The Rome Affair

by Karen Swan

  Cesca stuck her tongue out at him.

  ‘Just being serious for a minute, though,’ Guido interrupted. ‘I mean, I know the timing is good and the money’s great, but aren’t you worried this is a bit of a comedown?’ he asked, getting to the point as ever. ‘You’re so clever, Chess. You’re capable of so much more than transcribing the recollections of a rich old woman.’

  It was a compliment – of sorts – but still Cesca bridled. ‘Well, it’s no worse than trekking tourists from one monument to the next in the blazing midday sun, is it? Besides, you’re working on the assumption that just because I was a barrister, I was a good one.’

  ‘Oh, I know you were,’ he replied. ‘You can’t hide clever.’

  Just then, Signora Accardo came over with the primi, setting down plates expertly balanced from wrist to elbow. She picked up the bottle to replenish their glasses and was amazed to find it empty.

  ‘Already? You drink like fishes!’ she chided, in spite of the fact this meant more profit for her.

  ‘We’re celebrating, Signora. I got a new job today.’

  ‘Yes?’ Signora Accardo’s black eyes brightened. ‘What you do now?’

  ‘I’m going to be working at the Palazzo Mirandola for the Viscontessa.’

  The older woman’s expression seemed to freeze. ‘What doing?’

  ‘I’m writing her biography. I’m a proper bona fide writer now.’

  ‘All she will tell you is lies,’ Signora Accardo said, in a voice so low it was almost a growl. ‘She is the devil woman.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Cesca wasn’t sure if she had misheard.

  ‘You must keep away from her, Francesca.’

  ‘But I can’t. I need the job. I don’t understand, what’s made you—?’

  ‘She is a bad woman. Wicked things happen from her.’ Signora Accardo shook her head, reprimand in her eyes already – as though Cesca was tainted by association. ‘You must stay away. I know what I’m saying about.’ And she stalked off, her doughy hands pulled into fists, the empty bottle still left on the table.

  ‘What was all that?’ Cesca whispered to the stunned table. ‘She makes her sound like The Godmother!’

  Guido and Matteo shrugged, both looking baffled.

  ‘Well, the Viscontessa was married, like, seven times before she settled here,’ Alé said knowledgeably – Mail Online was her bible. ‘And the circles she moves in are very conservative, very Catholic. I bet it’s a snobbery thing – she’s in the club, but not really, you know? She just married her way in. She’s looked down upon by the oldest families.’

  Guido arched an eyebrow. ‘So Signora Accardo, the notably high-born osteria-owner’s wife, is making it her cause because . . . ?’ Irony dripped from his every word.

  Alé held her breath as she thought about it for a moment. ‘No, I’ve no idea,’ she shrugged finally.

  ‘Well, snobbery be damned then,’ Cesca said, pushing it from her mind and picking up her cutlery. ‘She seems decent enough to me, plus she’s paying me a king’s ransom for the cushiest job of my life.’ She smiled at her friends. ‘As far as I’m concerned, she’s the blinking fairy godmother.’

  Chapter Six

  Alberto set down the jasmine tea, the morning light shining through the white of the bone china. ‘Her Grace will be with you shortly.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She had been taken to a room which, given the left turn they’d taken at the front door, was on the opposite side of the palazzo to Elena’s monochromatic apartment. Situated on the ground floor, its ceilings were vaulted and decorated with flying cherubim and pink clouds, the walls clad with pastel-coloured marble marquetry, occasionally dimpling inwards with statue-decorated niches. Compared to the other lavishly gilded galleries they had passed through to get here, though, this one felt sedate and Cesca was grateful for the reprieve, her head throbbing both from lack of sleep (again) and last night’s wine (again – when would she learn?).

  Set against one wall was a large desk and a chair, which were both so dwarfed by the vast proportions of the room that they appeared like dolls’ furniture; piles of boxes were arranged in stubby towers around them. It was a strangely makeshift office in such a grand room and she wondered as to its original intended use. Ballroom dancing? Indoor bowls? Whatever, it didn’t easily or graciously accommodate its new guise as a modern workspace and she didn’t even like to think of how slow the wifi connection must be, having to get past those marble walls.

  She sipped the fragrant tea, taking her cup over to the window and looking out, her eyes automatically lifting up to where the other side of the palazzo loomed as she tried to identify the white apartment three floors up, but the rows of windows were unblinking, giving away nothing. Looking away, back down again, she stared out into a large garden tucked tight outside the windows. She had expected to see a stone courtyard, but although a colonnade ran along the opposite side of the palazzo, between the two wings was a pebble-mosaic parterre planted with orange and lemon trees, leading – she craned her neck left to see better – to steps and a wall and seemingly, given the neat groupings of cypresses falling away from sight, more land beyond. It was almost impossible to believe they were still in the heart of this ancient city, where the buildings nearly tumbled upon one another along tiny streets, and not in the open landscapes of Tuscany.

  ‘Exquisite, isn’t it? Whenever my friends ask why I continue to live alone in such an absurdly large house, I simply show them the garden.’

  Cesca turned to find Elena standing in the middle of the room. Cesca was surprised not to have heard her come in, particularly given her hostess was using her walking cane again. She was wearing a khaki linen shift with an Africanstyle horn necklace and stacked bangles which only served to highlight the slenderness of her arms. Her skin was pale and lightly freckled and her complexion boasted a radiance that Cesca’s – at forty years her junior – couldn’t muster this morning, on only six hours’ sleep. As ever, her past had woken her with a punch.

  ‘It’s such a lovely surprise. I was expecting to see . . . I don’t know, the back of your neighbours’ building or a courtyard? It’s remarkable you’ve got so much land, right here in the capital.’

  ‘Well, we have my late husband’s father to thank for that. He was instrumental in keeping the estate intact when Mussolini appropriated it during the war.’ She smiled warmly. ‘And I hope Alberto greeted you with better grace than the other night?’

  ‘Yes, he was charm personified,’ Cesca replied, even though he had greeted her with even more suspicion than when he’d thought she was running a scam. She walked back to the middle of the room and returned her tea cup to the tray on the table.

  ‘Good. He’s becoming quite grand in his old age. I fear soon I’ll be bringing his coffee.’

  Cesca smiled but she couldn’t imagine a world in which that would ever be a possibility. Elena possessed an innate regal grace; there would always be people to wait on her. ‘So is all this material for the book?’ She indicated the boxes.

  ‘Hmm?’ Elena glanced down. ‘Oh yes, those are the photographs the archivist worked on. My life in pictures, as it were. Everything should be in date order – both in the boxes and on the backs of the images themselves. Heaven knows how he managed to be so precise, but then I guess that’s what he was paid for. He considered himself a historian, you know. He would use details from the photographs such as the fashion of the clothes and hairstyles, or he would magnify the cover of a magazine on a table to identify the date.’

  ‘Wow,’ Cesca murmured, counting fourteen boxes in total whilst thinking how she’d been trained to do the same with case photographs.

  ‘Everything should be there – from my childhood at Graystones to now, and everything in between.’

  ‘Graystones is in America?’

  ‘Yes. It’s my parents’ compound in Rhode Island.’

  ‘Oh.’ Compound, she thought. It wasn’t often people had cause to use that word. ‘And how
long have you lived in Rome for?’

  ‘It will be thirty-seven years in August, can you believe it?’

  ‘Gosh. You really are an honorary Roman then.’

  ‘I’m not sure they ever truly accept you, to be honest, but heaven knows I’ve tried leaving here and failed miserably.’

  Cesca nodded, recalling Alé’s gossipy conjecture at dinner the night before.

  ‘When my darling Vito died, I didn’t think I could bear to stay. We are so terribly lucky, we have so many places we get to call home: Tuscany, London, Aspen, New York, Bel Air. I tried them all – I even lived in Marrakech for a while; I thought the colours and bustle would cheer me up – but somehow I can never settle anywhere but here. I feel this city claimed my heart as much as the man did.’

  ‘Well, I can relate to that – the city, I mean, not the man.’

  ‘When did you first come to Rome?’ Elena asked, looking interested, and Cesca noted that she had a way of gazing at her as she talked that suggested she was not only the most interesting person in the room (which was just as well, given they were alone), but possibly the most interesting person she’d ever met. She struck Cesca as a good listener, a confidante to many.

  ‘The December when I was nine. My parents brought me and my brother to see the snow falling through the oculus in the Pantheon.’

  Elena’s eyes softened. ‘The oculus. I have always thought it is the most romantic spot in the city.’

  ‘Well, it certainly made me fall in love. When my friends talked about going to live in Paris or New York, it was always here that I wanted to come. I meant to come back before now but you know how it is – life got in the way. School, uni, law school . . . There was never enough time or money.’

  ‘Law school?’ Elena was like a hawk, spotting the single mouse in the field of hay.

  Cesca blanched, realizing her slip. ‘Oh . . . yes . . . I’m a trained barrister. But I knew very quickly that it wasn’t for me,’ she said hurriedly, closing down the topic before it could be opened up. ‘Once I realized I’d made a mistake following law, I figured I needed to shape my life to the way I wanted it to be and that meant living here.’

  ‘All that work, though, the years of exams, hours of studying . . .’

  Cesca shrugged, already regretting opening her mouth. It was always the same; people could never believe she had turned her back on something she had strived so hard to reach. ‘Well, it led me here so I don’t regret it. I can’t. It’s a step on my path.’

  ‘And your parents are supportive?’ Elena asked, watching her closely as if detecting, somehow, something more.

  ‘They want me to be happy.’

  Elena nodded. ‘Ah yes, well, as a parent, I can understand that very well.’

  ‘Do you have children?’ They were back on safe ground again.

  ‘One. A son, Giotto. He lives in London with his wife and three children. We are very close.’

  ‘How lovely.’ Cesca looked back at the boxes again, remembering that she had to turn this small talk into a product. She was here to work after all. ‘Well, I’m afraid I haven’t done any background research on you, yet. But—’

  ‘Background research?’

  ‘Yes. A few hours on the internet and I should be pretty much up to speed on the broad strokes of your life, and then you and I can go into finer detail face to face.’

  ‘No.’

  Cesca tripped over her own thoughts. ‘I’m sorry, what?’

  Elena looked pained. ‘I would rather you did not google me, if that’s what you mean. At least, not to begin with.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Francesca, many lies have been written about me over the years; my wealth has made me a target from the day I was born, but this is my biography. I want to tell my life story but I can only do it through you and if you were to read those malicious, downright slanderous stories, I would become a cartoon character to you – something that would almost certainly translate onto the page.’

  Cesca swallowed down a sigh. It was true she knew practically nothing about her subject: mother of one, grandmother to three, American-born but settled in Rome for thirty-seven years, widowed for fifteen, a big property portfolio with a spectrum of taste that ran from the baroque to the brutally minimal. If it was a blank slate Elena wanted, she had found it in Cesca. ‘Okay, so then I won’t go near Google,’ she acquiesced. ‘I’ll start with the first box – go through it, select what appear to be the most pertinent photographs and then I can come to you with any questions I have and we can kick off from there. Does that sound okay? That way it’s more of a conversation than an interrogation.’

  Elena smiled, looking mollified. ‘What a marvellous idea. It all sounds so simple when you put it like that.’

  It took all of ten photos to establish that Elena came from money. Proper money. The Graystones box was the first she opened and it positively frothed with black-and-white kodaks of the rich at play – showjumping, shooting, yachting, water-skiing, even acting in glorious statue-filled garden theatres . . .

  Elena had been a plump child, her light-brown hair kept at shoulder length and pinned back with a satin ribbon band. Throughout her childhood, it appeared she was dressed in Mary Janes and white socks, often with gloves and a bonnet or boater too; her coats were tweed with velvet pan collars. The smocking on her dresses was impossible to miss.

  To Cesca it all looked incredibly uptight – and she noticed that in very few of the images was Elena ever smiling. That was no doubt due in part to the fact that she was almost always surrounded by adults, the only child in the group, but Cesca wondered as well about how close the child was to the incredibly glamorous parents flanking or holding her in some of the shots.

  The mother was like a blade – narrow and sharply angled in the best couture – with blue-black dyed hair set in stylized waves, her distinctive almond-shaped eyes giving her a sensual, feline quality. With small bones and no bosom, she looked great in a bias cut and was more often found in eveningwear than anything else. (Although Cesca made a mental note that it was these ‘high day and holiday’ occasions that were more likely to be recorded with a photograph, than those regular ‘nothing doing’ days.) There was a lot of fur, a lot of satin, and she was often photographed alongside lots of men in penguin suits with oiled hair.

  The most handsome of them appeared to be Elena’s father. Even now, seventy years later, his looks – frozen through the lens – transcended his era, marking him out as a timelessly stunning man. He was the physical opposite of his petite wife: sunshine-blond curls, a deeply polished tan, pale-grey eyes and a strapping, athletic physique. Judging from all the photographs, he rowed, sailed, rode (hunting and polo), skied (both water and snow) and boxed. Cesca could see Elena had inherited his pale eyes and aristocratic slim nose; from her mother, she had gained her petite frame and that radiant smile which cut through the otherwise icy hauteur of those good bones.

  Cesca felt a thread of envy ripple against her skin. Elena’s spoon hadn’t been silver but gold: not only had she won the gene-pool lottery but she had been born into unimaginable privilege. The house – Graystones, she had to assume – was like a scaled-up White House with porticos and balconies, except it had a shimmering weathered shingle roof. One particular shot, an aerial view, showed the entirety of the estate with its grand stables, polo field, tennis court, pool, lake and formal French garden carved into the swathe of fields and woodlands that ran down, on one side, to the sea. Suddenly, Elena’s gracious elegance made sense. She hadn’t needed to marry a prince to become a princess; she already was one in all but title.

  Cesca stopped at one photograph in particular. It showed the little family of three at yet another party: Elena’s mother in a light-coloured pleated silk dress, her father in a white silk DJ. Though the photo was black-and-white, Elena looked especially radiant in a velvet dress with a heart-shaped bodice. She looked different in this image – more sophisticated, somehow – and Cesca realized it was because s
he was wearing make-up.

  The three of them were standing on a terrace. Behind them were hundreds of people all looking up at them; there were pretty lights strung up between the trees and a halo of brightness just coming into the bottom of the shot. A birthday cake, perhaps? They were all laughing at something, mouths parted spontaneously and eyes dancing, her parents gazing upon her devotedly.

  Cesca sighed and wondered whether she had the stomach for so much unremitting perfection. Elena really had been the luckiest girl in the world.

  Chapter Seven

  Rhode Island, August 1961

  ‘Do you like it, Mother?’

  The seamstress stepped back to allow Whitney Valentine an unimpeded view of her daughter.

  Whitney’s steepled fingers pressed against her lips. ‘Darling, it’s simply divine. Grace of Monaco has nothing on you. We were absolutely correct to go for the silk tulle, don’t you agree, John?’

  The couturier nodded. ‘You were right as ever, Mrs Valentine. The zibeline would have been too stiff.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Whitney clapped her hands once, like a judge’s gavel bringing down sentence. It was official, then. The zibeline would have been too stiff; they had been right to choose the silk tulle. ‘It needs to be fluid, easy, weightless. Laney needs to float down the aisle like a feather on the wind.’ Whitney’s own slim hand twirled in the air expressively. ‘She is, after all, a thoroughly modern girl.’

  She was an It Girl to those who read the society pages. Since her coming out at her Sweet Sixteenth a couple of months earlier, Laney had become the most in-demand guest at every party, even though she was already no longer eligible.

  The sixteen-year-old bride stared at her reflection in the mirror. The dress was a dream – albeit her mother’s dream – with a crossover silk tulle bodice, shaped over the hips and then fanning out dramatically to a full tulle skirt over-laid with downy white feathers, which shimmied with every move. Long white gloves and an extravagant veil completed the look. This was the dress in which she would become Mrs Jack Montgomery.