The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  And Hal can see her, almost, as she would have been: sapling-lithe, cutting a swathe.

  They move out toward the horizon at an astonishing speed. Hal grips the rail and feels his teeth clatter together as they crest a wave, leaping unexpectedly into space. Earl Morgan lets out a whoop of exhilaration, and when Hal looks at him his eyes seem, momentarily, to have lost their dazed look. The breeze created by their movement is instantly cooling, and Hal feels the skin beneath his shirt prickle. Every so often, the contact with a larger wave sends a fine spray arching over them.

  They reach a distance from the shore that the Contessa is happy with, and the Conte idles the engine. Immediately the warmth returns. The shoreline shimmers in the heat, suddenly remote.

  ‘Well,’ the Contessa turns to them. ‘Who will go first?’

  There is a nervous silence. Then Stella says, ‘I will.’ She stands, and shrugs off her shirt and shorts to reveal her black bathing suit. It is the one she wore on that first day, when he spotted her on the jetty. He tries harder than ever not to look. The memories of the previous evening crowd in upon him now, demanding attention.

  The Contessa helps her fit her feet into the rubber. Then she is sliding into the water, gripping the tow rope. Slowly, the Conte manoeuvres the boat away from her until the tow rope has fully unfurled. Now Hal looks. And suddenly she appears very small, with the vastness of the ocean surrounding her. It is too familiar. The tightening of fear in his chest is involuntary. He ignores it.

  Stella raises her thumb to the Contessa’s shouted enquiry. Then the engine thrums, and the line tugs taut. There is no way that Hal can look away now. He feels that if he did so, even for a second, she might disappear from view. He is gripping the metal rail of the boat so tightly he is surprised it doesn’t come away in his hand. On the first few tries her balance falters almost instantly, and she collapses back into the water. Hal finds himself hoping that she will call it a day. But every time, she nods her head: yes, she wants to go again. Finally, the miracle happens. She lifts out of the water and stands, and remains standing, the muscles in her legs taut, her arms straight out in front.

  ‘Bravo,’ the Contessa shouts, delighted.

  Hal is no longer watching her in fear, but awe. She is magnificent to him. How could he ever have thought her weak? She doesn’t fall again. Eventually, when they have made several circuits and figures of eight with her following, poised as a ballet dancer, she makes the sign for them to stop, and drops gracefully back into the water. When they pull her in, she is laughing, and Hal feels again that tightness in his lungs, looking at her, though it has a different cause this time.

  ‘Well,’ Aubrey says, ‘that’s done it for the rest of us. How can we have a hope after that?’

  *

  Back at the castle, the rest of the day stretches before him. Will it be the same? They seem to have moved further apart than before any of it happened. It is hard to believe now in the intimacy of the night, in the confidences she made to him.

  But later, in bed, it is simple again. They might have known one another for centuries. When they are together like this they fit so perfectly that their two bodies might be the archetypes from which all others are but imperfect iterations.

  It is only afterwards, with the clumsiness and misunderstanding of speech, that the distance grows once more. He feels a kind of hopelessness. They are too polite, too cautious, feinting towards one another. Until she turns onto her side, and says, ‘Tell me about your writing.’

  ‘I don’t know …’

  ‘I’ve told you everything. And I know almost nothing about you, in return. You told me you stopped after your friend died.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  He knows that he doesn’t have to tell her; that he has a choice. It is the thing that he could not tell Suze, the thing that she refused to hear. He could choose not to tell Stella now, and continue just the same. Not quite the same, perhaps, because the unspoken thing would force yet more distance between them.

  He has to tell, he understands this. She has to know. ‘It was my fault.’

  She makes no answer. It is a relief: if she were to interrupt him now he might never find the courage to keep talking.

  ‘We were up in the Arctic, above Norway. The ship was covered in ice. I’d been tasked with clearing some of it off the main deck – me, and a few other men. Morris was one of them.

  ‘I saw it coming before anyone else. This wave was huge, much bigger than the ones before it. Something had happened to my brain. I can’t explain it, but it was so cold. It was as though my thoughts were slowed down. I didn’t say anything until it was too late. Morris and I – we were right next to the rail. It swept us off our feet and over the side.’

  The confusion of seeing only water where before there had been solid metal. How it had seized the breath from him. Unbelievable cold – though it didn’t feel like cold so much as the opposite, like a searing heat. He couldn’t get his breath back, no matter how hard his mouth and lungs worked. The ship, suddenly, seemed an Everest of steel, sheering unscalable out of the water. A row of tiny heads had appeared above the rail. Probably they were shouting, but he couldn’t hear anything except for the wheeze of his own tortured breathing.

  He had heard a shout – or not so much a shout, more a cry, like that of an animal in pain. He turned and saw Morris, some ten yards or so further away, fighting to stay afloat. Really struggling.

  He managed to pant out the words. ‘Are-you-all-right?’

  And the answer had come back in agonized gasps: ‘I-think-my-leg’s-bro-ken.’

  The ship wouldn’t turn, he knew this. They couldn’t: they were in convoy. Such things went to the highest level; a misstep could endanger the entire fleet. They were the last ship in the formation, too. There was nothing coming for them.

  It came to him. They would die here, surrounded by miles of frozen emptiness. Not by the hands of the enemy, but by random bad luck. His mind became oddly clear and calm then, even his breath seemed to come more easily. Let it be quick, then.

  And then a miracle: a tiny object against that pale polar sky, growing gradually larger. A black hoop. He had seen it in its snug compartment on deck; but never thought much about it. It had always looked more ceremonial than functional, with the name of the ship embossed in gold lettering. Now, it was everything. It was life itself.

  It fell a little ahead of him.

  Morris behind him, the lifebelt in front. He could swim to Morris, and then try and get them both to the lifebelt. But already it was moving further away from him; there would be another wave – and soon, he could feel the tow as it gathered itself. He might have only a few seconds’ opportunity to get to it.

  No: he couldn’t not try to save his friend. He began to try to swim towards Morris. But he was dragged back by the terrible sodden weight of his clothes, his boots. He tried to shrug himself out of them, but he was so weak, suddenly, his efforts rendered ineffectual. The cold had drained his energy, eaten it from him. Morris was reaching for him, but he seemed even further away. And suddenly he understood. He wouldn’t make it. Not to Morris and then back to the lifebelt. It was one or the other.

  By the time he was hauled aboard, his friend had drowned. One of the men had seen him go under. He hadn’t resurfaced. And then the next wave had come, and put an end to any doubt.

  He hasn’t told anyone this – not the whole of it, anyway. The men told him there was nothing he could have done. He couldn’t blame himself.

  But he did. If he had tried a little harder, if he had been brave enough to risk everything, he might have done it.

  Morris’ wife, Flora. When she had asked: ‘Did you see him, at the end?’ Did she, somehow, know? She couldn’t, could she? She was only asking in the way that a wife would, of the man who had seen her loved one’s last moments. Yet all the way back from her flat, on the bus, his hands had shaken.

  He finds he can’t look at Stella as he speaks. He knows tha
t she is watching him. But he doesn’t want to see her face, to see a judgement there.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I imagine that he said something to me, that he gave me permission. You know, that he understood.’ He laughs, without humour. ‘But he didn’t. He wanted to live – he was fighting for it with everything he had left. He wanted me to save him. And I might have done it. If I had only been less of a coward.’

  He covers his face with his hand. It is done now, at least, his shame laid bare. He tries to tell himself that this is something. Whatever she may think of him now, however she may despise him, he has relieved himself of the burden.

  ‘We do what we have to,’ she says, carefully, ‘in the moment, to survive. It is easy in hindsight to think you might have done more, that you might have tried harder.’

  From anyone else, this might sound like a mere platitude. But from her, with what he now knows of her, it is something different.

  He shuts his eyes. ‘There’s more, though.’ Might as well tell it all, now. How, after the war, he had gone to see Morris’ wife Flora. She had sat and wept quietly, politely, as though she was embarrassed by her show of emotion in front of this stranger. It should have been him. He didn’t have anyone relying on him to come home. Not to the same degree, anyhow. His parents – his mother, certainly – would have been devastated, but they had one another, and they had money. Looking at little Flora Eggers, in her flat that rattled with the movement of the passing trains, looking at the mismatched furniture and her cheap haircut, he had become very aware that Morris must have been everything to her and the boy, Fred, too solemn for such a small child. This was what love did to you, he thought, watching her.

  He had gone back, a few months later. He had remembered some anecdotes that he wanted to share with her – Morris at his best. He had some idea that it would help. He had bought a tin of biscuits from the Woolworth’s next to the station, but then, looking at them as he waited for her to answer the bell, they became inadequate. He wished then that he had had the foresight to go to Fortnum’s, get her some of the really good sort.

  A middle-aged woman had answered the door, and he had stepped back in surprise. Flora’s mother, perhaps.

  She had frowned at him, then at the biscuits. ‘Sorry, dear,’ she said. ‘If I want to buy them, I can go and get them myself. Don’t like being sold to on my doorstep.’

  ‘Oh, no – I’m not selling.’

  ‘What are you after then?’

  ‘I was wondering if Flora was at home?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mrs Eggers. Flora Eggers.’

  Her demeanour had changed absolutely. ‘Oh,’ she had said. ‘Oh, my dear … you haven’t heard. And that poor little boy.’

  She had gone out one morning, only a short walk to the track. Leapt into space.

  There is a long silence.

  ‘Hal.’ She takes his hand, again with that tentativeness strange in two who are lovers. ‘Every day, since Tino died … it is what I go back to in sleep – every time a little different, but always with the same outcome. I’m too stupid, or too slow. I think of who he might have become. He was so bright, so interested in everything. He could have been a scientist, or an artist. He would have done a better job of living than I have. But,’ she grasps his hand with a new urgency, ‘hearing you talk of your friend has made me wonder something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Whether we blame ourselves because in a way it makes things easier to understand if they have a reason, a fault, behind them.’ She looks at him. ‘Do you think that could be part of it?’

  For the first time he meets her gaze, and he finds no judgement there – only a surprising tenderness.

  Later, it is his turn.

  ‘That night in Rome,’ he speaks into her hair, ‘why did you ask to come back to my apartment?’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘No, you didn’t. All you said was that you had gone a little mad.’

  ‘I think I said, before, that I recently found out something about him. When I met him, I thought he was an International Brigadier, a man who had come to fight out of his sense of duty. They were everywhere in Madrid, at the time: every nationality, men who had come to stand up against Fascism. He let me believe it. I found out the truth a year ago, in Rome.’

  *

  Her

  1950

  It starts one day when my husband is away. He has business in Italy, now. The war, he tells me, has left it ‘wide open’ for investment.

  I am in New York, at home in the apartment. There is a call from the concierge.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Truss? There’s a man here who has asked to speak to you. I think he’s from the press.’

  I have been approached before by women’s magazines: will I speak to them about my decorative style, my wardrobe choices? My husband doesn’t want me to talk to them, though – he thinks it ‘tawdry’.

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘tell them I’m not interested.’

  ‘All right, ma’am. That’s what I said to him before – though he’s persistent. He says he has something he wants you to hear, not the other way around.’

  ‘Oh.’ This is new. And for some reason, I feel a small trepidation. It is like catching the trace of something rotten on the breeze. ‘No,’ I say, feeling more sure than ever now, ‘I don’t want to talk to him.’

  By the afternoon the apartment, despite its size, has become oppressive. I will go for a walk in the park, I decide. In the green surrounds I move quickly, not processing my surroundings, but pleased to be doing something that may take my mind off the thing that is troubling me. It is the idea of what the man wants to tell me. It looms large in my imagination. Perhaps, after all, I should hear him out. Knowing might be better than not.

  But I am afraid. Of what? Nothing. Everything.

  After my walk I go to a little café that I have discovered. It is one of my secrets. I suppose it sounds ridiculous: to have a secret as benign as a place serving coffee and cake. I know he would not like the thought of me coming here. The crockery is a little worn, and not of the best sort; the cakes are served in large, inelegant slabs. They serve doughnuts, too, fat hoops crusted with thick rinds of sugar. It is all, in short, not in the best taste.

  I order my doughnut and eat it quickly, furtively, licking the sugar from my fingers. I reach for the book I have brought with me, open it to read, begin to relax.

  ‘Excuse me, Mrs Truss?’

  I look up, and know that it is him, the man who came for me at the apartment. He must have been following me. For how long? Did he wait for me until I left the building, tail me in the park?

  ‘It’s about your husband,’ he says, in a rush. He is quite young, I realize, and he doesn’t look unkind. But that doesn’t mean anything.

  ‘Please,’ I say, ‘leave me alone.’ I stand, and try to get past him. He doesn’t move at first so I have to push my way out.

  ‘Please, Mrs Truss. I want you to hear it from me first. It’s about your husband,’ he repeats. ‘What he was doing in Spain.’

  When I hear that, I begin to run. I know that whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.

  When my husband returns, I tell him about it. ‘A man tried to speak to me, twice. He said it was about you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘About Spain.’

  ‘He came after you?’

  ‘Yes. He followed me in … in the park.’

  His face is frightening, though I know his anger is on my behalf. ‘Did you find out where he worked? What newspaper?’

  ‘No— I just tried to get away from him.’

  This is the last time we speak of it. A few days later, my husband asks if I want to go with him this time, back to Italy.

  ‘Why do you need to go back so soon?’

  ‘Everything is being set up – it’s a delicate time. But I thought it would be pleasant to get away together, anyway. We can go to Rome.’

  ‘I haven’t been to Europe since I left.’
>
  ‘Even more of a reason, then. It’s time you did.’

  We spend two days together in Rome, being driven around the city’s sights by a chauffeur: the Pantheon, the Colosseum. The roads are frenetic, screeching chaos, and it feels sometimes that we are being assaulted on all sides by traffic. Our driver swears, gesticulates. I feel queasy in the back seat, seeing the city slide by behind glass. I suggest to my husband that perhaps we might walk for a day instead, but he tells me that it is a dirty place – I would ruin my shoes – and full of pickpockets and worse.

  On the third day, in the Bulgari showroom, he has the shop girl fasten various necklaces around my neck. The one he chooses for me – emerald – is beautiful. It is also the heaviest, and I have to make an effort to keep my head lifted.

  ‘You know what people will understand,’ he says, ‘when they see you wearing this?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They will know you are loved.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  We are invited to drinks at the American ambassador’s house. My husband suggests that I might wear my new necklace.

  I dread the thought of having its weight about my neck for the whole evening. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I wanted to save that for something truly special.’

  ‘I’d like to see you wearing it. You don’t like it? It was the best piece in the shop.’

  ‘I love it.’

  He smiles. ‘Then wear it. For me.’

  I expected the drinks to be a turgid affair. Tired from the change in time zones, I have been dreading it. But I meet an interesting woman there.

  ‘I’ve been admiring your emeralds,’ she says, when we are introduced.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Though, I couldn’t help wondering – are they a pain to wear?’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’

  She nods, smiles. She introduces herself: she is Italian, quite elderly. An air of energy, of slight eccentricity.

  She begins to tell me about her new project: a small film studio that she had saved from bankruptcy. ‘We are looking to produce the first picture,’ she says. ‘But we need funding for it.’