Part 21 (1/2)

”Not at all.” Barnaby picked up the paper.

There were four messages on her cell phone. One from Mish and the other three from her mother. Though it was the first time she had turned on the phone in over a week, the voice mail informed her that several unheard messages had been deleted from her mailbox, which annoyed her. A bit like the post office writing to tell you it lost a package.

Barnaby read the Sunday Telegraph as she cupped her phone to her ear and listened.

”Heya.” It was Mish. ”Hope you're feeling better. G.o.d, I am so sorry I made you go out last night. Please don't hold it against me, okay? Okay? Anyway, I thought I'd leave one more message just in case you were returning calls. Wacky news. Remember that guy Benedict? The German banker dude we had naked sus.h.i.+ with? Well, he invited me to his place in Munich. Or Frankfurt. One of those places where they drink beer from giant mugs and dance around in suede overalls. Anyway, do you think I should go? I mean, I barely know him. But I guess you went to Barnaby's for the weekend. And look how that turned out. Although I must say he was looking pretty cute last night. The way he caught you as you fell and then carried you out of the room like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind. Okay I'm gonna go now. Call me. Bye.”

A beeping sound, and then her mother's voice in a mechanical tone.

”Meredith, it's your mother. Call me back.”

Beep. Irma again.

”Moo, it's Mum. I'm calling about...” A loud mechanical thrumming noise drowned her out for a moment. ”Sorry, darling. That was just my friend Philip practising his didgeridoo. Now, what am I calling about? I know there was a reason-” The noise grew into a roar. ”OH, WOULD YOU KNOCK IT OFF FOR TWO SECONDS. YOU'RE GIVING ME A HEADACHE.” A pause and then Irma's voice resumed its normal chirp. ”Oh, yes. I wanted to ask you how your head felt. I meant to say last night that you shouldn't go to sleep if you've hit your head. You might have a concussion and go into a coma. Though I suppose it's a little late for that now. Anyway, if you haven't yet gone to sleep, don't. And if you are in a coma, that's terrible. Comas can be awful. Philip knows because he spent four years in one. Of course that was drug-related. Oh, darling, you must meet him. He's terribly talented. I met him at the book launch last night. I do think you would approve. Call me. It's your mother. Did I already say that?”

Beep. Irma again.

”Isn't that funny? I completely forgot the reason why I called you in the first place. It was about this letter that came addressed to you, of all people. It looks intriguing. Philip and I both think you ought to open it as soon as possible. I wanted to open it but Philip said no. Wasn't that proper of him? Anyway, if you don't come home for it soon, curiosity may overcome my resolve. Bye, duck.” Click.

Meredith looked at Barnaby, who had folded the paper into eighths, just like one of the old men in three-piece suits she saw traveling to work every day on the tube. It must be a skill particular to English men. The women never seemed to do it. He was completely absorbed in a column written by a well-known Tory pundit known for his ruminations on such topics as why-the-London-transport-poses-a-threat-to-the-city's-septic-management. How fascinated he seemed, when just a few moments ago he had been proposing his ”arrangement” to her. She wasn't sure whether he thought she had turned him down or left it at maybe. None of it seemed clear.

She looked at Barnaby with his sandbox hair and his moth-eaten sweater (undoubtedly his father's) and she thought that maybe life with him would not be all that bad. And then for the squillionth time since she'd arrived in London, Meredith wished there was a book of rules on what to do depending on how you felt and where you were. She wished she could look up ”Correct response to proposal from sweet but b.u.mbling alcoholic falconers” on an index and follow the directions there.

As it was, she was on her own.

15.

There were no seats on the train at Pisa, so Meredith sat on her suitcase in the aisle. Shortly after the train began jerking toward Florence, a man in a fitted blue uniform approached and said something disapproving in Italian. He pointed to the vestibule between the cars. She over-p.r.o.nounced an apology and began to move, pulling her suitcase through the aisle behind her. It ricocheted off the seats on either side in a series of humiliating thuds. The other pa.s.sengers yanked away their arms and legs as she pa.s.sed, making their resentment apparent. There was no air-conditioning on the train, and people seemed to be allowed to smoke wherever they liked. Meredith could feel pinp.r.i.c.ks of sweat beneath her sweater. She wondered if she smelled bad.

The folding jump seats were taken, so she pulled her suitcase to the center of the s.p.a.ce and sat down on top of it. Several men were standing around, all of them smoking or talking into cell phones or both. They looked at her through mirrored lenses. She could feel their eyes examining each breast and b.u.t.tock with the critical judgment of a greengrocer. Meredith scrunched her knees to her chest and prayed silently that her moisturizer wouldn't explode inside her bag and stain all her clothes. She hardly had anything to wear as it was.

In a way, the invitation couldn't have come at a better time. There had been no question of her not going. Pa.s.sing up the chance to attend a dinner at Osmond Crouch's villa was unthinkable. ”Like a nun bailing on an audience with the Pope,” her mother had said when she expressed her ambivalence about the prospect of traveling to Italy for a dinner party. The mysterious thing was why he had asked her in the first place. The invitation, Irma said, had been delivered by a uniformed man in a chauffeur-driven car. It came in an oversize envelope made of thick creamy paper that smelled as crisp and metallic as money and was sealed with a blob of red wax and stamped with the image of two stags, their antlers interlocked. Miss Meredith Moore, it read on the outside in bold, blue fountain pen. Inside was printed a date, time and address and nothing more. THE 21ST OF JUNE AT 19:00 HRS. VOGRIE, FIESOLE. And then in the same fountain pen at the bottom, the words, Meredith, Do come. Followed by an illegible squiggle-the signature of a person who spent a lot of time signing things. If it hadn't been for her mother's interpreting powers, Meredith wouldn't have had a clue what the invitation was for.

She had to fold the invitation twice to fit it in her handbag.

Meredith was nervous, but Mish said she had a professional obligation to attend. Not that Meredith was actually a professional anything anymore. As a freelancer she'd long ago grown used to never knowing where her next paycheck might come from. ”Who knows?” she used to laugh. ”I may never work again!” But the thought of unemployment was no longer a dark joke. After walking off one set and being fired from another, she might well never work again. She cursed herself for ever having tempted fate out loud. Meredith had once read a statistic that after two months of unemployment a person's chances of reentering the workforce within the next two years dropped dramatically, something like 60 percent. It stuck in her head in the same way all those terrifying fertility statistics about your ovaries drying up after the age of thirty-five did. She imagined herself in half a decade-living alone in a bas.e.m.e.nt rental unit in a dilapidated government-subsidized high-rise on the outskirts of some anonymous midsize city. She would have broken down from the loneliness and adopted a cat. Probably two or three. They would have grown very fat and sad sitting around her apartment all day watching her watch the DVD box set of Audrey Hepburn films. She would have grown fat by then too. Fat, alone, infertile and unemployed. G.o.d.

The train halted, pitching her face-forward into the crotch of the man standing in front of her. Meredith righted herself and rubbed her face hard, wis.h.i.+ng she was dead. But the man did not seem embarra.s.sed in the slightest. Nor did he offer to help her up or even pause in the point he was explaining into his cell phone. He looked down at his trousers and smoothed away the crease beside his zipper made by Meredith's nose.

The men here looked different to her. They were extra-smooth, as if their skin had been blended into a sweet paste before being applied to their bodies. Their eyes were thick-lashed like women's and even indoors they hid under sungla.s.ses. She wondered what it would be like to have an Italian baby. She would definitely name it something swishy like Libero or Prudenzia. They would live together in a crumbly old farmhouse in an olive grove. Meredith tried to imagine her life with her Italian baby. Making pesto for lunch with a mortar and pestle. Doing her laundry by hand in the local stream and hanging it to dry outdoors. The fantasy went on until Meredith realized she had no idea what an olive tree looked like or if they even grew in this part of Italy. And the reality of doing laundry in a stream was probably a lot less lovely than the oil painting in her mind.

The train moved reluctantly toward Florence, jerking to a stop in every village along the way and pausing for several inexplicable siestas in between. The machinery felt sluggish, but inside it Meredith was wide awake. She had slept on the flight from London to Pisa and the nap had left her hyper-alert. Early summer fields swooshed by in an unending pan. Erratic borders were staked with cypress trees. A farmer stood outside a stone shed holding a rope tied to a cow. As the train pa.s.sed he lifted his arm to touch his hat-he was gone before Meredith could see whether or not it came off in his hand.

The station in Florence was crammed with people pus.h.i.+ng in different directions. It smelled like popcorn and damp cement.

She walked outside and stood in line for a taxi. The sun was blazing and the gra.s.s on the front lawn was bleached brown in spite of it being only the end of June. June twenty-first, to be exact. Meredith remembered the date because the dinner party she was going to was an annual event, held each year on the same date in honor of the summer solstice. Her mother had told her this.

Meredith wondered, not for the first time, how it was that Irma seemed to know so much about Osmond Crouch. She had wanted to ask but did not, out of a long-held habit of not asking her mother for more information than was absolutely necessary. Irma's history was a remote island Meredith had no inclination to visit. The wild travels and arcane accomplishments, her various affairs and endless vague connections to people filled Meredith with a numbing sort of anticuriosity. She didn't know and didn't ask. When her mother offered up something, Meredith ingested the information with a salt mine of skepticism.

A dusty Volkswagen pulled up in front of the line. The driver, a compact man in pressed denim and a fisherman's vest, jumped out and hoisted her bag into the trunk without a word and then opened the back door and waved her in with a flicking motion of his hand. Meredith looked for a seat belt in the upholstery cracks but couldn't find one. Instead of attempting an exchange in her nonexistent Italian she pulled the invitation out of her handbag and handed it to the driver, pointing to the location. Vogrie, Fiesole. The man nodded and turned back to look at her more closely this time. Meredith noticed he was very young.

”S, s, signorina,” he said. ”Una bella villa.” He winked. ”Andiamo!”

Less than an hour later, having been shown to her room by a rather menacing old butler in uniform, Meredith lay stiffly on a single bed attempting to sleep. It was hopeless. She opened her eyes and looked about, reflecting for a moment on the many different rooms she had slept in during the past couple of months. These were the sort of quarters that would have thrilled her as a girl. A turret. Like the one Rapunzel got locked up in. The walls were made of yellow stones that looked about a thousand years old, and there were tiny rectangular windows facing north, south, east and west, out of which you could see all the surrounding countryside, the village of Fiesole and all the way to the Duomo in the city center.

Despite the heat outside, the room was cool and damp. The floor was made of flagstones, and there was nothing on the walls. On her bedside table was a candle in a simple holder for carrying, so that she could see her way down to the bathroom in the night. The room was dim, unwired and without plumbing, and the only decoration in sight was a small, cheap-looking bra.s.s vase with three wilted sunflowers. Even castles, Meredith realized, did not always live up to their glamorous reputation.

She slid into something close to sleep. After some minutes or hours (she could not be sure which) there was a knock on the door. A flat, accented female voice informed her that c.o.c.ktails would be served in the library at seven. The messenger did not wait for confirmation but immediately retreated down the stairs with a series of shuffling footsteps. Meredith checked her wrist and realized she had forgotten her watch at her mother's flat. She hated to be without a watch and had worn one day and night from the time she was a small child.

There was nothing to do, she supposed, but get up and dress for dinner. She wondered how large the party would be and whether all the guests would be staying overnight or returning to wherever it was they lived. She had no idea what to expect.

She took a pink cotton washcloth out of her terry-cloth bath bag and cleaned her face and armpits. She brushed her teeth and hair and applied fresh deodorant and moisturizer and a bit of mascara. Meredith did not usually wear much makeup, but she had noticed on the train that Italian women seemed much more (as her mother might say) ”put together” than their British or North American counterparts. With this in mind she took the time to flat-iron her hair, and even applied a smidge of lipstick. After nearly fifteen minutes of frozen deliberation she pulled on a black sleeveless sheath dress and a pair of matching flats.

She climbed down the turret stairs slowly, running her fingers along the stone, feeling its natural coolness rising to meet her skin. It was terribly dark. When she got to the bottom, she stood stock-still, holding the wall, waiting for her eyes to adjust. She heard footsteps, and the next moment she felt something warm on her throat. A hand. She jumped back against the wall with a squawk.

”Terribly sorry!” said an English voice. ”Completely inexcusable. It's just my candle...It...It...” the voice stuttered a bit and then trailed off. A sizzle of sulfur was followed by an orangey glow. Within it was a man's face-bespectacled, indeterminately middle-aged, with a bald head as perfectly round and luminous as a cultured pearl. He squinted at Meredith and pushed his wire frames up his nose with his middle finger.

Meredith extended her hand. The man stared at it as though she were offering him something to eat he wasn't quite sure of. Then he handed her the candle. ”Thank you for inviting me,” she said.

He moved in for a handshake and then quickly reconsidered and slapped himself hard on the top of the skull.

”Good G.o.d, no.” He lowered his voice to a staticky hiss. ”Bless you. What a little flatterer you are. I'm positively b.u.t.tered. But no. You're wrong. I'm not him. We won't see him until later on. After the first round of c.o.c.ktails, anyway. He likes to make entrances, you know.”

”Who?” Meredith was not going to risk making another a.s.sumption. ”Well, obviously,” he said, snorting and rubbing his nose with both hands in a way that reminded Meredith of a large gerbil. ”The dishonourable Master Crouch. Tony Wickenhouse Shaftesbury.” He pumped Meredith's hand. ”All-purpose hack. You've probably seen my byline. It's an eyeful. So you can just call me Tony Two Names if you like. I'm afraid everybody does. Who can blame them really? Mmm?”

”Meredith Moore.”

He snorted once more and the candle went out. Once again the corridor was black as a mine shaft.

”Oh b.u.g.g.e.r.” He finally took Meredith's hand, the one without the candle in it. ”Come along. I'll take you to the library and then you can tell me your whole story. I'm certain you have one or you wouldn't be here.”

The library was a cavern with sky-high ceilings and leather-bound volumes stacked all the way up the walls. A wooden ladder on casters rolled along a track attached to the top of the shelves. In the center of the s.p.a.ce hung a wrought-iron fixture in the shape of a triple-masted tall s.h.i.+p in full sail. It swung gently from side to side, blazing with candles. Somewhere in the room a sad man gasped a ballad through tar-clogged lungs-Tom Waits? Meredith glanced around but could not detect a piece of stereo equipment anywhere.

Tony Two Names smiled, raised his hand and waved at two other male guests standing by the fire at the other end of the room. The hearth was so large the mantel seemed to be resting on their heads.

”Tell me then, Meredith, how is it that you know our host?”

”I don't really.”

”Ooh.” Tony adjusted his gla.s.ses by wrinkling his nose and opening his eyes wide in disingenuous alarm. ”Isn't that curious. So what are you famous for?”

”What do you mean?”

”You don't have to pretend to be shy with me. I mean, what is it you've done?”

”Nothing,” said Meredith. ”At least nothing that would make me famous. Or do you mean famous in a smaller sense of the word?”