by Victoria Fox
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, th
e 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
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
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 stammere
d. ‘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.
