The Silent Fountain
Victoria Fox
‘Atmospheric and foreboding this is the perfect contemporary homage to the gothic tradition.’ – The SunBeneath the surface lies a terrible secret…Hollywood, 1975: Tragedy sends troubled film star Vivien Lockhart into the arms of Giovanni Moretti, and it seems her fortunes have finally changed. Until she meets his sister, and learns that dark shadows haunt her new husband’s past…Tuscany, Present day: Everyone in London is searching for Lucy Whittaker – so Lucy needs to disappear. But her new home, the crumbling Castillo Barbarossa, is far from the secluded paradise it seemed.Across the decades, Vivien and Lucy find themselves trapped in the idyllic Italian villa.And if they are ever to truly escape its walls, they must first unearth its secrets…Rebecca meets Sante Montefiore in this atmospheric tale of lies, obsession, and betrayal…‘Wonderfully atmospheric and suspenseful’ – Nicola Cornick, author of The Phantom Tree‘Addictive reading, Victoria Fox hooks you and doesn’t let go. It’s Kate Morton with added sass!’ – Jenny Oliver, author of The Sunshine and Biscotti Club
VICTORIA FOX divides her time between Bristol and London. She used to work in publishing and is now the author of six novels.
For Joanna Croot
Contents
Cover (#u7adacc15-51e4-5e34-b00f-d60e9a0498ba)
About the Author (#u119c8522-67e6-5295-9c2d-4c739cd7c80c)
Title Page (#u47bb6298-cf98-550a-b50b-003db43b5a74)
Dedication (#ubd7eaaaf-7af0-53ea-8bf6-adfc48b2681c)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_891474b7-c6bc-5013-a748-8ebb1268bebe)
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_b707e297-d955-56b4-8bf0-dac47906a8c7)
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_51a95c7d-6c4c-57c4-bb3c-cef7daf26bad)
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_21507033-97da-57f2-9b83-9e507141696d)
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_254ca4b5-9a11-5a94-b5fe-e9a8a6037068)
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_9ac79ca0-671b-54a5-a8a9-aa4af90a3aff)
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_b2d611ed-7800-56a7-bc8b-539187fcefd2)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_4adc6e0f-3f53-5468-a37c-5180c443cf54)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_23a3c5a4-9f53-5eb9-8710-6fa3cf4eb89f)
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_d6594959-59fc-52c0-b6f2-f98538ed97d1)
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_4b627fc6-226d-5802-849e-397fd46204dd)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_64b8f004-7bd7-5219-9d7c-6ea6fbd9dc0d)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_f47dc905-d712-57a9-8310-60cefd1a9830)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_dcfe3971-2202-5bc3-918c-bf2a356c55dc)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_f3e598c7-551d-5822-bb69-7b1785d015d9)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#ulink_7ab0874f-334a-573a-9d30-c552d55281e6)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
PART TWO
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_c20ff032-9327-5f36-89d9-f837942e4f2d)
Italy, Summer 2016
It was always the same dream, and every time she saw it coming. She knew where it began. A bright light, gathering pace from a sheet of dark. A lucid thought, a picture more real than any she could fathom in waking hours. Afraid to look but more afraid to resist, she stepped towards the light, arms open, weak, and she knew it was a trick, but suddenly there she was, blissful, forgetting, her lips on his forehead, his soft skin and his smell; she could capture it now, so many years later and on the other side of consciousness. His hair, the warmth of his body, they were locked away in the deepest parts inside her, still intact despite the storms that place had weathered.
She knew where it ended. He shouldn’t have spoken; he shouldn’t have asked.
Don’t leave me. Come with me. I’m waiting.
I’ll catch you. We’ll be together again.
The water, still and cool and silver and quiet. Inviting. Come with me…
I’m waiting.
*
The woman wakes with a jolt. Her bedclothes are bunched and damp with sweat. It takes a moment to surface, the weight of water all around, pressing down. The air is tight in her lungs.
Adalina, the maid, comes in, opens the shutters and welcomes the day.
‘There, signora, that’s better. How did you sleep?’
Quick, efficient, the maid sets down the breakfast tray, pillows plumped, sheets pulled tight. And then the rainbow of pills, a box of medicines laid out like sweets, as if the colours make it better, make her want to take them, willingly.
The woman coughs; it is like bringing something solid up, a ball of wire.
There is blood on her handkerchief: a spray of bright dots, the worst omen. It won’t be long now. She folds it into her clenched palm. Adalina pretends not to see.
‘I…’ The woman’s mind is empty. Her tongue is swollen, a stranger to her mouth, as if she is the one who has swallowed the swamp.
‘Open the window,’ she says.
A flick of the wrist; the sun spills in. She can see the tips of the cypress trees, twelve fingers pointing towards the sky. She used to think he was up there, believe in useless comforts, but she doesn’t any more. He isn’t in the sky. He isn’t in the clouds. He isn’t even in the ground. He is inside her. Calling her, needing her.
Air. Warmth. Birdsong. She receives the scent of her budding gardens, can picture the roses on the arches beginning to bloom, pink and sweet, and the lavender and chives clustered against their high chalk walls, bursting white and lilac. How easily the outside creeps in. How easily it bridges that line, as fast and fluid as rain. How easily she ought to be able to do the same, one step, one foot in front of the other, that was all it took, that was what the doctors said. The same as trespassing into those rooms, those wings, that have been locked in dust for decades: unbearable now.
‘Such a beautiful house,’ they whispered, in the village, in the city, across the oceans for all she knew. ‘How tragic that she’s the way she is… Still, I suppose one can understand it, after…you know…’
‘The girl is due at midday,’ says Adalina, rattling the pills into a plastic receptacle at the same time as pouring the tea, as if one were no more unusual a feast than the other. ‘I’ve checked the airport and there are no delays. Will you be able to greet her? She’d like to meet you, I’m sure.’
The woman glances away. She watches her pale hands resting like a corpse’s on the sheet, the bloodstained handkerchief hidden there: a terrible key to a terrible secret. Her wrists are brittle, her nails short, and she thinks how old they look.
When did I grow old?
She shakes her head. ‘I shall stay in bed,’ she says. Just like every other day. This house has too many corners, too many secrets, crooked with shadows and silence. ‘And I shouldn’t like any disturbances. You can settle her in, I’ve no doubt.’
‘Very well, signora.’
She swallows the pills; Adalina retreats, her face a mask of discretion. The maid has no need to voice her feelings, but it is no matter. Let them be disappointed. Let them say, ‘She should make the effort. The girl’s come a long way.’ Let them think what they wish. Only she understands the impossibility of it.
Besides, she doesn’t want the girl here. She has never wanted her. The help knows too much, asks too many questions; they make it their business to pry.
What choice does she have? Adalina cannot manage. The castillo is enormous. They cannot do it alone.
This time, the truth is hers to keep. No one is getting to it.
She closes her eyes, drowsy, her pills beginning to take effect. On the cusp of sleep, she hears his voice again. Calling her from the water, the orange sun setting.
Come with me. I’ll catch you. I’m waiting.
She falls, her arms open wide.
PART ONE (#ulink_ad66fb2d-a4c3-5de0-8c96-aec0bd8d6fd5)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_0d2dcee7-335c-5b90-875f-fcd140541378)
London
One month earlier
They say you can never love again like you love the first time. Maybe it’s the heart changing shape, unable to resume its original form. Maybe it’s the highs made more acute for their novelty and strangeness. Or maybe it’s the soul that grows wise. It learns that the risks aren’t worth taking. It learns to hurt, and in doing so protect itself.
There is consolation in this, I think, as I thread through the crowds on the Underground – commuters in rush hour, plugged into their phones; tourists checking maps and getting stuck by the ticket machines; couples kissing on the escalators – the certainty that whatever happens, wherever I end up, I will never again go through what I have been through before. We are shepherded from the Northern Line up into fresh air, where the blare and hum of the city bleeds past in myriad lights and colour. I pass a group of girls heading out for the night; they must be my age, I suppose, late twenties, but the gulf between us is yawning. I look at them as if through a window, remembering when I was like them, frivolous, carefree, naïve – how it feels to stand on the brink of the world, no mistakes made, at least none so irrevocable as mine.
One thing I love about London is the anonymity. So many people and so many lives, and it’s an irony that I came here to be noticed, to be someone, yet it was at the centre of everything that I achieved invisibility. I will miss the anonymity, when they find out. I will look back on it as a cherished prize, never to be regained once lost.
I catch the bus, staring out of the window at rapidly darkening streets. Across the aisle a guy in glasses reads the Metro, its front page belting the headline: MURDERER HELD: COPS CATCH CAR BOOT KILLER. I shiver. Will I earn my own headline, one day soon? What will they say about me? I see my name, plain old Lucy Whittaker, in the round, friendly handwriting that as a child adorned my homework, my thank you letters, the birthday cards I wrote to my friends, then latterly the typed headers on my job applications, become all at once horrid and threatening, a name to be appalled by. People I once knew will say, ‘Not that Lucy Whittaker? But she’s far too quiet, far too shy, she wouldn’t do anything like that…’
But I did, I think. I did do something like that.
We come to my stop and I step out into the evening, wrapping my coat tight as the wind picks up. I keep my head down, the plastic box clamped under my arm.
My phone beeps. For a stupid moment I think it’s him, and I despise myself for how swiftly I dive into my pocket, hand trembling and hope sinking as I realise it’s not. It’s Bill, my flatmate. Belinda’s her name, but she never liked it.
When are you home? I have wine Xxx
I’m almost there so it isn’t worth replying. My walk slows. As ever when I open my messages I find my eyes drawn to his, our chains of all-night conversations, flirty, thrilling, the way my heart danced every time that screen lit up at two in the morning. I should delete them, but I can’t. It’s as if wiping them will erase any proof that it happened in the first place. That before the bad, there was good. There was, before. It was good. What happened, there was a reason for it…
Don’t be an idiot. There is no reason. Nothing justifies what you did.
And of course he wouldn’t be in touch. He’d never be in touch. It was over.
I turn on to our street. Unlocking the front door, I see Bill still hasn’t got the hang of sorting through the post, so I scoop the scattered envelopes off the floor and divide them between the flats, before taking our own upstairs. Bill still hasn’t got the hang of a lot of shared living, I’ve noticed, like replacing loo roll or putting out the recycling every once in a while. I don’t mind, though. She’s been my best friend since we could walk; she’s been with me through it all and she’s still with me now, the only one who knows the brutal truth and even then she didn’t walk away, when she really could have. When she should have. That’s why I don’t care about the recycling.
‘How was it?’ She’s waiting when I go in, drink poured, TV on, some rehash of a talent show, and she drains the volume when I lift my shoulders.
‘As expected.’ I set the box down and consider, as I had back at the office, how five years can be compressed into five minutes’ packing. Some old notecards, my desk calendar, a sangria-bottle fridge magnet from Portugal sent to me by a client.
‘No fanfare, then?’ Bill gives me a hug and a squeeze. The squeeze brings up tears but I blink them away. ‘It’s your own fault,’ Natasha, his deputy, had hissed, as I’d slunk towards the exit of Calloway & Cooper, trying to ignore the stares that followed, fascinated and horrified, like traffic crawling past a pile-up.
Natasha has had it in for me from day one. My theory? She’s in love with him. As his Commercial Director she was widely regarded as his second in command – but then I came along, usurping her as the closest person to him, his PA, and I know she tried to get someone else into the role because Holly in Accounts told me. Only, Natasha didn’t win. I did. And I think she couldn’t handle the fact that, for a second there, towards the end, before it all went wrong, it looked as if he might have loved me back. When it blew up, all her Christmases came at once. Natasha was delighted to see me go, and couldn’t believe her luck at the circumstances that drove me to it.
I try a laugh but it dies in my throat. ‘No fanfare,’ I agree, and grab the wine and sink it in one. Bill refills me. I want to smoke a cigarette, but I’m trying to give up. Great timing, Lucy, I think. Who cares now, if you live or die? But that is melodrama, and I annoy myself for thinking it. Instead, I keep focused on the alcohol. If I keep drinking, I’ll get numb, and if I get numb, I won’t feel anything. I won’t feel his touch on my cheek, his kiss on my mouth, my neck…
‘Come on,’ says Bill, with an uncertain smile. ‘It’s finished.’
‘Is it?’
‘You never have to see those people again. You never have to see him again.’
One thing Bill doesn’t understand, and I can’t find the words to explain: I have to see him again. Even after everything, how I should want to run as far away from him as I can, I’m as addicted to him as I was the first day. Inappropriate isn’t the half of it. I read that the funeral happened this morning, in a cemetery south of the river, and I can’t stop thinking of him, rigid with grief, those grey, beautiful eyes set hard on the ground, the cool drizzle settling on the shoulders of his coat, a coat I’d once warmed my hands in on a cold night on Tower Bridge, and he’d kissed the tip of my nose. How I long to put my arms around him now, tell him I am sorry and that I miss him. When what I should be feeling is guilt, burning guilt, shame and disgrace and all those things, and I do feel them, every day I do, but at the same time I can’t forget the power of us. We don’t belong with any of that confusion or chaos or sadness.
‘…You could consider it, you know, if that’s what you want.’
Bill is looking at me gently, waiting for a response.
‘What? I was miles away.’
‘Freddy’s sister’s boyfriend,’ she says, presumably for the second time. ‘He’s just come back from Italy – that language course he went on in Florence?’ Bill prompts me and to placate her I nod, even though I have no memory of this (so much over the last twelve months has dissolved to insignificance; I can’t even remember who Freddy is – someone Bill works with?). ‘While he was out there,’ she goes on, ‘he made friends with this girl who was looking after a house on weekends. Well, I say house, but it’s more like a mansion. In fact Freddy said it was this giant pile, and someone famous lives there but the friend never met her, and anyway, this woman’s a recluse and never goes out.’ Bill slumps down on the sofa. ‘Sounds intriguing, right? Like the start of a novel.’ There’s something behind the cushion and she reaches to retrieve it. ‘Hey,’ her face lights up, ‘I found 50p!’
I frown. ‘What’s this got to do with me?’
Bill crosses her legs. ‘The girl got fired and they’re looking for someone to replace her. All very hush-hush… apparently they’d never advertise. The woman sounds a bit weird, sure, but how hard could it be? Dusting a few shelves, sweeping the floor…’ She makes a face and I wonder if her knowledge of looking after a house extends beyond Cinderella. ‘Then getting to sunbathe all day with some sexy Italian you’ve met in the city? I’d do it myself if I didn’t have to go to work on Monday.’
I’m wary. ‘What are you suggesting?’
‘Think about it, Lucy.’ Her voice softens. ‘Since this thing happened, you’ve been desperate to get away. You haven’t stopped talking about it, how you can’t stay here. Look,’ she says, standing, ‘I want to show you something.’ She steers me to the mirror in the hall. ‘Tell me what you see,’ she says. ‘Honestly.’
It doesn’t help that strewn across the wall are pictures from the days before. Nights out with Bill, holidays with friends, a bungee jump I did on my twenty-fifth birthday, after I finally broke free from home and started building a future for myself. That’s how I see it, this looming punctuation mark in the story of my life, isolating the years preceding him and the lonely days after, creeping into weeks, and I was a different girl then: bright, hopeful, lucky, alive. What do I see now? A dull ache in my eyes, my skin wan with nights spent thinking and wondering and turning over what ifs, hollowness in my cheeks, and sadness, mostly sadness.
‘I don’t want to do this,’ I say, shrugging free.
‘You’re not you, Lucy. This isn’t you.’
‘What do you expect?’ I round on her, not keen on starting a fight but unable to help it. I need to shout at someone, to be angry, because I’m sick of being angry with myself. ‘Her funeral was today – did you know that? And I’m supposed to leave everything behind, the mess I’ve made, and swan off to Italy for a holiday?’
‘It’s not a holiday,’ says Bill, ‘it’s a job. And, let’s face it, you need one.’
‘I’ll manage.’
‘What about the press?’ She’s silenced me now. ‘What about when they’re blowing up your phone, or when they’re smashing down the door and you’re afraid to go outside? Do you think he’s going to defend you, then? He doesn’t care, Lucy – he doesn’t give a crap about you. He’ll put it all on you and then how’s it going to look?’
‘Don’t say those things about him.’
‘Fine, we won’t go there. You know how I feel. My point is: this is your chance. I mean, talk about timing! You could leave it all, come back once it’s settled.’
‘How’s it getting settled?’
‘It will. Everything fades eventually.’
I snort. But my back is to her, so she can’t see my face.
‘What’s the alternative?’ Bill asks.
I think about the alternative. Fronting the world, my family, my face splashed across the nation’s papers, quotes taken out of context, painted to be someone I’m not.
Would he break his silence then? Would he reach to help me; would he stand at my side? Bill’s words sting: He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a crap about you.
Her question hangs unanswered. It’s all I can do to turn to my friend, the fight gone out of me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, meaning it, and she shakes her head like it doesn’t matter. ‘I just…’ A well swims up my chest, threatening to spill over, and my voice goes funny. ‘I’m just not coping.’
‘I know.’ Bill hugs me. ‘Please promise me you’ll consider it?’
In bed that night, I do. Lying awake, pretending to myself that I’m not waiting for my phone to light up, I listen to the passing hum of traffic that gradually dwindles to quiet, before, at around two, I finally fall asleep. The last thing I think of, for the first time in months, isn’t him. It’s a house, surrounded by cypress trees, deep in the middle of the Italian hills. As I walk towards dreams, I’m in a tangled rose garden. Something unseen beckons me, a shadow slipping in and out of sunlight.
I come to a fountain, quiet and glittering silver.
I look in the pool at my reflection.
It takes a moment to recognise myself. For a heartbeat, it’s not me I see.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_9b7211f2-21b3-57c0-9491-9cb072d41141)
Italy
My train arrives in Florence three weeks later. It’s happened quickly – the best way, Bill tells me, to counter my usual inclination to overthink everything – and back in London I barely had time to make my decision, take a short phone interview with the owner of the house, renew my passport and get my papers sorted before Bill was yanking my suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and encouraging me to fill it.
I suspect she’s right. Without getting caught up in momentum, there would have been too many opportunities to stall, to opt out, to say that something this reckless and ill thought through really wasn’t me. Then again, what was? What made Lucy Whittaker? I had forgotten. I had lost her – and I wasn’t going to find her hanging around in our Camden flat, jobless and trapped in the past.
‘Go.’ Bill held me by the shoulders when she said goodbye. ‘Don’t think about anything here. Be happy, Lucy. Let go. Fall in love with Italy.’
My first impressions of the city aren’t great. Santa Maria Novella station is hot and crowded; I’m on the receiving end of a wave of distrustful glances when I kneel to sort through my bag because a bottle of shampoo leaked over my clothes on the flight to Pisa, and, as I’m trying to fathom the bus timetable to get me into the centre, a guy falls into me from behind, apologises – ‘Mi scusi, signora…’ – and seconds later I realise fifty euros are missing from the back pocket of my jeans. But when we enter the streets that I recognise, see the bronzed, proud hood of the Duomo with its decorative Campanile, all that marble shimmering pink and white in the sunshine, I forget my plight for a moment and succumb to Florence’s spell. Locals speed past on mopeds, exploding dust on cobbled streets; pizzerias open their shutters for lunch, red and white checked tablecloths being laid on a baking-hot terrace while waiters smoke idly, breaking before service; tourists wander past in sunhats, licking pink gelato from cornets; a dog drinks from a pipe on the Via del Corso. We said we’d come together, once, he and I. He wanted to bring me, promised we’d take a boat out on the Arno, eat spaghetti and drink wine; we’d stroll around the Uffizi, fall asleep in the afternoon in the Boboli Gardens. ‘Forget Paris – Florence is the most romantic city in the world.’
The bus stops and I have to move, as if physical distance might stow the memories away, as if I can leave him here in the empty seat next to mine.
It’s a quick change to take the bus to Fiesole. I’m ready to get there now, see the house and meet its proprietor, fill my hours with tasks that have nothing to do with him or my life at home. My dad wanted to know what on earth I was doing. ‘Italy?’ he interrogated. ‘Why? What about work? You left your job, Lucy? What happened?’
My sisters were the same. Sophie called from a fashion shoot to tell me I was walking away from the best role I’d ever have. Helen emailed from the luxury of her Thamesside apartment to brag about her lawyer fiancé being made partner at his firm, then saying as an afterthought that my ‘mini-break’ in Florence should be fun, but why wasn’t I going with a boyfriend? As for Tilda, I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She’s scuba diving in Barbados, with a surfer named Marc. Unlike the others, Tilda didn’t go to university. That was probably my biggest battle, as the eldest, trying to run my own life while taking the place of our mum: the endless months of Tilda stalemate, attempting to convince her that I knew better when maybe I didn’t.
The years between us are nothing significant, the kind of gap an ordinary family wouldn’t think twice about. But, for us, they were everything. They marked me as an adult before my time, and my sisters as children when really they could have been more. Helping to raise them was just what happened, a natural choice – no, not a choice, a given, but never one I resented. My dad couldn’t do it alone, and my sisters were too young to understand what it meant to be without their mother. It broke my heart that she would never see them pass their first exams, meet their first boyfriends, make and break those intense alliances exclusive to teenage girls, ever see them engaged or married or with children of their own – and of course much of this applied to me, although I never dwelled on that. I’m proud of the role I took on, but sometimes I wonder what might have been if I’d had the chance to have normal teenage years, be a normal girl. Then, maybe, my first love and first mistakes would have been less devastating than the ones that brought me here.
As the Tuscan countryside rolls past, winding and winding up from Florence through flame-shaped cypress trees and golden fields dotted with heat-drenched villas, I consider if what I’m doing here is exactly what I did after Mum died. Running without moving. Building a wall of practical tasks, tangible end goals, things I can get my hands dirty with, to avoid feeling… Feeling what? Just feeling.
None of my sisters knows about what happened. It’s not their fault – I haven’t told them. I’ve never told my family anything about my life, and the more personal it is, the more precious and the less willing I am to share it. Because I’ve always been the reliable, responsible one, and I’ve always looked after myself. I’ve never needed them for comfort or reassurance, not like they’ve needed me.
They’ll find out soon. Everyone will.
And then what?
The question echoes in my mind, unanswered and unanswerable.
‘Piazza Mino,’ the driver calls, as the bus jolts to a stop. I haul my bag. There’s no GPS signal so I consult the map I printed before I left, and begin walking.
The path is scorching. My muscles burn as I travel uphill, bright sun drenching the backs of my legs. I enjoy the air in my lungs, the sheen of sweat that gathers on my lip. These things make me feel alive, remind me I’m still breathing.
Thirty minutes later, I’m hot and thirsty. I’ve long since left the village behind and entered an ochre landscape, fields of maize and barley rolling wide on both sides, as I climb dusty lanes and take refuge in the occasional dapple of the olive groves. Silver-backed leaves offer flickering shade and I rest a while beneath them, drinking from my bottle and starting to feel faintly worried that I shall never find this place.
Then, beneath the smell of almonds and the sweet hint of blue-black grapes, a brighter scent: I spy a crop of lemon trees over the hill, running as far as the eye can see, each richly laden with yellow fruit. Squinting against the sun, I step up to the wall. On the horizon, melting to a blur in the fragrant heat, there is a building. It is enormous, its façade the colour of overripe peaches and with a sprawling, age-damaged terracotta roof. There are turrets, and the dark outline of arched windows.
I look at the map. This is it. The Castillo Barbarossa.
The road winds in a great loop around the estate and, making a decision, I topple my bag over the wall and opt for the shortcut. If the size of the castillo is anything to go by, it owns this grove and several other hectares beyond. I pick my way among the fruit trees. The lemons make me want to drink. I picture the owner of the house welcoming me with a refreshing glass, but then I remember what Bill told me. I remember what the woman was like on the phone – that strange, stilted interview, disconcertingly brief and undetailed, as if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me at all and was doing so under duress. I was relieved to know she wasn’t Italian, as I was planning to learn the language on the job; instead, I met a hint of an American accent, blunted by years in Europe and carrying with it the sharp plumminess of wealth and power. Afterwards, I told myself the connection had been bad. It would be better when we met in person. The follow-up message I received to tell me I’d been successful was testament that I had passed muster. There was nothing to doubt.
As I come closer to the house, dwarfed now by its massive proportions, the sun slips behind a cloud. The place looks ancient, and curiously un-lived-in, its wooden shutters bolted, its creamy walls more cracked and dilapidated than they had appeared from a distance. A sprawl of dark green creepers climbs like a skin rash up one side. I frown, checking the map again, then fold it and put it in my pocket.
Wide stone steps descend from the entrance, spilling on to a gravel shelf that rolls on to a second, then a third, then a fourth, at one time grand and verdant but now left to decades of neglect, their oval planters crumbling and full of dead, twisted things. At the helm is a fountain, long defunct, a stone shape rising from its basin that I cannot decipher from here. I feel as if I have seen the fountain before, though of course that is impossible. I emerge on to the drive and when I pass the fountain I do not want to look at it. Instead, I stop at the door and raise my hand.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_a9742021-635f-569a-8599-96882c5af7bd)
The woman hears the door go. They have so few visitors that it shakes her with a jolt. She hasn’t been sleeping but she hasn’t been awake: somewhere in between.
Distant voices. One is Adalina’s; the other belongs to a stranger.
The woman sits, unease racing from her toes to her stomach, where it settles. She watches the walls, listens for the telltale creaks of a board, wonders how long it will be before Adalina explains her absence. What will the maid say? How much will she elaborate? The woman has been clear about the story she wishes to tell, but whether that story gets translated, behind locked doors, in hidden corridors, in hushed voices in the old servants’ quarters, is another thing. She is no fool.
It is an effort to bring her legs out of bed, but the floor feels welcome on her naked soles. Sometimes she pictures the materials of this house, the solid wood and hard marble, the cool stone, absorbing every thought and feeling her body has expelled. If she squeezes the drapes, tears will seep out, like the wringing of a cloth; if she scratches the stairways, secrets will plume and curl in a thin ribbon: grey smoke.
She goes to the door and checks it is locked. At the window, she parts the shutters and checks the approach for some clue of the girl who has entered her home. There is none. Just the distant spread of olive groves and a wide, empty sky.
Her reflection is transparent in the glass, a see-through woman. It is forgiving, this trick: it makes her appear young, no shadows, no creases – no evidence of the painful years that have scarred her face. She can seldom recall the person she was; it is like peering into someone else’s life, a life that bears no relation whatsoever to one’s own. It is peculiar to think of that other self. She sees the photographs and watches the movies; she reads the items they printed about her in magazines, that bright white smile, the lacquered waves of blonde hair, that slick of raspberry lipstick… She’d been beautiful. There was no denying it. She’d been charming. She’d been witty. She’d been scintillating. Everybody had wanted to know her.
How quickly the world forgot. How efficiently tragedy brought leprosy on whomever it inflicted. She ought to be grateful for her obscurity. Most days she was, but on others she thought about the woman she had given up, or who had given up on her, and the difference between her life then and her life now was so staggering, so acute and painful that it stole her breath away. That vanished her would have flung the door wide and gone to greet their guest. She would have intimidated her with beauty and standing, and enjoyed the effect those assets had. No female would have got the better of her. But that was another world. She has learned a lot since then.
The shutters close, blink-quick. One glimpse of the fountain is enough. Adalina cannot understand why she doesn’t switch rooms. It might make her sleep better, chase the nightmares away. But she cannot. Instead she rests her forehead against the wall, a shiver of cold rinsing her body. She fights the bleeding cough that rattles in her throat, fights with all her might but still it breaks free, a warning, a candle slowly licking itself to extinction. A thread of sunlight filters through the shutters and on to the floor, where it pools, and at its centre a black beetle circles pointlessly, round and round, round and round, intent on its journey, going nowhere.
She’d been going somewhere, once. Years ago, in another life, a young girl with her toe on the brink… She’d had it all ahead of her, the map undrawn.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_b3547392-1ed0-5cad-906d-68f5f8153f46)
Vivien, America, 1972
It was April, the hottest on record. In the little chapel in Claremont, South Carolina, Vivien Lockhart and her mother stood side by side, Vivien careful not to slouch or round her shoulders because her father told her off for that, and when he told her off she’d be better off dead. Her white cotton dress stuck uncomfortably to her waist and she longed to tear it off, run in her petticoats down the aisle and out into the fresh air where the other teenagers were leaping into rivers and sunbathing on the grass, climbing trees and kissing boys. But instead she stayed where she was, every part of her yearning for more, pretending to pray and not to be having any of these thoughts.
Eventually, the silence was broken. Both Vivien and her mother straightened, just as they did at home, where, when the man of the house opened his mouth, all else ceased to exist. He demanded to be heard, and never more than when he was talking about God. His congregation clung to his every word. Vivien thought of him at the breakfast table that morning, wiping dots of fatty milk from his moustache, flipping out the newspaper and telling them that the blacks were getting away with murder.
‘And what did the Lord say when the blind man came to Him, and asked to see again?’ Gilbert Lockhart paused, forehead beaded with sweat and excitement. He leaned forward, extending one talon-like finger, like a vulture peering off a tree branch. ‘He said, in all His Glory and Almighty Power, I grant you eternal sight!’
The crowd exploded in applause. Even the prim Mrs Brigham, in her neatly pressed frock and a hat that resembled a bowl of fruit, shook with elation.
‘And what did the Lord say when the deaf man came to Him?’
This time, the minister’s beady eyes landed on his wife.
‘I grant you eternal hearing,’ replied Millicent obediently. The crowd went up, their shouts at fever pitch. Gilbert forced his wife and daughter to rehearse their script before every sermon. He would hit them when they slipped a word or forgot a line – stupid women, dumb women, good-for-nothing women without a sensible thought in their head. Vivien wondered if he trusted these lies. She didn’t know which was worse – that he was mad enough to, or that he knew he spun a wicked fiction.
Vivien knew what was coming, though every time she wished it weren’t so.
‘Indeed,’ cried Gilbert, ‘ye shall hear for ever!’
Vivien joined in with the appreciation, hoping that might be enough for him today, her mouth already drying at the thought of having to speak. But then he turned on her, and so too did the attention of his flock, for, in her lily-white dress with her neatly ringleted blonde curls, sixteen-year-old Vivien was the only child of the most beloved man in their community. Every word that spilled from her lips was nectar.
‘And what,’ said Gilbert slowly, ‘did the Lord, in all his wisdom and mercy, bestow upon the man who feared for his life?’
She knew the answer. The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. How could she say something she didn’t believe in? Millicent jabbed an elbow into her side.
‘I don’t know, Daddy,’ said Vivien meekly.
Gilbert was making an effort to remain calm. She could tell by the lightly throbbing vein in his temple. Just say it. Say what he wants to hear.
Above her father’s head, Jesus stared down at her from the cross, feet nailed with a bolt, a bloody crown of thorns around his head. The crimson slash in his side grinned horrendously. His chest was concave, his ribs visible. He died for your sins. Words Vivien heard every day of her life, and she didn’t understand them now any more than she had when they were first uttered. Vivien had never sinned – at least not in any way so serious as to condemn a man to death. Telling Mother that next door’s dog had eaten the vanilla-cream muffins when in fact it had been her didn’t count.
‘Yes, you do,’ said her father.
Say it. Or you know what will happen. Her mother did, too. Millicent was stiff as a board at her side, her head bowed. Why did she never stand up for herself – or for her daughter? Like when Vivien asked to play with the Chauncey kids one evening on their lake swing, or she was invited to Bridget Morrow’s birthday party and had the idea of going dressed as her favourite movie star, or she wanted to run barefoot across the prairie after lunch and chase the wild ponies who grazed there, her mother would fold her arms and say brittly: ‘Your father won’t like it.’ And that was the end of that.
What did her father like? Apart from God, she didn’t know.
Did he even like her?
‘He said,’ Gilbert capitulated in a strained voice, its menace perceptible only to his family, ‘I shall take your Fear away, and grant you everlasting Peace!’
The pews exploded once more in adulation.
But there would be no peace for them tonight.
*
Gilbert Lockhart was a supreme minister. His disciples exalted him. Vivien watched him outside church every Sunday, shaking hands, issuing blessings, and wondered where this kind, caring man went the instant they arrived home on their porch.
Today, she didn’t wait to find out. No sooner were they inside than she ran upstairs to her bedroom. Her father was mad. Crazy mad. She’d seen it in his eyes on the drive back, their pearl-grey Cadillac bouncing along the dirt track, how he glanced at her every so often in the rear-view, cold, threatening, a Just you wait kind of glance.
She wished she had a lock on her door. Instead, Vivien hauled a chair to lever against the knob. She pressed her ear against the wood. No footsteps yet. She focused on slowing her racing heart, safe now in her room, where no one could get her.
Downstairs, she could hear his booming voice, and her mother’s answering one, frail and meek, conciliatory. The weak attempt Millicent would make at dissuading him from his wrath, but as soon as he struck her the fight would go out of her. Vivien balled her fists. She had known at church that it would end this way, but even if she could go back and do it differently, she wouldn’t.
I don’t believe what he says, she thought. And it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God – she didn’t know what she believed in, it was too early to say – but she didn’t for one moment accept any kind of creed whereby a man could be a saint to his congregation, could spout about good and evil and fairness and forgiveness, then beat his wife and daughter black and blue the second they were out of sight. That wasn’t a religion Vivien was interested in. She couldn’t lie for him. She couldn’t lie to herself.
Opening her closet, she stared at the bag inside. Take it. Go.
It was everything she needed, enough to get started. Over the past year, sitting cross-legged on her bed, deep in the deep, dark night, when the house was quiet and the only light left on in the town was the light of the moon, it had given Vivien solace to choose these belongings, fingering the hem of a blouse or the edge of a pin. I will leave this place. I will get away. I will, I will… She had almost been able to forget the stinging welts across her back, like paint slashed on a canvas, slowly drying.
Vivien knelt to the bag. In the front pocket was a crumple of bills, money she had collected from girls at school for completing their homework. What else had she to do with her time? While girls like Felicity and Bridget were taken dancing or to the pictures, Vivien was made to study every hour she wasn’t in class. Once, she had completed her Math prep early and asked to be excused; Gilbert branded her a liar, smacking her and telling her she would never be clever enough to finish so quick, and she could forget about leaving the house until she had. From then on, Vivien resolved to take her classmates’ work home, too. Gilbert told her she wasn’t allowed a job, wasn’t allowed to earn, because money gave women ‘ideas’. Ironically, it was he who facilitated her first transactions, and he who had set her in the direction of escape.
From downstairs came the sound of china smashing… followed by silence. Vivien slammed the closet shut, diving to the security of her bed.
Something crackled beneath her head. Carefully, she slid her hand beneath her pillow to withdraw the folded paper, before with reverence she flattened it out. It was like looking through a window into another universe. Someone’s sister in the top grade had had the poster pasted up inside her locker. Vivien envied it, seeing it in the corridor; she had never clapped eyes on anything so glamorous and stylish, a beautiful woman in a mini-skirt, and a man gazing on with a look in his eye she was too young to pinpoint but that promised something sweet and strange. Vivien had paid the girl a week’s earnings, and the girl, about to chuck the wrinkled old thing away, accepted. Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million – that impish beehive, a thousand miles from Vivien’s own constructed ponytail, promised fun and naughtiness and freedom; and her daringly exposed knees, never to be seen in Claremont Town, at least not without a slap on the thigh that bloomed humiliated-red. The poster had fed her appetite for Hollywood, as had a cherished photo she’d found in last month’s paper of Marlon Brando (was it possible that people that handsome existed? They certainly didn’t in Claremont) and a glossy print of Sophia Loren, so exotic and dangerous.
The impulse to conceal them had been instant. There was no place in her father’s world for such things. Vivien could hear Gilbert’s words without needing to provoke them: Hollywood was a filthy breeding ground of vanity and wickedness. Money and fame were for sinners; they held no value in the eyes of the Lord. Anyone who followed that road was heading for disaster – that way the Devil’s arms opened.
Every night before sleep, Vivien would look at her pictures, these faraway people, and remind herself that they were real, that this life did exist, many miles from here and who knew how many risks beyond, but it did. It did.
And maybe, one day, she would find the courage to follow.
In the meantime, it gave Vivien pleasure to keep a secret from her parents. They fundamentally outnumbered her. How she yearned for a brother or a sister! Once, she had thought there was a chance. Vivien had prayed for an ally, a friend, and her father always told her that God answered prayers – but He hadn’t answered this one. There had been a time, years ago, hazy now in her memory, when Millicent had brightened, blossomed – then one night, when the stars were silver-bright, she and Gilbert had driven in a rush to the hospital. At dawn, her mother had returned pale and ruined, and Vivien had found a pair of bloody knickers in the laundry basket. Later, when she finally plucked up the mettle to ask after a possible sibling, she had been slapped hard round the cheek and the subject had never been raised again.
Thump, thump, thump… The footsteps made her wait longer than usual, but when they came they were unmistakeable. A slur to his gait: he’d been drinking, hence the delay. What was it the Bible said about abstinence? Gilbert Lockhart chose which orders to obey. More often, he made up his own. The belt was one of them.
Quickly, Vivien bundled the poster back under her pillow. She watched the door until, sure enough, the brass knob began to rattle. There was a brief quiet, then a shove, and the chair began to shake. Then there her father was, a glorious rageful vision, red-blotched and a fire in his eyes, his hands like rocks at his sides.
‘You stupid girl,’ he spat. ‘You know what happens when you disobey and yet still you do it. You got your mother into trouble as well. Are you happy now?’
I’m not happy. I can never be happy here – with you.
But still Vivien could not bring herself to say sorry, when there was nothing to be sorry for. She sat completely still, taking her mind away to a place he couldn’t touch, a place that was hers alone. She imagined she was Audrey Hepburn or Sophia Loren. Like a golden light, fantasies of a glittering Hollywood encircled her, a life in the sunshine, by the sea, with a man who loved her. The bag in the closet shone in her heart like a beacon, its promise mere feet from where her father stood but utterly invisible to him. He was the stupid one, the blind one. He always had been.
‘Showing me up like that,’ he seethed. ‘You deserve to be punished.’
As Gilbert drew his belt from its buckle, Vivien knew what she had to do – kneel on the floor, lean over the bed, just like she was begging – and it was easier not to fight. Physically, she would always lose. She had to be cleverer than that. And as the first stroke stung the backs of her thighs, that hot, searing pain she knew so well, she prayed. Not to God, or any god her father recognised. She prayed to herself – to be strong, and to do what she must. I will get out of here, she vowed.
Tomorrow, I’m running away.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_3afa18fa-765b-5004-b739-40004932b6cd)
Italy, Summer 2016
‘You must be Lucy.’
I am greeted at the door by a woman, her hair scraped back in a bun, not unfriendly looking but at the same time I’m hesitant to call it a greeting because it’s distinctly lacking in warmth. She introduces herself as Adalina, ‘personal maid to Signora’. As she ushers me over the threshold, her manner is one of a hostess at a dinner party, obliged to show guests around but with her mind perpetually on some other distracting matter: if everyone’s glasses are filled, who is mingling with whom, if the canapés are running low. I smile, deciding friendliness is the best approach.
It’s impossible to hide my surprise as I step into the hall. Adalina glances at me with satisfaction. Working here every day, she must forget the impact the place has on new arrivals. For a moment, I’m stunned.
‘It isn’t what you expected,’ says Adalina.
I gather myself. ‘I’m not sure what I expected.’
There is one word for the atrium in which we are standing – enormous – and the word echoes in my head, those round, open vowels, just as it might around the ceiling’s frescoed vaults. A shaft of sunshine spills from a circular window in the cupola, warming the flagstone floor. It’s church-like, and breathtakingly beautiful – but at the same time somehow tragic, and I stare up at the painted figures on the arched ceiling, angels and terrors, weeping and clasping, a maelstrom of human experience. In an alcove by the door, a finely painted Madonna in Prayer kneels, her hands together and head lowered, in blessing or mourning for visitors, perhaps both.
Adalina rings a large, heavy bell, one that brings to mind wake-up calls in boarding school dormitories, and an old man appears at the foot of the stairs. He wears a faded blue cap and frayed dungarees, and has the weathered features of someone who spends all day outdoors. ‘Take these to the east wing,’ instructs Adalina. ‘The Lilac Room.’ She motions to my bags and dutifully the man nods. His age suggests he’s less equipped to take the cases than I am, but, as I reach to help, he hauls the load on to his shoulder and I can picture him working the surrounding land, carrying hay bales or injured calves across his back as lightly as a satchel.
‘That’s Salvatore,’ Adalina says, when he’s gone. ‘Don’t waste your time with him.’ She taps the side of her head with her finger. ‘He’s not right. Hasn’t been for thirty years. Signora keeps him on out of pity.’
My interest must be visible, because Adalina assesses me for a moment before saying quite mildly: ‘Remember, Lucy, you are here to keep this house in order. Any questions you have about the building, the village, the city, you may ask me. Any questions you have about the people who live here, keep them to yourself. Do you understand?’ There’s no threat in this, just curiosity, as if Adalina is getting the measure of me, as if this is an extension of that bizarre interview.
‘Of course.’
‘Discretion is everything,’ says Adalina. ‘Now, come, I will show you the rest of the house, but be aware it will take time to familiarise yourself. We have just two rules. One,’ she says, gesturing to a closed door, leading, I surmise, to that part of the mansion I saw was covered in strangling vines, ‘the west wing is out of bounds. Two, so is the top floor. I will show you when we get there. It will not be hard for you to obey these rules – those parts are always locked so you will know if you trespass.’
Trespass. The word conjures Biblical transgression. Sin. Forbidden fruit.
I think of him.
‘This way, Lucy.’
Adalina leads me through the hall.
We embark up a grand staircase, burned-amber sandstone with an ornate banister, where we pass a series of portraits. ‘Who’s that?’ I ask, forgetting Adalina’s warning, transfixed as I am by the image of a man wearing a red blazer. One of his eyes is black and the other is green. He is standing against an emerald forest and the light of mischief dances in his stare, a light so convincingly caught on the canvas that I’m certain in the real world he is dead. Adalina watches me sideways.
‘We are in the process of covering these up,’ she says carefully, and beyond I spy several further frames draped in dustsheets. Reluctant, I follow her. Off the first landing, she shows me a series of bedrooms, unused but all the same needing care. One houses two rows of wooden sleigh beds, hospital-like, intended for children.
‘It was a sanatorium, last century,’ explains Adalina, a little too quickly.
The first thing I’ll do is air the rooms, I think, making a note of tasks I can begin in the morning. I’ve decided quickly that this is not a place in which I can allow myself to grow idle – partly because that road leads to him, and partly because I’m already resisting temptation to tease open drawers, to explore inside cabinets, to force rusted locks… to fling pale shrouds off portraits and read the names beneath.
The upper three floors are the same. There’s an old library, books caked in powder with spines cracked, and a mezzanine looking out over the garden. I want to climb up but Adalina tells me the steps are dangerous. ‘They haven’t been used in years.’ There are dressing rooms, reading rooms, water closets; pantries, larders and butteries; boudoirs and cabinets, storerooms, undercrofts and cellars; spaces left empty and who knows what they were once used for. The whole impression is one of a labyrinth, winding and never-ending, deliberately confusing where one space resonates almost exactly another. If I were alone, I’d already be lost.
We come to a door at the end of a corridor, and stop.
‘This leads to the attic,’ I say, and take the wooden handle in my palm, as if I’m testing it, as if Adalina might be wrong and it will swing open unaided. It doesn’t.
‘Nobody goes,’ confirms Adalina, and I understand this is the out-of-bounds top floor. ‘Your work extends to this point,’ she says, ‘and not beyond.’
I take my hand away.
‘I tell you this because of the girl we let go before you,’ says Adalina. ‘She did not heed my advice and Signora had no choice but to dismiss her.’
‘Will I meet her?’ I ask, and it hits me then that no one has told me her name. She. Her. Signora. The woman of the house…
‘Soon.’ Adalina’s gaze flits away. ‘For now I will show you your quarters.’
*
The Lilac Room, as it turns out, isn’t lilac at all. It is painted cream, with high, corniced ceilings and a four-poster bed swathed in thick red fabric. Crudely painted olive trees adorn one wall, just above the skirting, drawn, I’d wager, by a child.
Adalina wasn’t lying when she described this as my quarters, for, like the rest of the Barbarossa, it’s extensive. There is an adjoining bathroom, a little rundown but I’m not about to complain (I don’t relish the thought of getting lost out there in the middle of the night in pursuit of the loo), a writing desk, a couple of armchairs by a handsome fireplace (a peep up the flue tells me it’s long been blocked) and a mahogany wardrobe several times the size of the one Bill and I share back in London. Below the window, whose panes reach to twice my height, is an embroidered chaise.
Alone now, I can appreciate the full spread of the estate. Once upon a time the lawns would have been neatly landscaped, descending in tiers separated by stone to a pink- and peach-strewn rose garden, but the steps now leak into each other, the walls peeling and draped in vines, the grass overgrown. Beyond the roses, light catches on glass, where an old greenhouse is bursting with plants, and etched into a screen of brick I detect the subtle outline of a door. It reminds me of a book I read as a child, or maybe Mum read it to me, because the memory is accompanied by the mellow tang of cloves, but then I realise the window is ajar and it could just as easily be the cluster of herbs whose scent swims in on the breeze. I want to step outside and go towards that door and turn the rusted key. You will know if you trespass.
Further still, the lemon groves and the track I came in on, and, to the west, where the sun is gently setting and flooding the sky with orange and gold, there is a pergola, majestic on its mound of grass, as perfect as the curve on a paperweight. Against the bloodshot sky, twin swifts dip and dive their dusk-hour acrobatics.
There is one thing I’m omitting from this view, the thing I came past earlier and that I’m reluctant even now to acknowledge. The fountain by the entrance, set amid a dozen cypress trees, appears gloomier now the sun has fallen. I don’t know why it’s such a horrible thing. The protruding shape I detected earlier is an ugly stone fish, eyes bloated, scales crusted, its open mouth gasping air, fossilised mid-leap as if cast under a terrible spell. The trees don’t help either, standing guard, their spears raised – and perhaps that’s all it is, the notion that there is something cosseted within that requires protection, something beyond the decaying stone and stagnant water…
I turn away and fumble in my bag for my phone. There is a message from Bill, asking if I got here OK, but I must have picked it up in the city and then gone out of signal, for there’s no reception here at all. The thought of asking after Wi-Fi is anachronistic. Back at home, I’d have panicked at being off radar, but here it seems natural. Nobody except Bill knows where I am. Nobody can find me. I think of the bomb waiting to detonate in London – Natasha triumphantly handing my name to whoever’s interested, whoever wants to destroy it – and it seems impossibly far away.
Only when I lie on the bed and close my eyes does it occur to me that no contact means no him. What if he needs me? What if he has to get in touch, and can’t? I reassure myself with a plan to get connected in the city: soon, soon.
In the meantime, there is a pinch of pleasure in the thought, however unlikely, that he might be trying to reach me, that he might be the one seeking me out, instead of my repeatedly glimpsing a screen that gives me nothing. For once, I’m unavailable.
I’m gone. Nobody can catch me.
In minutes, I’m asleep.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_491ea532-e5b9-5d27-8ad7-9d317d1227be)
‘Vivien?’
The maid knocks gently then steps inside. It’s rare that Adalina addresses her by her name, and Vivien knows it is because they are about to share a confidence.
‘What is she like?’ Vivien asks. It isn’t what she really wants to ask, but she cannot ask that yet. It will seem too desperate, too close to the bone.
‘As we expected,’ says Adalina. ‘She’ll be fine.’
‘You told her…?’ Vivien glances away. ‘How much did you tell her?’
‘I told her nothing.’
Vivien exhales. Adalina lays down a supper tray, soup and crackers, a bunch of grapes the colour of bruises, but she has no appetite.
‘Are you all right, signora?’
‘I saw her from the window,’ Vivien says, daring to meet Adalina’s eye, wanting to know if the maid has seen it too. But Adalina gives nothing away.
‘Do you think she looks like…?’ Vivien swallows. She cannot say the name. ‘I saw her and I thought what a remarkable resemblance she has to—’
‘She’s dark. That is where it ends,’ says Adalina.
‘But her height, her build, everything – it’s everything.’
‘Not at all.’ Adalina protests, unwilling to give her charge any scope for indulgence. Vivien notices this, and seizes it as proof of her agreement.
‘You can’t deny it.’
‘I can. Up close she is entirely different.’
‘It was like seeing her again.’ The ‘her’ is spat like venom. It’s been years – years – but the poison remains. She cannot get her mouth around it, the taste bitter, too horrible, too immediate, all that hate multiplying inside her with nowhere to go.
‘Then you must meet the girl,’ says Adalina. ‘I will arrange it.’
‘I cannot have her living here if you are wrong.’ Vivien is trembling, her voice skittish, her heart leaden. Get control of yourself, she thinks, aware the resemblance the girl has is impossible, a trick of her mind, but the uncanny is all around, in the windows, in the water, in shadows and reflections, and she would not put it past the house to test her in this way. Vivien has heard the noises late at night, the creak of a floorboard, the slam of a door, the howl of the wind so like a woman’s scream…
‘You must eat,’ says Adalina. The pills come out, the tray set down.
Without warning, Vivien takes her hand. Adalina is surprised.
‘It isn’t her, is it?’ she asks in a strange, disembodied voice.
‘Of course not, signora.’
‘That would be impossible.’
‘Absolutely.’
‘She wouldn’t come back for me, would she?’
Adalina is frightened now.
‘Never,’ she rasps.
‘She wouldn’t dare.’
‘No, she wouldn’t dare.’
Vivien releases her grasp. Adalina fills a water glass, as if nothing has happened. Sometimes, the maid stays to help with supper. Tonight, she leaves.
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_0646d5fa-702d-5a87-a92d-688f5c57fcc9)
Vivien, Los Angeles, 1976
In years to come, Vivien Lockhart would look back on the night that her world began: on the point at which her journey was set. Four years since she had run from home, four years of surviving on luck and a dime – until the stars joined up their fatal alignment and the wide, brave future gathered her to its beating chest.
In a velvet-swathed dressing room at Boudoir Lalique, Vivien perfected a final swipe of mascara before sitting back to appraise her reflection. Wide blue eyes lined with dashing kohl; full, crimson lips; and her sleek blonde hair tied beneath a majestic scarlet turban, studded with rubies. Each time the vision was surprising – this person was a girl and a woman, herself and a stranger. Jewels glimmered at her forehead, and the neck of her opulent Biba robe, reminiscent of the one Farrah Fawcett wore to that premiere on Broadway at the weekend, made her appear like the head of a powerful sphinx. At Boudoir Lalique, she was no longer Vivien. She was Cleopatra.
‘You’re up, hon,’ said one of the girls, wafting into the dressing room in a mist of knockoff Chanel. ‘There’s a new guy out there tonight – he’s smokin’.’
Vivien stood, swallowed a knot of fear that she would be assigned this fresh patron. It made no difference if he was handsome or not: she was still at his mercy.
‘Thanks,’ she answered, watching as the girl grabbed her bag and hooked up with the others at the door, giggling and shrugging their coats on. Vivien had this idea of friendship among women, a caramel-hued roller-skate ride through buttered popcorn and candyfloss and hairspray, and they had asked her before to join them, tried to include her, but she always said no. She was scared of them, their breezy confidence and happy conversation, their cola bubblegum and easy swear words, so far removed from the dark, punitive annals of her own past. She’d love to have a friendship like that but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to dismantle the fortress she’d built, knowing its every limit and parameter, instructing herself to stay inside.
Vivien took a breath and stepped through the swathe of fabric on to the dance floor. The heat hit her instantly: of bodies, of liquor, of thick, glowing cigars… of wealth. All eyes were on her as she moved across the room, as lithe as a panther.
The Lalique wasn’t any old discotheque. Whereas others in town were as light as Cinzano, this was as syrupy and dark as the throat-searing brandy it served in diamond-cut tumblers behind the bar. Lavish, smoky, sexy, and strictly private, it oozed decadence. Men clustered in leather booths, some lone wolves, some prowling in packs. Vivien could smell the dollar bills that came through the doors, and wished each night that the cash would whisk her away, an ocean of it on which to cast her sailboat, taking her to the life she’d always longed for. Until then, she would close her heart and soul to the men who took her backstage, just as she had closed her heart and soul to her father. What choice did she have? She was never going back.
‘Hey, baby…’
‘Lookin’ good, honey…’
‘You wanna come sit with me for a while?’
Murmurs of approval and invitation followed her through the sultry space. Chin up, smile on, Vivien poured cognac and champagne and absinthe, prepared perfect squares of glass with their neat lines of cocaine, and sat with her company for the night, a group of Japanese businessmen. Quickly she ascertained the one in charge, the one who would have paid, and made sure to compliment him on his suit, his tie, his expensive cologne. The drunker the group became, the more freely their hands roamed. Vivien remembered the first time a client had touched her leg: the feel of his thumbs, pressing, pressing, first on her knee and then on her thigh, higher and higher still, hot and dry. She had frozen, but the club kept turning, the drinks kept flowing, and this was how it was.
‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ the chief asked now, his eyes red-rimmed. Vivien judged he had twenty minutes before he passed out.
When she had arrived at the Lalique two years ago, wide-eyed and hopeful, she had taken the job of hostess, welcoming parties, pouring drinks, looking pretty, draped against the glass-topped bar smoking one of her impossibly long silver-tipped cigarettes while David Bowie’s ‘Fame’ twanged its bass – at least that was how Mickey, the owner, had sold it. For a while she had enjoyed being Cleopatra, her alter ego, relishing the chance to run from the child she’d been in Claremont, spritzing perfumes, donning costumes, collecting her tips in a plush satin pouch at the end of the night. But then her job description changed. It started with the odd grope, the occasional leer, and then it was no longer enough to laugh at their jokes or let them squeeze her hand. ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ said Mickey, which was less advice than instruction. Each time one of her clients led her into the back, she drove out her dread and did her duty. She blocked out the rest.
‘Sure,’ Vivien told him. ‘Another drink first?’
‘You’re gonna lead me astray…’ he slurred.
She was about to respond when a figure caught her eye. A man was standing in her peripheral, alone and all the more brazen for that solitude.
His appearance threw her. Conversation dried on her lips – but luckily her companion was too trashed to notice. The stranger was handsome, fair, tall, but it was the way he was looking at her that stole her breath. There’s a new guy out there tonight – he’s smokin’. This man radiated power. He radiated money.
Vivien tried to look away, but each time she was pulled back. He was magnetic. She grappled for words, offered liquor to her clients and realised as she did that her hands were shaking, and still the man neither moved nor averted his gaze. He had to be the only sober one in the room. She felt his scrutiny scorch into her, but not in the usual lecherous way. He was admiring her; he was assessing her. Vivien sensed his interest penetrate every part, making her skin prickle, not unpleasurably.
Finally, she forced out, ‘Please excuse me. I’m not feeling well.’
She stood, and nearly brought the table down with her. A flurry of sloshed jeering; a hand reached out to steady her, or grab her, she wasn’t sure which, and she turned and fled. She had never bailed on a client before: it was forbidden. But she could sit beneath the burn of this stranger’s sun no longer. It made her vulnerable, as if he knew her; as if he could see right through her to the broken girl beneath…
Back in the dressing room, Vivien caught her breath. Moments passed.
Mickey yanked open the curtain.
‘What’s goin’ on?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve got a five-grand table tonight.’
‘I know, I’m sorry. I – I came over funny. Thought I was going to faint.’
‘Well, get yourself together.’ Mickey clamped down on a bitter-smelling cigar. He checked behind him. ‘Anyhow, don’t worry, I got Sandy on it.’
‘Sandy’s taken my table?’ This was unheard of.
‘Yeah.’
‘Why?’
Mickey drew the cigar out of his mouth.
‘Someone wants to meet you,’ he said.
Vivien knew whom he meant.
‘Who is he?’ she whispered.
‘You mean you don’t know?’
She shook her head.
Mickey watched her a moment, then said: ‘Come with me.’
He took her elbow and steered her through the dimly lit passage to his office. Of course the stranger and Mickey had spoken: Mickey took the measure of every man who stepped into the Lalique. But what did he want with her? For some reason, she felt sure it wasn’t the usual request. The man had been too… expensive looking, to just want a roll in the back without so much as knowing her name.
‘Tell me who he is,’ urged Vivien. Mickey said nothing, just gestured for her to keep up. ‘Aren’t you going to answer me?’ she pressed.
‘Here.’ Mickey stopped. Gently, he lifted the fabric from her head and let her golden hair tumble free. He drew a strand of it from in front of her blue eyes.
‘Always knew you were too good for this place,’ he said.
Vivien parted her lips to respond, and then, suddenly, there the man was.
He was standing outside Mickey’s door.
‘You wanna know who he is?’ said Mickey. ‘Why’n’t you ask him yourself?’
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_0a8cd4a2-f089-5f88-9a01-fedcc913ef52)
Italy, Summer 2016
I’m up early on my first morning. The house is quiet and for a moment I forget where I am, before I see my bags heaped at the end of the bed, still full. I’d meant to unpack before falling asleep, but supper must have finished me off – a glance at my panda eyes reminds me I forgot to wash my face. I think of my predecessor, Bill’s friend’s friend, the student whose inquisitiveness got the better of her, and decide that if I’m going to avoid the same fate I’ll need to start as I mean to go on. Ten minutes later, I’ve sorted the shampoo explosion I’d noticed at Pisa, the rest of my clothes are neatly hung and folded, and my belongings are arranged in the Lilac Room.
I shower before heading downstairs. The shrouded portraits, though blinded, watch me as I pass. I remember the man I saw, covered now. Who is he?
The hall is empty. I cannot hear a thing, no voices and no movement, just birdsong. In the scullery, breakfast is left out like a still life: a loaf of bread, a pat of butter, a jug of orange juice and a bunch of grapes. Adalina told me that she alone prepares the meals – ‘Signora prefers it that way’ – and that I must never interfere with cooking. This seems unusual, given that Adalina’s description of my job extends to tending every other aspect of the Barbarossa, from sweeping fire grates to dusting shelves to going to the foot of the drive each morning to collect fresh milk. Perhaps the woman of the house is fussy. Perhaps she can eat only certain things.
I mull this over while I devour the food, not half so picky myself. The grapes burst on my tongue and the butter soaks into the bread crusts, warmed by the morning heat. From a narrow window I can see out to the courtyard, and, as I take my first sip of coffee, I’m surprised to catch a figure resting a bucket on the lip of that ugly fountain. I can only assume it to be the maid. The figure appears to steady herself, before lifting the vessel and emptying it into the well. For a moment the scullery feels weirdly hostile, as if I’m witnessing something I shouldn’t, something clandestine, and am myself being witnessed doing it. The bucket goes to the ground and another comes up in its place, is emptied and then replaced by a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. I consider the heat of the Tuscan sun and how the pool would dry up otherwise – but why sustain it when its function is long gone? The fish hasn’t sung in decades.
If I listen hard I can hear the slosh of the water as it meets the stone, an urgent, vital connection, as if the liquid keeps the fountain alive, heart beating and lungs filled – like feeding something feral in a dark pit. The coffee tastes suddenly sour.
I look away, my appetite diminished. When I glance up again, the courtyard is empty.
*
Afterwards, I begin my commission for the morning – the ballroom. It hasn’t been used in decades and I have to force the door, which swings on rusted hinges. Peach drapery adorns the high windows, whose panes are adrift with cobwebs. I climb the stepladder and watch a thin spider pick its way across gossamer threads, before casting it away with a cloth. I sneeze, the dust in my nostrils.
The fireplace, a once-majestic stone cavern occupying the length of one wall, is equally clogged. Soon the dust is in my hair, and when I wipe my sleeve across my brow it comes away caked in grainy damp. Sunlight fires the room, its huge windows acting like a hothouse, making me sweat. I’m feeling light-headed when:
‘Lucy.’
I turn. There is nobody there.
I daren’t move for a moment, the room charged with some still, waiting entity. Silence comes back at me, no longer calm but malevolent, the empty room, the patient shafts of sunshine climbing across the floor, and the door, firmly closed, daring me to believe in the impossible. There is nobody there. Nobody here.
But I can hear her voice as clear as a bell. She’d said my name, then, too.
Lucy…
And I had turned to face her on that train platform, at once a stranger and a woman I knew better than my own reflection, for I had thought of her so many times and been told so much about her. Commuters, clueless on their slogs to work, had surrounded our tragic island, plugged into their tablets, swigging coffee to get through a hangover. It was different for us. We were separate. And I will never forget the look in her eyes, right before she did it. It wasn’t anger, though it should have been. It was resignation. Disappointment. As if in saying my name she might have proved herself wrong: I wasn’t Lucy, I hadn’t done those things; it had been in her head all along.
Lucy.
A kind voice, soft, inquisitive – not what I had expected.
I return to the fire grate, sinister now, its black hood as hard and cool as the rail tracks beneath our feet… Stand behind the yellow line. I had been conscious of a stupid thing, not what I should have been paying attention to at all: the fact I had just been with him. We had spent all night together, all morning, and his smell was on me.
The worst part was that I didn’t stay. In the turmoil that followed, I’d fled the scene, breathless, the world truncated to a series of shuddering camera frames, galloping at me, disorienting, fundamentally changed. I’d emerged into the day and thrown up on the pavement. Then I’d run. Like the coward I was, I’d run…
The sound of the castillo’s bell pulls me from my thoughts. Scrambling up, desperate to get out of the stifling room, I cross the floor. I didn’t really hear her voice. It was my imagination. I don’t believe in ghosts. Mum has never come back to me, so why should anyone else?
At the door, a man is holding two large boxes. He gets me to sign for them and then seems in a hurry to leave, rushing back to his van and disappearing down the drive in a cloud of chalk. I frown, examining the weight in my hands, and nudge the door shut with my foot. The boxes are plastic, sealed tight with lots of brown tape, and the contents labels are written in Italian. I see numbers and percentages, a warning in bold red type, and when I gently shake them, a force of habit born of a little girl’s fascination with her mother’s belongings (those delicately wrapped gifts my dad presented her with each Valentine’s Day; the soft leather purses she kept in her wardrobe, filled with mysterious things; the make-up bags she chided me gently not to play with, heavy with bottles and tubes that knocked against each other like boiled sweets), I hear a metallic rattle. The address is headed:
Sig.ra V Lockhart
I’m trying to figure out from where I know that name – some dim recess tosses it up as recognisable, Vanessa, Virginia, it’s on the tip of my tongue – when Adalina materialises behind me, relieves me of the boxes and says, ‘You must never answer the door. Only I answer.’
I’m about to reply, to object that I hadn’t known this because nobody told me, when, armed with the shadowy delivery, Adalina turns on her heel and vanishes upstairs to return to her charge, and I am left alone once more.
*
I don’t mean to go near the attic that afternoon, but I’m on such a roll come five o’clock that I decide to venture to that furthest corridor before calling it a day. From the windows, I can see right across to Florence. The Duomo shimmers against a golden sky, and the blue-green Arno snakes like a ribbon through the city. I can’t wait to be there: it’ll be like re-entering the world after weeks orbiting outer space.
I’ll start by getting online.
I tell myself it’s to contact Bill, to let my family know I’m well, but really I’m thinking of him, each hour that passes another hour in which he might have decided it’s been long enough, that we need each other, that he does still want me in his life. Then, buoyed by hope, I’ll have a sorbet in the Piazza della Signoria before strolling across the Ponte Vecchio and browsing the stalls. I’ll buy Bill a present, and my dad too, and then only when it’s late will I get the bus back to Fiesole and find my way up to the Barbarossa. Every day off will be like this, and, for the first time in a while, I feel as if I’m in the right place. As if maybe, just maybe, things might turn out OK.
The first thump takes me by surprise. But I’m not quite describing it right – it’s less a thump than a… drag. Like a heavy chair moving across floorboards.
It startles me and I sit back on my heels, listening, alert as a cat, my ears pricked to the slightest sound. The castillo is full of weird snaps and creaks, a maze of emptiness and silence compounding the effect, and I remind myself that just hours before, in the ballroom, I tricked myself into believing someone had said my name.
But then I hear it again. The same noise, louder this time. It is coming from above, and when I look to the ceiling, a patina of cracked, mottled stone, I hear it for a third time and am able to position it exactly. There is somebody in the attic.
I check behind, half expecting Adalina to haul me up and away, accusing me of breaking another law, but the corridor is deserted. I hear a bee outside the window, the pitch of its buzz lowering each time its body rushes against the pane. Slowly, I turn to the door at the end of the hall. Nobody goes. Your work extends to this point and not beyond. But Adalina didn’t say anything about other people being up there. If someone already is, won’t I be doing a service in exposing the contravention?
I advance. The door sits low, with a tapered hood, like those odd little accesses you see in churches. It strikes me that whoever once used this must have been short in stature, and I remember the abandoned sleigh beds. I press my ear to it, and listen.
No more thumps, no more drags, but I know what I heard. I push the handle, a coarse, rusted loop that leaves an orange stain on my palm. Puzzled at how something so feeble looking can be so robust, I resolve to apply my whole weight to the door, turning the lever as I do. It gives not an inch – except for a sensation of absolute cold on the shoulder touching the wood. I shake the lock, afraid to make too much noise, but I know that it won’t surrender. Never mind Adalina: this is its own gatekeeper.
Crouching, I notice a coppery tear-shaped flap. With some persuasion it shifts, exposing the keyhole. I press my eye to it. The cool hits me like a fan, and an old, musty smell emerges. The darkness is absolute. Whoever is up there is in the dark.
In the dark. In the quiet. Waiting.
I wait, too.
I’m reluctant to call out, because I don’t want Adalina to hear. It isn’t anything to do with the whistling anxiety that I might get a response, an anxiety that gathers pace by the second like a breeze on a moonlit lake; it’s that, contrary to all my logical sense, I’d be summoning someone or something I really don’t want anything to do with. I know that dragging sound was not friendly.
I replace the flap and return down the hall.
By the time I reach the stairs, I am running.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_34eadf3d-450c-51bb-b15c-8f0261ad6063)
Vivien, Los Angeles, 1976
His name was Jonny Laing, the man with the Midas touch. He introduced himself as if she ought to recognise the name, and Vivien was embarrassed that she didn’t.
‘It’s OK,’ Jonny said, with a cagey sort of delight, like a fox eyeing a chicken coop. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s one of the many things I like about you, Vivien. You’re… how should I put it? Uninitiated. Innocent. Unspoiled.’
Vivien had never considered herself to be unspoiled; her father had done a pretty good job of putting paid to that. But she liked that Jonny imagined her to be so, because he was smart and successful, and if he thought there was a scrap of purity left in her then maybe he was right. As she listened to him explain what he did for a living – ‘I’m in the movie business, and I know a star when I see one’ – all she could think was: I’m dreaming. This is a dream. Here was the answer to her desperate prayers, bam! Straight into her life, just like that. It couldn’t be happening, but it was.
He took her for supper at a restaurant downtown, and told her his plans: this project, that project, she would be perfect for them all. Was it really so easy? Or would she wake in a few hours’ time and realise she had imagined the whole thing? Vivien found herself confiding in him about where she had come from, about Gilbert, the thrashings, the escape, all the demons from her past and the parts that made her vulnerable, ugly. She braced herself for his criticism, to be told to pack up and go back to Claremont like a good girl. But Jonny didn’t treat her like a girl, he treated her like a queen. He was kind and generous and exciting. And, contrary to Vivien’s expectations as she stumbled home on a cloud, he was true to his word.
The next morning, a sleek motorcar arrived outside her crummy apartment. For the second time in her life, Vivien bundled her belongings into a canvas shell and prepared to embark into the wild unknown. Hollywood: the ultimate prize.
The following weeks and months were a storm. Vivien barely had time to think. If Jonny hadn’t reminded her to eat and sleep, if for nothing else than to preserve her ‘extraordinary’ beauty, she would have forgotten that too. Every day was a hurricane of photo shoots, magazine interviews, power brunches, castings and read-throughs. Jonny didn’t allow her a moment’s rest. The beachside condo he set up for her was exquisite, but she never spent any time there. She dined in the finest bistros, she had a wardrobe from the most exclusive stores, she was thrown in with the most influential movers and shakers in the business and she drank it up like nectar from heaven. Not any heaven Gilbert Lockhart would recognise, of course. If her father could see her now – his chaste, belt-lashed little girl – if he could see the things she had done to get here… To hell with you, Daddy, she thought. I’m through.
It wasn’t long before Vivien Lockhart’s name was on the lips of every major player in Hollywood. Her days at Boudoir Lalique seemed another world, the long, high dive board from which she feared she would never spring. Jonny was her saviour: he had flung her into the blue. She couldn’t thank him enough, not just for the promise of her career but also for restoring her faith in friendship. She had all but given up trusting anyone and then he came along, the friend she had yearned for, showing her that good could affect a life as tangibly and irreversibly as bad. There didn’t have to be a catch. Jonny had seen a light in her and fanned the flame. Over time, her soul began to lighten and heal. She reached out, full of hope.
Vivien savoured every moment of her rebirth with a grateful and open heart. She passed through LA awe-struck at her luck, marvelling at the glass buildings where Jonny and his partners forged fortunes on a lunch break. LAING FAIRMOUNT PICTURES, his sign read. She thanked every star in the galaxy for its existence.
And then Jonny had news.
‘Burt Sanderson’s asked to see you,’ he told her, arriving at her condo unannounced one evening. It was unlike Jonny to be flustered – but Burt was major league. If Vivien worked with the famous director, she was going stellar. Jonny knew it; she knew it. They had worked hard for this, getting all the pieces into place. Jonny likened it to engineering a racing car: you built it, you honed it, you polished it – then you just needed the track on which to see it fly. Burt Sanderson was that track.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I’ll see you there.’
*
Despite her nerves running off the scale, in the end it wasn’t so different to her gigs at the Lalique. Fixing her smile, saying the right thing, working to elicit this reaction or that. Burt and his panel were inscrutable to begin with, but then, as Vivien warmed to the part, channelling her character, a girl from the slums who makes it big, it occurred to her that she wasn’t acting at all. She didn’t need to. She was this person.
When Burt called the next day, Vivien was beside herself. Sitting in Jonny’s office in a sun-drenched window, she watched him replace the receiver.
Jonny met her eye. He looked at her strangely, his expression indecipherable.
She didn’t move from her chair. ‘I didn’t get it, did I?’ she said in a small voice. Never mind, it had been a long shot. It would probably go to Ava, or Faye. They deserved it. She was just the new kid on the block; she couldn’t expect to just—
‘He wants you,’ said Jonny.
‘What?’
Jonny’s face broke into a grin.
‘Honey, he wants you. We got it. You got it.’
Vivien blinked. A buzzing sound galloped through her ears.
‘Do you hear me, Vivien?’ Jonny held his arms out. ‘The part’s yours! Burt frickin’ Sanderson – do you understand what this means?’
Rapture struck. Vivien’s hands flew to her face. She leaped up and ran into his waiting embrace. ‘Oh, Jonny!’ she cried. ‘Oh, thank you, thank you!’
He held her, kissing her hair over and over. ‘You did it, Viv,’ he murmured.
‘I can’t believe it!’ Tears swam to her eyes, happy tears, elated tears, but she contained them because she was an actress now and she had to start as she meant to go on. Besides, she had nothing to cry about any longer. Jonny had rescued her: she need never cry again. He had transformed her life, this wonderful, brilliant man. She could kiss him! For a crazy second she thought she would.
Then, without warning, Jonny beat her to it. Before Vivien could protest, his lips were on hers. But instead of playful brevity, that impulsive kiss she had considered bestowing on him a moment ago, he lingered. His mouth pressed too hard.
She pulled away, laughing uneasily.
‘It’s swell, Jonny,’ she said. ‘I’m thrilled.’
He grabbed her again; his breath was hot in her face.
‘How thrilled?’ he rasped.
Vivien put her hands on his chest and pushed. He was as excited as she was, that was all. This was a huge deal for both of them.
He kissed her again. This time she did break free.
‘I have to go,’ she said, spots of confusion bursting behind her eyes. The balance that had sustained their companionship was suddenly off. She felt indebted to Jonny, his advance an open palm waiting for payment – and her pockets were empty.
‘Where?’ Jonny demanded.
‘I have a lunch date,’ she said meekly. It was a lie, the quickest one she could come up with. It occurred to her that she had never lied to Jonny before.
‘With who?’
‘A friend.’
‘Can’t you call it off?’ For the first time, a glint of menace appeared in Jonny’s eye, a petulance. She took a step back. ‘We did this together, Vivien,’ he said. ‘We secured Burt Sanderson together. We should celebrate… together. You and me.’
‘Like I said, I have plans.’
The next part happened too quickly to know what came first. Vivien opened the door, but in the same movement it was slammed shut. Jonny came at her, turned her against the wall, and then his hands were hitching up her skirt.
All at once Vivien realised she’d been fooled. This had always been the price – just like at Boudoir Lalique. There was no such thing as a no-strings contract.
‘C’mon, baby,’ he murmured, ‘you know you owe me.’
Vivien fought back with all her might but it was impossible; he was too strong. ‘Get off me!’ she screamed. ‘Get your hands off me!’
‘You want it too. You’ve wanted it from day one.’
‘Jonny, please—’
‘This is what you’re good at, isn’t it, baby?’ His greedy hands crept round to her breasts. No, she prayed, no, no, no. This can’t happen. I won’t let it.
‘All those men you went with at the club…’ Oh, God, she had told him too much, trusted him with her darkest secrets. How could I have been so stupid? ‘Just a sweet whore at heart, aren’t you? So, come on, it’s my turn now; I’ve earned my right. I’ve waited long enough. I’ve paid you more than any of those jocks…’
It took all Vivien’s might to free her arms, but once she had, the rest followed. Throwing her weight against him, she scraped her heel down his shin, at the same time digging her elbow high into his diaphragm, winding him. Jonny staggered back. Vivien grabbed his shoulders and brought her knee into his groin, making him howl.
Every part of her shook – with fear, with adrenalin, with victory. She didn’t know where her strength came from. Perhaps it had always been there, buried inside.
‘Never touch me again,’ she said, her voice quavering. She wanted to weep – with shock, with disappointment, with sadness at the innocence she had lost, the friendship she had watched blow to ash before her eyes. Would she ever meet a man who would care for her and put her first? Would she ever know love without pain, without expectation, without betrayal? Would she ever be able to trust a living soul without that nagging voice telling her: You’re safer on your own? Would she always be frightened, lonely, damaged… the eternal outsider? Something hardened within Vivien in that moment: something liquid turned to stone. ‘I owe you nothing, Jonny,’ she said, ‘do you get it? You found me. You offered me this. It never came at a price.’
She straightened her clothes and willed her trembling legs to carry her into the corridor. As she stepped out, she heard his voice ring out from behind.
‘I’ll get you for this,’ Jonny choked. ‘You’re nothing without me, Vivien. I’ve given you everything – and rest assured I can take it away just as fast.’
I’d like to see you try, Vivien thought, lifting her chin.
I’m stronger by myself. I’m stronger than you know.
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_c0b275fd-d2ef-5658-8f29-2cec89648dee)
Italy, Summer 2016
We speak, finally, on the Friday. Adalina tells me: ‘Signora isn’t able to see visitors; she’s unwell. But if you go to her room at midday she will talk with you.’
I’m curious as to how this encounter will unfold, and when I reach Signora’s room at the appointed time it’s all I can do not to laugh, because Adalina wasn’t joking. There is a chair parked outside the woman’s door, and the door itself has been left ajar. A shaft of light seeps from the mysterious bedroom, but nothing else is visible. Gingerly, I sit. Nothing happens. Finally, I venture: ‘Hello?’
The space is so quiet that to move the chair would be startling. Instead I adjust my position, so that another inch of the room creeps into view. Rugs. Drapes. Heavy furnishings, gold and black… There is the edge of a mirror, in which I think I glimpse a fraction of the woman’s reflection. The back of her head, her shoulders, perhaps. It’s like turning an abstract picture, trying to make sense and finding none. I realise I am desperate to see her. I imagine her as tall, her pale hair secured at the nape of the neck with a velvet clasp, her shoulders broad and her jaw firm, still crisply defined despite her years, her lips full and wide… I draw her not as pretty but as handsome: someone whose face, having seen it once, you will not forget.
When she speaks, I recognise immediately the person I talked to on the phone.
‘Lucy.’ Her voice is distinctive, deeply mellow, like plums in autumn on the verge of rot. It comes from a place much closer to me than the mirror would imply, and a chill skitters down my spine at the prospect that she is closer to me than I think, and that she isn’t the person in the bed, if indeed that is a person.
She says my name as if it tastes bad, her tongue splicing it in two.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
‘You’ve settled in?’ It isn’t a polite enquiry; there is no warmth or friendliness, more an impatience. I hold my hands together in my lap.
‘Yes,’ I say again, feeling like a schoolgirl outside the headmistress’s office, waiting for punishment. Only in this case, I have no idea what I’ve done wrong.
‘We wished to avoid hiring,’ the voice says shortly, rudely. ‘But the house won’t look after itself – and I can’t very well expect Adalina to do it.’
I’m unsure how to react. ‘I’m glad you decided to,’ I say, and before I can stop myself I’m babbling, eager to please and it emerges as over-share. ‘It came at the right time for me. I was looking to get out of London. This was too good to pass up.’
Stop talking. She doesn’t need to know.
‘Oh?’ comes the voice.
‘Family stuff,’ I say quickly. It sounds weak, a quick step back – and, though it’s impossible, the silence that follows is so loaded that I start to wonder if by some miracle she knows my story. What would she think of the crime I committed?
‘As you’re aware, I rarely take company,’ she says, and I’m relieved to move off subject. ‘You might view this job as an escape clause, or a frivolous holiday, but this house is my home and I will protect it with all that I have. If it’s equal to you, I would ask that we stay out of each other’s way wherever possible.’
My mouth is dry. Relief turns to surprise, then shock. ‘Of course,’ I say.
‘You may go now.’
The end of the meeting, if it can be called that. I’m debating the correctness of saying goodbye, surely too formal but then it’s hardly as if she’s set any other tone, before the door in front of me closes abruptly, a swift sharp snap then silence.
*
That evening I take the bus into town. Florence is coming to life on the cusp of night as only a city can: twinkling lights dance on the river, couples stroll through cobbled piazzas, the scent of burned-crust pizza fills the air along with a heady tang of wine.
I turn on my phone. It seems to take an age for it to switch network, find a signal and connect to 3G. I wait. The moments pass. Each time a message beeps in from my new server, my heart leaps then dives. There’s one from Bill, another from our landlord. Tilda WhatsApps from a Barbadian beach, wishing me luck, lots of smiling emojis. To my shame I’m not waiting for them. I wait for anything from him, an email, a text, a missed call, anything. I blink back tears: of course there’s none. What would Tilda think of her reliable big sister, the person who put her to bed and cooked her tea and waited up each night she went out, being responsible for…?
I can’t say it. I can’t think it.
Shoving my phone back in my bag, I head to the library, so focused on the distraction it will give me that I almost trip up the steps to the entrance.
It’s open late, quiet, studious, deliciously private. As I settle into a booth with a stack of archives, I turn my phone to vibrate, and read Bill’s message again:
Spill, then – who is she? What’s she like? Xxx
Today’s encounter with Signora has set me on edge. Horrible, I start to write back, horrible and rude and weird. Why did I come here? Why did I let you convince me? But I delete the draft. I don’t want to admit the truth to Bill – that the woman I spoke to is hard and cold, cruel and dismissive, but that for some insane reason I’m drawn to her, fascinated by her, and I feel connected to her in a way I can’t express. I need to know who she is. I need to know why she’s cut herself off.
Just like me.
I’ve become protective of my quarantine. Connecting to the outside world makes me panic that I’m about to learn drastic news. It’ll be Bill, or one of my sisters, or my dad, or some random on Facebook I haven’t spoken to in years, emailing me about the exposure at home. I can see it now; rehearsed the way it might unfold so many times. Lucy, what the hell? Is it true? Or perhaps, simply: It’s started.
As ever, temptation lingers to check the websites, Google his name, his wife’s name, see if anything new has cropped up, but I have to trust that Bill would tell me first. She doesn’t reference it, doesn’t even mention it, and I know she’s being kind. She’s trying to help me forget. How could I forget? I can’t. I decide to click the phone off altogether, instructing myself instead to the task at hand. In this, at least, I can distance myself from my plight. However challenging I’ve found the Barbarossa so far, it’s at least proved a change of scene – and however obstructive its owner, she’s given me a diversion. Something happened at that house. I sense it in the walls, the shadows and the dark. From Adalina’s secrecy and Salvatore’s madness. From the voice behind the door; from the noises in the attic, the cold and the quiet…
Something happened.
I begin by looking up the castillo on the library’s bank of computers. A quick search reveals nothing of its possessor, but the local records surrender more. It’s all in Italian so I run a quick translate – the rendition isn’t perfect, but it’s enough, and soon the story is forming. I scan the text, tracing reports back to the earliest point I can find: 1980, when she moved here from America. Her arrival had caused a stir.
Tuscany welcomes home its son, renowned doctor Giovanni ‘Gio’ Moretti, and his wife, Hollywood actress Vivien Lockhart, to the Castillo Barbarossa in Fiesole. The pair married last month in a romantic ceremony in Los Angeles and now return to Italy, according to their spokesperson, ‘to begin family life in a more peaceful setting’. Moretti will be engaged in a top-secret research project, for which he was privately selected, while Lockhart is said to be taking a break from her movie career…
So that was she. Of course it was. Vivien. Seeing the name in front of me, it seems obvious. Her fame was before my time, a bright brief spark in the seventies, but I’m sure Mum had her films on video when I was growing up, and in my mind’s eye I catch a flash of what she used to look like. Even the sound of her voice, lilting, seductive, embroidered with heavenly promise. It doesn’t match the voice I heard today. That voice was coarse with suffering. As if a demon had got inside her…
Moretti’s younger sister, about whom little is known, accompanies the couple; the trio are said to be close, and are ‘looking forward to facing a new start together’. Signor Giacomo Dinapoli, the siblings’ uncle, owned the fifteenth-century Castillo Barbarossa for many years before his death…
I read on, but the relevance to Vivien thins out and it becomes more about the house. I flip to the next article relating to her name, then the next and the next. I’m spoiled for information about the Barbarossa but there is little about its inhabitants. Was Giovanni Moretti the man whose portrait I saw on the staircase? I recall his unusual eyes, the insistence in his glare, and how quickly Adalina steered me on. And who was the sister? Why was she with them? There are items about parties thrown at the mansion, lavish, colourful affairs, a masked ball at Halloween, an annual occasion for which the Barbarossa is, or was, famous, but I’m unable to scratch beneath the surface and uncover what I’m hungry for. What am I hungry for – a scandal to put my own in the shade? Some act that Vivien committed, or was committed to her, that makes mine seem incidental, or not so bad? I try another search, marvel at her glamorous black and white headshots, magazine covers, Vivien laughing at parties where the vintage glitterati sip from teardrops of champagne and smoke Cuban cigars; screen grabs from her movies where she resembles a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Katharine Hepburn, and there is something familiar about her, a face I feel I met in another life, long-lost now. I Wikipedia her, but the material on her personal life is scarce. She was born in South Carolina, a religious upbringing then the move to LA, the swift soar to fame, leading to her marriage to Giovanni and the relocation to Europe.
After that, nothing… the trail ends.
Only, it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t.
Abandoning the web, there is one more thing I unearth in the district papers. It’s an account dated from November 1989.
… Furthermore to our report on last year’s tragedy at the Castillo Barbarossa, La Gazzetta can reveal that one-time actress Vivien Lockhart is now living alone at the mansion, having been abandoned by her husband. Signora Lockhart has not been seen in weeks and has become confined. One wonders what effect, both mental and physical, she suffered after the events that took place last winter. We send her our well wishes for recovery – as well as for her reconciliation with Signor Moretti.
I check back in the documents for La Gazzetta’s write-up from the previous year – but I find nothing. No other files under Vivien Lockhart.
I’ve reached a dead end.
‘Mi scusi, signora, ma stiamo chiudendo.’
The librarian distracts me from my thoughts. I look at the time. It’s gone ten. How have I spent three hours looking at this stuff, and not even noticed?
‘Grazie,’ I reply, gathering my things.
The library is deserted, the wooden booths empty. At the front desk, a woman is checking books back in, and smiles at me as I pass. I’m heading down the stairs to the street when I hear footsteps behind me, matching mine perfectly. I slow. So do the footsteps. I start again, quickening my pace. Whoever is behind me follows suit.
My pulse speeds up.
I’m relieved to reach the normality of the real world, but don’t stop until I am safely across the road and swept up in the crowd. A carnival is unfolding, the beat of a deep drum surging the revellers forward through the streets, flags held aloft, faces painted, and I duck into a doorway to catch myself. Only then do I look behind.
I’m in time to see a man watching me. My eyes go straight to him, though he is surrounded, as if I always knew I’d find him there. Perhaps it is because he is standing totally still, like a rock in furiously churning water. His face is obscured, I cannot make him out, but I would put him at a little older than me; he’s broad, dark, and staring right back. Immediately, I know who he is. I’ve always known.
They found me. It was only a matter of time before they did.
I turn and rush through the bleeding, blinding streets, weaving flames and hollering voices, desperate now to get back to the Barbarossa, frightened of what lies behind me but frightened, too, of what waits for me there.
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_bad2e06b-397c-5c4e-bbeb-5e58fb1bfb5e)
Vivien, Los Angeles, 1978
Vivien Lockhart rolled over in the warm glow of Californian sunshine, and stretched inside satin sheets. Outside, the green ocean sighed, waves lapping against a golden shore. What day was it? Ah, yes, an important one. Tonight, she would accept her first Leading Lady Award at the annual Actors Alliance. Everyone knew it was in the bag – her recent turn in the mega-hit Angels at War was unrivalled: she was a tour de force, a masterclass, a vision to behold, and the only way was up. Vivien was the brightest star in Hollywood. She had it all, everything she had fantasised about and more. Every studio wanted to work with her, every designer wanted to dress her, every rising starlet wanted to be her. Oh, and every man wanted to bed her.
‘Hey, baby…’
The model-slash-actor she’d brought back last night reached for her: bronzed arms, a mane of jet hair like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. She couldn’t remember his name. No doubt this was, for him, the start of some grand love affair.
‘Screw, is that the time?’ Vivien swung out of bed and headed for the shower; she had brunch with her agent at ten. ‘I gotta get ready. Dandy’ll kill me if I’m late.’
‘You don’t want breakfast?’ The model-slash-actor was disappointed.
‘No.’ She smiled sweetly at him. ‘By the time I’m done, I want you out.’
*
She bagged the award, of course. It had never belonged to anyone else. As Vivien went to collect her gong and deliver her speech, she reflected on the glittering crowds gazing up at her from the ranks. Envy on the women’s faces; lust on the men’s. Vivien’s crown was untoppleable: her beauty and talent were second to none.
‘Don’t you think you oughtta slow down a little?’ Dandy asked as they took a car to the after party off Broadway. Vivien unscrewed the cap off a Chambord miniature – her third. But that wasn’t counting the brandy.
She drained it. ‘Say what?’
‘You’ll be drunk.’
‘Haven’t I earned it?’
‘The night’s not over yet. You’re still on the clock.’
‘And I’m still fine.’
Dandy knew better than to press the issue. As Vivien applied lipstick, she decided that if it was a choice between the warm burn of alcohol in her throat and any approval Dandy could offer, she would choose the alcohol every time. For many years, she’d been dead against it – her father had been enough to put her off. But these days, it was all that would do. It kept her moving and stopped her thinking; it sped the days and nights along like a leaf in a rushing stream, never pausing or getting caught.
That was her motto: Keep going, keep striving. Looking back never did anyone any favours. Learn your lessons and wear them like armour.
Their car pulled up outside the warehouse venue. Owned by Warhol, inside it was a tropical, decadent paradise of exquisite creatures. Vivien was regaled on entering, the Halston jersey dress she had changed into after the ceremony admired and revered, her shimmering trophy marvelled at as if she held the sun in her hands.
‘Congratulations, Vivien,’ ‘Darling, well done,’ ‘Oh, you look ravishing!’
Compliments fell about her like rain. Dandy steered her through as best he could but everyone wanted to stop and take her hand, tell her how much they adored her and what a stunning performance she had achieved, hoping to delay her long enough that a paparazzo would pass and take their picture together and it would appear in the glossies in the morning. Fame was contagious, or so they hoped. Vivien was the golden lamp: touch her arm and she might just make their wish come true.
Her own wishes, of course, had come bountifully to fruition. Perhaps that was why, amid the clamour of appreciation, Vivien could only see the hollow truth beneath. These people had got her wrong. They imagined her to be the girl Dandy sold to the press – a butter-wouldn’t-melt ingénue who had walked into a Burt Sanderson audition one balmy afternoon and claimed the part she was born to play.
Nobody knew about her sordid beginnings, her violent father or her shameful work-for-tips at Boudoir Lalique. She was determined it would stay that way.
The hours passed in a haze of booze, drugs and dance. Vivien moved across the spotlit floor, disco balls shattering kaleidoscopic light and she was in one man’s arms and then another’s and then another’s, each of them faceless, nameless. She thought about the girls she had known in Claremont and at the Lalique – what did they make of her celebrity? Did they respect her, or pity her? Did they wish for the studs in her bed or did they have husbands of their own, children, families?
Vivien wondered if she herself would ever have a family. The one she’d left behind had injured her so badly that she vowed never to be beholden to one again. Besides, she was too sullied. These men thought they wanted her, and they did for a night, a week, a month – but for always? No. Not once they saw the hidden scars.
She was drifting to the bar when a voice pierced her from behind.
‘Hello, Vivien.’
It was like being stabbed in the back by a thin, sharp blade.
Not you. Please, not you.
‘Jonny Laing,’ she forced herself to answer. ‘What a surprise.’
She should have been more careful. She had checked tonight’s list and he hadn’t been on it, but clearly he’d managed to slide his way in, insidious, horrible, Jonny all over. She’d got sloppy; she had to be smarter. Vivien avoided her adversary at all costs, for the mere sight of him chilled her. Jonny relished the cards he held: even after all this time, he still believed he could have her. He believed that one day she would capitulate and he would get a return on his investment. The higher her star climbed, the more of a payout it would deliver. Tonight, she was stratospheric.
‘It seemed a shame not to congratulate you,’ said Jonny acidly. ‘You’re a hard woman to get hold of these days. To think of the partnership we once had…’
Vivien was desperate to shake him off, scrub herself down and erase any trace of him. Her heart galloped and her lungs strained. Everywhere she turned, her fellow luminaries appeared grotesque, made up like circus clowns, laughing and roaring.
Jonny held the key to her downfall. Imagine if they found out…
‘Leave me alone,’ she forced out. ‘Please. I’ll do anything.’
‘Anything?’ He grinned. ‘You know what I want.’
Vivien shook. Even if she did sleep with him, he would never leave her alone.
‘Never,’ she croaked. ‘Not that.’
‘Then we’re stuck.’
‘I’ve got money. You can have it. I’ll pay back every cent—’
He laughed, horribly. ‘Come on, Vivien, listen to yourself.’
‘I won’t sleep with you, Jonny.’
He licked his lips, slow, tantalising.
‘Come along, sweetheart, you never know – you might even enjoy it.’
‘Go to hell.’
‘Remember I know about you,’ he said. ‘I know everything.’
It took all her will not to spit in his face. She was trapped – as trapped as she’d been back in Claremont, hiding in her bedroom awaiting the sting of her father’s belt.
‘Jump off a cliff, you bastard,’ she said.
Vivien stepped away but he seized her arm, just as he had that day in his office. She couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, the world spiralling out of control. Twisting from him, she lost her balance and stumbled, fell, was caught—
‘Oops!’ Suddenly Dandy was with them, holding her up. ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we, darling?’ Casual smiles for their observers; it was nothing, a long day and an exciting night; he’d spin it right in the morning. ‘Come along, Viv.’
Grateful, she allowed herself to be led. And she heard Jonny’s parting hiss:
‘I’ll tell the world, Vivien… if you don’t give it to me.’
*
Over the coming weeks, Vivien lay low. She became a recluse in her apartment, too paranoid to go out but at the same time afraid to stay in: afraid of the bell ringing or the phone going, and Jonny reiterating his menace. She ignored calls from Dandy.
How had it come to this? All the glitter and fortune she had longed for, and yet at its heart a whistling void. She felt invisible, a ghost girl, not really here.
She drank to escape the pain. And one Friday night, things came to a head.
She had started with one gin, the alcohol rushing to her head, making her eyes sting. Next time she looked, the bottle was empty. That was the way of it, great blackouts, time losses she couldn’t account for. Just as she was nodding off on the couch, the telephone rang, startling her. Bleary-eyed, forgetting, she reached for it.
‘Hullo?’
‘Vivien, it’s your aunt, Celia.’
Vivien sat, rubbing her eyes, her blotted brain struggling to kick into gear. She hadn’t heard from Celia since… well, since she’d left. Since the last Sunday service they had both attended in Claremont. The woman’s voice severed her.
‘I’m afraid I have bad news,’ Celia went on. ‘Your mother is dead. The funeral is on Sunday. Your father told me not to bother but I thought you’d want to know.’
The conversation must have continued after that, but Vivien played no conscious part in it. When Celia hung up, she dropped the phone. She drank more. She stared her image down in the mirror and when she could stand it no longer she punched the glass, cracking it like a beautiful mosaic. Alcohol – she needed it. She needed to be numb. But there was none left, the cupboards empty, her secret stash under the bed depleted. Only one thing for it: she grabbed the keys to the Mustang.
It was kamikaze to go driving. Directionless, delirious, drunk, Vivien was the last person who should have got behind a wheel. It was a wonder she hadn’t been killed, the newspapers said afterwards, or that she hadn’t killed anyone else.
Vaguely she was aware of heading downtown. Once she had a drink she could work out what she was going to do. Saying farewell to her mother would mean seeing her father again. She couldn’t. She just couldn’t. Her father had been right. God only did look after the virtuous. She had always been destined for the gates of hell.
The car spun off the road and, after that, only black.
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_d6b70b8a-fa27-5c66-8ac6-01f46fe4c8e4)
Italy, Summer 2016
It rains all weekend, a damp, flat, rolling sky bursting with pent-up heat.
I’m inside when the Barbarossa’s phone rings. Having been chastised for answering the front door, I don’t go for it myself, and instead continue my work cleaning and sorting the old study. This morning I discovered a photograph in one of the desk drawers, of Vivien as a young woman. Without question, she had been fabulous, gazing into the camera, her blonde hair curled round her ears and a smile on her face. I’d wondered who had taken the picture – from the way she was posing, it was someone she had been in love with. In the background, I could make out the castillo. The note on the back, scribbled in pencil, read: V, 1981. And it wasn’t so much Vivien’s appearance that had arrested me, how young and vibrant she looked; it was the hope in her. The optimism. All that was gone now.
Forget it, I tell myself. Don’t go there. After my scare at the library, I’ve resolved to put a lid on my curiosity. The man was a journalist, I know it. By now he will have reported back to London, to some ravenous editor in an office on Southwark Street, a woman not unlike Natasha, polished and cutthroat, with the toothpaste-white smile of an angel but with a dagger concealed in her silk blouse. The woman will be celebrating, kicking off her heels, opening a chilled bottle of wine… But she won’t tell anyone, not yet, this story is too hot and too precious. Just for tonight, it’s hers alone. The story of the year: a tale of seduction, betrayal and murder.
And love…
I can’t risk meeting the same fate as my predecessor. I can’t risk being sent home. Right now, the Barbarossa is the only protection I have.
Yesterday, I overheard Vivien in conversation, presumably with Adalina. I was outside, clearing the rain-clogged gutters of leaves, head bent against the downpour, when from an open window I detected her voice. ‘You mean you really can’t see it?’ I fought to catch Adalina’s response over the spit of drops bouncing off the veranda roof, but what followed from Vivien filled the blanks. ‘God, woman, it’s unmistakeable. It’s like looking at a photograph. She’s too like her; I can’t bear it…’
Too like whom? Who was Vivien talking about?
I had to get Vivien on side. For as long as I was here, secluded in these hills, I was safe. She had succeeded for years in hiding from the world. Why couldn’t I do the same? I’m used to hiding, after all. Those years I spent at home caring for my broken family – maybe they were as much for me as for them. I needed to be closeted away. I needed to be forgotten.
Adalina appears at the study door.
‘It was for you,’ she says.
‘What was?’
‘The telephone.’
I’m startled. I haven’t given this number to anyone, not even Bill.
‘Who was it?’
‘They did not say. They only asked for Lucy. I told them to leave a message.’ She frowns. ‘And they hung up.’ Adalina is clearly annoyed, though at the distraction to her busy day or by her suspicion that I’m spreading Vivien Lockhart’s personal contact details all over Europe it’s hard to know. ‘They sounded… impatient.’
Fear scatters through me, and I ask: ‘Was it a man or a woman?’
‘A woman.’
The slice of hope that it might have been him (never mind the fact he has no clue that I’m in Italy and, even if he did, wouldn’t be able to track me down: love makes us believe in the impossible) is pinched out. ‘A woman?’ I repeat.
‘Please tell your friends not to call the house in future.’
‘It can’t have been a friend. Nobody knows this number.’
Adalina doesn’t buy it. Just tell them, her expression says, before she leaves.
I listen to my breath for a moment, fast and short.
I’ve been found.
*
I return to the library that evening, only this time I’m not chasing Vivien’s story. I’m chasing my own – and I have to reach it before someone else does.
I have to make contact with him. Now the time is here, now it’s happening, I feel strangely calm. All the things I’ve rehearsed to say go out of the window.
I take a breath and begin. Compose message.
So, here I am. It’s been a while. I never thought it would be so long, and longer still when every moment hurts. I’m sorry. That’s the first thing to say. I’m sorry for what happened.
The cursor blinks. I delete what I’ve written and start again.
I have a question, and it’s this. Am I bad? Am I evil? Tell me, because I don’t know. My crime is that I fell in love with a man who told me he was single. You told me you were single. I fell in love with your laugh and your hands and the gentle frown you wear when you are concentrating. I fell in love with adventure, with excitement. I fell in love with the girl you promised me I was: the girl I’d always wanted to be.
My fingers hover over the keys. When words aren’t enough, what then?
I remember the day we met. He interviewed me for the role, and all I could think of right the way through was a line from the job description: The position of PA requires you to work intimately with the director. Here he was. Intimately.
He’d been cool, calm, everything I wasn’t. Steel-grey eyes, burning in some lights, thawed in others; a sharp, square jaw; messy gold hair. I kept seeing those eyes. I see them now. Where absence forces other details to fail, that one never does. I’ve looked into them too many times. They’ve looked into me.
I was shocked by the revelation he was married, ready to walk. Don’t, he said. They were estranged. There were children but he barely saw them; his wife was with someone new, a man they called Daddy. It broke his heart. I loved him more.
Had I really been that stereotype?
Had I really been the mistress who waits, hands wringing, for a break-up?
Divorce was impossible, he promised. He was an important man, and his wife was Grace Calloway, a well-known TV personality. I was taken in by the glamour – my life had been anything but glamour up to that point. How beautiful she was, how celebrated, and yet he chose to spend his nights with me. It’s fake, he told me, none of it’s real. I clung to that. He needed me. I kept him going. Kept him sane.
The nights without him were the worst. I’d lie in bed, picturing him in a home that didn’t welcome him, his wife away with her lover, his children refusing to let him close. It was easier to imagine than the alternative. That maybe they had made up; maybe she had cooked him a meal (saltimbocca, his favourite) and they’d shared a bottle of Chianti (like the one we had in that cosy Italian under London Bridge on my birthday, where the bottles came in cork baskets with molten wax down their sides), and then she’d told him she wanted to try again. The children were what got him. He could never turn his back on them, nor should he even think of it.
I erase what I’ve written. This is what I mean to say:
Right in that moment before she died, James, she looked at me and I knew. I knew that she loved you. I knew that you were never estranged and that you were happy – at least as far as she was concerned. She was a fragile, injured woman, a wife and a mother, and I had done a terrible, terrible thing.
I wish you would talk to me. I wish you would call. I wish you would tell me that I’m wrong about all this. You loved me then and you love me now and you didn’t lie to me.
Where are you? I cannot do this alone.
Someone is watching. Someone is here.
What should I tell them? What should I say? How can I know, if you won’t talk to me?
Bill’s words fly back at me. Do you think he’s going to defend you? He doesn’t care. He’ll put it all on you and then how’s it going to look?
I can’t believe that – but what, then, am I supposed to draw from his silence? I have no idea how he’s coping. The funeral is over, the daytime-TV world moving on from their mourning, her Chic Chef’s corner deserted, soon to be replaced with some other voluptuous, cocoa-fondant-loving beauty, and now the questions are being asked. Grace Calloway committed suicide? Why? What possible reason could she have had to take her own life? Grace had everything: the perfect job, the perfect family and the perfect husband. There’s nothing like perfection to whet the appetite of the press. Scratch the surface, just a scratch; see what’s lurking beneath…
It wouldn’t have taken much. A bit of digging, the media turning up at his workplace, a snake-like Natasha disclosing everything to a reporter over a number of cocktails, realising next morning she’d perhaps said too much but not really caring.
I close my account, without sending the message. Tears prick my eyes, the uselessness of the whole thing; my utter lack of clarity as to what to do next. For a second, I consider ringing one of my sisters, but the thought of explaining it makes me weary. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t compute an impulsive Lucy. All their lives I’ve been the one who imposed rules and told off and packed lunches and burned toast, while they pushed boundaries and rebelled against an anger and sadness they couldn’t articulate. It was always their personalities that were entertained, their quirks and mischief and instincts, not mine. I was functional; I just got on with it.
Looking back, it might not be that my sisters overrode a more complex me; it might be that a more complex me simply had not existed. I buried her when I was fifteen and Mum was carried out of our house in the middle of the night, the life pinched out of her like a candle between two fingers. It was only when I met James that I set her free, the girl who had been caught and put in a jar, the lid screwed tight.
But I kept that girl to myself. She was my secret. And to my family I remained the trustworthy person they had always known.
They’ll find out soon enough.
I leave the booth, sling my bag over my shoulder and take the steps two at a time. Out on the street, the warm evening hits me like a fan. Suddenly, I’m dizzy. I cling to the wall, tiny pinpricks of light shimmering behind my eyes.
There is a café next door. I stumble in, ask for water, and sit in the cool of the air-conditioning, beneath an age-stained photograph of Michelangelo’s David.
I’m beginning to calm when I notice something. There is a man at the table opposite mine, a little older than me, watching me intently. It’s him.
The same man I saw outside the library last time.
Get up. Get out. Move.
The man stands. He approaches slowly, tucking his phone into his jeans, casually finishing his drink, and for an optimistic moment I expect him to walk right out of there, proving me wrong, but then his eyes are on me again and like a bad dream he closes the distance, stopping at my table, his hands in his pockets.
I pretend he isn’t there. When he pulls out a chair and sits down, I am forced to acknowledge him. He leans forward, his voice barely more than a whisper.
‘My name is Max,’ he says. ‘We need to talk.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_699059a3-0cb6-5bf6-91b3-236175255260)
Vivien swallows the pills with relish. The green ones are her favourite; they can knock her out for hours. All she wants right now is to be knocked out.
Every time she closes her eyes, she can see the girl’s face. Up close, the resemblance is uncanny, and what she hoped was a mistaken similitude, a trick of distance or light, is exposed as fact. They could be sisters. The girl is the spitting image. I thought you were gone from my life, she thinks. I thought we were through.
Adalina closes the curtains. ‘You will sleep now, signora?’
Vivien can sense the pills start to take effect, a drowsy, rocking motion like being on the swell of the sea. In the early days she would fight it, begrudging how it robbed her of control. Now, she surrenders, lets it claim her, oblivion.
‘Find him, Adalina…’ she whispers, as she tumbles towards sleep.
‘Shh…’ The maid sponges her forehead.
‘I have to see him again,’ murmurs Vivien. ‘Let him know I’m…’
‘Quiet now, signora, go to sleep.’
‘Find him for me, Adalina. Before it’s too late.’
‘Calm now, signora, that’s it, there now, calm…’
‘You must find him… Promise me you’ll find him…’
Against her delirium, Adalina’s face morphs and swells and at points ceases to be there at all. Vivien is aware of a sponge crossing her brow, or is it her own hand, her own skin, hot and damp and cloying? She hears the maid exhale, or perhaps it is herself, on the cusp of sleep, falling, dreaming… Quietly, Adalina leaves the room.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_254a7ffc-b64d-5847-a60b-546241a606a2)
Vivien, Los Angeles, 1978
‘Ms Lockhart?’
The voice came at her from the sky.
‘Vivien…?’
It was closer now. Warm. Kind. It seemed to hold a hand out to her, and in the darkness behind her closed eyes she travelled towards it, her senses awakening one by one. Where am I? White walls, a smell of disinfectant and the low hum of conversation – then the sound of a curtain being pulled. The voice, where had it gone? She needed to hear it again. It was like water, quenching an ancient thirst.
‘Ms Lockhart, my name is Dr Moretti…’
She blinked, drawing the vision into focus. A man. His voice was deep and rich, with a gentle European accent. He was handsome beyond measure. Dark hair, wild and dangerous, falling to the collar of his doctor’s coat; the glimpse of an earring, a single dark cross. One of his eyes was black and the other was green.
He was a different breed to the men she was used to. He looked like a prince who had lived for a thousand years and never aged a day. His skin was marble, lightly tanned by the LA sun but harbouring the deep, permanent colour of foreign blood. She imagined him living in a forest, surrounded by sky and leaves.
It wasn’t the first thing patients typically thought when (as Vivien later learned) they first emerged from a week-long coma. But she couldn’t help it.
‘You might feel confused for a while,’ said Dr Moretti, slipping his board into the slot at the end of her bed. ‘Your memory will take a while to come back. You’ve been through a trauma, Vivien – you must be good to yourself.’ He spoke this last part with affection, and while Vivien’s pride told her not to fall for it, to keep her walls as strong and high as they had ever been, she wanted dreadfully to trust him.
Her memory, though, seemed fine. While the exact circumstances that had brought her here were misty – the strained call with Aunt Celia, the empty bottles of gin scattered over her dresser, that blind stumble to the car and the gunning of the engine – she was remembering acutely the pain and heartache she’d felt that night, the utter despair. Except all that seemed a distant shadow now, now that he was standing in front of her, this beautiful man with the strange-coloured eyes and the earring that made him look like a pirate. Her pain alleviated, as if she wasn’t only waking from a deep sleep but also from her old, outdated life. Gilbert Lockhart had used to talk about rebirth. Baptism. Emerging from the water and into fresh air, beginning again.
‘I’ll leave you to rest,’ said Dr Moretti, drawing the curtain back. Vivien wanted to speak but no words came, though whether this was a physical non-starter or a state of being tongue-tied she didn’t know. ‘Forgive the nurses if they get excited,’ he said before leaving, with a sideways smile that thawed the hardest, furthest part inside her that no one on earth had touched before. ‘It’s not usual for us to care for somebody famous. But the good news is, Vivien, you’re going to be absolutely fine.’
*
Over the next few days, she drifted in and out of sleep, torn between the urge to get up, get dressed, stalk out of there, and the pull of being tended to, cared for, looked after. The doctor came and went, a perfect vision, and as Vivien’s strength slowly returned so did her voice. Until, one morning, she found the courage to speak to him.
‘You must think me a terrible mess,’ she said. Humiliation burned when she imagined being brought into hospital, a ruined starlet, selfish and spoiled, while Dr Moretti was a disciplined medic, concerned with saving lives, not wrecking them.
He was about to leave, but stopped at the door. ‘Not at all,’ he replied.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking,’ Vivien stammered. ‘I guess, I – I wasn’t thinking at all. I was upset, that’s all. Well, that’s an understatement.’ She laughed emptily but Dr Moretti’s face gave nothing away. Those eyes took her in, those strong, stormy eyes, with barely restrained feeling, like a stallion roped to a gate.
‘I’d had a telephone call and it threw me,’ she went on, unable to stop and yet conscious she was spilling too much, spilling it all, but now she’d started there was no way back. ‘I’ve been pretending for a long time,’ she explained, somehow feeling that she had to explain, she had to make this man understand her just the tiniest bit because if she didn’t then what was the point of anything in the world, anything at all? ‘I’ve been surviving without joy,’ she choked. ‘I’ve forgotten how to feel joy, how to feel happy about anything. Did I ever know how? I seem to be better at knowing sadness, and destroying everything I touch. Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m talking and talking and everyone thinks they know me but they don’t know me at all. I’m not even sure that I know me. I thought it would be easier for everyone if I just…’
She trailed off, feeling as though she had bared her soul in a way she had never expected to again: she had trained herself to be wiser, instructed herself to know better and she did know better. But how strange was the human heart. It told itself to close and yet still it opened, time and time and time again, in faith, towards the light.
He was silent for a long time.
Then: ‘Can I call someone for you?’
‘I don’t have anyone,’ she said.
His expression shifted in surprise. Those eyes again: how could she not fall into them? ‘No family?’ he pressed softly. ‘A mother, father… a friend?’
Vivien thought. ‘You can call my agent,’ she said. It sounded hopelessly sad, this brittle, proud star, with no one to call but her manager.
Dr Moretti came to her. He put a hand on her shoulder and it was the loveliest, tenderest touch she had ever received. A tear seeped down her cheek.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he told her gently.
She blinked and another tear fell. ‘Will I?’
He smiled. ‘Without doubt,’ he said. ‘I know a fighter when I see one.’
*
It was with some regret that Vivien was discharged a fortnight later, for she feared she would never see him again. She tried to occupy herself with getting back to work, and in true agent style Dandy leaped back on the wagon, seeing dollar signs where she saw redemption – she was surely hotter now than ever, the diva who had cheated death.
But Vivien couldn’t concentrate. It all seemed meaningless. The movie business no longer held her in thrall, the competition and rivalry that had charged her ambition dissipated like a whisper on the wind. Her life thus far had been about chasing the next prize, the next key, so that she could keep opening those doors and slamming the past shut behind her. But there were more important things than fame and money, things she had never contemplated before: things she hadn’t been able to contemplate before, because she had never met anyone with whom to share them.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Giovanni Moretti. She remembered how he had stirred emotions in her that she thought she had lost, his compassion, his patience, how he had drawn her honesty without even trying. Now she had uncovered that intimacy, she was frightened she would never find it again. In the short time she had spent with him, she’d felt a connection she had only read about in books. Had it been real? Had she been foolish to trust it, or had she been right this time? Was it still possible for her to know a good thing when she found it? Physically, too, he cast her under his spell. She woke in delicious sweats and ached to be kissed by him.
Months passed. Vivien had all but given up hope of ever renewing contact, when, out of the blue, he got in touch. She received the note through Dandy.
Vivien, I have to see you again. Meet me at Rococo’s, Friday, 8 p.m.
She didn’t need to be asked twice.
*
Their relationship began in earnest. Giovanni Moretti was, without doubt, the best thing that had ever happened to her. He was a strong, fine man in a reef full of sharks – intelligent, courageous and loyal, but with a mysterious, bruised soul that kept her guessing, kept her wanting, and she knew he would reveal it to her in time. She, after all, had revealed herself to him. Not since Jonny Laing had she been so truthful about her history – and she knew this time was different. She knew Gio Moretti wasn’t like other men. She told him everything, from Gilbert’s beatings through to her escape, from her nights at Boudoir Lalique to that sick advance in Jonny’s office and everything in between: the fact she kept on running but could never outrun her past.
He didn’t judge her, just took her in his arms when she had finished her story and stroked and kissed her hair. ‘It’s over now,’ he said. ‘I promise, it’s over.’
She sensed that her vulnerability mattered to him, though she couldn’t say why. He seemed to understand her in a way that no one else did, as if she reminded him of someone, as if they had perhaps known each other in another life.
Vivien’s only white lie was that it wasn’t just her mother who had died, but her father too. Both her parents were dead. She figured they might as well have been – Gilbert had ceased to exist for her that very same day she walked out of his house. Had her father been to visit her in hospital? Had he called? Had he cared? Had he sent even a card or a flaky bunch of flowers to wish her well? Had he hell. She owed him nothing. It was easier, cleaner, to cut all ties. To pretend there was zero left.
When she disclosed she was an orphan, Gio searched her eyes. There was something he ached to tell her, but he caught himself in time. Instead, he drew her to him and didn’t let go. ‘It’s you and me now, Vivien,’ he murmured. ‘Always.’
Their courtship was magical. She had never felt such desire, such safety, never thought the two could go hand in hand. She had written herself off as too selfish and damaged for commitment, but here Gio was, her guardian angel. She could stare into his eyes all day long, one black, one green, and lose herself in his embrace.
Dandy called night and day, demanding she answer his messages, asking why she’d let him down at a casting yet again. Why had she lost interest? What was going on? Speaking to Dandy was like yelling across tundra to a distant figure in the snow. He couldn’t hear her. She spoke another language; one that said, I’m through with this. It’s a heartless world. I’m done with Hollywood and I’m done with you all…
‘I need a break,’ she told her agent.
‘Are you knocked up?’
Normally Vivien would have taken affront, but it was difficult to feel mad about much these days. ‘Very funny, Dandy.’ Privately, the promise of carrying Gio’s baby was like a flurry of wings inside her. Now was too soon, but in a year or two… She couldn’t believe how swiftly it had happened, how much had changed. Having survived her accident, she was in awe of her body, of the things it might achieve.
She clung to her renaissance like a ship in a storm. Her heart said it was because she was full to the brim of love for him. She ignored the alarm that wormed between her ears at night, telling her that she had sabotaged the life she’d built – both lives, her one in Claremont and her one here – and Gio was all she had to tether her. If she lost him… Well, it wouldn’t happen, so there was no point thinking about it. So what if Gio was all she had? So what if she relied on him utterly? So what if, when you took him out of the equation, there was nothing left? Wasn’t that what real relationships were about? Vivien wouldn’t know; she’d never let herself find out.
Every day, Gio decorated her with roses, chocolates, perfumes and impromptu trips, to spas, cosy bistros, a boat on the lake. Vivien didn’t know where he got the money – he was a fine doctor, but he couldn’t earn enough to cover that kind of expense – but she wasn’t about to question it. Since opting out of work, her funds had started to dwindle. She hadn’t realised how much debt she’d stacked up, the compulsive sprees she’d undergone in an attempt to blot things out. She had spent foolishly on her high and was suffering for it on her low. Gio didn’t seem to mind.
I’ve got him, she thought. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going anywhere.
And it felt good, for once, not to have to build her barriers. They were untouchable, the pair of them: a couple who could take on the world.
*
Life continued happily for a while. Vivien knew she was recreating everything she had lacked as a child: sanctuary, certainty and security. She only wished that Gio would agree to move in with her. She didn’t pressure him, only suggested it once or twice, but he point-blank declared it a bad idea. ‘Why?’ she asked. But he wouldn’t say. There was always some excuse – it wasn’t the right time, he couldn’t get a lease on his place, couldn’t they wait just a bit longer? It didn’t make sense, though. Gio spent most of his time at hers and he seemed more in love with her than ever.
It began to bother her that he never invited her back to his house. It had crossed her mind as odd in the early days, sure, but Gio was too full of distractions, too clever at diverting questions, that with a kiss or a look her curiosity had been postponed. As time went on, Vivien’s suspicions crept in, threading through her like weeds, making her doubt, making her question, terrified that the ground on which she had gambled to plant her feet was yet again about to shatter beneath her. She couldn’t understand his secrecy. Her paranoia multiplied, niggling, tormenting, impossible to ignore. When he told her that he could no longer see her on Friday nights – Fridays had to be his – she drew the line. If Gio wanted space, fine. But he had to be truthful.
‘I don’t want space,’ he said, his face clouding. ‘I’m crazy about you, Viv.’
‘Then what’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ he said, turning away. ‘It’s the hospital. My shifts have changed.’
She didn’t buy it. But she was too afraid of the alternative, of pushing him into a confession. Is he having an affair? Is there someone else? The notion made the sky fall. What will I do without him? The thought of another woman chilled her.
She had to find out. The following Friday night, she drove to his house, parked opposite, and watched the windows. Her hands gripped the wheel.
Liar.
So much for the hospital. Why were his lights on? Why was there a gleaming Chrysler parked on the drive? Vivien knew. He wasn’t at work at all. He was in there, with some other woman he deemed special enough to bring home. They’d be making love right now, on the sheets Vivien had never slept on. They’d eat a meal at the table she had never sat at. They’d shower in the bathroom she had never stepped into.
How could he? How could he do this to her?
Even with the evidence as plain as day, Vivien couldn’t accept it. Gio was in love with her. He wasn’t like the rest. They were lovers but they were also friends.
Friends didn’t do this to each other – did they?
Minutes ticked by and turned into an hour, maybe two, she lost track.
Still, she continued to watch. Until eventually, at around ten, the payload appeared. In one of the upstairs windows, a woman could be glimpsed, a fleeting sight before she vanished in shadow. Vivien’s knuckles whitened. Her tears turned to fury.
She swung open the car door.
I’m going to catch them together and then I’ll punch his fucking lights out.
In a rage she stormed up the drive, past the gate, past his precious car, tempted to scratch it with her keys but there would be time for that on the way back, and pounded her fist on the door. In her mind, she rehearsed all she would say and do to the traitor. Who is it? Who is she? Someone I know?
But nothing could have prepared Vivien for the truth.
Nothing could have prepared her for who the woman was.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#ulink_1ce08f80-d2b0-5e63-9df7-fa6b5877899e)
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