by Victoria Fox
I, too, am sad to leave him behind: this man I’ve never met.
I shared this with Vivien in my message – I guess it was my way of showing her that I cared, and of telling her goodbye. In finding out so much about Giovanni Moretti, his early life and the loss of his beloved parents, his career and move to the States, his subsequent return to Italy and, of course, the greatest love affair of his life, with Vivien, I feel I know him. And, in knowing him, I am confident in how he felt about her, a sense cemented by the many past acquaintances I interviewed. Gio had been devoted to Vivien from the start. Any considerations he had held for Isabella over the years were held purely through a sense of sibling duty and regret.
As I hand my passport to the check-in desk, I hope this will bring Vivien some small comfort in her final days, knowing that her memories of their love were true and lasting. For what else does she have? How I would have treasured the chance to bring him to her, to see her face light up after so many years in the shade.
I gaze up at the Departures board: London, Heathrow, in two hours from now. My time in Italy seems not only to have brought me to another country but also to another time, and to leave it feels strange, like surfacing from a dream.
There’s a wince in my chest when I think of Max.
What is he doing now? Where is he? Who is he with? That last one hurts, but I have no right. I told him months ago, before I left in search of Gio, that I wouldn’t be back. Part of it was the complication of having a companion, especially one whom I knew would prove a diversion; and part of it was some small voice in my heart telling me that this was scarred ground, and did I really want another person treading on it so soon? Self-preservation, whatever you call it. It was the right choice. The last thing I need is another complicated relationship. It was fun while I was here, a distraction brought about through our connection to the Barbarossa – but once I’m home, it will fade to insignificance just as that house will. It’s for the best.
‘Why do you have to go?’ I will never forget how Max searched my eyes, right before I went. ‘She lied to us. She’s been lying all this time. Why her?’
I tried to explain it – how the death of that boy Alfie played on a loop in my mind; the tragedy of Isabella right after him; the demolition of the fountain when the Barbarossa burned down. Max said it was done with – I should move on. But I couldn’t. In this quest for Vivien, I had found my own shot at redemption.
It occurs to me that thinking of Max shouldn’t sting after all this time. I’ve been gone from him longer than I knew him. And yet… Time doesn’t always have the answers. Spending ten years with someone doesn’t mean it’s any better than in spending ten days – it’s just different. But still that part of me holds strong. It’s too soon. James hurt me and I haven’t yet healed. Max isn’t the answer.
Besides, I ponder as I meander through Departures, blindly scoping magazines and souvenirs – including a postcard of a slice of Fiesole that details the Barbarossa, like a weathered jewel on the hillside – we are from two separate worlds. Even I’ve become distanced from my life in London; imagine how it would be for him. No, Max belongs here, in Italy, in my adventure with the Barbarossa. He belongs in my past.
*
We land fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I drank on the plane and my head feels warm. It counters the sharp grey edges of an England I’ve forgotten, somehow more real and immediate than Italy – but not, I am pleased to report, as real and immediate as when I left. The last time I was here had been in a state of fear and distress.
Now, I feel calm. Or is that the wine?
Heads that might have turned months, even weeks, ago, do not. Newspaper stands that once screamed my name have moved on to other more pressing reports. The world does not revolve around me. It never did. Yes, I got some hate, and yes, people held a mild interest in me for a while – but God knows there are stories that warrant greater attention than mine.
I must look changed, too. My hair is shorter; the worry took its toll and I’m slimmer than I’ve ever been. My skin is a deep brown. My wardrobe is different.
As I pass through Arrivals, I’m so caught up in a renewed sense of purpose, and in the many people I need to make amends with, starting with one person in particular, that at first I don’t hear my name being called. Then it comes again.
‘Lucy?’
I turn. It’s Bill. She’s holding a bunch of slightly sad-looking carnations.
‘Your dad told me your flight,’ she says.
It’s so long since I’ve seen her. Months since I’ve spoken to her – our fight was the last time. I drop my bag and hug her. The flowers are squashed between us.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ she says, and we stay like that for a long time, just hugging.
*
Back at my dad’s house in the Cotswolds, the weeks slowly pass. It’s a nice slowness, a welcome one that eases me back into my former life. I spend my days walking the dog, curled up with a book, dunking digestive biscuits into proper tea. I know I am hiding from the world, that sooner or later I’ll have to step back into it, but for now this is a necessary recuperation, a shedding of the old skin in preparation to become someone new. With each hour, Italy recedes in my memory, its outlines shimmering, its colours fading, and some nights I wake at that dead hour, three a.m., and question if it ever happened at all. The Barbarossa could be on another planet for how distant it seems now. I cannot believe it is gone. It will always be alive inside me, the gardens, the Lilac Room, the portraits, the attic, the fountain…
My dad makes me tell him everything about Vivien and the house. I don’t plan to, it’s complicated, but one look in his eyes and I can never lie to him again. I’ve always seen him as this frail old man in need of being taken care of, when actually he is a strong and brave person who has survived against the odds. I know another of those.
He listens as I relay it all, winding up with Vivien’s deception and my promise to her that I would find Gio Moretti. And in searching for that man during my time away, instead I discovered myself. My future. Things I had thought were lost.
‘This man of yours,’ he pushes softly, ‘Max. Why not give him a chance?’
I shake my head. ‘It’s not happening, Dad. Let’s not talk about it.’
My sisters say the same, and it’s weird to hear them give me advice when all our lives it’s been the other way round. But I know what I’m doing. I admit that my sisters have pursued paths that I have always, on some level, envied – I was jealous of them escaping our village and forging their journeys; I resented that I had enabled their glittering worlds and in turn my own became drab and unexciting – but Italy is a place they will never know like I do. They will never see the Barbarossa, catch its scent of old leather and stone, touch the dovecote in the Oval, or walk between the lemon groves, boughs heavy with fruit, to get down to the city at night. This is mine.
For once, I’m not the one stuck at home. With only the lightest account of my time there, Helen’s rich engagement suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing, nor does Sophie’s glamorous catwalk, nor do Tilda’s runaway jaunts with her surfer boyfriend. At last, I have something to say, and I’m more than their stand-in, second-rate mother. I have a story that none of them will ever know. It’s my secret. And I see it in their eyes: that their sister finally set out on her own, away from them, to independence she had forgotten. More than that, they witness the way my dad looks at me because he and I have a bond that they missed out on. Now, I see them grasping at ways to help him – ‘I’ll make the coffee, Dad,’ ‘Let me give you a hand with that,’ ‘No, Dad, you put your feet up,’ – when he doesn’t need help any more.
I think about what Dad said about me being a good person. ‘Just like your mum,’ he tells me one night, kissing my cheek before I go up to bed.
I think of the woman on the train that day in Italy, and I go to sleep smiling.
*
Bill is on at me about going b
ack to London. She’s since left our old flat but there’s a new place in Shoreditch that she’s keen on, sharing with a couple of guys. I feel as if I’m letting her down by not being suitably excited about this – the men as well as the place – but I can’t help it. I don’t want to return to the city. I’ve been trying to figure out what I do want to do, but it’s not being a PA and it’s not commuting in on the tube every day. Dad suggests I retrain in a skill I feel passionate about. I search online and come across an ad for an apprenticeship restoring an old English Heritage property in Cambridge. It seems far-fetched at first, but I keep the window open, and every day I open my tablet and it’s there, blinking back at me, waiting.
It’s on one of these days when I’m meandering idly that I decide to Google Vivien. I don’t expect anything new to come up, but then I see a name I recognise:
RUNAWAY CULT LEADER FOUND. Gilbert Lockhart, father to one-time actress Vivien, was picked up by police on Sunday morning outside an all-day bar in Houston, Texas, and taken in for questioning. Octogenarian Mr Lockhart has evaded authorities since his disappearance from his daughter’s Italian home in 1988, having stolen the family’s assets, a fortune thought to be, in modern currency, in excess of twenty million Euros. Mr Lockhart claims to no longer be in possession of the money, having funnelled his wealth into the notorious Sixth Gate cult. The now-defunct sect hit headlines in 2003 for the Blakestown Massacre, resulting in the mass suicide of fourteen people, and has long been associated with fanaticism and religious radicalisation. Ms Lockhart has been informed of the development.
I read the item twice then immediately search for more details. Other sites report the same. So Gilbert Lockhart finally lost his mind, if he had ever had possession of it in the first place. And for all his lies and violence and betrayals, he wound up an old, staggering drunk on a sidewalk, bankrupt and destitute. I wonder if he has anything else to show for his years, or whether his self-destruction is it.
My mind buzzes with the information, but one thing sticks:
Vivien is alive.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
We’re all together for that Sunday lunch Dad promised. Mary fusses around us, nervous with my sisters and especially with me, because this was our house with our mother and we’re not used to feeling like guests. But I don’t mind. I like it. I like to be one of them, not the parent. We’ve all moved on. We’re all moving forward.
It’s chaos. Helen and her betrothed are bickering about the cost of their wedding venue, while Sophie keeps disappearing into the kitchen to take a call with her agent. Tilda refuses alcohol and looks peaky and I wonder if she might be pregnant, but nobody else seems to notice and of course I don’t raise it.
Somehow, Mary manages to get us all to sit down just after one.
‘Tell us about James again, Lucy, please!’ says Helen, passing the potatoes to our dad. ‘This is a great story,’ she nudges her fiancé, ‘you’ve got to hear it.’
Embarrassed, I wave her down.
‘Go on!’ encourages Sophie. Once upon a time, I would never have commanded the attention of this congregation, always the one who was batted off with her ultimatums about homework or administration of curfews.
‘It was nothing, really,’ I say. ‘I bumped into him last week.’
‘Such a bastard,’ mutters Tilda.
Sophie smiles. ‘Have you heard this, Dad?’
Dad nods. He tops up my wine. ‘She handled it beautifully.’
‘What did you say to him?’ asks Mary.
‘I hope you told him exactly what you thought of him,’ says Tilda.
The thing was, I hadn’t planned to. It hadn’t been important.
It hadn’t occurred to me to feel ill will towards James – I had spent so long obsessing over him that, when the time came for real anger, I think my mind was too exhausted with him to bother. Ultimately, his behaviour hadn’t surprised me. And I’d had so much else occupying my thoughts, more important stuff, that he’d kind of faded to insignificance. Even so, seeing my family’s anticipation, I can’t help but take some small pleasure in recounting the details once more. After all, the opportunity had presented itself perfectly and out of the blue – how could I have resisted?
So I tell them how I’d been visiting Bill in London, and how one day I’d taken myself off shopping down Carnaby Street. This is something I thought I’d never do again – just amble about the city, as free and easy as the next person. But it turned out to be true, what they said: something about today’s news being tomorrow’s chip paper. Almost a year on from Grace Calloway’s death, people had forgotten me. My name might raise a few eyebrows, but my face, well, that had hardly ever been in the news, and even if it had my changed appearance extinguished any trace. My scandal had been eclipsed by the next unfortunate fodder, over whom the public could wield their righteousness: some race row on Big Brother, the latest Strictly affair or a footballer caught cheating with his brother’s wife. I still feel deep remorse about what happened. Often, I check to see how the children are doing. To James’s credit, he is devoting more time to them these days, and by design or coincidence gets pictured playing with them in the park, or taking them off to Dubai to swim with dolphins in a six-star retreat. The cynical part of me suspects it is a deliberate PR move, painting him as this martyred single dad, but I hope he has genuinely changed – in that respect, at least. He hasn’t changed as far as women are concerned.
I recount how I’d slipped into a café and then, bam, there he was. He was sitting with a brunette. Even though her back was to me, I knew that it was Natasha Fenwick: the sharp line of the bare neck, and her precise, swinging ponytail. They were laughing, and there was a note in that laugh that dismayed me utterly, the disrespect, the selfishness, and before I knew it I was stalking to their table.
He had a coffee, and she had a spaghetti Bolognese. It struck me as odd that she should be eating when he wasn’t, and something other than a lettuce leaf. Almost as if somebody on my side had painted this picture and added in the detail, a tempting anomaly, whispering at my shoulder, Go on, do it, you know you want to do it…
I saw him double take, through appreciation before recognition. He thought I was some hot woman about to ask for his number, never mind that he was sitting with his girlfriend, and his willingness to dismiss that fact entirely only proved to me for the final time what a cheap shit I had once adored. But when he made the connection, oh, that was satisfying: total face-drop, mouth hanging open as if he’d been slapped. Perhaps he thought he was about to be. I thought about it too.
‘Hello, James,’ I said. Natasha’s shoulders curled. I saw her thinking, Please don’t make a scene. I thought: Bad luck. You wrote this farce and now the curtain’s up. To his credit, James said hello back. He didn’t pretend not to know me. Maybe he saw in my eyes that I wasn’t the same person he had taken advantage of.
It felt like a long time that I was standing there, and that the rest of the café was transfixed. In reality, it can’t have been more than a few seconds and nobody else cared. Regardless, I picked up Natasha’s plate of pasta and emptied it over James’s head. Tendrils of spaghetti dripped down the sides of his face, brown meat in his hair and an audible squelch as a pat of it landed in his YSL-suited lap. I took my time emptying the bowl, shaking out the last clinging slime of tomato before replacing it on the table. Natasha gasped, a little cry of appalled surprise that wasn’t quite brave enough to be anything else, anything louder – anything that might challenge me because she, too, sensed that I could not be challenged.
James took it, his face grey and unmoved. I expect he had wondered how this episode would play out, when the past finally caught up with him. I don’t know, he might have preferred public humiliation to the chilling alternative of a heart to heart.
There were a million things I could have said and they all rushed up at once. Natasha was too incidental to bother with: she could have been one of a hundred women and I felt sorry for her. But James… Yes, I want
ed to tell him how he had made me feel, how horribly he had treated me and what a lying cheat he had been from the start, and all this was on my tongue and I could taste every word and then I swallowed it. I thought: I’m done with being angry. I’m tired of feeling hate. And if I’d believed he would listen or that it would have changed anything for the better, maybe, but I didn’t believe it. James would never understand what he had done. He was doing it all over again, with Natasha. He didn’t care about me. He never had.
So I turned on my heel and left, the door swinging shut behind me.
‘Go, Lucy!’ Helen enthuses now.
‘It’s quite a story,’ agrees Mary, with a smile. I drink more wine. It gives me a glow to remember it: the dignity I took away with me; the mess I left behind.
For the rest of the meal, I’m content to listen to my sisters’ conversation, getting slowly light-headed and relaxed. It’s a surprise, therefore, when the doorbell rings. Nobody is expecting a visitor. Since I’m closest, I go.
‘Who is it?’ Tilda calls, before I’ve opened the door.
At first, when I do, I’m not sure of the answer – and even if I were I’m not confident I can speak. But I do know this person, from a dream I once had, a lemon-scented dream, except he’s older, much older, with one black eye and one green.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Italy, Winter 2016
The lake is grey-blue and shining. Its surface changes as clouds pass, dipping it in ink one second and throwing cool light on it the next. It is the kind of lake one could look at every day, and still discover something new. There is a timeless quality; its mirror reflected long before this life began, and will reflect long after it ends.
Vivien’s rest home is nestled in the valley. I’ve seen pictures online but nothing prepares me for the serenity of the place. The structure is Alpine-looking, with wooden balconies and a long, sloping roof, and out front is a collection of reclining loungers. All around, the gravity of rolling hills cushions and protects.