The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

  ‘Sire,’ she says – her voice a surprise in the silence.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  He doesn’t answer her. He doesn’t want her to become difficult.

  There is silence for a little while, and then she says, ‘I wanted to ask you about my dog, sire.’

  He can hear her fear in her voice, hear how she is trying to keep it from quavering. He is rather impressed – for a weak creature, as all women are, she is showing a surprising fortitude. But then she is not absolutely a normal woman. If her powers are indeed as strong as he told the priest, then he may be putting himself in great danger by his actions. But no matter: he must hold firm.

  She continues, ‘I know that he behaved badly, sire. But that is my fault, not his – I promise to train him properly. He has been my loyal companion since I arrived, and I miss him greatly.’

  She hasn’t guessed, he thinks. Or perhaps she has – and is using this pretence as a way of calming herself.

  The craft waiting for him in the harbour is a far smaller vessel than he is used to – but it is perfect for this: easily manoeuvred, and fast. And the wind is good: it will be behind them for most of the journey.

  Only twice has he questioned this plan. The first time, when she stepped into the craft, and looked up at him, questioning. Her face then appeared so pure that he could not believe any wickedness of her. The second was when she had asked him where they were headed, and had done so with such seeming innocence that he could hardly believe his own answer to the question.

  The place is a secluded bay, hidden in trees, where an ancient abbey of pale stone watches over the water. San Fruttuoso. He has decided that the proximity of such holiness will sanctify his actions. And, with the moon shining, the abbey glows with an unearthly light. He chooses to take this too as a sign that the act he is about to commit is something done with divine permission. Only when he comes to tie the rope about her legs does she begin to struggle. She makes quickly for the side of the craft – and he throws himself at her bodily, drags her back by her ankles, uses his weight to pin her down so that she cannot thrash away from him. Now he understands why she has been subdued. She was not resigned to her fate after all: she always intended to escape this way. She has already proven herself to be a strong swimmer. He cannot allow that to happen.

  Now she begins to scream – a terrible, animal sound – and when he presses his palm into her mouth she bites the flesh so hard that he feels the skin break. It has become nasty, brutal: this is not how he intended. He must be quick about it. With a blow of his hand, her eyes close, her head falls back. He drags the anchor towards himself, and fastens it tight about her legs. A true man of the sea, he knows the right knot to use in any circumstance.

  When it is done he looks back at the shore, suddenly convinced that he has been observed. The beach is deserted – and from that distance very little of what has occurred would be visible. And yet the windows of the abbey have become so many hollow eyes, impassively watching. He can no longer find any validation in its presence. He is struck by the sudden knowledge that he has acted alone, without any form of divine support. His whole body trembles with the horror of it. He steels himself to look down into the black water, certain that he will see her white form, far below. But there is nothing – not a ripple, not a bubble. Instead, in the moonlit surface, he sees his own face. And he looks like a man who has lost everything: his faith, his sanity, himself.

  He needs to get away from this place. But he seems to have lost all sense of the way. He gropes in his cloak for his compass: his trusted companion since his first sea voyage. But something is wrong. The needle refuses to still, tracking, instead, in a continuous circle. He watches in horrified fascination until he can’t bear the sight of it any longer, then tosses it to the boards. The stars, then. Any sailor knows how to navigate by the constellations. And yet when he looks heavenward, all he sees is an empty void. The moon, too, has been lost to view. What had been a clear sky has filled suddenly with clouds. The wind has stilled. But on the horizon comes a white streak, blinding in its brilliance.

  He understands, now. He is nothing but a piece of jetsam, caught in the calm before the storm.

  41

  Essaouira, Morocco, 1955

  I was only in the cell for a few hours. Several people – including Earl Morgan – could vouch for my having been seen asleep in the library during the hours under scrutiny. I think, more likely, the officers had chosen it for me as a form of punishment, for insulting their integrity.

  I was released into the afternoon. The Contessa was waiting for me. She looked, suddenly, every one of her years; older. With all the energy gone from her face, her features had a wrung-out look. When she saw me she came to me, and took my arm in hers. Before I could even ask if there was any news, she shook her head.

  As soon as I saw the line of the sea I broke into a run. With the Contessa’s shouts in my ears and the exclamations of the crowd that straggled the shoreline, I ran down to the sand, past the beach umbrellas, shrugging off clothes. I swam straight out in a strong crawl, as though I had a specific destination in mind. At that moment, I felt that I could swim forever, for as long as it took. It was only when I reached the deeper water that I knew my own impotence, a tiny being surrounded by the vast unknowableness of the sea. I shouted her name and the breeze swallowed it almost instantly. I dived beneath the surface and saw only stinging clouds of greenish blue.

  I am not stupid. I understood the futility of it. I was hours too late.

  Afterward, the Contessa shepherded me into one of the cafés that thronged the Croisette, with the stares of the waiters and other customers upon us. She made me sit down, with all the care of someone looking after the frail or elderly. The irony of this was not lost on me.

  ‘Hal,’ she said, taking my hand, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Truss,’ I said. ‘Where is he? Have they questioned him? It’s him, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Hal,’ the Contessa said, gently, ‘he has many people who can vouch for him from that night.’

  ‘Whom he paid, no doubt. The police too – I’m certain of it.’

  She touched my shoulder. ‘They think that it was a terrible accident.’

  She called the waiter over, had him pour us cups of coffee. She watched over me as I drank mine, attentive as a nursemaid. In the harbour, they were still searching. A flotilla of rescue boats trawled back and forth – a far cry from the pleasure boats of the day before. The crowd still watched, even as a fine rain began to fall, silent and solemn as mourners at a funeral.

  ‘He drowned her.’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘Hal, you can’t say such things. They don’t think—’

  ‘In the journal,’ I fished it from my pocket. ‘He drowned her, Luna, the girl in the water.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The film is a lie.’

  ‘Hal, you aren’t making any sense.’

  ‘Look,’ I opened it, turned to the final pages, showed it to her.

  She read, her brow furrowed. ‘It doesn’t say anything.’ She passed it back to me. I read what was written there.

  I need to remove her from evil influences here. I do not blame her – she is green and impressionable, and was perhaps not quite ready for Society. I am taking her away for several weeks. We will sail down the coast, back to the house in Portofino.

  It finished there. ‘But—’

  ‘It is understood that there was a great storm,’ the Contessa says, ‘recorded only a little while after this entry. There is, too, a letter from another in the family, dated from a similar time, speaking of “our poor drowned cousin”. The compass was found on the seabed, not far from San Fruttuoso. So yes, it is likely that he perished, that they both perished – but not that he drowned her. We choose to reinterpret the ending, to make it about a new life, rather than the end of one. A hope that all of us deserve.’

  ‘I don’t understand.�
� I began to leaf through the remaining blank pages, certain that there would be something more there. But I could find not a word – not even a mark.

  ‘Hal,’ she said then, ‘I do not think you should speak of this to anyone.’ Then, when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘I feel some responsibility for all that has happened.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I saw you both, at my party in Rome. I had met her before, and saw that she was miserable. Like someone wearing a brightly painted porcelain mask. And I met you and you seemed, well, equally lost.’

  I remembered Aubrey’s talk of her little projects. ‘And you tried – what – to bring us together?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nothing so crude as that. I couldn’t be certain of what I had seen between you. But I thought … perhaps I might have the capacity to bring happiness, of the sort I have had.’

  ‘It nearly worked,’ I said.

  She had suffered some sort of terrible accident. This was the conclusion that they arrived at. And the blood? It wasn’t as much as they had made out, actually. It might be entirely unrelated. Or perhaps she had tried to make like the lady diver and hit her head. There was much made of the fact that she could be reckless, impulsive: that she had gone swimming off the beach at San Fruttuoso and nearly drowned.

  The divers found her diamond necklace on the seabed. The clasp was broken. What force had done it? I remembered the hands about my neck.

  One of the guests remembered seeing some disturbance of the water near the boat, the gleam of something. Could it have been a person? He wasn’t sure. ‘It could have been a fish,’ he had then gone on to suggest, entirely invalidating his account, ‘or one of the champagne bottles. Or … or I suppose that I could have imagined it completely. I had drunk a great deal by that point.’

  There is a current, apparently, from near where the boat was moored – not far from the Île St Honorat – and straight out to sea. If Stella had got caught in that, she might have found herself in danger. It would also explain why they had not yet found her. A diamond necklace, if detached, would sink instantly. But a body might be carried some way by the water. But they expected to find a body in the end: that much was clear.

  I knew that if Truss had her killed, he would have made sure that no one would ever find her. He would have calculated, prepared. And though I did not want to believe that she was gone, it was a better explanation than an accident of her own making. I did not recognize this ‘reckless’ character that they had fabricated. She was brave, and rebellious, but not reckless. And that night she was as cautious as I had seen her. The suggestions of inebriation did not convince me either. When I had spoken to her, only a few hours before she supposedly disappeared, she had been absolutely sober.

  I spent a few days in Cannes, trying to persuade the police to take my suspicions seriously. But it was clear that my credibility had been damaged for them irreparably. Whether that was the disastrous interview in the station, or the work of Truss, I do not know.

  I had the Contessa’s cheque to live on. I didn’t want to take it at first, it felt sordid, and I hadn’t earned it. Tempo didn’t want to publish the article, it felt wrong, the editor explained, after the Truss woman’s death. They weren’t that sort of publication.

  ‘Please,’ she had said. ‘Let me do this for you, at least. Take it for me; so that I know you can start a new life for yourself.’

  I took a bus to the coast, and found a ferry terminal. Morocco, where we had planned to go together, was far enough away for a start.

  I drifted through Marrakech, but found it too fractious. Eventually, I discovered Essaouira. Of all places, this liminal town, facing the broad expanse of the grey sea, best echoed my state of mind.

  And something happened to me. I began to write. About her. I wrote with a kind of mad energy, as though if I could get it all out of me, I might somehow release myself from the pain. And from the dreams, too. They have not left me, though. In them I see her slipping beneath the black water. I see her struggling, and then I see her give herself over to it. I see his hands about her neck. But the worst dreams are those in which I see my hands about her neck; forcing her beneath the surface.

  A year ago, Gaspari came to visit me. I was living hand to mouth, and I think that he was shocked by how he found me. My savings had almost petered out.

  I was eking out the money by living as cheaply as I could, because I understood that when it was gone there would be no more coming. I bought stale bread. I befriended the fishermen by the quayside, and at the end of the day they would give me fish they had not sold for a sum that was nominal only. I could have sold the last things I own of value: an antique compass and a solitary emerald earring, but both held me too strongly in their thrall. I would as soon have sold my own organs as part with these reminders of that spring; of her.

  I had not cut my hair for months, and I had grown a dark growth of beard. There was no decision to actively neglect my appearance. It had simply not occurred to me to pay any heed to it. It was only when I saw Gaspari’s face when I met him out of the taxi, that I understood how I must have changed. When I looked in the mirror, after that, I saw a wild man. And when I led him into my rooms, I saw him take in the squalor and deprivation of the place. He said nothing. I understood that he did not want to embarrass me.

  At first we talked of everything but her. I knew much of it already, from the letters the Contessa continued to send me. How Earl Morgan had renounced film to live on a farm in Oklahoma, of all things, and was very much the happier for it. That Giulietta Castiglione was much her old self: most recently seen in a café on the Via Veneto with a tame cheetah on a lead.

  We talked of The Sea Captain. The film, not the real story – I didn’t want to talk of that. The picture had been a triumph. In one of the letters the Contessa had admitted that she feared it was in part due to the scandal – it lent a spurious, tragic glamour to the whole project. I could see that it made Gaspari uneasy, and I felt for him. He deserved the success without that association.

  He had brought a paper with him: a recent copy of Le Monde. I could not avoid news of the outside world entirely, it seemed, when it was literally brought to my doorstep. As he began to read from it, I did not listen properly at first. I was too preoccupied by noticing the changes in my friend, which I could look for now that his attention was diverted. Older, yes, greyer, but his terrible thinness was gone, his stoop less pronounced. He looked … cared-for.

  Then I heard him say something that caught my attention.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘This is what I have come to tell you, my friend.’ Gaspari cleared his throat, and repeated the sentence. ‘“Human remains were discovered by a honeymooning couple swimming off the Île Saint-Honorat. The remains are believed to be those of Mrs Stella Truss, who disappeared during a party on board a yacht—”’ Gaspari broke off. I think he saw my face. ‘I am so sorry. But I thought that it would help you to let her go.’

  ‘Are they certain that it’s her?’ It could not be true, I thought. I could not let the possibility of her survival be taken from me.

  ‘As certain as they can be,’ Gaspari said. ‘They do not reveal all of the details, but they say here that “they are certain of the gender, though the remains are badly decomposed—”’

  ‘Stop,’ I said, because I could not hear any more. I thought of Truss, and felt that familiar rage return. ‘But this must be enough proof for them. Surely, now, they will have to bring him in.’

  ‘Hal …’ Gaspari says, a little desperately, ‘they are saying here that the police are satisfied with their original assumption: that it was a terrible accident. Or that she took her own life—’

  ‘She would never have killed herself.’ Even as I said it I thought of the night I had met her in Rome, when she told me she had contemplated throwing herself from the rooftop. But it was different, this time
. She had hope – we had had each other, we had a future.

  ‘They say here that the circumstances of her background were tragic. That she lost her whole family in the war in Spain. She could have been depressed …’

  ‘It is not true.’

  ‘You must let it go. Hal, please, let her go. I thought that this would help you, knowing for certain that she is gone.’

  It didn’t help. But I wouldn’t tell him that. I understood that he was trying to be kind.

  Later we sat on the flat terrace above the building, with the lanterns lit, looking out over the dark sweep of sea. When the wind is up this is impossible – it is powerful enough to blow the lamps off the roof. But that evening there was only a light breeze, enough to keep us cool and quiet enough to talk over.

  ‘This life,’ Gaspari said. ‘It is such a solitary one. And this place may be beautiful, but it is lonely too. Come back to Rome for a few days. You can stay with us.’

  ‘Us?’

  He smiled, and nodded.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘An Englishman,’ he says. ‘A photographer.’ And then, ‘He is vain, yes, and he can be disagreeable, at times. And yet he is one of the kindest men, underneath. But I think you know that.’

  42

  Essaouira, Morocco, 1955

  Not long ago I received a strange message, from a hotel in Tangier. A guest, the telegram announced, would like to speak with me face to face. Could I travel to Tangier at once? I replied saying that I would speak with them, but they would have to come to me in Essaouira.

  It wasn’t possible, came the wire back. I had to come to them.

  Who was this person, I asked, who needed so urgently to speak with me? They preferred not to name themselves, came the reply.

  The whole situation was absurd. Essaouira to Tangier is no small journey, and the roads are bad. I knew that it would mean a day’s travelling, and no inconsiderable expense. I suppose that I could have merely ignored the summons – for a summons was what it was. But curiosity had got the better of me.