Season of Storms

by Susanna Kearsley

  “Oh, Lord.” My memory of that presence in the dark down there, the terror of it, rose within my mind and I was down the gangway and into the corridor well before anyone else, running madly, in search of the girl.

  “Poppy? Poppy, where are you?”

  “In here!” a hysterical voice cried from one of the unfinished dressing-rooms down at the end of the passage.

  I found her frozen to the dressing-room’s blank wall, too frightened to move. “He was going to hurt me!”

  I pried her from the wall and let her cling to me. “Who was, darling?”

  “Him.” Wild-eyed, she pointed to a heap of blankets spread untidily in one corner of the room, as though somebody had been sleeping there.

  The others had reached us now. Out of breath, panting, they spilled from the corridor into the dressing-room. “What’s happened?” Den asked.

  Holding Poppy close I spoke above her head. “She says that some man tried to hurt her.”

  “He was over there,” said Poppy, pointing again to the blankets, “lying down. I didn’t see him when I first came in, but then I turned around and he was . . . he . . .” She broke off, burying her face against my shoulder. “He ran away when I screamed.”

  Nicholas thought that convenient, and said so, a comment that earned him a fierce look from Madeleine.

  “Darling.” She stroked her daughter’s hair in sympathy. “It’s all right, he’s gone now. It was probably one of the workmen, just taking a nap.”

  “He was going to hurt me,” said Poppy, insistent.

  I looked at the blankets, remembering again that awful feeling of a body close behind me in the darkness, breathing warm against my neck, of reaching hands . . . I shuddered, looked at Den, and knew he understood.

  His face was grim. “I’d better go tell Alex.”

  ix

  DANIELA had been quick enough to offer up the culprit—one of the plasterers who, as Madeleine had suggested, had been catching forty winks instead of working. He hadn’t meant to frighten Poppy, so he claimed. He’d only taken off running because he’d thought he’d be in trouble, having been discovered sleeping on the job. Daniela had apologized on his behalf, but when Alex had mentioned that it might be nice for the man to come up and tell Poppy himself he was sorry, Daniela had gone all protective, leaving me wondering, a little cynically, if perhaps the man might not have been a plasterer at all, but another of her boyfriends whom she’d stashed down at the theatre for convenience.

  To be fair, though, she seemed to have quite enough men at the moment to keep herself occupied. I hadn’t seen her balding chap recently—at least, I didn’t think I had; I wouldn’t have known him from the front, nor from the back if he were wearing a hat—but for all I knew he was still hanging around down in Mira del Garda, at one of the hotels, patiently waiting for scraps of Daniela’s time after she’d finished with Alex and Nicholas.

  And if I’d had any doubts at all about her being involved with Nicholas, they were laid to rest emphatically that evening.

  It happened innocently enough. I didn’t go out, at a quarter past ten, with the object of tracking down Nicholas. I was actually doing a favour for Poppy—she’d come to my room in a panic to say that the dogs had run off, that they’d somehow got out into the gardens and she’d called and called but couldn’t make them come, and she was terrified that Alex would be angry with her, having left the greyhounds in her care, and could I please, please help her look for them?

  Of course I’d gone, but I’d gone on my own, leaving Poppy behind at the house. The gardens in the dark of night were no place for a child. I wasn’t all that keen on being out myself, but I didn’t intend to go far. There was no point, really, in running after greyhounds—they could run like the wind, and you’d never catch up with them. Better to whistle, I thought, and rely on their hearing to bring them to me.

  It was the one truly impressive talent I possessed, actually . . . whistling. I could whistle like a boy. I did it now, and called out, “Nero! Max!” and waited.

  Thinking I heard a faint woof in reply, I moved off towards it. There was no rain tonight, and the broken-up clouds let through more than enough moonlight to see by. I didn’t need to use my torch. Beneath my feet the path was soft, and my footsteps made almost no noise as I approached the little fountain with the dolphins.

  Which was why the couple locked in an embrace beside the fountain failed to hear me.

  I recognized Nicholas straight off, and at first I assumed that the woman, by simple association, was Madeleine. But then I noticed that this woman had longer hair; and the pair of them, when they finally drew apart to speak, were speaking in Italian.

  There wasn’t any kind of cover I could have made use of, if I’d been so inclined—I was standing right in the middle of the path, with the nearest shrubberies a good six feet off. But it didn’t much matter. No one was looking my way.

  Daniela raised herself on tiptoe for a final kiss and, turning, vanished down the path towards the villa. Nicholas, after a moment, turned, too. And stopped dead when he saw me.

  In the stunned pause that followed I switched on my torch. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen the dogs? No? Well, I expect you had other things to occupy you. Never mind.”

  He caught me up before I’d gone ten yards. The sprint had left him out of breath and his words didn’t come with their usual suaveness.

  “Look,” he said, “hold on a minute, will you?”

  I stopped walking, but only because he had grabbed me by the arm and swung me round to face him. “Look,” he began again, letting go my arm to rake his hand through his hair in a gesture that was meant to be boyishly appealing, “I know what you must think of me, but honestly, it wasn’t like that.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No, we were just fooling around a bit, that’s all. I’d never be truly unfaithful to Madeleine. Never.”

  “I see.” I turned away again, preparing to continue on.

  He stopped me for a second time, and this time didn’t let go his hold. “You won’t tell her, will you? Really, it was nothing, only Maddy has this thing about fidelity . . .”

  I looked at him, incredulous. “I bloody wonder why.”

  The bushes crashed beside us and the greyhounds bounded out into the open, tails wagging at first at the fun of the chase; then, as Max noticed Nicholas holding my arm, his ears folded back and he growled.

  “It’s all right, boy,” I told him, and pulled my arm free without looking at Nicholas.

  “Celia . . .”

  “Save it,” I said, and whistling up the dogs I headed back towards the house, and left him standing there alone.

  x

  I didn’t, as it happened, have to say a word to Madeleine.

  It was obvious at breakfast the next morning that they’d had a falling out. Well, obvious to me, at any rate—a stranger entering the dining room might not have known that anything was wrong, so skilled was Madeleine at putting on a social face; but I had watched her long enough to know that she was acting. I saw the effort.

  I think Poppy saw it, too. Children, in my experience, were like canaries in the coal mine when it came to adult arguments—they seemed to be able to detect the slightest whiff of tension in the air. It made them agitated. Poppy, no exception, had become a little chatterbox this morning, which was just as well, considering there were only the four of us down at the moment and three of us weren’t speaking.

  “. . . and Den said he’d never seen anyone learn parts as quickly as I do,” she said. “He thinks that acting’s in my genes. I didn’t know what he meant by that at first, but Celia told me that it meant he thought I might have inherited some of your talent, Mummy.”

  Nicholas, idly, said, “Celia should know.”

  Poppy looked at him. “Why?”

  “Her mother’s an actress as well,” he said. “Didn’t she tell you?”

  Poppy’s eyes were eager as they swung to mine. “Really? What’s her name? Would I
have heard of her?”

  My own gaze flashed to Nicholas. I saw the smugness in his face before he could conceal it and I knew that he was doing this on purpose. I saw Madeleine realize it, too, but even as she turned to intervene he said my mother’s name.

  There was a silence, and then Poppy said, “It isn’t true.”

  I looked at her. I didn’t want to—didn’t want to see the disappointment, the betrayal, but I gathered my courage and looked at her full in the face. It was worse than I’d imagined. “Poppy . . .”

  “No.” Her large eyes filled with tears. “It isn’t true.”

  “I’m afraid that it is.”

  She shook her head; the tears spilled over. “No.” And then she pushed her chair back violently and bolted from the room, fists clenched, arms stiff, as though she’d just been dealt a wounding blow.

  Nicholas, still with that faint taunting curve to his lips, said to me, “Oh, sorry. Was that meant to be a secret?”

  Madeleine turned in her chair to examine his profile, shaking her head. “Sometimes, Nicky,” she said levelly, “you really are a bastard.” She pushed her own chair back, and stopped me when I would have followed. “No, it’s all right, Celia, I’ll go have a talk with her. Don’t worry.”

  Which left me facing Nicholas alone. “Why would you do a thing like that?” I asked him.

  “Quid pro quo.” He raised his juice glass in a mocking toast. “Since you so kindly saw it as your duty to tell Madeleine the sordid truth about myself and the fair Daniela, I thought the least I could do was to return the favour.”

  I might have used a term more strong than Madeleine’s ‘bastard’ if I’d had the time to think of it, but my mind wasn’t quick enough to come up with anything suitably cutting. I simply stood and stared him down and said, “I didn’t tell her anything. I haven’t said a word . . . not yet, that is. Perhaps I should.”

  His smugness faltered as I stood. “Now, wait a minute . . .”

  “Quid pro quo,” I told him, “as you said.”

  And then, because I liked that as an exit line, I made it one.

  xi

  THE day went rapidly downhill from there. Poppy stayed away from our rehearsal, which was probably just as well—all three of us were noticeably off. And that, in turn, made Rupert irritable, and set him snapping at Den, who in his turn grew short-tempered. It didn’t surprise me at all when the skies clouded over in midafternoon, nor when the rumbling of thunder began to sound over the lake. Had I shared my former flatmate’s superstitions I’d have been tempted to believe that the combined negative energy of our small group was having an effect upon the weather; that the storm was an extension of ourselves.

  The only thing that got me through the day was knowing it was Saturday; that tomorrow would be a day off from the strain of rehearsing, a day to recover my balance. I clung to that thought all through the evening . . . through the long and awkward dinner from which Alex was, once again, inexplicably absent; through the long and silent hours that I spent reading in my room before I slept; and through the long and restless night in which my troubled dreams competed with the rain against my windows for attention.

  But Sunday dawned as dismal as the day before.

  The storms showed no sign of relenting, and when I went in search of Bryan, hoping he could cheer me up, I found him arguing with Rupert. The door to their room stood open a few inches, which was how I came to hear anything at all—I didn’t make a habit of eavesdropping, and I certainly was in no mood to stand by and listen while they had a row. In fact, I would probably have turned back down the passage and left them alone if I hadn’t heard the mention of my name.

  “Celia has a right to know the truth,” Bryan was saying, his voice not so much raised as insistent.

  Rupert’s reply was more forceful. “I’m not going to tell her. I’m not, and that’s final.”

  “It’s bloody well not final.”

  “Why, will you tell her yourself?”

  “I might do.”

  I pushed the door all the way open. “Tell me what?” I was intruding in a private conversation, and I knew it, but with everything else going on at the moment I suddenly couldn’t bear watching the two of them argue. As they turned in the surprised silence to look at me, I moved my gaze expectantly from Bryan’s face to Rupert’s, and repeated, “Tell me what?”

  Rupert said nothing at all for a long minute. Then he coughed to clear his throat, and looked at Bryan, and I could sense the subtle shift as they allied themselves against me, like they’d always done whenever I’d confronted either one of them—forgetting their quarrel to form a united, unbreakable front. I’d had no hope against it as a teenager, and I doubted that the years had improved my chances.

  “Angel,” said Bryan, deliberately soothing, “it’s nothing that can’t wait till after the play’s finished. This really isn’t the time.”

  Which meant it was something they thought would upset me. Rupert and Bryan had always gone out of their way to avoid telling me anything upsetting at times they thought were special or important to me—they’d once kept the death of a friend of ours secret until I’d finished taking my exams. Recalling that, I looked at them suspiciously. “Has anyone died?”

  Bryan shook his head. “No, it’s nothing like that.”

  The second possibility that struck me was more horrible. “You’re not . . . that is, the two of you aren’t breaking up?”

  “Of course not, Angel.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be having a row if it wasn’t important, and you might as well just tell me what it is at this point, play or no, because what I’ll be imagining will probably be a hundred times worse than the truth.”

  They shared another look, then Rupert stretched a hand towards me. “Celia, love, come and sit down.”

  I sat apprehensively, knowing the news would be bad. People, in my experience, didn’t usually ask you to sit down otherwise. Perched on the edge of the bed, shoulders tensed, I tried to brace myself for whatever might be coming. Rupert closed the door, with care.

  “Do you remember when my mother died?” he asked me.

  I hadn’t expected that. “Only vaguely.”

  Bryan, behind us, said, “Roo . . .” in a low, warning tone, but Rupert shushed him with a wave and kept his eyes on me. “Yes, well, you were very young, and she’d been ill for quite some time. She had HD,” he told me. “Huntington’s disease. They used to call it Huntington’s chorea, in those days.”

  “Roo, for God’s sake,” Bryan said, almost pleading, but it was too late. Rupert had broken rank and was advancing on his own.

  He went on, to me, “It’s a nasty progressive disease of the brain—eventually one loses one’s ability to walk, to talk, to reason. And there isn’t any cure.” Pausing, he frowned down at the carpet as though he were choosing his next words with care. “Most people, like my mother, don’t show any signs of illness till they’re middle-aged, and even then it can be only minor things . . . a stumble here and there, a change of temperament.”

  I stared at him, beginning to comprehend. “Oh, Roo . . .”

  “It’s an hereditary illness,” he went on. “If your parent has HD then there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll get it, too. It’s rather like carrying a time bomb inside you, and one with an uncertain fuse at that, because there’s no way to know if you have the disease until you yourself reach middle-age. As I have.”

  “No.” I shook my head, unwilling to accept what he was telling me.

  “I’ve noticed the symptoms for some time,” he said. “So has Bryan.”

  I glanced at Bryan for confirmation, and found it in his tight-lipped face, the sudden strain that showed behind his eyes. I looked away again. My insides felt as though a callous hand had crumpled them, and yet my voice, though hollow, sounded calm. “Are you very sure? About your symptoms, I mean. You’re sure it’s not just overwork?”

  “I’ve had the diagnosis,” he said gently. “I’d hoped I could spare y
ou a little while longer—at least until we’d finished this production, but . . .” His shrug held regret. “Bryan said my behaviour was starting to worry you.”

  I wished now that I’d never mentioned it, never complained, as if my not knowing could somehow make everything better again.

  Dry-eyed, I raised my head to look at him. “I don’t want you to die.”

  “Darling.” Sitting beside me, he drew me in close with an arm round my shoulder. “It’s early days, yet. I could have another fifteen years, or twenty. It’s a slow disease, HD.”

  I took no comfort in that, knowing I would have to watch him weaken, see him change. “It isn’t fair.”

  “Life rarely is, my dear,” he said, and pressed a sympathetic kiss against my hair. “Life rarely is.”

  We sat like that for some time. I was aware of Bryan sitting on my other side, his arm around me, too, and Rupert talking, going on about the play, about how fortunate we were to have this special time to spend with one another; but my mind had gone numb and his words didn’t register fully. Only the comforting tone of his voice truly reached me. The rest of my brain was absorbed with the intricate whorls of the bed’s woven coverlet, and how they pressed into my hand, reproducing the pattern. I would likely remember that coverlet forever, I thought. More than I’d remember Rupert’s exact words, or how he had looked when he’d said them, or how I had felt. Memory worked like that, sometimes.

  “All right?” Rupert was asking me. I didn’t know whether he meant that generally or in relation to a specific question, but I nodded anyway, and he seemed satisfied. “Right, then,” he said, “just let me finish shaving and we’ll go and get some breakfast, have a cup of tea—you’ll feel much better.”

  As he stood, his gaze locked with Bryan’s reproachful one. Rupert couldn’t hold the look. He gave a short, self-conscious cough and stated his defence. “Well, like you said, she has a right to know the truth,” he said to Bryan.