The Silent Fountain. Victoria Fox

personal contact details all over Europe it’s hard to know. ‘They sounded… impatient.’

      Fear scatters through me, and I ask: ‘Was it a man or a woman?’

      ‘A woman.’

      The slice of hope that it might have been him (never mind the fact he has no clue that I’m in Italy and, even if he did, wouldn’t be able to track me down: love makes us believe in the impossible) is pinched out. ‘A woman?’ I repeat.

      ‘Please tell your friends not to call the house in future.’

      ‘It can’t have been a friend. Nobody knows this number.’

      Adalina doesn’t buy it. Just tell them, her expression says, before she leaves.

      I listen to my breath for a moment, fast and short.

       I’ve been found.

      *

      I return to the library that evening, only this time I’m not chasing Vivien’s story. I’m chasing my own – and I have to reach it before someone else does.

      I have to make contact with him. Now the time is here, now it’s happening, I feel strangely calm. All the things I’ve rehearsed to say go out of the window.

      I take a breath and begin. Compose message.

      So, here I am. It’s been a while. I never thought it would be so long, and longer still when every moment hurts. I’m sorry. That’s the first thing to say. I’m sorry for what happened.

      The cursor blinks. I delete what I’ve written and start again.

      I have a question, and it’s this. Am I bad? Am I evil? Tell me, because I don’t know. My crime is that I fell in love with a man who told me he was single. You told me you were single. I fell in love with your laugh and your hands and the gentle frown you wear when you are concentrating. I fell in love with adventure, with excitement. I fell in love with the girl you promised me I was: the girl I’d always wanted to be.

      My fingers hover over the keys. When words aren’t enough, what then?

      I remember the day we met. He interviewed me for the role, and all I could think of right the way through was a line from the job description: The position of PA requires you to work intimately with the director. Here he was. Intimately.

      He’d been cool, calm, everything I wasn’t. Steel-grey eyes, burning in some lights, thawed in others; a sharp, square jaw; messy gold hair. I kept seeing those eyes. I see them now. Where absence forces other details to fail, that one never does. I’ve looked into them too many times. They’ve looked into me.

      I was shocked by the revelation he was married, ready to walk. Don’t, he said. They were estranged. There were children but he barely saw them; his wife was with someone new, a man they called Daddy. It broke his heart. I loved him more.

      Had I really been that stereotype?

      Had I really been the mistress who waits, hands wringing, for a break-up?

      Divorce was impossible, he promised. He was an important man, and his wife was Grace Calloway, a well-known TV personality. I was taken in by the glamour – my life had been anything but glamour up to that point. How beautiful she was, how celebrated, and yet he chose to spend his nights with me. It’s fake, he told me, none of it’s real. I clung to that. He needed me. I kept him going. Kept him sane.

      The nights without him were the worst. I’d lie in bed, picturing him in a home that didn’t welcome him, his wife away with her lover, his children refusing to let him close. It was easier to imagine than the alternative. That maybe they had made up; maybe she had cooked him a meal (saltimbocca, his favourite) and they’d shared a bottle of Chianti (like the one we had in that cosy Italian under London Bridge on my birthday, where the bottles came in cork baskets with molten wax down their sides), and then she’d told him she wanted to try again. The children were what got him. He could never turn his back on them, nor should he even think of it.

      I erase what I’ve written. This is what I mean to say:

      Right in that moment before she died, James, she looked at me and I knew. I knew that she loved you. I knew that you were never estranged and that you were happy – at least as far as she was concerned. She was a fragile, injured woman, a wife and a mother, and I had done a terrible, terrible thing.

      I wish you would talk to me. I wish you would call. I wish you would tell me that I’m wrong about all this. You loved me then and you love me now and you didn’t lie to me.

      Where are you? I cannot do this alone.

      Someone is watching. Someone is here.

      What should I tell them? What should I say? How can I know, if you won’t talk to me?

      Bill’s words fly back at me. Do you think he’s going to defend you? He doesn’t care. He’ll put it all on you and then how’s it going to look?

      I can’t believe that – but what, then, am I supposed to draw from his silence? I have no idea how he’s coping. The funeral is over, the daytime-TV world moving on from their mourning, her Chic Chef’s corner deserted, soon to be replaced with some other voluptuous, cocoa-fondant-loving beauty, and now the questions are being asked. Grace Calloway committed suicide? Why? What possible reason could she have had to take her own life? Grace had everything: the perfect job, the perfect family and the perfect husband. There’s nothing like perfection to whet the appetite of the press. Scratch the surface, just a scratch; see what’s lurking beneath…

      It wouldn’t have taken much. A bit of digging, the media turning up at his workplace, a snake-like Natasha disclosing everything to a reporter over a number of cocktails, realising next morning she’d perhaps said too much but not really caring.

      I close my account, without sending the message. Tears prick my eyes, the uselessness of the whole thing; my utter lack of clarity as to what to do next. For a second, I consider ringing one of my sisters, but the thought of explaining it makes me weary. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t compute an impulsive Lucy. All their lives I’ve been the one who imposed rules and told off and packed lunches and burned toast, while they pushed boundaries and rebelled against an anger and sadness they couldn’t articulate. It was always their personalities that were entertained, their quirks and mischief and instincts, not mine. I was functional; I just got on with it.

      Looking back, it might not be that my sisters overrode a more complex me; it might be that a more complex me simply had not existed. I buried her when I was fifteen and Mum was carried out of our house in the middle of the night, the life pinched out of her like a candle between two fingers. It was only when I met James that I set her free, the girl who had been caught and put in a jar, the lid screwed tight.

      But I kept that girl to myself. She was my secret. And to my family I remained the trustworthy person they had always known.

       They’ll find out soon enough.

      I leave the booth, sling my bag over my shoulder and take the steps two at a time. Out on the street, the warm evening hits me like a fan. Suddenly, I’m dizzy. I cling to the wall, tiny pinpricks of light shimmering behind my eyes.

      There is a café next door. I stumble in, ask for water, and sit in the cool of the air-conditioning, beneath an age-stained photograph of Michelangelo’s David.

      I’m beginning to calm when I notice something. There is a man at the table opposite mine, a little older than me, watching me intently. It’s him.

      The same man I saw outside the library last time.

       Get up. Get out. Move.

      The man stands. He approaches slowly, tucking his phone into his jeans, casually finishing his drink, and for an optimistic moment I expect him to walk right out of there, proving me wrong, but then his eyes are on me again and like a bad dream he closes the distance, stopping at my table, his hands