table she turns to Hal, her smile one of triumph. Her gaze falls to the compass, which he is still turning, almost mindlessly, in his hands.

‘You may borrow it for a while if you wish,’ she says, ‘to study it further.’

He feels he should demur: there is something about the needle that unnerves him. But he finds himself thanking her, slipping the thing into his pocket, where its weight pulls at the fabric. He will hand it back first thing in the morning, he decides.

In his cot, back in his cabin, he is tired but cannot sleep. The gentle rolling movement of the yacht on its anchor should be restful, but it only echoes his own restlessness. Each time he shuts his eyes he can see it like a retinal imprint: the sweep of sea, the figure in the water. And it is too quiet. He is used to the sounds of night in the city, the sirens and voices and the muffled late-night arguments of his neighbours. The few sounds that did make it across the water from the shore – the blare of a car horn, the faint jangle of music – are silenced now by the lateness of the hour. The quiet here becomes, when one listens to it, perversely loud. His ears strain for any sound beyond the slap and whisper of the water – but there is none.

He pulls back the curtain to the porthole. The sea is revealed to him bright as silver, reflecting the moon. The surface is puckered by submarine disturbances; the movements of fish and secret currents. Strange to think of that great weight of water, held back by so little. And beneath him all manner of creatures of whose existence he can only guess. Now his cabin is lit with moonlight too. The objects it finds glow rather than shine. The face of his watch, laid out next to the berth, his shoes, which he polished before the trip. The white pot, concealing within that strange broken device. Is the needle still tracking now? He reaches for it and finds that it is. Something about it unnerves him, though he could never say exactly why. He slides it into the drawer next to his cot.




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