The Silent Fountain

The space is so quiet that to move the chair would be startling. Instead I adjust my position, so that another inch of the room creeps into view. Rugs. Drapes. Heavy furnishings, gold and black… There is the edge of a mirror, in which I think I glimpse a fraction of the woman’s reflection. The back of her head, her shoulders, perhaps. It’s like turning an abstract picture, trying to make sense and finding none. I realise I am desperate to see her. I imagine her as tall, her pale hair secured at the nape of the neck with a velvet clasp, her shoulders broad and her jaw firm, still crisply defined despite her years, her lips full and wide… I draw her not as pretty but as handsome: someone whose face, having seen it once, you will not forget.

When she speaks, I recognise immediately the person I talked to on the phone.

‘Lucy.’ Her voice is distinctive, deeply mellow, like plums in autumn on the verge of rot. It comes from a place much closer to me than the mirror would imply, and a chill skitters down my spine at the prospect that she is closer to me than I think, and that she isn’t the person in the bed, if indeed that is a person.

She says my name as if it tastes bad, her tongue splicing it in two.

‘Yes,’ I answer.

‘You’ve settled in?’ It isn’t a polite enquiry; there is no warmth or friendliness, more an impatience. I hold my hands together in my lap.

‘Yes,’ I say again, feeling like a schoolgirl outside the headmistress’s office, waiting for punishment. Only in this case, I have no idea what I’ve done wrong.

‘We wished to avoid hiring,’ the voice says shortly, rudely. ‘But the house won’t look after itself – and I can’t very well expect Adalina to do it.’

I’m unsure how to react. ‘I’m glad you decided to,’ I say, and before I can stop myself I’m babbling, eager to please and it emerges as over-share. ‘It came at the right time for me. I was looking to get out of London. This was too good to pass up.’

Stop talking. She doesn’t need to know.

‘Oh?’ comes the voice.

‘Family stuff,’ I say quickly. It sounds weak, a quick step back – and, though it’s impossible, the silence that follows is so loaded that I start to wonder if by some miracle she knows my story. What would she think of the crime I committed?

‘As you’re aware, I rarely take company,’ she says, and I’m relieved to move off subject. ‘You might view this job as an escape clause, or a frivolous holiday, but this house is my home and I will protect it with all that I have. If it’s equal to you, I would ask that we stay out of each other’s way wherever possible.’

My mouth is dry. Relief turns to surprise, then shock. ‘Of course,’ I say.

‘You may go now.’

The end of the meeting, if it can be called that. I’m debating the correctness of saying goodbye, surely too formal but then it’s hardly as if she’s set any other tone, before the door in front of me closes abruptly, a swift sharp snap then silence.

*

That evening I take the bus into town. Florence is coming to life on the cusp of night as only a city can: twinkling lights dance on the river, couples stroll through cobbled piazzas, the scent of burned-crust pizza fills the air along with a heady tang of wine.

I turn on my phone. It seems to take an age for it to switch network, find a signal and connect to 3G. I wait. The moments pass. Each time a message beeps in from my new server, my heart leaps then dives. There’s one from Bill, another from our landlord. Tilda WhatsApps from a Barbadian beach, wishing me luck, lots of smiling emojis. To my shame I’m not waiting for them. I wait for anything from him, an email, a text, a missed call, anything. I blink back tears: of course there’s none. What would Tilda think of her reliable big sister, the person who put her to bed and cooked her tea and waited up each night she went out, being responsible for…?

I can’t say it. I can’t think it.

Shoving my phone back in my bag, I head to the library, so focused on the distraction it will give me that I almost trip up the steps to the entrance.

It’s open late, quiet, studious, deliciously private. As I settle into a booth with a stack of archives, I turn my phone to vibrate, and read Bill’s message again:

Spill, then – who is she? What’s she like? Xxx

Today’s encounter with Signora has set me on edge. Horrible, I start to write back, horrible and rude and weird. Why did I come here? Why did I let you convince me? But I delete the draft. I don’t want to admit the truth to Bill – that the woman I spoke to is hard and cold, cruel and dismissive, but that for some insane reason I’m drawn to her, fascinated by her, and I feel connected to her in a way I can’t express. I need to know who she is. I need to know why she’s cut herself off.

Just like me.

I’ve become protective of my quarantine. Connecting to the outside world makes me panic that I’m about to learn drastic news. It’ll be Bill, or one of my sisters, or my dad, or some random on Facebook I haven’t spoken to in years, emailing me about the exposure at home. I can see it now; rehearsed the way it might unfold so many times. Lucy, what the hell? Is it true? Or perhaps, simply: It’s started.

As ever, temptation lingers to check the websites, Google his name, his wife’s name, see if anything new has cropped up, but I have to trust that Bill would tell me first. She doesn’t reference it, doesn’t even mention it, and I know she’s being kind. She’s trying to help me forget. How could I forget? I can’t. I decide to click the phone off altogether, instructing myself instead to the task at hand. In this, at least, I can distance myself from my plight. However challenging I’ve found the Barbarossa so far, it’s at least proved a change of scene – and however obstructive its owner, she’s given me a diversion. Something happened at that house. I sense it in the walls, the shadows and the dark. From Adalina’s secrecy and Salvatore’s madness. From the voice behind the door; from the noises in the attic, the cold and the quiet…

Something happened.

I begin by looking up the castillo on the library’s bank of computers. A quick search reveals nothing of its possessor, but the local records surrender more. It’s all in Italian so I run a quick translate – the rendition isn’t perfect, but it’s enough, and soon the story is forming. I scan the text, tracing reports back to the earliest point I can find: 1980, when she moved here from America. Her arrival had caused a stir.

Tuscany welcomes home its son, renowned doctor Giovanni ‘Gio’ Moretti, and his wife, Hollywood actress Vivien Lockhart, to the Castillo Barbarossa in Fiesole. The pair married last month in a romantic ceremony in Los Angeles and now return to Italy, according to their spokesperson, ‘to begin family life in a more peaceful setting’. Moretti will be engaged in a top-secret research project, for which he was privately selected, while Lockhart is said to be taking a break from her movie career…

So that was she. Of course it was. Vivien. Seeing the name in front of me, it seems obvious. Her fame was before my time, a bright brief spark in the seventies, but I’m sure Mum had her films on video when I was growing up, and in my mind’s eye I catch a flash of what she used to look like. Even the sound of her voice, lilting, seductive, embroidered with heavenly promise. It doesn’t match the voice I heard today. That voice was coarse with suffering. As if a demon had got inside her…

Moretti’s younger sister, about whom little is known, accompanies the couple; the trio are said to be close, and are ‘looking forward to facing a new start together’. Signor Giacomo Dinapoli, the siblings’ uncle, owned the fifteenth-century Castillo Barbarossa for many years before his death…

I read on, but the relevance to Vivien thins out and it becomes more about the house. I flip to the next article relating to her name, then the next and the next. I’m spoiled for information about the Barbarossa but there is little about its inhabitants. Was Giovanni Moretti the man whose portrait I saw on the staircase? I recall his unusual eyes, the insistence in his glare, and how quickly Adalina steered me on. And who was the sister? Why was she with them? There are items about parties thrown at the mansion, lavish, colourful affairs, a masked ball at Halloween, an annual occasion for which the Barbarossa is, or was, famous, but I’m unable to scratch beneath the surface and uncover what I’m hungry for. What am I hungry for – a scandal to put my own in the shade? Some act that Vivien committed, or was committed to her, that makes mine seem incidental, or not so bad? I try another search, marvel at her glamorous black and white headshots, magazine covers, Vivien laughing at parties where the vintage glitterati sip from teardrops of champagne and smoke Cuban cigars; screen grabs from her movies where she resembles a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Katharine Hepburn, and there is something familiar about her, a face I feel I met in another life, long-lost now. I Wikipedia her, but the material on her personal life is scarce. She was born in South Carolina, a religious upbringing then the move to LA, the swift soar to fame, leading to her marriage to Giovanni and the relocation to Europe.

After that, nothing… the trail ends.

Only, it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t.

Abandoning the web, there is one more thing I unearth in the district papers. It’s an account dated from November 1989.

… Furthermore to our report on last year’s tragedy at the Castillo Barbarossa, La Gazzetta can reveal that one-time actress Vivien Lockhart is now living alone at the mansion, having been abandoned by her husband. Signora Lockhart has not been seen in weeks and has become confined. One wonders what effect, both mental and physical, she suffered after the events that took place last winter. We send her our well wishes for recovery – as well as for her reconciliation with Signor Moretti.

I check back in the documents for La Gazzetta’s write-up from the previous year – but I find nothing. No other files under Vivien Lockhart.

I’ve reached a dead end.

‘Mi scusi, signora, ma stiamo chiudendo.’

The librarian distracts me from my thoughts. I look at the time. It’s gone ten. How have I spent three hours looking at this stuff, and not even noticed?

‘Grazie,’ I reply, gathering my things.

The library is deserted, the wooden booths empty. At the front desk, a woman is checking books back in, and smiles at me as I pass. I’m heading down the stairs to the street when I hear footsteps behind me, matching mine perfectly. I slow. So do the footsteps. I start again, quickening my pace. Whoever is behind me follows suit.

My pulse speeds up.

I’m relieved to reach the normality of the real world, but don’t stop until I am safely across the road and swept up in the crowd. A carnival is unfolding, the beat of a deep drum surging the revellers forward through the streets, flags held aloft, faces painted, and I duck into a doorway to catch myself. Only then do I look behind.

I’m in time to see a man watching me. My eyes go straight to him, though he is surrounded, as if I always knew I’d find him there. Perhaps it is because he is standing totally still, like a rock in furiously churning water. His face is obscured, I cannot make him out, but I would put him at a little older than me; he’s broad, dark, and staring right back. Immediately, I know who he is. I’ve always known.

They found me. It was only a matter of time before they did.

I turn and rush through the bleeding, blinding streets, weaving flames and hollering voices, desperate now to get back to the Barbarossa, frightened of what lies behind me but frightened, too, of what waits for me there.

CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_bad2e06b-397c-5c4e-bbeb-5e58fb1bfb5e)

Vivien, Los Angeles, 1978