The Silent Fountain. Victoria Fox

to let my family know I’m well, but really I’m thinking of him, each hour that passes another hour in which he might have decided it’s been long enough, that we need each other, that he does still want me in his life. Then, buoyed by hope, I’ll have a sorbet in the Piazza della Signoria before strolling across the Ponte Vecchio and browsing the stalls. I’ll buy Bill a present, and my dad too, and then only when it’s late will I get the bus back to Fiesole and find my way up to the Barbarossa. Every day off will be like this, and, for the first time in a while, I feel as if I’m in the right place. As if maybe, just maybe, things might turn out OK.

      The first thump takes me by surprise. But I’m not quite describing it right – it’s less a thump than a… drag. Like a heavy chair moving across floorboards.

      It startles me and I sit back on my heels, listening, alert as a cat, my ears pricked to the slightest sound. The castillo is full of weird snaps and creaks, a maze of emptiness and silence compounding the effect, and I remind myself that just hours before, in the ballroom, I tricked myself into believing someone had said my name.

      But then I hear it again. The same noise, louder this time. It is coming from above, and when I look to the ceiling, a patina of cracked, mottled stone, I hear it for a third time and am able to position it exactly. There is somebody in the attic.

      I check behind, half expecting Adalina to haul me up and away, accusing me of breaking another law, but the corridor is deserted. I hear a bee outside the window, the pitch of its buzz lowering each time its body rushes against the pane. Slowly, I turn to the door at the end of the hall. Nobody goes. Your work extends to this point and not beyond. But Adalina didn’t say anything about other people being up there. If someone already is, won’t I be doing a service in exposing the contravention?

      I advance. The door sits low, with a tapered hood, like those odd little accesses you see in churches. It strikes me that whoever once used this must have been short in stature, and I remember the abandoned sleigh beds. I press my ear to it, and listen.

      No more thumps, no more drags, but I know what I heard. I push the handle, a coarse, rusted loop that leaves an orange stain on my palm. Puzzled at how something so feeble looking can be so robust, I resolve to apply my whole weight to the door, turning the lever as I do. It gives not an inch – except for a sensation of absolute cold on the shoulder touching the wood. I shake the lock, afraid to make too much noise, but I know that it won’t surrender. Never mind Adalina: this is its own gatekeeper.

      Crouching, I notice a coppery tear-shaped flap. With some persuasion it shifts, exposing the keyhole. I press my eye to it. The cool hits me like a fan, and an old, musty smell emerges. The darkness is absolute. Whoever is up there is in the dark.

      In the dark. In the quiet. Waiting.

      I wait, too.

      I’m reluctant to call out, because I don’t want Adalina to hear. It isn’t anything to do with the whistling anxiety that I might get a response, an anxiety that gathers pace by the second like a breeze on a moonlit lake; it’s that, contrary to all my logical sense, I’d be summoning someone or something I really don’t want anything to do with. I know that dragging sound was not friendly.

      I replace the flap and return down the hall.

      By the time I reach the stairs, I am running.

CHAPTER NINE

       Vivien, Los Angeles, 1976

      His name was Jonny Laing, the man with the Midas touch. He introduced himself as if she ought to recognise the name, and Vivien was embarrassed that she didn’t.

      ‘It’s OK,’ Jonny said, with a cagey sort of delight, like a fox eyeing a chicken coop. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to. It’s one of the many things I like about you, Vivien. You’re… how should I put it? Uninitiated. Innocent. Unspoiled.’

      Vivien had never considered herself to be unspoiled; her father had done a pretty good job of putting paid to that. But she liked that Jonny imagined her to be so, because he was smart and successful, and if he thought there was a scrap of purity left in her then maybe he was right. As she listened to him explain what he did for a living – ‘I’m in the movie business, and I know a star when I see one’ – all she could think was: I’m dreaming. This is a dream. Here was the answer to her desperate prayers, bam! Straight into her life, just like that. It couldn’t be happening, but it was.

      He took her for supper at a restaurant downtown, and told her his plans: this project, that project, she would be perfect for them all. Was it really so easy? Or would she wake in a few hours’ time and realise she had imagined the whole thing? Vivien found herself confiding in him about where she had come from, about Gilbert, the thrashings, the escape, all the demons from her past and the parts that made her vulnerable, ugly. She braced herself for his criticism, to be told to pack up and go back to Claremont like a good girl. But Jonny didn’t treat her like a girl, he treated her like a queen. He was kind and generous and exciting. And, contrary to Vivien’s expectations as she stumbled home on a cloud, he was true to his word.

      The next morning, a sleek motorcar arrived outside her crummy apartment. For the second time in her life, Vivien bundled her belongings into a canvas shell and prepared to embark into the wild unknown. Hollywood: the ultimate prize.

      The following weeks and months were a storm. Vivien barely had time to think. If Jonny hadn’t reminded her to eat and sleep, if for nothing else than to preserve her ‘extraordinary’ beauty, she would have forgotten that too. Every day was a hurricane of photo shoots, magazine interviews, power brunches, castings and read-throughs. Jonny didn’t allow her a moment’s rest. The beachside condo he set up for her was exquisite, but she never spent any time there. She dined in the finest bistros, she had a wardrobe from the most exclusive stores, she was thrown in with the most influential movers and shakers in the business and she drank it up like nectar from heaven. Not any heaven Gilbert Lockhart would recognise, of course. If her father could see her now – his chaste, belt-lashed little girl – if he could see the things she had done to get here… To hell with you, Daddy, she thought. I’m through.

      It wasn’t long before Vivien Lockhart’s name was on the lips of every major player in Hollywood. Her days at Boudoir Lalique seemed another world, the long, high dive board from which she feared she would never spring. Jonny was her saviour: he had flung her into the blue. She couldn’t thank him enough, not just for the promise of her career but also for restoring her faith in friendship. She had all but given up trusting anyone and then he came along, the friend she had yearned for, showing her that good could affect a life as tangibly and irreversibly as bad. There didn’t have to be a catch. Jonny had seen a light in her and fanned the flame. Over time, her soul began to lighten and heal. She reached out, full of hope.

      Vivien savoured every moment of her rebirth with a grateful and open heart. She passed through LA awe-struck at her luck, marvelling at the glass buildings where Jonny and his partners forged fortunes on a lunch break. LAING FAIRMOUNT PICTURES, his sign read. She thanked every star in the galaxy for its existence.

      And then Jonny had news.

      ‘Burt Sanderson’s asked to see you,’ he told her, arriving at her condo unannounced one evening. It was unlike Jonny to be flustered – but Burt was major league. If Vivien worked with the famous director, she was going stellar. Jonny knew it; she knew it. They had worked hard for this, getting all the pieces into place. Jonny likened it to engineering a racing car: you built it, you honed it, you polished it – then you just needed the track on which to see it fly. Burt Sanderson was that track.

      ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I’ll see you there.’

      *

      Despite her nerves running off the scale, in the end it wasn’t so different to her gigs at the Lalique. Fixing her smile, saying the right thing, working to elicit this reaction or that. Burt and his panel were inscrutable to begin with, but then, as Vivien warmed to the part, channelling her