by Lucy Foley
Then a voice said, ‘Kate Darling?’
I turned. A tall man stood there, at a guess not much older than myself, with black hair of that unusual hue that bears no relation to brown – the blue-black of a raven’s feather.
‘I’m Oliver,’ he said, by way of a greeting, and took up my bags without exactly looking happy to do so. Then he gestured through the glass doors. ‘I’m parked out that way.’
His accent intrigued me. It was impeccable, almost antique – which, oddly enough, gave it a foreign sound. I trailed behind him to the car park, realizing that he had offered no explanation of who he was … and didn’t feel that I was invited to ask. This was a bad start. I had hoped that once in Corsica my doubts would miraculously retreat – that I would be filled with new confidence and purpose. Now, with this less-than-friendly welcome, my apprehension had increased.
The car was an elderly 2CV in mint-green, speckled like an old apple with rust. The man, Oliver, appeared incongruous beside it: too tall and solemn for such a small, jaunty-looking vehicle, and had I not been so preoccupied by nerves I think the contrast would have made me smile.
The long, low buildings beyond the airport were quickly lost to new surroundings: steep and arid, the road a dusty ribbon hedged on either side with dry and thorny shrub. We were driving across the spine of Corsica, Oliver explained, a ridge of mountains that ran the length of the island. The car barrelled along at what felt like a dangerous speed, clouds of dust foaming behind us. We saw no sign of civilization for a long stretch. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a man appeared over the top of the next incline, running towards us along the other side of the road. He was shirtless, his chest burnt to a deep mahogany by the sun, his skin slick with sweat. We had to be some way from the previous town. I watched him pass, craning round in astonishment to see him start on the steep incline that the car had clattered its way down.
‘Corsicans are tough people,’ Oliver said, with an unmistakable note of pride. Was he Corsican? I wondered again about his connection to Stafford. Was he a member of staff, perhaps, a protégé … a lover, even? I knew that Stafford had had a wife, but that didn’t mean anything. I studied his profile, pondering this.
Just then he turned his head and caught me looking, and I looked quickly away. I concentrated resolutely on the view from the window, letting the false breeze created by the movement of the car tickle the damp hair away from my forehead and cool my hot skin.
Suddenly the sea emerged before us on the horizon: a strip of brilliant metallic blue between the sentinel peaks of two mountains, appearing at first like a trick of the eye. So majestic was this view that my hands itched for my camera – now buried deep in my rucksack – and if I had been braver I would have asked him to stop.
The arid landscape gave way gradually to vineyards, stretching as far as the eye could see. The scent of the herbs grew stronger, and there was salt in the air. I wondered whether one might be able to taste it in the wine produced from the crop that grew about us. The view of the coast was uninterrupted and I could see to where the great lump of grey rock that was the island sheared away in steep cliffs, atop which a sprawl of buildings clung like a white growth of lichen.
‘Bonifacio,’ said Oliver.
I craned to take it all in. From here it seemed that the whole town was about to plunge headfirst over the edge into the Mediterranean. ‘There must be incredible views.’
He shrugged. ‘The view from the house is better.’
We drove for another thirty minutes or so to a fork in the road, where we bumped and clanked our slow way along a potholed track for twenty minutes. Finally, just as I had begun to wonder whether I could stand one more minute of the bone-jolting movement, we arrived.
The Maison du Vent crowned the promontory of rock that it sat upon like a citadel, high above the deep, placid blue of the Mediterranean Sea. Below was a square of gravel where Oliver parked the car next to an even more decrepit vehicle – a three-wheeler truck of almost toy-like proportions. A flight of steps, carved into the rock, climbed erratically up from the roadside. Rosemary grew at intervals from cracks in the stone.
‘That’s Gerard’s car,’ said Oliver, gesturing to the van. ‘He’s the groundsman here. His wife is the housekeeper, Marie.’
As if invoked, a small, dark, broad woman appeared at the top of the steps and shouted something incomprehensible back at the house before hurrying down to us. She wore a dress of a stiff calico, spotlessly white against her sun-browned skin. As she drew closer, I saw that she was older than she’d appeared from afar, perhaps sixty or more, but everything about her – the powerful hands and plump arms, the skein of coarse black hair wound upon her head – suggested the strength and vitality of a much younger woman.
‘Welcome, welcome.’ She spoke with such a heavy accent that at first I thought the words had been in another language. She insisted on taking one of my bags from the car, hefting it from the roof rack and grasping it beneath her arm as if it weighed nothing. Then she turned and took to the stairs again. Oliver carried the other, leaving me to walk up the steps feeling rather useless, my arms swinging free.
We came up around one wall on to a terrace formed from the same lump of stone as the house itself. I saw immediately that the villa, a low-slung, flat-roofed building, was not the point. The point was the view. It was like looking down from the lofty eyrie of some cliff-dwelling bird: an impossible perspective. I could make out a boat in the distance as a tiny white crumb, tracking its slow progress across the still blue carpet of water. It wasn’t difficult to see why Stafford had chosen to make his home here, nor why he hardly ever left. The three of us stood gazing out to sea for a moment, and even Marie, who I would have supposed inured to it by now, appeared to take pause. Perhaps you never quite get used to a sight like that. Then the door opened behind us, and Thomas Stafford stepped out into the sun.
I had seen pictures of him, naturally, but even I can admit that photographs are not always enough to convey the true presence of a person. I think I had expected that he would be more eccentric in appearance, perhaps even the cliché of the artistic figure – paint-splattered, wild-haired. Stafford, however, was tall and elegant in pale linen. His hair, white and still thick, was combed back from his brow. His expression, as he came towards me, was perhaps the only discomposed thing about him. I have never felt under such scrutiny as I did then beneath the unblinking intensity of his gaze.
‘Good God.’ He whispered it so quietly that at first I couldn’t be sure whether I’d imagined it. But as he moved closer he spoke again. ‘Extraordinary,’ he said, ‘… uncanny.’ When I saw that there were tears in his eyes I looked away, completely discomfited. After a long pause he gathered himself. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in a steadier voice, ‘I seem to have forgotten myself. It is just that for a second I could have sworn …’ He shook his head, and gave a careful smile. ‘I don’t know what came over me. Please, forgive a foolish old man. And welcome, Miss Darling.’ In an instant, the frail person I had briefly glimpsed had disappeared, and Stafford had taken charge of himself once more. ‘You have met Marie,’ he gestured, ‘and Oliver, who … ah … who appears to have vanished.’ Oliver was indeed nowhere to be seen.
‘Please, call me Kate,’ I said, and wasn’t able to manage much more. Something rose up inside me and I felt suddenly overwhelmed. I don’t know what it was: the strangeness of the situation, perhaps, or of Stafford’s reaction to me. I swayed where I stood and shut my eyes, trying to regain my composure.
Stafford looked concerned. ‘Are you all right?’
I shook my head, feeling foolish. ‘It’s the heat,’ I said, ‘and – I didn’t sleep well last night. It’s been a bit of a shock, all of this.’ I gestured about me, lamely.
‘I think,’ said Stafford, ‘we should both sit down for a few minutes.’ He led me to an ironwork table and drew out a chair for me. I sank into it gratefully, and he took a seat opposite me. I hadn’t even noticed Marie leave us, but she return
ed in a couple of minutes bearing tea. It was, despite the heat of the day, strangely refreshing – and comforting too, a taste of normality. Stafford studied me thoughtfully. ‘You must have been through so much in the last year,’ he said, ‘and now this. Kate – I want to say how sorry I was to hear of your mother’s death. I saw her dance, you know, as Juliet. I confess I’d never seen the point of ballet before that – I’d always been much more interested in opera – but she danced her part so beautifully, with such grace, that I was close to tears in the final scene.’ He smiled gently. ‘I know that the memory of an old man cannot mean much to you, but … I felt that I should tell you, all the same. She was exquisite.’
His kindness was disabling. I felt something rend within me and panicked, thinking I might be about to cry. It was with a great surge of effort that I managed to regain control. I sipped my tea carefully, watching the incremental progress of that distant boat across the horizon, and gradually felt myself retreat from the edge.
When he seemed satisfied that I had recovered sufficiently, Stafford offered to show me about. The earliest part of the house, he explained, had belonged to a Genoese noble some three hundred years ago. It had been a retreat for the man and his family, modelled on a simple peasant dwelling – but several times the size. The building had been in a state of complete disrepair when Stafford and his late wife, Elodia, had happened upon it during a walk along this part of the coast. Back then, it had been nearly impossible to gain access through the thick growths of ivy and bramble that had wrapped themselves about the structure like a noose, completely obscuring the stone steps that were the only way of gaining entrance.
‘It’s an ongoing project,’ Stafford said. ‘Every year there’s some other bit of decrepit plaster to patch, stone wall to repair … safeguards to stop the whole thing toppling into the sea. I’m probably getting too old for it now, but I can’t help myself – I’m in love. It almost looks like it wants to fall, don’t you think? That’s what I’ve always liked about this place, the drama, the audacity of it. Elodia thought I was mad when I set my heart on it – though ultimately she came to care for it even more than I did. Her people were Corsicans through and through – they could trace their ancestry right back to the days of Genoese rule of the island. So, for her, living here was a way of being further connected to her homeland, to her past.’
At the far end, I noticed, the sun-bleached old building had grown an extraordinary appendage: a structure made from glass and chrome, and yet, through the genius of the architect, not at odds with the old stone it annexed. Stafford explained that this was his new studio. ‘Oliver built it for me. He’s an architect.’
‘It’s astonishing.’
‘It has become his trademark, you could say, marrying the old and new. A delicate art, knitting the two together.’
‘Did you commission it from him?’
‘No,’ he gave me a quizzical glance, ‘it was a little less formal than that.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Except I didn’t.
Stafford looked at me. Then he laughed. It was a sound that had not aged with the rest of him, that was still young and vigorous. ‘Oliver’s my grandson.’
I must have shown my surprise because Stafford laughed again and shook his head. ‘I take it he didn’t choose to tell you that much.’
‘No.’
‘Ah, well, that’s Oliver for you. He has always been a man of few words.’
‘He doesn’t look like you.’
‘No, indeed,’ Stafford said.
I was embarrassed, having realized too late how rude it sounded, and looked for something else to say. ‘Does he live here?’
‘Not usually. He’s based in Paris. He only qualified a couple of years ago, but he’s already had a number of commissions. His aesthetic is popular – he seems to have struck a balance somewhere between the commercial and avant-garde.’
I quashed the uncharitable thought that having a grandfather who occupied the position Stafford did in the art world could not have hurt Oliver’s career.
‘So he’s here on holiday?’
There was a pause, slightly too long. ‘Yes,’ Stafford said. ‘Yes, of a sort.’ I waited, to see if he would say more, but that was, apparently, the end of it.
He asked me then about my visit to Mrs Delaney. ‘She wrote to me, you know,’ he said.
‘She did?’
‘Her letter arrived only a couple of days after yours. That is absolutely like Rosa, you understand, feeling she had to make sure I did the right thing – not convinced that I would do it on my own.’ He smiled. ‘She is at once the best sister imaginable, and the most infuriating. But then she is the elder sister, and I am the younger brother – the baby of the family – and that is how it will always be.’
We continued with the tour. Below the courtyard where we stood, a flight of stone steps led down to a swimming pool – of which, leaning forward, I could make out one blue corner.
‘It’s far from grand, and rather cold, I’m afraid: the water comes from within the rock. There was a well there before. It used to worry me, the thought of water in the very cliff my house was built on, trickling through, perhaps undermining the structure, but it’s been that way for centuries, so why should it have to change now? An old man has no business worrying about such things.’
Beyond that, another series of steps led down to a private cove. ‘Ah,’ Stafford said, as a figure emerged at the top of them: small and wiry, of indeterminate age, with a thin, sun-browned face and a cap affixed to his head. ‘Hello, Gerard.’ The man waved and grinned, then carried on past us to wherever he had been headed.
‘There’s a rust-bucket of a fishing boat down there that you’re welcome to use if she’s watertight – it’s been Gerard’s pet project recently to make her seaworthy. Perhaps Oliver could show you around. He’s been taking her out since he was a boy, so he knows some of the best spots – places that can only be accessed by sea.’
The idea of spending more time alone with Oliver, taciturn and monosyllabic, was less than appealing. ‘But, of course,’ Stafford said then, to my relief. ‘That is not why you are here.’
7
It was Stafford and I for dinner. Oliver sometimes came back to the house late, Stafford explained, if he’d gone off with his camera – his other passion, besides architecture, being photography. I wondered, curiously, what sort of photographs he would take, how his architect’s eye might inform the shot.
‘He tends to get wrapped up in it and forget he needs to eat until he’s practically collapsing with hunger,’ Stafford said, ‘especially when the light’s this good. The best time for taking photographs, he says, is first or last thing, when the shadows are longer and the colours richer.’
‘He’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s what I do, photography.’ He looked at me with interest, just as Marie placed our supper before us: baked fish scented with thyme atop a pile of sautéed potatoes. Stafford poured the wine. It was Corsican – and it did, I thought, taste a little of salt and herbs.
Then Stafford asked about my work. I found myself going into more detail than I’d intended. Something in his manner – interested, but undemanding – drew me out. ‘I do enjoy working in the shop,’ I said, ‘and I like my boss. I know I’m lucky, being able to work, well, at least tangentially to what I’d actually like to do, but I’m twenty-seven – I think I hoped I’d be doing more by now, setting the world alight, or something. When … well, when Mum was my age, she’d been a prima ballerina for eight years.’ I told him then of my secret fear that I perhaps wasn’t good enough, would never be good enough to make it in any real way.
I expected Stafford to laugh and tell me I was still young, that I must wait my turn: the stock response of those who have accomplished in life what they want to – to whom, with the perspective their success lends them, the path looks easy. But he considered it seriously. ‘I know it’s difficult,’ he said. ‘Believe me, I’ve been where you are now. The most important thing is to c
ontinue to do the thing you want to, to keep battling on. That, in my opinion, is the main part of the struggle. Most give up when it seems too difficult.’
Then, without warning, he stood and disappeared inside the house. When he returned, I saw that he was clutching something, but I didn’t realize until he placed it on the table between us that it was the photograph I had sent him.
‘Do you have it with you?’ he asked. ‘The original?’
I took the envelope from my bag and handed it to him. He drew the paper out and placed it carefully before him. Very slowly, his finger traced the image and I watched, riveted, feeling in some strange way that I was witnessing something I shouldn’t.
‘When I drew this,’ he said, eventually, ‘I wasn’t yet where you are now. I knew that I loved art – and yes, I suppose I knew that I was good at it. But I wasn’t brave enough to have decided that it was something I would actually try to make my life.’ He smiled. ‘I was lucky, though. I had someone who believed in my ability with far greater conviction than I.’ He turned the drawing to face me. ‘Kate Darling, meet Alice Eversley.’
I stared into that quixotic gaze I had come to know so well, those inkblot pupils. ‘But her name is Célia.’
‘No, it isn’t. Or, perhaps it is both. I suspect there are aspects to all of this that I don’t fully understand myself. What I can tell you is that this woman is – or was once – a girl called Alice.’ He smiled then, as if at a private joke. ‘But of course.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since your letter – trying to puzzle it out, and I have just understood it. It is the letters of her name, merely rearranged. That is so like Alice, too. We used to write each other messages in code when we were children – and she was always particularly fond of anagrams.’