Season of Storms (13 page)

Alex watched while we measured. “I thought that I sent you the designer’s ground plan.”

“Did you? I must have misplaced it,” said Den. “Anyhow, there’s no harm in checking things twice.” Taking note of a number, he ordered me round to another position while I tried to keep my face straight. What a brat, I was thinking—he’d had the theatre measurements all along, he hadn’t needed me at all. This whole escapade had been Den’s way of getting me down here, with him, on my own.

Away from Rupert, I was guessing. Only Rupert wasn’t stupid, he’d spent too many years being my chaperon to miss a trick. Stepping forward casually he said, “Here, let me help you with that, Dennis. I’m sure Celia has other things to do.”

I surrendered my end of the measuring tape without argument, privately amused by his unwarranted concern, but when I would have pointed out that I had nowhere else to be just now, Alex said, “I’m heading back myself, if you’d like to walk with me.”

That rather changed things. “Yes, I would,” I told him. “Thanks.” And reaching up I took the hand that he was offering to help me up and off the stage.

ix

I
don’t recall that anything momentous happened on that walk back to the house. Alex said something about the weather being cold for this time of year, and I said something nice about the gardens, and I asked him where the dogs were, and he told me that he’d kennelled them because they couldn’t go where he had gone. And that was that.

But by the time we reached the terrace I was hopelessly infatuated. His quiet hazel eyes, the way he walked, the way he held his head to one side when he listened, made me feel all tangled-up inside and foolish. Foolish enough to be thinking again of Sally’s tarot reading, and her ‘man with light brown hair.’
The King of Cups . . . a businessman,
she’d said,
but with an interest in the arts.
Well, that was Alex, wasn’t it? Serious on the outside, emotional inside.
He’s at the bottom of all of this,
Sally had said—my foundation.

I tried not to go all adolescent over him, but the smile I gave when I thanked him for walking me back was a little too bright. He surprised me by smiling himself.

“You’re very welcome. I enjoyed the company.”

The terrace wasn’t empty. Nicholas was there already, leaning on the parapet. “Teresa’s been looking for you,” he told Alex. “It’s got something to do with a Mrs. Forlani’s car.”

I looked at Alex, curious. “Mrs. Forlani? Of the Trust, you mean? She’s here?”

“Yes, she likes to come by every month or so, to check the progress of the workmen. You’ll meet her at lunch.”

She must be a very old lady, I thought, considering the age that her husband had been when he died. She’d be doing well to make it up the terrace steps.

Alex said, “You will excuse me?” and moved past me and into the house, presumably to look for Teresa to sort out the problem. Because I didn’t want to appear to be following him, I stayed behind with Nicholas. He wasn’t looking terribly sociable, but I didn’t let that put me off. If I was going to work with him and Madeleine, I thought, then I would have to start behaving as their equal.

I strolled over to the parapet to join him, nonchalant. “We’ve been down to the theatre.”

“Oh, yes? I wondered where everyone had got to. Den and Rupert, too?”

I nodded. “They’re still down there, measuring.”

“I haven’t seen the theatre yet. We meant to go have a look yesterday, Maddy and I, but what with the maid crisis here and you lot showing up, we just never got round to it. Maybe we’ll have another go at it this afternoon.”

“Oh no, you can’t. That is,” I said, “the workmen will be finishing the stage today, so the theatre’s off-limits—we weren’t even supposed to be down there this morning, but nobody told us.”

Nicholas had raised his eyebrows, as though marvelling at the audacity of an upstart like myself telling him what he could and couldn’t do. “It’s an open-air theatre, isn’t it? Well then, they can hardly prevent us from taking a look. Or are there guards with guns?”

Unscathed by the sarcasm, I said, “Very nearly.” And I told him how we’d almost been assaulted by that giant of a man, Pietro.

“Ah yes, Pietro.” Nicholas pulled a face and paused to light a cigarette. “We ran into him, too, Maddy and I, the first night we were here—we came round a bend in the garden path and wham! There he was. It didn’t half give me a turn, I can tell you.”

I thought running into Pietro would give anyone a turn, and said so.

Nicholas agreed. “Ugly bastard, isn’t he? He’d make a perfect Caliban.”

The reference caught me off my guard. It was exactly how I’d have cast Pietro myself, in my Shakespeare game—as Caliban, the brutish vengeful monster from
The Tempest
—but I hadn’t expected that Nicholas would share my quirk of assigning people roles. I looked at him with a new interest.

Perhaps, I thought, he wasn’t so shallow, after all. Perhaps he was someone worth getting to know. I might have misinterpreted his character, and been too quick to judge.

I was watching him, thinking this, when he lifted his head and looked past me. “Ah, there you are, darling. I wondered what was keeping you.”

I turned and saw Madeleine’s glance flick between us, unreadable, as she came across the terrace. Like a child accused unfairly of a wrongdoing, I wanted to explain, to let her know I didn’t fancy Nicholas, that we’d only been talking—to shout to the world that I wasn’t my mother.

But I sensed that my words, even if I’d had the courage to say them out loud, would have fallen on deaf ears. Madeleine appeared to be preoccupied. And as she drew nearer I could see that it was even more than that—her troubled frown was anything but absent. “I’m sorry.” Her apology came automatically, the force of manners overriding her more personal concerns. “I’ve had a call from Poppy’s school.”

Nicholas reverted to his former shallow self. “Oh yes? And what has she done now?”

“She’s got glandular fever.”

“Poor thing,” I said, in sympathy. I’d been spared that particular disease as a child, but one of my classmates had suffered through it. She’d missed a whole term.

“Rotten luck.” That was Nicholas, blowing a smoke ring. “But it’s hardly a fatal complaint, and the school does have a nurse.”

Madeleine was only half-listening. Brushing a curl of dark hair from her forehead with a worried hand, she went on, “They said that she’s been asking for me, wanting me. I don’t know what to do.”

“Darling, there’s nothing you
can
do.”

“I could bring her here.”

He looked at her as if she’d gone quite mad. “We’re rehearsing a play.”

“Yes, I know, but I won’t be rehearsing all day, every day—I’ll have time to look after her. She’ll likely be in bed sleeping most of the time.”

“And if we all come down with glandular fever? What then?”

I cut in. “It’s a child’s disease, really. Adults don’t usually catch it.”

Nicholas didn’t thank me for the intrusion. Still looking at Madeleine, he said, “I just don’t see why you have to—”

“Because she’s my daughter.”

I tried to imagine my own mother standing there, facing down a boyfriend with the simple explanation: ‘Because she’s my daughter.’ I couldn’t, of course.

And then Madeleine turned her head slightly and our eyes met, and I felt the strangest feeling of connection, as though she knew that I was on her side. “I’ll ask Alex if he minds,” she said.

Alex’s voice asked, “If I mind what?”

He’d come out onto the terrace so quietly I hadn’t even heard him, and he stood now a few yards away, looking from one to the other of us expectantly. He wasn’t alone.

A woman had come with him, a young woman in a red dress with sunglasses hiding her eyes as she raised her hand to elegantly flick her long dark hair behind her shoulder.

I found myself staring, not only because she was with Alex, although I wasn’t altogether pleased by the fact, but because I was certain I’d seen her before. And then I remembered: I’d seen her in Venice. The woman in yellow who’d been in the basilica, and later, at the restaurant.

A little stunned by the coincidence, I took the opportunity, in the brief interval while Madeleine explained the problem of her daughter’s illness, to study the woman. I don’t think she noticed, although of course with the sunglasses I couldn’t see her eyes. Still, I didn’t imagine that this was the sort of woman who would notice other people anyway. She had a bored expression that reminded me of Mother, of someone with a narrow, self-reflected view of life who’d grown accustomed to admiring stares and, when looking at crowds, saw not faces but one single entity.

She didn’t shake our hands, but merely stood apart and nodded when Alex, having assured Madeleine that of course her daughter must come to Il Piacere, introduced us round. He finished, “Everyone, may I present Daniela Forlani.”

Again I could feel myself staring. Daniela Forlani! That couldn’t be right, I thought. Leonardo Forlani had been in his nineties; his widow couldn’t possibly be this woman, who looked thirty and probably wasn’t much older. She had to be his daughter, surely. She couldn’t be—

“Daniela’s late husband was the founder of the Trust that is restoring this estate,” said Alex. “She likes to visit now and then, to keep us all in line.”

“Oh,
caro,
no, you know that is not true,” she told him, in a languid voice whose command of English fell somewhere between Teresa’s and Alex’s—more educated than the housekeeper’s, and with a better sense of structure, but still heavily accented. “No. I come because you spoil me so.”

Nicholas frowned very faintly. “You will excuse me, but you did say your name was Forlani? I thought that here in Italy a woman didn’t take her husband’s name.”

An eyebrow arched at the question. “This was my name as well, before I married. The families are, I believe, distantly related.” Her tone implied it hardly mattered, and was certainly none of his business.

But Nicholas seemed to have taken an interest. Money, I thought, was more heady than any perfume. He shifted his long body against the parapet. “So you’ll be in the ladies’ wing, too, then?”

Her dark head turned a fraction till her sunglasses reflected his image. “No,” she said, as though the very thought were quite absurd, “I stay in the villa.”

The Villa delle Tempeste, I presumed. A good place for her. I had the feeling she’d be quite adept at brewing storms. I was wondering what had become of the man she had been with in Venice, the man with the heart-shaped bald spot, when Madeleine smiled and asked politely, “Have you only just arrived?”

I waited to hear what Daniela Forlani would answer—whether she’d mention where she’d come from, that she’d been in Venice. But she chose not to answer at all, as though Madeleine hadn’t said anything that needed a response. Clicking open her handbag she drew out a packet of long filtered cigarettes, shook one loose and lit it with a snap of her silver lighter. Inhaling elegantly, she moved to the parapet, the red of her dress vivid against the pointed dark spears of the cypresses that steeply dropped towards the lake. “There will be rain this afternoon,” she said, and indeed it appeared that the weather was turning. A haze of cloud masked the summits of the mountains in the distance, and the colour of the lake had changed from blue to duller grey.

The air, too, felt colder, but I couldn’t be sure whether that was the weather or simply Daniela Forlani.

x

“
WELL,
I’ll tell you,” said Den, “if she wasn’t already taken, I’d be going after her myself.” He gave a whistle of appreciation as he knelt again and went on with the marking out, using chalk to trace the stage’s outline on the bare wood floor of our rehearsal room. Rupert and I were assisting, Rupert reading out the measurements while I, as before, held one end of the measuring tape.

Ordinarily the marking-out was done with coloured tape, but the floor of this room was such a marvel of polished parquetry that Den had been afraid of doing damage, so he’d opted for the chalk. He’d have to keep doing it over, as it wore off, but it seemed a small price to pay to safeguard the beauty of this room.

Like many of the rooms at Il Piacere, this one had a name: The Stanza degli Angeli, the Room of Angels. Unconsciously I found myself fingering my necklace, the little angel pendant Bryan had given me for my birthday, as I looked around at all the other angels that surrounded me. They hovered high above in the hand-painted ceiling, and smiled from the plaster rosettes set like pearls at the centre of each ceiling panel, and fluttered their wings round the huge gilded frames of the mirrors that lined every wall. My little gold-and-diamond guardian angel was, I thought, in quite elegant company.

Rupert was saying now, drily, to Den, that anyone who’d been at lunch with us an hour ago would have thought that he
was
going after Daniela Forlani. “You’re not exactly subtle.”

Den glanced up and grinned. “I was only being polite.” Resuming his work he added, “But at least I’ve got one of my questions answered, now. I’ve been wondering what would make a guy like D’Ascanio hand over his family estate to the Forlani Trust . . . I mean, it’s such a crazy thing to do, unless you’re short of money, and that doesn’t seem to be the case with him. Only now that I’ve seen what the Trust uses for bait, I can understand why he bit. Celia, honey, can you give me just a few more inches? There, that’s great. Thanks.” Glancing up again he said, to me, “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Am I? It’s that lunch, I expect. Makes me drowsy.”

I
was
feeling draggy and slow, though I expected my silence had more to do with Daniela Forlani than anything else; with the way that she had smiled and talked with Alex over lunch, and with my learning that she’d actually arrived at the Villa delle Tempeste last night, and that hers had doubtless been the light I’d noticed from my window, the light that had drawn Alex down from the terrace and into the gardens. And if I’d needed proof of that, the fact he’d left the dogs behind rather clinched things—Daniela had made it quite clear over lunch that she didn’t much care for the greyhounds. Which meant Alex had probably been with her this morning as well, I thought, recalling how he’d told me he had kennelled Max and Nero because he couldn’t take them where he’d gone. In fact, for all I knew he’d spent the night there, at the villa, with Daniela. It could very well have been
her
window he’d been looking out when he’d seen Den and me pass by on our way to the theatre.

I hadn’t said anything, at lunch, about having seen her in Venice, or about her male companion with the heart-shaped bald spot. It wasn’t my business, any of it. And besides, if she was with Alex, then however disappointed I might be, I wasn’t going to interfere. I didn’t make plays for other women’s men. I wasn’t Mother.

Rupert told me, “You should go and have a lie-down. We can manage.”

“No, I’m fine.” To prove it, I looked round and said, “I’m guessing that this was a ballroom?”

The answer came, not from Den or from Rupert, but from the doorway behind me. “My grandfather practised his fencing here,” Alex said. “I’m told he was not fond of dancing.”

I wheeled, and found him watching me.

He asked, “Does that disappoint you?”

“Not actually, no.” I had an easier time imagining Galeazzo D’Ascanio fighting his reflection here than waltzing. From what I’d read of him in his biographies, he hadn’t been particularly social, and for all he’d loved throwing wild and decadent parties, I thought it far more likely he’d have stood against the wall and watched, as his grandson was doing right now.

The dogs were at his side again, their long tails wagging. Max, the bolder one, took a step closer, accepting the invitation of my outstretched hand. As I petted the smooth brindled head Alex said, “He’s not usually so friendly.”

A few hours earlier I would have responded in kind to the tone of his voice, the rare smile, but now that I knew he was attached, I was careful to do nothing that could be considered flirting. “Yes, well, dogs can always tell the people who like them, can’t they?”

And then I bit my tongue because that could have been taken as being a shot at Daniela Forlani—too close to Mother’s cattiness for comfort.

Alex studied me a moment; turned to Rupert. “I have time now, if you’d like to come and choose the furniture, the tables and the chairs, that you would like to have in here for your rehearsals. I can have someone bring the things down later on.”

I wondered who he would get to do that. He must surely be running out of servants, with the maid and his driver still missing. I didn’t say anything out loud, of course, but Den had no such reservations.

“I can carry one end of a table, if you’re running short of bodies,” he offered cheerfully. “Still no sign of Giancarlo, I take it? Teresa was saying that sometimes he goes off for weeks at a time, is that right?”

“It has been known to happen.” Alex tipped his head to one side. “When were you talking to Teresa?”

“Oh, just before lunch, for a minute. I was dying for a cup of coffee, and she made me one.”

“You must have impressed her,” said Alex, with the faintest of smiles. “Like Max, she usually isn’t so friendly with strangers.”

“She’s friendly with me.” Den scratched his head and flashed a boyish smile. “Guess I’m just lucky. Hey, speaking of coffee, Rupert, do you think you could grab me a cup on your way back from picking the furniture?”

Rupert hadn’t looked too eager to go and do anything, but his professionalism won out over any reluctance he might have had to leave me in the room alone with Den. “Certainly. Celia? Would you like a coffee, too?”

“No, thanks, I’m fine.”

“Right, I shouldn’t be long.”

“Take as long as you like,” Den invited, with a wink. He really couldn’t help himself, I supposed, as I watched him complete his chalk circle. When Rupert and Alex had gone he stood, brushing the dust from his hands. “There, that’s it for the stage. Now I just have to figure out where the gangway goes.”

I handed him the measurements to study. “So you’ve been chatting up Teresa, have you?”

“Just getting the gossip. She told me something interesting about the maid who’s done a bunk—it seems the girl was hot and heavy with Pietro. Yeah,” he said, as he saw my expression, “that’s what I thought, too. I can’t imagine any woman wanting to be with the guy, but there you go. There’s someone for everyone, that’s what they say. Anyhow, Teresa said the girl had been upset for a couple of days, so she thinks they’d had some kind of lovers’ quarrel, and that’s why the girl disappeared.”

Having seen Pietro, I was inclined to think the maid had done the wisest thing. I had a sudden thought. “Next time you’re talking to Teresa, see if you can find out why she doesn’t like me.”

Den took his end of the measuring tape and began backing up, with his eyes on the numbers. “It’s not you,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s the ghost.”

“Sorry?”

“She’s got this idea that Celia Sands—the first one—is still hanging around her old rooms. You know, haunting the place.”

“Ah.” I remembered the emphatic way Teresa had told me that my rooms were no place for guests. How had she put it, exactly?
Things happen.
“And what makes her think that?”

“She told me that she’d had a few . . . experiences. She didn’t go into the details. Why, would you like me to ask her about it?”

“No, it doesn’t matter, really.” I didn’t believe in ghosts.

“She’s quite a character, Teresa is. What role did you give her?”

Again I looked lost and said, “Sorry?”

“In that game you play, the Shakespeare game.”

“How did you know about that?”

“Rupert told us. Last night,” he said, “after dinner—you’d gone up to your room, I think, and we all got talking about Shakespeare, I can’t remember why, but Rupert told us how you’re always giving roles to people.”

“Ah.” There was really no cause to be angry with Rupert, I thought. There was nothing particularly private about my game—all my friends knew I did it, and Rupert would never have purposely done anything to embarrass me. But I did feel embarrassed. I was so much younger than everyone here, and so much less accomplished, and I hadn’t especially wanted them to know all my childish habits. Something stirred my memory. “Was Nicholas there, too, last night?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Oh, no reason.” But that explained why, on the terrace this morning, he’d made that comment about Pietro being a perfect Caliban, and why he’d smiled when he’d said it. He’d been playing a game of his own, I thought. Which meant my first impression had been right: he was a rat. Like Bryan always told me, first impressions were the ones to trust. I smiled at Den. “In answer to your question, I haven’t given any role to Teresa, not yet.”

“She’s a tough one,” he admitted. “Not like you.”

“Oh, yes? And how would you cast me?” I waited for him to pick one of the obvious ones—Juliet, or Ophelia, or—

“Cordelia,” he said, without missing a beat.

Youngest daughter of King Lear. The loyal one, the one who had the kindest heart. I was flattered. “Wait a minute, though . . . didn’t she get poisoned at the end?”

“I don’t think you’re in any immediate danger.” He marked out his lines on the floor for the gangway. “There, we just need the furniture, now.” As he knelt to replace the page of stage measurements in the ring binder he’d brought with him, he said, “Oh, hey, I almost forgot. Here you go, you’ll need this for tomorrow.”

I took the single page he handed me, a labyrinth of lines. “What’s this?”

“A map of the hallways, from your room to this one.”

He was nothing, I thought, if not meticulous. “You think I’ll get lost, do you?”

“Not if you follow that map, you won’t.”

With a smile at the drawing I folded it over and tucked it away in my pocket.