The Invitation(24)

I don’t know what you want from me, he thinks.

‘What can you two be talking about?’ Hal looks up to find Truss regarding them across the table. At his words the other guests turn to look, too. He smiles at Hal. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Jacobs – is my wife giving you a hard time already?’ Now he looks at Stella, who has not raised her head. ‘She gets carried away, sometimes – don’t you, Kitten?’

Silence.

‘Well, Kitten?’

She nods. Truss gives a little mock toast with his glass and turns back to Gloria. Stella takes a long sip of her wine. Then she turns to Hal. ‘Forgive me,’ she says – shortly, bitterly, as though it was he who chastised her in front of all present. Before he can think of something to say to her, she has turned away.

The evening seems to have fractured, after this. The guests sit in silence, the plates have been cleared away, the wine bottles emptied. The wind has picked up, and Aubrey Boyd shivers miserably in his thin blazer. A faint-hearted soul might call an end to the dinner now. But the Contessa is not that.

She speaks fearlessly into the silence. ‘Some of you,’ with a nod to Gaspari, ‘already know this, but I thought it might be interesting for those who don’t. The film is based on a strange legend in my family. My ancestor was the sea captain played so superbly by our leading man here,’ she turns to Earl Morgan, but his eyes are glassy with drink, and he seems barely to register her comment. Undeterred, she takes something from the pocket of her jacket. Hal tries to get a closer look at it. A little pot, made from ivory – with some sort of design carved into it.

‘This,’ she holds it up, ‘belonged to him.’

She passes it to Earl Morgan, who studies the pattern for a few seconds disinterestedly, and then hands it on. Now Stella has been passed the pot by Gaspari. Hal watches her examining it, with quiet focus. She turns it over and around in her hands. And then, with an audible pop, she prises the thing open.

‘Ah,’ the Contessa says, pleased, ‘you have discovered its secret. I was wondering when someone was going to do that.’

The others crane to see. Stella holds it up, so that the inside is visible. A dial of some sort, with spokes of alternating red and green, encircled by a gold band.

‘A compass,’ Aubrey says, peering over her shoulder.

‘Broken,’ she says. ‘The arrow …’ she watches it for a few seconds, tilting it back and forth, ‘it keeps going round and round.’

‘Yes,’ the Contessa says. ‘A shame. But perhaps only to be expected, considering its great age.’

Finally, it has come to Hal, and he has a chance to study it himself. There had been a large bronze compass mounted on the captain’s bridge of the battlecruiser, which he had got to see only after they had been decommissioned. Funny, how little the design has changed. It has a peculiar weight in his hand, and a surprising warmth that he assumes must come from the touch of the others before him. North, he presumes, is the point marked by a fleur-de-lys.

He turns it toward the Contessa, and points to the flower. ‘Why this?’

‘The three petals,’ she says, ‘represent religious faith, wisdom, and chivalry. The essential tenets of any nobleman, that kept him on his proper course.’

Hal watches as the needle tracks a stuttering circle, driven by some unknown force. He is at once unnerved by it, and oddly compelled.

The silence now has a different quality. Hal realizes now that a kind of magic has been performed. The Contessa has drawn them together in the telling of it, salvaging the supper by introducing this new, strange element. As conversation resumes around the table she turns to Hal, her smile one of triumph. Her gaze falls to the compass, which he is still turning, almost mindlessly, in his hands.

‘You may borrow it for a while if you wish,’ she says, ‘to study it further.’

He feels he should demur: there is something about the needle that unnerves him. But he finds himself thanking her, slipping the thing into his pocket, where its weight pulls at the fabric. He will hand it back first thing in the morning, he decides.

In his cot, back in his cabin, he is tired but cannot sleep. The gentle rolling movement of the yacht on its anchor should be restful, but it only echoes his own restlessness. Each time he shuts his eyes he can see it like a retinal imprint: the sweep of sea, the figure in the water. And it is too quiet. He is used to the sounds of night in the city, the sirens and voices and the muffled late-night arguments of his neighbours. The few sounds that did make it across the water from the shore – the blare of a car horn, the faint jangle of music – are silenced now by the lateness of the hour. The quiet here becomes, when one listens to it, perversely loud. His ears strain for any sound beyond the slap and whisper of the water – but there is none.

He pulls back the curtain to the porthole. The sea is revealed to him bright as silver, reflecting the moon. The surface is puckered by submarine disturbances; the movements of fish and secret currents. Strange to think of that great weight of water, held back by so little. And beneath him all manner of creatures of whose existence he can only guess. Now his cabin is lit with moonlight too. The objects it finds glow rather than shine. The face of his watch, laid out next to the berth, his shoes, which he polished before the trip. The white pot, concealing within that strange broken device. Is the needle still tracking now? He reaches for it and finds that it is. Something about it unnerves him, though he could never say exactly why. He slides it into the drawer next to his cot.