The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  The Contessa claps her hands, loudly. ‘Aubrey, well done. You have great talent. But let us begin the next round.’

  The lowest score is Hal’s, and it is a relief. Here is his chance to distract them all from Aubrey’s unwitting cruelty. Without stopping to think, he leaps up, and launches himself across the deck and into space. He somersaults, twice, and enters the water sharp as a blade. The sea rushes in a cold shock around him, and he surfaces gasping. Blinking up at the yacht, he can see that a row of heads has appeared over the side.

  ‘You’re a madman!’ Aubrey shouts.

  And from Gaspari: ‘Bravo, ragazzo, bravo!’

  Even Giulietta, when he climbs aboard, appears less bored than usual, is even looking at him with something like approval.

  He doesn’t look at Stella. Probably she thinks him a fool, an exhibitionist. Little does she know that he did it for her. That he hasn’t dived like that since the Navy training pool at Southampton, in 1942, and never thought to do so again.

  A couple more rounds follow. Hal sitting wrapped in a towel brought by one of the stewards – though he insisted he could get one himself. Earl Morgan’s chosen talent, opening his gullet and downing a bottle of red wine, is met with a stunned silence. Then Giulietta gets up and performs a folk dance in bare feet, her skirt foaming up over her knees, her black hair lashing about her shoulders. The Contessa recites a sonnet by Dante:

  ‘Io mi senti’ svegliar dentro a lo core,’ she begins, ‘un spirito amoroso che dormia . . .’

  I felt in the deep chamber of my heart, a passionate spirit out of slumber move . . .

  Then it is Stella. She looks about herself uneasily for a taut moment, and Hal is certain she is about to decline. He sees Giulietta’s look of contempt, Aubrey’s frown. He wills her not to. But then, a little awkwardly, she pushes back her chair and gets to her feet. She clears her throat. Silence. And then she begins to sing.

  There is nothing finessed or tutored about her voice, but this is its power. It is raw, and pure. It is at once a pain in the centre of the chest and a balm. It is yearning and fulfilment. At first Hal is so disabled by the sound of it, and all that it makes him feel, that he doesn’t realize she is singing in Spanish.

  When she stops, a profound silence follows. The listeners look at one another across the table, unspeaking. Gaspari fumbles in his pocket and retrieves a handkerchief. Earl Morgan has covered his face with his hands. Giulietta, however, looks absolutely furious. Though there was never any form of competition, she must understand that she has been outdone.

  Later, in his cabin he lies awake. The oppressive heat isn’t helping. He goes to the washstand and splashes his face with cold water, and then fills the bowl and submerges half his head in it trying to block out thought.

  For some reason he thinks now of the paintings. He can see the captain, the haunted aspect of him, as clearly as if the thing were hanging here in front of him. What drives a man to look that way? He thinks he is beginning to understand.

  They have stolen her from me. I must find her.

  But it will mean leaving my ship, my men . . .

  It would be a disgrace . . . I would be shunned.

  So be it.

  I would forsake a hundred ships for her. I would forswear my reputation. I would forget my name.

  THE CAPTAIN MOORS in the first small town. He is certain that this is where they will have left her – they would not have risked going ashore in Pisan territory, no matter their urgency.

  Dusk is falling, and the lanterns are already lit. There are a couple of fishermen tending to their nets, and he goes to them, asks them if they have seen a young woman, oddly dressed. He describes her long black hair, the extraordinary pallor of her skin. They watch him curiously as he talks, and he realizes how strange he must look to them – a frantic, disarrayed nobleman.

  ‘There was a girl like that,’ one man mumbles. ‘She were dropped off here by a boat. She were taken to the whorehouse, I believe.’

  ‘The whorehouse?’ The captain stares. ‘But why?’

  The other man shrugs. ‘She looked like a whore, is why.’

  ‘She is not a whore.’ The men react to the sharpness of his tone, their expressions become hostile, wary.

  ‘All women are whores,’ the first man says, ‘when you get them with the lights off.’ His companion chuckles.

  The captain sees that he is beginning to lose their interest. Besides, he knows where the establishment they refer to is. In what seems now like another life, he once visited it himself. He throws them a couple of small coins – it always helps to make a friend in such a place – and is on his way.

  She is more beautiful than he remembered. And, though it should appal him, seeing her done up like the other women, it excites him. The rouged lips and cheeks, the flimsy, revealing gown. He would be half-tempted to merely ask her to lead him to one of the rooms … But no. He stops these thoughts before they even begin. He has nobler aims than that.

  She seems … not precisely delighted to see him, but no matter. He would not expect her to be in her proper humour. She has had an ordeal. Not, thankfully, the ordeal that he had feared. He has promises from the Madam that she has not yet been visited by any other man. The woman extracts an eye-watering price from him, too, before she allows him to take the girl: two solid gold genovini. It is only fair, she says, taking into account future lost earnings. He has made the novice haggler’s mistake, he knows, in letting her see how much he desires the purchase. But no matter. She is his again.

  When he wakes the next morning he is convinced that he is still upon the ship, and is thrown into confusion by the unfamiliarity of his new surroundings. Then it comes to him. He has left the ship, his ship. Is he mad? What can he have been thinking? But then he remembers her, and everything falls into place.

  Before, there had not been time to think. He had lost his head over her entirely. Now, though, he begins to plan. When he left the ship the night before he felt prepared to give up everything, if only he could find her. Now, he realizes that this may not be necessary. He may return to Genoa without recrimination. His lieutenants will not defame him, or give him away: his uncle is one of the most powerful men in the city. He will simply say that he was needfully detained by business. Before, he might have been prepared to marry her. But now he realizes that he would be a fool to throw away the opportunity afforded him by his engagement to tie his lot in with one of Genoa’s richest families. He will marry Beatrix, but he will not need to give up— He stops. He still has not found out her name. Well. No matter, there will be time for all that. He will not need to give her up, that is the important thing. Many great and revered men have acted as he will do.

  Gently, he explains his plan to her. They will go first to his house near Portofino, and rest there for a couple of days. There she will become his mistress. He will send out for fine clothes and jewellery – the things that are due to the mistress of one of such high standing as himself. Then they will return to Genoa, where he will set her up with a fine house. There is a long silence, and he wonders if she has not understood him.

  ‘Well,’ he asks finally, softly, ‘what do you think of that?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I would prefer not.’ There is another long silence. He asks her what she means.

  ‘I would prefer to leave, and be on my way. Thank you, though, for your kind offer.’

  He is absolutely perplexed. He thinks of how they had found her: half-dead, with those bruises about her ankles. ‘But you would want for nothing. You would live like an empress. Do you understand? Do you understand who I am?’

  Slowly, she nods. ‘I understand,’ she says, ‘that you are a kind man. That you helped me when I was in need.’

  ‘But where would you go?’

  A silence.

  ‘Do you have family?’ He is already certain that she does not. She shakes her head.

  ‘Do you realize how vulnerable that makes you? Do you wish to find yourself back in the who
rehouse?’

  He sees her considering, turning it over in her mind. Struck by inspiration, he says, ‘I was hasty. You don’t have to make any … commitment to me in that regard yet. I won’t touch you, if you do not wish it. But let me ensure that you are safe, at least for the next few weeks.’

  Finally, she seems to agree. They sail to Portofino, and there he outfits her, as promised, in gowns of the finest cloth. Still, she will not tell him her name. In frustration, he chooses one for her, one that he feels suits her. ‘I shall call you Luna,’ he says, ‘for your beauty.’ The captain is a learned man, proud of his grasp of the classics. He takes her silence as her acceptance of this new moniker. It suits her, and her beauty, far better than any other name would, he decides.

  They spend two weeks in his villa in Portofino, just the two of them – and the small army of servants he keeps there. Gradually she begins to unfurl. He draws her story from her. She tells him that her parents are dead, and that from infancy she was brought up by an elderly woman who was not her relative. This woman was a healer, she explains, who taught her everything she knew. But she, too, is no longer alive.

  What he really wants to know is how she ended up half-drowned, so far from land. But on this point she is reticent. Every time he alludes to it, she steers the conversation from the subject. Which only intrigues him further. Intrigues and – if he were to be absolutely honest – slightly unnerves him. For she is strange. Her manner, her way of speaking. Her beauty: hair so dark it looks hardly natural, and her pallor. Paleness in a woman is highly desirable, of course, and yet sometimes he finds it hard to believe that blood really beats somewhere beneath the surface.

  Twice now, he has found her roaming the corridors in a sleep-state, moving with her eyes closed but her feet carrying her as surely as if they were open. He has not dared to wake her – has watched instead in dumb horror as she makes her slow but purposeful circuit of the palazzo.

  There are further terrible storms, too, battering their way along the coast, howling through the bay. One evening, having gone to check if she is frightened by the racket, he finds her watching the spectacle through the great window, her face lit by excitement. He cannot help but remember the suspicions of some of the men when the first storm had arrived from nowhere. He remembers, too, the word his lieutenant had used. He forces it from his mind.

  23

  At some point, Hal must have fallen asleep. He wakes to find himself slumped over the desk, his cheek stuck to the open page of the journal. The air is oppressively warm and close, as thick as honey. He has no idea of the time – but it feels late. He reaches for his watch and finds instead that the thing he has picked up is the compass. He squints at the face. Is it his imagination, or is the needle tracking faster than before? Not for the first time he has the unnerving conviction that its motion is transmitting some code for which he lacks the correct cipher.

  His skin feels feverishly hot. He reaches for the catch to open the porthole just as light explodes through the room, illuminating the whole cabin. He sits back on the bed, disorientated. Seconds later the thunder follows: a great roar of noise, fire and dynamite. The silence that follows the commotion is textured, unlike the quiet that preceded it. He waits, tensed, for the next assault. It comes sooner than expected, with greater ferocity.

  He goes back to the window to try and see anything, but all is dark, and the only thing he can make out is the black gleam of the water. No rain yet. The air crackles. And now there is wind, beginning to rustle and then moan about the boat, whistling in the rigging.

  A cry – a human cry, he thinks, but high as an animal’s. Then, following on its tail, another catastrophe of light. A terrible splintering, wrenching, tearing sound – then the sigh of something falling: a crash that reverberates through the whole space.

  Now there are shouts, footsteps running. The yacht seems filled with hundreds of men, ten times the number that are actually aboard. Hal, finally, is properly awake. He runs to the door and flings it open. Outside in the corridor is a scene of panic. Roberto and another member of staff thunder past. Someone is sobbing wretchedly.

  He follows the men up to the deck, where he finds a scene of devastation. Where the main mast once stood is a smoking stump. Scattered about it are the remains of the rest of it: flakes of ash, smouldering chunks like the remnants left in the grate after a fire. The rain, now, has finally begun, and it drenches everything, leaving a sorry, black mess.

  The men, ready to act but unable to do anything to help the situation, pick listlessly through the charred remains.

  Hal remembers the cry. He goes to Roberto, who is surveying the damage, looking perhaps the happiest Hal has ever seen him.

  ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘No,’ Roberto says, with something unmistakably like regret.

  ‘I heard a scream, I thought someone …’

  ‘Ah, yes – one of the signoras, she took a great fright at the flash. She saw it all happen. She is inside, very upset.’ He points to the stern of the boat, and Hal sees that the weeper, surprisingly, is Giulietta Castiglione.

  ‘I hate storms,’ she says, furiously, when Hal approaches, dabbing at her blotched face. For the first time since Hal has met her, she looks less than groomed: her nightdress crumpled, her hair static. Her face without make-up is vulnerable-looking, like a superhero divested of his mask. Stella and Gaspari sit with her, muttering words of calm. Earl Morgan sits in one of the chairs, rubbing his eyes and looking about groggily.

  The only person who does not emerge until the last possible moment is Aubrey Boyd. His silvery head appears at the top of the stairs, followed by the rest of him, clad in a pair of maroon silk pyjamas and a chinoiserie robe. He peers about himself in bemusement.

  ‘What is this all in aid of?’ He sounds vaguely peevish, as though the gathering is a party to which he has not been invited.

  ‘The storm …’ Hal begins, and then stops, because surely it is obvious.

  ‘Storm?’ Aubrey blinks at him. ‘Wasn’t aware of any storm.’ Now he sees the stump of the mast. ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hal says. ‘We were hit.’

  ‘With what? Thor’s hammer?’

  ‘Lightning.’

  ‘Well.’ A pause. ‘How thrilling.’

  The Contessa returns from where she has been talking with Roberto. She makes a little twist of her mouth.

  ‘It does not look good, my friends. The second mast will have to be mended before we can sail all the way to San Remo. But, as with all things in life, there is a positive. We are not far away from my husband, who is staying at our tower near Cervo. We can limp our way there, Roberto tells me, and wait while the yacht is mended.’

  24

  The castle sits high on a sward of land that plunges into the water below. When the lifeboat draws closer the slope separates into different iterations of green, and as they lurch towards shore in the little tender, Gaspari turns to Hal. ‘This is all quite an adventure, no? Something for you to write about.’

  ‘I suppose it is.’ Hal lowers his voice. ‘What is the Conte like?’

  ‘Ah,’ Gaspari whispers, glancing at their hostess, who is turned away from them, toward the shore. ‘Quite as unique as our wonderful Contessa – they are an excellent match.’ And then he smiles. This time it is not that downward smile Hal has become accustomed to, but a real smile – one that transforms his face. He would never be considered a handsome man, Hal thinks, but it lends his features their own unusual charm.

  They unload their bags onto a stone jetty. Above them a flight of steps ascends some fifty feet toward the castle. Hal makes a move towards Stella’s bag but she grabs it instead. ‘It’s fine. I can do it.’

  He goes to pick up Gaspari’s bag instead, knowing that the director is too frail to manage the climb with the burden.

  ‘Don’t,’ Gaspari says, seeing what he is doing. Hal mistakes it for pride, at first, but then he says, ‘The Contessa will call them. I’ve seen this before.’
He points at the stone wall of the cliff. Partially hidden beneath the trailing fronds of ivy is a brass telephone. The Contessa goes to it, lifts the receiver and waits. All watch and listen. Now the tinny rattle of an answering voice can be heard through it. The Contessa speaks into it, rapidly, then she turns to the group and gives a thumbs up – a gesture that, from her, somehow appears wonderfully incongruous.

  ‘What happens now?’ Hal asks.

  ‘We wait.’

  And in a minute, a man and a youth of about sixteen appear at the top of the steps, and hurry down towards them.

  ‘They are the gardeners,’ Gaspari says. ‘I have met the older one – Gino – before.’

  Sure enough, when the man reaches the jetty he greets Gaspari like a long-lost friend. He looks over the others, and whispers something to the director, who shakes his head. Then, with a little smile, he asks something else. Gaspari shakes his head.

  The bags are swept up – Hal manages to keep hold of his own. He is still not comfortable with the idea of someone else carrying them while his own hands are free.

  ‘What did he say to you?’ he asks Gaspari, as they begin to climb, the two of them bringing up the rear.

  ‘Gino? He wanted to know if he would have a chance to meet Giulietta – he asked if I was making a film with her. I said not yet.’

  ‘And what was the other thing he asked?’

  ‘The other?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh … he, ah, wanted to know about Mrs Truss. I explained that she is a married woman.’

  Hal had guessed it when he saw the man’s gaze run over her. The cheek of it. He thinks he has managed to keep his expression neutral, but he gradually becomes aware that the director is watching him curiously. He looks away.

  At the top of the stairs stands an elderly man, extremely tall and thin, clad in a safari suit and deerstalker hat. He observes their progress up towards him through a pair of impressive binoculars. When they reach the top the Contessa goes to him, and they embrace.