Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “That’s all right. I quite like Snakes and Ladders.” I touched the board and tried to picture Alex as a small boy, playing this—an English game . . . a present, perhaps, from the mother he couldn’t remember.

  “Den isn’t very good at this,” said Poppy. “He kept landing on the snakes this afternoon.”

  Which was appropriate, I thought, considering that the snakes were all associated with human vices, things I fancied Den O’Malley had his share of.

  Poppy said, “He lost most of the games. But he said if we’d been playing the American version he’d have beaten me every time.” She didn’t appear to have taken him seriously. “He comes from New York, in America. Have you ever been to New York?”

  “No, I haven’t.” I rolled the die, advancing my game piece a measly two squares.

  “Too bad. One more and you’d have had a ladder.” Rolling six, she slid up a ladder herself and went on, “Mummy’s been to New York, with a play. She says it’s nice there. Not as scary as they make it look on television. Mummy travels a lot with her acting.” She glanced at me, tentative. “I’m going to be an actress, too,” she said, watching carefully for my reaction. When I didn’t laugh or make a patronizing comment she relaxed. “Den thinks I’ll make a good actress—he says I have the memory for it, and with luck I’ll have the genes.”

  “Well, Den’s been in the business a long time,” I told her, encouragingly, as I slid up a ladder for doing good deeds. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

  She looked pleased. “What did he mean, about me having the genes?”

  “He probably meant that you’ll have inherited some of your mother’s talent.”

  “And my father’s,” she reminded me. “He’s an actor too, you know.”

  I knew. I’d have preferred to forget, but . . .

  “I don’t take after him much, though,” she said. “I’m glad of that. He broke my mother’s heart.” Her words were solemn, with the ring of something she had heard repeated fairly often through her childhood. “He left her for another woman, when I was a baby.”

  “Oh,” I said lamely. She didn’t know, then. Didn’t know I was the ‘other woman’s’ daughter. Not feeling able to look at her, suddenly, I bent my head and shook the die as though my life depended on it.

  “She was an actress, too. She still is,” Poppy said, and named my mother with distaste. “But she didn’t stay with Father. She went off to live with someone else. Doesn’t matter, though, she’s still a bitch,” she said, revelling in her use of the grown-up word, “and I hate her.”

  I let go the die. It skidded off the game board and went halfway down the table. Poppy leaned over to read it. “Five,” she announced. “Oh, bad luck. That’s a snake.”

  For my vices, I thought, as I slid my game piece down the laughing serpent. For my vices.

  xiv

  WE came off book the next day at rehearsal.

  This was always the most terrifying time for me, the time when I felt certain I was the worst actress ever; when I felt certain even Rupert, having witnessed my ineptness, would politely send me home, recast my part. Even though we’d been rehearsing the play for two weeks now, my memory, as usual, seemed to have failed me completely. Deprived of the script in my hands, I was hopeless—remembering one speech, forgetting the next, and then faltering on, stopping every few minutes to ask for a prompt.

  I felt the panic starting now within my chest as I wheeled to face Madeleine, whose character was poised to have mine ushered from the ‘room.’ “No, please, you mustn’t, I—” Oh, damn, I thought. I’d lost it. “Line,” I said.

  Den supplied it. “You are my final hope . . .”

  Oh, right. “You are my final hope, the only person who can bring me peace.” How on earth, I wondered, could I have forgotten something so simple?

  She fixed her lovely eyes on me and said, “I cannot change the past. If he is dead, he will remain so.”

  “But I have heard that you can give the dead a voice.”

  Considering, she crossed a step in front of me, confusing me a little as I tried to remember whether I was meant to move in response.

  “The price will not be small,” she warned. “Are you prepared to pay it?”

  My thoughts still on the blocking, I looked at her blankly. “Line.”

  Den, in his clear level voice, said: “I have money.”

  “I have money.”

  Rupert stopped us there, whether from pity or because he couldn’t stand it any longer I didn’t know. “All right,” he spoke up from his corner, “that’s fine, let’s leave it there and take ten minutes, then pick up again with—”

  Den leaned over, interrupting him with a low comment, and Rupert glanced down at his watch in surprise. “So it is. Right, change of plan then, everybody. Celia and Maddy, your first wardrobe fitting is scheduled for three o’clock, and since it’s nearly that now we’ll take a full hour and start back at four o’clock with scene . . .”—he flipped a page back in his script to check—“scene three. All right?”

  Freed from my torture, I was about to apologize to Madeleine for making such a mess of our rehearsal when she met my eyes conspiratorially, raising one hand with a sigh to massage her neck. “God, I do hate this,” she said. “I feel like such an idiot without my book—I never can remember my lines properly. And age only makes things worse.”

  “But you were perfect,” I protested.

  “Hardly. Den,” she asked him, turning, “how many times did I ask for a line?”

  Strolling over to join us, he grinned. “I lost count. You were both keeping me pretty busy.”

  Madeleine sent me an ‘I told you so’ look.’ “You see?”

  Den raised an eyebrow. “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Celia thinks that I’m perfect.”

  Den winked at me. “Don’t worry, honey, no one’s ever perfect when we take their scripts away. There are some stories I could tell you . . .”

  “Darling,” Madeleine broke in, using the endearment rather naturally, I thought, “I don’t suppose you’d be a prince and bring us both a cup of tea? We won’t have time to fetch our own before the fitting.”

  “Tea it is. Where are they doing the fitting, in here?”

  “Yes, I think so. I haven’t heard otherwise.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He’d forgotten, I think, that Teresa was no longer in the house, and her replacement—a dour-faced woman on loan from a hotel in Mira del Garda—was neither as efficient nor accommodating. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d had to make the tea himself. At any rate, it was nearly twenty minutes later by the time he reappeared, by which time the wardrobe mistress had arrived with a bright-eyed assistant in tow who had cheerfully pinned us both into our half-finished costumes and was fitting a wig on my head to assess the effect.

  I didn’t like the wig, myself. The style was all right—a close-fitting sweep of tight waves with small curls on my forehead—and the colour was necessary. Galeazzo had written Il Prezzo for Celia the First, after all, and there were any number of references in the script to the blondeness of the widow’s hair. The problem was that the hair in this wig had turned out to be spot on the same shade as Mother’s. It didn’t matter that her colour came from a bottle, or that our facial features weren’t at all alike—when I looked in the mirror I saw Mother’s hair, and it bothered me.

  If Madeleine saw the resemblance as well, she was too gracious to say so. She looked lovely herself, in the close-fitting costume of lavender silk that moved lightly each time that she shifted position, her arms held out gracefully, like a dancer’s, to allow the wardrobe mistress to achieve a proper fitting of the sleeves. Madeleine looked, in fact, so very lovely that I didn’t think Den would be able, or inclined, to take his eyes from her. So it came as a surprise when I looked up to find him staring straight at me.

  Madeleine noticed him, too. “Oh, our tea. Dennis, thank you so much. You can pu
t the cups there, on the table, if you don’t mind.”

  He looked at the cups in his hands, as though surprised to find that he was holding them, then set them on the table as requested before lifting his gaze once again to my face, rather strangely, as if he were looking right through me at somebody else.

  “Do we look all right?” Madeleine asked.

  “What? Oh, yes, you look gorgeous, the pair of you.”

  The wardrobe mistress straightened like a warden; shooed him off. “No men,” she said firmly, in accented English. “You go now and close the door.”

  “But surely—”

  “No men.”

  Defeated, he turned, pausing once at the door to look back. In my blonde wig, I decided, I must have looked more like my mother than even I had thought. Den—who had worked with her once, he’d said—seemed to be seeing a ghost. I half-expected him to comment on it, but then his faint frown disappeared, and “Blonde hair suits you, Celia” was the only thing he said before he passed into the corridor and shut the door behind him.

  He steepled his fingers and watched while his publisher read the last page. The veranda had become so quiet he could hear plainly not only the to-and-fro beat of the pendulum in the long-case clock behind him, but the even subtler ticking of the minute hand as it marked out the hour. It clicked again now as his publisher set down the page and reordered the manuscript.

  “Extraordinary,” was the publisher’s pronouncement. “You’ve outdone yourself, my friend.”

  “I was . . . inspired.” Turning his gaze to the window he looked at the two figures seated outside in the gardens, on the bench beneath the walnut tree—the still-slender woman like sunshine herself in a pale yellow organdie dress, and the young man beside her . . .

  “That’s quite a moustache,” said the publisher, looking out also. “I take it that’s the boy who’ll play the soldier?”

  “Yes. He was a friend of Celia’s once, in London. She suggested him.” He tried to say that lightly, letting none of his misgivings show. After all, had not Celia assured him the boy meant nothing to her, that there could be no one else? “You’ll come to the performance?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. May I take this script with me?”

  “Of course. And the poems, as well.”

  “Ah, the poems.” The publisher picked up the second typescript with less enthusiasm, but politely. “Do you have a title for this new collection?”

  “I call it The Season of Storms, from a quote I have found in the book of the Crusades by Charles Lamb, the Englishman—a speech the Venetian doge makes to his followers, telling them why they must wait before journeying on to the Holy Land. ‘My lords,’ says the doge to them, ‘winter is come, and the season of storms . . .’ ” Without meaning to do it he looked once again to the window; to where the two figures still sat on the garden bench, talking and laughing, and watching them now he felt suddenly old.

  Very softly, he said again, “Winter is come.”

  xv

  I was seeing ghosts myself, or rather, hearing them. That night after dinner, alone in my bedroom, I heard the floor creak rhythmically as though someone were walking towards me. The creaks stopped, then a few minutes later approached from the opposite side of the bed. It didn’t help that I was sitting up reading A Study of Spirits, the book about hauntings and ghosts that I’d borrowed from Alex’s study.

  I liked to have something to read in the evenings. The others had taken to gathering down in the Stanza d’Arazzo for drinks and a rehash of what had gone wrong or—less frequently—right, at rehearsal. I sometimes sat in, but more often now I simply went upstairs and read, to unwind. Even in London, I’d never been part of the set that went down to the pub every night to talk shop. I found the work itself so hard and tiring that the last thing I wanted was to let it carry on into my social hours. And working far from home like this, with such a small group of people, made the experience that much more intense, and left me more in need of balance.

  But A Study of Spirits simply wasn’t doing the trick tonight, and I’d already been twice through The Season of Storms. Remembering that Rupert had a bookcase in his room, I went to see what he could offer me, happy to have an excuse for a few moments’ break from my creaking floor and the ever-watchful eyes of Celia the First’s portrait over my bed.

  Rupert’s door was locked, and he didn’t answer when I knocked, which more than likely meant he wasn’t in his room. Thinking to find him downstairs with the others, I stopped by the Stanza d’Arazzo but Nicholas was the only one in there, sitting with brandy in hand, and a cigarette.

  I paused in the doorway. “You haven’t seen Rupert, by any chance?”

  “He was here a minute ago. Went to look at books, or something, in D’Ascanio’s study.”

  “Thanks.” Looking round the room, I asked, “Where’s everyone else, tonight?”

  “I really couldn’t say.” He took a lengthy sip of brandy. “No one tells me anything.”

  “Ah.” I left him there, not wanting to get too closely involved in the romantic entanglements of my fellow actors. Instead I turned my steps towards the Veranda della Diana. Rupert, I thought, must have overcome his reluctance to poke round the study with Alex not there. Alex, I knew, was out—he’d left the dogs in Poppy’s care just after lunch with the warning he might not be back till quite late. She’d been thrilled. Daniela, finding Alex not at dinner, had been less pleased. “Such fuss for a funeral,” she’d said. “It is the family who should arrange these things, not Alessandro.”

  Madeleine had replied that perhaps Alex felt that Giancarlo was family. “The two of them must have been children together.”

  Daniela had shaken her head. “No, Giancarlo was older by ten years.”

  But I’d understood Madeleine’s point, and agreed with it. Alex had told me himself that Giancarlo had lived his whole life here; that he’d had an intimate connection to Il Piacere . . . and indeed the house itself seemed to be mourning him. The rooms I was passing through now appeared deeper in shadow than usual, everything round me respectfully hushed.

  I didn’t like to disturb the silence by knocking at the study door, and at any rate Rupert had left the door slightly ajar, so I just nudged it open and put my head round.

  “Ah, Celia,” Rupert greeted me, and waved me in. “Come look at this.”

  He was standing with Alex, a few feet away, bending over some large book that they’d spread open on a side table. Alex turned as well, when Rupert spoke, and as I came into the room he stepped aside to make a space for me between them.

  “What did I tell you?” asked Rupert, and for a moment, from the delighted look on his face, I thought he might actually have found his longed-for lost play by Sophocles—a large book, he’d said it would be, and an old one, and this was decidedly both. But when I looked down at the open pages I could see that it wasn’t a play. It looked more like an illuminated manuscript, with brightly painted pictures of religious scenes.

  “I told you the Crusaders carried books out of Constantinople,” said Rupert. “Have a look at this prayer-book—have you ever seen anything so marvellous? Alex brought it down to show me.”

  Alex raised a shoulder. “Yes, well, you were asking me about the Fourth Crusade, and I know how interested you are in books. This was one of my father’s favourite private treasures. It’s never been properly authenticated, mind you—I don’t think it left my father’s room while he was living, and he certainly wouldn’t have permitted anyone to have taken it away to be studied, or properly dated. I suppose I ought to have it done, myself, sometime. Send it off to an expert.”

  “You might never get it back,” said Rupert. He was looking rather covetous himself, I thought. He loved old books, and this one was positively ancient—leather-bound with parchment leaves that showed the wear of centuries, their edges rough and browned and stained in places with the evidence of damp.

  I couldn’t read the writing, which was Greek, but Rupert could. Gingerly turni
ng the pages, he read aloud in rough translation various prayers and rites of the Greek Orthodox Church.

  I wasn’t really listening. I was too aware of Alex standing next to me to concentrate. From time to time I fancied I felt him glancing down at me, and once I shot a quick look up myself and our eyes met, just briefly—mine hesitant, his tinged with something that looked like impatience. I broke the contact, looking down.

  “Here’s one for your grandmother, Alex,” said Rupert, reading aloud: “ ‘A Prayer for the Laying of Ghosts.’ ”

  The illustration for that prayer was unexpectedly lovely, a radiant sunburst against a cloudy sky, as though the heavens had opened to admit a wandering spirit that had just been laid to rest.

  Rupert started to read the words to us, but the telephone rang on the desk, interrupting.

  Alex stepped away to pick up the receiver, speaking curtly. “Pronto.” Then his voice changed, and although I couldn’t understand the language I could tell that he was talking to a woman. He said something calmly, soothingly, and nodded, ringing off. “I’m afraid I must go out,” he said.

  Rupert closed the prayer-book with reluctance. “I should let you have this back, then.”

  “Oh, no, keep it for a few days, if you like. It’s just gathering dust on its shelf; it deserves to be read and enjoyed, and I know I can trust you to take care of it.”

  You would have thought he’d handed Rupert the Crown Jewels. “Are you absolutely certain?”

  “Yes, of course. Take it back to your room.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I offered. I’d meant that for Rupert, of course, but Alex, who had turned towards the door himself, misunderstood.

  “All right,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, caught off my guard. “Sorry . . . I mean, I was talking to Roo . . .”