The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

Gaspari turns back to Hal. ‘The Conte.’

  Hal considers the elderly couple. How well suited they are to one another, both hewn into interesting shapes by life. They live lives almost independent from one another, evidently. And yet Hal sees the Contessa’s fingers interlace with his, her gaze caress the raw-boned face. And the old man stoops from his great height to kiss the crown of her head.

  The room he is shown to is dark and cool, echoing in the same important way as the church in Portovenere. The warmth of the day outside quickly fades from memory – the floor has a particular chill to it that Hal decides must be peculiar to ancient stone; the cold of centuries. At first glance, everything in the room looks as though it might have remained there since the era of the castle’s inception: from the faded pastoral scenes frescoed upon the walls to the four-poster bed with its threadbare but beautiful damask coverlet. Gradually, though, other elements reveal themselves: pieces that speak of exotic travels. Three wooden African masks hung on one wall, a Moorish patterned rug on the floor, the curved scimitar sword in its embellished scabbard.

  Aubrey Boyd is in the room beside Hal’s, Giulietta on the other side. Stella, Earl Morgan and Gaspari are in rooms on the next floor.

  Now he can hear voices upstairs. He pushes his door open to make them out more clearly.

  ‘This room,’ Giulietta is saying, in her most imperious tone, ‘is far bigger than mine. I would prefer to sleep here.’

  The Contessa, of course, proves a worthy match. ‘But I am afraid it is not your room,’ she says, pleasantly, ‘it is the one I have given to Mrs Truss.’

  Now Stella speaks. ‘It’s all right,’ she says, wearily. ‘I don’t mind swapping.’

  The Contessa tries to dissuade her.

  ‘No,’ Stella says, firmly. ‘I don’t need a large room.’

  Hal closes the door. Fame, he thinks, has a great deal to answer for. It rewards behaviour that should otherwise be stamped out long before adulthood. He will find some way of making sure that some trace of this infiltrates his piece.

  Supper is served in the courtyard outside the castle, which sits above a sheer drop down to where the sea froths against the rocks beneath. Behind them the wall of the castle is almost completely obscured by an ancient growth of wisteria with blossoms from which tiny purple petals, dislodged by the breeze, take to the air and land all around. Several cats of every imaginable size and colour have appeared and they circle the guests curiously, the bolder among them threading their way between table legs and ankles. Nina watches them warily, letting off the occasional warning bark, but the animals are unperturbed by her presence.

  ‘We used a cat for one scene in the film,’ Gaspari says.

  ‘I remember it,’ Hal says, ‘the one that leads the man through the streets to the shrine.’

  ‘Yes. That’s it.’ Gaspari nods, pleased. ‘We trialled several different animals before we found the one that would do what we wanted, and only then because we bribed it with little pieces of chicken tied out of sight. It would refuse to do anything – anything – unless there was chicken involved. And people think that the film world is a glamorous place. Auditioning cats – imagine!’

  The Conte sits on Hal’s other side. Hal is pleased by the novelty of having someone to talk to who hasn’t also been on the Pygmalion. And the Conte makes an excellent dinner companion. For all his bizarreness of appearance – he arrives at dinner in a purple Chinese silk tunic and matching trousers – and his great age, he is lucid as the grappa that is handed around after the meal. He regales Hal with his tales of the Syrian desert, where he and the Contessa once spent a whole six months living with a Bedou tribe. He tells Hal of the storms of sand, in which the fine particles in part assumed the characteristics of water. A sea that seethed and stormed, enveloping all.

  ‘You have to keep moving – so that you do not become like un sarcofago. It happens in seconds, otherwise. I almost lost my wife like that. She was trying to take a photograph of it … imagine.’

  He describes to Hal the Bedou tribes’ strong sense of honour and hospitality, and of their customs: the poetry they would recite in the evening, their great piousness.

  ‘There is a purity to a desert existence, to living according to its laws. But there is also a strength of mind and body required for that life. I was too weak.’ He gestures, ‘I missed the sea, I missed the green. But sometimes, now, the Contessa and I find we miss the desert, too. It is something that gets into the blood, a most rare and powerful drug. Who knows, maybe one day, we will return there, my wife and I. Our bodies are weaker but our minds, perhaps, have acquired the necessary resilience.’

  When they have finished eating he takes Hal to the tent they have brought back with them and erected at one end of the courtyard. It is a long, low shape, a thick coarse cloth made from woven goat hair. Hal climbs inside the dark space and smells woodsmoke and incense and something else, too – something indefinable. A residue, perhaps, of the intense heat of the desert sun which has by some magic permeated into the fabric itself.

  ‘You have the best night’s sleep of your life in these,’ he tells Hal.

  He used to be a keen aviator, too, but the war put paid to that. ‘I used to dream about building aeroplanes. When I was a boy it was my passion; all I could think about. I spent my days designing them. And then as a young man I gave up the engineering part – I had not the mathematical brain that was needed – and instead became rather good at flying the things. But to see my hobby become something that could kill … it destroyed my passion for it completely.’

  Hal thinks of the fact that he hasn’t set foot in a sailing dinghy since 1938. ‘Will you ever fly again?’

  ‘Perhaps. But my eyesight is not how it was. I have other interests now: my garden, my fishing.’

  The Conte and Contessa spent the war years in Switzerland, wanting, as the Conte explains, to distance themselves as far as possible from the disgrace of the country under Fascism.

  ‘From the mid-thirties we were exiles. We stayed with friends, we lived in one of the spa hotels for several years. For a while I thought we might not recognize the country when – if – we returned. And it is changed. We are all changed. But luckily there is enough of the old place, and of ourselves, left to recognize.’

  He rises from his seat now and pours another round of grappa for everyone.

  ‘To new friends.’ He salutes Hal, Giulietta, Aubrey, Stella. ‘And to old.’ This last with a fond smile for Gaspari. ‘To the sea.’ He sweeps a hand across the blue. ‘To Italy.’ He has almost put down his glass when he remembers something. ‘And to love, of course. To the older kind,’ he toasts the Contessa and then, unmistakably, he raises his glass to Hal and then to Stella, ‘and to young.’

  There is a strained silence.

  ‘Caro,’ the Contessa says, with a quick smile. ‘I explained it to you. Mrs Truss’ husband has had to travel to Milan. Hal is the journalist.’

  ‘Oh.’ He frowns.

  ‘I think you have had too much grappa, carissimo. You cannot drink as much as you used to.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ the Conte says, as though finally remembering his lines, and giving them all a winning smile. ‘Forgive an old man his confusion.’ He taps his forehead. ‘It is nothing but so much spider’s yarn up here.’

  *

  Later, when most of the guests have retreated to their own rooms, Hal finds the Contessa sitting out on the terrace alone, a glass of grappa in her hand. ‘Look at them,’ she says, and points.

  At first he cannot see what it is she means. And then they begin to appear like retinal scratches: tiny filaments of light appearing from and dissolving into the dark.

  ‘Fireflies.’ This is the first time in his life he has seen them.

  ‘Sit with me,’ she says. ‘And have some more grappa.’ She pours a little into a second glass and passes it to him. They watch the strange show for several minutes in silence.

  ‘They are early this year – it has been warm. But soon,’
she sweeps a hand, ‘they will fill all of this. They will almost vanquish the dark.’

  ‘I’d like to see that.’

  ‘Perhaps one day you will return, join us here for a longer time.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘You are Italian, are you not?’

  ‘My mother is.’

  ‘I knew it. You speak the language too beautifully for it to be otherwise. And that was why you chose Rome for your escape?’

  ‘Escape?’

  ‘That was what you told me at my party. The reason you gave.’

  He remembers. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘But what is a young man like you doing all alone? Aubrey I think I understand – he seems, well, if not content, then certainly resigned to his aloneness. But I don’t think it is the same with you.’

  From anyone else this questioning would be prying, impertinent. But from the Contessa it is curiously inoffensive. Perhaps, Hal thinks, it is the authority lent by age.

  ‘I was going to be married – in England.’

  She raises her eyebrows.

  ‘It didn’t work. We met before the war; I was studying in London, she worked there, as a clerk. I was twenty when I proposed: I’d hardly lived at all. And then, after the war … I suppose we weren’t the same people that we had been before it.’

  Not quite true. Suze had been very much the same. He was the one who had changed out of all recognition. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to return to the man he had been: he had. But it was as though the cells of him had undergone an irreversible change. There was no way back.

  He remembers that final, terrible reckoning in a Kensington teashop near Suze’s flat. He had never seen her cry before that, not even during the war. And yet however terrible it had felt to know that he had been the cause of this pain, there had also been a secret, queasy sense of relief that it was done, that it was over. Because in the end it had come down to his fear of disappointing her, of not being the person she thought she was marrying. And his realization that, though he cared for her, he did not love her enough to spend his whole life trying to be that person.

  ‘You know,’ the Contessa says, after a long silence, ‘I wasn’t always married to the Conte.’

  Hal turns to look at her, in surprise.

  ‘No,’ she says, slowly, ‘before him, I was married to another. I was unfortunate enough not to realize my mistake until after my wedding. He wasn’t a pleasant man. The Conte was my salvation.’ She gestures down at herself. ‘You see now someone who is not afraid to be the person she truly is – who will wear the colours she wants to, who will let herself grow old without mourning the loss of her beauty. Because I am free to do as I choose, be exactly how I want to be. He made me see that it could be like that. And that is what love is, I think. But my former marriage – you would not have recognized me then.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We were stationed in Eritrea, my husband was posted there a couple of years before the First War. He started having affairs almost instantly – he was a handsome man, a charming one when he wanted to be – and when he came home he would describe to me my shortcomings in comparison: the smallness of my breasts, the size of my nose, the thickness of my waist. The fact that I did not know how to seduce a man, how to please him. I was not then the woman I am now. I began to believe in my own deficiencies.’

  Hal is stunned by the cruelty of it.

  ‘Then I met the Conte, at an expatriate drinks out there. I thought he was a buffoon: bald, far too tall, badly dressed. Obsessed with his plane. But he showed me how to be free. In a way, I wish that I could have learned it on my own – but sometimes we need another to show us our own bravery.’ After a pause, she says, ‘I had a little boy, once.’

  ‘With the Conte?’

  She shakes her head. ‘With my first husband. He got malaria. Oh, it was such a long time ago now – almost a lifetime. But it is strange how often he is in my thoughts, even now, in my old age. Perhaps it is because he was my only one.

  ‘He had dark hair, and blue, blue eyes. It is a Ligurian trait, this combination. You know, it was what I first thought when I saw you – that you looked as though you could have been born here. And my second thought was that you reminded me of him, my son. I can’t explain it. But I would hope that, had he grown to be a man, he would be something like you.’

  He finds, suddenly, that he has to look away.

  An hour later, all have excused themselves. Alone in his room, Hal finds himself returning inevitably to that other world.

  HE HAS SET her up in a house in Genoa. There are whispers about the mysterious woman living on the Via Cairoli. She has been seen, and noted, by a number of the Genoese quality. This perturbs the captain, because he has specifically told her to leave the house as little as possible. As expected, his departure from the ship has not become the scandal it could have done. His uncle is not impressed with him, he can tell, but will not risk opening the thing up to gossip.

  Still she has not allowed him into her bed. But he can be patient. It is only a matter of time. She is kind to him, after all. Once, when he had complained of a congestion in his head she had asked the cook to make him up a remedy of her own invention – a poultice of pungent herbs that he could hold to his face and inhale. And it had, incredibly, worked. He had been grateful and also – though he would hardly admit it to himself – unnerved.

  ‘All that you need,’ he tells her on his next visit, as they sit drinking their tea in the salon he has had decorated for her, ‘you have here. You should have no reason to leave the building.’

  He is right, of course. There is a good-sized garden with the most fashionable features available: an artificial grotto, and a mosaic tricked out with delicately coloured corals and glass.

  There is a bathroom with its own private bath: a rare luxury. There is even a miniature chapel, which he learns from the housekeeper she never uses. He has cakes brought to her from the finest pasticceria, wines from his own store. Rare fruits, purchased at great expense from the best merchants. She has, in short, everything.

  ‘So why,’ he asks her, ‘would you want to leave?’

  ‘To see the sea.’

  ‘You can see it from the upstairs windows.’

  ‘I don’t want to see it like that. I want to see it up close. And to walk in the fresh air.’

  ‘You have your garden.’

  ‘It is not the same.’

  ‘And to see other people.’

  This last fills him with horror. ‘See people. Who, tell me, would you want to see? You see me, often. I visit whenever I can.’

  ‘I don’t mean anyone specifically. I just mean real people, in the streets.’

  ‘But this is a dangerous city. You shouldn’t be travelling about on your own.’

  ‘I’m not. I have Bear with me.’

  Bear is the stray she found in the alleyway beside the house, a dog that looks half-wolf half-hound. A beautiful, dangerous animal – with eyes that almost match her own – and obedient only to her, apparently. He rather regrets having let her keep the creature now. She lavishes so much attention upon the animal that there does not seem to be any left for him.

  And the idea of the dog as her protection is not enough to placate him. For it is not just concern for her safety that he finds troubling: it is the thought of having to share the sight of her with the rest of the world – with the paupers and grocers and fishermen who flock into the streets. But it isn’t that, he thinks. He is worried for her safety. He will meet her halfway, he decides.

  ‘I will throw you a ball.’

  ‘A ball?’

  ‘Yes. Though I will make sure that there is no … unseemly connection between us. I will explain that you are my ward – the daughter of a Corsican family, who is in need of my protection. That will explain the accent, too.’ He knows that this is nonsense. Those that care will already have made their assumptions about the sort of relationship that exists be
tween them – the sort of relationship, in all honesty, that he would wish them to have. But he does not want to offend her.

  ‘In that way,’ he says, warming to the idea, ‘you may meet people, and be safe.’ And he rather does like the thought of showing her off to the envy of all others, in a controlled situation, of his choosing. Beatrix is no concern: she is a practical, unromantic sort. He knows that she harbours no illusions about their relationship. Though perhaps he would not be quite so bold if she were not safely tucked away at her father’s estate in the countryside.

  The ball is a success. She is a success, in a silk gown embroidered with silver and gold thread. It is an outfit that would give the magistrato delle pompe forty fits, because such levels of ostentation on a single garment are forbidden.

  ‘I would like to paint her.’ He overhears this, and turns to find the speaker. It is the Flemish painter – a young man, but already renowned for his great skill. At first he is unsure about the idea. To have an image made seems to him merely another way in which he would be forced to share her with other people. But as he thinks on it, he realizes that it need not be a portrait for public viewing. It could hang in his own house – in his own bedchamber, even. Then he would be able to feast on her beauty always. In fact, it may be the best idea he has had for a long time.

  He approaches the painter, imperiously. ‘I would like to commission you, to make her portrait.’

  The man is delighted.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Well,’ the artist says, earnestly, ‘to have such a subject would be payment in itself.’

  The captain is the scion of merchants – he understands an excellent bargain when it is offered. But for some reason that he cannot identify, he does not like the idea of it. ‘No,’ he says, firmly, ‘I would pay the fair price for such a work.’

  If the man is surprised he does not betray it. ‘Certainly.’ He names his price, and it is exorbitant. Yet suddenly he desires this image of her more than anything. The man could ask for the moon itself and he would find some way of fishing it from the sky.

  Hal puts the journal down. Something has happened. Around him the castle sleeps. Except, in the midst of the silence he hears something. A sound of pain, low and animal.