by Victoria Fox
I trip back over the times I saw the women leave the house – or, rather, the times I saw the person I believed to be Adalina leave the house. I never saw Vivien. I assumed she was hidden in the backs of cars, behind closed doors, that arch voice that interviewed me over the phone and when I arrived, assuming her to be the renowned recluse I’d heard about and whom I honestly had no expectation of meeting. But there had never been a hidden Vivien: she’d been in front of me the whole time.
Why hadn’t I seen it? Now I know, I can pick out the echoes – the line of the cheekbones, the curve of the mouth, but, truly, there is so little in common between the woman before me and the starlet the world knew that anyone could have been fooled. Age, yes, but more than that: anguish. The years have changed Vivien wholly.
‘Lili’s been so real to me at times,’ Vivien goes on. ‘I’ve dreamed her – entire conversations with her, I don’t know if they’ve happened or if I’ve made them up.’
‘What did she do wrong?’ I ask softly.
It was painful for her to remember.
‘Lili talked me out of it,’ Vivien says. ‘I was all ready. I was this close to removing Isabella from our lives, but at the last moment she stopped me. She told me it would destroy my husband. That I should have empathy for that siren because we had both been victims.’ Vivien’s shoulders tense against the memory. ‘But I should have made her the victim,’ she spits, ‘before she got to my son. I told Lili what she was capable of. I told her it was Isabella or us – but did she listen? No. She looked me straight in the eye and asked me to trust her. She swore to me that we would be safe.’
There it is, the gleaming truth. ‘If Max’s aunt hadn’t stopped you,’ I say, ‘Isabella wouldn’t have been alive to kill Alfie.’
Vivien nods. ‘But I never blamed Lili,’ she whispers. ‘How could I? It was Isabella – the evil belonged to her, no one else. From the moment I met her, I knew she meant me harm, but even I never suspected the lengths she was willing to go to. For the most part, it was a petty rivalry, vying to be the woman in my husband’s life. She took it to a new place. She made me suffer more than any living soul should have to suffer.’ Vivien grips my arm. ‘The death of a child,’ she says, ‘is suffering beyond imagination. They say that time heals but it doesn’t. I miss my baby every day.’
‘Isabella regretted it.’
‘Apparently. I only regret that she did away with herself before I could do it for her. After Alfie, she ran. The police were out looking for her but she disappeared into thin air. A week later, we woke to the body – or, rather, Salvatore woke us. She’d drowned herself in the place where she drowned him. She couldn’t even leave me that, his burial ground – she couldn’t even leave that pure. Forever that fountain is his and forever it is hers. She claimed him in the end, just as she’d always wanted.’
A thousand questions spring to my throat. None emerges.
‘Do you know the worst part?’ says Vivien. ‘She made me trust her. In that final year, she became my friend. I actually felt sorry for her – can you believe that? I defended her, I felt compassion for her, I forgave her all that she had done against me. The night she took him, I went to bed early. I’ll never forget her standing by the door, how she turned back into the room and held up a hand and said, “Good night.”’ Vivien swallows. ‘All these years, I’ve looked for a clue in that. Something in the way she said it, some warning I might have missed and that could have made a difference. If I’d just taken Alfie into bed with me. If I’d just locked the door…’
Vivien’s head bows. A tear drops on to her lap.
‘You managed to keep it so quiet,’ I venture. I want to touch her, put a hand on her, but I have the sense that such contact, such tenderness, might break her, like pressing a fingertip to a soap bubble only to make it vanish.
‘Gio ensured it,’ she says. ‘We couldn’t have people knowing how it happened. Of course, they found out that we’d lost him – both him and her in the same month. But over my dead body were they finding out how. I think somebody did – there was a report at the time that we fought to suppress.’
So Vivien became the woman she is today. Having stifled that giant event in her life, the obvious thing was to stifle the rest of it. She was the one who’d planted her diary by my door that night, at 3:12 a.m., the moment Isabella had perished. She’d wanted the truth to come out, and for me to be the one to find it.
‘I never believed in God,’ says Vivien. The change of tack makes me release the long breath I’ve been holding. ‘My father was terrible and he turned me against it. But then I found out that it was only the god he’d been worshipping that didn’t exist. Other ones did. I found another one. It’s a god inside me, most of the time.’ She nods to the crucifix. ‘Not this one. Well, a version of this one, but it’s not one I share. I don’t come to church to be with other people. My church is wherever I am. It’s in my soul and in my memories of my son. Only my god and I know that.’
She coughs. It begins mildly but quickly escalates, until she is doubled over, hacking into a handkerchief. Now I do rub her back and her spine feels thin and frail. All that time, the woman I supposed to be Adalina had been collecting the pills herself. I’d pictured her taking them upstairs to Vivien, counting them out, pressing her to swallow them with a beaker of water. All along it had been her. Her illness.
‘I’m dying,’ she says. The handkerchief comes away and I see an angry flash of blood. ‘It will be soon. That’s why I need to ask something of you.’ New energy fires up her eyes. ‘There you have it, my story, Lucy: you wanted it and there it is. Do what you like with it. After I’m gone, I won’t care.’
I move to object: there is no possibility that I would ever exploit her story. Aside from a basic decency I would never compromise, I have had it done to me. I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of malicious gossip, and gossip they would. The world would salivate over her tragedy, when at the core of it was a broken woman who had lost her most sacred thing.
But she stops me. ‘In exchange I ask for your help.’
‘Of course.’
She licks dry lips. ‘My husband,’ she says. ‘I don’t know where he is. He left the Barbarossa right after Isabella’s suicide. Losing Alfie was one thing. He refused to accept that Isabella had done it, even when they did the autopsy and confirmed her involvement…’ She trails off; I decide not to ask. ‘Then when she died it came crashing in… the double catastrophe he had suffered. We should have supported each other, but these things tear you apart, as individuals as well as husband and wife. Each of us mourned in our own way, shut off from the other. Gio’s feelings about Isabella were different to mine, of course. I abominated her. I remember trying to think of any word stronger than that, some word that could pinpoint just how I detested her, but there wasn’t any strong enough. Until I felt my fingers close around her throat, I would never know peace. He condemned her act, but he didn’t condemn her. Not enough. He didn’t admit that if he’d listened to me, it might have saved Alfie’s life.’
I imagine what they were like when they first met, so in love, and the currents of deep affection that had characterised their marriage. In another life, one free from Isabella, from the baggage of both their pasts, it might have been different. It might have been perfect. I can see that Vivien knows this, too.
‘I must find him before I go,’ she says, looking once more at me. She doesn’t need to say where she is going. ‘I have had to accept that all else is lost to me, but I know two things with certainty.’ A beat. ‘I know that my son is waiting for me. And I know that I must see Giovanni’s face one more time before I die.’
‘Is he still in Italy?’
‘I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him since that day he left in 1989. He could be dead… but I have to try. Or, you do. Please, Lucy. You’re the only hope I have. Please, help me. Help me to find my husband.’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
She leaves me clutching a pi
ece of paper. On it, she has written the address of her new residence: a retreat on Lake Como in the north of the country. It’s a sanctuary for the sick, she tells me, where she can receive all the care she needs.
Vivien is not returning to the Barbarossa – the castillo is gone to her now. She will have said her goodbyes and deserted her demons. I watch her melt into the crowds until they swallow her up, and it must have taken such bravery to venture here, away from her quarantine and out into the world. She appears small, a glimpse of the woman she was. I think about her life, the loss and heartache, the glamour and grief, and it’s all I can do not to run after her. What for? What can I do?
I realise there is much I want to say to her, so many words, about how the Barbarossa saved me; how her mystery drew me out of myself and back into the universe; and how if it weren’t for her allowing me into her life, I might never have recovered my own. Our situations are leagues apart, but at the same time we are not so different. We both loved a man, we both faced another woman, and we both confronted a death that changed everything. But my story? It’s a picture book compared with the saga of Vivien Lockhart. I only wish it hadn’t ended so sadly for her. I glance down at the piece of paper. I am possessed by the need to achieve her request. I have to find Gio Moretti before it’s too late – and I haven’t got long.
Max calls. There is too much to go into over the phone, so I arrange to meet him later. I consider how I am going to begin telling him everything, starting with the truth about Vivien’s identity, the invention of Adalina… and ending with the death of her son. All this time I’ve been obsessing over my own predicament, regretting and resenting and waiting for life to start back up again, but I haven’t had a clue about what it is to really struggle. To hell with James Calloway and his selfish agenda. To hell with anyone in England who passes judgement on my actions, when they cannot begin to comprehend the reality. Vivien has proven that the only people who matter are those at the centre of the storm: they know the facts. The rest falls away.
*
I sit outside the church for some time, working out my next move. Giovanni Moretti hasn’t been seen or heard from in decades; the last Vivien knew of him was of his retreating back as it abandoned the Barbarossa, a single bag slung over his shoulder.
‘The sun was setting behind him,’ Vivien told me as she departed. ‘I always thought he was sent to me as an angel, and never more so than in that moment…’
I’m distracted from my thoughts by the sudden, screeching sound of a siren.
It slices across the silence so abruptly that I startle, and am drawn out through the church courtyard and on to the street. The scene that greets me is one of chaos. Crowds push and shove, gathering towards something visible from the bridge.
‘What’s going on?’ I ask the man next to me, in Italian.
‘There’s a blaze over the hill,’ he tells me, and as he does I turn and see the smoke rising in a plume in the distance. ‘They’re saying it’s the Castillo Barbarossa.’
*
Before I know it, I’m sprinting; the acrid smell of burning fills my nostrils, the grey jet of ash and hope rising high on the hill. I don’t realise how good my Italian has become until I’m bartering with a guy at the side of the road to loan me his Vespa. In minutes I’m thrusting cash into his hand and mounting the bike.
Emergency vehicles have clogged up the streets and the traffic is a non-starter, so I duck into a shortcut and loop through the backstreets, frustrated that I can’t go faster, willing the roads to disappear beneath my wheels and the cobbles to give way to the hillsides that have become home. Home. The word stirs me, because surely the Barbarossa is anything but – that strange, remote, intimidating castle I stumbled upon all those weeks before. And yet, I race for it as I would for my father’s house, the house where I grew up, the house where my mum died. It matters to me.
As the streets narrow to lanes and the lanes climb, people are stopping to watch the horizon; the blare of sirens draws everything taut. Smoke spreads, filling the blue sky with churning grey, and it’s more than the expulsion of powder and dust; it’s a living thing, a shape that swells with love and hate and death and disorder.
I pass a woman relaying events into her phone, a group of boys filming the action. The Barbarossa is an institution here, as much a part of the Fiesole hills as the lemon groves and the tiny churches with their cool-to-touch frescoes and gentle bell chimes that ring out in the morning. As I draw nearer and hook up with the original road, the scent is stronger and the engine wails are louder, interspersed now with human voices and shouted directions, the rescue team working together.
Rescue. Is Vivien there? No, she’s gone. A thought crosses my mind, a thought about Vivien and the fire and how it started, but the sirens drown it.
At last, I reach the wall of the castillo, and now I can see the house – or what is left of it. Giant orange flames leap from window to window in the upper vaults; fire dances and spits; clouds of soot billow from every wound. I ditch the bike and dash for the gate, unable in any case to manoeuvre past the raft of trucks gathered there, hoses spraying, ladders mounted, futile attempts at harnessing pandemonium. The Barbarossa flares and glows, like a scream held for years in the throat.
‘Signora, you’re not allowed past here,’ says one of the carabinieri.
‘I live here.’
‘Your name?’
‘Lucy Whittaker – I’m a friend of Vivien Lockhart.’
‘Where is Vivien?’
I open my mouth to tell him where she’s headed, the scribbled details hidden in my pocket, but I stop. ‘She’s not here,’ I say, and his expression relaxes.
‘You’re certain?’
I nod. There is no doubt in my mind, and, seeing the Barbarossa alive and aglow, violent and frantic, I know that my thought about Vivien and the fire was right. She was never coming back. There would be nowhere to come back to.
‘What happened?’ I ask, though I know.
The officer nods to the blazing roof. ‘The attic,’ he says. ‘Someone dropped a match up there. Whoever did this meant to: they wanted it destroyed. Likely a local troublemaker, we’ve had reports in the area. Unfortunately places like this attract attention – sometimes the wrong kind. It’s terrible, to do this to a family home.’ The hot glare dances in his eyes. ‘All those memories gone up in smoke.’
All those memories…
They were precisely why she had done it.
The man is called back to action, and I’m left to watch history turn to dust. Until I am drawn to a figure I recognise, crouching by the wall on a bag of his belongings.
Salvatore. I go to him.
‘She left,’ he says, not taking his eyes from the fire.
‘Yes.’
‘Did she do it?’
‘I think so.’
His expression is unreadable, his tone without feeling. ‘It’s all gone. I said it would. I said you should get out before it took you too.’
‘Where will you go, Salve?’
He waits a moment, then shows me something I have never seen before: his smile. No, not quite a smile, a remnant of one – what his smile might once have been.
‘Anywhere,’ he tells me. ‘Anywhere but here.’
‘You’re free,’ I say. ‘It’s over.’
He lifts his head, and when our gazes lock this time it is with understanding. In that instant, Salvatore knows that I know. I know what he saw, what he found, and how it ruined him. And I glimpse in him his release from the house, from Vivien Lockhart, a shade of the man he used to be, the Barbarossa lessening its grip bit by bit until it lets him go. He appears younger, as young as he was before it happened.
A deafening clap severs our exchange. I turn back to the castle in time to see a portion of the façade crumble away. It does so with a casual slip, as smooth and deadly as the break of an avalanche. As if in slow motion, the tranche of rock falls to the ground, scattering the crowd of fighters beneath. Then, with an almighty
boom, it crashes into stone, into a silent, twisted fish, its mouth open and empty to the sky.
It takes a second for me to process what has been struck. Then, with the spray of water bursting into the air, I realise.
‘It’s over,’ repeats Salvatore. ‘It’s over.’
CHAPTER FIFTY
Five months later
At last, I’m ready. I’m going home.
As I queue to check in at Pisa airport, I only wish I had better news. But I know I tried my best. I said as much in my letter to Vivien.
Please know that I searched for him tirelessly… There was nothing I didn’t try, no avenue I didn’t explore… Over the past few months I have scoured the country from top to tail, followed a lead into France, down into Spain, even, at one point, chasing up contacts in America. The closest I got was with the wife of an ex-colleague of Gio’s, who said she had last seen him running a boat-hire venture for holidaymakers in St Barts. But by the time I reached it, the venture had folded and elusive Gio had moved on again. The contact thought he might have changed his surname, but she couldn’t remember to what – his grandmother’s maiden name, perhaps? Cue a refreshed search, beginning with the census detailing his grandmother as a Bastianelli, but there were no Giovanni Bastianellis to be found anywhere across the globe…
The search went cold.
If there was anything else I could do, I would, I wrote in my letter. Before sending it, I called the Lake Como retreat to ask after Vivien’s wellbeing – if I’m honest, to ask if she was alive. She was, but part of me feared my sending of the note would snuff out any remaining candle she still held. Knowing of my search for Gio and the anticipation of his return would be what kept her going. But I had drawn it out long enough. I owed her honesty. And I could not delay my own life any further.