The Silent Fountain. Victoria Fox

CHAPTER EIGHT

       Italy, Summer 2016

      I’m up early on my first morning. The house is quiet and for a moment I forget where I am, before I see my bags heaped at the end of the bed, still full. I’d meant to unpack before falling asleep, but supper must have finished me off – a glance at my panda eyes reminds me I forgot to wash my face. I think of my predecessor, Bill’s friend’s friend, the student whose inquisitiveness got the better of her, and decide that if I’m going to avoid the same fate I’ll need to start as I mean to go on. Ten minutes later, I’ve sorted the shampoo explosion I’d noticed at Pisa, the rest of my clothes are neatly hung and folded, and my belongings are arranged in the Lilac Room.

      I shower before heading downstairs. The shrouded portraits, though blinded, watch me as I pass. I remember the man I saw, covered now. Who is he?

      The hall is empty. I cannot hear a thing, no voices and no movement, just birdsong. In the scullery, breakfast is left out like a still life: a loaf of bread, a pat of butter, a jug of orange juice and a bunch of grapes. Adalina told me that she alone prepares the meals – ‘Signora prefers it that way’ – and that I must never interfere with cooking. This seems unusual, given that Adalina’s description of my job extends to tending every other aspect of the Barbarossa, from sweeping fire grates to dusting shelves to going to the foot of the drive each morning to collect fresh milk. Perhaps the woman of the house is fussy. Perhaps she can eat only certain things.

      I mull this over while I devour the food, not half so picky myself. The grapes burst on my tongue and the butter soaks into the bread crusts, warmed by the morning heat. From a narrow window I can see out to the courtyard, and, as I take my first sip of coffee, I’m surprised to catch a figure resting a bucket on the lip of that ugly fountain. I can only assume it to be the maid. The figure appears to steady herself, before lifting the vessel and emptying it into the well. For a moment the scullery feels weirdly hostile, as if I’m witnessing something I shouldn’t, something clandestine, and am myself being witnessed doing it. The bucket goes to the ground and another comes up in its place, is emptied and then replaced by a third, then a fourth, then a fifth. I consider the heat of the Tuscan sun and how the pool would dry up otherwise – but why sustain it when its function is long gone? The fish hasn’t sung in decades.

      If I listen hard I can hear the slosh of the water as it meets the stone, an urgent, vital connection, as if the liquid keeps the fountain alive, heart beating and lungs filled – like feeding something feral in a dark pit. The coffee tastes suddenly sour.

      I look away, my appetite diminished. When I glance up again, the courtyard is empty.

      *

      Afterwards, I begin my commission for the morning – the ballroom. It hasn’t been used in decades and I have to force the door, which swings on rusted hinges. Peach drapery adorns the high windows, whose panes are adrift with cobwebs. I climb the stepladder and watch a thin spider pick its way across gossamer threads, before casting it away with a cloth. I sneeze, the dust in my nostrils.

      The fireplace, a once-majestic stone cavern occupying the length of one wall, is equally clogged. Soon the dust is in my hair, and when I wipe my sleeve across my brow it comes away caked in grainy damp. Sunlight fires the room, its huge windows acting like a hothouse, making me sweat. I’m feeling light-headed when:

      ‘Lucy.’

      I turn. There is nobody there.

      I daren’t move for a moment, the room charged with some still, waiting entity. Silence comes back at me, no longer calm but malevolent, the empty room, the patient shafts of sunshine climbing across the floor, and the door, firmly closed, daring me to believe in the impossible. There is nobody there. Nobody here.

      But I can hear her voice as clear as a bell. She’d said my name, then, too.

       Lucy…

      And I had turned to face her on that train platform, at once a stranger and a woman I knew better than my own reflection, for I had thought of her so many times and been told so much about her. Commuters, clueless on their slogs to work, had surrounded our tragic island, plugged into their tablets, swigging coffee to get through a hangover. It was different for us. We were separate. And I will never forget the look in her eyes, right before she did it. It wasn’t anger, though it should have been. It was resignation. Disappointment. As if in saying my name she might have proved herself wrong: I wasn’t Lucy, I hadn’t done those things; it had been in her head all along.

       Lucy.

      A kind voice, soft, inquisitive – not what I had expected.

      I return to the fire grate, sinister now, its black hood as hard and cool as the rail tracks beneath our feet… Stand behind the yellow line. I had been conscious of a stupid thing, not what I should have been paying attention to at all: the fact I had just been with him. We had spent all night together, all morning, and his smell was on me.

      The worst part was that I didn’t stay. In the turmoil that followed, I’d fled the scene, breathless, the world truncated to a series of shuddering camera frames, galloping at me, disorienting, fundamentally changed. I’d emerged into the day and thrown up on the pavement. Then I’d run. Like the coward I was, I’d run…

      The sound of the castillo’s bell pulls me from my thoughts. Scrambling up, desperate to get out of the stifling room, I cross the floor. I didn’t really hear her voice. It was my imagination. I don’t believe in ghosts. Mum has never come back to me, so why should anyone else?

      At the door, a man is holding two large boxes. He gets me to sign for them and then seems in a hurry to leave, rushing back to his van and disappearing down the drive in a cloud of chalk. I frown, examining the weight in my hands, and nudge the door shut with my foot. The boxes are plastic, sealed tight with lots of brown tape, and the contents labels are written in Italian. I see numbers and percentages, a warning in bold red type, and when I gently shake them, a force of habit born of a little girl’s fascination with her mother’s belongings (those delicately wrapped gifts my dad presented her with each Valentine’s Day; the soft leather purses she kept in her wardrobe, filled with mysterious things; the make-up bags she chided me gently not to play with, heavy with bottles and tubes that knocked against each other like boiled sweets), I hear a metallic rattle. The address is headed:

       Sig.ra V Lockhart

      I’m trying to figure out from where I know that name – some dim recess tosses it up as recognisable, Vanessa, Virginia, it’s on the tip of my tongue – when Adalina materialises behind me, relieves me of the boxes and says, ‘You must never answer the door. Only I answer.’

      I’m about to reply, to object that I hadn’t known this because nobody told me, when, armed with the shadowy delivery, Adalina turns on her heel and vanishes upstairs to return to her charge, and I am left alone once more.

      *

      I don’t mean to go near the attic that afternoon, but I’m on such a roll come five o’clock that I decide to venture to that furthest corridor before calling it a day. From the windows, I can see right across to Florence. The Duomo shimmers against a golden sky, and the blue-green Arno snakes like a ribbon through the city. I can’t wait to be there: it’ll be like re-entering the world after weeks orbiting outer space.

      I’ll start by getting online.

      I tell myself it’s to contact Bill, 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