The Continuity Girl Part 21

"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 sushi 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, wishing 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 pushing 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 ship 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?"

"I didn't. But now that we're on to the subject, what are you famous for in the smaller sense of the word?" He shifted his shoulders and looked right at her as though he was truly curious.

Although she was certain she would never trust Tony, Meredith realized it was quite possible she would end up liking him. With this in mind she carefully considered her answer.

"I suppose I'm famous for being a.n.a.l about things."

"What sorts of things?"

"Oh, you know, tiny things. The sort of stuff that other people don't usually notice."

"My G.o.d, you make yourself sound boring. I hope I don't have to sit beside you at dinner." He narrowed his eyes. "But you're not really boring at all, are you. You're having us all on. Perhaps you've got a secret plan-that's it. You're a double agent-"

"Are you drinking?" Meredith said, hoping to change the subject.

Tony raised an eyebrow. He was aiming for a gesture of practiced raffishness, but instead his eyebrow hovered above his spectacles, an inchworm stopped midinch.

"Perhaps."

"I'm only asking because I was wondering where to get one."

Tony smiled and reached over to a long narrow tapestry hanging on the wall beside the door. At the bottom was a bra.s.s ring, which he pulled. Somewhere far away a buzzer sounded.

"Someone will be along shortly."

Meredith thanked him.

"Oh, you are a sa.s.sy little thing, aren't you? I should be careful of you." Tony took her by the elbow and guided her across the room toward the men by the fire. "Now, come meet our lucky fellow guests," he whispered in her ear.

She could feel the fine hair at her temple wilt with the moisture of his breath. It smelled like spearmint and propane fumes.

"Dennis and Phillipe. Phillipe is from Spain. A dancer. Dennis is some sort of art collector. Terrifically rich. No one knows how. They just got married. Isn't that charming? Not that I'm gay. Thank G.o.d. Are you?"

"No." Meredith frowned. She wasn't used to personal questions from complete strangers. Tony, she sensed, was the sort of person who blurted things out in order to set his conversation partner off balance. It worked.

He kept whispering in her ear until they were only a few feet from the other two. The older man spoke with an American accent and wore his hair in a swooping pompadour. He was impressively tall and sumptuously upholstered in velvet and silk. His husband stood shyly beside him, looking out under a dark fringe of eyelashes, lips perfectly bowed and rosy-plump. If not for the pepper grindings of stubble across his jaw and a protruding Adam's apple, Meredith would have mistaken him for a particularly muscular girl.

Tony threw his arms around both men and squeezed them until they stumbled together like children in a potato-sack race. "Look at the blushing brides, would you? I'd like you both to meet my lovely fiancee, Meredith, uh..." He looked at her questioningly.

"Moore," Meredith said.

"Of course. Meredith Moore. Isn't she just a pudding?"

Dennis and Phillipe seemed to understand this as a joke, for they shook her hand laughing and offered no congratulations. Then a gaunt man appeared holding a silver tray clamped in a pair of white cotton gloves. He was dressed in what appeared to be a militaristic uniform, complete with decorative gold ropes and epaulets. Meredith took a flute off the tray and sipped the orange liquid inside.

"Bellinis. Osmond harvests the peaches from his orchard and squeezes the juice himself," said Dennis, watching her reaction.

Meredith felt exposed, as though she had just been caught inspecting herself in the mirror. She heard herself giggle.

The music switched to an impossible fusion jazz composition and the gaunt military butler strode out of the library, his tray heavily loaded with used gla.s.sware. At Tony's prompting, Dennis began to tell the story of his and Phillipe's recent seaside wedding in Spain. Meredith's eyes began to wander over the objects in the room. Most of the furniture was Florentine gilt. Delicate wooden pieces full of curving angles and filigreed edges painted in a vulgar matte gold. Heavy silk curtains hung beside the windows. In the corner stood a harpsichord, the lid lifted to expose its web of strings and hammers. Apart from the leaking candle wax, the room was immaculate.

"A local fisherman caught the sh.e.l.lfish and then his wife made an enormous paella," Dennis was saying, "which we served with the local wine in these fantastic swinging wicker baskets. It was all very homey. I wanted to create a casual sort of peasants-on-the-seash.o.r.e vibe. Phillipe didn't want flowers but I insisted he carry a single calla lily. Just the one. Didn't I, darling?"

Phillipe gave a sleepy smile. "Dennith wath wonderful. He do everything. I jeth show up," he said with an irresistible Spanish lisp.

With a couple more sips of her Bellini, Meredith felt her spirits rising. Small talk, which had seemed an impossible ch.o.r.e only a moment before, was suddenly effortless. A pleasure. She chatted easily with Phillipe and Dennis as Tony went off to greet some other guests who'd just arrived-a short youngish bald man with a tall, striking older blonde woman wearing an enormous diamond necklace. More Bellinis came, and the room began to fill with people of every age, size and description. Between kisses and introductions, Tony would scoot over and insert bits of delectable information in her ear. "See the social X-ray in the purple dress? Just got out of rehab for mainlining c.o.ke. Lost custody of her children in the process. That man feeding her the oyster? Her barrister. And the angelic young couple holding hands near the window? They're only the hottest actors in Sweden. About to costar in a big action thriller financed by our host. Fraternal twins, but rumour has it they f.u.c.k. Or they're f.u.c.king and rumour has it they're twins. I forget which."

Several languages she recognized plus a couple she didn't floated through the air and up to the ceiling, where they merged into a canopy soundtrack of party chatter. Meredith kept looking around for Osmond, but having no idea what he looked like, she wasn't sure what to watch for, or even what she would say if she did see him. The party surged forward like a rowboat on high seas.

The following afternoon Meredith lay in the garden beside the pool. A wet cloth was draped across her face, and she moved it aside only to take pinched sips from a can of lemon soda. The tin, which had been ice-cold when the butler offered it to her from his tray, was now blistered from condensation in the blazing summer heat. A dozen or so of her fellow guests lounged around the patio. Meredith recognized a few of them from last night's dinner, but the rest seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. She took her place under the partial shade of a particularly leafy potted lemon tree and smeared her body from tip to toe with expensive French SPF 60 block she'd found on one of the garden tables. Then, as a finishing touch, she draped a beach towel over herself for extra protection. Meredith did not tan. Which is not to say she was one of those people who couldn't tan-just that she didn't, never had, and because of that, didn't know whether she actually could or not. Still, she could hardly sit indoors on such a perfect day.

Every thirty minutes or so, she raised herself from where she lay and slipped soundlessly into the pool. The heat was breathtaking. For a moment her hangover symptoms would abate, but by the time she hoisted herself over the cement edge and resumed her place on the chaise, her hair would have dried into hippie mats and the droplets on her skin would have evaporated, leaving her hot and throbbing once again.

The party the night before swirled through her brain. Snippets of conversation slid into one another. She felt as though she had been plucked up by a tornado and set down somewhere else entirely.

Osmond Crouch had materialized just in time for dinner-a short rounded man in a black suit and T-shirt, with a face that looked like the full moon when he smiled. He sat flanked by the Swedish actors, appearing contented but somehow removed from the scene before him.

Meredith never did get to meet him.

After dinner she was so woozy with drink and travel that Tony offered to help her back up the stairs to her turret room. She had a vague memory of slapping his hand out from under the back of her skirt as they climbed the stairs, but decided to put it from her mind, along with the cartload of other cringe-worthy moments from the past several weeks. Now, she told herself, all she had to do was get through the next few hours, go to bed and get up and leave in the morning. Most of the guests were staying on for a long weekend. Meredith hadn't even intended to stay an extra night, but Tony had persuaded her not to leave when she ran into him at breakfast in the dining room. Over berries and pressed yogurt, he and Dennis cheerily invited her to come with them for a bike ride into Florence. Many of the party guests were going, though she couldn't properly imagine how, given that most of them had stayed up drinking for hours after she had gone to bed.

Underneath her washcloth veil and beach-towel tent, the full weight of the afternoon heat pressed itself upon her. The sun had shifted again, and she would have to move her chaise out of its reach. She huffed, irritably considering the prospect of going back indoors to nap on her clammy bed in the turret. Maybe if she just moved the chaise one more time the sun would stay in place. Meredith threw off her covers and looked in surprise at the figure standing above her.

Osmond. He wore a short terry-cloth robe that hung open over a black Speedo bathing suit. A silver s.h.a.g carpet covered his chest and belly. He was holding the leaves of the lemon tree aside and grinning.

"You must be a vampiress," he said, c.o.c.king his head teasingly. "Most women get annoyed when a man steps into their sun but with you it is the opposite." He spoke with the word-perfect formality of someone speaking a second language that has become, for all practical intents, his first.

"I'm not a big tanner."

"Smart girl. The sun is damaging."

"It's not that really. I just don't like the feeling of exposure."

Osmond let the branches go and they swished back into place between them. "Ridiculous," he said, picking a dead leaf from the tree and crumbling it between his fingers. "A lovely young woman like you should be shown to the world. If anything, you should spend more time in the sun. Figuratively speaking."

Meredith had nothing intelligent to add but she felt she should do something. She sat up to introduce herself, causing the beach towel to fall away and reveal her bare chest. Somehow her bikini top had come unstrung. She covered herself, cupping a palm over each t.i.t like a starlet on the cover of a fashion glossy. Osmond smiled. He did not look away.

"G.o.d." She tried to laugh in a casual way. "How very, uh, European of me." She grabbed the bikini top with one hand and wrapped the other arm around her rib cage so it covered both nipples. She struggled one-handedly to yank the two tiny cotton triangles into place without revealing herself. Without a word, Osmond moved to the other side of the chaise, took the strings from her and tied them in a bow around her neck.

"Thanks."

"My pleasure." He was standing behind her, but she did not want to turn around and face him just yet.

"I am so pleased you accepted my invitation, Meredith. I wasn't entirely certain that you would."