The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  They take their seats for supper, and Hal finds himself placed between Stella and Giulietta Castiglione.

  He tries, first, to engage Giulietta in conversation, but she resists every attempt to be drawn out. Finally, when she begins to study her reflection in the back of the spoon, he gives up, and turns to his left.

  ‘How are you?’ he asks Stella, with faultless formality.

  ‘Well, thank you.’ She gives him a quick, polite smile.

  ‘Good.’

  Then she says, in a barely audible murmur, ‘I’m sorry.’

  He thinks he understands all that she means to encompass by it. But it is not enough, somehow. He wants to make her uncomfortable, he realizes, make her see that this is equally awkward for him. He wants to provoke her. ‘I’m simply confused,’ he murmurs, ‘because it was you—’

  ‘Mr Jacobs.’ She looks up at him, and he sees something in her expression that unnerves him: fear. ‘Please,’ she says. And then, through her teeth, ‘People are looking.’

  He glances up and finds the Contessa’s gaze on them, her expression unreadable. Truss though, is turned away, speaking to the singer. His hand rests on the back of the chair, the picture of ease. But this doesn’t mean anything. Hal has already decided that he is the sort of man who notices everything.

  He looks for something innocuous to say. If Stella chose, he realizes, she could merely turn her head and start a conversation with Signor Gaspari on her other side, cutting him off. And though he decided only a few hours ago that he would avoid all but the most necessary interaction with her he finds that he wants to keep her attention. ‘It’s a fascinating place,’ he says, gesturing around them. ‘Don’t you think?’

  He expects her to simply agree but he can see her considering the question, turning it over. Then she says, ‘I’m not sure that it is, actually. It feels full of … of death.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, curious, ‘there’s a great weight of history here. But surely that is part of its charm.’

  She appears not to have heard him. ‘These stones – they’re like a skeleton that has been left out in the open, that has suffered the indignity of not being given the burial it deserves.’ There is something like real pain in her voice. He stares at her. Now she is the one not playing by the rules.

  ‘Stella,’ he says, and then quickly corrects himself. ‘Mrs Truss, this castle was built centuries ago. The people who once lived here have been dead – and buried – for hundreds of years. These are nothing more than stones.’

  But she does not seem to be listening. ‘How long do you think it takes,’ she asks him, ‘before the dead are forgotten entirely?’ She sounds intent now, almost angry. He wonders briefly if she has had too much to drink – but her wine glass appears untouched.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he says, cautiously. ‘But probably as long as there is someone living to remember them.’

  He looks at her, hoping that it is enough.

  It isn’t. ‘But don’t you think there are some things that should never be forgotten? Even as time softens the marks?’

  I don’t know what you want from me, he thinks.

  ‘What can you two be talking about?’ Hal looks up to find Truss regarding them across the table. At his words the other guests turn to look, too. He smiles at Hal. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Jacobs – is my wife giving you a hard time already?’ Now he looks at Stella, who has not raised her head. ‘She gets carried away, sometimes – don’t you, Kitten?’

  Silence.

  ‘Well, Kitten?’

  She nods. Truss gives a little mock toast with his glass and turns back to Gloria. Stella takes a long sip of her wine. Then she turns to Hal. ‘Forgive me,’ she says – shortly, bitterly, as though it was he who chastised her in front of all present. Before he can think of something to say to her, she has turned away.

  The evening seems to have fractured, after this. The guests sit in silence, the plates have been cleared away, the wine bottles emptied. The wind has picked up, and Aubrey Boyd shivers miserably in his thin blazer. A faint-hearted soul might call an end to the dinner now. But the Contessa is not that.

  She speaks fearlessly into the silence. ‘Some of you,’ with a nod to Gaspari, ‘already know this, but I thought it might be interesting for those who don’t. The film is based on a strange legend in my family. My ancestor was the sea captain played so superbly by our leading man here,’ she turns to Earl Morgan, but his eyes are glassy with drink, and he seems barely to register her comment. Undeterred, she takes something from the pocket of her jacket. Hal tries to get a closer look at it. A little pot, made from ivory – with some sort of design carved into it.

  ‘This,’ she holds it up, ‘belonged to him.’

  She passes it to Earl Morgan, who studies the pattern for a few seconds disinterestedly, and then hands it on. Now Stella has been passed the pot by Gaspari. Hal watches her examining it, with quiet focus. She turns it over and around in her hands. And then, with an audible pop, she prises the thing open.

  ‘Ah,’ the Contessa says, pleased, ‘you have discovered its secret. I was wondering when someone was going to do that.’

  The others crane to see. Stella holds it up, so that the inside is visible. A dial of some sort, with spokes of alternating red and green, encircled by a gold band.

  ‘A compass,’ Aubrey says, peering over her shoulder.

  ‘Broken,’ she says. ‘The arrow …’ she watches it for a few seconds, tilting it back and forth, ‘it keeps going round and round.’

  ‘Yes,’ the Contessa says. ‘A shame. But perhaps only to be expected, considering its great age.’

  Finally, it has come to Hal, and he has a chance to study it himself. There had been a large bronze compass mounted on the captain’s bridge of the battlecruiser, which he had got to see only after they had been decommissioned. Funny, how little the design has changed. It has a peculiar weight in his hand, and a surprising warmth that he assumes must come from the touch of the others before him. North, he presumes, is the point marked by a fleur-de-lys.

  He turns it toward the Contessa, and points to the flower. ‘Why this?’

  ‘The three petals,’ she says, ‘represent religious faith, wisdom, and chivalry. The essential tenets of any nobleman, that kept him on his proper course.’

  Hal watches as the needle tracks a stuttering circle, driven by some unknown force. He is at once unnerved by it, and oddly compelled.

  The silence now has a different quality. Hal realizes now that a kind of magic has been performed. The Contessa has drawn them together in the telling of it, salvaging the supper by introducing this new, strange element. As conversation resumes around the table she turns to Hal, her smile one of triumph. Her gaze falls to the compass, which he is still turning, almost mindlessly, in his hands.

  ‘You may borrow it for a while if you wish,’ she says, ‘to study it further.’

  He feels he should demur: there is something about the needle that unnerves him. But he finds himself thanking her, slipping the thing into his pocket, where its weight pulls at the fabric. He will hand it back first thing in the morning, he decides.

  In his cot, back in his cabin, he is tired but cannot sleep. The gentle rolling movement of the yacht on its anchor should be restful, but it only echoes his own restlessness. Each time he shuts his eyes he can see it like a retinal imprint: the sweep of sea, the figure in the water. And it is too quiet. He is used to the sounds of night in the city, the sirens and voices and the muffled late-night arguments of his neighbours. The few sounds that did make it across the water from the shore – the blare of a car horn, the faint jangle of music – are silenced now by the lateness of the hour. The quiet here becomes, when one listens to it, perversely loud. His ears strain for any sound beyond the slap and whisper of the water – but there is none.

  He pulls back the curtain to the porthole. The sea is revealed to him bright as silver, reflecting the moon. The surface is puckered by submarine disturbances; the movements of fis
h and secret currents. Strange to think of that great weight of water, held back by so little. And beneath him all manner of creatures of whose existence he can only guess. Now his cabin is lit with moonlight too. The objects it finds glow rather than shine. The face of his watch, laid out next to the berth, his shoes, which he polished before the trip. The white pot, concealing within that strange broken device. Is the needle still tracking now? He reaches for it and finds that it is. Something about it unnerves him, though he could never say exactly why. He slides it into the drawer next to his cot.

  Still, sleep does not come. He hasn’t slept properly for years – not counting that night in Rome, with her beside him. The last place he remembers sleeping well was a hammock slung in a crowded mess deck, with the swell of the Atlantic beneath. Then, after the death of Morris, lying a few metres away from the place where his friend would have slept himself, it had become a hell. He noticed the other men glancing there, and then quickly away, as though the place were a bad omen.

  How many men were sent to their fate by Lionheart? Somewhere in the thousands. Too great a number to comprehend, though he, like all the men on board, had been an author of all those deaths. But only one death clings to him. Has threatened, at times, to destroy him. Because it was his fault. Only he knows this, of course. Perhaps that is what gives it such power. If others knew, the weight of the secret might be lifted a little. But it is too shameful to share.

  He will try and do something useful with this wakefulness, he thinks. He has brought the Underwood with him – he could type up the events of the first day. Except that his thoughts keep being drawn back toward things that won’t be of any interest to the readership, who will come to it hungry for the taste of celebrity. A man in a pale linen suit whose elegance seems to bely a kind of concentrated violence somewhere just beneath the surface. A woman who, for all her composure, and for all the winking gems at wrist and throat, seems a little lost. Seems profoundly sad.

  8

  Her

  I can’t sleep. My mind is too full. The evening was such a strange ordeal. Him in particular, sitting so near to me with his questions, and his judgement. Oh, I know that he judges me, beneath his nice, British manners. I see how he looks at me, now that he knows who I am. What I am. I find myself wishing that I had the chance to explain my actions to him – though I don’t know exactly what excuse I would give. And then I remind myself that he is nobody: that I don’t care what he makes of me. After this, I need never see or think of him again.

  And the film. I wish that I could have been prepared for what it made me feel. All I could think, as they sailed towards the new world at the end, was of her, of what she might have left behind in the way of family, of history. But perhaps there was nothing to leave.

  November 1936

  The radio has been on all night in my father’s study: I kept waking and hearing the murmur of it through the wall. And he has been in there all night, too – I can hear him now, moving restlessly about. Eventually, I go in, to see what it all means.

  He is very pale.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask, because it is clear to me that something is happening, that some change has occurred in him.

  He touches the back of his head, which he always does when he is agitated. There is a thinning patch there, which reminds me of a bear that passed from me to Tino, the fur rubbed away by our embraces.

  ‘Madrid. I have had news from Salvador. They’re attacking through the Casa del Campo.’

  It is a park, at the outskirts of the city. Aunt Aída took us there once when we were staying with them. I remember pine trees, undulating green, a stream near which we had almost stumbled over a courting couple. A place of peace. The idea of war – or death – occurring there is an impossible one.

  ‘If Madrid falls,’ Papa says, ‘everything will be lost. All the progress the government has made. These men, they want to plunge us back into the Dark Ages. They want to turn good men and women, people who have begun to hope for something more, back into starving peasants. Do you understand?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Estrella,’ he says. ‘I have to go and help.’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘no, Papa – we need you here.’

  ‘They’re using my words on the radio,’ he says, with an unmistakable note of pride. They are, I’ve heard them, too. “A time will come when ordinary Spanish men and women will have to fight to protect their freedom. Because the oppressor will fight to destroy it. At this time, there can be no distinction between the ordinary man and the soldier. We must all be soldiers.”

  ‘They’re using words that I meant when I wrote them, that I should stand by. And yet I sit here, doing nothing.’ He looks at me. He is waiting for me, I think, to give him my permission. But I can’t. This isn’t like his other trips, the ones made in peacetime.

  ‘What about us?’ I ask. ‘We could come with you, to Madrid. We could stay with Tío Salvador and Tía Aída.’

  ‘No.’ He shakes his head. ‘It wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘If it isn’t safe,’ I realize that I am close to tears, ‘if it isn’t safe, then you mustn’t go.’ My father is many things, but he is no soldier. At one time, as many children do of their fathers, I believed him invincible. But now, as I think of those soldiers they have spoken of on the radio – men trained from my own age in war, men out for blood – he appears diminished to me, vulnerable.

  ‘Please,’ I say. ‘We need you here, Papa. Tino needs you.’

  ‘You’re seventeen now, Estrella. I trust you to take care of him while I’m gone.’

  I am sixteen, in fact, but there seems little point in mentioning this: it won’t change anything in his mind.

  ‘I am doing this for you, Estrella. For you and Tino. Do you understand?’

  ‘I don’t want you to go.’ I hate the way I sound, like a child. But I feel like a child. I am afraid. I don’t want to be left alone.

  *

  I wake. I’m not lying down, as I should be. I’m crouched over. Beneath me not a mattress, but something hard and unyielding.

  It takes me several seconds to realize that I am not in my father’s study, nor bleeding in the dirt by the side of a road outside Madrid, but kneeling on the deck of the yacht in my nightdress. I remind myself. It is 1953. I am Stella Truss – not Estrella, the girl I left in Spain. I stand, my limbs stiff with cold, shivering in my thin nightgown. Thank goodness, no one else appears to be about.

  This is my own fault. I have pills I could take, to prevent the sleepwalking, but I stopped taking them because I began to feel they were making me stupid when I was awake.

  It has been happening more and more of late. The dreams have been more vivid, too. There are memories that will react to suppression by finding any and every fissure to flow through. If one is not careful, they have the power to drown.

  9

  Hal’s eyes are sore with lost sleep. If he has slept at all, it can only have been an hour or so. At some point in the early hours of the morning he was certain that he heard movement on the deck above him: a kind of shuffling tread. Roberto, probably. But there is something almost otherworldly about it. Perhaps it is simply the way in which, away from the land, everything takes on a slightly changed quality. He had forgotten this. It had been that way on Lionheart. He remembers lying like this at the beginning, listening to the foreign sounds of the ship. Small creaks amplified into almost human groans. Wind trapped and fractured and funnelled, producing strange distortions. When the cruiser was right up near the Norwegian coast, on patrol, a superstition went about that they were being haunted by the ghost of a Viking warlord. You could hear him at night, they said, howling about the quarterdeck. You could hear something, too, though probably due only to a shift in the wind. But one night the men on watch claimed that they had seen him, green as the aurora borealis. And Hal had written a short story about him. He was a captain, he wrote, mourning his sunken ship. Any craft that passed over his watery grave would carry him with them, for a whil
e. Morris had read it, and declared it quite brilliant.

  He met Morris in the first week, while looking for a place to sling his hammock. He had quickly learned that there was a hierarchy – not of the official kind, but of the sort he recalled from school: one imposed purely by the ratings themselves. All of the best spots were taken by the men who had served for the longest. Then the next longest and so forth. He had wandered the maze of compartments, finding suspended forms filling every space like huge chrysalises – and not a spare square metre anywhere. He would have to leave the main deck completely.

  ‘Anyone know of a spot elsewhere?’

  No answer: many of the men were already asleep, or disinclined to help, now that they were comfortably tucked up.

  ‘Over here, lad.’

  A figure was emerging from one of the far-most hammocks like a giant spider – one of the longest pairs of legs Hal had ever seen. Finally the man stood there, tall and lanky, a largish nose, amiable face.

  ‘You can have this spot for the first week – I’ll go sleep in the Capstan flat. No one wants to be on his tod for the first few days.’

  Hal had seen the space the man meant: cluttered with cable-winding machinery, as frigid as a refrigerator.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Don’t ask me again – I might change my mind. But I could do with a spell without Bennett’s snoring, anyway. And I don’t mind the cold.’

  He would think, later, of the horrible irony of Morris saying this. It would have been the cold that killed him first.

  He had thought Morris was little more than a big-hearted joker at first: a man who was always being ribbed by the other men for something – his nose, his constant talk about his new wife, Flora, or his seasickness (he suffered dreadfully, almost constantly). But then Hal learned, from another rating, that Morris wrote stories of his own, and asked to read one. It had made the hairs stand up on his arms. It had made him envious. He had always wanted to be able to write like that, with that concision, and had never managed it. Every time he tried it had come out like a spoof. But Morris’ style was absolutely his own. Here was this rare talent, hidden inside this clumsy vessel. He had books, too: a veritable lending library. Some of the men thought him a bit soft, at first, because of it. But when the long, uneventful days came and sunk them in boredom, they began to ask, somewhat sheepishly, what Morris might recommend.