by Joanna Hines
Chapter 39
By the River
‘WHY?’ ASKED KATE AS they emerged from the river onto the shingle bank where they’d left their clothes. ‘And what happened to Simona?’
‘She was killed in the accident,’ said Francesca, helping Kate to her feet and giving her a towel. Now that she’d taken the plunge, she wanted to pour her story out, and not stop for breath until every last word was spoken; she wanted to shout it to the heavens and paint it in gold letters on the sky, but she could tell that Kate was still dazed with the shock of first hearing. It was vital to tread carefully so as not to overwhelm her precious audience. Her catcher.
‘Why the pretence?’ asked Kate, pulling the towel over her bare shoulders. She sat, shivering and baffled, looking out over the river. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Because of my uncle’s inheritance, of course. It turned out he’d left everything to Simona. He gave up on me when I went to Florence after the flood. It was so weird: he didn’t mind when I attacked him—in some creepy kind of way, he seemed to think that brought us closer together—but he couldn’t bear it when I started to make a life away from my family. By the terms of his will, if anything happened to Simona, my cousin Dario would have inherited the lot.’ She paused, then corrected herself. ‘When Simona died, my cousin Dario should have inherited the lot. The Fondazione has been created on the most almighty fraud, but at least I’ve had the satisfaction of knowing I put the money to better use than Dario would’ve done. On his twenty-first birthday, I made my parents settle a part of my uncle’s fortune on him—a small Rubens’ worth,’ she added with a smile, ‘but he blew the lot in about five years. Most of it on drugs. I’ve been keeping him in rehab ever since.’
‘But your uncle must have realized it was Simona—’
Francesca shook her head. ‘No one knew how much he’d taken in, because he had a stroke when he heard about the accident. My mother had to tell him and… it was too much for him. The old bastard must have had a heart after all. He hung on for several weeks, but he never really recovered.’
‘It seems impossible,’ said Kate, shaking her head in disbelief. ‘How on earth did you get away with it?’
‘More easily than you’d think. People see what they want to see—or, sometimes, what they’re paid to see—just as you have done over the past few days.’
‘But I hadn’t seen you in years.’
Francesca hesitated. She was so desperate for Kate to understand the whole story, it was hard to know where to begin. She said, ‘Imagine how it must have been in that first week, Kate, the week when you were in hospital. Everyone was stunned by the news: not just of the accident, but my uncle’s stroke all in the same day. After a double tragedy like that, people just wanted to be supportive—and when my parents said they needed to be left alone to grieve in private, my guess is their acquaintances were relieved to have an excuse to stay away. That kind of huge disaster frightens people. No one ever thought it was odd. My parents didn’t have any real friends and they had always tried to stop me and Simona from mixing too.’ She frowned, then said carefully, ‘I’ve spent years trying to figure it all out, Kate. They say families with secrets put up a barrier between themselves and the outside world. Our secret had always been our poverty and debts: our well-heeled facade was totally fake. It was feast or famine, depending on whether my uncle chose to foot the bill or not. That’s why we never even went to school but had a succession of useless tutors at home. And because I’d been in America for three years, it was a long time since anyone had seen me and Simona together. Apart from you.’
‘So that’s why we weren’t wanted at the funeral.’
‘The funeral, yes.’ Francesca was silent for a few moments, then she said quietly, ‘I went to my own funeral. Can you imagine what that’s like? Seeing all those people weeping for me, seeing my own coffin covered in flowers. Seeing everything through that thick black veil, so convenient for the deception. For years it seemed as though I only ever saw the world through a black veil.’
‘Oh, Francesca… But you were taking such a risk—how could you know you’d get away with it?’
Kate turned to look at her for the first time since they’d come out of the water. Her arms were covered in goose-bumps, and she looked troubled. Francesca realized she’d omitted to explain the most important fact of all. ‘Oh, Kate,’ she said, ‘I never wanted to become Simona! I didn’t give a shit about the money, surely you remember that.’
‘Then why go along with it?’
‘Because I never had any choice! When Simona was killed.—and in such a horrific way—well, I guess I must have lost the plot for a while. I kept seeing the accident: you were in Mario’s car, your head was covered in blood and I thought maybe you’d been killed… and Simona’s head…’ Her heart was pounding and there was an acid taste in her mouth as the sequence reeled through her mind.
‘It’s okay, Francesca. It’s okay.’ Kate reached over and put her hand on her arm. ‘It’s over.’
Francesca was shaking. She said in a low voice, ‘But it’s never over, Kate, never. I keep seeing it again and again, wondering what I should have done that was different. How I might have saved Simona.’ She was silent for a few moments, thinking. ‘Well, maybe I couldn’t have stopped the accident. But people get over tragedies in time, even one like that. For me the nightmare never ended because I lost control of my life. I even lost control of who I was. If only I’d stayed calm…’
‘You can’t blame yourself, Francesca. Not after what you’d been through.’
‘You can’t blame yourself, Francesca. Not after what you’d just been through.’
‘Yes, I know, that’s what people always say, but, oh God, Kate, I should have been stronger! I’m so ashamed, even now, but the truth is it was a relief when they sedated me. I thought when I came round everything would be okay again, but it wasn’t. It was worse. They told me Simona was dead and you’d gone back to England and Mario was going to take me to America so I could get well again. It was all such a fog. Now of course I realize that it was because of the tranquillizers I was taking—doctors used to dish them out for just about everything back then—so I couldn’t think straight. I must have signed things—they told me there were a few things Simona should have put her signature on before she died, so I signed her name. They said it was just to make it all “tidy”, and I was such a zombie I did whatever they wanted. It wasn’t until Mario and I were in the hotel in Florida that I discovered I’d travelled with the “wrong” passport. That was when he told me what they’d done.’
‘So Mario was in it too?’
‘Oh yes. Mario was involved right from the beginning.’
‘Why?’
‘The worst part was he kept saying he’d done it for my sake. This terrible wrong had been done to me and he tried to make out I should be grateful! He said I needed the money, that I’d never be able to get by without it. He said I shouldn’t complain about losing my name because with my uncle’s wealth I had the chance to be whoever I wanted. Names don’t matter. He claimed he’d done it for my whole family, because my parents would have gone under if my cousin had got the money. And I think maybe he believed it, too.’
‘Is that when you tried to kill him?’
‘Yes, in that crummy hotel in Florida—God, how I hated that place. I don’t know if I really wanted him dead. It was more that I wanted him to hurt the way I was hurting. I don’t think he ever understood what it’s like to have to spend your whole life pretending to be someone else. If just once he’d acknowledged the price I had to pay, then it might have been different. But he didn’t. He made a joke of it. “What’s in a name?” he said, “A rose smells just as sweet…” But it’s not true, Kate. A name can be your whole world. He’s never understood that. Never.’
‘God,’ said Kate. ‘You must really hate him.’
‘Hate him?’ Francesca’s eyes were swimming with tears. ‘Oh, Kate, if only it was that simple. Mario’s th
e only man I’ve ever loved. I think he used to feel the same about me, but because of everything that happened it never worked out for us. So we’ve never been able to part and we’ve never been together properly… just torment. For both of us.’
‘So how did you survive?’
Francesca laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t really, not for years. I stayed away from Italy, and of course that suited everyone just fine. They spun all sorts of stories about what the crazy heiress was up to abroad, but I never found out about that until I came home again. My parents ran the Beatrice estate and sent me money. So I travelled. I even got married once. I was in New Mexico and we’d been living together for six months. He was the kindest, gentlest man you ever knew. His name was Paul Denver. Just an ordinary guy—and I tried to be his ordinary wife, Fran Denver. I told him Fran was my nickname, even though it said Simona on my passport. For a while, I was almost happy with Paul. But then he started asking questions, wanting to know more about me. And I couldn’t tell him, so one day I just left and set off on my travels again.’ She fell silent, bumping up against the impossibility of ever explaining to Kate what those empty years had been like when ‘Francesca’ no longer existed and ‘Simona’ felt like a death sentence—sometimes it was only under an assumed name that she felt she had a chance of being herself. She slid Kate a sideways glance and said, ‘I took on other names, sometimes, just to see what they felt like. A few times, Kate, I pretended to be you.’
‘Me?’ Kate looked shocked.
‘Yes, if you go through the records of one of the ashrams in Poona, you’ll discover that a Kate Holland made several visits.’
‘Why did you choose my name?’
‘Because you were always so confident, Kate, so sure of who you were and your place in the world. All that time when I was floundering around, I thought: Kate would have known how to handle this, Kate would never let other people take over her life and wreck it. Sometimes I felt as though I was dissolving, becoming a non person, but you were always… solid. At least, that’s how I remembered you.’
‘But the last time you saw me, I was leaving with Mario. Weren’t you angry about that?’
‘Not really, I envied you. I wished I had the courage to grab what I wanted and head off for freedom. But I couldn’t even hang on to my own name.’
‘God, Francesca. That’s so dreadful.’
‘Yes.’ Francesca felt a kind of calm spreading through her body. It was all she had wanted, all these years. Not pity or sympathy. Just someone who recognized who she was and accepted what she’d been through. It didn’t seem such a lot to ask, yet it had taken her half a lifetime to find it. Half naked and sitting on the riverbank in the afternoon sun, she dared to hope her life might one day make a kind of sense, after all.
‘But I still don’t understand,’ said Kate. ‘If you thought I could have helped, why didn’t you come and find me back then? Why wait until now?’
Why? Francesca remembered the despair of those rootless days. ‘That was the whole trouble, Kate. You were the one person I couldn’t reach.’
‘Why on earth not? You know I would have helped you, Francesca. If it was so impossible for you to carry on as Simona, why didn’t you just tell the truth?’
‘My God, you think I didn’t want to? I imagined it a thousand times, but Mario had developed very sensitive antennae and he always guessed when I’ve been planning to come clean. He always found a way to persuade me not to. There would have been a huge scandal—well, I could have survived that. But there’d have been a court case too, because of the money, and my parents would probably have ended up in prison. That’s what Mario kept telling me, and I think he was right. And they’d already suffered so much, with Simona’s death and everything—how could I inflict that on them too?’
‘But it was their fault, not yours. Why should you pay the price of their mistakes?’
‘I know, but, oh, Kate, it’s easy to see it clearly now, but it’s different when you’re in the middle of it and it’s your own family who would have to pay. From my point of view they’d wrecked my life, but according to their way of looking at things, they’d done the best for me they could. I had the wealth they’d always thought was so important. And it’s not easy to shop your parents. I did go to see our family lawyer once, but Mario had got to him first.’
‘You mean the lawyer was corrupt as well?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It was more subtle than that. My mother told people I was mentally unstable and had these occasional psychotic outbursts—of course, the fact that I’d attacked Mario and my uncle, and spent those years in the clinic before Florence, meant the odds were stacked against me. Mario did the same thing last night when we were at the restaurant, do you remember? I mean, who would you trust? A crazy heiress who keeps changing her story or the parents who’ve been running the show and their friend the well-respected doctor?’
Kate turned slowly. She said, ‘I trust you, Francesca.’
There was a long silence. Francesca let the words enfold her, like the circles of sound from an ancient bell. I trust you, Francesca. Then she whispered, ‘Thank you, Kate.’
‘Francesca,’ Kate said the word again.
Francesca sat quietly. Her spirit began to inhabit the name that had been waiting for her all these years.
Then she frowned. There was still so much more to get out in the open. Now she’d started, she felt as though she wouldn’t stop until the last lie had been exposed. She said, ‘The worst part of living a lie is that to make it work you have to believe it yourself. Once I got the idea for the Fondazione and saw a way to make some good come out of all the horrors, I came back here. To achieve what I wanted, I had to forget about Francesca and become Simona. It’s what Mario had been telling me to do all along.’
‘Jesus. That must have been hard.’
‘Yes it was.’
After a while, Kate asked, ‘So why are you telling me now? What’s changed?’
‘In some ways, it’s a question of what hasn’t changed. However hard I tried, I could never really shake off the feeling of being an imposter. It was like that story about the emperor’s new clothes. Sooner or later, I’d be found out. Every time I stood up to make a speech, like yesterday, I’d be waiting for a member of the audience to yell out that I was a fraud. Even when I answered the phone, I always expected someone to ask for Francesca, not Simona. For years I’ve had a recurring nightmare where I’m stabbing my reflection in the mirror, only instead of being glass, the mirror is made of flesh, and real blood comes out. But I kept going until my father died. That was when I sent you the first picture.’
‘“Truth is the Daughter of Time?”’
‘That’s right. I wasn’t very clear exactly what I wanted from you. I guess I was trying to reach you, see what would happen next. Because something had to give. I knew I couldn’t live the lie for ever, but I’d always tried to protect my father—sometimes he seemed to be as much a victim of my mother’s schemes as I was. Once he was dead, I felt more free to act. And you’ve seen what’s happened to my mother—no court would find her fit to plead the way she is now.’
‘And you?’
‘When my father was dying, he still called me Simona. It terrified me, the idea that I too might die and no one would mourn for Francesca, not this time, they’d be grieving for someone who never existed. It’s one thing to live a lie, but to contemplate dying, with the lie still in place—can you imagine what that feels like?’
‘No. I can’t.’ Kate grinned ruefully. ‘I guess I must be solid, after all.’
Francesca stood up and went to the edge of the river. She reached up her arms and spread them wide. She wanted to embrace the universe. ‘I’ve imagined this feeling for so long. What it’s like to be me, Francesca. No more pretending.’
‘And what does it feel like?’
Francesca turned. She saw Kate looking up at her, seeing Francesca. ‘Better than I ever imagined,’ she said. She began to pick up her clothes.<
br />
A little later, when they’d dressed and were walking slowly along the path that led away from the river, Kate asked, ‘I still don’t understand why you chose me.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘No, I’m flattered, but all the same…’
‘It’s odd?’ asked Francesca anxiously.
‘I suppose so.’
‘Well, in a way, I don’t think it was the real you I wanted. I’d built up a picture of an imaginary Kate Holland in my mind, kind of halfway between how you used to be and an idealized person, the sort of mother I wished I’d had, or the perfect friend and confessor. That’s why it’s taken me two days to pluck up the courage to tell you—I guess I had to get to know the real Kate a bit before I knew if I could trust you.’
‘But why me? There must have been other people you could have told.’
Francesca walked ahead in silence before she answered. They emerged from the scrubby undergrowth to the place on the driveway where the car was parked. She said, ‘You were my only link to the person I was starting to be in Florence, the person I might have become if I’d made it back to Florence the day Simona was killed. You know that poem about the road less travelled?’
‘Robert Frost? Of course. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I—”’
‘“I took the one less travelled by.” Well, that’s true of my life and I hope to God no one else has ever had to travel the road I’ve been on. When I was with you and the others I was just setting out on the road I knew I wanted to travel on for the rest of my life. I thought I had found a way to be different from the person my parents were trying to turn me into. After Simona died I lost all that, I forfeited even my own name. Until now.’
They got into the car and flung their wet towels in the back.
‘So what happens now?’ asked Kate.
