1
Now
I am just leaving for dinner when I hear.
People talk of remembering exactly where they were when great events happened: Princess Di, the Twin Towers, Trump. I know this isn’t quite on the same scale, but I’ll remember exactly where I was, all the same.
I’ve had back-to-back lessons all day, but now, at last, I have an hour to myself, the only person left in the languages office. I spend it working on my paper “Pirandello and the Search for Truth” for the Modern Language Review, barely coming up for air. This is the part of academia I enjoy the most: the research, the pulling together of an idea, the rearranging of words and thoughts on the page until they start to take on a life of their own, form arguments, cohesion. I’m hoping that this will be the one they’ll finally agree to publish.
I am the only French and Italian teacher at Graybridge Hall, have been for the last ten years. When they decided to introduce Italian for the younger years, as well as the older students, I did suggest that perhaps now it would be time to look at hiring someone else. But Ms. Graybridge, the eponymous head—and third of that name to have held the position—reminded me that the school’s ethos was “personal and continuous care for every girl.” Which didn’t really make sense as a rebuttal, but which I knew was shorthand for no, and which she knew—because of certain circumstances under which I assumed my position in the first place—I wouldn’t argue with.
Not that I don’t enjoy teaching. Sometimes. “Shaping young minds” and all that seems like it should be a worthy cause. When I was younger, much younger, I imagined maybe I would do a PhD, become a professor. I also thought about diplomatic service, traveling the world as a translator, journalism, maybe, why not? Instead I sit through mock orals on topics as ground-breaking as Food and Eating Out, Cinema and TV, and My Family.
My rumbling stomach is the first signal I have that evening is approaching, and when I tear myself away from my laptop screen to look at the darkening sky, I decide to ditch my planned root around in the fridge and be sociable instead. Wednesday is quiz night at the pub near school. A group of teachers go every week, the little thrill they get as their cerebral cortexes light up with a correct answer just about making up for a day spent asking the girls to kindly not look at their Apple Watches until break, and maybe not take their makeup out of their Marc Jacobs backpacks until class is over just this once.
I close down my laptop and do a brisk tidy of the room before slipping on my coat and scarf, and am just about to slide my phone into my rucksack when an alert catches my eye—specifically, a name, bouncing out of the BBC News push notification, one I have avoided all thought of for a long while, as much out of circumstance as necessity.
Sebastian Hale.
I freeze in the doorway—phone clutched in my hand as preciously as though it were the Rosetta stone—and look again, not quite believing I saw it right, presuming perhaps it was just wishful thinking, a long hour of screen-staring playing tricks on my eyes, that could have conjured his name before me.
But there it is. That name. Those five syllables. The six vowels and seven consonants that have held more significance for me than any word or sentence written in my entire attempted academic career.
And next to them, three words that throw my whole world off-kilter, that see me reaching for the door handle and wrenching it shut, all thoughts of dinner gone from my mind:
Sebastian Hale Appeal Proceeds Tonight
I sit at my desk, lights off, face illuminated by the white glow of my phone screen, and read someone else’s report of the story I know so well. The story I have lived. I place the phone facedown on the desk, snuffing out its light, and press my palms into the woodwork. The feel of my flesh rubbing against the desk’s smooth surface grounds me, helps me process the report—think.
I knew there had been requests for appeals over the years, all denied by the Corte d’Assise d’Appello. A change of lawyer, probably hoping that new eyes on the case could find something that was missed. But they’ve all come to nothing. How did I miss this?
If he is retried, if there is any possibility that he might be released...everything would change.
After the initial trial, after my part was done and I could finally go home and resume the life I had worked so hard to live, I tried—I really, truly tried—to put it behind me.
That was what she did, after all, and I wanted to follow her lead. I have always wanted to follow her lead. But that time has never truly left me. Sometimes, it will take the smallest thing—the light filtering through a window just so, a particular kind of humid heat, walking past a patisserie and being hit with a waft of baked vanilla sweetness—and it all comes back to me with cut-glass clarity. The sound of our laughter ricocheting off ocher-colored walls. The clink of glasses and the taste of hot weather, raw red wine. The touch of sweat-dewed skin. The scent of pine. The giddy, delightful feeling of being young and happy and having the rest of our lives spooling out in front of us.
These are the good things—the things I want to remember.
The bad things...those I have no choice but to remember.
And now, at the sight of his name alone, I am instantly transported: flying on the wings of a deep déjà vu, away from the cold late-autumn day and the dusty corners of my tired office and back, back, back to that time—that summer.
To those gold-tinged days and months that crescendoed so spectacularly into those final, onyx hours.
To the start.
2
Then
“You have to go, Rachel—it’s the chance of a lifetime!” Ms. Moore, as prone to drama as she was to clichés, had caught me just as I was about to head home, beckoned me into the languages office with a palpable nervous energy and ushered me over to her desk.
Me, her favorite pupil. A shining example of what dedication and ambition could achieve in the drudgery of our ambitionless school. An offer for Cambridge, the only one in my year. Modern Languages—French and Italian, no less, despite the fact that the school didn’t even offer the latter, and wouldn’t, no matter how much Ms. Moore campaigned. I was her protégée, her project, her “See, I can make a difference.” Her proof that she mattered. And in return, I felt I mattered too.
On the screen of the bulky white Dell computer, an email:
Dearest Nikki,
I have a favor to ask of you...
“I tutored her children for the year after university.” She’d tapped the screen with a short, unpainted fingernail, next to an email signature that read, “Contessa Silvia Daniele.” “She’s looking for girls to work in her pensione over the summer.” She snorted. “I say pensione—it’s more like a luxury hotel. Very few rooms, very expensive. It’s beautiful.” I could tell she wanted to pull me to her, could see her hands itching toward my navy jumper, and then, remembering the propriety of her position, she flexed her fingers, and patted my wrist lightly instead. “She wants bright girls, Rachel. Polite English girls who can please her guests and give the hotel a sense of British charm. It’s four months. Room and board in exchange for light housekeeping, waitressing, a bit of cooking. She’ll even throw in language lessons. Oh, Rachel—” she’d turned to me, and I saw the memories wipe years off her face “—you have to do it. Florence—it’s just magical.”
Mum sniffed at it, didn’t understand, when I put it to her that evening, judging my moment carefully between the last swallowed mouthful of chicken Kiev and her nightly delve into the box of Milk Tray chocolates: “Just one—I need a little something sweet.”
“I didn’t bring you up to be some rich woman’s maid.”
She cleared our dinner plates up with a loud clatter and wouldn’t look at me.
But then Dad, later, stooping in the doorway of my room, in his temperate, monosyllabic way: “Go. Have a fun summer. You’ve earned it.”
He pressed a check into my hands. Enough for a return ticket to Pisa.
A blast of heat smacked me in the face as soon as I walked out of the airport. I knew Italy would be hot, but I hadn’t imagined this, this heavy thickness, the weight of it. Carried by a crowd of jostling voices toward the coaches bound for Florence, guessing, hoping I wouldn’t end up in Naples. My phrasebook Italian slurred, cautious: scusi, per favore. The squat driver, beard glistening with sweat, helping place my suitcase in the hold.
Disgorged at Santa Maria Novella Station, I couldn’t help a rush of disappointment. Pigeons. A McDonald’s. I stared at the guidebook image of the basilica’s green-and-white facade and wondered, Is this what they mean by la dolce vita? A man with roving eyes swung listlessly on a pole by the station steps, chewing methodically on a feather. When I walked past him, he bellowed a discordant “Bah!” that caused me to yelp and the woman next to me, a skittish pup in tow, to roll her eyes and mutter something incoherent. I thought of home.
But then I was in a taxi, and we were winding along the road, my carefully meted out taxi fare clutched in a sticky palm.
The driver’s eyes had rounded when I gave him the name Villa Medici, and I saw him take in my jeans and crumpled T-shirt.
“Holiday?” He cocked his head.
“No, no...lavoro?” I failed to think of a mime to demonstrate, but he nodded knowingly.
“Ah.”
The city peeled away in favor of green hills. Tall cypresses began to dot our peripheries, and a blanket of yellow seemed to descend, bathing everything in sunlight so thick that sound appeared muffled but for the faint calls of birds, the tinny rumble of the radio.
Eventually, we pulled off the main road and headed up a narrow path, where the unruly landscape brushed softly against the sides of the car. The taxi growled over the earth so deeply I felt the vibrations in my marrow. I glanced at the driver, looking for some sign of displeasure or annoyance, but he just turned off the now-staticky radio, soldiered on.
The air inside the car was stale, the wheeze of the air-conditioning providing little relief to the back seats, so that my T-shirt started to cling to me, sweat pooling at the base of my spine where it met the rough upholstery. I reached over to wind down the window, welcoming the instant coolness blowing against my face, but the driver grunted so sternly I froze my grip on the roller.
“Pulviscolo.”
“Sorry?”
“Pulviscolo,” he said again, firmer, whirling his free hand in a wide circle and then miming a cough.
I looked out the window at the clouds of dust choked up by the wheels. “Ah. Sorry.”
“Hmm.” He nodded, satisfied, then pointed to the air vents above the gear stick. “Is better.”
I reached for my hair tie, scraped my ponytail tighter. At last, when we were so high I felt as if my breath were catching in my chest, we pulled up to a wrought-iron gate, and the car juddered to a stop.
“Ecco là.” He pointed. “Here she is. The Villa Medici.” And there she was.
When I remember seeing that place for the first time, just thinking about it breathes within me the same soaring lightness I felt that first day, even now, even so many years later, even though darkness clings to the edge of the memory like the kicked-up dirt that clung to the sides of the taxi.
The majesty, the grace of the place. Its sheer facade, a faded deep yellow I would soon recognize as typically Tuscan. The arched windows and gently graduating steps picked out in the gray pietra serena sandstone, “the stone of the Renaissance.” Bracketed on all sides by manicured gardens and impish nude statues winking into the sun. The smell of the roses, sweeter and stronger in the late-afternoon sun. The sound of a silver teaspoon hitting a china cup; the splash of a body hitting the pool water in a swanlike dive.
It was glorious. And, for four months, it would be home.
She’s shut it up now, Silvia. One, maybe two years after it all happened. I found that out much later, when a nostalgic ennui led me to search for Villa Medici online. The reviews are still there—you can look them up—but they trail off after 2006. An online listing: “now permanently closed.” Feverishly, I tried the telephone number, still engraved in my memory, was surprised to find it still working.
“No, no,” came the answer. “La contessa, she moved permanently to Milano, where is her grandchildren. No, I don’t have her number. Dispiace. I’m sorry.”
Silvia did always like everything to be perfect. Unsullied. I wonder whether the thought of being part of everything that happened, even just on the edges of it, grew too much for her.
The car zoomed off in a puff of earth, leaving me to grate my suitcase over the roughed-up ground. He’d dropped me at the foothill of the estate, by the unmarked wrought-iron gate, and as I heaved it open, I couldn’t help but feel I was intruding, every step I made, every drag of my suitcase clashing with the peace.
Gardens began to emerge as I clambered up the sloping dirt path, dotted with robust pine trees. Under the shade of one, a couple were stretched out—she, stomach-first on a sunbed, leg bent skyward at the knee; he, on a deck chair, reading the paper. He pulled it down as I passed, observed me over the top of his bifocals, resumed reading. I supposed, compared to the usual clientele, I was an uninteresting sort of person.
At the entrance, flanked by a marble terrace dotted with wrought-iron furniture, I hesitated. I had received no instruction as to where to go when I arrived; was there some servants’ entrance? Some discreet, tucked-away door where I belonged?
“Hello?” Seeing nowhere suitable, I plunged forward, called into the cool silence, my voice catching on the stone walls. There was a small reception desk to my right, but no one manning it. I stepped farther in. “Hello?”
The clack of heels on marble made me turn to my left, peer through a set of frescoed living rooms to the figure approaching.
“May I help you?” the figure asked in liltingly accented English.
I was acutely aware of my appearance: sweaty from travel and, more recently, hot and dusty from dragging my suitcase. I subtly pressed my hand against the side of my jeans, wicking away the excess moisture, and held it out as she came toward me.
“I’m Rachel?” It came out as a question. Idiot. “Rachel Bailey. Ms. Moore’s—Nikki’s—pupil?”
“Ah!” She waggled her fingers in the air, and the hundreds of diamonds on them sparkled. “Rachel.” She hardened the ch, lingered on the l, so my name became a song. “Please to meet you.” And then, ignoring my outstretched hand, she kissed me firmly on both cheeks.
This was Silvia.
Most of the women I was close to up to that point could be marked out by their reserve: Mum, Gran, Mum’s sister, Elaine. It wasn’t due to any lack of affection on their part, but tactility was never their style. Mum was always prone to the pat on the shoulder, a stiff hug perhaps, if feeling particularly lavish, but she certainly wasn’t one for kisses and cuddles. When Gran told us she had cancer, I’d shuffled to where she’d sat, dwarfed by Mum’s overstuffed chintz sofa, tears stinging my eyes, and reached out for her. She, in turn, cleared her throat and patted me sharply on the upper arm. There, there, dear, no need to get emotional.
I soon learned that Silvia was the opposite of this, and more.
If Silvia was near you, she was touching you. A honey-colored hand resting on your upper arm to elucidate a point or cupping the point of your elbow to lead you where she wanted you to go, her fingers pressed to your back to announce her presence in the room you were in, the ridges of her heavily stacked rings digging into your flesh. She seemed to feed on the energy from the Tuscan sun, always ebullient, always moving, leaving behind her a jet stream of Chanel No. 5, the jingle of her jewels still ringing in your ears after she’d exited a room. She was once a model. Silvia Baroni, then. In the sixties. This, she told me nonchalantly that first day, breezing through the brocaded and gilded living rooms and pausing to show me the decadent portraits of her, hair bouffant and eyes smoldering, that lined the walls. Her career was brief, but prolific: the conte had fallen head over heels for her during a fashion show at the Palazzo Pitti and pursued her until she agreed to marry him. The demands of being a contessa—charities, fundraisers, children—caused the fashion world to slip through her fingers, but with the children now raised and living their own lives, and a team of staff keeping the rest of her affairs in order, “this”—and at “this” she swirled an elegant hand around us—had become her world.
“And you?” We had moved out of the main house now, past the cypress-bound pool and toward a whitewashed, rectangular building obscured by a fence.
I squinted at her in the midday sun. Shunning her sixties, Silvia oozed the beauty and glamour of a woman half her age. Her face, tellingly smooth for a woman in her phase of life, was impeccably made up, her bosom elevated to show off her neat figure. She had probably seen things and been to places I couldn’t even begin to imagine. How could I find anything interesting to tell her?
“I...” She waited. “I’m from Woking.” I shrugged. “It’s in Surrey?” Nothing. “Greater London?” Ugh. “I’m starting at Cambridge University in October.” At this, I perked up—inherent pride. “Studying languages. French and Italian. Ms. Moore...she thought this would be a good way for me to kick-start my Italian. I...” The sunlight cremated my cheeks. “I’m afraid I’m nothing particularly special.”
Silvia smiled kindly, nestled a finger under my chin, so that I was looking into her smoke-rimmed eyes.
“My dear, in Italy we have a phrase—ognuno è artefice del proprio destino. ‘We are all the masters of our own fate.’ I was a nobody from Calabria, the fourth of six kids. But I had brains and I had beauty and I put them to work. If you want to make yourself special, you make yourself special. No one else is going to do it for you. And now, allora, here is your room.” She paused, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get you settled in.”
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