The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  Hal waits for her to continue, but she does not. She has turned towards another man, who is approaching them across the grass. He is elegant in fine, pale linen, with leonine hair swept back from his brow. A fingerprint of grey at each temple. He is not particularly tall, but there is something about him suggestive of stature. A trick of the eye, Hal thinks. A confidence trick. He smiles, revealing white teeth. Even Hal can see that he is handsome, in that American way. And somehow ageless – in spite of the grey.

  ‘Mr Truss.’ The Contessa’s smile is not the same one she gave Signor Gaspari. It is the smile of a diplomat, measured out in a precise quantity.

  ‘It’s a wonderful party, Contessa. I must congratulate you.’

  ‘Thank you. Hal, meet Frank Truss – who has been very supportive of the film. Frank Truss, meet Hal Jacobs, the journalist who will be joining us.’

  ‘Hal,’ Truss puts out a hand. Hal takes it, and feels the coolness of the man’s grasp, and also the strength of it. ‘Who do you work for?’

  Without knowing why, Hal feels put on his guard, as though the man has challenged him in some indefinable way. ‘I don’t work for anyone in particular,’ he says. ‘But this piece is for Tempo magazine.’

  ‘Ah. Well.’ He flashes his white smile. ‘I don’t know it. But, clearly, I will have to make sure to watch what I say.’

  ‘I’m not that sort of journalist,’ Hal says. It sounds more hostile than he had intended.

  ‘Well, good. I’m sure you’re the right man for the job. Great to have you on board.’

  He speaks, thinks Hal, as though the whole trip were of his own devising. Odd, but there is something about him – his statesmanlike bearing perhaps, his air of entitled ease – that reminds Hal of his father. A man who expects deference. And if he is anything like Hal’s father, it is an unpleasant experience for those that fail to show it.

  As Truss moves away, the Contessa turns to him, confidentially.

  ‘He’s the money behind the film,’ she says.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘A powerful man.’ She lowers her tone. ‘He has other business in Italy – industry, I understand. And … It is also possible that he may have certain connections here one would rather not look too closely at. I, certainly, am not going to look too closely at them. Perhaps investing in the arts looks good for him. But he describes himself as a man of culture: so that is how I will view him. And I like his wife, which helps.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Contessa searches the crowd. ‘Though I can’t see her here. Never mind, there will be plenty of time for us all to get acquainted. But – ah – there is our leading lady!’

  It is a face known to Hal because of the number of times he has seen it in newsprint and celluloid form. Giulietta Castiglione. Her outfit is surprisingly modest, a sprigged peasant dress, cut high at the neck. Her small feet are bare, more likely a careful choice than real bohemian artlessness. She has black hair, a great thick fall of it – the longest strands of which reach almost to her waist. There is a hum of interest about her. All the men – old and young – are transfixed. From the elderly women emanates a cloud of disapproval.

  They say she has already turned down marriage proposals from some of the biggest names in Hollywood and in Cinecittà. And she was engaged, for a period of precisely one week, to her co-star in the film that made her name in America: A Holiday of Sorts.

  Hal caught A Holiday in a Roman cinema, dubbed into Italian. It was a blowsy comedy: an American ambassador falls in love with a Neapolitan nun – played, with improbably ripe sensuality, by Giulietta. It should have been the sort of film one might watch to while away a rainy afternoon and then instantly forget. But there had been something about the actress: the combination of knowing and girlish naiveté, the curves of her body at odds with that virginally youthful face. She had been disturbing, unforgettable.

  In the flesh, her charisma is more tangible, and more complex. Hal, watching her dip her head coyly in answer to a question from one man, and then throw her head back and laugh in answer to another, quickly begins to realize that she had not been playing a part so much as a dilute version of herself.

  ‘Well,’ the Contessa says, ‘quite something, is she not?’ And then, ‘Wait until you see her in the film.’

  Hal wonders how this sensual presence will translate itself into Gaspari’s work. The two seem as contradictory as fire and water. But perhaps this will be what makes the combination work.

  Despite himself, he is beginning to look forward to the trip. Before he had thought only about the money, how it would make everything easier for him. But he sees now that here is the promise of an experience out of the ordinary, one that will help him forget himself. And the chance to be in the presence of a great storyteller; for that is what Signor Gaspari is. To learn from him, perhaps.

  At some point the Contessa is drawn into conversation with another guest, and Hal is free to roam on his own. The drinks keep coming and Hal, who for a long while hasn’t been able to afford the luxury of getting drunk, takes advantage of them. By his fifth – every one so necessary at the time – the evening has melted into a syrup of sensation. He wanders through the grounds, meeting guests and forgetting them instantly.

  Later, the dancing begins, and Hal finds himself thrust into the fray. The poor girl whose hand he has commandeered trips and squeals, to no avail, as he spins her around and around and around, and the lantern lights become a vortex of flame about them.

  In the small hours he wanders down to the gardens. Peacocks strut about freely, disturbed from their sleep by the din of the party. He sits down upon a miniature stone house, blinking in an attempt to clear his head, and observes one of the males. The bird preens himself, his plumage gleaming in the lantern-light, tail feathers rustling importantly. And yet for all the beauty of his feathers, Hal sees that the creature’s feet are scaled and ugly, like a common chicken’s. This suddenly strikes him as philosophically significant.

  ‘You think you’re special,’ he tells the bird, labouring over the words, ‘but you aren’t. We’re all just chickens, underneath it all, however much effort we put into not revealing it.’

  Later, he remembers the woman he saw in the gardens behind the house, at dusk. Though it was several hours ago he has some drunken idea that she will still be there; that he only has to go and look for her. So he makes his way round to the back of the house, and towards the dark line of cypresses, his way illuminated now only by the silver light of the moon. Of course, she is not there. Perhaps she was a figment of his imagination.

  As he turns to make his way back to the house – he must go to bed, he knows, or wake up here covered in pine needles – he sees something gleaming dully upon the ground. He stoops, and finds an earring – a stud of some large, cut stone, the colour indiscernible in the gloom. He puts it in his pocket. So she was real, after all.

  5

  He wakes with a start, and stares about in confusion at the unfamiliar room. He knows that he is not in Rome, because there his view is of the tired brickwork of the building opposite. Here he can see only lancing blue. Everything hurts him: the strength of the light, the whiteness of the room … He shuts his eyes, and opens them again, hoping that the pain this time will have lessened, but there is no change. Shakily he climbs out of the bed and sways his way across to the bathroom. Now he is remembering, but in a series of dislocated images: a peacock, the Contessa’s monk-like robe, that final drink. A man with white teeth bared in a smile.

  His face in the mirror betrays little of the night’s excess. ‘It’s strange,’ Suze told him, once, ‘but you somehow look even better when you’re tired. It’s almost unnerving.’ But he does feel terrible. What would help, he feels, would be to bathe his head with cool water. He splashes his face with water from the tap, but he can’t seem to get it cold enough. He thinks: the sea.

  It is still early enough that most of the guests won’t yet be about. Certainly, no one is visible as he mak
es his way downstairs and down through the gardens. And yet as he nears the end of the path he glimpses movement at the far end of the jetty, and stops. A golden head emerges, then the rest of her. She wears a black bathing suit, high at the neck but generously cut away at the shoulders. He watches her move up the jetty toward him and feels a nudge of recognition. A famous actress, perhaps. After all, anything is possible in this place.

  She stoops and picks up her wrap, which lies strewn across the boards, and ties it with a quick, careless movement about her waist. Hal watches, standing completely still as if under some sort of spell.

  She has nearly reached the path. For the first time he sees her face properly, and only now does he recognize her.

  She looks different from the last time he saw her – still beautiful, of course, but before everything about her had seemed polished to a high sheen. Wet, her hair appears darker than before. Her legs are pale and bare.

  He watches as she loops her wrap around the back of her head with her other hand – the left – to rub it dry. Then she glances up toward the house and sees him. He sees how she goes still, like an animal freezing before taking flight. He hurries his pace towards her, as though she might flee from him.

  But she stays in her spot on the path, clutching the towel to herself.

  ‘It’s you,’ he says, as he walks toward her.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, quietly, ‘it’s me.’ He has somehow managed to forget the exact sound of her voice – the oddness hidden beneath the American accent, as though the latter has only been lacquered over the top.

  She is not pleased to see him. He can see it in her face – the dismay, even something like fear. Her gaze moves up towards the house as though she is aware of an audience watching. Involuntarily he finds himself turning to look, but sees no one there.

  ‘I assumed I wouldn’t see you again,’ he says.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks, as though he hasn’t spoken. Her voice is low, almost a whisper.

  He stalls. ‘I’m the journalist,’ he adds, feeling suddenly put on the defensive. ‘I’m writing a piece for Tempo.’

  ‘Journalist? I thought you were a writer.’

  ‘I am.’ He tries not to sound too defensive. ‘It’s a form of writing, like any other.’

  She doesn’t reply. He is unnerved by the fixity of her gaze. She is studying him as though trying to convince herself he is really there. Then, remembering herself, she looks away, gives a shake of her head. And when she looks back at him her expression is a blank. Hal has the distinct impression of a blind being drawn hurriedly down.

  ‘Well,’ she says, running her hand through her damp hair, ‘I see.’ And then, with visible effort, ‘And how have you been?’ There is an impersonal civility to her tone. This is not the woman he remembers. Then she had been reticent, but not false.

  ‘I didn’t see you at the party last night,’ he says.

  ‘Oh. I wasn’t feeling well.’

  And then he thinks. ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘Last night. At the end of the garden, by the trees … wearing that black dress.’

  Her face is a blank. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I was in bed.’

  He remembers now the emerald stud in his suit pocket. ‘I found something – an earring.’

  ‘Not mine,’ she says, brusque. And then, politely, ‘Did you enjoy it? The party?’

  ‘I don’t remember that much of it, to be honest.’

  ‘Ah,’ she nods. ‘And who did you meet?’

  ‘Aubrey Boyd, Signor Gaspari. Another man, an American – Truss, that was his name. Do you know—’

  But she cuts him off. ‘The water’s cold,’ she says, and draws the towel tighter about herself. ‘I have to go and change into something warmer.’ Still she avoids his gaze. ‘I’ll see you later, perhaps. At breakfast.’

  ‘All right,’ Hal says. ‘I meant to ask—’

  But she has already moved beyond him – carefully, so that a good couple of feet of air remain between them – and is striding purposefully toward the house. He watches her all the way up the path, the wrap snickering away from her in the breeze.

  He walks down to the jetty, where her wet footprints form a trail on the bleached wood, yet to dry in the sun. He shrugs off his shorts and shirt and, without giving himself time to think about it, dives from the end. Only too late does he realize that he does not know how shallow it is, but he is lucky – when he rights himself his feet don’t touch the bottom. And frigid; very much a spring sea, without weeks of warmth behind it. A sting against the flesh, but gradually becoming bearable. He has swum in the Solent in April; it is nothing compared to that. He has known greater cold, too, cold that steals the breath and binds fast and deadly to the flesh. But he will not think of that.

  He lets it surround his aching head; rolls onto his back and kicks away from the shore. The water is still about him. It seems to cradle him, to buoy him up. This is the sea of his boyhood: of childhood trips to the Sussex coast.

  They had gone to the beach together: Hal and his parents. East Head had been the favourite, a white spit of land crested with soft dunes. Water, warm in the summer shallows but cold where the bottom shelved into the main channel. It was where he learned to swim – a good place for it, because it was so benign. No, he thinks now. That’s not quite right. Not all benign. The treachery of memory. At the far end of the spit the calm surface hid a secret current, straight out towards France. A woman had been swept into the open sea one summer. A child the next year – and her father had saved her, only to drown himself. He was never allowed to swim at that end of the beach, and there was a flag there, to warn of it. But every summer someone disregarded the warning.

  Ah, but those long, drowsy, salty days on the beach eating sandwiches gritty with sand. His mother glamorous in her headscarf and wrapper, her toenails painted with dark varnish. His father still dapper, but running slightly to fat. Never quite her match.

  What he would give to return to that place. Not childhood, precisely, but that place of simple pleasures, of unknowingness. That is the problem with home: it reminds him of what he was, what was lost. And the sea has been changed for him forever now.

  He pushes harder, driving himself through the water, thinking of nothing but the movement, the labour of his muscles.

  Pausing briefly to look back at the shore, he realizes that he has already come some way. He is almost as far from the jetty as he is from the finger of land that curves round in front of the bay. He might as well swim to it, see what is on the other side.

  It is further than he had realized, and the sea becomes rougher further out. But finally he reaches and rounds the small spit of land. Revealed on the other side is a yacht, moored a little way off the coast at anchor. It is clear from the relative size of the men visible on deck that the boat is huge. There are two masts, each appearing as tall – perhaps taller – than the boat is long. The hull is dark blue. It seems designed for crossing oceans at great speed. Now Hal understands. This is how they will be making their way to Cannes.

  Swimming back is a little harder. The jetty appears very small, a great distance away. His muscles ache. He isn’t worried, but he is bored of it now, fatigued. Perhaps the tide is against him too, for it all feels more difficult. Does the Mediterranean have a tide? He isn’t certain. His hangover intrudes as it did not on the outward leg, his head beginning to ache as though his brain has swollen too large for the skull.

  The last forty metres or so are most difficult of all. It feels as though something has wrapped itself around his legs. There is some sort of current, he realizes, one that must have helped him on the way out. Now it is tugging at him, pulling him away from the shore. His muscles ache with the effort and occasionally he swallows a mouthful of briny water. You are meant to swim sideways with a current, he thinks – but if he were to do that he would be taken past the headland and into open sea. For the first time since he learned to swim, he feels somet
hing like alarm: a sense of real danger. He does not seem to be getting any closer to the shore, and yet the effort merely to stay in one spot is extraordinary. Will he call for help? Would there be any use in it? He squints up through the sweat and the water fogging his vision, and cannot see anyone in the garden. But just as he decides that he must do it, no matter the humiliation, his final effort propels him further than before. The current’s hold on him seems to slacken, as though an invisible hand has instantly released him. His movements become easy again, he is moving forward. Though he feels his tiredness through his whole body it is difficult to believe now in the danger of a few seconds before.

  When he finally pulls himself from the water, his arms are weak, his legs shake. Unable to think of anything else to do, unable to quite make sense of what has happened to him, he lies prone on the warm wood and waits for the sun to dry him.

  Her

  My hands are still trembling. It took great determination not to run from him: to remain for a few minutes, instead, and talk as civilly as I could manage. I knew that we might be seen from the house. For that reason, I had to act as normally as I could.

  I cannot believe it is him. I worked hard afterwards, to put that night in Rome from my mind. Forgetting is something I am adept at. I had almost been able to convince myself that it hadn’t really happened. Not because the memory of it was abhorrent. The opposite, in fact. This was what made it dangerous.

  When I get back to the room, to my relief, Frank is in the dressing room, the door closed. He calls to me, through the door.

  ‘Did you have a good swim?’

  I stop. Is there something in his tone? Does he know? Could he somehow know about Rome, and have orchestrated this?… I am being absurd. If he had known, I would have found out long before now.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘yes. A little cold, but refreshing.’

  ‘Good.’

  I hadn’t swum far. Enough to feel my muscles ache. Off at an angle, to avoid the current the Contessa had warned of: an undertow along this stretch of coast that has been known to sweep swimmers out to sea. The English poet, Shelley, drowned only a little way along the coast from here: it is not so benign as it appears.