The Silent Fountain

by Victoria Fox

They’re the words I have yearned to hear. I should rejoice, hold him and never let go, safe in the knowledge that nothing can tear us apart.

  ‘I don’t blame you for running away,’ he goes on. ‘I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t wanted to, as well. It would have been so much easier. But I had obligations, Grace’s estate to manage…’ It’s the first time he has mentioned his wife. I scan his face for emotion, rage or sadness or both, and find none. I remember Dad after Mum died, how he went into himself and never let on how upset he was. Maybe James is the same. He says his wife’s name as if he’s referring to a household pet.

  ‘How are your children?’ I ask.

  James flinches. ‘Bearing up,’ he says shortly. Then he softens. ‘This isn’t about them, Lucy, OK?’ He takes my hand, turns it palm up and traces my lines with his fingertip – what he always used to do in bed while we swopped secrets, stories, sex. ‘This is about us. I came out here to see you and I’m so glad I found you. I took a risk. I wanted to take a risk from day one but the stakes were too high.’

  ‘I thought you hated me.’

  ‘How could you think that? After everything, don’t you trust me?’

  There is a moment’s pause before I say, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then it can hardly be a surprise to see me.’ He runs a hand through his golden hair. ‘I’ve been on the cusp of phoning you so many times, sending a text, an email, whatever. I didn’t even care if my phone might get bugged or someone was listening in. Did you hear the latest, the Courier hacking my line?’ I shake my head. ‘Anyway, I’m a careful man these days, put it that way. Unless it’s something, someone, I’m serious about. I’ve been through hell without you. The funeral was a shambles, Grace would have hated it. The seafood puffs they served at the wake were like chalk.’

  I stop him. ‘You told me you were estranged.’

  He frowns. ‘What?’

  ‘You and Grace: you told me you were nothing to each other. All that time we were together. Then I find out she was devoted to you, right to the end…’

  I see him thinking. ‘We’d agreed to separate months ago,’ he says.

  ‘That’s not what she thought. According to the papers—’

  It’s James’s turn to cut me off. ‘According to the papers, what?’ he says snappishly. ‘Don’t tell me you actually listen to a word they say?’

  ‘No, it’s just…’

  ‘Just what?’ There is impatience in his voice, in the way his features tense then relax. ‘Come on, Lucy,’ he says, his hand on my leg, ‘you’re not going to do this to me now, are you? I just want to be with you, no interrogation, no pressure. I get enough of that at home. I thought you’d be pleased to see me.’

  ‘I am pleased to see you. I’m thrilled. I really am.’

  ‘Good.’ He kisses me, harder this time. His lips feel cold. I think of how it was before, and this is just the same – same face, same teeth, same hair, same scent of pinecones and sharp citrus shower gel.

  ‘Is it terrible in London?’ I ask, when we part.

  James exhales. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he says, ‘it’s bad. But they don’t have your name, right? And it’s going to stay that way. Your friend told me no one in your circle knows. I paid Natasha Fenwick a visit, I always suspected she had an inkling.’

  My mouth is dry. ‘And…?’

  ‘Even if she had, it’s been knocked out of her now. I told her she’d be fired from C & C quicker than I put in a sushi order if she so much as breathes a word.’ He nods. ‘That’s why I was relieved you came to Italy – get you right away from the mess. Imagine if some hack gets a sniff. It’ll be proven, then, won’t it?’

  I swallow. ‘Isn’t it already?’

  James guffaws. ‘God, no,’ he says. ‘My lawyers are working round the clock to discredit these ridiculous claims.’ He pauses to shoot me a wink. I think of his wife in the ground and it makes me feel sick. ‘According to my camp, it’s slander, plain and simple. Grace was a troubled woman, she had demons unrelated to me – and that’s true, by the way, she was a fruit loop from time to time.’ He seizes my hand and kisses it. ‘Once a suitable interval has passed, we can be together, Lucy. No one will think to link you with any of this. I came here to tell you that.’

  A suitable interval…

  I nod slowly. This is a lot to process.

  ‘And to check,’ he goes on, ‘even though I know I don’t need to: you haven’t spoken to anyone about us, have you? No one except Belinda?’

  I pull my hand away. He waits.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  He watches me a second, as if trying to ascertain if I am lying. Then his features break into a grin. ‘Good girl,’ he says, ‘I knew it. I’m sorry I had to ask.’

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘It’s just we’ve got to protect ourselves. There’s too much on the line.’

  ‘Yes.’ Though I hear his ‘we’ as ‘I’, and his ‘ourselves’ as ‘myself’.

  ‘But not here, my darling.’ James leaps up. ‘Come on, I’ve got a hotel bed waiting for me and there’s only one thing missing.’ He pulls me to my feet and hoops his arms round my waist. The bird inside me tries to sing, and fails.

  ‘Actually, I…’ I begin. ‘I’m expected somewhere.’

  ‘You are?’ He’s perplexed. What does he think I’ve been doing out here all this time – just hanging around on street corners, waiting for my knight to arrive?

  ‘Yes, I have a job, up in the hills. I work for a private estate.’

  He smiles indulgently. ‘I’m proud of you, Lucy. Always a doer.’

  ‘I’m on duty tonight,’ I fib. I have to get my head around everything; I have to be alone. A little voice tells me I should rush at the chance to go with James. Isn’t this what I’ve been dreaming about? Another warns me to slow down. Wait. Just wait.

  ‘Room for one more at this extravagant pile?’ He kisses me again.

  I draw back. ‘They’re strict,’ I answer, hoping I appear disappointed. His expectant gaze compels me to say, ‘But I could see you tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m in town for a few days,’ he says, ‘so I guess that gives us time. Try to extend your curfew for tomorrow, then, yes?’ He delivers this with the same authority he used at Calloway & Cooper. How my knees would tremble when he demanded his minutes, or his coffee from the Starbucks on the corner, whose order for soya milk and cinnamon foam I could never quite remember because I fancied him so much.

  ‘Definitely,’ I say, with more conviction than I feel. Too much has happened today, that’s all. I know I will wake in the morning with nothing but ecstasy in my heart and the need to get down to see him. He came for me. He came.

  *

  Sleep evades me that night. Back at the Barbarossa, my mind spins in the dark, my dialogue with Alison, James’s smile when he saw me, his touch, his lips, the bristle on his chin that I love so much, and, through it all, fast-fire glimpses of Max, that shot of limoncello he bought me when we first met, the clink of his glass against mine…

  Even as I think, my story is being printed. I picture it travelling home with Alison in her smart leather bag, then on a computer screen in her apartment, cursor blinking as she chews her thumb, thinking of a headline; the words sent to her editor, the tick of approval, the let’s-make-the-morning rush and then there it is in black and white, hundreds of thousands, millions of copies churning through machines, crisp papers set to hit the tables of countless breakfasting Britons, the frantic gossip on buses, trains, on texts – ‘Did you see they finally caught that girl?’ – and the ensuing explosion on social media. I wonder what my hashtag will be. When I looked online that day by the river, I found #RIPGrace and #CallowayAffair leading the trends. Now it will be #LucyFound or #BlameLucy. I don’t know. Alison led me to believe she’d be kind, but what if? What if she paints me as a twisted fiend, hell-bent on wrecking a marriage and causing a mother to take her own life? However I appear, the truth is unequivocal: it came from my mouth. I
admitted it all.

  Dad. I burn with shame. And my sisters, unable to grasp how their gentle, predictable big sister could be capable of such an act… the very carelessness I never permitted in them. At the time, telling Alison everything seemed the only available route. Now, I’m realising the repercussions. This is going to hit me hard. I’ll spend the rest of my life explaining.

  You haven’t spoken to anyone about us, have you?

  I roll over in the dark, as if I can turn my back on thoughts of James.

  It doesn’t help. There he is, in front of me, his optimistic smile and trusting eyes, and the subtle note of menace in his voice, which felt familiar because it was how he had always spoken to me. I hadn’t noticed that before. Always this quiet suggestion of what my answer should be; the response that would please him was the one that I gave. Just like today. I lied. Why hadn’t I felt able to tell him the truth?

  I wish I could go back and unpick it. Tomorrow, I’ll see him, and I’ll set it all straight. But I know there won’t be a tomorrow. James will wake up to a call from someone at home, his lawyer, or his best friend Grant who I never liked, and that will be it. I’ll never have a chance to see him again. In and out of my life, just like that.

  The thought arrives with a hot bright flash of relief, which is swiftly eclipsed by sadness. James said he wanted to be with me. Every word I’d hoped he’d ever utter had been spoken. I want you. I always have. In my stupidity I had thrown it away.

  *

  I must eventually drift off to sleep, because I am woken by a whisper.

  Lucy…

  It’s still dark. A thin band of moonlight creeps through the curtains. I check the time: 3:12 a.m. I listen hard, my heart pumping, waiting to hear it again. I’m not afraid, just alert, and I know it is the same voice I heard in the ballroom on my first day. The room feels cold, and saturated with thick, cloying menace.

  Seconds – minutes? – pass, and the quiet is absolute. I look down at my body lying beneath the crisp white sheet, and for an instant it doesn’t look like mine; it could be the body of any woman, slender and still, the outline of a body in a morgue.

  It begins with the slightest movement, so faint as to be missed with a blink.

  The sheet twitches, a small sharp tug at the foot, as if being administered by someone out of sight, concealed at the end of the bed. I gasp, draw my legs up, and it is a quirk of the night, I’m sure, but it takes a moment for the contour of the body to catch up with the movement, as if we are divided by seconds, an original and an echo.

  I go to scream but cannot make a sound. I’m paralysed, pinned to the sheets, transfixed by the site of the movement and waiting for the next pull, that little jerk, mischievous almost, fascinated by and afraid of it in equal measure. In the dusk I search, terrified, for a hand or a head, some shape to this invisible company.

  There is none. I wait and I wait, and it does not happen again.

  I get out of bed, the floorboards coarse and cold beneath my feet. Gingerly, I take a few steps, my wide eyes drawn into the pitch, searching and frightened of that search. It’s freezing. The skin on my arms is riddled with goosebumps; a chill trickles down the back of my neck, my legs, puddling round my feet. It shouldn’t be this cold.

  Am I dreaming? My nerves are spiked with the certainty that anything could happen; I’m in a zone where normal rules fly out of the window and all that’s left is infinite, fearsome possibility. There is no safety net here. Whatever is with me cannot be escaped; I can run, I can leave this room, but it will still be with me. The air seems to pulse, pregnant with an urgent warning: a shout that drowns in silence.

  Tap, tap, tap.

  There is a knock at my bedroom door. My hand shakes as I reach to open it, white fingers trembling in the black like some shiver of life fifty fathoms beneath the sea. Don’t come again is all I can think. Please don’t. Please don’t.

  I open the door. Darkness surrounds me, and at my feet is an object.

  It is Vivien Lockhart’s diary.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Vivien, Italy, 1985

  ‘Shall we tell her, Gio?’ Isabella said.

  Vivien looked between them, too stunned to speak. Isabella’s voice sailed into silence, throbbing there like a living thing. The subsequent moment of absolute quiet lasted so long that Vivien wondered if she had imagined it.

  One look at Isabella told her she had not. The sister wore a smirk – no, more subtle than that, something Gio would never see – and licked her lips as if polishing a weapon that had laid unused in a chest for years, slowly gathering dust.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Vivien whispered. She both desired and feared hearing Isabella’s voice again. It was a higher register than she had imagined, softer, more lilting, more like a girl’s half her age, as if through lack of use it had preserved its infancy, like a gleaming set of silver cutlery kept pristine in a drawer.

  ‘Gio…?’ Vivien turned to her husband but he didn’t speak. From his expression, eyes lowered, that telltale dagger of shame, she knew that Isabella’s voice wasn’t a revelation to him. Vivien had been right. They had been talking.

  ‘Bella,’ he said at last, with a swift movement of his head, ‘could you leave us alone?’ Isabella watched him in a horrible instant of conspiracy, before retreating.

  Tell me what?

  A thousand terrors occurred to Vivien at lightning speed, then dissolved just as quick. She kept her eyes on her husband.

  Protect this moment, she thought. Everything is about to change.

  *

  He took her into the drawing room so that she could sit down. Funny how that was the precursor to every rash of bad news ever uttered. Are you sitting down?

  ‘I guess you need an explanation,’ Gio said.

  For the first time, Vivien disliked her husband. She had railed against him before, countless times – but she had never actually despised him. Why wasn’t he kneeling in front of her, taking her hands, pleading with her to understand whatever odious truth he was steadying himself to reveal? Why was he staring at the floor?

  ‘How long has it been going on?’ She wasn’t sure what ‘it’ was; it sounded like a goddamn affair, though that was absurd. ‘How long has she been talking?’

  His gaze flickered. Was he going to lie? The eyes settled. No, he wasn’t.

  ‘A year after we came here,’ he said. ‘Give or take.’

  Vivien swallowed. All that time… Five years… It was worse than an affair. If Gio had come home and told her he had met someone else, one of the diamond-drenched socialites who attended the Barbarossa soirees, the knife would have twisted less deep. All the time they had been here, sitting in silence at the supper table, Vivien’s queries fumbling into the familiar abyss of quiet, Gio pretending while all the while Isabella’s muteness had been for Vivien’s benefit alone, was a blade-sharp betrayal. She could not process it.

  ‘Give or take?’ she echoed.

  ‘I can explain,’ he said. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘It seems simple to me, Gio,’ she said, utterly frozen. ‘You’ve been lying to me for half a decade. You’ve been having secret conversations with your sister, making a fool of me, laughing at my expense—’

  ‘No,’ he objected, ‘it was never like that.’

  ‘No? Not even when you were whispering in corridors, hiding away upstairs? What’s the big secret, Gio? What’s this about? Tell me now or I walk, and I take your child with me. I mean it. I can’t be with someone capable of this.’

  Gio ran a hand through his wild black hair. How she loved his hands. How his hands had broken her heart, and every other part of her.

  ‘We thought it was safer this way.’ Quickly he clarified, ‘Not Bella and me – it wasn’t our decision. It was work. They told me not to. Not until we were sure.’

  ‘I’m not following, Gio,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to be clear.’

  Outside, rain began drumming against the windows. The room collapsed in darkness. Gio loo
ked tired. Not sleepless-nights tired, but bone tired, as if tiredness had been chasing him for years and he had only just surrendered and let it claim him.

  ‘I came to Italy to continue my uncle’s work,’ he said. ‘What Dinapoli was engaged in was… controversial, to say the least. I had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and, I’m sorry, bellissima, but that included you.’

  ‘But not your sister.’

  He paused. ‘I’m getting to that part.’

  ‘I suggest you hurry.’

  The rain grew heavier. The lamps in the drawing room flickered before righting themselves. Gio’s expression was strained as he chose his words.

  ‘Bella was – is – key to our trials,’ he said cautiously. ‘We’re learning so much through her, work my uncle was never able to complete. When they asked me to come back, I was torn. I didn’t want to dig up the past and neither would Bella. But when I spoke to her about it, she wrote to me vowing that she had to face what happened, and so she was willing to give it a try. How could I ignore that? It was an opportunity for closure on my parents’ tragedy, the chance to recover the sister I lost. I owed it to her. It was my fault she ended up like this. If I’d gone that day…’ He shook his head. ‘Viv, I was excited – to get to work on something important, after so long stitching up cuts in an ER. What Dinapoli did was revolutionary, he was—’

  ‘Hang on,’ said Vivien. Her mind strove to grasp it. She kept thinking of her husband consulting over the move with Isabella. Had he consulted his wife? No. From the start, he’d hidden the truth, brought her here under false pretences.

  ‘What work?’ she asked. She couldn’t think of the number of times she had enquired after his employment, how he spent his days, her questions deflected like light bouncing off mirrors. It was secret, and that was the end of that.

  A secret to everyone except Isabella…

  A muscle twitched by Gio’s green eye.

  There’s nowhere to hide now, darling.

  ‘When we lived here as teenagers,’ he confessed, ‘Dinapoli sought to treat Isabella. To cure her, recover her voice. Each day he would spend hours with her, upstairs, in the attic where she sleeps now.’