Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “I am sorry,” Alex told us, as the big man’s footsteps faded in the darkness leading backstage. “I should have warned you, the theatre was meant to be off-limits today, so Pietro’s men could do their work.”

  Den looked round, as though seeking evidence of the invisible workmen, and finding none returned to brushing off his leg. “Yeah, I can see they’re hard at it.”

  Alex was looking at me. “Are you all right now?”

  I’d hoped he hadn’t seen me in my ‘faint,’ but it was clear from the tone of his voice, the concern in his eyes, that he had. Blast, I thought.

  Rupert came to my aid. “She fainted on my orders, I’m afraid. Celia’s really not so easy to intimidate, but I thought we could use a distraction, so . . .” He shrugged a good-natured apology. “Used to do it myself, years ago, playing football at school—not faint, exactly, but I’d grab my knee and drop and roll around. It always did the trick.”

  “Yes, well,” I told him, still massaging my shoulder, “next time I’ll remember that, and let you do the falling down, shall I?”

  Den assured me I’d fallen down beautifully. “You’re just showing off all your talents for me this morning, aren’t you?” He was referring to my speech from Electra, I knew, but his choice of words and the smile that went with them seemed to suggest something rather more intimate.

  Alex’s eyes moved in silence from Den to myself and then, clasping his hands behind his back, he tipped his head up to study the lights in the rafters. “It’s been the biggest project, this. We practically rebuilt it from the ruins.”

  “You did a good job,” Den said, looking around. “It’s a shame, though, that your dad let it fall apart in the first place.”

  The shutters came down then, as though Alex didn’t like talking of anything personal. But he did say, “My father preferred to put his money into the family business.”

  Not content to leave it there, Den seized the opportunity to ask, “And what business is that?”

  Alex smiled. “We build ships.”

  “Oh, I see.” Den waited a few moments longer, presumably to see if any further details might be offered. When none were, he gave a small cough before asking, “Is there much work left to do here?”

  “Enough,” said Alex. “The stage needs refinishing. That’s what the men will be doing today. They spent all of Friday sanding the stage and preparing the wood—it’s all maple, imported, a very hard wood. We couldn’t save all the old boards,” he explained, as I looked down to study the pale amber floor at my feet. “When the roof went, the weather got in and ruined many of them, but we saved what we could, and the new parts blend in rather well.”

  I couldn’t tell the new boards from the old, to be honest. Pietro’s men had done an expert job.

  “Then, when the stage is done,” Alex went on, “there is the sound system to be installed. The acoustics here are very good, like in the old Greek theatres—the hills cast back the sound like the sides of a bowl, you understand, but with the microphones we can be certain everyone will hear. And then there are the dressing-rooms to finish. Nothing structural there, but they badly need paint and a bit of updating.”

  Rupert said he couldn’t wait to see them. “I did try to have a look, but all the doors back there are locked.”

  “Pietro is protective of his tools,” said Alex, and the sudden whine of some electric tool from down the gangway served as emphasis, reminding us that Pietro himself was still very much in evidence, backstage.

  Den glanced towards the noise. “Yeah, well, he needs to learn some manners.”

  “I’m sorry he gave you a scare.” It was the second time that Alex had been forced to make apologies for somebody who worked for him, I thought. It must have been an irritation, but he handled it with class. “It won’t happen again.”

  Rupert said it was lucky that Alex had happened along when he did.

  “Yes, I was looking out the window when the two of you went by”—this he addressed to Den and me—“and I could see that you were coming here, and that’s when I remembered I’d forgotten to say anything last night about the theatre being off-limits. And then Pietro went by, after you, and so . . .” His shrug was full of meaning.

  Rupert remarked that the theatre seemed to be a popular place this morning. “I only came to have a poke about, myself. I don’t know what these two are doing, but—”

  “We came to measure the stage,” I explained. “So Den could do his marking out in the rehearsal room.”

  Rupert looked at Den. “Oh, yes?”

  “That’s right.” Rummaging round in his jacket pocket, Den produced a tape measure and held it up for Rupert with a smile before passing one end to me. “Celia, would you take this and go stand at the edge of the stage, please?”

  Alex watched while we measured. “I thought that I sent you the designer’s ground plan.”

  “Did you? I must have misplaced it,” said Den. “Anyhow, there’s no harm in checking things twice.” Taking note of a number, he ordered me round to another position while I tried to keep my face straight. What a brat, I was thinking—he’d had the theatre measurements all along, he hadn’t needed me at all. This whole escapade had been Den’s way of getting me down here, with him, on my own.

  Away from Rupert, I was guessing. Only Rupert wasn’t stupid, he’d spent too many years being my chaperon to miss a trick. Stepping forward casually he said, “Here, let me help you with that, Dennis. I’m sure Celia has other things to do.”

  I surrendered my end of the measuring tape without argument, privately amused by his unwarranted concern, but when I would have pointed out that I had nowhere else to be just now, Alex said, “I’m heading back myself, if you’d like to walk with me.”

  That rather changed things. “Yes, I would,” I told him. “Thanks.” And reaching up I took the hand that he was offering to help me up and off the stage.

  ix

  I don’t recall that anything momentous happened on that walk back to the house. Alex said something about the weather being cold for this time of year, and I said something nice about the gardens, and I asked him where the dogs were, and he told me that he’d kennelled them because they couldn’t go where he had gone. And that was that.

  But by the time we reached the terrace I was hopelessly infatuated. His quiet hazel eyes, the way he walked, the way he held his head to one side when he listened, made me feel all tangled-up inside and foolish. Foolish enough to be thinking again of Sally’s tarot reading, and her ‘man with light brown hair.’ The King of Cups . . . a businessman, she’d said, but with an interest in the arts. Well, that was Alex, wasn’t it? Serious on the outside, emotional inside. He’s at the bottom of all of this, Sally had said—my foundation.

  I tried not to go all adolescent over him, but the smile I gave when I thanked him for walking me back was a little too bright. He surprised me by smiling himself.

  “You’re very welcome. I enjoyed the company.”

  The terrace wasn’t empty. Nicholas was there already, leaning on the parapet. “Teresa’s been looking for you,” he told Alex. “It’s got something to do with a Mrs. Forlani’s car.”

  I looked at Alex, curious. “Mrs. Forlani? Of the Trust, you mean? She’s here?”

  “Yes, she likes to come by every month or so, to check the progress of the workmen. You’ll meet her at lunch.”

  She must be a very old lady, I thought, considering the age that her husband had been when he died. She’d be doing well to make it up the terrace steps.

  Alex said, “You will excuse me?” and moved past me and into the house, presumably to look for Teresa to sort out the problem. Because I didn’t want to appear to be following him, I stayed behind with Nicholas. He wasn’t looking terribly sociable, but I didn’t let that put me off. If I was going to work with him and Madeleine, I thought, then I would have to start behaving as their equal.

  I strolled over to the parapet to join him, nonchalant. “We’ve been down to the theatr
e.”

  “Oh, yes? I wondered where everyone had got to. Den and Rupert, too?”

  I nodded. “They’re still down there, measuring.”

  “I haven’t seen the theatre yet. We meant to go have a look yesterday, Maddy and I, but what with the maid crisis here and you lot showing up, we just never got round to it. Maybe we’ll have another go at it this afternoon.”

  “Oh no, you can’t. That is,” I said, “the workmen will be finishing the stage today, so the theatre’s off-limits—we weren’t even supposed to be down there this morning, but nobody told us.”

  Nicholas had raised his eyebrows, as though marvelling at the audacity of an upstart like myself telling him what he could and couldn’t do. “It’s an open-air theatre, isn’t it? Well then, they can hardly prevent us from taking a look. Or are there guards with guns?”

  Unscathed by the sarcasm, I said, “Very nearly.” And I told him how we’d almost been assaulted by that giant of a man, Pietro.

  “Ah yes, Pietro.” Nicholas pulled a face and paused to light a cigarette. “We ran into him, too, Maddy and I, the first night we were here—we came round a bend in the garden path and wham! There he was. It didn’t half give me a turn, I can tell you.”

  I thought running into Pietro would give anyone a turn, and said so.

  Nicholas agreed. “Ugly bastard, isn’t he? He’d make a perfect Caliban.”

  The reference caught me off my guard. It was exactly how I’d have cast Pietro myself, in my Shakespeare game—as Caliban, the brutish vengeful monster from The Tempest—but I hadn’t expected that Nicholas would share my quirk of assigning people roles. I looked at him with a new interest.

  Perhaps, I thought, he wasn’t so shallow, after all. Perhaps he was someone worth getting to know. I might have misinterpreted his character, and been too quick to judge.

  I was watching him, thinking this, when he lifted his head and looked past me. “Ah, there you are, darling. I wondered what was keeping you.”

  I turned and saw Madeleine’s glance flick between us, unreadable, as she came across the terrace. Like a child accused unfairly of a wrongdoing, I wanted to explain, to let her know I didn’t fancy Nicholas, that we’d only been talking—to shout to the world that I wasn’t my mother.

  But I sensed that my words, even if I’d had the courage to say them out loud, would have fallen on deaf ears. Madeleine appeared to be preoccupied. And as she drew nearer I could see that it was even more than that—her troubled frown was anything but absent. “I’m sorry.” Her apology came automatically, the force of manners overriding her more personal concerns. “I’ve had a call from Poppy’s school.”

  Nicholas reverted to his former shallow self. “Oh yes? And what has she done now?”

  “She’s got glandular fever.”

  “Poor thing,” I said, in sympathy. I’d been spared that particular disease as a child, but one of my classmates had suffered through it. She’d missed a whole term.

  “Rotten luck.” That was Nicholas, blowing a smoke ring. “But it’s hardly a fatal complaint, and the school does have a nurse.”

  Madeleine was only half-listening. Brushing a curl of dark hair from her forehead with a worried hand, she went on, “They said that she’s been asking for me, wanting me. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Darling, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “I could bring her here.”

  He looked at her as if she’d gone quite mad. “We’re rehearsing a play.”

  “Yes, I know, but I won’t be rehearsing all day, every day—I’ll have time to look after her. She’ll likely be in bed sleeping most of the time.”

  “And if we all come down with glandular fever? What then?”

  I cut in. “It’s a child’s disease, really. Adults don’t usually catch it.”

  Nicholas didn’t thank me for the intrusion. Still looking at Madeleine, he said, “I just don’t see why you have to—”

  “Because she’s my daughter.”

  I tried to imagine my own mother standing there, facing down a boyfriend with the simple explanation: ‘Because she’s my daughter.’ I couldn’t, of course.

  And then Madeleine turned her head slightly and our eyes met, and I felt the strangest feeling of connection, as though she knew that I was on her side. “I’ll ask Alex if he minds,” she said.

  Alex’s voice asked, “If I mind what?”

  He’d come out onto the terrace so quietly I hadn’t even heard him, and he stood now a few yards away, looking from one to the other of us expectantly. He wasn’t alone.

  A woman had come with him, a young woman in a red dress with sunglasses hiding her eyes as she raised her hand to elegantly flick her long dark hair behind her shoulder.

  I found myself staring, not only because she was with Alex, although I wasn’t altogether pleased by the fact, but because I was certain I’d seen her before. And then I remembered: I’d seen her in Venice. The woman in yellow who’d been in the basilica, and later, at the restaurant.

  A little stunned by the coincidence, I took the opportunity, in the brief interval while Madeleine explained the problem of her daughter’s illness, to study the woman. I don’t think she noticed, although of course with the sunglasses I couldn’t see her eyes. Still, I didn’t imagine that this was the sort of woman who would notice other people anyway. She had a bored expression that reminded me of Mother, of someone with a narrow, self-reflected view of life who’d grown accustomed to admiring stares and, when looking at crowds, saw not faces but one single entity.

  She didn’t shake our hands, but merely stood apart and nodded when Alex, having assured Madeleine that of course her daughter must come to Il Piacere, introduced us round. He finished, “Everyone, may I present Daniela Forlani.”

  Again I could feel myself staring. Daniela Forlani! That couldn’t be right, I thought. Leonardo Forlani had been in his nineties; his widow couldn’t possibly be this woman, who looked thirty and probably wasn’t much older. She had to be his daughter, surely. She couldn’t be—

  “Daniela’s late husband was the founder of the Trust that is restoring this estate,” said Alex. “She likes to visit now and then, to keep us all in line.”

  “Oh, caro, no, you know that is not true,” she told him, in a languid voice whose command of English fell somewhere between Teresa’s and Alex’s—more educated than the housekeeper’s, and with a better sense of structure, but still heavily accented. “No. I come because you spoil me so.”

  Nicholas frowned very faintly. “You will excuse me, but you did say your name was Forlani? I thought that here in Italy a woman didn’t take her husband’s name.”

  An eyebrow arched at the question. “This was my name as well, before I married. The families are, I believe, distantly related.” Her tone implied it hardly mattered, and was certainly none of his business.

  But Nicholas seemed to have taken an interest. Money, I thought, was more heady than any perfume. He shifted his long body against the parapet. “So you’ll be in the ladies’ wing, too, then?”

  Her dark head turned a fraction till her sunglasses reflected his image. “No,” she said, as though the very thought were quite absurd, “I stay in the villa.”

  The Villa delle Tempeste, I presumed. A good place for her. I had the feeling she’d be quite adept at brewing storms. I was wondering what had become of the man she had been with in Venice, the man with the heart-shaped bald spot, when Madeleine smiled and asked politely, “Have you only just arrived?”

  I waited to hear what Daniela Forlani would answer—whether she’d mention where she’d come from, that she’d been in Venice. But she chose not to answer at all, as though Madeleine hadn’t said anything that needed a response. Clicking open her handbag she drew out a packet of long filtered cigarettes, shook one loose and lit it with a snap of her silver lighter. Inhaling elegantly, she moved to the parapet, the red of her dress vivid against the pointed dark spears of the cypresses that steeply dropped towards t
he lake. “There will be rain this afternoon,” she said, and indeed it appeared that the weather was turning. A haze of cloud masked the summits of the mountains in the distance, and the colour of the lake had changed from blue to duller grey.

  The air, too, felt colder, but I couldn’t be sure whether that was the weather or simply Daniela Forlani.

  x

  “WELL, I’ll tell you,” said Den, “if she wasn’t already taken, I’d be going after her myself.” He gave a whistle of appreciation as he knelt again and went on with the marking out, using chalk to trace the stage’s outline on the bare wood floor of our rehearsal room. Rupert and I were assisting, Rupert reading out the measurements while I, as before, held one end of the measuring tape.

  Ordinarily the marking-out was done with coloured tape, but the floor of this room was such a marvel of polished parquetry that Den had been afraid of doing damage, so he’d opted for the chalk. He’d have to keep doing it over, as it wore off, but it seemed a small price to pay to safeguard the beauty of this room.

  Like many of the rooms at Il Piacere, this one had a name: The Stanza degli Angeli, the Room of Angels. Unconsciously I found myself fingering my necklace, the little angel pendant Bryan had given me for my birthday, as I looked around at all the other angels that surrounded me. They hovered high above in the hand-painted ceiling, and smiled from the plaster rosettes set like pearls at the centre of each ceiling panel, and fluttered their wings round the huge gilded frames of the mirrors that lined every wall. My little gold-and-diamond guardian angel was, I thought, in quite elegant company.

  Rupert was saying now, drily, to Den, that anyone who’d been at lunch with us an hour ago would have thought that he was going after Daniela Forlani. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

  Den glanced up and grinned. “I was only being polite.” Resuming his work he added, “But at least I’ve got one of my questions answered, now. I’ve been wondering what would make a guy like D’Ascanio hand over his family estate to the Forlani Trust . . . I mean, it’s such a crazy thing to do, unless you’re short of money, and that doesn’t seem to be the case with him. Only now that I’ve seen what the Trust uses for bait, I can understand why he bit. Celia, honey, can you give me just a few more inches? There, that’s great. Thanks.” Glancing up again he said, to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”