Savages

by Shirley Conran

Genres: General Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Five women must spend months alone together in a hostile jungle, threatened on land and in the water and—perhaps most dangerous of all—by their own exposed and violent passions, that turn them, into savages far worse than their hunters and enemies.

Release date: July 24, 2012

Publisher: Pocket Books

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25, 1984

Slowly, silently the door swung open. That was odd, thought Lorenza, because since that silly kidnap threat, the invisible security precautions at home had been rigorous. She pushed at the blackened, heavy medieval door. She had known its weathered vertical ridges all her life; her great-grandfather had brought this wooden door, along with the rest of the manor house, from the Cotswolds across the Atlantic to Pennsylvania. For twenty-three years—all her life—she had seen daydream pictures in the door’s wizened indentations as she waited for it to be opened.

“Where is everybody?” she called, as she stepped onto the old York stone of the entrance hall and kicked off her scarlet pumps.

Nobody answered. The echoes of the bell died away.

In stockinged feet, Lorenza walked back outside the front door and glanced beyond her red Ferrari Mondial, carelessly parked askew at the bottom of the steps. She gazed around the quiet parkland that fell away on all sides from the house to distant woods and the Ohio River, but she saw nobody.

Once again, Lorenza gave the bell three peremptory tugs, then walked over to one of the ancient stone lions that stood at the top of the steps. She patted its stone head, as she always did when she came home, then pulled off her sable coat and draped it over the lion; it was warm for the end of October.

She wandered back into the hall and looked up at the lifesize Sargent portrait of her great-grandmother. “Robbed? Raped? Kidnapped? Where do you think they all are, Greatgrandma?”

Lorenza had the same abundant but wispy russet hair as the anxious-looking lady in the pale-gray satin ballgown, but she didn’t have the same twenty-inch waist; Lorenza was chubby, like her mother, especially now. At last she was pregnant! She’d married Andrew sixteen months ago, in June 1983, and since the day she’d returned from her honeymoon her mother had looked hopeful. Lorenza had only to watch her mother stroke her six black cats—sinuous, small panthers—to know that she loved with her hands and longed for a grandchild to cuddle.

In her stockinged feet, Lorenza padded to her right, through a suite of reception rooms linked by double doors; there was no sign of anyone in the morning room, the salon, the library or the ballroom, beyond, which ran the full depth of the house and led into the orangery.

As she returned through the library, Lorenza noticed her mother’s reading glasses lying by a scatter of papers on the silver-gray carpet. So her mother was around somewhere, she thought. Idly, she picked up two invitation cards, a newspaper and a travel brochure. She looked with interest at the travel brochure, on the cover of which was pictured a tropical beach; palm trees waved against an aquamarine sky, above which scarlet words promised: “Paradise can be yours on Paui.” Lorenza flicked open the brochure and saw photographs of a low modern hotel, tropical gardens, black women with pink flowers stuck behind their ears, trays of flower-decorated drinks; young, clean-cut, bronzed white couples smiled into each other’s eyes as they dined under the stars, swam in an azure pool, swung golf clubs and tennis rackets or enjoyed a champagne picnic on a deserted beach. “Just north of Australia and south of the equator, you can reserve a slice of paradise for yourself,” the brochure suggested. “Toll-free reservations 1-800-545-PAUI.”

Lorenza threw down her mother’s papers, returned to the hall and shouted again up the ancient stairs. Her voice echoed around the oak-paneled minstrel’s gallery, but once more there was no response. She pattered to the back of the hall and peered through the double doors onto the terrace, where three fountains were linked by flowerbeds, the whole neatly framed by rows of box hedge. Although the Grahams employed three gardeners, her mother was often to be found weeding the formal Italian garden, beyond which the lawn sloped down to the Ohio River. Today there wasn’t a soul in sight.

Lorenza headed to her left, down the passage that led past the dining room and her father’s study to the staff quarters. No one in the kitchen … No one in the pantry … No one in the staff sitting room … No one in the flower room. But this house contained a butler, a cook, three Filipino housemaids and her mother’s personal maid. Where were they all?

The linen room was off the staff sitting room. In front of a pile of unfolded sheets, a shapeless woman in a white smock was slumped in a rocking chair, her sleeves rolled up over skinny arms with sinews that stood out like a man’s. On the back of each hand was a delta of thick blue veins.

Lorenza tiptoed over, tickled the woman’s ear and bawled into it, “Ciao, Nella!”

With a shriek the woman leaped to her feet, clutching her breast. “Oh! You very bad girl, Miss Lorenza!” As Lorenza hugged her, Nella added in a muffled voice, “You give me the heart attack, then nobody to cook for the family.” Nella had been transplanted from Rome when Lorenza’s mother had first arrived in Pittsburgh as the new Mrs. Arthur Graham.

Lorenza yelled, “Where’s Mama? And where’s everyone else?”

Nella was deaf and had to be bawled at. She used her deafness as a convenient excuse for not hearing anything she did not wish to discuss. If pressed, she would thump the square of white fabric that jutted out between her flat breasts and hid her old-fashioned box hearing aid, saying, “This thing no damn good again, needs fixing.”

Nella said, “Your mama give staff free afternoon, because us all work late tomorrow night for your papa’s birthday party. Your mama, she gone shopping.”

“What for?”

“Clothes.”

“But Mama always buys her clothes in Rome.”

Nella looked uncomfortable. “Well, maybe not clothes, but is a secret.”

“Aw, come on, Nella.”

Nella looked furtive, but what Italian cook can keep a secret? “Your mama go shopping with the decorator to choose things for your apartment upstairs. Your mama have your rooms redone, because of the baby.”

“But Andrew and I live in New York, and the baby will live there with us, not here.”

“Your mama say, just in case.”

“Just in case of what?”

Lorenza’s attention was distracted as she heard an engine softly hum in the distance. She pushed open a diamond-paned window, hung out and waved at the white Van den Plas Jaguar as it moved sedately up the gravel drive. She said, “Mama must be the only person in the world who drives a six-cylinder Jaguar fifteen miles an hour.”

“Your mama have plenty accident in her cars. Your mama not fast, but not careful. Always she think about other things, always some other place in her head. Your papa want she have some man to drive her, but your mama, she say too much trouble, is just someone else to organize.”

But Nella was talking to the air. Lorenza had rushed off to meet her mother.

Silvana Graham hurried up the steps, dropped two gift wrapped packages at the top and hugged her daughter. “Put your shoes on, darling! Mustn’t catch cold, it’s bad for the baby.” She had a low, lilting voice like a flock of doves, a voice not unusual in Rome, but rare in Pennsylvania. This soothing quality of Silvana’s voice permanently irritated her husband, because it sounded as if she were trying to calm him down, and therefore reminded him of his high blood pressure.

Lorenza kissed her mother on the lips. It was Silvana’s bewitching mouth that had captivated Arthur Graham the first time he saw her, laughing in a seaside café at Santa Margherita, on the Italian Riviera, in 1956. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan Arthur had been surprised by his own reaction to the sensuality and insouciance of the big-breasted, cheerful seventeen-year-old with the loud laugh. Twenty-eight years later, only Silvana’s mouth remained the same. The big dark eyes had lost their sparkle, the heavy black hair no longer tumbled around her shoulders but was tamed back in a tight, graying French twist.

The two women moved toward the library. Shoeless Lorenza waddled with pregnant self-importance; her mother’s slow, regal carriage just offset a heaviness that threatened to turn into bulkiness, but even her upright head could no longer disguise the start of a double chin. Women thought Silvana Graham elegant but unapproachable; men thought she was over the hill, twenty-five pounds too heavy and not worth making a pass at. Silvana moved through life in a lethargic dream, propelled forward only by timetables. “Mustn’t keep the servants waiting” had been the constant admonishment in the small palazzo in Rome, near the Borghese Gardens, where Silvana was born, and where her parents still lived.

In the library, Lorenza picked up the tropical island brochure. “What’s this about, Mama? Are you escaping at last?”

Silvana laughed at their old joke. “No, it’s a business trip. We’re leaving next week for Australia. Nexus is holding the annual conference in Sydney this year. After that, we’re having the usual top-brass working holiday. Your father has chosen Paui because he’s never been fishing there, and apparently there are plenty of sharks. He’s never caught a shark.”

“There’s something to be said for being president of a corporation.” Lorenza threw herself on the silver brocade sofa, propped her feet up and started to discuss her pregnancy with the obsessive concentration of a five-months-pregnant first-timer, who little realized how bored she would be by the subject in two months’ time. Although her baby wasn’t due until late February, Lorenza now looked at her life as if down the wrong end of a telescope: it had shrunk to a circle that included only her husband and this blurry-faced sexless baby. Silvana listened to her daughter’s self-important chatter. “Andrew feels … Andrew knows … Andrew wants me to give up my job … Andrew thinks he should look after my money. It’s one of the things I want to talk to Papa about. Andrew says it’s ridiculous to have someone else invest my money, when he’s a broker … Andrew says …”

Silvana said, “Why give up your job? I thought you enjoyed it. Although I never understood why you took a job in the first place.”

“Don’t you remember? Gran said it would give me an interest.” Lorenza remembered that Arthur’s mother had also implied she didn’t want Lorenza to follow her mother’s aimless path, padding her life out with trivia in order not to notice that she was merely marking time until she died. Gran had always had eccentric ideas.

Lorenza laughed. “It’s just an itsy-bitsy job at Sotheby’s. Andrew says I haven’t learned as much about pictures as Gran expected, and I don’t use my history degree. I’m polite to people on the phone, help someone else to catalogue the paintings and occasionally take telephone bids at auctions…. I’ll have plenty to do at home, looking after Andrew and the baby.”

Silvana lifted the heavy silver coffeepot from the tray that Nella had just placed in front of her. “Nella’s sister is coming from Varese to be your nanny. You’ll have plenty of staff. You’re luckier than most women. You’ll have time to do something, to continue to be somebody.”

Lorenza looked surprised. “Mama! That’s sixties Women’s Lib talk!” She laughed affectionately. “It’s taken you twenty years to catch up.”

“No, it’s taken me twenty years to notice.”

“Notice what?”

Silvana rubbed her pearl necklace against her cream silk collar, a sign of mild agitation. Hesitantly she said, “Few women are as happy after marriage as they expected to be.”

“What are you talking about, Mama?” Don’t say you and Papa are going to split, she thought. She asked in alarm, “Aren’t you happy? Haven’t you got everything that you could possibly want?”

Everything except what matters most, thought Silvana.

“What more could you possibly want, Mama?”

“To feel that I exist.”

So it was only that. Lorenza stretched out one arm and gently pulled Silvana’s hand toward her pink Fiorucci maternity overalls, so that Silvana could feel the hard little belly beneath. “Of course you exist, and so does that.”

Silvana said, “I hope it’s a boy.” She hesitated again, then added, “I meant what I said about your job. I don’t want your life to be eaten up without your noticing it. One day you look up and think, Where did it go, my life?” She shook her head. “Don’t laugh, Lorenza. The people you love can swallow up your life, if you let it happen. You won’t notice it’s happening or how it happens—and if you do notice, you won’t know how to stop it.”

“Darling Mama, don’t worry.” Lorenza’s indulgent voice didn’t quite hide her irritation. “I have total faith in Andrew.”

* * *

Silvana shrugged, remembering that she had once had total faith in Arthur. She recalled the angry scene with her father when she had carefully, casually told her parents over breakfast—one warm autumn day like this, years ago in Rome—that she wanted them to meet an American friend. Yes, a man. No, she had met him on the beach. (Because husky, blond Arthur had followed her from the café to the sand.) Her father had turned the page of his newspaper and said sharply that well-brought-up girls did not pick up boys on the beach, and he certainly did not wish to meet a young beach bum. So seventeen-year-old Silvana blurted out that Arthur was not young—he was quite old, thirty-four, and she was going to marry him!

The result had been like pushing a flaming rag into a jar of kerosene. Her father smashed down the paper, leaped out of his chair and yelled, “When is it due?” Her mother said, “Tulio, lower your voice or the servants will hear.” She then looked reproachfully at Silvana and asked, “When is it due?”

Amused at being taken for a parvenu, Arthur (whose girlfriend had flown back to New York after a quarrel, leaving him alone on vacation) had taken care to get Silvana pregnant as soon as she had explained that she was—sort of—engaged to be married, to the son of the family whose beautifully tended estate in Tuscany bounded theirs. Without a word Arthur had turned down the next country lane, stopped the car and thrust himself upon her. Silvana had willingly thrust back, then and subsequently, in the backs of hired cars, under hedges, in vineyards, legs waving from the bottom of a motorboat, and once behind a village bakery. Silvana had been thrilled at being made a proper woman by a proper man—not a boy. She thought that Arthur had all the sophistication, vitality and glamour of the U.S.A., a country that Silvana knew only from the movies and the advertising pages of Life magazine, a country which seemed glamorous and as distant as Mars from shabby postwar Italy, where an unmarried girl meekly obeyed her father.

After her father stormed from the breakfast room, followed by her mother repeating, “At least she says he’s a Catholic, Tulio,” the weeping Silvana had been examined by a strange physician—not the family doctor—then locked in her bedroom while her parents argued angrily. Nella, the kitchen maid who brought her meals, took Silvana’s note to Arthur, who read the sad, crumpled letter, grinned, then telephoned his mother in Pittsburgh.

Not astonished by his news, but astounded that this time Arthur actually intended to marry a girl he’d gotten pregnant, Mrs. Graham had sighed, telephoned Nexus Tower and told the office to book her a seat to Rome. After the eighteen-hour flight, during which she had plenty of time to realize that she would, as always, be unable to dissuade her only son from doing what he wanted, Mrs. Graham stepped into the waiting maroon Rolls-Royce, thinking, Well, at least she’s a Catholic.

Upon arriving at her usual suite at the Grand, Mrs. Graham wrote a short letter of invitation to Silvana’s parents, which was delivered by hand to the crumbling Palazzo Cariotto just off the Borghese Gardens.

Count Cariotto went alone to meet the tragically widowed Mrs. Graham, who wore a navy Mainbocher dress, one long string of 16-millimeter pearls—she liked the fact that it never occurred to people that they were real—and her engagement ring, which was the biggest diamond the Count had ever seen. He found his eyes repeatedly drawn to it as they talked, with formal delicacy, of the inexorably approaching event. Eventually it was agreed that their lawyers should meet to discuss the suggested, generous marriage settlement upon Silvana, and the Count returned home to tell his wife that it could have been worse, at least the mother was a lady.

The engagement party was held on a starlit September evening in the interior courtyard of the Palazzo Cariotto, where careful spotlighting drew eyes away from the decay. White satin streamers fell from tubs of dark-green yew trees; marble statues were hung with garlands of white flowers; the many servants wore livery with waistcoats striped in the dark green and yellow Cariotto colors. All the delicious buffet food—the trout, the huge hams, the smoked delicacies, the fruit and the wine—had come from the Cariotto estate in Tuscany. Although the Count’s business schemes invariably failed—someone he trusted always let him down—his farms ran as smoothly as they had always run, administered by the land agent who had inherited the job from his father, to whom it had been handed down by his father.

As swiftly as was decent, the engagement party was followed by the wedding—the bridegroom had business commitments, the Countess explained to her friends, who nodded understandingly. Following the elaborate Roman ceremony, Silvana and Arthur flew to India for their honeymoon. Thirty minutes after the Karachi stopover, Silvana had the first of her miscarriages. This had upset the food service and sanitary facilities in the first-class cabin, but music was played to drown the noise of her pain and an ambulance was waiting at Delhi, where she spent a depressing three weeks in King George Hospital, before being flown in cautious stages back to Pittsburgh.

Silvana had now seen that Arthur was wonderful in a crisis, and fell even more deeply in love with him. “Arthur says … Arthur thinks … Arthur wants me … Arthur insists …” she told her mother over the long-distance calls that grew increasingly frequent. Her mother, correctly diagnosing homesickness, dispatched young Nella to help Silvana settle down in Arthur’s family mansion in Sewickley, but Silvana never felt really happy away from the cheerful noise of Rome or the serenity of the Tuscan countryside where she had grown up, and flew back regularly to visit. Twice a year she observed her mother and father growing smaller, thinner and grayer. At first she clung to Arthur, seeking the support and security of his enfolding arms, but those strong, blond-haired, muscular arms enforced as well as enfolded. Silvana soon found out that she could do anything she wanted—unless Arthur wanted something else.

Arthur’s mother had moved out of the English manor house in Sewickley before Arthur and his bride returned from India. Happily she commissioned Philip Johnson to build her a long, low house of glass, high in the hills, which is what she had always wanted, rather than that gloomy pile of thirty rooms with diamond-paned windows that never let in enough light and heavy carved furniture—much of it supposedly sixteenth century—faded tapestries, brocade upholstery in several dingy shades and heavy, dark velvet curtains.

While Silvana recovered from her first miscarriage, she lay in her four-poster bed and scribbled notes about her pending transformation of the gloomy house. But when, one morning, she casually told Arthur what she was doing, he stopped dressing and looked at her sharply, tie tack in one hand, its stud in the other. “This is one of the best houses in Pennsylvania,” he had said. “I grew up here and I don’t want anything changed. You can replace things when necessary, but the replacements are to be just that—not changes.”

Silvana tried to protest, she even made the mistake of saying that most of the expensive furniture was fake—or, if not, then greatly repaired. Arthur listened in cold silence, turned his ice-blue eyes toward her without moving his head and observed, “At least it doesn’t have to be propped up with somebody else’s money.” A large part of Silvana’s settlement had been “loaned” to repair the Palazzo Cariotto. For a week after that, Arthur did not speak to her. In bed, he treated her as if they had not been introduced. They made up, but things were never the same again.

In romantic fiction, which Silvana loved, the hero is always permanently obsessed by the heroine, whereas in real life, once passion fades, a woman always comes second to a man’s career. Silvana never came to terms with the fact that her romantic ideas were unrealistic, so without noticing it she gradually became permanently depressed—a condition that evinced itself in weariness.

By the time Silvana managed to carry a baby to term, she had been married for four years and had been pregnant, sick or recovering from a miscarriage for almost all of that time. Arthur no longer found Silvana’s pink, moist mouth a novelty, and his interest in her had dissolved like the morning mist that rose from the river at the foot of their estate. The twelve evenings that followed the birth of their daughter were spent by Silvana alone (so that she could rest, Arthur had said). On the thirteenth evening, Silvana realized that Arthur must be doing all those wonderful things to somebody else. She tried to discuss this with him, but if Arthur didn’t want to talk about something, then it wasn’t discussed. His job at Nexus Mining International—the firm started by his great-grandfather—was an excuse for any absence. If Silvana telephoned him at his downtown office in Nexus Tower, then he was at the plant, or vice versa. On his frequent trips to the Nexus offices in New York or Toronto, Arthur was absent all day, and in the evening he left orders at his hotel that he was not to be disturbed.

But, although Arthur didn’t bother to hide his lack of interest from Silvana, he seemed to want to hide it from Pittsburgh. He was never seen with another woman, and he and Silvana made regular public appearances, at which he insisted that Silvana be exquisitely dressed. However, it was noticed that the couple rarely talked to each other when they were seated in the cream-and-crimson velvet Graham box at Heinz Hall, waiting to listen to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra or watch the Pittsburgh Ballet Company.

By that time, Silvana found that she could no longer speak up for herself—the words would not come. She had been frightened of asking Arthur for the truth, but now she was frightened of being told it. She was terrified that one day Arthur would divorce her. She would wake up in the dark with the words Then what? whispering in her ears. She felt panic at the thought of being without a husband, of being sent home to Rome like some export reject, of hearing her father say, “I told you so.” So, after a few timid attempts at discussion had been expertly turned aside by Arthur, Silvana shut her eyes to her marital unhappiness. After all, passion never lasted longer than two years, did it?

But in Arthur’s case, passion had not been replaced by affection. He simply disregarded his wife. Increasingly, Silvana felt insignificant and without hope. She trembled when spoken to, and to speak was a great effort. To outsiders she appeared vague, absentminded or aloof. She felt that real life was on the other side of a glass wall, but she could never decide whether she was looking into the aquarium, or looking out. She confided her humiliation to no one, feeling that pity would render it intolerable.

She clung to her baby, chubby Lorenza who blew bubbles and dribbled down fragile clothes that had been embroidered by Italian nuns. Everyone at Nexus knew that Arthur had returned to his bachelor habits and was once again using his old apartment below the hotel penthouse that was permanently reserved for visiting Nexus VIPs. But, surprisingly, he had felt possessive pride as soon as he saw his baby daughter’s red, screwed-up little face and heard her yell. “She takes after you,” said Silvana, and he beamed.

Within three months of Lorenza’s birth, Arthur’s old nursery suite of four rooms had been redecorated in pale pink, and from that moment Silvana knew she could have anything she wanted, provided that it was for the benefit of Lorenza. Anything, that is to say, except money.

Arthur allowed Silvana no cash. Everything had to be charged. Arthur’s secretary paid the travel bills to Rome, the accounts from Valentino, the bills from Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue, where Silvana bought all her Christian Dior lingerie. Not that Arthur was cheap. If Silvana wanted a new car, she had only to say so in September, when Arthur ordered his next year’s models. Schooled by his mother, Arthur had good taste in jewelry and loved to buy it, so Silvana had plenty of everything—emeralds, pearls, sapphires and diamonds (not rubies, Arthur thought them vulgar). However, Silvana never had any cash.

Arthur knew that cash meant freedom. With even a little stash, flight would be possible. If Arthur didn’t want Silvana to stay, he also didn’t want her to go. The fact of Silvana’s existence prevented Arthur’s mistresses from being too demanding, because Arthur always made it clear that, as he was a Catholic, there could never be a divorce. So Silvana was not allowed the one thing that might have powered her flight from humiliation—she was dependent upon her husband’s whim and her husband’s money. How could she leave him, with no self-confidence and no cash? Silvana felt ashamed of her powerless situation and dealt with her timidity and insecurity by withdrawing from the world. She tried to become nothing, so that nothing could hurt her. Her body was present, but she was not, and Arthur didn’t want her body. Biologically, Silvana was alive, but emotionally she felt dead—she went through the motions of living like a languid sleepwalker, and at all times, behind her exquisite manners, she suppressed her rage toward her husband.

Except on one occasion.

* * *

The Grahams kept a ten-berth yacht at Monte Carlo and generally spent the month of June cruising the Mediterranean with a few friends. One starlit night in 1968 the party went ashore at Cannes to dine at the Carlton and Arthur drank too much Laphroaig malt whiskey after dinner. As they were returning through the moonlight in the launch, he made the mistake of telling Silvana that everyone knew she’d married him for his money.

Silvana, in strapless emerald satin, jumped to her feet—dangerously rocking the launch—and cried, “My father called you a beach bum, and as far as I knew, that’s what you were. This is what I care about your money!”

She pulled off her emerald earrings and flung them overboard.

In the stunned silence that followed, Silvana tore off her emerald bracelet and tossed it into the black, lapping waters. As the launch droned on slowly toward the yacht, Silvana licked her finger—she had put on weight and her rings were now tight—and yanked off her huge emerald engagement ring. She held it up in the moonlight and asked, “How much did you pay for that, darling?” Over the side it went, as Silvana laughed.

One of the male guests grabbed Arthur as he lunged toward Silvana, and the sailor at the wheel yelled “Attention!” as they nearly rammed the stern of another boat. Silvana was the first to climb aboard their yacht. Heedless of her guests, she scrambled below to her stateroom, locked the door and with trembling fingers opened her safe. Because of her agitation, she had to dial the combin