The Invitation(65)

She raises her eyebrows.

‘It didn’t work. We met before the war; I was studying in London, she worked there, as a clerk. I was twenty when I proposed: I’d hardly lived at all. And then, after the war … I suppose we weren’t the same people that we had been before it.’

Not quite true. Suze had been very much the same. He was the one who had changed out of all recognition. It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried to return to the man he had been: he had. But it was as though the cells of him had undergone an irreversible change. There was no way back.

He remembers that final, terrible reckoning in a Kensington teashop near Suze’s flat. He had never seen her cry before that, not even during the war. And yet however terrible it had felt to know that he had been the cause of this pain, there had also been a secret, queasy sense of relief that it was done, that it was over. Because in the end it had come down to his fear of disappointing her, of not being the person she thought she was marrying. And his realization that, though he cared for her, he did not love her enough to spend his whole life trying to be that person.

‘You know,’ the Contessa says, after a long silence, ‘I wasn’t always married to the Conte.’

Hal turns to look at her, in surprise.

‘No,’ she says, slowly, ‘before him, I was married to another. I was unfortunate enough not to realize my mistake until after my wedding. He wasn’t a pleasant man. The Conte was my salvation.’ She gestures down at herself. ‘You see now someone who is not afraid to be the person she truly is – who will wear the colours she wants to, who will let herself grow old without mourning the loss of her beauty. Because I am free to do as I choose, be exactly how I want to be. He made me see that it could be like that. And that is what love is, I think. But my former marriage – you would not have recognized me then.’

‘What happened?’

‘We were stationed in Eritrea, my husband was posted there a couple of years before the First War. He started having affairs almost instantly – he was a handsome man, a charming one when he wanted to be – and when he came home he would describe to me my shortcomings in comparison: the smallness of my breasts, the size of my nose, the thickness of my waist. The fact that I did not know how to seduce a man, how to please him. I was not then the woman I am now. I began to believe in my own deficiencies.’

Hal is stunned by the cruelty of it.

‘Then I met the Conte, at an expatriate drinks out there. I thought he was a buffoon: bald, far too tall, badly dressed. Obsessed with his plane. But he showed me how to be free. In a way, I wish that I could have learned it on my own – but sometimes we need another to show us our own bravery.’ After a pause, she says, ‘I had a little boy, once.’

‘With the Conte?’

She shakes her head. ‘With my first husband. He got malaria. Oh, it was such a long time ago now – almost a lifetime. But it is strange how often he is in my thoughts, even now, in my old age. Perhaps it is because he was my only one.

‘He had dark hair, and blue, blue eyes. It is a Ligurian trait, this combination. You know, it was what I first thought when I saw you – that you looked as though you could have been born here. And my second thought was that you reminded me of him, my son. I can’t explain it. But I would hope that, had he grown to be a man, he would be something like you.’

He finds, suddenly, that he has to look away.

An hour later, all have excused themselves. Alone in his room, Hal finds himself returning inevitably to that other world.

HE HAS SET her up in a house in Genoa. There are whispers about the mysterious woman living on the Via Cairoli. She has been seen, and noted, by a number of the Genoese quality. This perturbs the captain, because he has specifically told her to leave the house as little as possible. As expected, his departure from the ship has not become the scandal it could have done. His uncle is not impressed with him, he can tell, but will not risk opening the thing up to gossip.

Still she has not allowed him into her bed. But he can be patient. It is only a matter of time. She is kind to him, after all. Once, when he had complained of a congestion in his head she had asked the cook to make him up a remedy of her own invention – a poultice of pungent herbs that he could hold to his face and inhale. And it had, incredibly, worked. He had been grateful and also – though he would hardly admit it to himself – unnerved.

‘All that you need,’ he tells her on his next visit, as they sit drinking their tea in the salon he has had decorated for her, ‘you have here. You should have no reason to leave the building.’

He is right, of course. There is a good-sized garden with the most fashionable features available: an artificial grotto, and a mosaic tricked out with delicately coloured corals and glass.

There is a bathroom with its own private bath: a rare luxury. There is even a miniature chapel, which he learns from the housekeeper she never uses. He has cakes brought to her from the finest pasticceria, wines from his own store. Rare fruits, purchased at great expense from the best merchants. She has, in short, everything.

‘So why,’ he asks her, ‘would you want to leave?’

‘To see the sea.’

‘You can see it from the upstairs windows.’

‘I don’t want to see it like that. I want to see it up close. And to walk in the fresh air.’

‘You have your garden.’