Kitabı oku: «The Silent Fountain»

For Joanna Croot

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright

PROLOGUE

Italy, Summer 2016

It was always the same dream, and every time she saw it coming. She knew where it began. A bright light, gathering pace from a sheet of dark. A lucid thought, a picture more real than any she could fathom in waking hours. Afraid to look but more afraid to resist, she stepped towards the light, arms open, weak, and she knew it was a trick, but suddenly there she was, blissful, forgetting, her lips on his forehead, his soft skin and his smell; she could capture it now, so many years later and on the other side of consciousness. His hair, the warmth of his body, they were locked away in the deepest parts inside her, still intact despite the storms that place had weathered.

She knew where it ended. He shouldn’t have spoken; he shouldn’t have asked.

Don’t leave me. Come with me. I’m waiting.

I’ll catch you. We’ll be together again.

The water, still and cool and silver and quiet. Inviting. Come with me…

I’m waiting.

*

The woman wakes with a jolt. Her bedclothes are bunched and damp with sweat. It takes a moment to surface, the weight of water all around, pressing down. The air is tight in her lungs.

Adalina, the maid, comes in, opens the shutters and welcomes the day.

‘There, signora, that’s better. How did you sleep?’

Quick, efficient, the maid sets down the breakfast tray, pillows plumped, sheets pulled tight. And then the rainbow of pills, a box of medicines laid out like sweets, as if the colours make it better, make her want to take them, willingly.

The woman coughs; it is like bringing something solid up, a ball of wire.

There is blood on her handkerchief: a spray of bright dots, the worst omen. It won’t be long now. She folds it into her clenched palm. Adalina pretends not to see.

‘I…’ The woman’s mind is empty. Her tongue is swollen, a stranger to her mouth, as if she is the one who has swallowed the swamp.

‘Open the window,’ she says.

A flick of the wrist; the sun spills in. She can see the tips of the cypress trees, twelve fingers pointing towards the sky. She used to think he was up there, believe in useless comforts, but she doesn’t any more. He isn’t in the sky. He isn’t in the clouds. He isn’t even in the ground. He is inside her. Calling her, needing her.

Air. Warmth. Birdsong. She receives the scent of her budding gardens, can picture the roses on the arches beginning to bloom, pink and sweet, and the lavender and chives clustered against their high chalk walls, bursting white and lilac. How easily the outside creeps in. How easily it bridges that line, as fast and fluid as rain. How easily she ought to be able to do the same, one step, one foot in front of the other, that was all it took, that was what the doctors said. The same as trespassing into those rooms, those wings, that have been locked in dust for decades: unbearable now.

‘Such a beautiful house,’ they whispered, in the village, in the city, across the oceans for all she knew. ‘How tragic that she’s the way she is… Still, I suppose one can understand it, after…you know…’

‘The girl is due at midday,’ says Adalina, rattling the pills into a plastic receptacle at the same time as pouring the tea, as if one were no more unusual a feast than the other. ‘I’ve checked the airport and there are no delays. Will you be able to greet her? She’d like to meet you, I’m sure.’

The woman glances away. She watches her pale hands resting like a corpse’s on the sheet, the bloodstained handkerchief hidden there: a terrible key to a terrible secret. Her wrists are brittle, her nails short, and she thinks how old they look.

When did I grow old?

She shakes her head. ‘I shall stay in bed,’ she says. Just like every other day. This house has too many corners, too many secrets, crooked with shadows and silence. ‘And I shouldn’t like any disturbances. You can settle her in, I’ve no doubt.’

‘Very well, signora.’

She swallows the pills; Adalina retreats, her face a mask of discretion. The maid has no need to voice her feelings, but it is no matter. Let them be disappointed. Let them say, ‘She should make the effort. The girl’s come a long way.’ Let them think what they wish. Only she understands the impossibility of it.

Besides, she doesn’t want the girl here. She has never wanted her. The help knows too much, asks too many questions; they make it their business to pry.

What choice does she have? Adalina cannot manage. The castillo is enormous. They cannot do it alone.

This time, the truth is hers to keep. No one is getting to it.

She closes her eyes, drowsy, her pills beginning to take effect. On the cusp of sleep, she hears his voice again. Calling her from the water, the orange sun setting.

Come with me. I’ll catch you. I’m waiting.

She falls, her arms open wide.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

London

One month earlier

They say you can never love again like you love the first time. Maybe it’s the heart changing shape, unable to resume its original form. Maybe it’s the highs made more acute for their novelty and strangeness. Or maybe it’s the soul that grows wise. It learns that the risks aren’t worth taking. It learns to hurt, and in doing so protect itself.

There is consolation in this, I think, as I thread through the crowds on the Underground – commuters in rush hour, plugged into their phones; tourists checking maps and getting stuck by the ticket machines; couples kissing on the escalators – the certainty that whatever happens, wherever I end up, I will never again go through what I have been through before. We are shepherded from the Northern Line up into fresh air, where the blare and hum of the city bleeds past in myriad lights and colour. I pass a group of girls heading out for the night; they must be my age, I suppose, late twenties, but the gulf between us is yawning. I look at them as if through a window, remembering when I was like them, frivolous, carefree, naïve – how it feels to stand on the brink of the world, no mistakes made, at least none so irrevocable as mine.

One thing I love about London is the anonymity. So many people and so many lives, and it’s an irony that I came here to be noticed, to be someone, yet it was at the centre of everything that I achieved invisibility. I will miss the anonymity, when they find out. I will look back on it as a cherished prize, never to be regained once lost.

I catch the bus, staring out of the window at rapidly darkening streets. Across the aisle a guy in glasses reads the Metro, its front page belting the headline: MURDERER HELD: COPS CATCH CAR BOOT KILLER. I shiver. Will I earn my own headline, one day soon? What will they say about me? I see my name, plain old Lucy Whittaker, in the round, friendly handwriting that as a child adorned my homework, my thank you letters, the birthday cards I wrote to my friends, then latterly the typed headers on my job applications, become all at once horrid and threatening, a name to be appalled by. People I once knew will say, ‘Not that Lucy Whittaker? But she’s far too quiet, far too shy, she wouldn’t do anything like that…’

But I did, I think. I did do something like that.

We come to my stop and I step out into the evening, wrapping my coat tight as the wind picks up. I keep my head down, the plastic box clamped under my arm.

My phone beeps. For a stupid moment I think it’s him, and I despise myself for how swiftly I dive into my pocket, hand trembling and hope sinking as I realise it’s not. It’s Bill, my flatmate. Belinda’s her name, but she never liked it.

When are you home? I have wine Xxx

I’m almost there so it isn’t worth replying. My walk slows. As ever when I open my messages I find my eyes drawn to his, our chains of all-night conversations, flirty, thrilling, the way my heart danced every time that screen lit up at two in the morning. I should delete them, but I can’t. It’s as if wiping them will erase any proof that it happened in the first place. That before the bad, there was good. There was, before. It was good. What happened, there was a reason for it…

Don’t be an idiot. There is no reason. Nothing justifies what you did.

And of course he wouldn’t be in touch. He’d never be in touch. It was over.

I turn on to our street. Unlocking the front door, I see Bill still hasn’t got the hang of sorting through the post, so I scoop the scattered envelopes off the floor and divide them between the flats, before taking our own upstairs. Bill still hasn’t got the hang of a lot of shared living, I’ve noticed, like replacing loo roll or putting out the recycling every once in a while. I don’t mind, though. She’s been my best friend since we could walk; she’s been with me through it all and she’s still with me now, the only one who knows the brutal truth and even then she didn’t walk away, when she really could have. When she should have. That’s why I don’t care about the recycling.

‘How was it?’ She’s waiting when I go in, drink poured, TV on, some rehash of a talent show, and she drains the volume when I lift my shoulders.

‘As expected.’ I set the box down and consider, as I had back at the office, how five years can be compressed into five minutes’ packing. Some old notecards, my desk calendar, a sangria-bottle fridge magnet from Portugal sent to me by a client.

‘No fanfare, then?’ Bill gives me a hug and a squeeze. The squeeze brings up tears but I blink them away. ‘It’s your own fault,’ Natasha, his deputy, had hissed, as I’d slunk towards the exit of Calloway & Cooper, trying to ignore the stares that followed, fascinated and horrified, like traffic crawling past a pile-up.

Natasha has had it in for me from day one. My theory? She’s in love with him. As his Commercial Director she was widely regarded as his second in command – but then I came along, usurping her as the closest person to him, his PA, and I know she tried to get someone else into the role because Holly in Accounts told me. Only, Natasha didn’t win. I did. And I think she couldn’t handle the fact that, for a second there, towards the end, before it all went wrong, it looked as if he might have loved me back. When it blew up, all her Christmases came at once. Natasha was delighted to see me go, and couldn’t believe her luck at the circumstances that drove me to it.

I try a laugh but it dies in my throat. ‘No fanfare,’ I agree, and grab the wine and sink it in one. Bill refills me. I want to smoke a cigarette, but I’m trying to give up. Great timing, Lucy, I think. Who cares now, if you live or die? But that is melodrama, and I annoy myself for thinking it. Instead, I keep focused on the alcohol. If I keep drinking, I’ll get numb, and if I get numb, I won’t feel anything. I won’t feel his touch on my cheek, his kiss on my mouth, my neck…

‘Come on,’ says Bill, with an uncertain smile. ‘It’s finished.’

‘Is it?’

‘You never have to see those people again. You never have to see him again.’

One thing Bill doesn’t understand, and I can’t find the words to explain: I have to see him again. Even after everything, how I should want to run as far away from him as I can, I’m as addicted to him as I was the first day. Inappropriate isn’t the half of it. I read that the funeral happened this morning, in a cemetery south of the river, and I can’t stop thinking of him, rigid with grief, those grey, beautiful eyes set hard on the ground, the cool drizzle settling on the shoulders of his coat, a coat I’d once warmed my hands in on a cold night on Tower Bridge, and he’d kissed the tip of my nose. How I long to put my arms around him now, tell him I am sorry and that I miss him. When what I should be feeling is guilt, burning guilt, shame and disgrace and all those things, and I do feel them, every day I do, but at the same time I can’t forget the power of us. We don’t belong with any of that confusion or chaos or sadness.

‘…You could consider it, you know, if that’s what you want.’

Bill is looking at me gently, waiting for a response.

‘What? I was miles away.’

‘Freddy’s sister’s boyfriend,’ she says, presumably for the second time. ‘He’s just come back from Italy – that language course he went on in Florence?’ Bill prompts me and to placate her I nod, even though I have no memory of this (so much over the last twelve months has dissolved to insignificance; I can’t even remember who Freddy is – someone Bill works with?). ‘While he was out there,’ she goes on, ‘he made friends with this girl who was looking after a house on weekends. Well, I say house, but it’s more like a mansion. In fact Freddy said it was this giant pile, and someone famous lives there but the friend never met her, and anyway, this woman’s a recluse and never goes out.’ Bill slumps down on the sofa. ‘Sounds intriguing, right? Like the start of a novel.’ There’s something behind the cushion and she reaches to retrieve it. ‘Hey,’ her face lights up, ‘I found 50p!’

I frown. ‘What’s this got to do with me?’

Bill crosses her legs. ‘The girl got fired and they’re looking for someone to replace her. All very hush-hush… apparently they’d never advertise. The woman sounds a bit weird, sure, but how hard could it be? Dusting a few shelves, sweeping the floor…’ She makes a face and I wonder if her knowledge of looking after a house extends beyond Cinderella. ‘Then getting to sunbathe all day with some sexy Italian you’ve met in the city? I’d do it myself if I didn’t have to go to work on Monday.’

I’m wary. ‘What are you suggesting?’

‘Think about it, Lucy.’ Her voice softens. ‘Since this thing happened, you’ve been desperate to get away. You haven’t stopped talking about it, how you can’t stay here. Look,’ she says, standing, ‘I want to show you something.’ She steers me to the mirror in the hall. ‘Tell me what you see,’ she says. ‘Honestly.’

It doesn’t help that strewn across the wall are pictures from the days before. Nights out with Bill, holidays with friends, a bungee jump I did on my twenty-fifth birthday, after I finally broke free from home and started building a future for myself. That’s how I see it, this looming punctuation mark in the story of my life, isolating the years preceding him and the lonely days after, creeping into weeks, and I was a different girl then: bright, hopeful, lucky, alive. What do I see now? A dull ache in my eyes, my skin wan with nights spent thinking and wondering and turning over what ifs, hollowness in my cheeks, and sadness, mostly sadness.

‘I don’t want to do this,’ I say, shrugging free.

‘You’re not you, Lucy. This isn’t you.’

‘What do you expect?’ I round on her, not keen on starting a fight but unable to help it. I need to shout at someone, to be angry, because I’m sick of being angry with myself. ‘Her funeral was today – did you know that? And I’m supposed to leave everything behind, the mess I’ve made, and swan off to Italy for a holiday?’

‘It’s not a holiday,’ says Bill, ‘it’s a job. And, let’s face it, you need one.’

‘I’ll manage.’

‘What about the press?’ She’s silenced me now. ‘What about when they’re blowing up your phone, or when they’re smashing down the door and you’re afraid to go outside? Do you think he’s going to defend you, then? He doesn’t care, Lucy – he doesn’t give a crap about you. He’ll put it all on you and then how’s it going to look?’

‘Don’t say those things about him.’

‘Fine, we won’t go there. You know how I feel. My point is: this is your chance. I mean, talk about timing! You could leave it all, come back once it’s settled.’

‘How’s it getting settled?’

‘It will. Everything fades eventually.’

I snort. But my back is to her, so she can’t see my face.

‘What’s the alternative?’ Bill asks.

I think about the alternative. Fronting the world, my family, my face splashed across the nation’s papers, quotes taken out of context, painted to be someone I’m not.

Would he break his silence then? Would he reach to help me; would he stand at my side? Bill’s words sting: He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a crap about you.

Her question hangs unanswered. It’s all I can do to turn to my friend, the fight gone out of me. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, meaning it, and she shakes her head like it doesn’t matter. ‘I just…’ A well swims up my chest, threatening to spill over, and my voice goes funny. ‘I’m just not coping.’

‘I know.’ Bill hugs me. ‘Please promise me you’ll consider it?’

In bed that night, I do. Lying awake, pretending to myself that I’m not waiting for my phone to light up, I listen to the passing hum of traffic that gradually dwindles to quiet, before, at around two, I finally fall asleep. The last thing I think of, for the first time in months, isn’t him. It’s a house, surrounded by cypress trees, deep in the middle of the Italian hills. As I walk towards dreams, I’m in a tangled rose garden. Something unseen beckons me, a shadow slipping in and out of sunlight.

I come to a fountain, quiet and glittering silver.

I look in the pool at my reflection.

It takes a moment to recognise myself. For a heartbeat, it’s not me I see.

CHAPTER TWO

Italy

My train arrives in Florence three weeks later. It’s happened quickly – the best way, Bill tells me, to counter my usual inclination to overthink everything – and back in London I barely had time to make my decision, take a short phone interview with the owner of the house, renew my passport and get my papers sorted before Bill was yanking my suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and encouraging me to fill it.

I suspect she’s right. Without getting caught up in momentum, there would have been too many opportunities to stall, to opt out, to say that something this reckless and ill thought through really wasn’t me. Then again, what was? What made Lucy Whittaker? I had forgotten. I had lost her – and I wasn’t going to find her hanging around in our Camden flat, jobless and trapped in the past.

‘Go.’ Bill held me by the shoulders when she said goodbye. ‘Don’t think about anything here. Be happy, Lucy. Let go. Fall in love with Italy.’

My first impressions of the city aren’t great. Santa Maria Novella station is hot and crowded; I’m on the receiving end of a wave of distrustful glances when I kneel to sort through my bag because a bottle of shampoo leaked over my clothes on the flight to Pisa, and, as I’m trying to fathom the bus timetable to get me into the centre, a guy falls into me from behind, apologises – ‘Mi scusi, signora…’ – and seconds later I realise fifty euros are missing from the back pocket of my jeans. But when we enter the streets that I recognise, see the bronzed, proud hood of the Duomo with its decorative Campanile, all that marble shimmering pink and white in the sunshine, I forget my plight for a moment and succumb to Florence’s spell. Locals speed past on mopeds, exploding dust on cobbled streets; pizzerias open their shutters for lunch, red and white checked tablecloths being laid on a baking-hot terrace while waiters smoke idly, breaking before service; tourists wander past in sunhats, licking pink gelato from cornets; a dog drinks from a pipe on the Via del Corso. We said we’d come together, once, he and I. He wanted to bring me, promised we’d take a boat out on the Arno, eat spaghetti and drink wine; we’d stroll around the Uffizi, fall asleep in the afternoon in the Boboli Gardens. ‘Forget Paris – Florence is the most romantic city in the world.’

The bus stops and I have to move, as if physical distance might stow the memories away, as if I can leave him here in the empty seat next to mine.

It’s a quick change to take the bus to Fiesole. I’m ready to get there now, see the house and meet its proprietor, fill my hours with tasks that have nothing to do with him or my life at home. My dad wanted to know what on earth I was doing. ‘Italy?’ he interrogated. ‘Why? What about work? You left your job, Lucy? What happened?’

My sisters were the same. Sophie called from a fashion shoot to tell me I was walking away from the best role I’d ever have. Helen emailed from the luxury of her Thamesside apartment to brag about her lawyer fiancé being made partner at his firm, then saying as an afterthought that my ‘mini-break’ in Florence should be fun, but why wasn’t I going with a boyfriend? As for Tilda, I haven’t heard from her in weeks. She’s scuba diving in Barbados, with a surfer named Marc. Unlike the others, Tilda didn’t go to university. That was probably my biggest battle, as the eldest, trying to run my own life while taking the place of our mum: the endless months of Tilda stalemate, attempting to convince her that I knew better when maybe I didn’t.

The years between us are nothing significant, the kind of gap an ordinary family wouldn’t think twice about. But, for us, they were everything. They marked me as an adult before my time, and my sisters as children when really they could have been more. Helping to raise them was just what happened, a natural choice – no, not a choice, a given, but never one I resented. My dad couldn’t do it alone, and my sisters were too young to understand what it meant to be without their mother. It broke my heart that she would never see them pass their first exams, meet their first boyfriends, make and break those intense alliances exclusive to teenage girls, ever see them engaged or married or with children of their own – and of course much of this applied to me, although I never dwelled on that. I’m proud of the role I took on, but sometimes I wonder what might have been if I’d had the chance to have normal teenage years, be a normal girl. Then, maybe, my first love and first mistakes would have been less devastating than the ones that brought me here.

As the Tuscan countryside rolls past, winding and winding up from Florence through flame-shaped cypress trees and golden fields dotted with heat-drenched villas, I consider if what I’m doing here is exactly what I did after Mum died. Running without moving. Building a wall of practical tasks, tangible end goals, things I can get my hands dirty with, to avoid feeling… Feeling what? Just feeling.

None of my sisters knows about what happened. It’s not their fault – I haven’t told them. I’ve never told my family anything about my life, and the more personal it is, the more precious and the less willing I am to share it. Because I’ve always been the reliable, responsible one, and I’ve always looked after myself. I’ve never needed them for comfort or reassurance, not like they’ve needed me.

They’ll find out soon. Everyone will.

And then what?

The question echoes in my mind, unanswered and unanswerable.

‘Piazza Mino,’ the driver calls, as the bus jolts to a stop. I haul my bag. There’s no GPS signal so I consult the map I printed before I left, and begin walking.

The path is scorching. My muscles burn as I travel uphill, bright sun drenching the backs of my legs. I enjoy the air in my lungs, the sheen of sweat that gathers on my lip. These things make me feel alive, remind me I’m still breathing.

Thirty minutes later, I’m hot and thirsty. I’ve long since left the village behind and entered an ochre landscape, fields of maize and barley rolling wide on both sides, as I climb dusty lanes and take refuge in the occasional dapple of the olive groves. Silver-backed leaves offer flickering shade and I rest a while beneath them, drinking from my bottle and starting to feel faintly worried that I shall never find this place.

Then, beneath the smell of almonds and the sweet hint of blue-black grapes, a brighter scent: I spy a crop of lemon trees over the hill, running as far as the eye can see, each richly laden with yellow fruit. Squinting against the sun, I step up to the wall. On the horizon, melting to a blur in the fragrant heat, there is a building. It is enormous, its façade the colour of overripe peaches and with a sprawling, age-damaged terracotta roof. There are turrets, and the dark outline of arched windows.

I look at the map. This is it. The Castillo Barbarossa.

The road winds in a great loop around the estate and, making a decision, I topple my bag over the wall and opt for the shortcut. If the size of the castillo is anything to go by, it owns this grove and several other hectares beyond. I pick my way among the fruit trees. The lemons make me want to drink. I picture the owner of the house welcoming me with a refreshing glass, but then I remember what Bill told me. I remember what the woman was like on the phone – that strange, stilted interview, disconcertingly brief and undetailed, as if she hadn’t wanted to speak to me at all and was doing so under duress. I was relieved to know she wasn’t Italian, as I was planning to learn the language on the job; instead, I met a hint of an American accent, blunted by years in Europe and carrying with it the sharp plumminess of wealth and power. Afterwards, I told myself the connection had been bad. It would be better when we met in person. The follow-up message I received to tell me I’d been successful was testament that I had passed muster. There was nothing to doubt.

As I come closer to the house, dwarfed now by its massive proportions, the sun slips behind a cloud. The place looks ancient, and curiously un-lived-in, its wooden shutters bolted, its creamy walls more cracked and dilapidated than they had appeared from a distance. A sprawl of dark green creepers climbs like a skin rash up one side. I frown, checking the map again, then fold it and put it in my pocket.

Wide stone steps descend from the entrance, spilling on to a gravel shelf that rolls on to a second, then a third, then a fourth, at one time grand and verdant but now left to decades of neglect, their oval planters crumbling and full of dead, twisted things. At the helm is a fountain, long defunct, a stone shape rising from its basin that I cannot decipher from here. I feel as if I have seen the fountain before, though of course that is impossible. I emerge on to the drive and when I pass the fountain I do not want to look at it. Instead, I stop at the door and raise my hand.

CHAPTER THREE

The woman hears the door go. They have so few visitors that it shakes her with a jolt. She hasn’t been sleeping but she hasn’t been awake: somewhere in between.

Distant voices. One is Adalina’s; the other belongs to a stranger.

The woman sits, unease racing from her toes to her stomach, where it settles. She watches the walls, listens for the telltale creaks of a board, wonders how long it will be before Adalina explains her absence. What will the maid say? How much will she elaborate? The woman has been clear about the story she wishes to tell, but whether that story gets translated, behind locked doors, in hidden corridors, in hushed voices in the old servants’ quarters, is another thing. She is no fool.

It is an effort to bring her legs out of bed, but the floor feels welcome on her naked soles. Sometimes she pictures the materials of this house, the solid wood and hard marble, the cool stone, absorbing every thought and feeling her body has expelled. If she squeezes the drapes, tears will seep out, like the wringing of a cloth; if she scratches the stairways, secrets will plume and curl in a thin ribbon: grey smoke.

She goes to the door and checks it is locked. At the window, she parts the shutters and checks the approach for some clue of the girl who has entered her home. There is none. Just the distant spread of olive groves and a wide, empty sky.

Her reflection is transparent in the glass, a see-through woman. It is forgiving, this trick: it makes her appear young, no shadows, no creases – no evidence of the painful years that have scarred her face. She can seldom recall the person she was; it is like peering into someone else’s life, a life that bears no relation whatsoever to one’s own. It is peculiar to think of that other self. She sees the photographs and watches the movies; she reads the items they printed about her in magazines, that bright white smile, the lacquered waves of blonde hair, that slick of raspberry lipstick… She’d been beautiful. There was no denying it. She’d been charming. She’d been witty. She’d been scintillating. Everybody had wanted to know her.

How quickly the world forgot. How efficiently tragedy brought leprosy on whomever it inflicted. She ought to be grateful for her obscurity. Most days she was, but on others she thought about the woman she had given up, or who had given up on her, and the difference between her life then and her life now was so staggering, so acute and painful that it stole her breath away. That vanished her would have flung the door wide and gone to greet their guest. She would have intimidated her with beauty and standing, and enjoyed the effect those assets had. No female would have got the better of her. But that was another world. She has learned a lot since then.

The shutters close, blink-quick. One glimpse of the fountain is enough. Adalina cannot understand why she doesn’t switch rooms. It might make her sleep better, chase the nightmares away. But she cannot. Instead she rests her forehead against the wall, a shiver of cold rinsing her body. She fights the bleeding cough that rattles in her throat, fights with all her might but still it breaks free, a warning, a candle slowly licking itself to extinction. A thread of sunlight filters through the shutters and on to the floor, where it pools, and at its centre a black beetle circles pointlessly, round and round, round and round, intent on its journey, going nowhere.

She’d been going somewhere, once. Years ago, in another life, a young girl with her toe on the brink… She’d had it all ahead of her, the map undrawn.

CHAPTER FOUR

Vivien, America, 1972

It was April, the hottest on record. In the little chapel in Claremont, South Carolina, Vivien Lockhart and her mother stood side by side, Vivien careful not to slouch or round her shoulders because her father told her off for that, and when he told her off she’d be better off dead. Her white cotton dress stuck uncomfortably to her waist and she longed to tear it off, run in her petticoats down the aisle and out into the fresh air where the other teenagers were leaping into rivers and sunbathing on the grass, climbing trees and kissing boys. But instead she stayed where she was, every part of her yearning for more, pretending to pray and not to be having any of these thoughts.

Eventually, the silence was broken. Both Vivien and her mother straightened, just as they did at home, where, when the man of the house opened his mouth, all else ceased to exist. He demanded to be heard, and never more than when he was talking about God. His congregation clung to his every word. Vivien thought of him at the breakfast table that morning, wiping dots of fatty milk from his moustache, flipping out the newspaper and telling them that the blacks were getting away with murder.

‘And what did the Lord say when the blind man came to Him, and asked to see again?’ Gilbert Lockhart paused, forehead beaded with sweat and excitement. He leaned forward, extending one talon-like finger, like a vulture peering off a tree branch. ‘He said, in all His Glory and Almighty Power, I grant you eternal sight!’

The crowd exploded in applause. Even the prim Mrs Brigham, in her neatly pressed frock and a hat that resembled a bowl of fruit, shook with elation.

‘And what did the Lord say when the deaf man came to Him?’

This time, the minister’s beady eyes landed on his wife.

‘I grant you eternal hearing,’ replied Millicent obediently. The crowd went up, their shouts at fever pitch. Gilbert forced his wife and daughter to rehearse their script before every sermon. He would hit them when they slipped a word or forgot a line – stupid women, dumb women, good-for-nothing women without a sensible thought in their head. Vivien wondered if he trusted these lies. She didn’t know which was worse – that he was mad enough to, or that he knew he spun a wicked fiction.

Vivien knew what was coming, though every time she wished it weren’t so.

‘Indeed,’ cried Gilbert, ‘ye shall hear for ever!’

Vivien joined in with the appreciation, hoping that might be enough for him today, her mouth already drying at the thought of having to speak. But then he turned on her, and so too did the attention of his flock, for, in her lily-white dress with her neatly ringleted blonde curls, sixteen-year-old Vivien was the only child of the most beloved man in their community. Every word that spilled from her lips was nectar.

‘And what,’ said Gilbert slowly, ‘did the Lord, in all his wisdom and mercy, bestow upon the man who feared for his life?’

She knew the answer. The trouble was, she didn’t believe it. How could she say something she didn’t believe in? Millicent jabbed an elbow into her side.

‘I don’t know, Daddy,’ said Vivien meekly.

Gilbert was making an effort to remain calm. She could tell by the lightly throbbing vein in his temple. Just say it. Say what he wants to hear.

Above her father’s head, Jesus stared down at her from the cross, feet nailed with a bolt, a bloody crown of thorns around his head. The crimson slash in his side grinned horrendously. His chest was concave, his ribs visible. He died for your sins. Words Vivien heard every day of her life, and she didn’t understand them now any more than she had when they were first uttered. Vivien had never sinned – at least not in any way so serious as to condemn a man to death. Telling Mother that next door’s dog had eaten the vanilla-cream muffins when in fact it had been her didn’t count.

‘Yes, you do,’ said her father.

Say it. Or you know what will happen. Her mother did, too. Millicent was stiff as a board at her side, her head bowed. Why did she never stand up for herself – or for her daughter? Like when Vivien asked to play with the Chauncey kids one evening on their lake swing, or she was invited to Bridget Morrow’s birthday party and had the idea of going dressed as her favourite movie star, or she wanted to run barefoot across the prairie after lunch and chase the wild ponies who grazed there, her mother would fold her arms and say brittly: ‘Your father won’t like it.’ And that was the end of that.

What did her father like? Apart from God, she didn’t know.

Did he even like her?

‘He said,’ Gilbert capitulated in a strained voice, its menace perceptible only to his family, ‘I shall take your Fear away, and grant you everlasting Peace!’

The pews exploded once more in adulation.

But there would be no peace for them tonight.

*

Gilbert Lockhart was a supreme minister. His disciples exalted him. Vivien watched him outside church every Sunday, shaking hands, issuing blessings, and wondered where this kind, caring man went the instant they arrived home on their porch.

Today, she didn’t wait to find out. No sooner were they inside than she ran upstairs to her bedroom. Her father was mad. Crazy mad. She’d seen it in his eyes on the drive back, their pearl-grey Cadillac bouncing along the dirt track, how he glanced at her every so often in the rear-view, cold, threatening, a Just you wait kind of glance.

She wished she had a lock on her door. Instead, Vivien hauled a chair to lever against the knob. She pressed her ear against the wood. No footsteps yet. She focused on slowing her racing heart, safe now in her room, where no one could get her.

Downstairs, she could hear his booming voice, and her mother’s answering one, frail and meek, conciliatory. The weak attempt Millicent would make at dissuading him from his wrath, but as soon as he struck her the fight would go out of her. Vivien balled her fists. She had known at church that it would end this way, but even if she could go back and do it differently, she wouldn’t.

I don’t believe what he says, she thought. And it wasn’t that she didn’t believe in God – she didn’t know what she believed in, it was too early to say – but she didn’t for one moment accept any kind of creed whereby a man could be a saint to his congregation, could spout about good and evil and fairness and forgiveness, then beat his wife and daughter black and blue the second they were out of sight. That wasn’t a religion Vivien was interested in. She couldn’t lie for him. She couldn’t lie to herself.

Opening her closet, she stared at the bag inside. Take it. Go.

It was everything she needed, enough to get started. Over the past year, sitting cross-legged on her bed, deep in the deep, dark night, when the house was quiet and the only light left on in the town was the light of the moon, it had given Vivien solace to choose these belongings, fingering the hem of a blouse or the edge of a pin. I will leave this place. I will get away. I will, I will… She had almost been able to forget the stinging welts across her back, like paint slashed on a canvas, slowly drying.

Vivien knelt to the bag. In the front pocket was a crumple of bills, money she had collected from girls at school for completing their homework. What else had she to do with her time? While girls like Felicity and Bridget were taken dancing or to the pictures, Vivien was made to study every hour she wasn’t in class. Once, she had completed her Math prep early and asked to be excused; Gilbert branded her a liar, smacking her and telling her she would never be clever enough to finish so quick, and she could forget about leaving the house until she had. From then on, Vivien resolved to take her classmates’ work home, too. Gilbert told her she wasn’t allowed a job, wasn’t allowed to earn, because money gave women ‘ideas’. Ironically, it was he who facilitated her first transactions, and he who had set her in the direction of escape.

From downstairs came the sound of china smashing… followed by silence. Vivien slammed the closet shut, diving to the security of her bed.

Something crackled beneath her head. Carefully, she slid her hand beneath her pillow to withdraw the folded paper, before with reverence she flattened it out. It was like looking through a window into another universe. Someone’s sister in the top grade had had the poster pasted up inside her locker. Vivien envied it, seeing it in the corridor; she had never clapped eyes on anything so glamorous and stylish, a beautiful woman in a mini-skirt, and a man gazing on with a look in his eye she was too young to pinpoint but that promised something sweet and strange. Vivien had paid the girl a week’s earnings, and the girl, about to chuck the wrinkled old thing away, accepted. Audrey Hepburn in How to Steal a Million – that impish beehive, a thousand miles from Vivien’s own constructed ponytail, promised fun and naughtiness and freedom; and her daringly exposed knees, never to be seen in Claremont Town, at least not without a slap on the thigh that bloomed humiliated-red. The poster had fed her appetite for Hollywood, as had a cherished photo she’d found in last month’s paper of Marlon Brando (was it possible that people that handsome existed? They certainly didn’t in Claremont) and a glossy print of Sophia Loren, so exotic and dangerous.

The impulse to conceal them had been instant. There was no place in her father’s world for such things. Vivien could hear Gilbert’s words without needing to provoke them: Hollywood was a filthy breeding ground of vanity and wickedness. Money and fame were for sinners; they held no value in the eyes of the Lord. Anyone who followed that road was heading for disaster – that way the Devil’s arms opened.

Every night before sleep, Vivien would look at her pictures, these faraway people, and remind herself that they were real, that this life did exist, many miles from here and who knew how many risks beyond, but it did. It did.

And maybe, one day, she would find the courage to follow.

In the meantime, it gave Vivien pleasure to keep a secret from her parents. They fundamentally outnumbered her. How she yearned for a brother or a sister! Once, she had thought there was a chance. Vivien had prayed for an ally, a friend, and her father always told her that God answered prayers – but He hadn’t answered this one. There had been a time, years ago, hazy now in her memory, when Millicent had brightened, blossomed – then one night, when the stars were silver-bright, she and Gilbert had driven in a rush to the hospital. At dawn, her mother had returned pale and ruined, and Vivien had found a pair of bloody knickers in the laundry basket. Later, when she finally plucked up the mettle to ask after a possible sibling, she had been slapped hard round the cheek and the subject had never been raised again.

Thump, thump, thump… The footsteps made her wait longer than usual, but when they came they were unmistakeable. A slur to his gait: he’d been drinking, hence the delay. What was it the Bible said about abstinence? Gilbert Lockhart chose which orders to obey. More often, he made up his own. The belt was one of them.

Quickly, Vivien bundled the poster back under her pillow. She watched the door until, sure enough, the brass knob began to rattle. There was a brief quiet, then a shove, and the chair began to shake. Then there her father was, a glorious rageful vision, red-blotched and a fire in his eyes, his hands like rocks at his sides.

‘You stupid girl,’ he spat. ‘You know what happens when you disobey and yet still you do it. You got your mother into trouble as well. Are you happy now?’

I’m not happy. I can never be happy here – with you.

But still Vivien could not bring herself to say sorry, when there was nothing to be sorry for. She sat completely still, taking her mind away to a place he couldn’t touch, a place that was hers alone. She imagined she was Audrey Hepburn or Sophia Loren. Like a golden light, fantasies of a glittering Hollywood encircled her, a life in the sunshine, by the sea, with a man who loved her. The bag in the closet shone in her heart like a beacon, its promise mere feet from where her father stood but utterly invisible to him. He was the stupid one, the blind one. He always had been.

‘Showing me up like that,’ he seethed. ‘You deserve to be punished.’

As Gilbert drew his belt from its buckle, Vivien knew what she had to do – kneel on the floor, lean over the bed, just like she was begging – and it was easier not to fight. Physically, she would always lose. She had to be cleverer than that. And as the first stroke stung the backs of her thighs, that hot, searing pain she knew so well, she prayed. Not to God, or any god her father recognised. She prayed to herself – to be strong, and to do what she must. I will get out of here, she vowed.

Tomorrow, I’m running away.

CHAPTER FIVE

Italy, Summer 2016

‘You must be Lucy.’

I am greeted at the door by a woman, her hair scraped back in a bun, not unfriendly looking but at the same time I’m hesitant to call it a greeting because it’s distinctly lacking in warmth. She introduces herself as Adalina, ‘personal maid to Signora’. As she ushers me over the threshold, her manner is one of a hostess at a dinner party, obliged to show guests around but with her mind perpetually on some other distracting matter: if everyone’s glasses are filled, who is mingling with whom, if the canapés are running low. I smile, deciding friendliness is the best approach.

It’s impossible to hide my surprise as I step into the hall. Adalina glances at me with satisfaction. Working here every day, she must forget the impact the place has on new arrivals. For a moment, I’m stunned.

‘It isn’t what you expected,’ says Adalina.

I gather myself. ‘I’m not sure what I expected.’

There is one word for the atrium in which we are standing – enormous – and the word echoes in my head, those round, open vowels, just as it might around the ceiling’s frescoed vaults. A shaft of sunshine spills from a circular window in the cupola, warming the flagstone floor. It’s church-like, and breathtakingly beautiful – but at the same time somehow tragic, and I stare up at the painted figures on the arched ceiling, angels and terrors, weeping and clasping, a maelstrom of human experience. In an alcove by the door, a finely painted Madonna in Prayer kneels, her hands together and head lowered, in blessing or mourning for visitors, perhaps both.

Adalina rings a large, heavy bell, one that brings to mind wake-up calls in boarding school dormitories, and an old man appears at the foot of the stairs. He wears a faded blue cap and frayed dungarees, and has the weathered features of someone who spends all day outdoors. ‘Take these to the east wing,’ instructs Adalina. ‘The Lilac Room.’ She motions to my bags and dutifully the man nods. His age suggests he’s less equipped to take the cases than I am, but, as I reach to help, he hauls the load on to his shoulder and I can picture him working the surrounding land, carrying hay bales or injured calves across his back as lightly as a satchel.

‘That’s Salvatore,’ Adalina says, when he’s gone. ‘Don’t waste your time with him.’ She taps the side of her head with her finger. ‘He’s not right. Hasn’t been for thirty years. Signora keeps him on out of pity.’

My interest must be visible, because Adalina assesses me for a moment before saying quite mildly: ‘Remember, Lucy, you are here to keep this house in order. Any questions you have about the building, the village, the city, you may ask me. Any questions you have about the people who live here, keep them to yourself. Do you understand?’ There’s no threat in this, just curiosity, as if Adalina is getting the measure of me, as if this is an extension of that bizarre interview.

‘Of course.’

‘Discretion is everything,’ says Adalina. ‘Now, come, I will show you the rest of the house, but be aware it will take time to familiarise yourself. We have just two rules. One,’ she says, gesturing to a closed door, leading, I surmise, to that part of the mansion I saw was covered in strangling vines, ‘the west wing is out of bounds. Two, so is the top floor. I will show you when we get there. It will not be hard for you to obey these rules – those parts are always locked so you will know if you trespass.’

Trespass. The word conjures Biblical transgression. Sin. Forbidden fruit.

I think of him.

‘This way, Lucy.’

Adalina leads me through the hall.

We embark up a grand staircase, burned-amber sandstone with an ornate banister, where we pass a series of portraits. ‘Who’s that?’ I ask, forgetting Adalina’s warning, transfixed as I am by the image of a man wearing a red blazer. One of his eyes is black and the other is green. He is standing against an emerald forest and the light of mischief dances in his stare, a light so convincingly caught on the canvas that I’m certain in the real world he is dead. Adalina watches me sideways.

‘We are in the process of covering these up,’ she says carefully, and beyond I spy several further frames draped in dustsheets. Reluctant, I follow her. Off the first landing, she shows me a series of bedrooms, unused but all the same needing care. One houses two rows of wooden sleigh beds, hospital-like, intended for children.

‘It was a sanatorium, last century,’ explains Adalina, a little too quickly.

The first thing I’ll do is air the rooms, I think, making a note of tasks I can begin in the morning. I’ve decided quickly that this is not a place in which I can allow myself to grow idle – partly because that road leads to him, and partly because I’m already resisting temptation to tease open drawers, to explore inside cabinets, to force rusted locks… to fling pale shrouds off portraits and read the names beneath.

The upper three floors are the same. There’s an old library, books caked in powder with spines cracked, and a mezzanine looking out over the garden. I want to climb up but Adalina tells me the steps are dangerous. ‘They haven’t been used in years.’ There are dressing rooms, reading rooms, water closets; pantries, larders and butteries; boudoirs and cabinets, storerooms, undercrofts and cellars; spaces left empty and who knows what they were once used for. The whole impression is one of a labyrinth, winding and never-ending, deliberately confusing where one space resonates almost exactly another. If I were alone, I’d already be lost.

We come to a door at the end of a corridor, and stop.

‘This leads to the attic,’ I say, and take the wooden handle in my palm, as if I’m testing it, as if Adalina might be wrong and it will swing open unaided. It doesn’t.

‘Nobody goes,’ confirms Adalina, and I understand this is the out-of-bounds top floor. ‘Your work extends to this point,’ she says, ‘and not beyond.’

I take my hand away.

‘I tell you this because of the girl we let go before you,’ says Adalina. ‘She did not heed my advice and Signora had no choice but to dismiss her.’

‘Will I meet her?’ I ask, and it hits me then that no one has told me her name. She. Her. Signora. The woman of the house…

‘Soon.’ Adalina’s gaze flits away. ‘For now I will show you your quarters.’

*

The Lilac Room, as it turns out, isn’t lilac at all. It is painted cream, with high, corniced ceilings and a four-poster bed swathed in thick red fabric. Crudely painted olive trees adorn one wall, just above the skirting, drawn, I’d wager, by a child.

Adalina wasn’t lying when she described this as my quarters, for, like the rest of the Barbarossa, it’s extensive. There is an adjoining bathroom, a little rundown but I’m not about to complain (I don’t relish the thought of getting lost out there in the middle of the night in pursuit of the loo), a writing desk, a couple of armchairs by a handsome fireplace (a peep up the flue tells me it’s long been blocked) and a mahogany wardrobe several times the size of the one Bill and I share back in London. Below the window, whose panes reach to twice my height, is an embroidered chaise.

Alone now, I can appreciate the full spread of the estate. Once upon a time the lawns would have been neatly landscaped, descending in tiers separated by stone to a pink- and peach-strewn rose garden, but the steps now leak into each other, the walls peeling and draped in vines, the grass overgrown. Beyond the roses, light catches on glass, where an old greenhouse is bursting with plants, and etched into a screen of brick I detect the subtle outline of a door. It reminds me of a book I read as a child, or maybe Mum read it to me, because the memory is accompanied by the mellow tang of cloves, but then I realise the window is ajar and it could just as easily be the cluster of herbs whose scent swims in on the breeze. I want to step outside and go towards that door and turn the rusted key. You will know if you trespass.

Further still, the lemon groves and the track I came in on, and, to the west, where the sun is gently setting and flooding the sky with orange and gold, there is a pergola, majestic on its mound of grass, as perfect as the curve on a paperweight. Against the bloodshot sky, twin swifts dip and dive their dusk-hour acrobatics.

There is one thing I’m omitting from this view, the thing I came past earlier and that I’m reluctant even now to acknowledge. The fountain by the entrance, set amid a dozen cypress trees, appears gloomier now the sun has fallen. I don’t know why it’s such a horrible thing. The protruding shape I detected earlier is an ugly stone fish, eyes bloated, scales crusted, its open mouth gasping air, fossilised mid-leap as if cast under a terrible spell. The trees don’t help either, standing guard, their spears raised – and perhaps that’s all it is, the notion that there is something cosseted within that requires protection, something beyond the decaying stone and stagnant water…

I turn away and fumble in my bag for my phone. There is a message from Bill, asking if I got here OK, but I must have picked it up in the city and then gone out of signal, for there’s no reception here at all. The thought of asking after Wi-Fi is anachronistic. Back at home, I’d have panicked at being off radar, but here it seems natural. Nobody except Bill knows where I am. Nobody can find me. I think of the bomb waiting to detonate in London – Natasha triumphantly handing my name to whoever’s interested, whoever wants to destroy it – and it seems impossibly far away.

Only when I lie on the bed and close my eyes does it occur to me that no contact means no him. What if he needs me? What if he has to get in touch, and can’t? I reassure myself with a plan to get connected in the city: soon, soon.

In the meantime, there is a pinch of pleasure in the thought, however unlikely, that he might be trying to reach me, that he might be the one seeking me out, instead of my repeatedly glimpsing a screen that gives me nothing. For once, I’m unavailable.

I’m gone. Nobody can catch me.

In minutes, I’m asleep.