The Invitation(68)

As he turns to make for shore, blinking the sting of the salt from his eyes, he sees a figure on the jetty. It is Stella, sitting on the jetty, watching him.

‘Hello,’ she calls.

‘Hello.’

He hoists himself up onto the stone, and as he stoops to pick up his towel he can feel her eyes upon him, on the naked skin of his chest and stomach. He enjoys it. And when he turns to look at her, and catches her watching, she looks quickly away.

When he has towelled himself dry he sits down beside her. In her sundress and her white plimsolls, with her hair tied back, she looks very proper – like a country club tennis star. So different to his vision of her last night, with her wet hair across her forehead, her nightdress sodden.

She has her handbag beside her. ‘Are you going somewhere?’

‘I was going to walk to Cervo,’ she tells him. ‘The little town? The Contessa tells me it’s worth a visit.’ A beat. ‘Do you want to join me?’

He gestures down at himself. Once again he feels rather than sees the warmth of her gaze upon his skin. ‘I’ll have to get dressed.’

She inclines her head. ‘I can wait.’

He dresses with a kind of frenzy. He had thought, after the strangeness of the night before, that she might be guarded with him. But the opposite seems to be true. He can feel her eyes on him, still.





Her


I don’t know what makes me ask him. But I’m not sure why I’ve done many things over the last few days. I don’t feel completely in control. Last night, for example. Waking to find myself in the dark water, with him wading in after me. This is exactly why my husband insists I should be taking the pills: the sleepwalking is dangerous, he says.

After I returned to my room I found myself opening my door, stepping outside. I stood in the corridor beside his door with my hand raised, ready to knock, before I realized what I was doing. But I was very much awake then.

This is not the woman who thinks out every sentence before she utters it, who is measured, self-possessed, never unexpected or controversial. But then neither was I her the other night on the yacht when I opened my mouth and sang. These are the actions of someone who meets a stranger at a party and asks him to take her with him into the nighttime city.





27


Cervo


A red-roofed, pastel-coloured town – little more than a hamlet – perched above the blue sweep of the Mediterranean. On the flat rocks that extend into the sea several dozen bronzed bodies are visible, lying prone in the warm wash of the sunlight. A place where one might live like a king on very little. He could be happier in a place like this, Hal thinks, than if he were to stay in the best hotel in Portofino.

The cobbled walkway up to the town is fringed by an embarrassment of flowers: reds and pinks, yellow and purple and white: colours that might never be put together by design. But nature, who knows nothing of convention, has the audacity of a genius.

In the medieval streets at the heart of the place the buildings seem to lean towards one another, pressing inwards. Stella moves in front of him like a pale flag against the shadows, looking about herself. He wants to know exactly what it is that draws her attention there, at the apex of two buildings, or there, in that dark corner. But there is almost absolute silence around them, and to speak into it would be to break the spell. Perhaps the entire population of the town is on the beach, because it seems they are the only ones here.

Suddenly they are launched into sunlight: a bright square above the sweep of the sea revealed on one side. Now the heat of the day is upon them again: a vivid, pressing warmth. Before them is a majestic church decorated in marine colours – seafoam, coral, palest sand – looking almost as though it were once something dredged from the sea.

‘Do you want to go in?’ he asks Stella.

‘You go,’ she says. ‘I’ll sit there—’ gesturing to an ironwork table and chairs set up in one corner of the square.

He knows what she will do: sit, and gaze out at the sea. It holds a particular fascination for her, as though she never grows tired of looking at it. He thinks he understands. For one who grew up with it, as he did, it was – until recently – something like an old friend. For her, it is still a mesmerizing stranger.

‘All right.’

The colours used inside are the same, but in the shadows they gain depth, majesty. There are a couple of bowed white heads in the pews: indistinguishable from Hal’s position as men or women, their stillness absolute. They could have been sitting here for hours – days. He never inherited his mother’s religion – agnosticism is one of the only things on which he and his father agree. And yet he has always been fascinated by her faith, her absolute trust in a higher power. He has wished at times, since the war, that he shared it. That belief in a higher plan in particular, the conviction that everything that happens – even the terrible things – happens for some reason too complex and mysterious for understanding. And the act, too, of confessing – and through that confession, to have some hope of finding absolution. The funny thing is, he often finds himself in the role of confessor, like some sort of a secular priest. It has always been this way: at school, friends had confided in him their various misdeeds, their shameful secrets. And on Lionheart, too. But since he has had something of his own to confess he seems to have met only with resistance. Suze brushing his words away as though they might soil her. Or his own suppressions, his own shame.