The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  The director she has attached to it is a good friend. I ask her his name.

  ‘Giacomo Gaspari.’

  ‘I saw his film, Elegy.’ There is a European picture house I go to sometimes, to pass the slow hours in the middle of the day. ‘I loved it.’ I did. What I don’t mention is that I had to leave halfway, because the bombed city had suddenly become Madrid, and the grief had become my own.

  My husband approaches, introductions are made. I mention the Contessa’s film, and excuse myself to the powder room. I know that the idea will appeal to him: it will be an opportunity to display his good taste on a larger scale.

  The next morning, at breakfast, he tells me: ‘I must go to Milan. But there is the Contessa’s party: I thought you should go – I’m thinking of investing in her film. We can arrange a car to take you this evening. I’ll be back tomorrow evening.’

  For a few hours, I sit outside in the hotel garden. Beyond the walls I can hear the city: at once foreign and familiar. I try to concentrate on the plot of the novel and then, when that fails, on the images in my magazine. But somehow the city begins to seep in about me. I keep thinking of the little cafés, full of life, that I glimpsed from the car window. There is nothing stopping me from going in search of one, I realize.

  ‘I’m going out for an hour,’ I tell the concierge – as I would tell the man at the front desk in our building in New York. He gives me an odd look, and it occurs to me that I needn’t have said anything to him; that I needn’t say anything to anyone at all. In the street I feel a vertiginous sense of freedom. Everything is unknown. I could go anywhere, walk the city for miles. But then I realize that I could get lost, might not be able to find my way back. I decide to stop at the first café I happen across. I order myself a coffee.

  ‘Anything else, signora? Something to read, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  The man disappears and returns with my coffee and a sheaf of newspapers: La Repubblica and, surprisingly, the New York Times.

  ‘A few days old,’ he says, apologetically.

  ‘Thank you.’ I begin to leaf through it, mindlessly. I am more interested in observing the crowd around me. There is a mother with her fat toddler; a young couple who seem fused together, oblivious to anything else. A couple of dark-haired men drinking espressos; one of whom is intent on a trio of beautiful girls. The pages pass through my hands largely unread. Until I see something. My name is there: incongruous in that foreign, sunlit square.

  Mrs Stella Truss was unavailable for comment …

  I want to put the paper down; I want to run back to the hotel. But this thing I have seen cannot be unseen. I force myself to read the rest.

  Originally, like a number of other profiteers, Mr Truss had been helping to arrange the supply of armaments to the Fascist rebels in Spain. Then, when Germany and Italy pledged their support and effectively put them out of business, many of these men switched sides, taking advantage of the non-interventionist policies of Britain and France. The Republican government, desperate, were plundering the coffers of the Bank of Spain; prepared to pay well over the odds for ancient – and often faulty – weaponry.

  The journalist explained that he been contacted by an anonymous source who had known of my husband in Spain.

  Some of those providing arms to the Republican army did so for ideological reasons – or they claim they did. But Frank Truss: he was out, pure and simple, to make a quick buck.

  The war that had killed my brother and father had made him rich. The worst part? I had suspected. Or, rather, I had known that there were aspects that hadn’t fitted. The immaculate suits, the lack of a uniform, the way he was able to get hold of anything he needed – anything at all – in the midst of a war-torn city. The simple fact that he avoided any specific detail about where he had been fighting. And then there had been that drunkard at the party, with his questions and his scorn. The man I have married is a liar; but so am I: perhaps a worse one than he, because I have managed to deceive myself.

  Back in the hotel, I sit on the bed, a suitcase half-packed beside me. What will I do? Where will I go? I have no money, no roots anywhere. I’m not sure I even know how to survive on my own any longer.

  The telephone rings. For a moment I think it might be him, that he has somehow found out about my discovery. I lift the receiver.

  ‘Signora,’ the man says, ‘I am calling to tell you that your car is waiting.’

  The party, which I have forgotten all about. Somehow, it is already evening. I will go. Away from here there may be space to think, to decide what I will do. I dress like one in a dream, travel through the twilight city in the same stupor.

  The Contessa tries, admirably, to draw me into conversation with my fellow guests, but I find myself unable to follow the thread of any conversation. I drift through the crowd, avoiding the gaze of others, avoiding the attempts made by other guests to speak to me. At the end of the room is an open doorway, and I find myself drawn towards it, out into the night.

  A roof garden, above the city. To my relief it seems I am the only one to have found it. Finally, here is space and relative quiet.

  I have two options, as far as I can tell. I can remain or I can run away.

  But then, looking out across the black void that is the city, another way presents itself. The idea has its own strange appeal. I take a cigarette from my bag. I will smoke it for courage. Though I wouldn’t need nearly as much courage to do that as I would if I am to run. I will finish it, and then I will decide.

  Before I can find my matches, I hear movement on the metal ladder. I watch a man emerge, look about himself. I can see him because of the way the moonlight catches him – though I am certain he can’t see me. I know instantly that he isn’t one of them. The other guests are all people like my husband; but he lacks that same patina of wealth – the ease of it.

  He has come so near to me now that I have to say something, or risk him stumble across me.

  ‘Hello,’ I say.

  I see him start, turn to face me. It is the first time I have had a proper look at his face. And something in his expression catches at me. There is something in it that I recognize, something that makes me realize I don’t want to choose oblivion; not quite yet.

  *

  I wake before dawn the next morning.

  He is here next to me, the stranger, his arm thrown behind his head. The underside of his arm is pale: blue-white, soft skin. There is a vulnerability to his face in sleep that I thought he must go to great pains to disguise in his waking hours.

  Last night, I was brave, or mad, or something between the two; blown towards him by the force of my despair. I sought another kind of oblivion through him. The woman of the evening before was a completely different creature to myself now. Part of me wishes I still had her courage. I know that I am a coward again, I can feel it. I am a coward, and I will go back to my husband, because the other options available to me are too frightening in the light of day. I run from the apartment like a thief.

  On our flight back to New York, I am aware of an ache in my chest, almost like grief. I suppose it is the knowledge that I really have said goodbye to her this time – that girl that I was.

  She moves in his arms so she can look at his face. ‘So you see, I tried to leave him, and I wasn’t brave enough to do it. And when we returned to New York everything went back to how it had been. I had thought it would be hard, pretending I didn’t know. It was easy. So much easier than I would have thought.’

  ‘You should leave him. If not for how he lied, then for how he treats you, now. He diminishes you.’

  A long silence. Then she says, ‘I know. But I thought all of that before, and then I realized that I wouldn’t know where to begin. You get used to living in a certain way. I’ve left it too late. Starting a new life at sixteen is one thing, but now …’

  ‘You don’t have any ties. You don’t have any children, even.’

  ‘No,’ she says, quietly. ‘I don’t. But I do h
ave a home, a life.’

  ‘Even if those are a sham?’ But he stops himself from saying more. Who is he to convince her to give these up, he who has neither?

  There is a long silence. Then she says, ‘I keep wondering—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If the reason I feel free, now, is precisely because this’ – she gestures to the bed, the room – ‘isn’t real life. It’s make-believe. It is a fantasy.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He had, at first. Right at the beginning, he had wondered if the very reason he was drawn to her was because she was beyond his reach. But he doesn’t believe it any longer. He tries to put it into words. ‘I think,’ he says, ‘actually, that this might be the one real thing that has happened to me in a long time.’ For once, he is articulate. In saying it he realizes the truth of it. How, suddenly, the future is all possibility.

  He turns to her. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  She won’t look at him. ‘It’s impossible, Hal. I have had … a wonderful couple of days.’ He sees her wince a little at the triteness of it. ‘But something like this, it can’t last.’

  ‘What if it did, though?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Never has he felt so inarticulate: never has he so keenly felt the need for the right words.

  She shakes her head, half-smiles. ‘You and I don’t know one another well enough to discover the things we will hate about each other yet. That’s all it is.’

  He looks at her, wonders if she can mean it. Reminds himself of all her talk of playing a part. No doubt she has become very adept indeed. Besides, she is right. They hardly know one another. It is the thing that, sometimes, is too easy to forget. Especially now that she has become the keeper of his secret, too.

  The intimacy between them has disintegrated. She excuses herself, returns to her room, and all the strange magic of the last hour goes with her. But he has told her, that thing he hadn’t until now even been able to put on paper. Already, it has changed him. That, at least, is real.

  33

  That afternoon, Hal sits with Gaspari on the stone jetty. The director has been swimming, and Hal realizes it is the first time he has seen him less than immaculately turned out. His wet hair is plastered to his head, the thin patches showing the whiteness of his pate. He looks frailer still without his clothes, the hunch of his shoulders appears more pronounced, and his skin in the sun’s glare is parchment- coloured.

  Hal watches as he closes his eyes against the light, and stretches himself back on his towel. ‘It is always a pleasure,’ he says, ‘coming here. A funny thing, that being struck by lightning could turn out so well.’

  Hal nods. If Gaspari knew the whole story, he thinks. In the couple of days here, everything has changed.

  ‘It is them,’ Gaspari says. He nods toward the Conte and Contessa, who are some way out, swimming strongly. From here, one might almost believe they were two youths. ‘There are days when I assume it is over for me. Love, real happiness … I decide that these things belong to youth. I decide that it is the way of someone like me: to be alone, to be melancholy. And then I spend a few days with them, these people who found one another a little later in life, and I begin to have hope.’

  ‘Would you choose it again, even knowing the pain it could bring?’

  Gaspari nods. ‘When you find something that rare, amico, it is seldom a matter of choice. If you find it, you must hold to it, fast.’

  He goes for a walk, alone, along the sea path. All afternoon, the idea has been insinuating itself to him. Each time, he tries to stifle it. He imagines himself tramping it down under his feet with each step. And yet … several hours later, it is still there on the edge of thought. At supper, they sit on opposite sides of the table. Coiffed, immaculate, she is unnervingly the other version of herself once more. Until those occasions when her gaze meets his and then ricochets quickly away.

  His plan to leave Rome, to leave Europe for somewhere wilder, more remote. He had assumed he would go alone. But what if they went together? If they were to do so, it would be a constructive act. They could make a new life somewhere. The thing that had stopped her, she said, had been her own cowardice, her fear of starting again on her own. This would be different.

  It could be madness, to even consider sharing the sacred thing that is his plan for the future with someone who is still so nearly a stranger. It would be a gamble. The thing that he comes back to, though, is that the alternative will be to lose her, for good. When considered like this the other thing is not so significant a risk. And a risk in contrast to what? His solitary life in Rome, the unlovely apartment? The key is to convince her: she who has more to lose.

  As it is, the moment is forced.

  ‘I have had word from your husband,’ the Contessa tells Stella, at supper. ‘The yacht is mended, and he will travel with Roberto from Genoa.’

  Hal watches Stella, and thinks: the time is now, is tonight. He would wish for longer. Everything between them is still so new. But he knows that as soon as Truss returns she will retreat until her braver self is all but suffocated.

  When he is certain that the others are sleeping, he goes to her room, and knocks quietly on the door. He puts his case to her with all the certainty and composure of a lawyer. When he has finished she puts her hand to her forehead, as though she has a headache.

  ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I suddenly feel very old. Old and tired. We don’t—’

  ‘I know,’ he says, ‘I know. But we could get to know each other. And, if it didn’t work … well, I would let you go.’

  He watches her, thinking it through.

  She looks up at him. ‘Hal, he would go mad. I’m sure he would know how to find me.’

  Hal can believe it, too. Truss seems the sort of man who would be ruthless in tracking down the whereabouts of something he had lost.

  ‘We would disappear. We’d go somewhere no one could find us. That would be the whole point. We could change our names, we could become different people completely. I’ve heard of men in Rome who will make up a passport in any nationality or identity you like so long as you pay their fee.’

  ‘You’ve thought about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I have. It may be that we hardly know each other. I agree, it would be a great risk. But you are the only person with whom I have shared that part of myself. And I think it’s the same for you.’

  She nods.

  ‘That has to be important.’

  For the first time, she appears to properly consider it. He can see the shift as she turns it over. ‘Hal,’ she says, ‘no. It’s madness.’

  ‘Fine.’ He is humiliated: she has made him look needy. He wants to tell her that it has cost him to get to this point, how he worked to convince himself, too – how he is certain of it, now. But there is no use in it: he has put his case, and she has rejected it.

  He leaves the room.

  Her

  After he has gone, I sit for a long time on the bed, thinking. It would be an act of madness, exactly as I told him. But I wonder if he saw how I was pulled towards it, this idea of his. I am, even now. It would mean starting again, rewriting myself. The prospect excites as much as it terrifies. It is what I did in Madrid. That, though, was an act of survival. The necessary thing. But the last time I did it, I was so young. I was still a child. I had even less to lose. I had nothing, in fact – except myself.

  *

  Hal sleeps badly. He tries telling himself that it is for the best, that it would only have caused complications. This way will be cleaner. The problem is that the future, without her in it, appears less complete. If none of this had happened, he might have been content – or as near to it as possible.

  And then he sees the door opening.

  ‘Explain it to me again,’ she says, coming towards him, ‘how it would work.’

  PART FOUR

  34

  It is the Contessa who sees
her first. ‘Ah, la mia barca!’

  All turn to see. And there she is: the distinctive shape of the sails, gleaming like silver in the morning light, the twin masts good as new.

  She gains upon them all too quickly, growing from a speck to a toy yacht to the real thing, and Hal watches in trepidation, as one might the approach of an advancing enemy. This only increases when the yacht is close enough for him to see the figures on deck. Truss is talking to Roberto at the stern.

  ‘Ah,’ the Contessa says. ‘But of course. Roberto must have picked him up in Genoa. How sensible.’ Yet she does not seem overly pleased at the sight of him.

  Hal glances at Stella, and finds her looking at him, her expression unreadable. Is she slipping a little away from him? Is her resolve already becoming muddied? He will have to trust her: there is nothing else. Out of sight, below the wall, he brushes his hand against hers. He feels her fingers thread through his, and grip them, briefly, before she moves them away.

  A couple of hours later, sitting on the deck of the Pygmalion once more, with the castle lost to view, the events of the last couple of days become yet more unreal. Hal cannot help but notice that both Stella and Truss have disappeared. He tries not to pay it any attention, not to let those thoughts take root in his mind. In only a few days’ time they will be alone together once more. Now they cannot risk suspicion. Naturally, for the time being, she must play her part.

  They will leave when they reach France – during Cannes. Of course there are doubts. The important thing, he thinks, is that none of them are powerful enough to change his mind.

  35

  San Remo

  A place of blowsy splendour: sea-front phalanxes of tall palms, orange trees laden with ripe fruit, the wedding-cake grandeur of the Casino and the Russian Orthodox church.

  ‘It is a little vulgar,’ the Contessa says to Hal, joining him at the bow. ‘But that is the French influence, naturally.’