The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  It is a small cut, but smeared with grime. Hal picks her up and tucks her under one arm, and together they wash the wound in the fountain, the dog looking up at them pitifully. Then Stella unfastens the scarf from around her neck to tie about it.

  Hal goes to stop her. ‘You don’t need to do that. We’ll find a napkin somewhere.’

  ‘No,’ Stella says. ‘I don’t like it much.’

  He looks at the scarf wrapped about the animal’s paw and sees the word printed in the corner: Hermès. He thinks of the diamond bracelet around her wrist the first time they met, the pale fur about her shoulders. How different their worlds are, he thinks. And how far she has come from that teenager she described, walking barefoot in the dirt with her chickens, foraging for herbs. But then he remembers her catlike agility on the path yesterday, her knowledge of all the wildflowers. Perhaps that girl is there, still, if one is to look for her. And perhaps in the very act of sacrificing a silk scarf for a dog’s dirty paw, she is making herself known.

  They leave the courtyard and begin trying to retrace their route, without much success. It is almost as though the city is determined to resist and frustrate their attempts to navigate it, presenting junctions where they had not noticed them before.

  They wander into a street with a bar and a couple of trattorias.

  ‘We didn’t come here,’ she says. ‘I don’t recognize this at all.’

  ‘We’ll ask someone – see if they can point us in the right direction.’

  But the owner of the trattoria frowns and shakes his head when Hal describes the palazzo.

  ‘You could stay,’ he says, hopefully, ‘and have a drink here first?’

  Hal suspects that the man’s lack of geography is nothing more than good business sense. But perhaps it would make sense.

  ‘We could stop here for a bit,’ he tells Stella. ‘Recover our bearings. If we carry on walking we may find ourselves getting more lost.’

  He watches her deciding. Finally, she nods.

  He orders them a bottle of cold, straw-coloured wine. It costs far more than he would ever normally spend, and yet he thinks that it is probably one of the cheapest wines she will have tried in a while. Nina, who the bartender treats with the same care and deference as an infant child, is given her own dog bed and a bowl of water. She lies on her sheepskin like a reclining queen. Stella and Hal, meanwhile, are crammed in around a small table, their knees close, occasionally touching. This contact of skin troubles him. He wonders if it is the same for her too: he sees how her hand trembles as she raises it to her lips.

  She laughs, nervously. ‘Have you noticed how we keep seeming to end up alone together? It is almost as though someone is conspiring for it to happen.’

  He toys briefly with the idea of telling her that the Contessa’s sprained ankle no longer appears to be giving her any trouble whatsoever. But he decides not to. It is only a suspicion. Instead, he says: ‘How are you? I heard that you were exhausted, after your swim.’

  She takes another sip of her wine. ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’

  ‘I saw the boat go after you,’ he says. ‘The funny thing was, you seemed to be all right then, too.’

  Her eyes meet his for a second. Then she looks quickly away. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please don’t pity me. I can take anything else, but not that. I don’t need it. And certainly not from you.’

  He wonders what she means by this. Probably that he himself is the one to be pitied. She has seen the way he lives, after all. Perhaps she has a point.

  ‘I don’t pity you,’ he says. He sees her relax, a little. But then some rogue urge, some need to provoke, makes him say, ‘I don’t pity you, because I understand that you’ve made some sort of choice, to be with a man like that.’

  Her face has flushed red, with anger, he thinks, or humiliation. ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘Explain it to me, then.’

  21

  Madrid, March 1937

  ‘Hello.’

  In spite of myself, I am intrigued.

  ‘Hello,’ I say. The man smiles. He is younger than I thought: though not young, still twice my age, perhaps. He isn’t Spanish. His clothes are foreign, English or American, I think: a fine jacket, a waistcoat, matching, spotlessly clean trousers. I wonder how he manages it, in the midst of a war.

  He introduces himself: he is an American. He has a way about him in fact, an air of ease, that is even more of a rarity in this place than clean clothes.

  And he is attractive, I notice – in a way that only becomes apparent when you keep looking. An elegance, perhaps, rather than a handsomeness.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he says. ‘It isn’t safe for someone like you.’

  Where has he been, that he thinks this warm bar is a place of relative danger? ‘It’s better than anywhere else.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, studying me, ‘are you old enough to drink?’

  ‘I’d prefer food.’

  ‘In that case,’ he says, ‘you shall have some.’

  The food comes. His eyes are on me. I am eating like an animal, I know: but I do not seem to be able to stop. Not the dreamed-of sardines but a dish of broken eggs, just as good. I slow only when I realize that if I carry on at this speed I will be sick, and it will be for nothing. I have decided what I will do: I will eat, and then I will excuse myself and leave.

  But there is wine too, which I am not accustomed to even in normal circumstances. It loosens something in me. I begin to talk. I can’t speak about the circumstances, but I tell him of Papa and Tino, how the loss of them has changed everything, that without them, I don’t know myself. All the time he watches my face, as though he finds something fascinating there.

  It is only at the end of the evening that I realize that while I have laid myself bare before him, I don’t know anything about him beyond his name and his nationality. Is this due to rudeness on my part, my preoccupation with my grief? Or some reluctance to tell on his?

  ‘Come tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’d like to buy you supper again.’

  The meal has worked its effect upon me already. I feel stronger, steadier in my thoughts. If I can eat again tomorrow as I have done this evening, it won’t matter if I can’t find food during the day. It doesn’t ever occur to me to refuse. Why would I?

  *

  The next evening I am determined to ask him about himself. This time I notice a definite resistance to my probing. It is subtle, but it is there. He begins to turn everything towards me again, but I have already talked enough; feel hollowed out with it. So I persevere.

  ‘Why are you here, in Spain?’

  He takes a sip of his whisky, savours it. ‘Have you heard of the International Brigades?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you know of them?’

  I tell him. They are men who have come from around the world, American, Englishmen, French – even German and Italian – to fight against Fascism. They say that their bravery is unparalleled. There is talk of how, last month, they met the rebels in the Jarama Valley and fought them off with suicidal valour.

  He nods.

  ‘You’re one of them?’

  ‘Yes. In a way, I am.’

  Suddenly I am seeing him in a new light. His reticence becomes something heroic. ‘Why are you here, in Madrid?’ What I really mean is: why isn’t he in uniform, as his compatriots are? Why is he staying in a hotel, drinking wine with me, rather than on a battlefield somewhere?

  ‘Ah,’ he smiles, and seems to understand my meaning. ‘My work is unusual. It’s … somewhat clandestine. That’s about all I can tell you, I’m afraid.’

  I nod. I want him to know that he can trust me not to press him for information. That his secret is safe in my keeping. I think how much my father would have liked him, this man who is here, in a country not his own, out of a sense of moral duty.

  I notice details that fascin
ate and disturb me: the triangle of pale chest revealed by the open neck of his shirt. The coppery hairs that scatter the skin there. The largeness and elegance of his hands, the way he fills his clothes – indeed his own skin – with such confidence and grace. He is not a tall man. But there is such a sense of conviction about him, of condensed energy, that he gives the impression of height.

  In the mirror in the powder room I find myself (how can I be thinking of such things at a time like this?) combing my hair back from my face, holding it up, to see if it might make me look older, more sophisticated. I rinse my face. I pinch my cheeks and watch them fill with colour. But all that I can see is a grubby girl. I think of the female journalist I have seen in the bar, cutting through the room like a blade through silk: tall, effortlessly elegant, in military-issue clothes that fit her so well they might as well have been couture. By comparison, the reflection I see in the mirror is that of a shabby, unfinished person. A not-quite woman.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he asks me, on our third meeting.

  I tell him.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, shocked. ‘That’s not good. You should move here.’

  I’m not exactly sure what he means by this. He must know that I can’t afford it. I feel a little stupid, from the wine. ‘With you?’

  He smiles his charming, impossible-to-read smile. ‘In a room near to mine, if you’d like. I’m on the best side. It’s funny, the rooms that were the most expensive – the rooms at the front, are those that nobody wants now, because they’re in the line of fire. I have one of the smaller rooms at the back of the hotel – which are the most sought-after. I could have you set up in one of those.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Come, it can’t be a difficult choice, surely? You know,’ he says, ‘in this hotel we have running water. Hot and cold. They say it is the last supply in the whole city.’

  I am encrusted, now, in a thick layer of the city’s grime. It hasn’t troubled me at all, before this moment – but suddenly the idea of being able to sluice it from myself is almost as enticing as the food. But it won’t come for free: I’m sure of that. I’m not like Maria, I’m not one of them. Not yet, not quite. And yet, like the madwoman in the Gran Vía metro, it does not seem such a long fall. Does it matter much, anyway?

  ‘No, thank you.’ I stand.

  ‘I’ve offended you,’ he says.

  ‘No.’

  He reaches across the table to me, and lets his hand fall a few centimetres from my own. ‘Just a bath,’ he says. ‘I offer it because I can, and I would like to do something to help you. Not because I expect anything in return.’

  I sit in the bathtub and take in my surroundings. A gilt mirror, elaborately wrought. I catch sight of myself in it: a pale face, eyes that look darker than they are. The protuberance of my spine.

  The walls are painted a very pale green. Seafoam, I think this hue is called. Is the sea ever this colour? I wonder if I will live to see the real thing, to compare it with. A fresco of fat cherubs on the ceiling, rosy flesh. What a strange, sickly creature they must think me. This bathroom speaks of plenty, of permanence. Impossible to imagine it rendered into so much mortar and dust by a bomb. Except, looking closer, I find a long crack running from one corner of the ceiling to the centre. It is, I am sure, a fresh destruction. It severs the shoulder of the sixth cherub from his neck. Here is another victim of this war.

  ‘How is the water?’

  He sounds so near that for a second I think he is in the bathroom with me. I cover myself. No, he is outside the door: but he must be right next to it.

  ‘It’s good,’ I say, ‘thank you.’ Suddenly, to linger any longer seems too much like an invitation. I step from the bath, find the towel. I dress, quickly, as though there are eyes on me.

  When I open the door he is sitting in the armchair, in his immaculate suit. ‘It can’t have been so very wonderful,’ he says, ‘if you got out so quickly.’

  ‘Oh, I—’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you can have another. I’ve got you the room next door.’

  *

  She stops, to take a sip of her wine. Hal imagines her as the young girl she was then. She would have been a rare thing indeed: a point of bright light. And then he imagines Truss, watching, wanting to make that light his own. The idea sickens him.

  ‘Ah,’ they hear a familiar voice from the doorway. ‘There you are.’

  ‘Oh,’ Stella says, shooting quickly up from her seat as though it has burned her. She is standing, smoothing herself down.

  ‘We lost our bearings,’ Hal explains.

  ‘Of course.’ Aubrey smiles, looks between them. If he sees anything odd in the two of them having been sitting together like this, his expression doesn’t betray it. ‘I had to ask some ladies of the night if they’d seen you. They were quite helpful, actually, especially after I promised to send them the photograph I’d taken of them.’

  ‘Are we late?’ Stella asks.

  ‘Oh no, not particularly. The Contessa just wanted everyone to start gathering back on the yacht. And you aren’t the last – we’ve lost Morgan to some other drinking hole.’

  ‘My husband,’ Stella asks, ‘was he looking for me?’

  ‘I don’t imagine so,’ Aubrey says. ‘He’s spent the whole afternoon shut up somewhere making a call – business in Milan, he said.’

  She visibly relaxes, and her reaction depresses Hal. It seems horrible to him that a man like that should have so much influence over her.

  Her

  Shortly after the beginning of my new life, my husband began to address me as ‘Stella’, removing, with a few letters, the foreignness of my name. At first I found it odd. But gradually it started to make sense to me. It was part of the necessary detachment of my old self from my new. Estrella could not be anything but foreign. Stella could be from anywhere, or nowhere. Now I have been Stella for so long. Impossible to talk of my old life with our acquaintances in New York. They understand me only in the context of my husband, our wealth, the city. They would not understand. Until quite recently – until my discovery, that is – this suited me absolutely. In fact, I feared not being seen as one of them, of being exposed as something different. I worked to extinguish every trace of my old accent, every vestige of the girl I had once been.

  With him, it is different. That night in Rome – we knew nothing of each other. We were absolute strangers. The liberation of that. And when he talks to me, now, I feel that perhaps he sees something more than Stella, the rich man’s wife – and that, too, is freeing. It isn’t just that I find myself wanting to talk of that time – I seem to be unable not to do so. And yet there is a reason I haven’t returned to that time for more than a decade. To go back there is to leave myself vulnerable. It is liberating – but also dangerous.

  When we are gathered back in the harbour once more, my husband takes me to one side to tell me that he must travel to Milan for a few days.

  ‘Would you like to come with me – or would you prefer to stay?’

  For some reason I feel under special scrutiny. It would be safer to go with him. I would escape the particular kind of danger here. But I don’t seem able to help myself.

  ‘I think,’ I say, ‘that I would prefer to stay. It would be rude, otherwise, to desert the Contessa, the other guests.’

  He inclines his head slightly, as though he had expected the answer already. Then he takes my chin in his hand. I feel the grip of his fingers, for a second, and then he tilts my face up toward him and kisses me.

  PART THREE

  22

  ‘But it’s such a shame,’ the Contessa says. They have not yet left the Genoese harbour, and Truss has announced that he must travel to Milan for a few days for business. ‘You really must go?’

  Truss nods. ‘I’m afraid so. I should be back in time for the screening, though.’

  ‘Not both of you?’

  ‘I would love Stella to come with me, naturally.’ He smiles at her. ‘But we both feel that i
t is much better if she stays. She will have a happier time here.’

  They set sail from Genoa a couple of hours after Truss has left them. The air has an odd stillness to it: the ever-persistent breeze briefly absent. The heat gathers in the lull. It is something to do with the bank of cloud that has massed during the afternoon, keeping the warmth trapped.

  That evening, after supper, they play a game, which involves marking anyone who gets a rhyme wrong with a blackened stub of cork. By the end, the marks on Morgan’s face have nearly joined together, the Contessa has only one, Hal thinks, and Stella has three. The one on her forehead is smudged into her hairline, and she is flushed with laughter, and perhaps a little from the wine. Hal looks at her and wonders how he could ever have imagined her ordinary, or two-dimensional. But then she is a different woman, tonight, to the one who looked like she might have sprung, fully formed, from an advert in a magazine.

  Afterwards, they play a game of forfeits. Anyone with the lowest hand in any given round, the Contessa explains, must display a talent. Aubrey is first – and chooses to do impressions. His first is a mimicry of the dowager duchess he was summoned to photograph in Biarritz – ‘If you allow me to appear with more than one chin, young man, I’m not paying.’ Hal sees Stella throw back her head and laugh. Next, he chooses Hal. ‘You have to imagine me a great deal more handsome,’ he says, pretending to gaze sombrely into the middle distance, and then to scribble on an imaginary page. For a second, Hal wonders how Aubrey could possibly know. Then he realizes that, of course, Aubrey is imagining a journalist’s pad, nothing else. Finally, he chooses Stella. He smoothes his hair behind his ears, and props an imaginary magazine in front of himself. His face changes, becomes a tight, anxious mask. Hal sees immediately that Aubrey has misjudged. It is unmistakably her, but it is the wrong side of cruel. Knowing what he now does of Aubrey, he is prepared to forgive him. But when he glances at Stella, he sees that the smile has left her face.