by Victoria Fox
‘Adalina,’ I say, ‘what are you doing here?’
Adalina’s eyes regard me warily from the shadows. She spies Max and takes a step back into the gloom, not wanting to be seen. Who can blame her? Max and his family have a past with that house – a serious, murderous past. Adalina and Vivien aren’t yet aware of our intentions to exclude the police. For all they know, we could already have informed them, armed guards marching their way to the castillo.
‘I must speak to you,’ Adalina says. ‘It’s urgent.’
‘If it’s about my resignation, I won’t reconsider.’
Adalina meets my eye. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to.’ Her gaze keeps flitting to Max, as if she’s worried that he will see her.
I get straight to the point. ‘Vivien’s secret is safe with us,’ I say gently. Her eyes dart to mine, but I cannot read what they contain. Is it fear, gratitude? It’s sadness: definitely sadness. ‘We’re not going to tell anyone. Who are we to judge what happened all those years ago? We weren’t there. We didn’t know Isabella.’
‘Isabella died.’ It is as if Adalina hasn’t spoken her name in decades – maybe she hasn’t. The name chokes out like a rusted key spat from a lock.
‘We know,’ I say.
As Adalina opens her mouth to continue, I fill in the blanks for her.
‘We know what Vivien did. We know that she…’ I can’t say the word, ‘made her disappear. It was the fountain, wasn’t it? That was where she drowned her.’
Adalina blinks, frowns, blinks again. ‘No,’ she says. ‘That isn’t right.’
I’ve thought of it so many times – two women carrying a drugged bundle wrapped in a sheet, one at the head and one at the feet, the moon high and wide in a black sky, their breath emerging in the cold air in gusts of white steam – that it’s been accepted as fact. These aren’t images I’ve fabricated: they’re really what happened.
‘It isn’t?’
Adalina shakes her head. She takes my arm and tries to move me away.
‘I need your help,’ she says. ‘I will tell you everything in return for your help.’
I think of her mistress back at the Barbarossa, slowly dying.
‘Is it Vivien?’ I ask.
Adalina throws one last glance at Max.
‘It’s always Vivien,’ she says.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Vivien, Italy, 1988
In the year following Gilbert Lockhart’s departure, Isabella was kinder to them than ever. She was there for Vivien to talk to, nodding gently and listening as Vivien raged about the man who had done her wrong; generously she covered any practical aspects of the daily running of the house whenever Lili was indisposed; selflessly she offered to contribute what paltry sum she had saved in an account, which of course they refused; and willingly she cared for Alfie while Vivien sought to make inroads in her career, which was the only way she could fathom of earning back the funds they had lost. Vivien romanticised about reigniting her fame, of being a star again, of winning back what they had lost ten times over so that when Gilbert came calling for more she would hold a loaded pistol to his head and gleefully fire the trigger.
It wasn’t going to be easy, however. Dandy Michaels was in retirement and wouldn’t give her the time of day. ‘The industry’s moved on, Viv,’ he told her over a bad line. ‘I don’t see a place for you any more. It’s big tits and big hair these days.’ I can do big tits and big hair, she thought. I can do anything. She hung up from Dandy and immediately got on the phone to a host of other talent agents, most of whom were too young to remember how bright her star had once burned. ‘Ah, Vivien Lockhart, right…’ some assistant would singsong, promising that their senior would ring back.
‘Don’t be disheartened,’ encouraged Isabella, helping her to unearth her old contacts, calling distant sun-drenched offices and leaving messages that somehow, unlike Vivien’s, managed to sound intriguing rather than begging. Vivien couldn’t eradicate that note of begging from her own voice. She was desperate, and it showed.
Occasionally she bought a batch of imported celebrity magazines – a torture and a luxury – from a newsagent’s in the city, to check up on her circus of Hollywood acquaintances. When she’d first left, Vivien had figured in a snapshot here, a rumour there, but over time that had gradually dwindled to obscurity. Last month, one article described her as a ‘forgotten face’, a label that had stayed with her, niggling at her when she least expected it, getting ready for bed at night or walking alone in the gardens during the day. By the time she left LA, she had convinced herself she hated it, she was over it… but to be a forgotten face? Was that all her efforts amounted to?
The grit with which Vivien attacked this revival project was reminiscent of her early days, powering through her struggle with Jonny Laing and all that followed. It struck her that only her father could light this fire within her, the flames of indignation, the need to triumph, and never fall victim to him again.
But where was Gilbert?
The authorities brought up nothing. What little money Vivien had left she gambled on a private detective, to no avail. He was the best in the business but Gilbert had left no trace. ‘In all my thirty years doing this job,’ said her guy, ‘I’ve never come across an absconder like this.’ Had Gilbert changed his name? Vivien queried. Had surgery, altered his appearance? She was only half being serious but the detective nodded. ‘Undoubtedly,’ he replied. ‘And that isn’t normally a problem. But I’m searching for any ends here and I’m coming up short. I’m sorry.’ To his credit, he returned her money. If only he could have returned her sonofabitch father.
Gio stroked her hair in bed. ‘We’ll get through this,’ he told her, kissing her, and, as she lay with him, their baby in his little bed next door, she felt her rage momentarily subside because at least she had them, her family, and all the riches in the world couldn’t buy Gilbert that. He was the poorest man she knew.
*
If Vivien had told her former self that one day she would like Isabella, be thankful for her, she would have laughed herself out of town. As it was, the sister was a support not just to Vivien but also to Gio, taking care of matters discreetly and without needing to be praised, oiling the cogs of their marriage and enabling them to work to their best capacity as parents. Tempers were fraught and moods were unpredictable. Isabella acted as a necessary mediator and Vivien was grateful. She thought back to the day Adalina had changed her mind, dismantling Vivien’s emotion and forcing her to see Isabella as the casualty she was. If she hadn’t, Isabella wouldn’t be here at all.
It was dreadful to remember how close she had got to that wicked act. If Adalina hadn’t been so strong in her persuasion, Isabella would be in the ground.
Just one thing niggled Vivien. She had never asked Isabella about the note she had found: I want him. Upon mentioning it to Lili, the maid had shrugged and said, ‘A man at Signor Moretti’s work?’ It had occurred to her before: Isabella was lonely; it was probable that she had fallen for someone during her trips with Gio and the feeling was unrequited. The note was odd, yes, but Isabella was the first to admit that her behaviour had hardly been normal. To bring it up would only embarrass her further.
Especially after the conversation Vivien had shared with Gio a week before:
‘Do you think Isabella will ever have kids? She’s so good with Alfie.’
Gio had been reading the paper. He glanced up briefly, paused, seemed to think twice about what he was readying to say, then answered: ‘She can’t.’
‘She can’t?’
‘No. We don’t know why. She was told when she was twenty. She’s unable.’
Vivien’s mouth parted in surprise. Gio’s firm tone signalled that he did not wish to discuss it, and that was fortunate because she’d been on the cusp of blurting something out about Dinapoli – because that was it, surely? The awful things Dinapoli had done to Isabella had left her barren. As if his abuse hadn’t been enough!
Once more, sympathy flood
ed through her. So much made sense about Isabella now. She had been dealt more blows than anyone could take.
It also went some of the way to explaining the strange possessions Vivien had stumbled across in Isabella’s bedroom. On Friday morning, she had gone up to the attic to ask if Isabella might watch Alfie for an hour while she went to the bank and begged another loan. Isabella wasn’t there, but the door was ajar, and through it Vivien spied a collection of toys: a rocking horse, a carousel and a cotton army of soldiers. Of course, she had been playing up here with Alfie. Perhaps she had procured the toys without Vivien knowing – Vivien certainly hadn’t seen her son with them before. Or maybe Isabella had them already, because who knew what went through the mind of a woman who had been ruined like that? Vivien was in no position to judge.
In the weeks and months to come, in the long and lonely years until her death, Vivien would gaze back on these flags as the universe’s red warning. They weren’t even subtle hints; they were full-on alarms. How could she have missed them?
I want him.
Him. But not a man at all…
A boy. A child.
If she had followed just one of them up, she might have been able to prevent the horror. But perhaps she hadn’t wanted to see what was right in front of her.
Perhaps, after trusting and being betrayed by her father, she could not endure it again. Perhaps she could not acknowledge any more drama, and guarded her family from it with everything she had – even ignorance. Perhaps she was afraid.
Then again it took guts to remember the events leading up to that night, and she had done that enough times, so she couldn’t be a coward. She had to be strong.
If only…
How she would come to hate those two words. How they would come to define her every waking thought, and every sleeping terror. If only she had protected her mistrust of that woman. If only she had nurtured it and let it grow. If only she had ignored Adalina and seen her plan through. If only she had refused to believe the deceits – or believe them but not let them touch her, because making somebody the victim did not make that person immune from becoming the perpetrator.
And then the incidentals: if only she had gone away with Alfie that night (but who was to say it wouldn’t have happened the next night, or the night after?); if only she had taken her baby into her bed; if only she had held him in her arms and kissed his sweet head over and over, just one more time, oh, she would give her life just to kiss him one more time. In her blackest hours, if only he hadn’t been born – for then the wild weed of her pain could have been annihilated at its root.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
The hour came. A Sunday. Vivien went to bed early, shortly after her son. She fell asleep instantly and it seemed only a second before she was woken again, scrambling to consult the time, midnight, and in the fever of having been roused from a deep yet unaccountably troubled sleep, patting the sheets beside her for the baby she must have fallen asleep with and buried beneath the covers – a frequent trick of the mind.
What had woken her? A shout. A man’s shout. It came again.
She didn’t recognise it. Awful. Not that she didn’t recognise the person making it – Salvatore, who else? – but the bite of terror that accompanied it she had never heard before. She couldn’t decipher what he was saying, just this urgent pitch, horribly, horribly urgent, fearful, a man who has shed all protocol, and in Salvatore’s case that was unheard of, all etiquette, to show the whites of his bones, the skeleton of his fright. It was an animal cry, a wolf in the mountains. Danger, danger!
She knew before she knew. The instant her feet hit that floor and she started running, she knew. She didn’t even have to go into his bedroom to see his empty cot, or his open door: she knew. A sound emerged from her as she flew down the stairs and into the night, black night shuddering through her, or she through it, and it came from a place so grim and yawning that it seemed to carry all her blood and breath along with it, and she supposed that everyone had this place inside them but it was only a few, only a damned few, who ever got to discover it was there.
The fountain. Salve. The body in his arms, wetly asleep, a dripping boy, his ankles crossed, and she ran for him, calling his name, but he couldn’t hear her.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Italy, Summer 2016
I expect us to return to the Barbarossa, but we don’t. Instead Adalina takes me to an old church on the Piazza Maria, a modest peach and white building, set in its own courtyard. Inside, it’s cool and empty, the pews deserted. A crucifixion hangs at the altar, Christ’s feet crossed and nailed, his head bowed. Prayer candles flicker.
‘I often come,’ says Adalina, ‘to pray for them.’
We sit together. It’s cold. I want to be back in Max’s apartment, curled up on his sofa, watching him cook. Adalina appears older in this light, not quite herself. She doesn’t look well. Against the backdrop of the Barbarossa, she exudes a certain authority, but here she looks tired and ill, more like how I imagine Vivien.
‘Pray for whom?’ I ask. It’s as good a place to start as any.
‘My son,’ she says. She looks hopefully at me, as if she’s waiting for me to grasp something so that she doesn’t have to say it. ‘And Isabella.’
‘Adalina, what happened to Isabella?’
‘She killed herself. Vivien didn’t kill her.’
‘Max’s aunt…?’
Adalina shakes her head. ‘No. Never. Lili wasn’t like that. She was a gentle woman – a best friend. The only true friend the Barbarossa had.’
‘Why?’ Isabella: bright, vibrant, damaged, hopeless. ‘Why did she do it?’
‘You were right about the fountain,’ says Adalina. ‘Isabella weighed herself down and stepped into it, and she waited…’ Adalina’s features flicker in the light, focused as if trying to conjure the finest detail in her memory, as if that might answer the myriad questions to which she was yet to find adequate response. ‘She must have been so patient, just letting the breath run out of her. She must have wanted to die so much, to have that will… to override every signal in her body telling her to surface.’
I close my eyes. ‘It was in the middle of the night, wasn’t it?’
I don’t need to open them to know that I’m right. Twelve minutes past three in the morning. All those times I awoke at the Barbarossa, unsure what had roused me. The figure in white by the fountain… The phantom in my bedroom… The noises in the attic…
‘Salvatore found her,’ Adalina goes on. ‘It was the final trauma. He was never the same after that.’
I cannot look at her. Instead, I watch the crucifix. I am not religious and yet in moments of crisis and uncertainty, there is comfort in this presence, constant and true, in reassurance that sinners have come and gone and all is judged at the final hour.
‘But Vivien kept him on?’
‘He was too unreliable to let go. And, I suppose… she felt sorry for him.’
That was it, then. That was the ‘accident’ that the papers had cited. That was why Gio had run from his marriage. It all made sense now. Isabella was more broken than anyone could have anticipated. Nothing could have stopped her – the Morettis’ deaths, the abuse at Dinapoli’s hands, her brother leaving her behind…
But that’s not all.
‘What did Max’s aunt have to apologise for?’
Adalina exhales. She clasps her hands together in her lap, old hands, fragile hands, but the nails are perfect, glamorous even, long and shaped and pearlescent. I have never noticed before. They do not look like the hands of a maid.
‘She didn’t, really,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’
‘What wasn’t?’ I wait. ‘Adalina…?’
At last, she meets my eye.
‘Isabella killed herself because she could not live any longer. She could not live with her guilt. It ate her up and so she had to follow him into that watery grave.’
I try to join the dots. ‘Her father?’ I think of his drowning, her m
other too. ‘She had to follow her parents?’
Adalina shakes her head as if to say, I wish that were it. I wish that were true.
She speaks in a whisper. ‘Isabella had to follow Alfonso.’
Alfie. Vivien’s son. A horrid sensation gathers in the pit of my stomach.
‘She drowned him.’
Those three words, emerging from Adalina’s lips, sound like another language. There is such pain in them, such awful, irrepressible pain, the kind of pain that lasts a lifetime and beyond, the kind of pain that can never be dulled, never be dimmed; it exists in its own black sphere beyond the realm of our comprehension.
‘She took him from his bed and she drowned him. He was three years old.’ Adalina sobs, one harsh sob, alive with grief, then a series of silent ones that shake her whole body. ‘Such was her hatred for our family. You’d think she would have spared him for Gio’s sake alone, but no. That innocent boy, my world, my love – that poor, innocent child at the beginning of his precious life… Oh, Alfie, darling Alfie…’
The dots join. The picture is revealed.
I take Vivien’s hand.
‘He was your son, wasn’t he?’ I say.
She squeezes my fingers; there is no need for words. Adalina never existed – at least not in the here and now. She existed once, as Max’s aunt and Vivien’s maid, and when she died Vivien sought to replace her. She couldn’t be alone: she had lost too many people. Her son was gone. Her husband was gone. There was no one left.
‘I was lonely,’ Vivien whispers, picking up my train of thought. ‘But neither could I abide anyone at the house. I couldn’t bear the thought of stepping out into the world, let alone allowing it in. I was so lonely, and I…’ She lifts her shoulders. ‘I invented her. I acted her. I brought her back to life. Pathetic, isn’t it.’
I try to work out what it is. In another context it would be troubling, insane even, but, sitting here next to her, listening to her account of her poor son’s death, all I can feel for Vivien is sympathy and understanding. No wonder she had let go of her mind, when she had been made to let go of everything else. She had been fraught and confused and ultimately it was easier to play a role because then she didn’t have to be herself. She didn’t have to answer to anyone, least of all me, or any of the other help she’d been compelled to hire because she couldn’t cope on her own.
