by Lucy Foley
I come groggily awake. Then I hear the thing that has woken me. I know this sound: I have heard them pass over, high above. I don’t understand the other sound, though. A high-pitched scream. Not human: the shriek of a machine.
As an idea surfaces – the possibility of what it might be – I am being hurled through space, and all behind me is white heat.
I am lying on my back. A hot bubble of silence surrounds me. I feel detached from myself, thrown loose. For a moment I wonder if this is dying. No, I realize, it is merely that I have come within touching distance of that veil that separates life from death.
‘Oh,’ Stella says, stopping on the track.
‘What?’
‘I think we’re nearly there.’
There, in front of them, San Fruttuoso has appeared through a brief gap in the trees. There is the pale expanse of beach far below, the façade of the abbey gleaming like bone. The yacht is visible too, moored a hundred feet or so from the shore. The change that comes over her now is marked. The words are stopped up, the sadness and the energy … all seem to dissipate. She is combing her hair with her fingers and smoothing it behind her ears, drying the film of sweat from her brow. Before his eyes she is diminishing to a negative of the woman she was a moment before. His opportunity to comfort, to empathize, has passed.
As they pick their way down through the trees she stumbles, once, and he catches her arm to stop her fall. She thanks him, shortly, but these are the only words that pass between them.
When they are nearly at the beach, he tries. ‘Stella,’ he says, and then stops. He wants to show her how it has affected him, what she has told him of her past. He wants her to continue. But the words he finds are inadequate.
Gesture might be better. He could reach out, to touch her shoulder. But it would be imprudent. Since the night when they danced together he has avoided touching her at all costs. Especially now, since the dream of the night before. He lets his hand fall to his side, and feels his failure.
17
They discover the party in a restaurant beside one of the encircling arms of rock, perched above the water. The beach is surprisingly crowded: Italians lie or sit chatting and smoking on beds spread out across the sand, the women in brightly coloured swimming costumes and caps. A couple of children run shrieking in and out of the shallows, splashing one another. Behind all, rising solemn and pale, a memento mori, is the ancient façade of the abbey. He wonders what it has seen in all the centuries it has stood here.
Stella sits next to her husband once more. The transformation is complete: she wears a sunhat, a silk scarf. Her face is obscured by the brim of the hat. She might as well have put on a mask, Hal thinks.
At the head of their table, the Contessa is cooling her injured ankle in a wine bucket of iced water. But when she goes to stand, Hal sees to his surprise that there is no apparent pain as the foot takes her weight.
‘Strange,’ Gaspari says, ‘to see it again like this – without the film crews here. You know, we got here, and discovered the whole place covered with seaweed – there had been a storm. It took four hours, perhaps more, to clear it all. And when the sun came out it stank.’
‘Lucky that you can’t transmit an odour through the screen – yet.’
Gaspari smiles. ‘Sometimes I worry we do too much of this in film: show the sanitized version of a place, a person. Whether we should be showing things as they really are, in all their ugliness and complexity.’
Hal looks surreptitiously at Earl Morgan and thinks of how he looks in the film. Compares that now to the ruin before him. The truth would make a depressing spectacle indeed.
‘To a lot of people,’ he says, ‘I think that’s what film is about – escaping the ugliness for a couple of hours.’
‘For you?’
Hal sees Stella’s head turn slightly. He shrugs, eager to deflect attention from himself. ‘I think, in art, it is as noble a thing to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult.’
After lunch, there is a move to the sand. Hal and Aubrey Boyd sit against the sun-warmed bank of rocks that flanks the shingled beach on one side. The shadow from the rocks bisects the ground between them: Hal on the sunny side, Aubrey on the other, in what might be the only patch of shade on the whole beach. He has somehow got very sunburned: his skin is a terrible, raw pink and there are painful-looking blisters along his hairline.
‘I’m not built for this climate,’ he tells Hal, forlornly. ‘Mine is a Nordic complexion, suited only for temperate weather, not this barbaric heat. I have delicate skin.’
Hal has fared better than Aubrey: his skin has merely begun to tan. Only the crevices between his fingers bear evidence of his former, paler self.
Ahead of them, Giulietta Castiglione frolics in the surf in a bikini that displays her formidable curves to their best possible effect, laughing for the few photographers that have, of course, materialized among the crowd. Hal is beginning to recognize familiar faces among them: a couple have appeared at every stop. They click away delightedly as Giulietta splashes the water, tosses her hair, and is that carefree child–woman once more – quite different to the shrewd, often morose person that Hal has glimpsed in private moments.
‘She’s a little bitch,’ Aubrey says, ‘as far as I can tell. But she photographs extremely well. And one has to admit she’s divine to look at.’
‘She is.’ It is inarguable fact.
‘I’ve always loved beautiful things,’ Aubrey says. ‘Ever since I was a boy. There was very little beauty at the school I was sent away to. Grisly place, terrible interiors.’ The glib tone has a brittleness to it. It can’t have been easy, Hal thinks, for someone like Aubrey at a boys’ boarding school.
‘If it was anything like mine, I can imagine.’
‘Of course, it makes one appreciate one’s home all the more.’
‘Where did you grow up?’
‘Kent. Not much more than a cottage,’ Aubrey says, ‘but a big garden, which was the walled kind, you know – with climbing roses, and beds of lavender, and apple trees. In the summer, I wanted to spend my every waking moment there. And there was Feely …’
‘Feely?’
‘My older sister. Ophelia. When she came out into the garden she was the most beautiful thing in it. She’d let me dress her up in shawls and paste jewels – as an empress, or a fairy queen, and paint her in watercolours.’
Hal looks at Aubrey, and realizes that a change has occurred. In his voice, his gestures, there is a new softness, where before there was all haughtiness, arch sarcasm.
‘Cigarette?’ Aubrey asks.
‘If you’re having one.’
Aubrey passes him one, and lights it. When Hal inhales he coughs at the peculiar taste.
‘Sorry,’ Aubrey says. ‘Should have warned you. They’re Turkish: perfumed. I won’t be offended if you hate it.’
Hal sniffs it, dubiously. ‘Perhaps they take some getting used to.’
Aubrey takes a long drag on his, and gives a little sigh of pleasure. ‘I discovered these on a job in Istanbul. Never looked back – the normal stuff tastes ever so boring now.’ He waves away the cloud of smoke between them. ‘Where was I?’
‘Your sister – the garden.’
But now Aubrey is distracted, looking towards the water. ‘Oh look. Mrs Truss is going for a swim.’
They watch as Stella wades through the shallows, with only a momentary hesitation at the shock of the cold, and then begins a steady crawl directly away from the beach. His thoughts return inevitably to the walk. How different she had briefly been, before the inevitable retreat into herself. He wonders how he could have thought her two-dimensional. And remembering her on the path, quick and nimble, watching her now, swimming steadily, he wonders how he could have thought her weak.
He looks up and finds Aubrey watching him, curiously, realizes that he is vaguely aware of him having said something.
‘What?’
; ‘I said you’re rather pensive. Penny for them?’
‘Oh,’ he says quickly, ‘I’m a little tired, from the hike.’
‘Goodness, I can imagine.’ Aubrey takes a drag of his cigarette. ‘She doesn’t appear to be tired, though. One might almost think she were attempting to swim to Corsica.’
Hal follows his gaze. Stella is a long way out now, and still swimming hard. He can see the occasional flash of her limbs, her golden head.
‘Perhaps she is.’
‘Can it be safe out there?’ Aubrey says. ‘It looks rather choppy. Oh look – he’s wondering the same thing.’
Truss is standing at the edge of the beach now, almost in the shallows, one palm shading his eyes. He makes what appears to be a beckoning motion with one hand – but Stella would be too far away to see it, even if she were not facing in the opposite direction. He might do better to try shouting, but Hal is certain that he will not. He knows enough of the man now to understand that Truss would consider this a sign of weakness: a lapse of control.
Hal watches as he walks across to the beach lifeguards, and says something. He turns to Aubrey, who is watching too. ‘Did you hear that?’
Aubrey is frowning, confused. ‘It’s odd, but I thought that I heard him say … no, but then why would he?’
‘What is it?’
‘Well … I thought I heard him tell the man that Mrs Truss was in trouble … that he thought she might be struggling to stay afloat.’
‘She looks all right to me,’ Hal says.
They watch as Stella’s arm rises, just as surely as before, to propel her through the water.
‘Well,’ Aubrey says, ‘perhaps he can see something that we cannot.’ Hal remembers the riptide that had so surprised him in the Gulf of the Poets. It is possible – but then Stella isn’t making any sort of attempt to swim back to shore: rather the opposite.
The lifeguards, finally, seem convinced, and have snapped into action. They are pushing a small motorboat down the shingle, into the shallows. Truss follows them and, at the last minute, steps into the boat too. The craft takes off across the water with an oily gurgle, listing wildly before levelling.
Hal stands, to get a closer look. They are almost upon Stella now – her distance from the shore is only significant in swimming terms. They are slowing, drawing nearer. Truss is leaning over, gesturing to her, and some sort of discussion appears to be taking place. Then one of the men – and Truss – lean over the side and hoist Stella into the boat. There appears to be a brief struggle. She falls into the craft with an audible thump.
Aubrey winces. ‘Gracious.’
The boat makes a swift U-turn, and returns to the beach, one of the men leaping out to guide it towards the shore. Truss steps down with a single, elegant stride. Then he turns and lifts Stella out of the boat, as though she were a child. She has a towel wrapped around her, and her face is expressionless. She does not appear grateful, or relieved. And Hal is certain that what they have just witnessed was not a show of husbandly concern so much as a demonstration of power.
They moor for the evening in the bay. Stella has not left her cabin – and does not appear for supper.
‘My wife would like me to pass on her apologies,’ Truss tells the assembled party. ‘She is not well, this evening.’
‘I suppose it must be the shock,’ Aubrey says. ‘Of getting in trouble like that, on her swim.’
Truss turns to Aubrey, and smiles. ‘Indeed,’ he says, languidly. ‘I believe you could be right. And there was the exertion of the walk, too. My wife is a delicate creature.’
Hal thinks of her stepping nimbly in front of him along the path, of the strength and speed with which she had cut through the water, and thinks it is almost as though they are talking of different women.
Later, Hal remains on deck with Aubrey, watching as the last of the light dissolves into the water.
‘What do you think happened?’ Hal asks.
‘What?’
‘About—’ He finds that he is about to say Stella, and stops himself. ‘About Mrs Truss.’
‘Well,’ Aubrey says. ‘It looked as though she had got a little further out than was perhaps safe. And Mr Truss, I presume, was concerned for her safety—’
Hal interrupts, losing his struggle with himself. ‘Did it honestly look like that to you?’
Aubrey looks flustered. ‘Well, I don’t know …’
‘I thought,’ says Hal, in an undertone, ‘that she looked like she was fine, and that he decided, for whatever reason of his own, that he wanted her back on the beach.’
‘I say,’ Aubrey says, ‘I don’t—’ And he stops abruptly, looking beyond Hal, his face frozen.
‘Hello, chaps,’ Truss says. ‘Can I get either of you a drink?’ He indicates the bar. His smile is broad.
They accept, dumbly, and watch as he makes them – shooing away the offer of one of the staff to help. They sit in uneasy silence until he carries the drinks over, placing each down with a deft flourish.
‘Would you like to join us?’ Aubrey asks, in a strangled voice.
‘Ah.’ Truss shakes his head. ‘Thank you, but no. I shall go back and see to my wife.’ He smiles at each of them in turn, meeting Hal’s gaze last. ‘Good evening.’
‘Oh,’ says Aubrey, sitting back in his chair. His hand, as he lifts the drink to his lips, is trembling so violently that a little of it spills on to his sleeve. ‘My nerves … I can’t bear it.’
‘Sorry,’ Hal says. Did Truss hear him? Impossible to say. He must have approached them as silently as a cat. He sees now how pale Aubrey has gone, and thinks quickly of a way to placate him. ‘Tell me about your work. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t seen it before.’
‘Oh.’ Aubrey makes a dismissive motion with his hand, but seems rather pleased. He sits up a little in his chair, appears to recover some of his poise. He reaches for his drink again and gives it a stir with the silver stick, his tremor noticeably better.
‘Do you have anything with you?’
‘Well,’ Aubrey says, hesitantly pleased, ‘as a matter of fact I do.’
‘Will you show me?’
Aubrey disappears, and returns to the desk with a large, leather-bound portfolio. Hal takes it from him. He had been prepared to be underwhelmed. Photography of Aubrey’s speciality – personages and fashion models – has never interested him. And yet, sifting through the pages, he finds images of great beauty. More than this, he discovers images that disturb and move him. There is a dark-haired woman standing on a station platform, her arm raised toward the train in greeting or, possibly, farewell. No doubt her pose and the setting are intended to display the silver fur coat to its best advantage, but nevertheless it speaks to Hal. The next image shows another brunette woman, her face framed by the shoulder of the man with whom she is dancing. Her eyes are cast down. The image makes a convenient frame for the jewels at her ears, the rings that glitter on the hand that grips her partner’s back – but Hal sees in it something more than that. It is a melancholy image. To him she appears trapped. Impossible to tell whether that is the intention, or his own projection. All the women have a particular look: pale skin, dark hair, fine bones. They are not the same model – though at a glance they could be mistaken as such.
‘Aubrey,’ he says, and looks up to find the photographer watching him intently.
‘Yes?’
‘These are wonderful. They’re … they’re really something.’ It feels inadequate, but it seems to be enough. There is something rather touching about Aubrey’s expression of delight. He is a celebrated artist, and must be used to receiving his fair share of compliments. And yet Hal’s clumsy praise has evidently found its mark.
‘And,’ Hal says, ‘I wanted you to ask you something. The subjects … they all share similar features. I thought they were the same woman, at first. I suppose I was wondering if there was some reason for it.’
‘My sister,’ Aubrey says.
‘Ophelia?’
Aubrey n
ods. ‘They all look like her. I don’t always manage to pick my model, of course – and sometimes a brunette is not right for the image. Take Mrs Truss, her blondness so perfect next to your darkness in that image with the yacht. But I only keep the images like this in my portfolio.’
‘Your sister must be a beautiful woman.’
‘She was, yes.’
‘Oh,’ Hal says, wrong-footed. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘She’s alive,’ Aubrey says. He sighs. ‘It’s a rather strange, sad story, I’m afraid.’ He grimaces.
‘And you don’t have to tell it to me, if you don’t wish to.’
‘No. Perhaps I had better not.’ He sips his drink. ‘To the very journalist writing an article about us all.’
‘It’s not that sort of article – as I’m sure you know.’ He recalls the Tempo editor’s words. ‘It’s about what Giulietta has for breakfast – what Earl Morgan has for a nightcap. Though’ – lowering his voice – ‘that will involve some artistic licence. More importantly, I’m not that sort of journalist.’
‘But what is “that sort” exactly? Would any journalist admit to being it – even the lowest hack? People are ever so good at deceiving themselves into believing that they are somehow superior, set apart. I’m as guilty of it as anyone – it’s probably why I make such a fuss about those parasites following us about with their flashbulbs.’
‘Well,’ Hal says, ‘perhaps. But I can assure you, I have too many secrets of my own to risk revealing anyone else’s.’
‘That,’ Aubrey says, raising one long finger, ‘is logic I do understand.’ He peers at Hal. ‘What is it about you? You’re good at asking questions, but you aren’t so good at answering them yourself.’
