The Invitation(57)

They leave the courtyard and begin trying to retrace their route, without much success. It is almost as though the city is determined to resist and frustrate their attempts to navigate it, presenting junctions where they had not noticed them before.

They wander into a street with a bar and a couple of trattorias.

‘We didn’t come here,’ she says. ‘I don’t recognize this at all.’

‘We’ll ask someone – see if they can point us in the right direction.’

But the owner of the trattoria frowns and shakes his head when Hal describes the palazzo.

‘You could stay,’ he says, hopefully, ‘and have a drink here first?’

Hal suspects that the man’s lack of geography is nothing more than good business sense. But perhaps it would make sense.

‘We could stop here for a bit,’ he tells Stella. ‘Recover our bearings. If we carry on walking we may find ourselves getting more lost.’

He watches her deciding. Finally, she nods.

He orders them a bottle of cold, straw-coloured wine. It costs far more than he would ever normally spend, and yet he thinks that it is probably one of the cheapest wines she will have tried in a while. Nina, who the bartender treats with the same care and deference as an infant child, is given her own dog bed and a bowl of water. She lies on her sheepskin like a reclining queen. Stella and Hal, meanwhile, are crammed in around a small table, their knees close, occasionally touching. This contact of skin troubles him. He wonders if it is the same for her too: he sees how her hand trembles as she raises it to her lips.

She laughs, nervously. ‘Have you noticed how we keep seeming to end up alone together? It is almost as though someone is conspiring for it to happen.’

He toys briefly with the idea of telling her that the Contessa’s sprained ankle no longer appears to be giving her any trouble whatsoever. But he decides not to. It is only a suspicion. Instead, he says: ‘How are you? I heard that you were exhausted, after your swim.’

She takes another sip of her wine. ‘I’m perfectly all right, thank you.’

‘I saw the boat go after you,’ he says. ‘The funny thing was, you seemed to be all right then, too.’

Her eyes meet his for a second. Then she looks quickly away. ‘Please,’ she says. ‘Don’t.’

‘What?’

‘Please don’t pity me. I can take anything else, but not that. I don’t need it. And certainly not from you.’

He wonders what she means by this. Probably that he himself is the one to be pitied. She has seen the way he lives, after all. Perhaps she has a point.

‘I don’t pity you,’ he says. He sees her relax, a little. But then some rogue urge, some need to provoke, makes him say, ‘I don’t pity you, because I understand that you’ve made some sort of choice, to be with a man like that.’

Her face has flushed red, with anger, he thinks, or humiliation. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘Explain it to me, then.’





21


Madrid, March 1937


‘Hello.’

In spite of myself, I am intrigued.

‘Hello,’ I say. The man smiles. He is younger than I thought: though not young, still twice my age, perhaps. He isn’t Spanish. His clothes are foreign, English or American, I think: a fine jacket, a waistcoat, matching, spotlessly clean trousers. I wonder how he manages it, in the midst of a war.

He introduces himself: he is an American. He has a way about him in fact, an air of ease, that is even more of a rarity in this place than clean clothes.

And he is attractive, I notice – in a way that only becomes apparent when you keep looking. An elegance, perhaps, rather than a handsomeness.

‘Thank you.’

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he says. ‘It isn’t safe for someone like you.’

Where has he been, that he thinks this warm bar is a place of relative danger? ‘It’s better than anywhere else.’

‘Well,’ he says, studying me, ‘are you old enough to drink?’

‘I’d prefer food.’

‘In that case,’ he says, ‘you shall have some.’

The food comes. His eyes are on me. I am eating like an animal, I know: but I do not seem to be able to stop. Not the dreamed-of sardines but a dish of broken eggs, just as good. I slow only when I realize that if I carry on at this speed I will be sick, and it will be for nothing. I have decided what I will do: I will eat, and then I will excuse myself and leave.

But there is wine too, which I am not accustomed to even in normal circumstances. It loosens something in me. I begin to talk. I can’t speak about the circumstances, but I tell him of Papa and Tino, how the loss of them has changed everything, that without them, I don’t know myself. All the time he watches my face, as though he finds something fascinating there.

It is only at the end of the evening that I realize that while I have laid myself bare before him, I don’t know anything about him beyond his name and his nationality. Is this due to rudeness on my part, my preoccupation with my grief? Or some reluctance to tell on his?

‘Come tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I’d like to buy you supper again.’

The meal has worked its effect upon me already. I feel stronger, steadier in my thoughts. If I can eat again tomorrow as I have done this evening, it won’t matter if I can’t find food during the day. It doesn’t ever occur to me to refuse. Why would I?