The Invitation(59)

When I open the door he is sitting in the armchair, in his immaculate suit. ‘It can’t have been so very wonderful,’ he says, ‘if you got out so quickly.’

‘Oh, I—’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘you can have another. I’ve got you the room next door.’

*

She stops, to take a sip of her wine. Hal imagines her as the young girl she was then. She would have been a rare thing indeed: a point of bright light. And then he imagines Truss, watching, wanting to make that light his own. The idea sickens him.

‘Ah,’ they hear a familiar voice from the doorway. ‘There you are.’

‘Oh,’ Stella says, shooting quickly up from her seat as though it has burned her. She is standing, smoothing herself down.

‘We lost our bearings,’ Hal explains.

‘Of course.’ Aubrey smiles, looks between them. If he sees anything odd in the two of them having been sitting together like this, his expression doesn’t betray it. ‘I had to ask some ladies of the night if they’d seen you. They were quite helpful, actually, especially after I promised to send them the photograph I’d taken of them.’

‘Are we late?’ Stella asks.

‘Oh no, not particularly. The Contessa just wanted everyone to start gathering back on the yacht. And you aren’t the last – we’ve lost Morgan to some other drinking hole.’

‘My husband,’ Stella asks, ‘was he looking for me?’

‘I don’t imagine so,’ Aubrey says. ‘He’s spent the whole afternoon shut up somewhere making a call – business in Milan, he said.’

She visibly relaxes, and her reaction depresses Hal. It seems horrible to him that a man like that should have so much influence over her.





Her


Shortly after the beginning of my new life, my husband began to address me as ‘Stella’, removing, with a few letters, the foreignness of my name. At first I found it odd. But gradually it started to make sense to me. It was part of the necessary detachment of my old self from my new. Estrella could not be anything but foreign. Stella could be from anywhere, or nowhere. Now I have been Stella for so long. Impossible to talk of my old life with our acquaintances in New York. They understand me only in the context of my husband, our wealth, the city. They would not understand. Until quite recently – until my discovery, that is – this suited me absolutely. In fact, I feared not being seen as one of them, of being exposed as something different. I worked to extinguish every trace of my old accent, every vestige of the girl I had once been.

With him, it is different. That night in Rome – we knew nothing of each other. We were absolute strangers. The liberation of that. And when he talks to me, now, I feel that perhaps he sees something more than Stella, the rich man’s wife – and that, too, is freeing. It isn’t just that I find myself wanting to talk of that time – I seem to be unable not to do so. And yet there is a reason I haven’t returned to that time for more than a decade. To go back there is to leave myself vulnerable. It is liberating – but also dangerous.

When we are gathered back in the harbour once more, my husband takes me to one side to tell me that he must travel to Milan for a few days.

‘Would you like to come with me – or would you prefer to stay?’

For some reason I feel under special scrutiny. It would be safer to go with him. I would escape the particular kind of danger here. But I don’t seem able to help myself.

‘I think,’ I say, ‘that I would prefer to stay. It would be rude, otherwise, to desert the Contessa, the other guests.’

He inclines his head slightly, as though he had expected the answer already. Then he takes my chin in his hand. I feel the grip of his fingers, for a second, and then he tilts my face up toward him and kisses me.





PART THREE





22


‘But it’s such a shame,’ the Contessa says. They have not yet left the Genoese harbour, and Truss has announced that he must travel to Milan for a few days for business. ‘You really must go?’

Truss nods. ‘I’m afraid so. I should be back in time for the screening, though.’

‘Not both of you?’

‘I would love Stella to come with me, naturally.’ He smiles at her. ‘But we both feel that it is much better if she stays. She will have a happier time here.’

They set sail from Genoa a couple of hours after Truss has left them. The air has an odd stillness to it: the ever-persistent breeze briefly absent. The heat gathers in the lull. It is something to do with the bank of cloud that has massed during the afternoon, keeping the warmth trapped.

That evening, after supper, they play a game, which involves marking anyone who gets a rhyme wrong with a blackened stub of cork. By the end, the marks on Morgan’s face have nearly joined together, the Contessa has only one, Hal thinks, and Stella has three. The one on her forehead is smudged into her hairline, and she is flushed with laughter, and perhaps a little from the wine. Hal looks at her and wonders how he could ever have imagined her ordinary, or two-dimensional. But then she is a different woman, tonight, to the one who looked like she might have sprung, fully formed, from an advert in a magazine.

Afterwards, they play a game of forfeits. Anyone with the lowest hand in any given round, the Contessa explains, must display a talent. Aubrey is first – and chooses to do impressions. His first is a mimicry of the dowager duchess he was summoned to photograph in Biarritz – ‘If you allow me to appear with more than one chin, young man, I’m not paying.’ Hal sees Stella throw back her head and laugh. Next, he chooses Hal. ‘You have to imagine me a great deal more handsome,’ he says, pretending to gaze sombrely into the middle distance, and then to scribble on an imaginary page. For a second, Hal wonders how Aubrey could possibly know. Then he realizes that, of course, Aubrey is imagining a journalist’s pad, nothing else. Finally, he chooses Stella. He smoothes his hair behind his ears, and props an imaginary magazine in front of himself. His face changes, becomes a tight, anxious mask. Hal sees immediately that Aubrey has misjudged. It is unmistakably her, but it is the wrong side of cruel. Knowing what he now does of Aubrey, he is prepared to forgive him. But when he glances at Stella, he sees that the smile has left her face.