Season of Storms (16 page)

ACT III

E
NTER A
G
HOST
.

All her particular worth grows to this sum: She stains the time past: lights the time to come.

Webster:
The Duchess of Malfi,
Act I, Scene II

i

NEXT
morning I woke early and went looking for Madeleine. I found her on the terrace, where she’d set herself up comfortably with sweet rolls and a pot of tea and a chair pulled up close to the parapet, from which she could admire the morning view. Watching me approach, she raised a hand to shade her eyes and smiled. “You’re all dressed up this morning,” was her greeting.

“Oh. Rehearsal clothes,” I explained away the belted long skirt and the blouse. “I thought it might help me to get a feel for my character, you know, to dress for the period.”

“Ah.” Her nod held the understanding of a veteran. “You believe in the outside-in method, then, do you? Like Larry Olivier. He always said you put shoes on your character first, get the externals right, and the rest will follow. Whereas dear old Ralph Richardson worked from the inside out, focussing mainly on feelings.”

“Well, I sort of do both,” I admitted. “I’m more concerned, I guess, with how my character feels than what she’s wearing, but the clothes you wear affect the way you move, and that affects the way you feel, so . . .”

“. . . you’re not bound to one technique.” She smiled. “I understand completely. Do sit down. There ought to be another chair around here somewhere.”

“This is fine.” I moved forwards, taking a seat on the parapet, facing her.

“Have some tea, there’s plenty in the pot. That new girl brought it out for me, poor thing. She’s a bundle of nerves, working under Teresa.”

I poured myself a cup of tea and sugared it. “Teresa’s husband’s still not back?”

“I don’t believe so, no. Unless,” she reasoned with a smile, “she’s done him in for all the worry that he’s caused her.”

“She’d be justified at that,” I said. “I’d hate to have a man do that to me, take off for days on end.”

Again, under Madeleine’s warm, patient eyes, I felt the difference in our ages and experience. “Every man has imperfections. And every woman,” she went on, her head turning a fraction at the sound of someone bounding up the stone steps from the garden, “has her own level of tolerance.”

Nicholas, showing impeccable timing as always, appeared at the top of the stairs, dark hair ruffled by the breeze. He smoothed it with a hand and smiled. “There you are, darling. I thought I might find you out here.” Strolling forwards, he bent down to kiss her.

“You’ve been for a walk,” she observed.

“Mm. Down to the theatre and back. Did you miss me?”

“Celia’s been keeping me company.”

“Ah.” Straightening, he looked me over. “Formal dress for breakfast, is it? Someone might have told me.”

“Mind what you mock, darling,” Madeleine warned. “I’ve been known to dress the part for my rehearsals too, from time to time.”

“I’m not mocking it.” Stepping back a pace he lit a cigarette and lounged against the parapet, beside me. “Whatever works, I say. So long as I can show up in my jeans, that’s all I ask.”

Madeleine tilted her head. “I don’t know. I’d rather like to see you every day in military uniform.”

“You will in performance,” he promised. “But rehearsing in uniform won’t make me feel like a soldier. That comes from in here.” He tapped the centre of his chest. “To act like a soldier I have to feel a soldier’s pride, a fear of being seen to be afraid, a sense of duty . . .” As he spoke the words his body straightened to attention, shoulders back, chin out. “And there you are, you see? That’s Johnny in a nutshell,” he told us, naming his character.

“Oh, but surely Johnny’s more than that,” said Madeleine.

“Not much. He’s duty-driven, Johnny is. Why else would he throw himself into the front lines because somebody’s told him if he does, his side will win?”

“I wondered,” she said, “if perhaps he wasn’t plagued by guilt.”

“For what?”

She lowered her eyes, lifting one shoulder in a noncommittal gesture. “Was he faithful to his wife? It’s left rather open to question, I think, in the play.”

Nicholas relaxed again against the parapet, lifting his cigarette and blowing out a thoughtful stream of smoke, watching her face. And then his quick, easy smile returned. “What do you think?”

“I’m really not sure.”

“Well, I am. He was faithful.” Turning to tap his ash over the edge of the terrace, he said, “The whistle must have blown. There go the workmen.”

I saw only the sleeve of someone’s shirt disappearing into the trees. “I hope they’re doing indoor work.” I cast a doubtful look towards the deep blue bank of cloud that lay along the farther shore, flattening the colour of the lake to choppy grey. “It doesn’t look as though this sun will last.”

I don’t think Madeleine was listening; her eyes were still on Nicholas. I thought for a moment she might question him further about where he’d been, but she didn’t, and after a moment he glanced at her breakfast tray. “Any tea left in that pot?”

“If there is, it’ll be stone cold.”

“Give it here, then. I’ll get us a fresh pot. Be back in a minute.”

I found myself looking at Madeleine’s face as she watched him walk off. She held her head motionless, calm, eyes quite clear of emotion. And then she glanced towards me and she smiled, a bit self-consciously. “He’ll leave me, of course,” she said lightly. “They all do. But he is a diversion.”

She said that, I thought, almost as a kind of apology, which made me feel all the more guilty. If it hadn’t been for me and that one stupid, stupid argument with Mother, Madeleine’s life would have gone on quite peacefully—no scandal, no divorce, no self-abusive string of men like Nicholas. Like my widowed character in D’Ascanio’s play, I found myself wishing for one chance to turn back the clock, to make everything right again. Only real life, of course, didn’t work like that.

Something of what I was feeling must have shown in my face, because she said, “My dear, you needn’t look like that.” The kind smile was a dagger through my heart. “My love life’s not your fault.”

ii

UPSTAIRS,
a piece of paper had been slipped beneath my door—Bryan’s e-mailed reply to my note from last night.

As always, Bryan’s presence in any form made me feel a bit better, and having read the warmly chatty message through I felt my mood improving. He didn’t bother hiding his surprise at my news that Den O’Malley had replaced the SM we were meant to have, but apart from a few minor details about Den—that he’d once lived in London and that he and Rupert had worked with each other a couple of times—Bryan didn’t tell me anything that might have helped me understand why Rupert was behaving as he was.

I put it down, myself, to his being overprotective and fatherly, not wanting his little girl to be corrupted by an obvious, if likeable, cad. That, or the fact that, having set this up to be a special time for just the two of us, the first and last play we would ever do together, Rupert now found himself having to share my attention. I couldn’t do much about the latter problem, short of making an effort to spend time together with Rupert, but I tackled the first concern head-on before our rehearsal.

“. . . So you see,” I said to Rupert, as I finished with my speech, “you needn’t worry. I mean, Den is nearly as old as you are . . .”

“Ancient,” Rupert agreed with a solemn nod, holding back his smile.

“You know what I mean.”

“Mm.” He was only half-listening, yawning and cradling a coffee. “The thing about Dennis is—”

“Morning, gorgeous,” Den said as he entered the rehearsal room, charged up with morning energy. “I missed you at breakfast.”

“I came down at eight,” I explained. “And I didn’t stay long. I had to go back to my room and do my warm-ups.” As unself-conscious as I might be onstage, I’d never felt entirely comfortable doing body and voice exercises with everyone watching—and anyway, I much preferred the flattering acoustics of my bathroom.

“On your own? How boring. See, I could have kept you company.” He wasn’t being serious; it wasn’t even flirting. It was more the sort of teasing that one did with friends. I smiled.

“No, thanks. I don’t need the distraction.”

“Well, at least that’s something, now,” he told me, pleased. “I’m a distraction.”

Rupert, at the table, said without looking up, “Dennis, you are many things. And if you don’t stop talking and have a seat so we can start working, I’m liable to tell you what a few of them are.”

His tone was light and I was fairly certain he was joking, but you couldn’t really tell with Rupert, sometimes.

iii

WE
did table work the next few days, and by week’s end were getting to our feet with books in hand to make our first tentative efforts at blocking the first act. The long table was pushed against the side wall, out of the way, and new furniture brought in to form a makeshift set within the marked chalk circle of our rehearsal ‘stage’—a smaller round table and two uncomfortably stuffed armchairs that were, along with an imaginary chandelier suspended from the ceiling, the only real set elements we had to work around.

Rupert, as was his custom, let us find the movements that seemed most natural to our characters. Saying little, he circled us constantly, watching, assessing, and stopping us only when something looked wrong. I had to think more about position than I’d ever had to on a normal stage. Theatre-in-the-round demanded motion, subtle sometimes but carefully planned, so that all the audience could have a chance to see more than our backs, to feel involved.

By Saturday evening I was so exhausted that I stumbled from my after-dinner bath straight into bed, looking forward to a lie-in and a restful day off.

I should have known better.

The birds woke me early with a chattering of song that seemed determined to announce a break in the rain that had fallen more or less steadily these past few days. Although the mist still clung to the darkly treed hills like the smoke from a forest fire, blending seamlessly into the grey, cloud-filled sky, I could see at least into the gardens and down to the lake, and the constant dull patter of rain on my windows had ceased. In its place, behind the birdsong, was the random drip of leaves and flowers shaking themselves dry. And something else . . . a voice below the terrace, speaking freely at full volume with no fear of waking anyone. A woman’s voice, an English voice, but one I didn’t recognize.

A car door slammed, and footsteps, small and dragging, started up the stairs, followed in a moment by a second set, more firm and sure, that climbed with steady purpose. I looked through my window in time to see a slight figure, half-drowned in a bright silver raincoat and hat, appear at the end of the terrace. Madeleine’s daughter, I thought, had arrived.

The woman behind her was tallish and lean with a mass of white hair, and wore only a thick Irish sweater and trousers in defiance of the wet. She carried a plain leather suitcase in either hand. Why they’d come up the back way and not used the front entrance I didn’t know, but then remembering that the man Alex had met that first night we were here had also come up by the terrace, I wondered if maybe this wasn’t the quickest way up to the house from the garage, or wherever it was that people parked their cars upon arriving.

At any rate, as the woman and girl crossed the slick grey terrace I heard the door beneath me, near the dining room, swing open and Teresa hurried out to take their bags, still wearing her apron, as though she’d been caught unprepared for the pair’s arrival.

Madeleine must have been watching as well. I heard movement in the next room, then the click of her door and a creak from the landing as she headed downstairs. It took me slightly longer to get dressed and ready myself, partly because I thought it only polite to give mother and daughter a moment to themselves before the entire household descended upon them. In fact, I’d half-expected Poppy Hedrick would be up and settled in her room by the time I went down for my breakfast, but she wasn’t. She was sitting in the dining room with Madeleine and the older woman, sipping tea and trying with all the earnestness of a twelve-year-old to look grown up.

She was, I thought, quite an attractive child, with a slight edge of sullenness that kept her from being pretty. But that, too, went with being twelve, as I remembered. Freed from the folds of the raincoat, she looked rather fragile, long-limbed and fine-boned, with dark hair like her mother’s that fell in loose waves past her narrow shoulders, framing a pale, large-eyed face; more pale now, I expected, from illness.

Her eyes moved to me as I entered, but she waited for a proper introduction.

Madeleine gave it. “Poppy, this is Celia Sands, another actress in the play. Celia, come and meet my daughter.”

Poppy’s handshake was very precise, very careful. “How do you do.”

“And this,” went on Madeleine, turning, “is Mrs. Farrow, who’s done escort duty all the way from England.”

“Mrs. Farrow.” I held out my hand, and was greeted with an iron grasp that brooked no hesitation.

“Edwina,” she corrected me, in a cultured voice clearly above mine in class. “I feel ancient when young women call me Mrs. Farrow, like I’m in a home, or hospital, or something. So”—she looked me up and down—“you’re the girl with the famous name, are you?”

“That’s right.” Rising to the challenge, I met her gaze squarely and smiled. “I’m afraid I don’t look much like the original.”

She brushed that off as immaterial. “She was more of an image, you know, than a flesh-and-blood person. All attitude.”

Something in the way she said that, coupled with the fact that I couldn’t determine her age, made me ask, “Did you know her, then?”

“Me? Heavens, no. I was only a girl. But I did see her once at the Old Vic, one of the last performances she ever gave, I believe. I don’t remember the play. I barely remember her, as I said, though I thought at the time she was lovely.” She looked at me in realization. “But of course, you’re in her rooms, aren’t you? You’ll have seen the portrait.”

“Yes.”

Madeleine said, “Such a shame she died young.”

Edwina Farrow arched her eyebrows. “Inevitable, I should have said. She had an unfortunate aura.”

I might have asked her what she meant by that, if her gaze at that moment hadn’t gone up and over my shoulder. “Ah, there you are, Alex. Teresa said she thought you might be up. She didn’t wake you, did she? Good. I told her not to. Nero, Max, my darling boys,” she greeted the enthusiastic greyhounds, who had bounded forwards joyfully to meet her, their whole bodies wagging, each seeming determined to be the first onto her lap. She pushed them off laughing and made a great fuss of them, rumpling their ears. “Now that’s the sort of welcome that I like,” she said, and then, to Alex, “I don’t expect the same exuberance from you, my dear, but ‘good morning’ would do, for a start.”

Alex, standing in the doorway, looked closer to my own age this morning in his polo-neck and jeans, his waving hair damp at the ends as though he’d just showered. But there was still a certain stiffness to his shoulders, a formality of habit, and it showed now in his face as he stepped forwards, as the dogs had, and bent to kiss Edwina Farrow’s cheek.

“Good morning, Grandmother,” he said.

I’d known all along, of course, that Alex was half-English, a fact that was apparent when I saw him with Daniela or Teresa—his reserve, his quiet movements, seemed distinctly un-Italian. So it was odd that now, beside Edwina, he should suddenly strike me as being so very
un
-English, so foreign. It was, I supposed, a simple matter of perception, like a frock that looked blue when you viewed it in one light, and green in another.

I was pondering this when he straightened and said to Edwina, “How did you get here? I thought I was supposed to meet your train at Desenzano after lunch.”

“Yes, well, we had a change of plan. There were so many delays coming down through the Alps that our train didn’t get into Milan until the wee hours of this morning, and there seemed no point to me then in stopping at an hotel like I’d planned, and no point either in waiting around for hours for our connection, not with Poppy feeling ill. So I thought, bother it, I’ll hire a car.”

“You drove?” His eyebrows lifted, though I didn’t think he looked particularly shocked by her actions. “You drove from Milan?”

“And why not? I have my licence. And the car can be returned at Brescia—I asked. Giancarlo can do it tomorrow.”

“I’ll do it myself,” he said.

Edwina Farrow had sharp eyes. “Gone off again, has he? I thought that might be it, when Teresa came out on her own to collect Poppy’s bags. On one of his binges, is he?”

“I really wouldn’t know,” said Alex, tolerant. “He hasn’t been in touch.”

“Yes, well, that’s typical. How long has he been away this time?”

Alex shrugged. “Just a week. He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

“Just a week.” She shook her head. “Your father would never have stood for it—Giancarlo would have been out on his ear, and Teresa’s cooking wouldn’t have saved him. Still,” she softened the statement with a smile, “Teresa is a damned good cook. I wonder if you could convince her, Alex, to make her wonderful gnocchi for me while I’m here.”

“I’m sure she’d be delighted.” A pause, then he asked her, a little too casually, “Will you be staying long?”

“Only a few days. I’ve booked myself on a tour of the Greek isles that leaves from Brindisi on Saturday next, and I’ll want to spend a bit of time in Rome before that, I should think. We’ll see.” Glancing down at the greyhounds she scratched Max’s head. “For now all I want is a meal and a hot bath and maybe a rest. Would you be a dear, Alex, and see that my cases get down to the villa? I tried to explain to your man at the garage, but he didn’t seem terribly swift.”

Avoiding her eyes, he said, “Ah. Well, I’m afraid that there might be a slight complication. Daniela Forlani—you remember Daniela?”

“Vividly,” his grandmother replied in a tone of voice that made me warm to her.

“Daniela is here for a visit as well, and she’s settled in already at the villa, so . . .”

“The Villa delle Tempeste,” she said, “is fully capable of housing twenty people, let alone two women. And besides, I always stay there. Your Daniela will simply have to suffer through my company, these next few days. I’m sure that she’ll survive.”

I found I liked Edwina Farrow more and more. So much so that, when Madeleine and Poppy had excused themselves and gone upstairs, and Alex and the dogs had gone to see about the luggage, I hung back and poured a second cup of coffee from the silver pot the new maid had just brought out to the sideboard. As I stirred in the sugar I tried to think of ways to get to know this woman better, things to say.

I turned to find her taking stock of me. “Did you think he didn’t have one?” she asked, catching me off guard.

“I’m sorry?”

“Did you think that Alex didn’t have a grandmother?”

“Oh. Well, I—”

“It’s only,” she said, “that you looked so surprised when you learned who I was.”

“It did surprise me, rather,” I confessed. “But only because Galeazzo D’Ascanio’s been dead for fifty years, and if I’ve done the maths right then his son—Alex’s dad—must be well into his eighties, if he’s still alive . . .”

“He’s not.”

“. . . so I didn’t imagine that Alex would have any grandparents left.”

“Only me.” She smiled. “My daughter was quite a bit younger than Alex’s father, as you might have guessed.” I didn’t ask for further information, but she supplied it anyway, matter-of-factly as though the details were public knowledge. “She was just out of school when they married, and he was already a pensioner. Not very bright of her, really. I expect she was hoping to be a rich widow, but she was the one who died first. Cancer,” she told me. “And
he
went on fifteen years longer, as fit as a horse, more’s the pity for Alex.” That, too, she said as though I ought to understand exactly what she meant by it, although I didn’t.

I assumed she was telling me Alex’s childhood had been less than happy, a point I’d already inferred from a few of the comments he’d made.

“Did he never remarry, then, Alex’s father?”

“Oh, no. Heavens, no.” The idea amused her. “He was hardly a sociable man. No one but my daughter would have ever put up with him. Fancy shutting up this place”—she spread her hands feelingly, invoking the forces of reason—“and letting it all run to ruin. Sheer madness.”

“He didn’t sell the house, though.”

“No, at least he showed some sense, there. And I’m glad that Alex decided to put the work into it, open it up again, however misguided his reasons might be.”

A voice from the door interrupted. “Good morning.” Den came in yawning so widely I don’t think he noticed Edwina straight off, but when he did he shook himself awake enough to smile his charming smile. “What is it with this house?” he asked. “Every time I turn my back another beautiful woman springs out of the woodwork. I’m Dennis O’Malley, my friends call me Den. And you are . . . ?”

“Far too old to fall for lines like that, my boy,” she told him, but she shook the hand he offered all the same. “Edwina Farrow.”

It had probably, I thought, been quite a while since anybody had called Den ‘my boy.’ For a moment it threw him clear out of his stride. Then he grinned. “You’re English, too. That’s great. I have a thing for Englishwomen.”

Edwina’s intelligent eyes moved from Den’s face to mine and then back again, and I saw the slight settling back and the change of expression that signalled a shift in her interest.
Oh no, not her, too,
I groaned inwardly. It was bad enough Rupert read more into my interactions with Den than he ought to, but now total strangers were doing the same.

Aloud, I told Den, “Mrs. Farrow brought Madeleine’s daughter down with her. They’ve only just got here.”

“Travel with a twelve-year-old.” He shuddered at the thought. “I couldn’t do it myself. Not sober, anyway. So, you must be from Poppy’s school then, are you? Or did Alex hire you privately?”

“Wrong on both counts.”

I tried to cut in. “Den . . .”

But he wasn’t listening. “Oh? Then how did you—?”

“I’m Alex D’Ascanio’s grandmother, Mr. O’Malley. And you needn’t bother telling me I look too young and all that rubbish—women of my age have highly developed malarkey detectors. And speaking of age,” she said, standing, “I’ve had quite a late night and I’m starting to feel the effects, so if you’ll both excuse me I think I’ll go down and get settled and have a bit of a rest.”

Den stood with her, a gentleman, and when she’d departed he took his seat smiling. “Now
that,
” he informed me, “is one tough old granny.”