The Invitation(98)

‘The film is a lie.’

‘Hal, you aren’t making any sense.’

‘Look,’ I opened it, turned to the final pages, showed it to her.

She read, her brow furrowed. ‘It doesn’t say anything.’ She passed it back to me. I read what was written there.

I need to remove her from evil influences here. I do not blame her – she is green and impressionable, and was perhaps not quite ready for Society. I am taking her away for several weeks. We will sail down the coast, back to the house in Portofino.

It finished there. ‘But—’

‘It is understood that there was a great storm,’ the Contessa says, ‘recorded only a little while after this entry. There is, too, a letter from another in the family, dated from a similar time, speaking of “our poor drowned cousin”. The compass was found on the seabed, not far from San Fruttuoso. So yes, it is likely that he perished, that they both perished – but not that he drowned her. We choose to reinterpret the ending, to make it about a new life, rather than the end of one. A hope that all of us deserve.’

‘I don’t understand.’ I began to leaf through the remaining blank pages, certain that there would be something more there. But I could find not a word – not even a mark.

‘Hal,’ she said then, ‘I do not think you should speak of this to anyone.’ Then, when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘I feel some responsibility for all that has happened.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘It is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw you both, at my party in Rome. I had met her before, and saw that she was miserable. Like someone wearing a brightly painted porcelain mask. And I met you and you seemed, well, equally lost.’

I remembered Aubrey’s talk of her little projects. ‘And you tried – what – to bring us together?’

She shook her head. ‘Nothing so crude as that. I couldn’t be certain of what I had seen between you. But I thought … perhaps I might have the capacity to bring happiness, of the sort I have had.’

‘It nearly worked,’ I said.

She had suffered some sort of terrible accident. This was the conclusion that they arrived at. And the blood? It wasn’t as much as they had made out, actually. It might be entirely unrelated. Or perhaps she had tried to make like the lady diver and hit her head. There was much made of the fact that she could be reckless, impulsive: that she had gone swimming off the beach at San Fruttuoso and nearly drowned.

The divers found her diamond necklace on the seabed. The clasp was broken. What force had done it? I remembered the hands about my neck.

One of the guests remembered seeing some disturbance of the water near the boat, the gleam of something. Could it have been a person? He wasn’t sure. ‘It could have been a fish,’ he had then gone on to suggest, entirely invalidating his account, ‘or one of the champagne bottles. Or … or I suppose that I could have imagined it completely. I had drunk a great deal by that point.’

There is a current, apparently, from near where the boat was moored – not far from the ?le St Honorat – and straight out to sea. If Stella had got caught in that, she might have found herself in danger. It would also explain why they had not yet found her. A diamond necklace, if detached, would sink instantly. But a body might be carried some way by the water. But they expected to find a body in the end: that much was clear.

I knew that if Truss had her killed, he would have made sure that no one would ever find her. He would have calculated, prepared. And though I did not want to believe that she was gone, it was a better explanation than an accident of her own making. I did not recognize this ‘reckless’ character that they had fabricated. She was brave, and rebellious, but not reckless. And that night she was as cautious as I had seen her. The suggestions of inebriation did not convince me either. When I had spoken to her, only a few hours before she supposedly disappeared, she had been absolutely sober.

I spent a few days in Cannes, trying to persuade the police to take my suspicions seriously. But it was clear that my credibility had been damaged for them irreparably. Whether that was the disastrous interview in the station, or the work of Truss, I do not know.

I had the Contessa’s cheque to live on. I didn’t want to take it at first, it felt sordid, and I hadn’t earned it. Tempo didn’t want to publish the article, it felt wrong, the editor explained, after the Truss woman’s death. They weren’t that sort of publication.

‘Please,’ she had said. ‘Let me do this for you, at least. Take it for me; so that I know you can start a new life for yourself.’

I took a bus to the coast, and found a ferry terminal. Morocco, where we had planned to go together, was far enough away for a start.

I drifted through Marrakech, but found it too fractious. Eventually, I discovered Essaouira. Of all places, this liminal town, facing the broad expanse of the grey sea, best echoed my state of mind.

And something happened to me. I began to write. About her. I wrote with a kind of mad energy, as though if I could get it all out of me, I might somehow release myself from the pain. And from the dreams, too. They have not left me, though. In them I see her slipping beneath the black water. I see her struggling, and then I see her give herself over to it. I see his hands about her neck. But the worst dreams are those in which I see my hands about her neck; forcing her beneath the surface.