The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  Giulietta looks up at him, catches him watching her, and blows a thin stream of smoke into his face. He coughs and looks away. The same sort of reckoning could be applied to her personality too, he thinks: she is at once repugnant and strangely alluring.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘You see now why I laugh at you when you call me spoiled?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She draws on her cigarette, eyes narrowed. ‘You remember, when you asked me, how it feel, to be called “Italy’s finest export”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I will tell you truly. I feel pleased, and angry, all at the same time. But most of all, I feel triumphant. And you know why?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because at one time, they told my family: “In this country, you don’t belong. You are less than us, you are low-down beings.” And now, when they say to me, “Oh, signora, you are perfect, you are all that is good about this country,” I want to celebrate, and punch the air, and sometimes … sometimes, I want to spit in their faces.’

  So war is in her story too. And while the rest of us, thinks Hal, are doing a passable job of simply surviving, she has forged something from it, has made it a part of her success. This is not to be scorned.

  After letting this sink in, she says, ‘You understand why I don’t like you telling me what to say, for your article? It is because I am not una burratina – a puppet – you know? But Mrs Truss, she is such a puppet.’

  ‘No,’ Hal says, quickly, almost instinctively. ‘She isn’t. You don’t know anything of it.’

  There is something cruel in her smile now. ‘You try to protect her.’ She bites her lip. ‘A little like,’ she pauses, as though searching for the perfect word, ‘… a son.’

  ‘She is only a few years older—’ he says, and then stops himself.

  ‘Only a few years?’ she raises her eyebrows. ‘I would have thought more.’

  For a few moments they sit in silence. And then Hal feels a warm pressure on the bare skin of his ankle. He glances down and sees her small, tanned foot caressing him. The toenails are painted a dark, glossy red. His first reaction is involuntary – a leap of uncomplicated desire. But almost as quickly it is quashed by the sense that he is committing some betrayal. He knows that it is absurd but the feeling remains, all the same. He extricates his leg.

  ‘You should come to my room,’ she says, in murmured Italian now, ‘after supper. I’d like to practise my English further with you.’

  It is a terrible line, but perhaps such an approach to seduction is effective if one is a goddess of the silver screen.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Thank you, but no.’

  She frowns – not so much with annoyance, more as though his response makes no sense to her.

  What is wrong with him? One of the ‘most desirable women in the world today’ – according to Life magazine – is making herself available to him, and yet he wants nothing of it. He is a single man, with no tie to another soul.

  Giulietta flings her cigarette into the shrubbery, where it smokes ominously for a few seconds before dying out. She stands, and, with a toss of her dark head that says she refuses to waste another second on such a hopeless case, she takes her leave of him. Hal pours the remainder of the bottle into his glass, and, like a man taking his medicine, knocks it back in a single gulp.

  29

  Her

  The peculiar intimacy of that night in Rome. For a year, I have not let myself think about it. And the tenderness. I had not known it could be like that, not with a stranger. No, it was something more than that. I had not known it could be like that with anyone.

  1939

  My husband has a house in a place called Southampton, and a yacht moored there. I have never properly looked at the sea before. In Spain, we lived in the heart of the country, surrounded by dry land for miles around. And I saw it on our journey to America, of course, but only as a uniform blue void, miles below. Now, the broad sweep of the Atlantic Ocean terrifies and fascinates me. All I can see is blue – and it emphasizes how far I have come from my old country, from my previous life.

  I decide that if I learn to swim my fear of it might be managed. I will have some measure of control over it. He doesn’t like the idea of it, exactly – I can tell. He tells me that there are dangerous currents. But I persuade him. I tell him that the prospect of going sailing on his yacht – which he wants me to do – will terrify me until I know I could save myself if I fall in.

  I teach myself. He offered to find me a tutor – as he has for language and elocution – but I want to do it on my own. I want it to be something that is mine alone. After a few weeks I can manage a clumsy crawl. Soon I am addicted. When I am in the water I feel powerful. And if I force my muscles to work hard enough I discover I can almost empty my mind of the grief and the guilt that remain still tied to me like my own shadow. Perhaps, one day, I will be able to outswim them.

  My husband is proud of his yacht. I know nothing about boats, but even I know that she is beautiful. I suppose that I should say ‘our’ yacht, but that wouldn’t feel right. I don’t yet know that anything here quite belongs to me, not even the lace underwear I wear.

  The first time he takes me out on her, he tells me the story of how she came to be his. ‘I bought her in 1930. You could say rescued her, to be more accurate. She was ready for the seabed when I first saw her.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, it’s a funny story. Her previous owner had her built in 1927. Absolutely no expense spared, you understand – his only stipulation was that she would be the most beautiful boat in any harbour she might grace with her presence. She was his pride and joy.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ I say.

  ‘Only this fellow made some unwise decisions, bad moves – whatever you’d like to call it. Anyhow, he ended up losing everything in the Crash, like so many others. Even his wife, by all accounts. She went and married some other fellow. So he rigged up this boat and sailed out to sea. No one else on board. It isn’t, I’m sure you can appreciate, the sort of yacht one man alone can handle.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So he would have come to a sticky pass, in the end, as it was. But he shot himself, first, once he’d got a way out. And then it all went to hell, of course. The boat ended up wrecked a little way down the coast. She was almost unsalvageable, and I think many thought I was mad when I said I wanted to buy her. I rather liked the thought of it – the poetic justice of it, if you like. He lost everything as I was making my fortune.’

  He wasn’t always wealthy. I know a little about what it is that he does. His work is, he tells me, in seeing opportunities where no one else would think to look.

  Whichever side loses the war that has begun in Europe, he says, there will be opportunity. One of his specialisms is in buying ruins – concerns that have failed, or been run into the ground – and transforming them into something new. A little like his yacht, I suppose.

  Not long ago, I had an unpleasant experience at a gala with a man who had had far too much to drink. I was coming back from the powder room, looking for my husband in the crowd.

  ‘Tell me,’ the man said, sliding himself in front of me, and looking me up and down. His breath smelt of alcohol. ‘How does he do it?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘He gets everything, doesn’t he? How does a nobody like him end up with so much?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Ha! Oh, you don’t, do you? I suppose you’ll be telling me you know nothing about Spain, either.’

  It caught me off guard. ‘What?’

  ‘Well, we all know he’d made a good haul before then – picking over the scraps of ’29, when every decent fellow was losing all he had. While my father was losing most of my inheritance. But he came back from Spain rich as Croesus.’

  ‘My husband,’ I said, with the tremor of my anger in my voice, ‘was in Spain to fight for a cause he believed in.’

  ‘Fight for a cause …’ he dr
ew the words out, making them ridiculous. ‘Well, that’s a new way of putting it. I suppose it fits, in a way.’ He shook his head at me, almost pityingly. ‘But you don’t know anything, do you?’

  I think he wanted me to ask him what he meant by this. I refused to give him that pleasure. Besides, I did not – do not – want to know.

  I never mentioned it to my husband. I convinced myself that it was too absurd to be worth repeating. And yet, really, it was that it had stirred up in me some unnamed fear, which I carry with me still. It is a thread I don’t want to risk pulling.

  There is a couple who come out on the yacht with us sometimes, and often to supper. Randolph and Gloria Standish. I’m not sure about the husband. But I like her. She seems more straightforward than any of the other wives I have met, unafraid to speak her mind.

  One evening, when we have all had too much to drink, and whilst the men are down on the jetty smoking cigars, Gloria tells me about her husband’s infidelity.

  ‘Can I be absolutely honest?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Part of me prefers it when he has some other piece on the side. He bothers me less. I certainly get a great deal more beauty sleep. Men, and their appetites.’

  I am a little taken back by her confession, but also encouraged by it to make one of my own. ‘My husband doesn’t touch me.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I mean never. He never has.’

  Her eyebrows go up. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I was wondering … well— I wondered if he might be,’ I lower my voice, aware this is something more scandalous than anything we have discussed so far, and also something about which I know little, ‘not interested, in that regard.’

  But she is shaking her head, and looking at me, I think, almost pityingly. ‘Oh my dear, no, that isn’t right at all.’

  ‘I know I shouldn’t say it, but—’

  ‘No, I mean it really isn’t right. If you must know, he and I had a fling – aeons ago, long before he met you. And I can tell you that he isn’t one of those.’

  I plan a confrontation of sorts. A seduction might be a more appropriate word, but I have so little idea of what I am doing that it hardly merits the word. He has been away on business for several days upstate. On the afternoon he is due to return, I take a long bath in the scented oil, which I never normally use, finding its scent too much. I dress myself in the cobweb-fine lace and silks. I look in the mirror. Do I have it, that elusive, specific appeal that Gloria Standish undoubtedly does? I’m not sure.

  I try to arrange myself in a way that I presume is seductive, but I am flustered, my heartbeat thudding through me. I do not know why I am so afraid. Perhaps it is the fact that for the first time in a long while, I am attempting something that hasn’t been suggested for me. I listen to him opening doors, no doubt wondering where I am. He says my name, and then again, a little louder. He would never shout, my husband – it would be too undignified. I could call to him but it would ruin the surprise, so I remain quiet, hardly breathing. Finally, the bedroom door opens, and he stands in the frame, looking in. I watch his face.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Suddenly I feel cold. I could reach for the blanket at the end of the bed, but this would involve exposing myself further.

  ‘I thought …’ I say, ‘I thought I would surprise you.’

  He steps closer to the bed, but I realize his eyes are cast away from me now, as though he can’t bear the sight of me like this.

  He cuts me off. ‘Please, get up. Go and put some clothes on. This,’ he gestures in my direction, ‘is not who you are.’

  Only now do I begin to understand. This is not the part he has scripted for me. I am his picturesque companion at dinners and social functions, outfitted in the latest fashions. I am virginal, pure.

  I slink from the room like a criminal.

  But later, he comes to my room. He doesn’t turn on the light. The cover is pulled back, and immediately he is pushing up the silk of my nightgown. I do not know what to expect, but I have always assumed that there must be pleasure in it. Otherwise why would the Standishes go about conducting their various affairs? But apparently there isn’t time for that. And all the time, while I press my face into the pillow, he hisses words in my ear – words I thought men only used for women they detested.

  Afterwards, he speaks into my hair, his voice gentle. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Forgive me. You are so good, and so young. I don’t know what came over me.’

  In the morning, it is as though it never happened. He is if anything more attentive. Over breakfast, he suggests we take a trip together. Where would I like to go? Have I ever been skiing? No? He will take me skiing then: we could go to the Colorado mountains. I will love it.

  I eat my eggs, and sip my coffee. This is the bargain that I have made. I understand now.

  30

  In the hall outside, an old clock strikes one o’clock. Hal is lying in bed, turning the compass over in his palm. He has become used to the particular weight and feel of it in his hand. Of late, he has even begun to carry it with him in the pocket of his trousers. Even as it unsettles him, he feels now a connection with it that he wouldn’t be able, even if he tried, to put into words. At some point, he will have to give it back to the Contessa. The idea fills him with a powerful regret.

  As for the journal … he is aware that there are only a few pages of writing left. He is reading these last few more slowly. He can’t decide if this is because he wishes to eke them out, because then this peculiar journey will be finished, or because he is apprehensive of what they will contain.

  A MONTH HAS passed, and the painting is still not finished. He is beginning to grow impatient. There is a particular expanse of wall that he knows will be perfect for it. The Flemish artist suggests that if he were to come and work on it every day – rather than a couple of times a week – the wait could be shortened. The captain agrees. Often, when he comes to visit Luna, he finds the painter just leaving – having spent a long morning at work on the piece. He has the chaotic look peculiar to men of his ilk, the captain thinks: his hair and clothes in disarray, his face flushed with the exertion of his craft.

  Several times, he has asked to see the painting. But the painter refuses. ‘It might affect the rest of the work,’ he says. ‘I must be allowed to create without the weight of another’s opinion informing me of how to proceed.’

  The captain would like to say that, as he is the one paying for the painting, it perhaps shouldn’t matter if his opinion informs it. But he knows little of the artistic process, and doesn’t want to jeopardize it. He must continue, instead, to be content with looking at the subject herself in the snatched time permitted between sittings for the portrait and the hours she spends resting in her chamber.

  Finally, the artist informs the captain, the unveiling is ready to occur. The painting is finished. The captain is almost beside himself with excitement. He has already instructed a master framer to get ready a gilt frame for the dimensions of the canvas: it will be on his wall in a matter of days. He enters the salon where the painter and Luna wait for him.

  He waits with breath held as the artist draws back the curtain of material shielding the image from view. The scent of the oil – rich, resinous – reaches him before the painting is exposed, and he closes his eyes to better appreciate it.

  When he opens his eyes, it is before him. There she is in all her loveliness – as lovely, if not more so, as the woman who sits beside the canvas. It is a work of brilliance: some source of light appearing to shine from within it, illuminating the bones of the face, the whites of the eyes, casting the shadow of long dark lashes upon her cheeks.

  But something is wrong. He cannot understand it at first. It is not the image itself, so much as the feeling that emanates from it. Confused, he glances back at the painter and the girl, just in time to see a look, quick as a shift of the light, pass between them. And in that look is all the answer he needs.

 
He lunges for the girl. ‘Puttana!’ His hands find her upper arms, he drags her from the seat onto the floor.

  The painter grapples with him, but the man is slight, small-boned, and shaken off easily.

  ‘Is it true?’ he shouts at the girl. ‘You would let him seduce you, and not me?’

  She will not answer him, even as his fingers dig into the flesh of her upper arms.

  There is a growl, and then the beast of a dog is hurtling toward him, teeth bared. The weight of it knocks him to his feet, and its claws rip quickly through the silk of his shirt, scouring the tender skin beneath. The creature’s breath, hot and foul, is in his nostrils. The thing will consume him, he thinks – and he shrieks in fear and pain. There is a pause, long enough for the dog to reveal its rows of crooked teeth. And then it is clambering off him, with evident reluctance, and trotting to its mistress’ heels. She has called it off.

  He has never known such humiliation, and such rage. She has betrayed him, utterly. She needs to be taught a lesson that she will not forget. There is only one place he can think of going.

  ‘Father,’ he tells the priest. ‘I have been bewitched. I am ashamed to say it, but I have allowed myself to be seduced by one who follows the way of Diana.’

  The whole story is told. The first encounter, the storms, the remedies – her strange bond with the dog.

  The priest listens, intent. And then he speaks. ‘My son. We live now in a more enlightened age. At least in the Republic of Genoa. We are no longer in the practice of rounding such women up and murdering them. Of course, there are people who choose to take matters into their own hands. And I would not necessarily judge them. There are villages where whole crops have failed because of the work of such women, where all the infants have sickened and died. But the Church cannot sanction such extreme measures. My advice would be to distance yourself as far from her as possible.’