Fault Line - Retail (17 page)

‘It certainly seems a peaceful place.’

‘It does, doesn’t it? Islands, especially those as small as this, have a special quality about them, I think. They exist a little apart from the world and tend to attract people in need of … refuge and healing.’

It seemed to me he might be talking about himself rather than Margherita Covelli. A wistful tone had come into his voice, as if he’d begun reflecting on his own reasons for settling there. He took a thoughtful puff at his cigar and gazed beyond me into some shadowy recess of his past.

Then he rallied and gave me a jaunty grin. ‘Capri has more than its fair share of idlers and lotus-eaters in retreat from nothing more than the obligation to earn a living, of course. I should damn well know. I’m one of them.’ He laughed his growling laugh. ‘A splash more brandy, my boy?’

FOURTEEN

IT’S HARD NOW
, looking back, to recall just how happy I was for most of the few weeks I spent on Capri in the summer of 1969. I recall it as a fact, of course, with the reasons clear and simple in my mind. But memory is always overlain with the knowledge of what follows. And what followed then erased many happinesses, not just mine.

You could say tragedy came out of the blue, for Capri was truly and brilliantly blue in the high, strident Mediterranean light, an intoxicating blend of limitless sky and encompassing sea. And no one anticipated what was going to happen. No one set out – as far as I know – to bring it about. So, yes, you could say it came out of the blue.

It wouldn’t quite be true, though. I never saw it coming – never guessed how the dominoes might fall. But I pushed them. There’s no denying that. This tragedy was man-made. I should know. I was one of those who made it.

I wanted Vivien so badly I couldn’t think about much else, certainly not the mystery her brother had bequeathed to us. Even Vivien had lost her determination to pursue an answer since arriving on Capri and concluding that Great-Uncle Francis held the key to nothing but a contented, if very possibly cuckolded, lifestyle. Capri itself was partly to blame for this. Its heat and stillness, compounded for visitors like us by its seductive otherness, made the cares and
preoccupations
we’d brought with us seem distant and futile and ultimately unimportant.

Vivien didn’t give up without a struggle. She recalled that during their previous stay at the Villa Orchis, while she’d done little but swim and sunbathe, Oliver had gone off on solitary hikes around the coast. He’d been particularly interested in the Roman ruins at either end of the island and so we began our aimless search for his secret by walking out to the remains of the Villa Jovis, on the eastern headland.

From here the Emperor Tiberius had ruled the Roman Empire, but all that remained of his clifftop palace was fallen walls and roofless halls. We wandered the site, surprising basking lizards that scattered before us as we went. The sun blazed down and the pine woods around the villa shimmered in a heat haze. I looked at Vivien as she walked ahead of me, her legs and arms bronzed and her hair bleached from the week and a bit she’d already spent on the island. She was wearing cut-off jeans, a thin-strapped top and a straw hat. Her hair fell beneath the hat to just above her shoulders, bouncing slightly as she walked. A bangle on her wrist winked dazzlingly at me. At intervals, she glanced round and smiled, as if she knew what I was thinking and understood perfectly.

We came to Tiberius’s Drop, a sheer cliff, from which, according to the guidebook, those who’d mortally offended the Emperor were required to throw themselves to their deaths. I imagined leaping out, arms spread, into the void and asked, almost rhetorically, ‘Did they really jump – or were they pushed?’

‘Oh, they jumped,’ Vivien said with utter certainty.

‘How d’you know?’

‘Because I’ve just remembered Oliver describing this place to me and telling me that if you annoyed the Emperor by forcing the guards to push you, your family would suffer for it. So, they jumped.’

‘A cruel choice,’ I said, gazing out to sea.

‘Not according to Oliver. He reckoned stepping out into thin air would’ve been easy. As long as you didn’t think about what happened when you stopped falling.’

Our eyes met. Oliver was there, between us, an invisible but palpable presence. Whether he was blessing us or cursing us I couldn’t have said. Nor, I suspect, could Vivien. Perhaps it made no difference. Perhaps there
was
no difference.

I took her hand and we moved away from the edge. ‘I’m so glad you knew him, Jonathan,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it’s you who’s here with me.’

And so, it didn’t need saying, was I.

We headed back along the narrow paths and alleys of the island towards Capri town, stopping on our way for lunch at a sun-shaded trattoria, where the wine tasted all the fuller to me for the headiness of sharing it with a beautiful young woman who was nearly, oh so nearly, mine.

From Capri we descended to Marina Grande, where we strolled through the crowds to the beach and swam a little and lazed a lot as the afternoon wore on.

I must have fallen into a doze brought on by wine and heat. When I woke, with the shadow of the bluff above us stretching across the towel on which we lay, I found Vivien propped up on one elbow beside me, staring intently into my eyes. She was still in her bikini from our swim. There was a frown of concentration on her brow, as if she was debating something very seriously.

‘Jonathan …’

I didn’t wait for her to say any more. I raised my head and kissed her. I felt her hair tickling my neck, her breasts compressing against me. I put a hand to her shoulder and ran it down her flank, tracing the curve of her waist and hip.

We broke the kiss and gazed at each other. Our course had been set now. We weren’t lovers yet. But soon we would be. The realization carried solemnity as well as desire.

‘Let’s go back to the villa,’ she said. ‘It’ll be cooler there.’

I wished we could have been transported to the Villa Orchis instantly, to the shuttered privacy of her room or mine. But wishes
aren’t
wings. We had to take the funicular back up to Capri and walk from there through the late-afternoon heat. There were many kisses along the way. I hardly knew how we’d manage our arrival.

To my dismay and frustration, it became apparent as we walked up the drive that Francis and Luisa had been entertaining a visitor to tea, who’d been hoping, we were told, to meet us. We had no choice but to sit down on the terrace and socialize.

The visitor was an Italian man of about Francis’s age, portly and jet-black-haired, well-tailored and syrupy-voiced. Valerio Salvenini, it transpired, was a garrulous native of the island, who claimed acquaintance with numerous famous Capri residents, both living and dead, and proceeded to reel off a succession of well-worn anecdotes about them.

His wife, he artfully lamented, was away, prompting Luisa to invite him to stay for dinner. All I could do, when he accepted, was swap a rueful little smile with Vivien. We were trapped.

The need to shower before dinner supplied a brief respite from Salvenini’s tall tales. I went out afterwards from my room on to the balcony and found Vivien waiting for me, barefoot, wet-haired and wrapped in a bathrobe. We exchanged eloquent smiles and a lingering kiss.

‘I think all that sunshine and fresh air we’ve been out in today means I’m going to need an early night,’ she whispered in my ear.

‘Me too.’ I slipped my hand inside the robe and fondled her breast.

‘Some things are better if you have to wait for them.’

‘Provided you don’t have to wait too long.’

‘Go on doing what you’re doing,’ she gasped, ‘and I’ll have to take another shower.’

‘I could join you.’

She gently lifted my hand away and pressed a finger to my lips. ‘Later.’

I have little memory of what Salvenini told us that evening. Maxim Gorky, Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thornton Wilder, Norman Douglas, Graham Greene, Gracie Fields: they all received a mention, I think. The possibility of an introduction to Greene, Salvenini’s close neighbour in Anacapri, was held out to us at some stage: a ripe fruit we failed to pluck. If he was disappointed by our unresponsiveness, he didn’t show it. Perhaps he guessed we had only each other on our minds. Perhaps Francis and Luisa guessed as well. Perhaps it was plainly obvious. They’d all been young once. Whereas we’d never been old.

If I could choose one night from my whole life to live over again, it would be that night at the Villa Orchis with Vivien, the French windows of her room standing open to the soft island air, moonlight rippling across her body as I wrapped my arms around her. There was a single moment of rapture and incredulity as I climaxed inside her for the first time that in some part of my mind I realized even then would never be surpassed.

The week that followed passed in a haze of sensuality. By day, Vivien and I swam and walked and explored the island. By night we made long, languorous love and slept late into the morning. I was hers and she was mine. It was a taste of heaven.

Our hosts could hardly have missed the ample evidence of how intimate our relationship had become, but never drew attention to it or interfered in any way. As perhaps befitted partners in an unconventional marriage – assuming as I did that Vivien was right about Paolo’s role in it – they appeared genially tolerant of us, if not approving. ‘We were put on this planet to enjoy what it has to offer, my boy,’ Francis said to me one evening. ‘
Everything
it has to offer.’

A similar sentiment was expressed by Countess Covelli when she met us in Capri one afternoon and offered us tea at her villa as a reward for carrying home the bags she’d accumulated during a tour of the town’s smartest boutiques. ‘I adore the company of young
people,’
she said as we reached her elegant, secluded residence, the Villa Erycina. ‘It helps me remember what it was like to be young myself.’ She smiled at us deliberately. ‘Young
and
in love, of course.’

It was true. We were in love. Well, I certainly was. And Vivien had given me every reason to think she was too. But neither of us had actually declared our love. It had taken a third party to do that. I suppose I was afraid it was simply too good to be true. And Vivien? My
belle dame sans merci
, as her brother had called her? Or someone who merely shared my fear? I didn’t know which she was. I still had to find that out.

The Villa Erycina was smaller than the Villa Orchis, but architecturally more distinguished, with fluted columns, high, vaulted ceilings and gleaming marble floors. The countess, it became apparent as she gave us a brief tour of the house before tea on the terrace, had no patience for clutter. All was restraint and order – comfort on the level more of a hotel than a home.

The most personal touches were an array of silver-framed photographs on the drawing-room mantelpiece. Children of two or three different generations – to judge by their clothing and hairstyles – were variously pictured, some formally in a studio, some casually grouped in a domestic setting. The woman at the centre of one such group was clearly Margherita several decades younger. And the stiff-backed, handsomely sleek man pictured separately in evening dress was, I guessed, her late husband.

‘
Si, si
,’ said Margherita, nodding in confirmation. ‘That is Urbano.’

‘Francis told me how he came to die,’ I said. ‘It was … a sad story.’

‘Yes.’ She gazed at the photograph for a moment. ‘But not so sad as if I had been married to a Fascist.’

‘You must be very proud of him,’ said Vivien.

‘Of course. But I am still angry with him sometimes also. For leaving me to live the rest of my life without him. For having to explain to his grandchildren why they cannot know him. Perhaps I
should
have listened to my mother. She advised me not to marry him.’

‘What did she have against him?’

Margherita laughed fondly. ‘She said he was a man of principle. She said he could not be relied on to put his family first. And she was right. But that was partly why I loved him. For his sense of honour. The last thing he said to me was, “It is better to be betrayed than to be a traitor.”’ Tears glistened in her eyes. ‘Forgive me. That is enough about the past. Let us go and have tea.’

I wanted to ask Margherita how the count had been betrayed, but she obviously preferred not to dwell on the subject, so I left it there, confident as I was that Francis would satisfy my curiosity.

I wasn’t disappointed. The count, Francis later told me, had only reluctantly gone into hiding following the Germans’ restoration of Mussolini in September 1943. Margherita had, after much cajoling, persuaded him to take refuge with a distant relative near Vicenza, while she laid a false trail by decamping with the children to their holiday home in San Remo. ‘But someone tipped the Germans off and Urbano was arrested. Margherita was allowed to visit him in prison before his execution. She told me once how infuriatingly philosophical he’d been. She said it was almost as if he was glad to have been captured, as if he considered hiding from the Germans … undignified. A true gentleman, even to the end.’

Vivien and I spoke of Oliver less and less as the days slipped past deliciously. We didn’t forget him, of course. But he’d drifted into the dead’s natural habitat of unvoiced memories and neither of us, I think, wanted to risk breaking the spell Capri had cast on us by recalling too often the supposed reason for our presence on the island.

That reason seemed more than a little ridiculous now, anyway. Francis obviously had no better idea than we had why and how Oliver had ended his life. I asked one day to see his famous mineral collection and he happily obliged. As I knew from Vivien’s description, it was housed in a large four-drawered cabinet in his
study.
He pulled the top drawer open and drew my attention to the zeta cipher straight away.

‘Can’t resist showing off my classical education, I’m afraid,’ he laughed. ‘Has Vivien told you she found the pig’s egg I gave Oliver in his bedroom at Nanstrassoe House?’