The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  ‘Write what?’

  ‘A novel, I suppose.’ Next he will have to admit that he hasn’t written anything beyond the first paragraph. He must deflect attention from himself. ‘And you,’ he says quickly, ‘you’re here on holiday?’

  ‘Yes.’ He waits for an elaboration: how long she is visiting, where she is staying, who she is staying with – he remembers the ‘we’. He has learned this – that if you wait long enough, the interviewee will feel uncomfortable or bored enough to fill the gap. But she says nothing. She is a little too good at this game, he thinks. All he knows of her is her first name, and her nationality. And there is a question over even that, because there is that accent, that slippage revealing some foreign note beneath.

  ‘Where is home?’ he asks.

  ‘Home?’ She looks thrown, for a second.

  ‘Yes. Where do you come from?’

  Funny, but the question seems to give her pause. It fits, he thinks, with his idea of some ethereal creature who comes from nowhere and might vanish back into the darkness in a moment. ‘I live in New York,’ she says.

  ‘And is this your first visit to Europe?’

  ‘Oh, no. But I haven’t—’ he sees her catch herself. Then, slowly, as if carefully choosing her words: ‘I haven’t travelled to Europe for a while.’

  The war, he thinks, probably. It has taken a while for Americans to start coming back.

  She takes another sip, and as she does he sees something he had not noticed before. It gives him a shock. On her left hand, two of the fingers are completely missing: the smallest and the ring. The trauma is clearly an old one, the skin healed over the knuckles, but ridged with scar tissue. It is a strange thing, this violent absence, because she seems to him so complete and unblemished. Without warning she puts down the bottle and catches him looking.

  ‘An accident,’ she says, ‘when I was a child.’

  ‘Did it hurt?’

  ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I don’t actually remember.’

  She does, he thinks, watching her. And it did hurt a great deal. Now, as never before, he understands Fede’s curiosity about his own background. The reticence is tantalizing.

  Now she is checking her watch, and he guesses what is coming next. ‘It’s getting late,’ she says.

  ‘I haven’t shown you the garden,’ he says, before she can say that she needs to leave. He has no idea what he is going to show her, now. But this doesn’t matter. The important thing is that she stays. That the evening, the strange enchantment of it, is prolonged. The thought of his apartment, dark and empty, is suddenly more than unappealing – it is something almost fearful.

  To his relief, she agrees. He shows her the entrance to the garden, a slender door in an unremarkable wall of old brick. Fede told him about this place. No one knows who it belongs to, he explained, or who cares for it. So few people know of it that it is a true sanctuary.

  There are clementine and orange trees growing here, now burdened with ripe fruit. Among them are statues: putti, faceless goddesses wound about with ivy: some so enmeshed in it that they look half-consumed by it. And then on the wall behind them the really special thing. A gorgeous fresco of fruit trees, like a reflection of the garden itself, and pale nightingales and a sky of midnight blue. Only a few of the details are visible in the moonlight, but he hears her catch her breath at the sight. He thinks, suddenly, that he would like to take her here in the daytime, so that she can see the colours. The background is a blue that looks particularly antique, not of the modern world, a colour lost to time. Fede claims that the painting is a Roman original. It could be ancient, it looks it. But it could be a medieval imitation and still be older than the relics of many cities.

  He gestures back towards the real clementine trees. ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  When he passes the fruit to her their fingers touch for an instant, and the contact is like a heated brand. It causes everything to shift for him. He hasn’t felt it, this specific kind of excitement, for such a long time. He had thought that he might not again. And now here … with her, with someone he has only just met. It makes no sense.

  He watches as she removes the peel in a single strand. ‘I’ve never managed to do that.’

  For the first time, she smiles.

  The flesh is cold from the air, and incredibly sweet. But what he would like, he thinks suddenly, watching her eat hers, is to taste the juice on her mouth. The thought is another flare of warmth. When he looks up at her she is watching him. And he thanks God that she has no way of knowing what he is thinking.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asks. ‘I’ve lost my bearings.’

  ‘The Aventine hill. It’s one of my favourite places.’ There’s a stateliness to it, a solitude. ‘The Forum is back that way,’ he points. ‘And across the river is where I live – Trastevere.’

  ‘What’s that like?’

  ‘Some parts are rather grand – but I’m afraid I don’t live in one of those. It has … character, I suppose. Sometimes the streets are so narrow you feel the walls might actually be moving in towards you. In a way, it’s where real people live. The real Rome. I mean, for those that can’t afford an Aventine villa, or an apartment near the Spanish Steps.’ He catches again the gleam of diamonds and thinks she is probably from that small club of people who can.

  ‘I’d like to see it.’

  ‘Really?’

  She nods.

  He sees her take it in: the narrowness of the cobbled streets, the shuttered houses with the washing strung between, the cat that slinks its way through the shadows. The recent rain gleams underfoot like spilled ink.

  ‘I like it.’ She can’t mean it. ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Not far from here, actually.’

  ‘Will you show me?’

  Perhaps he is mistaking her meaning … and yet he doesn’t think so. All he can think to say is, ‘Are you sure?’

  For a second, she appears to waver. But then she gathers herself. ‘Yes.’ He has the distinct impression that this is some dare she has set herself. He can’t believe that it is normal for her. And yet the whole evening feels as though it is under some kind of enchantment – an evening in which ‘normal’ has been forgotten.

  ‘It’s very small,’ he says. He doesn’t take anyone back there: it is a hovel. ‘Perhaps we could go somewhere else …’ He is thinking. A hotel? Not her hotel, but perhaps another, anonymous …

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Take me there.’

  He has another moment of doubt. She seems … how to put it? A little fraught. The confidence of her manner isn’t fooling him. Perhaps the sensible, the gentlemanly thing, would be to suggest that he accompany her back to her hotel and leave her at the reception. But it is beyond him. He is filled with longing, half-blinded by it. That feeling part, so long anaesthetized, has come briefly to life.

  They say nothing else to one another as he leads her through the few remaining streets, and they walk a couple of feet apart, as though some invisible force dictates it.

  His apartment is in a worse state than he had remembered: the espresso pot has leaked a treacly stain onto the small table; the bed is barely made. He sees it through new eyes. How it is at once almost empty and yet disarrayed. The exposed light bulb, the meagre rail of clothes, the detritus of his life piled variously about. He has lived in it for years as one might live in a hotel room for a week.

  But she is intrigued, rather than appalled. He sees her drift towards the makeshift desk with the portable Underwood. Holding, not a page from the novel, but the beginnings of an article for The Tiber, a horribly unfunny sketch about an Englishman coming to terms with the concept of risotto. Imagine a rice pudding, only . . .

  She will see it, and know that the novel is a pipe dream. She will think him pitiable. He rushes into the space, to block her off.

  ‘Do you want …’ he looks at the espresso maker, wondering how quickly he can clean and heat it, ‘… a coffee, perhaps?’

&
nbsp; ‘No, thank you. I wonder …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have something stronger?’

  He has whisky, which she agrees to. He makes them up – explains that he doesn’t have an icebox. She doesn’t mind. He watches as she drinks hers steadily. She puts it down, emptied, and looks at him.

  He looks on, hardly breathing, as her hands go to the buttons at her neck, and begin to unfasten them. Her movements appear assured, her expression fixed, but then he sees that her fingers are trembling so badly that each is a struggle. This makes him want her all the more.

  ‘I haven’t done this before,’ she says, as though it needed saying.

  ‘Neither have I.’ It isn’t strictly true – he has been to bed with women on the first night of knowing them. But not like this, somehow. Never has the whole of him been alive to it in this way.

  She is shrugging the dress from her shoulders, and now she stands before him in her slip and underthings, nude to the waist. He sees how soft her skin looks; how some foreign sun has tanned it in places, and left it milk-white in others. He sees the small, taut indentation of her navel, the dusky nipples.

  He is freeing himself from his clothes as quickly as he is able, and she moves back towards the rumpled bed, watching him, all the time.

  He realizes, with something almost like amusement, that they have not kissed one another and yet here they are, two naked strangers. It would take so little to shatter this moment, to tip it over into absurdity. His mind is too full to make sense of all of it. And then she reaches her arm out to him, and he steps towards her, and feels her hands on him, her hands moving downward, and his mind empties of all thought.

  Afterwards, he goes to pour them each another drink. She lies in the bed and watches him, the sheets pulled up about her. He brings the glasses back to her, and they drink in silence for a few minutes. He wonders if she, like him, has suddenly been reminded of the strangeness of the situation, of the fact that they know nothing about one another.

  ‘Is that where you write?’

  He follows her gaze to the makeshift desk, the typewriter, and realizes that what she must be seeing is a romantic image – a false one. He drains the glass, feels it burn through the centre of him. And perhaps it is the work of the whisky, perhaps it is his knowledge that they may never meet again, but he feels a sudden compelling need for honesty. ‘I have a confession. I’m not a writer. I thought I was, once.’ She has turned her head on the pillow to look at him. He coughs, continues. ‘I had a collection of short stories published. Not in a big way, you know – but it was something.’

  In 1938, just out of university. It was a very small press, and the print run had been a few hundred copies. And yet, nevertheless, here it was: him, a published author, at the age of twenty-one. The sole review had been good if not absolutely effusive. That was enough. There was time for improvement. He had his whole life ahead of him. His mother had been overjoyed. His father, a Brigadier, a hero of the Great War, had been … what? A little bemused. All well and good for Hal to have this hobby before doing the thing, the real job, that would mark him out as a man. Hal knew, though, that this was the thing he wanted to do for ever. He feared it, because he wanted it so badly.

  ‘I’ve lost it now,’ he says. ‘I can’t do it any longer.’

  There is no answer at first, and he wonders if she might have fallen asleep. But then she says, ‘What happened?’

  ‘The war,’ he says, because it is an accepted cliché these days – and also partially true.

  It was something that had changed, in him. Every time he tried to write he felt the words coloured by this change, as though it infected everything. As though it could be read in every sentence: this man is a coward; is a fraud.

  He won’t see her again. ‘Someone died,’ he says, ‘a friend. He wrote, too. After that, I haven’t felt like I deserved to be doing it … not when he never will.’ The liberation, of saying it aloud.

  She doesn’t ask for him to explain further, and he is relieved, because he feels only a hair’s breadth away from telling her the whole thing, which he might regret.

  ‘You won’t have lost it. Once you’re a writer, it’s in you, somewhere.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘My father was one.’

  ‘Would I have heard of him?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Tell me about him.’ But no answer comes, and when he looks down at her, he sees that her eyes are closed.

  2

  That morning, watching her readying herself to leave, his body had been alive with remembered sensation. In the unforgiving early light he had seen with some surprise that she was a little older than he had thought: several years his senior, perhaps.

  She was pale, anxious, altered. She had hardly looked at him, even when he spoke to her, asked her if he could get her anything, walk her to her hotel. When she had sat and rolled on her stockings she had ripped the heel of one in her haste to be dressed and gone.

  The last thing she had said before she left was: ‘You won’t …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone about this?’

  ‘No. Will you?’

  ‘No.’ She had said it with some force, and he had wondered if he should be offended.

  Then she had left, and his apartment had become once again the small, untidy, unremarkable place it had been before. He had lain in the tangled sheets, with the warmth of the new memory upon his skin.

  She will be back in America now, no doubt. Undoubtedly she is no longer in Rome. But he keeps imagining he sees her. Through a café window, in the Borghese gardens, buying groceries at the Campo de’ Fiori market.

  Those few whispered sentences, in the moments before sleep, had been the frankest conversation he could remember having with anyone in a long time. Perhaps since before the war. That had been one of the problems, with Suze. Every time he had tried to talk she had seemed so uneasy, or, worse, bored – that he hadn’t wanted to say any more. So he’d never managed to tell her about what he had done; about his guilt. Perhaps she had guessed that there was something she wouldn’t want to know, and this was why she had been so resistant to being told. She had wanted to see him, as everyone did, as the returned hero. If you had returned alive, whole, you had had a Good War; you were heroic. This thing he wanted to tell her would not fit with that image.

  Stella: he realizes he never even found out her last name. Yet he doubts that she would have told him, had he asked. It was all part of it, the sense that she was holding some vital part of herself back. It had intrigued him, this reticence, because he recognized it in himself. And then, in bed, she had briefly come apart, and he thought he had caught a glimpse of that hidden person.

  He would like to talk to her again, to see her once more. But no doubt the peculiar magic of it had been due to them being strangers.

  He can’t even remember her face. Had she been so beautiful as all that? Usually, he has a good recall of detail. He can recall what she had been wearing, but when he thinks of her face, the impression he is left with is like the after- effect of staring too long at a lamp.

  There is one thing, though, one inarguable fact. For the first time in years – years of insomnia or fitful, disturbed sleep – he had a full night’s rest, and did not dream.

  He learns that the Contessa has got the funding for her picture. Fede tells him it is some American industrialist, keen to cloak himself in culture perhaps. Filming has apparently already begun, somewhere on the coast, and in a studio near Rome. Not Cinecittà, though, but a tiny set-up owned by the Contessa herself. An interesting name: il Mondo Illuminato. The Illuminated World.

  On a whim, he takes a detour one morning past the building that had housed the party. But the whole place is shut up, looking almost as though it has remained thus for the last five hundred years. Perhaps he should not be surprised. The whole night had felt hardly real.

  3

&
nbsp; March 1953

  An early spring day, almost warm. He walks to work along the river, squinting against the light that flashes off the water. The city looks as glorious as he has ever seen it, wreathed in gold, and yet as ever he feels as if he is looking at it through a pane of glass; one step removed. Perhaps it is time to move again, he thinks. Perhaps he should have gone further afield in the first place: out of Europe. America. Australia. Money, though: that is a problem. North Africa could be more feasible. Somewhere out of the way, where he might live on very little and make a last attempt at the wretched writing. The war novel: the one meant to make some sense of it all. The problem, he thinks, is that one has to have made sense of something in one’s own mind before committing it to paper.

  As soon as he enters the office, he is stopped by Arlo, the post boy.

  ‘A woman called, and asked for you.’

  ‘She did? What was her name?’

  ‘Um.’ Arlo checks the note. ‘No name.’ And then defensively, ‘She said she was a friend – I didn’t think to ask.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s staying at a hotel …’ Arlo searches for the name, raises his eyebrows when he finds it. ‘The Hassler.’

  He wonders. It could be her, he thinks. He cannot think of anyone else he knows who could afford to stay at the Hassler, after all. He feels a thrill of something like anticipation.

  ‘This way, sir.’

  Hal follows the man into the drawing room. His first thought is that it is precisely the sort of atmosphere his father, the Brigadier, would be drawn to. It reminds him powerfully, in fact, of the Cavalry and Guards club, where his father would stay while in London. From the windows the Spanish Steps are visible, thronged with life. The room is not crowded, but he searches in vain for a glimpse of blonde.

  The waiter is leading him now toward a table in the opposite corner. When he sees its occupant, seated with her back to him, Hal is about to tell the man that he has made a mistake. This cannot be the person he is meeting. But then she turns.