The Silent Fountain

by Victoria Fox

  Third, if she counted Isabella.

  Though it was a distant memory, the shock of the message she’d found in the attic still had the power to stun her. I want him. She saw it in dreams, chased it in nightmares. She would find herself totally preoccupied with the baby, then in a rare quiet moment she would stop, and the sister and all her secrets seemed to bear down on Vivien, circling over her head like the heavy flap of a dark bird’s wings.

  Adalina urged her to wait. ‘Let time pass, signora, I beg you…’ Vivien was unmovable, determined to act, until: ‘If not for your marriage then for your baby.’

  That was what did it. Alfie. If Vivien let her preoccupation with Isabella steal the very first part of her baby’s life, steal her attention and her devotion, steal time away from tending his needs and his cries, then Isabella had triumphed there too.

  As the weeks wore on, Adalina led her to hope that Gio would step up: as he watched his son grow, so his sister would be put in the shade. But it didn’t happen. Their dynamic was as insufferable as ever. Vivien began to suspect that Adalina had merely been buying time for herself, seeking to slip away from a situation before she became embroiled in it. Too late, thought Vivien. You’re part of this.

  Often, it was close to irresistible to tell Gio what she had found, the defaced ticket stubs calling to her from where she’d concealed them in a drawer: I want him, I want him, I want him. But she knew what he would say, how he would twist it to his sister’s favour. He had taken Isabella to Carmen as a thank you; the note she’d scrawled on the back couldn’t possibly reference him, it would be another suitor, perhaps a colleague of his; Isabella had always been sentimental about possessions, which was why she’d kept the memento – as a child she had filled a memory box, another quirk of hers, one of the many peculiarities that made her magnificent…

  Vivien could not abide a single utterance more in defence of Isabella. And so it was one more thing she kept from Gio, a lie piled on a lie piled on a lie. It made no difference. Through their fights, she had discredited herself. Nothing she said, even if she swore it on her life, would resonate sufficiently for him to take against her.

  *

  Come the autumn, an opportunity presented itself. Vivien had pondered how this would emerge – the opening she needed – because surely it would. One night, after Vivien had bathed Alfie and put him to bed, Gio returned to the Barbarossa with a shock announcement. He had to leave Tuscany for three weeks on a placement.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I know it’s bad timing… but I can’t get out of it. It’ll pass quickly, you’ll see. I’ll be back before you know it.’

  ‘Is Isabella going?’

  He shook his head.

  Good, she thought. Isabella will be here – with me.

  Gio was up early the next morning to pack. A car was collecting him at midday. Vivien prepared Alfie in his corduroys and little sailor shirt to say goodbye, and as they hugged at the door she felt a nascent glow at the knowledge that, unbeknownst to Gio, by the time he returned home everything would be different.

  When the door closed behind him, Vivien turned to see Isabella at the foot of the stairs. The sister had emerged from her confinement, as she often did, looking immaculate, like a mermaid from the tangle of the deep. Her eyes roamed Vivien’s generous, shapeless smock, a far cry from her own tailored silhouette.

  To hell with you, Vivien thought. I’ve got a beautiful baby to show for it.

  ‘Can I hold him?’ Isabella put her arms out. She didn’t look at Vivien when she asked the question, just at Alfie, who gazed back at her with a dizzy, silly smile.

  If the sister so much as thought that Vivien would allow her within touching distance of Alfie, she was sorely mistaken. Vivien had seen how Isabella looked at the boy, regarding him with scarcely controlled hunger that at times bordered on outright starvation. Vivien had been protective since the birth, refusing to permit Isabella access, and it was only when she was taking a bath, or catching up on her sleep, that Isabella, via Gio, could spend time with him. Vivien knew that Isabella would never put a foot wrong while Gio was present, she wouldn’t dare, and Vivien had made her husband promise never to let their son out of his sight. Now, she felt the customary jolt of satisfaction that she finally possessed something that the other woman didn’t. Isabella would never have that bond with Gio. She would never be his partner in the fullest sense.

  Vivien tightened her hold on her son. She turned and walked away.

  ‘It looks like it’s just you and me now, Vivien,’ came Isabella’s voice from behind her, beautiful and deadly both at once. ‘Just you and me and your baby.’

  *

  The trick was to make it appear as if Isabella had made this decision herself; that there was nothing left for her here, not now Gio and Vivien had their family. This was her only way out: the world had never welcomed her; she could no longer find happiness in any corner of it. Gio would be devastated, naturally, but he would come to realise that it had been inevitable. Isabella had always been destined for such an end.

  Vivien settled on a day, forty-eight hours after Gio’s departure. Long enough for there to be some safe distance between the Barbarossa and her husband, but not so long as to feel Isabella’s claws sinking too deep into her back. ‘Shall I take him?’ Isabella would offer from the doorway, her black eyes gleaming. ‘Give him to me,’ she would encourage, when Vivien was attempting to fasten her coat one-handed. Vivien saw the way the sister’s face lit up at the sight of Alfie. You can covet my husband, she thought, but you will never come close to my son. If Gio were here, he would tell her to be generous, let Isabella play the role of doting aunt. And she’d play it well, in front of him. Only Vivien knew the risk she would be taking. It was why the time for action had arrived.

  She scoured her conscience, looking to rake up any vestige of sympathy for Isabella, but she found none. Each time she passed that portrait in the hall, Isabella as the queen of the castle, her hatred and resentment refreshed. Leave it much longer and the sister would destroy Vivien’s marriage for good. She could not let that happen. As she cradled her baby and kissed the soft hair above his ears, determined to give him all she herself had missed out on, she knew she could not let that happen.

  When the morning came, she was up at dawn. Miraculously, Alfie slept on, so Vivien tied her robe and padded downstairs. The house was quiet. Tentative daylight bathed the floor in milky glow. On the staircase, the gloom-shrouded portraits glared back at her – Gio, her accuser; Isabella, her assailant; and herself, a last-minute bolt-on, an arbitrary extra, here as in real life. In the dark, their features seemed to twist and morph, real and not real, half alive, half dead.

  Calmly, she went to prepare the tincture. Adalina had hinted at the quantity just sufficiently to give Vivien what she needed, but the maid’s conscience hadn’t allowed her to become a real, working part of it. ‘My nephew,’ she appealed to Vivien. ‘If we were to be caught… I’m sorry, signora, I can’t. You are on your own.’

  As the day’s first sun stretched its fingers through the shutters of the gallery, Vivien perfected her mixture with care. Beyond the window, the mottled stone fountain emerged from its long dark night. It seemed to glare at her with fixed abomination, as if she had wronged it in a former life, as if it was waiting to pounce.

  She would pounce first.

  Vivien concluded her work; her hands were steady as a surgeon’s. It felt good to regain her power. Back to the woman she used to be, a survivor, not a victim.

  Two things happened as she emerged into the hall, the concoction concealed in her dressing robe. The first was the sound of her baby’s cry, howling from a far chamber. The second was the shock of the great door ringing. It was early for visitors. Who should be dropping by at this antisocial hour? She went to answer it.

  She saw him, but it took a moment for her brain to catch up.

  You.

  Standing on the doorstep, his cap in hand, was Gilbert Lockhart.


  ‘Hello, Vivien,’ he said. ‘Surprise.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Italy, Summer 2016

  The platform is packed with travellers, shouts in Italian darting between them like colourful birds, and I hurry through the fray towards my carriage. I’m about to board the train when something catches my foot; I trip, put my hands out and the ground slams into my palms. It hurts; my wrist throbs where it took the impact. My bag falls from my shoulder. A scatter of change rolls away from me.

  ‘Stai bene?’ asks a passing guy, stopping to help. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Sí, grazie,’ I reply, dusting myself off. Faces peer down at me from the carriage windows. We gather the coins; I thank him, shove them in my pocket.

  He steps on to the train ahead of me and I’m about to follow.

  But then I stop.

  I stop and stare. And stare.

  There is a face I know. Only… it can’t be.

  Looking right at me, third row back, cream skin, wide green eyes; the glass between us rendering her complexion misty, like a drift of cloud on a photograph.

  Her name is on my lips: that most trusted of names, the first name, the simplest, most natural name of all, but there is a sob in my throat and no sound comes out. I’m hot then I’m cold. I trust then I don’t trust. It can’t be. It’s not.

  Mum.

  It’s just someone who looks like her.

  The woman opens her mouth and her features are kind, full of love, just like I remember. She says something, one word, and I understand it immediately.

  The photograph fades, reappears. I want to run to her. My feet won’t move.

  ‘Are you boarding?’ asks the guard in Italian.

  I blink. Shake my head. He blows his whistle. The train moves off.

  *

  My legs barely carry me back to the concourse. The world around me ceases to be real, the sky turned on its head. I am living in the negative: the dark side of the moon.

  ‘Lucy!’

  My name takes a while to reach me, as if it doesn’t belong to me, a paper tag I unlooped from my ankle. Then I turn, the world shifting, settling. It’s Max.

  He’s rushing through the crowds, up the steps, takes my arm when he reaches me then drops it. His face is hard to read, confusion, relief, hope. I fight to focus.

  It can’t have been her. It can’t.

  It was.

  ‘Lucy, thank God I made it,’ he says. ‘You can’t go.’

  I nod. My lips are dry. ‘I know. She told me not to. She told me to stay.’

  He catches his breath. ‘Who? Vivien?’

  She was real, she was there – so brief, like the bright gold flash of a firework before it dissolves into night. ‘No. Nothing. No one. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Well, this does,’ says Max. ‘I read Vivien’s diary, Lucy. It’s…’ He runs a hand through his hair. ‘I couldn’t let you leave. I have to talk to you. It’s urgent.’

  An announcement rings out for the last departure to Rome.

  Max touches my arm. ‘Are you OK? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  At last, I meet his eye. ‘I need fresh air,’ I say.

  *

  Out on the street, crowds swarm around our little island. It strikes me for a moment how we must appear, like lovers about to be parted, or else reunited.

  I shiver. I can no longer trust what I’m seeing, what is real and what is not.

  Stay.

  Have I lost my mind, or have I found it?

  I look at Max. Stay.

  Vivien. The Barbarossa. It isn’t over yet.

  Stay.

  ‘I thought it was time to go home,’ I say to Max, slowly, carefully. ‘I’m guessing you know the story.’ He doesn’t need to answer. He’ll have found out.

  ‘I have people to explain things to.’ I think of Dad, my family and friends. It sounds dismissive, as if Max, my friend in Italy, doesn’t warrant an explanation; the others are more important. Well, of course they are. ‘I came to Italy to escape something that happened to me. I thought I was the one who made it happen, that it was my fault… but now I know it wasn’t just me.’

  Max waits a beat. ‘Was he the guy you left with the other day?’

  I remember James watching us on the terrace. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  I can see from Max’s expression that it matters. I guess the reportage didn’t make it clear either way. Alison was careful not to paint me as a bitter ex-mistress still desperately pining for a lover she couldn’t have; equally, it was evident how much I’d adored him, even after Grace committed suicide. I have to think about my answer, and the fact I do tells me what I need to know. I shake my head. ‘I did,’ I say.

  Max puts his hands in his pockets. It’s hot, the sky above us huge and blue. A nearby busker plays Bob Marley. ‘What changed your mind?’ he asks.

  I hesitate, consider telling him, and then decide that it’s mine, just mine.

  ‘Too much here,’ I answer, ‘making me want to stick around.’

  Max gives the trace of a smile, looks down, and nicks the cleft in his chin. My heart skips. I don’t know why. I don’t know where we go from here.

  Before I can find out, my phone buzzes with a call from Bill.

  ‘I should take this,’ I say. Max frowns (wondering if it’s James? I don’t reassure him that it isn’t) and draws a cigarette out of his pocket, leaning against the sun-soaked wall to smoke. I realise he isn’t going to let me out of his sight.

  I pick up. ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey, yourself,’ says Bill. It’s good to hear her voice, and that nothing in the way she speaks to me has changed. ‘What time do you get in?’

  ‘Here’s the thing. I’m not coming back any more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, I am, eventually. Soon. But something came up.’

  ‘Newsflash, Luce – something came up here, too.’

  ‘I know. But maybe it’s best if I postpone. Wait for things to cool down.’

  ‘It’s because James is there, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re hooking up with him again, Lucy, please—’

  ‘I’m not.’

  There’s quiet on the line and I wonder if we’ve been cut off. Then Bill says:

  ‘I didn’t want to say this on the phone, but since you’re not coming back…’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You can’t trust him, Lucy. I mean it.’

  Annoyance flashes through me. This is so far from my intentions right now that I resent Bill’s lack of understanding, and lack of belief in me.

  ‘He didn’t come to Florence to win you back,’ she goes on, ‘whatever he’s told you. He’s issued a reply online.’ She waits a beat. ‘Basically it counters everything you’ve said – everything that was in Alison Cooney’s reveal. He maintains he tried to tell you no, but you wouldn’t accept it. He says you seduced him, stalked him, turned him against his wife. How he never really loved you. And how…’

  ‘How what?’ My voice is strained.

  ‘How you threatened his kids if he called it off with you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s right. He’s not holding back, Lucy. He wants to make you suffer.’

  ‘No kidding.’ I’m numb, stumbling to keep up.

  ‘There’s more. He was with Natasha – the whole time he was with you.’

  ‘Natasha Fenwick?’

  But it couldn’t be anyone else. Of course… Natasha.

  ‘He’s painting himself as the casualty here,’ says Bill. ‘Said you made him despair about his marriage, convinced him Grace was playing around behind his back, flirting with her co-stars, coming home late at night… How you got him drinking, even taking drugs to help blot it out, and he started seeing other women because you tortured him emotionally. I mean, it’s all bollocks, clearly the most ludicrous bollocks I’ve ever heard, but it’s out there, Lucy – and it’s your
word against his.’

  I’m stunned, and turn my back on Max so he can’t see. I knew that James would be furious at my unleashing my version of events, but this is taking it to extremes. To go so far as to soil his dead wife’s name – what kind of man is he?

  And Natasha? I should have known. She always hated me: now I know why.

  But why tell me all that bullshit when he got here, about how he wanted me back? He’d made me feel like the only girl on earth, like it was him and me against the world. All that time he was probably saying the exact same thing to Natasha.

  ‘I reckon he only came out to Florence to get you on side,’ says Bill. ‘He feared something like this would happen and he wanted to keep you quiet.’

  I swallow. Bill’s right. Tears spring to my eyes but they’re not born of sadness. They’re tears of frustration and anger, at James but mostly at myself. If I had taken a single moment to assess how he’d treated me, the heartbreaking silence since Grace’s death, I might have realised that he’d always be a player. He would always put his own interests before mine. How blind I’ve been. How blind and stupid.

  ‘Luce, are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think you should come home. The fact you’re not here makes it look worse.’

  ‘Makes what look worse?’

  ‘Everything James is saying. You should be here to defend yourself.’

  ‘I don’t need to. I know the truth.’

  ‘But others don’t.’

  My patience snaps. ‘Do you know what, Bill? I’ve given up caring what other people think. Why should I? They can draw whatever conclusions they want.’

  ‘But what about the people who matter?’

  ‘They should know me better than to believe any of that.’

  Bill pauses; it’s probably just to think about her next comment, but I read her silence as some refutation of this fact and before I know it I’m shouting:

  ‘It would be nice if you could support my decision to stay. Don’t you think I’ve had enough criticism, and I might just want a friend to talk to?’

  This isn’t strictly fair. Bill has been nothing but a dear friend to me. But my upset has a momentum of its own, and all the things I ought to direct at James, I direct at her. It stings that she was right all along about him and this proves it. Even though her disclosure isn’t an ‘I told you so,’ that’s how it feels.