The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  ‘I’m not sure you’ve asked me any.’

  ‘No, perhaps that’s right. I am ferociously self-interested.’ Hal wonders if this is absolutely true. He witnessed the care with which Aubrey had supported the Contessa as they began the descent.

  There is a long pause, and Hal realizes Aubrey has closed his eyes. At first, it almost looks as though he has fallen asleep. But then, in a tone that has lost all of its archness, he says: ‘I told you, earlier, that my sister was a great beauty.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t mean,’ he opens his eyes and looks up at Hal with surprising fierceness, as though challenged, ‘I don’t mean in the usual sense, you understand – not in the way in which prettiness is sometimes described as beauty. She was beautiful in a way that shocked people, that caused strangers in the street to turn and stare.’

  Hal nods, because some response is apparently expected of him.

  ‘She was like that from childhood. Though many children are lovely to look at, even those who turn out to be terribly plain adults, so it only became properly noticeable when she was a young woman.’

  Hal studies Aubrey, and thinks that he could only ever have been an odd-looking child, just as he is an odd-looking adult. But there is perhaps something to that sad brown gaze that, in another manifestation, could become something like beautiful.

  As if he has guessed at Hal’s thought, Aubrey says, ‘Don’t imagine that we resembled each other, of course. Nobody knows where my looks came from. My mother used to despair over me.

  ‘My mother was obsessed with my sister’s looks. She had once been called a beauty herself, but she was first to admit that she hadn’t been anywhere in the register of Ophelia’s looks. I think that was probably where the trouble started. Ophelia wasn’t allowed in the sun, or at least not until any exposed area of skin had been covered. She couldn’t ride, or play tennis, in case she had an accident and bruised or – worse still – scarred herself. So she was extremely sheltered. We didn’t have pots of money, but what we did have was spent on Ophelia.’ He says it, thinks Hal, without rancour. ‘Then my sister had her coming out as a debutante. It’s an idea as old as time, of course, but my mother was convinced that she would be the one to restore the family’s coffers. It might have worked. My parents went to a great deal of expense over it: because it was an investment, in some respects. And one young man in particular was quite taken with her. But it all went rather wrong.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The thing about Feely,’ Aubrey said, ‘was that she was too nice to people. She was too sheltered. It was the third visit of this particular young man to our house, and he’d been asking about the history of the place: very interested. She’d been telling him about the escape route, for priests, that led from our house to the nearby chapel. She was sheltered, but perhaps she had some romantic idea of their having a chance to be alone together – without my mother watching their every move. Anyway, she offered to show him the priest hole. And—’ Aubrey closes his eyes. ‘He attacked her.’

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘It turned out he’d had some trauma, in the First War. Had been in the tunnels – had some horrible experience of small spaces. He must have got confused, suddenly, frightened. He picked …’ Aubrey clears his throat. ‘Excuse me. I haven’t spoken about this in a while. It was ever such a long time ago, but—’

  ‘That doesn’t mean anything,’ Hal says.

  ‘Thank you.’ Aubrey nods. ‘He found a bit of brick, somewhere, and hit her with it. I got there too late. I mean – too late to stop him from hurting her. I mean, it was lucky, really – he could have killed her …’ He trails off. ‘It’s why I’m a pacifist. That war could do that to a young man who in all other respects might have been a kind and perfectly normal chap …

  ‘The problem with Feely is that she had been taught that her looks were everything, the only currency she had. And there was some dreadful scarring.’ He reaches for his drink, drains it completely. ‘She’s not in desperately good health, now. Physically, she’s fine, except a little frail. The funny thing …’ He stops, and shakes his head. ‘The funny thing is, she is one of the cleverest people I know – and the most talented. She’s a tremendous painter. I sometimes think that if only she’d been born ugly, or even just a little less beautiful, she might have had a chance to be happy.’

  He looks across at Hal, and gives a funny smile. ‘There. Now tell me if that isn’t at once the most absurd and tragic tale you’ve heard for a while.’

  ‘It is tragic, certainly.’

  ‘So now,’ Boyd goes on, almost as though Hal hasn’t spoken, ‘all the women I choose to photograph – the ones I pick myself – seem to have some essence of her. The same look, you know – dark, exquisite bones, rather haunted-looking. I suppose I have this idea …’ he pauses, ‘this idea that through my photographs she is living the life she could have had. Does that make any sort of sense?’

  Hal looks down at the book. On the current page, the model sits by a swimming pool reading a novel, a cigarette dangling from her hand. She looks like a woman with a story to tell, someone who lives a large life. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I think it does.’

  18

  Her

  I lie awake. My thoughts move back and forth: between the humiliation of the afternoon, and the walk before it. Both a strange relief and a new burden, telling Hal about Spain. Relief, because I haven’t spoken of it in so long. But in doing so I have created a new tie between us, a bridge of knowing, when I had sought to do the opposite.

  I hear my husband come into the cabin. I am turned away from him. I will pretend to be asleep.

  ‘Stella,’ he says, softly. ‘Kitten?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘You understand, don’t you? I was worried for you – you were so far out. I was concerned that you would put yourself in danger without realizing it.’

  I can’t make myself breathe normally, as I would if I were asleep. The air seems to catch inside me and burn in my chest.

  ‘Goodnight, Stella.’ He places his hand on my hip and I flinch involuntarily. It is not the reaction of a sleeping person. But it is a tiny movement. He doesn’t mention it – perhaps he doesn’t notice, after all.

  I don’t know exactly what happened. I started out with no real sense of purpose. Then, at the point at which I might usually have turned around, I found I wanted to continue. I felt that I could have continued forever, in fact, outswimming all that has been resurfacing around me. When I told him, I saw it again, all that could not be unseen – and how it had altered me. It was more than just a loss, you see. It was a realignment; a sea change.

  February 1937

  I am lying on my back on the tarmac of the road. Above me the sky rushes, but I seem to be fixed in place. It is too silent. I wait for the one sound that is important: the sound of Tino’s voice.

  There are things scattered about me: things that I recognize, out of place here in their domesticity. The brightly coloured pages of a children’s book, a wicker basket: Tino’s things, relatively unscathed.

  But where the cabin of the truck used to be is a catastrophe of blackened metal, twisted by incredible force, shattered glass. Somehow, I have landed clear of it.

  I understand, as I look about me, that Tino has not. He is in there, still.

  I try to stand, but my body won’t obey me. I begin to crawl, instead, through the littered glass, keeping my eyes upon the horror in front of me, waiting for any sign of movement. I have never felt fear like this.

  There is something beneath that ruin of metal: a colour that I recognize. Something that insists itself, but that I cannot allow myself to believe. Even as I refuse to do so, and even before I reach him and try to free him, to take him in my arms, I know.

  Since I first held him I have done everything in my power to keep him safe. It has not been enough.

  Light, pressing pale red through my eyelids. There is pain in my hand, a hot concentration of it, and I hold to
it, to distract me from that other pain.

  I am in Madrid. I have lost two fingers from my right hand and have a slight concussion. Some of the sounds come to me as though through water. Otherwise, I am unharmed. I was miraculously lucky. The convoy was targeted by a fleet of Heinkel bombers. The driver of the final truck, uninjured himself, had found me beside the wreckage.

  ‘There wasn’t …’ I sit up. ‘He didn’t see …’ I don’t know why I am asking. I know. I saw. But it is almost still possible to believe in it as a terrible waking dream. Until the nurse stops me and says, ‘There was no one else, querida.’

  They need to discharge me: there are others with injuries far worse. They wear their strain heavy about them, these men and women. These are people stretched to their limit. I wonder what they have seen – and then try not to think. Do I have anywhere to go? They ask it, but without the requirement of an answer. Either way, my bed is required – I must be on my way.

  ‘Your cat,’ the nurse comes to me, holding what appears to be a brown bundle. When she sees my face she says, ‘It isn’t yours? We thought …’

  I look into the hoary old face of Señor Bombón and feel a sudden, brief loathing for the animal, who has somehow managed to live when my little brother has died.

  ‘No,’ I hold out my left hand, the one without the dressing. ‘He’s mine.’

  I am not myself. Madrid, too, is at once the same and strangely altered – like somewhere in a nightmare. I have known it as a place visited for Christmas, holidays, special occasions. Sometimes, when Papa did not want to be disturbed from his work, Tino and I would come here to stay with my aunt and uncle. They would take us for trips into the city, and I understood then what it might be like to have a parent who had a little more time to give.

  There are landmarks I remember from those trips: the House of the Seven Chimneys, the parlour my aunt once took us to for an ice cream, now boarded closed, the Metrópolis building on the Calle de Alcalá, with its winged seraph, the pet shop on Calle de Cervantes where Uncle Salvador once helped Tino pick a toy for Señor Bombón: also shut. Actually, the sign has been painted over with an Anarchist slogan: I don’t think it has sold budgerigars in a long time. But in between these are scenes of frozen violence: metal ripped and twisted, stone pockmarked with holes, façades that have been torn asunder, leaving interiors gaping like toothless mouths. As I pass an apartment block I can see straight through to the rooms inside. I understand this new Madrid, as I look upon it. I am like this city. At a first glance, perhaps, relatively intact. But I too have been shattered, warped. I will never be the same.

  When I turn into the street, with its row of acacia trees, the elegant houses in shades of pistachio and umber, it is as though nothing has changed. I remember this from childhood, I remember coming here on a searingly hot day. But some twenty yards away is a new impossibility. The houses on both sides are torn down to their foundations. This new horror. This new unimaginable thing. Where their house once stood is a blank; a sad mess of mortar and brick. It is all too familiar. As I move closer I see furniture broken into matchsticks, I see dust-covered rags that once might have been curtains. A rug like a red wound, a piano sagging drunkenly in the middle, keys scattered on the floorboards. Closer still: broken china, glass. Closer still: a small object … a woman’s leather glove. And then I stop. I won’t continue, not this time. There is no need to get any nearer. No one could have survived this.

  I sit on the stoop of one of the houses opposite, and shut my eyes. I am so tired, and very cold: Señor Bombón is the one warm spot, curled on my lap.

  When I next open them the light has changed. I must have fallen asleep: the stone is hard against my back. My feet are so cold I can no longer feel them. In the rubble that was the house there is sudden movement. It is an impossible sight in the midst of the destruction, like a resurrection. I watch as a woman emerges from the mess, her arms full: cans of food. She is young, but holds herself crouched over like an old woman, braced against the sky. Yet she moves like a cat, careful, light-footed. She doesn’t see me until she is very near and then she stops dead. ‘Why are you loitering there? Are you trying to get yourself killed?’

  I don’t answer, but I do wonder if it is, in fact, what I am trying for.

  ‘It isn’t stealing,’ she says, clasping her bounty of cans to her chest. ‘They won’t need these where they’re gone.’

  Still I don’t answer.

  ‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Do I have to carry you? I will leave you here.’

  I sit up. And I realize, as I do, that my lap is no longer warm. Señor Bombón is gone. I find my voice. ‘Have you seen a cat?’

  She looks at me as though I am mad. ‘No, no cat.’

  He was a hateful creature, really. He bit and scratched Papa and me. The only one he liked was Tino. And yet I discover that I am weeping.

  ‘Ah,’ she says, raising her eyebrows ‘¡Qué lío!’ What a mess.

  An underground station. A dark press of bodies: the occasional flicker of a lighter, bursts of laughter, talk, the wail of a baby. People are living here. They have come prepared, with blankets, with miniature stoves, with books and toys.

  The woman – Maria is her name – persuades a group – a family, I think – to make space for two more. She has a blanket, which she unrolls carefully. She does not offer to share it: it is obvious that it would not be large enough for both of us. I have my father’s jacket, anyway. It begins quickly, inevitably: the drone of engines somewhere far above, then the terrible sounds that follow: that high scream. And then the impact, so near that at times the platform vibrates beneath my head, as if for an incoming train.

  ‘That house,’ Maria says. ‘Was it yours?’

  ‘It belonged to my aunt and uncle.’

  She doesn’t ask me if they lived. Perhaps that part is obvious. She doesn’t apologize, either, for looting the remains. ‘You do what you have to do,’ she says, ‘sabes? To stay alive. You do … things you would never have dreamed of doing, in normal life.’

  In the morning, Maria is gone. She has disappeared into the city. Perhaps she doesn’t stay in one place for too long; perhaps she has been killed. She might have saved my life, yesterday. I’m not sure whether to be grateful.

  There is something shameful in it, this need to survive. It is beyond thought. Papa, Tino are gone – I have nothing left. Yet this will to live is as strong as an undertow, it sweeps me with it. When I hear the sirens I cower and run like any other. In the days, I venture into the city to find the things I need – food, mainly. I have no money. I would work, if I could, but there is nothing; the usual patterns of life disrupted. Shops open for only a couple of hours – if at all. The whole city has shut down by 8p.m.

  I become shameless. I stand in line and then, when it comes to my turn, I put out my hands and beg. Often the grocer or one of the men or women in the queue will take pity on me, and I will walk away with something: a heel of bread, say, or chickpeas, which I will tip into my mouth straight from the tin. I have no qualms now about clambering into broken houses to relieve them of their contents. Usually, though, others have got there first. The thing is to get there first, the morning after the destruction.

  There are things that I see.

  I will try not to think of them.

  I pretend that my eyes are the lens of a camera. That behind them is nothing but the mechanism of a machine, blinking, viewing, but not processing.

  At night I return to the metro station like a rat to its hole. The dim platform is a microcosm of life above ground. There is fear, but here is something I’ve learned: fear is an exhausting thing, and life goes on around it. There are men playing cards, a woman darning something, a boy about my own age colouring in a book.

  It is the families I find difficult. They huddle in tight groups. They press together to keep warm. I can remember the compact heat of Tino’s body beside mine as I read to him, his thin arm threaded through mine. How he clung to me, particularly in those fina
l months. Assuming comfort, protection, in which I failed him, in the end.

  I can still summon him to me, but never whole – only in the details. The sight of him amidst the green at the end of the garden, the sudden pale oval of his face turning back to look. The intensity of him, bent over one of his strange, beautiful diagrams. And the colour of his hair, darkened slightly from its old, infant blond. He was in a state of transformation, his lines growing sharper in the last year, losing the last softnesses of early childhood. I had seen this at the time as something to mourn; as the end of something. Now I would give anything to see those changes continue. I cannot believe that he will not continue to transform. The boy he could have become, the adult. These possibilities have been extinguished, forever. Most of all, I cannot believe I will never see him again.

  So I watch them jealously, the families. These are people who have been bombed out of their homes, who think, perhaps, that they have lost everything. I wonder if they will come to realize that what they have here is everything that matters.

  Outside, it is as though two Madrids – the wartime and the peacetime city – are layered over one another. Certain streets have been left almost unblemished. Certain people, too. I glimpse a woman hanging out her washing on a roof terrace, as bombs fall less than half a mile away. I see children playing in the street metres from the spot where a team of soldiers are using picks to dig an unexploded shell from the tarmac. I watch an elderly couple share a pigskin of wine, sitting on the blanket they have spread on the pavement.

  But for some the fear has swallowed everything. One night in the metro there is a woman who has been driven mad by the bombing. She shrieks in the darkness, wails, grinds her teeth. People try to persuade her to be quiet – perhaps out of the superstitious idea that she will somehow draw the bombers’ attention upon us. And partly, I think, because the sounds she makes are like an articulation of their own terror. I wonder if they are thinking the same thing as me: that it would be so easy to become like her. To loose the few remaining threads keeping sanity and dignity in check.