by Karen Swan
‘Now there’s a pretty sound.’
She hesitated, then took a step closer, wanting to see his face, wanting to appear bolder than she felt. ‘Tell me your name.’
‘Tell me why you’re sad.’
‘I’m not sad.’
‘On the contrary – you’re the sorriest-looking sight I’ve seen since my dog got caught in the rain. Aren’t you happy to be sixteen?’ He walked around her, still out of sight, like a cat circling an injured bird.
‘It’s fine. It’s just a number.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so, Miss Valentine. Not looking like that.’
The compliment – unveiled this time – took her bravado from her like a thieving wind. ‘I should get back.’ She turned to leave.
‘Why?’ He stepped out of the shadows now, the pale light of the half-moon falling across him like a satin sheet. His blond hair, closely cropped at the back and sides, swept across a broad forehead, his blue eyes a colour-pop against his tan, his nose straight and his chin strong with a slight cleft. He looked just like the movie star Tab Hunter, her most fervent crush; her mother had met him a few times at some Hollywood parties and promised to introduce them but Laney didn’t hold out much hope. Her mother’s promises were notably lax.
‘I can’t stay.’
Flicking the cigarette to the ground and grinding out the little light with his shoe, he walked over to her, stopping just a few feet away. ‘Has anyone even noticed you’re gone?’
She swallowed. She had never been alone with a boy before, much less alone in the dark with a boy who looked like him. ‘They will do.’
‘No, they won’t, and do you know why?’ He looked down at her, his eyes seeming to blaze with an anger she couldn’t comprehend. ‘Because they’re damned fools, too busy lining up to kiss your dad’s ass.’ He reached an arm out to her, tipping up her chin with a crooked index finger, his eyes raking over her face like fingers. ‘It’s your Sweet Sixteenth but it’s not about you. Nothing ever is, is it? They don’t even notice that the beautiful girl with every earthly gift also has the saddest eyes.’
She looked away, trying to hide, but his grip was firm and his eyes found hers again easily. ‘But I do.’ He paused and with every silent second that passed, she felt he was drawing the breath from her as though it was golden thread on a spool. ‘And what’s more, I know exactly what to do about it.’
Chapter Five
Rome, July 2017
It was an extravagance she couldn’t afford. Coffee on the Piazza Angelica came at a premium the tourists were prepared to pay for the views of the bustling market, but for a local – as she was, at least temporarily – it was madness. Rather, they all went to Luca’s for their morning espresso, standing at the bar behind the window and chatting briefly, loudly, with their neighbours before heading off for the day. Alé had taken her there in her first fortnight of arriving here but it had taken Cesca another month before she had built up the nerve – and linguistic confidence – to go there on her own and shoot the breeze.
But today she had needed to sit. Having walked for hours, she had needed to sit and stare at nothing and make a plan because without a plan, she would be back in England within three weeks. Her coffee had been finished in three gulps, at a cost of one euro eighty per gulp, but she continued to stir the spoon in the empty cup meditatively for another good hour or so.
As far as she could see, she had several options. She could set up on her own and do her own tours. But that meant getting a website and some brochures printed and she didn’t have the money for any of that; and anyway, the city was already overrun with walking groups trekking between the public sites of the Forum and the Pantheon, the Spanish Steps and the Colosseum.
She could teach English – there were numerous language schools in the city and she was already experienced in dealing with the public. Or she could be a waitress. Perhaps Signora Accardo needed help; she always seemed rushed off her feet whenever Cesca passed.
As for what she would have loved more than anything – writing her blog full-time – that was still a pipe dream. In spite of Matteo’s sweet support, if she was to have any chance of attracting advertisers and some sort of proper revenue through it, she would first need at least half a million subscribers.
The waiter came over and removed her empty cup from her hands with a knowing, rather unapologetic nod. Time out. It was her cue to move on. They needed the table.
She got up and began walking again, not noticing the flower stall with its buckets of cascading peonies and tulips and lisianthus; she didn’t see the group of idling tourists, their rucksacks worn – in common agreement – back-to-front on their chests like baby papooses: it wasn’t a fashion trend, more some sort of declaration of war against the pickpockets. But she did hear the scooter buzz around the periphery and she recognized Ricci – Franco’s eldest son – with no helmet on, heading to open up the pizzeria.
How much had changed for them both in those few hours since she’d waved to him last night, she reflected. For him, a batch of dough had simply proved overnight, whilst for her, her very future here was now in jeopardy.
She slowed her walk, feeling rootless, her gaze flickering towards the grand palazzo that fronted the entire width of the far end of the square, its creamy shutters still latched shut over the many windows, keeping out the heat (and perhaps prying eyes), its simple, plain, ice-blue facade a bare-faced denial of the baroque extravagance on the other side of the walls. She remembered again the excesses of the galleried rooms and how they had seemed to pulse with a latent energy, as though vestiges of the many lives spent amongst them hovered still beneath the rugs and behind the paintings, and she gave a shiver, feeling pity for the tiny bird-like woman who seemed to share the space with them now, alone in that white room.
‘Damned principles,’ she muttered to herself, wondering whether to check the bins again. Could she be so lucky? As if.
She rounded the corner into the piazzetta. It was not so different to how she had left it in her haste earlier, except that the fig tree was now in the sun: the angled edge of light was steadily pulling back the shadows over the pizzeria, the cobbles, the olive tree in the centre, her apartment and the already-swept steps. It would continue its path until finally the osteria would be bathed in an amber glow, ready for the lunchtime trade.
Cesca jogged up the steps lightly, not wanting to run into Signora Dutti, who still wanted to know what had happened last night with the grand neighbour, and who would now want to know why she was back so early and could she pay her ren—?
‘Oh!’
She stopped dead on the small tiled area at the top of the steps, seeing that her front door was wide open. Dust motes whirled in the air in the triangular wedge of sunlight spilling into the flat.
Elena Damiani, regal in the dim light, slowly rose from the narrow-backed chair by the small square table as though she were the host. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘. . . Not at all,’ Cesca replied, quickly recovering herself and setting her bag down on the floor, wishing she wasn’t still in yesterday’s clothes. Elena, naturally, had changed from her languid pyjamas and kimono into a crisp shirt and ankle-grazing narrow trousers and looked so chic, Cesca felt sure she must be en route to lunch with the Pope (who would also, no doubt, feel distinctly shabbily dressed by comparison).
‘It’s a charming apartment you have here, you must be so thrilled to have secured it.’
‘Um . . .’ Cesca automatically surveyed the small, shady space in response, noticing with fresh eyes what her friends saw: the dated décor, the sparse furniture, the bloom of damp on the ceiling from a dislodged roof tile. It probably looked like one of the broom cupboards in the palazzo.
‘I always wondered what it must be like in here and it’s even better than I imagined. So authentic,’ Elena said, delicately pointing a ballerina-pump-shod toe at the floor tiles.
Cesca didn’t reply. She was wondering how long this woman had been sitting here
, and how long she intended to stay. What if Cesca had made her tour in time and managed not to get the sack? She would have been out for the rest of the day with her other bookings. Would the Viscontessa have sat here and simply waited all that time? She resolved to have a word with her landlady about keeping strangers out of her home in her absence. ‘Can I get you a drink? A cup of tea? Some water?’
‘That would have been delightful but sadly I must be getting on. I have a lunch appointment at one. Terribly dull, but needs must.’ She gave a small bored sigh, and Cesca wondered whether she was indeed lunching with the pon-tiff.
‘Then . . . how may I help you?’ Cesca asked, cutting to the chase with a polite smile.
‘I saw you sitting at the cafe in Piazza Angelica. You looked terribly upset.’
‘Oh. Well, it’s been a bit of a morning,’ Cesca said with forced understatement, this time wondering from which of the many windows Elena had spied her.
‘Yes, I gathered. You looked as though your world had ended . . .’ When Cesca didn’t offer up any explanation, she added, ‘So I thought I might be able to help out.’
Cesca looked up. The reward? That five thousand euros would be the buffer she needed until she could find something new. To hell with principles! A girl’s gotta eat!
‘It was funny seeing you again so soon, actually; I’d been thinking about our meeting last night.’ Her cool eyes settled on Cesca with a surgeon’s clarity. ‘I like you.’
‘Uh . . . thank you,’ Cesca replied, stretching the words out, feeling on guard.
‘I think we could become great friends, you and I.’
Cesca worked very hard not to allow her right eyebrow to hitch up to her hairline. What exactly did she have in common with a seventy-something socialite princess? ‘Okay. I . . . I mean, yes. Thank you. Of course, me too.’
‘You are a terrible liar!’ Elena laughed, that distinctive sound filling the room. ‘Don’t worry, I appreciate this may seem a stretch of the imagination but, inside, I am your age, twenty-seven years old and yet to meet the love of my life; in my head, my life is still ahead of me: it’s only the mirror telling me otherwise. So when I look at you and see a confident, principled, intelligent young woman, I see someone I instinctively feel is a kindred spirit, regardless of the age gap between us.’
‘Thank you.’
‘To get to the point, I have come with a proposition for you.’
‘A proposition?’
‘Yes, I would like us to work together.’
Cesca could see Elena watching her closely, reading the fractional twitches of her features as her words landed. No easy money then? No handover of the five thousand she had already ‘earned’?
‘It crossed my mind to ask you last night but you said you had a job, so . . .’ She arched a plucked eyebrow, clearly waiting for some sort of confirmation from Cesca.
Cesca’s shoulders sagged. ‘Well, amazingly, between then and now I’ve managed to lose it.’
‘How absolutely wonderful! I rather hoped as much!’ Elena trilled, clapping her hands together. ‘Then their loss is my gain—’
Cesca looked at her sceptically.
‘—Because, you see, I need a writer and you are a writer.’
‘Well, I’m a blogger. I wouldn’t say I’m a writer per se.’
‘Nonsense. You write your posts and people read them. They engage with them. Forty-three thousand people engage with them.’
‘I guess . . .’ Cesca said slowly. ‘But what is it you want written?’ Cesca’s mind began to race. A blog for the palace? A website?
‘I’ve got an old publisher friend who’s been on at me for some time to do a book about my life. He’s been asking for years, in truth. I tried putting him off and onto some of my friends who would just die for this kind of thing, but he’s so awfully insistent they want me and, really, as he put it to me: what else have I to do with my days?’
‘That was hardly diplomatic of him.’
‘Well, to be honest, he has a point. Lately I’ve been coming around to the idea of getting my house in order. At some point, I have to start paying attention to what the mirror’s telling me, whether I like it or not.’
‘You’re a very striking woman,’ Cesca said politely, taking care to omit the ‘still’.
Elena smiled, but she knew when she was being flattered. ‘Well, I wasn’t sure about it until we met last night. It’s a very intimate process, you see. It would mean going through my personal photographs, talking about my life in great detail . . . I’m sure you can appreciate that is a daunting prospect for me. I would need to be able to trust the person I was working with and you, Francesca, have already proved yourself to be highly trustworthy.’
‘So you want me to write your biography?’ Cesca asked, wanting to clarify things completely.
‘It is not necessarily as overwhelming a proposition as it may first sound, as some of the preliminary work has already been done,’ Elena said reassuringly, seeing the alarm on Cesca’s face. ‘A few months back, I employed an archivist to go through my photographs and arrange them chronologically as much as was possible. But after that, well, I’m afraid I rather ran out of steam. I didn’t like any of the people the publishers proposed and I had no idea how to find a writer myself.’ She shrugged. ‘At least, I didn’t until you turned up on the doorstep last night. I looked at your blog after you left.’ She smiled. ‘You now have forty-three thousand and one followers.’
Cesca chuckled, flattered. ‘Thank you.’
Elena handed over a small piece of folded ivory paper. ‘That’s what the publisher says they’ll pay but if it’s not enough, let me know and I’ll make a call. They’re not going to lose the project on account of something like that.’
Cesca’s mouth dropped open in astonishment as she read the figure. That was a year’s rent, with enough left over to buy a second-hand scooter. It was more than she had made in her first year at the Bar.
‘They want it done by the beginning of September, so it would mean coming to work with me full-time for the next couple of months. The remit is to present “the woman behind the enigma”.’ Elena shot Cesca a wry look. ‘Their words, not mine. What do you think?’
Cesca stared back at the immaculate woman. Cartier watch, navy Valentino trousers, globe pearls, a very discreet facelift – she was her opposite in every possible way: rich where Cesca was poor, old where she was young, tidy where she was scruffy. And yet there was a recognition of sorts between them. Whether it was shared intellect or a rather weary world view, she didn’t know, but Elena was right: she felt certain they could work together.
‘I’d be interested on one condition,’ Cesca said slowly, glimpsing an opportunity for the long game, something that would benefit her beyond this project and that paycheque.
Elena arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh?’
‘You grant me an exclusive for my blog.’
‘An exclusive what? An interview? Because I’ve never spoken to a journalist in my life.’
‘I’m not a journalist,’ Cesca replied calmly. ‘And you would have full veto.’
Elena looked sceptical. ‘What would it be about?’
‘I don’t know yet. I know nothing about you but there must be something in your wonderful palazzo that I could show my readers. It could be whatever you felt comfortable sharing, just so long as it was something no one has seen before. It would have to be something that would get a buzz going, and bring people to the site.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Elena gave her a long, appraising look – clearly conflicted by the counter-proposition – before nodding slowly. ‘Well, I’m sure there must be something we could find that would be of use to you.’
Cesca beamed. ‘Fantastic,’ she replied, holding out her hand. ‘When do we start?’
‘You’re like a cat, you know that?’ Alé gasped in amazement as Cesca raised her glass for a toast.
‘On account of my long tail, you mean?’
‘You always land on your fe
et!’ she laughed.
‘Well, I’m never usually this lucky. I’ve certainly never lost one job and landed another in a day before.’
‘For triple the money!’ Matteo said, shaking his head in disbelief. He’d not had a pay rise in three years.
‘I assume, from the fact that this is the sixth time you’ve mentioned it, that you’re expecting me to pick up the tab tonight?’
‘Aw, would you?’ Alé winked. As a newly qualified teacher, she only just made her rent and was having to supplement her income by working as a private tutor through the holidays; Matteo, though well-dressed, earned a pittance as a manager at a pricey menswear boutique on Via Condotti; and Guido was a graphic designer at one of the city’s big firms, with big dreams but pockets too small for breaking away and setting up on his own.
‘To think this time yesterday you were running away from us on the pretence of protecting your job—’ Matteo said.
‘I was protecting my job. I needed an early night.’
‘And instead you ended up sipping bellinis at midnight with one of our city’s most enigmatic socialites.’
‘And now I’m working for her. It’s all very strange,’ she shrugged.
‘Some might say fated,’ Guido said, with dramatically furrowed eyebrows and a deeply ironic tone.
‘So what’s she like then?’ Alé asked. ‘My mother is going to go nuts when I tell her. She thinks the Viscontessa is the most stylish woman in Rome.’
‘Uh, well yes, she’s very chic. She’s got that rich manner about her, you know? Everyone’s “Dahling, kiss, kiss!”, everything’s easy and breezy.’
‘That’s because she never has to get her hands dirty. She has people like us to do it for her,’ Matteo said.
‘Plus she’s unbelievably tiny. I don’t think she can have eaten since 1987. She makes me feel like a giant. I swear I could fit her in my coat pocket.’
‘She would fall out of the holes at the bottom,’ Matteo quipped, pulling a ‘sad’ face.