And yet he must come from a wealthy family. I pondered over this. David had ruined Aidan’s mother in more ways than one; he had taken her reputation and her fortune. I thought about the cruise she had been on when she died. “Someone suggested” she take it, Aidan had said. Had the “someone” also paid for it? What had she felt like, boarding the ship at Tilbury, embracing her son, then watching him go back down the gangplank and join the crowd on the dock to wave goodbye?
What had been in Aidan’s mind, and in his heart? Did his disgust with David extend to disgust with the entire business of acting and making films to the extent that he was considering giving up altogether?
There was a knock on the door and I heard Aidan’s voice. “Are you changing, or can I come in?”
“Oh, I’ll come out!” I began to fold the new clothes back into their tissue paper. If he saw them arrayed like this, he might think I was as obsessed by clothes as the people he despised. “Just a minute!”
When I opened the door I noticed he’d gone into the kitchen, where he stood with a bottle of wine in one hand and a glass in the other. “I would have brought this to you in your boudoir, madam, you know,” he said with the sort of arch look beloved of stage actors. “Madam likes red, does she not?”
“Yes, please.”
I perched on the kitchen stool, hugging my knees. I had to make myself as small as possible because the kitchen was not designed to contain more than one person at a time. Aidan poured us each a glass of wine and held his up. “Chin chin.” We clinked glasses. “To Italy.”
We drank. The wine was strong, but delicious. I took two more sips. “Right,” said Aidan. “I’m Sergeant-Major Tobias, and you’re Private Hope. Here’s the drill.”
“Drill! You’re too young to have been in the war.”
“I spent the war in a boarding school, for heaven’s sake. Do you think we didn’t have drill?”
I tried to imagine what Aidan had been like as a schoolboy. I would have been a very little girl. “So while I was learning my letters and knitting socks for Our Boys in France,” I said, “you were practising to be one of Our Boys.”
“But luckily the war ended before I had to go, thank God.”
I thought of the memorial in Haverth that bore the names of sixteen young men from the parish who had given their lives in France. One of them was Mary Trease’s half-brother. When the telegram had come, the loss ceased to be personal to the Treases and became that of the whole village. Robert Trease had been killed early in the war; as more and more families were bereaved, and fiancées robbed of their marriages, all we prayed for was the end.
“Ready?” said Aidan. “I’m Signor Lingo, the proprietor of the language school. I speak English, of course, but only just.” He cleared his throat and took on his character. “So, Miss Freebody, you wish to have Italian class? I am so very honoured! But please, you tell me why you come to Castiglioncello?”
“Um… My cousin, Mr Tobias, is acting in a film being made near here. We have taken an apartment in the town, and I shall be keeping house for him. As we are to be here for some time, I wish to learn to converse with Italian people.”
“Very good,” said Aidan. He poured some more wine into his glass and held out the bottle, but I shook my head. “And, Miss Freebody,” he went on, still as Signor Lingo, “may I ask what you do when you are not learning of the Italian here with us? You have free time? You like to come out with me to swimming, perhaps?”
I was frowning at him, my glass halfway to my mouth. “What?”
“I’m trying to be authentic,” he said. He put down his wine glass and shrugged, spreading his hands. “We poor men, we see bee-oo-ti-ful lady like you and we cannot help ourselves. You come to beach with me?”
I took a sip. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Just warning you. Italians are well-known for being Casanovas, as I’m sure you know. They’ll try it on with you, Clara, every single one you meet, so I hope you’re ready.”
“Well…” I was not sure what to say. “I’ll have to be, I suppose.”
He had taken up his glass again and was looking into it, swirling the wine around moodily. “You see, what I’m really trying to say, in my clumsy way, is that I don’t think you realize how very, very attractive you are. To men, I mean.” His cheeks suddenly flushed. I was intrigued; I had never seen his composure disintegrate so suddenly.
“Obviously, David’s eye was caught by your astonishing beauty on that newsreel, and, to give him his due, he also recognized talent in you. But every man on that film set would have courted you if he could. Well, except Dennis, but that’s another story. The only reason they kept their hands off you is that David already had his hands on you.” He had recovered enough to look at me with glowing eyes. “Believe me, Clara, beauty is a gorgeous thing, but it can be a weapon, too. And in the end, when you’ve fought off God knows how many Italians, you’re going to have to use that weapon against David.”
The kitchen was silent. I sat there on the stool, and Aidan leaned against the stove. We regarded each other warily. I had begun to understand what he was saying to me but was not sure I wanted to. “You mean, I must use the fact that he finds me so attractive to…”
“To weaken him,” supplied Aidan. “And when he is weak, we will be strong.”
My knowledge of Italy came from a school atlas. The capital city was Rome, and I could envisage roughly where Venice was. But the north-west coast was uncharted territory to me. Aidan mentioned a place called Livorno – Leghorn in English – and told me that Pisa, with its famous leaning tower, was not far from where we were going. In fact, we would be changing trains at Pisa station. But I was unable to imagine it until he retrieved a large book from the bottom shelf of the bookcase and flipped through it until he found the page he wanted.
“There,” he said, placing the open book on my lap. “This picture is of Lerici, the place where the poet Shelley lived a hundred years ago.”
The book was called In the Footsteps of Poets and Artists: A Traveller’s Guide to the Mediterranean. I stared at the picture he had pointed out. It showed a painting depicting a scene in a village. There were small houses and a dried mud track scored by carriage wheels. People went about their business: a woman with an armful of washing, a man with a fishing net. It looked to be a port about the size of Aberaeron, but any similarity between the two places ended there. The sky was painted in Della Robbia blue – the colour of the virgin’s robe – a blue so intense it was almost purple. The light seemed to come from a brighter heaven than the one above us here in England, turning the buildings and their shadows to chessboard blocks of white and black. In the corner there was a glimpse of a sparkling sea decorated with small fishing boats.
I looked up. “But this is only a painting,” I said doubtfully. “It can’t possibly be like this in reality.”
“I assure you it is! Why else would poets and writers and artists adore it so? Italy, the French Riviera, Greece, Spain … the light of the Med is quite different from our northern light. It warms not only the skin, but the soul, I can tell you.”
“No wonder David likes going there.”
“Quite. And not only David. Places like Italy and Greece are good for making films, for the very same reason: the sunlight. There was a community of artists fifty years ago in Castiglioncello, but now it’s more a community of film-makers. They’ve all got their villas there, not just Giovanni. It’s rather a fashionable place, full of Americans. Hence the language school.”
I read the caption beneath the picture. “Ler-iss-ee, on the Lig-oo-rian coast, by Sir Henry Fox, R. A., 1911.”
“Not bad.” Aidan twisted his neck to look at the picture too. “It’s Ler-ee-chee, but you did well with ‘Ligurian coast’. Liguria is the part of Italy where Castiglioncello is situated. South of Lerici, but still on the coast, in a little bay.”
I imitated his pronunciation. “Casti-yon-chello?”
“Bravo! Someone told me once that
Welsh and Italian have a historical affinity. Or was it Spanish? At any rate, you’ll be speaking Italian like a native before you know it.”
“With the help of Signor Lingo, of course.”
We smiled at each other. Aidan’s hair fell over his forehead. He was relaxed and seemed as happy as I was to be sharing a drink in his kitchen. Perhaps it was the sight of the emptying bottle that prompted me to ask a question I had been contemplating. “Speaking of David…”
“Which we weren’t, were we?” He gave me an indulgent look, as if I were a child in need of gentle correction. “And if we were, let’s not, shall we? It’s such a tiresome subject.”
“But I have something I must ask you.” I had begun to know Aidan well enough to understand that his flippancy almost always hid true concern and that he would listen to me if I persevered. “Tell me, did you ever go to David’s house on the island?”
His mouth tightened so slightly that it was almost imperceptible. He pushed back his hair thoughtfully. “Are you quite sure you wish to know?”
This disconcerted me. “Why should I not?” Then I thought of something. “If you mean he takes cocaine there, that doesn’t matter. You told me you never touch it, and I believe you. But I would love to know what the house is like. He couldn’t take me there because the whole time we were working on the film the house was being remodelled. He’d recently bought it, he said. Sometimes he stayed there, but other times he stayed at his club.”
He looked at me, lips slightly parted, his wine glass forgotten between his fingers. “So that’s what he told you, is it?” The space between us in the small room was only the length of his arm. Still watching me, he reached out and placed his palm on my cheek. His voice was low. “Clara, the whole time we were working on that film, David, Marjorie and that whole ghastly set were hopping in and out of each other’s beds in that house. It’s called ‘Le Grenier’ or some damned silly French name. And he’s had it for ages. I’ve only been there once, years ago, before David and I became enemies. It’s nothing special, just a sort of bungalow. And it certainly hasn’t been renovated in the last fifty years.”
I looked down at the book on my lap. “So Mrs Schofield doesn’t exist, then?”
“Who?”
We caught the train to Dover, where we boarded what seemed to me an enormous ship, as impressive as an ocean liner, though Aidan said it was only a cross-channel ferry. But I was fascinated and awed by the Maid of Kent. It was too windy and wet to stay outside on deck, so Aidan led me down some steep steps to the first class lounge. It resembled a hotel foyer, carpeted and surrounded by large windows. Nestled in a chair as close to one of these windows as possible, I pressed my nose to the glass, eager to take in everything that passed.
Not much did. The windy weather whipped the waves into spray, riming the windows with salt. I saw some brave people battling to walk the deck but did not envy them. “Probably sick,” said Aidan when I pointed them out. “Fresh air apparently helps the old mal de mer. Do you feel all right?”
“Perfectly, thank you.”
“Then you won’t mind if I smoke?”
It was unusual for him to ask. “Not at all.”
When he was settled with his cigarette, I picked up the copy of the Tatler magazine that had been left on the table for the occupants of the first class lounge and began to flick through the pages. It was a magazine for rich people, full of photographs of society women in ball gowns. I liked to look at the fashionable clothes and the interiors in which the pictures were taken. Did aristocratic people really live in such places?
The faces of the women, and sometimes the men, fascinated me. Since my entry into the film-making world I had discovered a good deal about how make-up and costume could alter someone’s appearance, but it was still astonishing to see how the camera captured something that was not real. Although the caption on the photograph reported the person’s name, and often their parentage, their faces were like ghosts’, pale-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a look both haughty and haunting as they posed in silk dresses and rows of pearls. It reminded me how little of me – the real person – the cinema audience would ever see. To them I would be as ghostly and two dimensional as these visions in the magazine.
I began a sigh, but it turned into a gasp. I sat forward. “Aidan, look at this!”
I passed him the open magazine. “That photo, of a party in New York. Look at the names underneath it.”
He gazed, blinking, at the page. “Well, would you believe it?” He whistled through his teeth. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
We looked at the picture together. It was on the society gossip page and featured a smartly dressed couple posing at a charity event at the Waldorf Hotel. The woman, a beauty as Aidan had said, was hand in hand with the man, and both were smiling happily. The caption read: Among the distinguished guests were Mr Heinrich Stolz, the well-known art collector, and his constant companion, Miss Catherine Melrose, who has recently launched her latest collection of exquisite jewellery.
But she was not Miss Catherine Melrose. She was Mrs David Penn.
“Good grief, the man must be crackers,” said Aidan. “Who would divorce this gorgeous creature for Marjorie Cunningham?” Then, after a pause, “Though I suppose darling Marjorie is nearer his age.”
But I could not dismiss the photograph so glibly. It remained before my eyes all the way to Calais and was still there when we boarded the train to Paris. I tried to sleep; I tried to think of something else. I tried to engage Aidan in conversation. Everything failed to erase it. At Paris we took a taxi to another station, where the sleeper train which would take us through France and Switzerland and on to Italy was waiting. Aidan bought ham rolls, croissants and coffee through the window of the carriage from a little cart that trundled along the platform, and we ate ravenously. The coffee was the best I had ever tasted. When I mentioned this to Aidan, he grinned, raised his cup and said, “There is no such thing as coffee in England, really, you know.”
“Or Wales,” I added. What would Frank say if he knew what delicious bread, pastries and coffee existed? I resolved at that moment that nothing would stop me from bringing him, and even Mam and Da, to Europe some day. Whatever lay in my future, I could not let this privilege be mine alone.
The train set off; the day wore on. Much of northern France was flat, with lines of trees, and the land was still scarred here and there by the remnants of the war – bumpy fields where trenches had been, and ruined buildings. But as dusk fell, our journey took us towards the Alps, and I glimpsed the distant blue-grey mountains with their white caps. Sleepy as I was, I stared, thrilled by the sight. But even as I did, the scenery faded and Catherine Penhaligon, as her official name must be, once again appeared before me. Blonde, slender, dressed expensively in a shimmering gown, a fur hanging idly from her hand, her neck and ears decorated by diamond jewellery, perhaps of her own design. I could not erase her image.
Our connection from Pisa was late, and by the time Aidan and I climbed down from the train at Castiglioncello, my exhaustion was reflected by his. Shoulders drooping, stumbling against each other, we crossed the platform. Two porters competed for our baggage, babbling incomprehensibly. My heart sank. I had never heard Italian before at such close quarters. This was the language I was supposed to master, “for verisimilitude”.
Aidan dismissed one of the men and the other set about putting our luggage on his trolley. We emerged from the station into darkness and the exotic presence of Italy. I will never forget the mildness of the air and the scent of pines that greeted me that night. I had to bite back the observation that it was not like Wales. My comparison between Aberystwyth and Brighton had been met with disdain by David; I had learnt a lesson.
But my impression of that old-fashioned two-seater carriage, and the stony road it travelled on under a black sky sprinkled with stars, was no less vivid for not being able to speak of it. It was mid-April; I had no inkling of the intensity of the heat that would rule my existence bef
ore the next few weeks were out. I did not know that everything I had brought in my case, and everything that had been sent poste restante from the Thamesbank Hotel, would be too warm to wear. My habitual costume would become that of the Italian girls: a cotton dress, sandals and a light shawl.
Above the squeak of the carriage wheels and the thud of the horses’ shoes, I heard unfamiliar sounds: insects, I supposed, and the chatter of night-time birds. Above me the pines stretched to the sky, scattering the road with their needles. And all around me lay the invisible presence of newness.
During that carriage ride, I strained my nerves in an attempt to imprint every sensation on my memory, to relay to those in Haverth, of course, but also to store in my own heart.
The apartment Aidan had rented was on the first floor of an ancient house built around a small, green-tiled courtyard. The key had been left under a chipped plaster model of a cat beside the door. As Aidan fumbled for it in the darkness, I breathed deeply. The scent of flowers was strong. All around me bloomed geraniums, bougainvillea, peonies and many other species I could not name.
101 Pieces of Me Page 13