The Invitation(47)
As they pick their way down through the trees she stumbles, once, and he catches her arm to stop her fall. She thanks him, shortly, but these are the only words that pass between them.
When they are nearly at the beach, he tries. ‘Stella,’ he says, and then stops. He wants to show her how it has affected him, what she has told him of her past. He wants her to continue. But the words he finds are inadequate.
Gesture might be better. He could reach out, to touch her shoulder. But it would be imprudent. Since the night when they danced together he has avoided touching her at all costs. Especially now, since the dream of the night before. He lets his hand fall to his side, and feels his failure.
17
They discover the party in a restaurant beside one of the encircling arms of rock, perched above the water. The beach is surprisingly crowded: Italians lie or sit chatting and smoking on beds spread out across the sand, the women in brightly coloured swimming costumes and caps. A couple of children run shrieking in and out of the shallows, splashing one another. Behind all, rising solemn and pale, a memento mori, is the ancient fa?ade of the abbey. He wonders what it has seen in all the centuries it has stood here.
Stella sits next to her husband once more. The transformation is complete: she wears a sunhat, a silk scarf. Her face is obscured by the brim of the hat. She might as well have put on a mask, Hal thinks.
At the head of their table, the Contessa is cooling her injured ankle in a wine bucket of iced water. But when she goes to stand, Hal sees to his surprise that there is no apparent pain as the foot takes her weight.
‘Strange,’ Gaspari says, ‘to see it again like this – without the film crews here. You know, we got here, and discovered the whole place covered with seaweed – there had been a storm. It took four hours, perhaps more, to clear it all. And when the sun came out it stank.’
‘Lucky that you can’t transmit an odour through the screen – yet.’
Gaspari smiles. ‘Sometimes I worry we do too much of this in film: show the sanitized version of a place, a person. Whether we should be showing things as they really are, in all their ugliness and complexity.’
Hal looks surreptitiously at Earl Morgan and thinks of how he looks in the film. Compares that now to the ruin before him. The truth would make a depressing spectacle indeed.
‘To a lot of people,’ he says, ‘I think that’s what film is about – escaping the ugliness for a couple of hours.’
‘For you?’
Hal sees Stella’s head turn slightly. He shrugs, eager to deflect attention from himself. ‘I think, in art, it is as noble a thing to try to make people happy, to help them escape, as it is to make them think. And perhaps more difficult.’
After lunch, there is a move to the sand. Hal and Aubrey Boyd sit against the sun-warmed bank of rocks that flanks the shingled beach on one side. The shadow from the rocks bisects the ground between them: Hal on the sunny side, Aubrey on the other, in what might be the only patch of shade on the whole beach. He has somehow got very sunburned: his skin is a terrible, raw pink and there are painful-looking blisters along his hairline.
‘I’m not built for this climate,’ he tells Hal, forlornly. ‘Mine is a Nordic complexion, suited only for temperate weather, not this barbaric heat. I have delicate skin.’
Hal has fared better than Aubrey: his skin has merely begun to tan. Only the crevices between his fingers bear evidence of his former, paler self.
Ahead of them, Giulietta Castiglione frolics in the surf in a bikini that displays her formidable curves to their best possible effect, laughing for the few photographers that have, of course, materialized among the crowd. Hal is beginning to recognize familiar faces among them: a couple have appeared at every stop. They click away delightedly as Giulietta splashes the water, tosses her hair, and is that carefree child–woman once more – quite different to the shrewd, often morose person that Hal has glimpsed in private moments.
‘She’s a little bitch,’ Aubrey says, ‘as far as I can tell. But she photographs extremely well. And one has to admit she’s divine to look at.’
‘She is.’ It is inarguable fact.
‘I’ve always loved beautiful things,’ Aubrey says. ‘Ever since I was a boy. There was very little beauty at the school I was sent away to. Grisly place, terrible interiors.’ The glib tone has a brittleness to it. It can’t have been easy, Hal thinks, for someone like Aubrey at a boys’ boarding school.
‘If it was anything like mine, I can imagine.’
‘Of course, it makes one appreciate one’s home all the more.’
‘Where did you grow up?’
‘Kent. Not much more than a cottage,’ Aubrey says, ‘but a big garden, which was the walled kind, you know – with climbing roses, and beds of lavender, and apple trees. In the summer, I wanted to spend my every waking moment there. And there was Feely …’
‘Feely?’
‘My older sister. Ophelia. When she came out into the garden she was the most beautiful thing in it. She’d let me dress her up in shawls and paste jewels – as an empress, or a fairy queen, and paint her in watercolours.’
Hal looks at Aubrey, and realizes that a change has occurred. In his voice, his gestures, there is a new softness, where before there was all haughtiness, arch sarcasm.