by Ella Carey
“Okay, honey?” the head mechanic asked. “Unusual to see you here at this time of day.”
“Oh, I’m just fine,” Tess said. But she noticed the way they all stood there, watching her almost warily, she thought, before turning back to their tools and their jobs.
The knots that were lodged around Tess’s shoulder blades loosened just a touch as she stepped underneath the green canopy above Caffè Reggio’s front door. She slipped into the familiar interior, settling at one of the round wooden tables and letting her eyes roam over the copies of old masters that lined the rich terra-cotta walls. Human drama. Italian passion. Usually she loved looking at these old prints. Whatever. She ordered a cappuccino.
When Nico, the café’s longest-serving waiter, brought the coffee over for her, he paused at her table and looked at her with his deep brown eyes. “I do not like to see that look on my favorite and most beautiful customer’s face, Tess Miller.”
Tess let out a sigh. Nico’s flattery didn’t bother her one bit—she knew it was lighthearted, knew it was harmless. She had known him all the time she had lived on this street. To be honest, she was glad he was working today.
“It looks like frustration,” he went on, “which means something is bothering you which you can do nothing about.”
Tess took a sip of the coffee, letting the dusting of chocolate dissolve on her tongue. She shot a glance toward the door as it opened and the flurry that was Flora appeared, silhouetted against the glass.
“Tess,” she said, marching toward her and dodging all the tables with the expertise of a pro. As usual, she was dressed utterly in vintage—a canary-yellow 1950s suit with a string of pearls around her pale neck. Flora’s red hair sat in soft pin curls, but the expression on her face was pure grit.
Tess’s friend swept into the chair opposite her, having kissed Nico on the cheek.
“Spill,” she said to Tess. “Tedious board meeting in thirty minutes. Give me the damage and fast.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Tess said. “So. Leon gave Alec Burgess’s next novel to our newest hire. Guess who it is?”
“James Cooper.” Flora uttered his name as if it were a stain on her coat. “Bloody hell, Tess,” she went on, her British accent coming to the fore. Flora might have been working in the US for several years, but every now and then she sounded pure London, and Tess was reminded of her friend’s meteoric rise up the publishing ladder on both sides of the pond. Flora inspired her, and Tess felt a new sense of energy flowing into her system.
Nico’s eyes flew from Tess to Flora.
Tess stirred her coffee so fast it started to whirl. “I’ve worked with Alec Burgess for three years, put my entire heart into his career, made every one of his books into a bestseller. I feel as if I’ve worked ten times harder than everyone else. I guess it’s floored me. Exhausted me, to be honest.”
Nico pulled a napkin out of the belt of his apron and wiped it across his face.
Tess looked up at him, taking in his neatly brushed gray hair. His face was tinged with gray too, but his eyes still sparkled with life.
“You know what to do, Tess?” he said.
“You tell me.”
“When you are overlooked, and there is nothing to be done, you must make the most of what you do have. You need to take the opportunities you have left and make them your own. That way, you will succeed. We cannot do anything about fate.” He smiled.
“Sods to that, Nico,” Flora announced. But she leaned across and threw an arm around the waiter, who blushed quite pink. “Tess has to fight. It’s absolute rubbish. They can’t just take her most successful author away from her without any discussion. What’s their reasoning?”
“James is more literary than I am.” The words landed with a thud and hung around for a moment while Flora’s eyes rolled to the ceiling.
“James Cooper?” Flora threw her eyes to the roof. “He’s a celebrity editor. His daddy probably engineered the whole thing. Probably is a member of the same darned country club as your boss, Leon . . . in fact, I could check that out for you, if you like. After a few drinks, they would have stitched up the whole thing. James is just a puppet. His father’s perfect boy. He does what he’s told; everyone’s happy. He’ll probably marry some socialite and on they go . . . It’s a world I don’t want to get involved in. Fun to watch, but horrible when it cuts down someone you care about. And I care about you. So, what are you going to do?”
Nico inclined his head. “No, it’s fate,” he said. “Everything is. You’ll see.”
Tess laughed. “Excellent. Thank you, both of you.”
“You are showing your dimple again, which lights up the boring days of all the waiters here in Caffè Reggio,” Nico said. “Make the most of what you have got. It is all we can do. And sometimes, things work out better than you might think.”
“You need to take him on.” Flora pulled out her Filofax, as if that held some secret answer to the whole thing. “Fight him.”
Tess placed her coffee cup down on her saucer. “Brilliant. A philosopher and a warrior.” She put her head in her hands and looked at them both from under her eyelashes. “The hard fact is, I’m most likely going to have to start again if they carry through with this, which it looks like they are going to do.”
Nico stood up. “Fate.”
“I should go,” Flora announced. “Or I’ll get into trouble. Tess, I want you to promise me that you won’t take this lying down. You put in all the hard yards for Burgess. You should get to reap the rewards. Cooper’s just a charmer, a playboy, and a spoilt upper-class rich boy dressed as a man. Fight, Tess.” Flora stood up, towering over them like a golden butterfly in her batwing jacket.
Tess pushed her chair back and gave Nico a resigned smile.
“Thank you,” she murmured. “But I seem to have been swept aside with a flick of Leon’s well-groomed hands. I’m gutted at the moment. My brain has gone to pieces.”
Flora was halfway out the door. “Call me! When you have some more news!”
“It will resolve itself,” Nico insisted, placing his hand on Tess’s back. “These things often seem worse than they are. Sometimes, the hardest and the best thing we can do is nothing.”
Tess turned to him, stopping on the spot. “Nothing?”
“Nothing,” he insisted.
“Nothing” had never been part of any of Tess’s plans. As she made her way back out into the bustling street, she tugged her red coat around her body as strange nervous flutters started up in her stomach. Suddenly, she felt cold. What if this was the first in a line of steps that would lead to her being fired? What if they weren’t happy with her?
Her career was all that she had.
Tess stopped at the red door that led into her apartment building, pulled her key out, then put it back in her bag. No, she’d go for a walk around the Village. She needed to think. She needed to save her job. She needed to confront Leon, and James. Fast.
And fate? As much as she adored Nico, the idea of fate seemed about as helpful as a trip to the moon.
CHAPTER TWO
Rome, 1987
Edward reached across the bed, running his hands over the spot where Edith had slept for over thirty-five years. And thought of Rebecca.
She’d whispered to him yet again in his dreams last night. Sometimes we don’t want to revisit the past, but the past wants to revisit us. Was this some wretched new form of grief? A way of distancing his mind from Edith’s death, while bewitching him in some tortuous way back to 1946?
It was as if all the years since then were melded into one tangled, insignificant whirl—Oxford, his marriage, the children, his university career. Even being in Rome, surrounded by relics from the ancient world, could not distract him from the pull of his past.
Edward sat up in bed. He ran a hand through his still-thick hair, the inevitable gray still peppered through with a few last shots of dark blond. He moved across to the shuttered French doors, throwing them open and stepping onto
the small balcony, not caring about the fact he was in his pajama bottoms and his old gray T-shirt while standing above the busy street. He stared out at the familiarity below the apartment that he and Edith bought ten years ago, after Haslemere, his family estate, had finally been sold.
During the auction, neighbors and opportunists alike grappled over everything Edward’s family had held dear since 1839—the monogrammed silver that graced the steamship his grandfather used for family holidays to England, his mother’s exquisite ball gowns, as delicate as gossamer, the silverware that the butler counted each night in his cedar-lined pantry, where as a child Edward often perched on the bench by the window, watching while the old man decanted wine.
Now, Edward couldn’t fight off his own guilt at his long-held attitude toward his family’s wealth. As he moved from childhood to adulthood, he’d come to see that the famous Russell family’s opulent lifestyle and the value they placed on social standing were both unnecessary and unfair. But still, he’d found it difficult, in the end, to say goodbye to his family’s legacy and to those old ghosts of his ancestors that were rumored to linger in Haslemere’s grand hallways. Now it seemed that one ghost from his own past did not want to say goodbye to him.
He leaned against the balcony railing, fighting with the memory of making his final way up Haslemere’s forlorn gravel driveway ten years ago, passing the bell that stood sentinel by the gate that led to the stable yard. It used to be rung every morning when it was time for all the employees—the shearers, the farmers, the station managers, and the servants—to start work. In the late nineteenth century, the world-famous sheep station had employed seventy men on permanent wages. Hundreds of itinerant shearers toiled in the cathedral-sized shearing sheds when Edward’s grandfather had brought Haslemere to great prominence.
When Edward sold out, there were only three employees left: a gardener, a cleaner, and one station hand. Edith had done her best, bless her, to embrace the old lifestyle with far more enthusiasm than Edward ever felt. While he’d toyed with the idea of running the paddocks as a collective, Edith had entertained none of that. She’d pushed on in the old way, relishing the idea of playing the role of the perfect country wife, putting her heart into making a gorgeous home out of the old mansion for their three children, Mary, Jonathon, and Peter, who’d roamed around the increasingly decrepit gardens, their childhoods as carefree as Edward and she could make them.
Edward spent most of his time lecturing in Melbourne, desperately trying to fund the great behemoth that he’d inherited. But his income from lecturing and writing biographies could not sustain a grand house in the middle of nowhere, and in spite of Edith’s own inheritance, they were never going to be able to support the vast business that his forebears had built. Once he’d packed everything up ten years ago, he’d never returned.
But still, what he missed, were he honest, was the sense of place: the old whispering gum trees in the endless paddocks on either side of the long driveway that was lined, in turn, with oaks that his grandfather insisted on planting as a token to the old country. He missed the still, green paddocks dotted with well-tended sheep. He’d enjoyed working in the garden when he could. And he did have an affection for the great old house, with its ballroom and galleries and fourteen bedrooms and the farmhouse kitchen, where the temperamental wood-heated stove used to smoke out the whole house when it was first lit in autumn, causing everyone to flee outside. It was as if the old oven had a personality of its own—the servants named it Betty—and it had to be fed throughout the winter with logs from the gums in the paddocks, or its flame would die out.
That was the only life he had known, and yet it was based on complete inequality. He hadn’t been able to resolve his feelings about that, especially after the horrors of the war, the holocaust. How could he live with such luxuries when so many had lost their lives for no reason at all?
Edward’s flight to Rome was supposed to be the answer, to both remove him and distract him from his past. He’d expounded to Edith the wonders of Italy as if on a mission to convince her that the ancient world was their savior, and the new world didn’t matter. He’d lectured her about the Italian passion for everything that was important—food, family. Love. And yet, now with the hopelessness of grief for everything he’d lost, he knew that coming to Rome only tied in with his yearning for that time in 1946. In this classic setting, he kept circling back to that very word he’d been so attracted to straight after the war, “modernism,” the rejection of all those tenets that had held society together until the war blew apart every assumption about class and social roles—tenets that his family had stuck to for generations.
Rome hadn’t helped. It had made things worse. Being among the living, breathing ruins of the ancient world made his family’s 150 years at Haslemere and their adherence to parochial conformity seem as inconsequential as a single drop of rain in a storm. Edward had clung to the idea of Rome as the place where he could lose and find himself at the same time. But neither of these things had happened.
His insistent, circular thoughts of Rebecca reminded him of the routine supply flights that he was forced to take during the war, up and down the east coast of Australia, over and over the same ground, every day. Edward flew the aircraft with one hand, his eyes on whatever book he’d picked up that day from Haslemere’s library: Dickens, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics. He’d prop them up in the cockpit in front of his nose. He’d retreated into a dreamlike world, away from reality, the war, everything, back then. Was his mind trying to do that now?
He tugged his pajama cord around his still-trim waist. He would, as usual, go out, buy the paper and his morning coffee, stand at the shining counter at Caffè Greco while sipping and people watching, then wander out into the Via Condotti, with its charming designer boutiques, before making his way up the Spanish Steps to the pure bliss of the gardens surrounding the Villa Borghese. It was easy enough to look like any other expatriate in Rome. No one knew what was going on in his head.
Edward had been playing a game of Russian roulette with himself since Edith’s funeral. The way he saw it, he had two choices: he could continue like this, his mind pregnant with the past, or he could do something about it. And there was only one thing that would help. But he’d stopped writing decades ago. He had no desire to take himself back to those secret shores that he had sworn he would never revisit. That period of his life was too difficult, too frightening, and too exquisite to face. And yet it was not going to leave him in peace.
Edward moved through his bedroom to the en suite bathroom, turned on the shower, stepped in front of the mirror, and gazed at his green eyes in the bijou little room that he and Edith had renovated. He’d done his best with Edith, what he thought was the right thing. But in doing so, he’d locked himself away from the truth of his feelings throughout his marriage.
After showering, he collected his keys and enough cash for coffee and Italian bread with jam, and then stepped out of the small living room into the stairwell, but his thoughts pulled him back to Rebecca.
Had anyone known her as he had?
Edward moved out into the Roman sunshine. By the time he made it to Via Condotti, he was reminding himself that even if Rebecca’s brother still lived, or her mother, or if any of those long-ago artist friends they had made together in the forties were still breathing, no one knew Rebecca Swift as he had.
It was as if, after all these years, she was talking to him, whispering in some secret language that only they had known during their brief time together, before she fell to her death in the ocean that day in 1946. As he walked he thought that perhaps it didn’t matter why she was haunting him again, but one thing was clear: it would be intolerable to go one more day without doing something about it.
Edward pushed open Caffè Greco’s door, took a seat on one of the leather banquettes, sipped his coffee, and ate his white roll and jam, resting his free hand on the small, round marble table. He watched people’s reflections in the mirrors that lined th
e walls and listened to their rapid conversations, taking in a word or two sometimes.
He loved Italy with a passion, but even here, he had not been able to write. The words had dried up. He’d been given thousands of words when he was young, until they had all stopped. He would be kidding himself to think that he had written anything that mattered since Rebecca died. He’d lapsed into writing other people’s biographies to avoid his own truths, which he knew would shine through if he wrote fiction.
Edward went back into the street. The crowds had picked up. He fell in step behind a boisterous family, the children’s voices high with excitement, rising and lingering in the space between the crumbling old buildings, childish words becoming lost in the washing that was strung over the street. Day-to-day commonalities—Rebecca had not held truck with those. Edward felt a smile pass over his lips, and he pictured her long dark hair swinging beneath her cherry-red beret.
She would make a good story.
He could hear her teasing him, telling him to go right ahead. Some things were harder to let go of than others.
Edward stopped outside a newsdealer. But only for a moment. Then he walked inside, and for the first time in years, he bought a notebook. And strolled out again into the sunshine, relief soaring from his soul.
CHAPTER THREE
New York, 1987
Tess moved around the tiny one-room apartment that she called home. If she closed her eyes and pretended, it was easy to imagine that everything was all right. She always looked forward to going into the office in the morning. Today she’d prepared to call Alec and talk about his new book. The phone call was marked in her planner. She’d underlined the appointment in red pen. Tess had become so used to her day-to-day existence for the last few years that she’d assumed she was leading a life that would not stop. She thought she had made it, that her job and author list were both safe. Assumptions were something that she’d never rely on again.
Now she stared, helpless, around her studio in the old building on West Third. The four walls stared back at her as if nothing were amiss. Her small cream sofa sat there as usual. Tess’s pale blue blanket was folded neatly on an arm, just as she’d left it this morning. The jar of basil that she had bought yesterday to make a pesto sauce still sat green and fragrant across the room on her kitchen counter. A couple of dresses hung on the front of her small wardrobe. Was it yesterday that she’d picked them up from the dry cleaners? Yesterday seemed an elusive place.
