W
HEN CATE HAD COME for her interview at Orfeo last summer, it had been Dottoressa Meadows who’d picked her up from the station in Pozzo. The Director, coming to collect an interviewee. Cate had been surprised, and impressed, by this at the time: it had seemed to her a good omen. A sign of something democractic in the system, to be chauffeured by the boss.
But Dottoressa Meadows had barely even shaken her hand at the station, and said nothing, or close to it, as they drove, the car sweet with an expensive fragrance Cate remembered from her most sophisticated aunt’s top drawer. Now, of course, Cate knew – everyone knew – that Loni Meadows regularly found reasons to nip into town; that the big offroader smelled of her perfume because it had become to all intents and purposes her personal property. Then, Cate had ended up staring through the car’s high windows at the great sweeping hills, glittering in the heat haze, miles and miles without a single farmstead. On their way through the hills they’d passed at least one car wreck being examined by the police, only the car’s bonnet visible, thrust out from under a dense thicket of myrtle.
Was that why Cate didn’t remember the white truck she’d passed on her way to work, with its lifting gear and the police tape, until much
later? Shock does weird things, they say; when someone dies, you might think about something that happened, oh, years ago, but what happened that very morning is wiped.
‘Her car came off the road, some time last night,’ Luca Gallo had said to their little group in the hushed dining room, his bright face solemn with shock, and still Cate didn’t make the connection; at that moment she’d been thinking, for some reason, that it had happened much further away. Not in the next valley, not barely out of sight of the high grey walls of the castle. ‘She sustained head injuries. With the cold – ’ and he had faltered then, perhaps at the sight of them all staring back at him, perhaps as the reality hit. It had been minus eight, last night; she’d have lain there alone, in the dark and the cold. Dying; dead.
An accident. Did all accidents feel like this? Frightening: the suddenness of it, the randomness? But if it had certainly been sudden, it hadn’t felt quite random to Cate. She was scared.
She might have done anything in the half an hour before she had to be outside Luca’s office; no doubt he intended her to complete whatever tasks Ginevra had for her and then come straight to him. Cate had got so far as retrieving a tray from the library, but when she came out into the wide hall something stopped her. A tiny gust of fragrance, no more than the memory of Loni’s scent. And she set the tray down carefully and before anyone could ask her what she thought she was doing, she walked up the stairs.
Softly she took two steps to the double doors that faced her, the doors that led to the double-fronted
piano nobile
apartment that Loni Meadows had appropriated for herself. One of the doors was open, just a crack.
Cate paused. Around her the castle was silent; around her ankles suddenly the air turned cold, not quite a draught, more like a steady cold breath. She shifted, but it was still there, insistent as a presence. Cate felt the chill up to the back of her neck, raising the hairs; she was jumpy as a cat. No such thing as ghosts.
And before she could allow herself to consider what she was doing, Cate pushed, and the doors swung open.
The room was south facing and flooded with a winter sunlight that was thin but surprisingly strong. Cate had to blink and hold a hand to her eyes. Loni Meadows had not closed her shutters, had she? That was what Cate had seen from her
motorino
; the
Dottoressa
had never got to bed last night. As her eyes adjusted, Cate took in the room; the huge gilded bedhead, the plumped pillows, the smooth velvet counterpane. On it, four or five outfits, as if she’d pulled things out of the wardrobe and thrown them down, choosing what to wear. The disarray of the inlaid dressing table, the clothes dropped carelessly on the velvet bedspread. A splash of green silk on the floor, a pair of boots, one on its side, and the whole room full of her scent, sweet and musky. Cate closed her eyes, breathed it in for a second. It was only last night: I only saw her last night.
Wearing the green silk blouse at the dinner table, velvet jeans, boots. She’d come up here and changed to go out.
On the desk was Loni’s tiny laptop computer, closed. Cate laid a hand on its textured white surface and suddenly she had the strangest, most horrible sensation of not being alone, as though these elements of Loni Meadows scattered around the room had brought something else to life somewhere close, and it was breathing.
Quite still, and holding her own breath – holding that sweet, cloying scent inside her – Cate listened: was the sound human? Was it just the castle’s fabric, the wood and stone settling? Was it wind, on the windows? She lifted her hand from the little computer, and then it came, something weightier and more definite than breath, or even than the movement of clothing: it might be a footstep, a light, soft step, and another one. And then without thinking Cate turned and walked – ran, almost – towards the sound, towards the door to the landing, pulling it back.
There was no one there.
‘Who is it?’ she said, and her voice echoed in the stairwell. Had she heard it, just as she came to the door, had she heard the tiniest sound of a sharp intake of breath from somewhere above her? Or was it her overactive imagination?
Cate took two steps to the wide stairwell across the landing and looked up, into the dark. ‘Who’s there?’ she said again. But there was
only silence, and as suddenly as she had taken fright Cate felt stupid. Hysterical. Overhead she heard the scrape of a chair from one of the rooms belonging to the men. Her imagination.
Downstairs, the library and music room were silent. Her imagination.
When she arrived at the office, Cate could hear the murmur of Luca’s voice inside. He was already on the phone.
It was Luca Gallo who’d interviewed Cate, all that time ago; Dottoressa Meadows had cracked a smile when they’d arrived and Luca had come out, then she’d wafted her hand vaguely in Cate’s direction before hurrying into the gallery, already dialling on her mobile phone.
Luca had been easy; Cate had liked him immediately. Impressed with her travelling, not asking her, as some had – as her mother and stepfather never failed to ask – why didn’t you stick at anything? Why didn’t you want to settle down?
‘New Orleans,’ he’d said, instead, ‘wow. And Spain. And cruise ships? That must have been interesting.’
On the desk between them were fanned brochures giving the history of the Trust, but Cate didn’t need to read them. She had already Googled the set-up before the interview, so she knew the romantic story, of how an Italian migrant called Fabio Orfeo, grandfather of the current incumbent, had made money in America and come back to set up the Trust; of how he had hoped to gain artistic credentials of some sort by establishing an anglophone community in the family’s big white elephant of a crumbling castle in southern Tuscany. For ‘the promotion of inter-disciplinary fraternization’, whatever that meant. To provide space, time and quiet for artists of every colour to discover of their best.
Niccolò Orfeo was the family’s representative now, a handsome man in his late sixties, barrel-chested, powerful and fluently charming, with a fine moustache. He came out from his villa in Florence to give introductory speeches to the guests and to bolster the numbers at dinner from time to time as the course progressed. Sitting next to the
Dottoressa
, he would pass disparaging remarks to Loni Meadows about Ginevra’s cooking, barely bothering to lower his voice.
At her interview the first thing that had struck Cate was that Luca’s little office was packed to bursting; stacks of brochures, a map of the world, computers, printer, coffee-machine, train timetables, a pinboard with photographs of Trust events. It looked like fun: a smiling group ranged on the curved stone seating of an amphitheatre, in a pavilion at the Venice Biennale, in a sculpture park. Only if you looked very hard could you find any evidence of a life outside the Trust: a tiny, passport-sized photo of another smiling, bearded face, half hidden under the computer screen.
Cate now knew this was Luca’s Sicilian boyfriend Salvatore, who came up a couple of times a year. They were strict about partners at the Trust, he’d made that clear.
‘The principle is, a bit like a retreat,’ he’d said earnestly. ‘A monastic existence, if you like, just concentration on the work. And if the guests aren’t allowed their spouses, or their partners – well, it would be a bit much, wouldn’t it? We – the staff – the least we can do is to make it easy for them. So we keep our private lives away from Orfeo too.’
Cate hadn’t really talked about that to Vincenzo, nor about the gentle, persistent pressure for her to live in.
‘Look,’ Luca had said at the interview, ‘it’s not a condition of employment. It’s your choice.’
She had just nodded, and he hadn’t pressed her.
‘You’ll begin by doing a bit of everything,’ he’d said, still cheerful. ‘You’ve got so much experience; I mean, I’m impressed. We’ll start you in the kitchen, with some cleaning work. But with your languages – Spanish and English?’
‘And a bit of German,’ she’d said, shy all of a sudden.
‘And German.’ He’d clapped his hands. ‘The languages will take you further than kitchen work. If you want to go further.’
There was something about the way Luca looked at you, so direct, so open and full of plans, so evangelical. You had to smile back.
‘That would be great,’ she’d said, and he’d gone on.
‘I’m thinking of – well, we could call it liaison, with the guests.
There are interns,’ and despite himself Luca’s mouth had turned down as he’d pronounced the word, ‘they come from colleges in America, but they’re young. They have – unreasonable expectations – they get homesick, they’re not in it for the long term.’
That had certainly been true. Ten days ago the latest intern, Beth, the third since Cate’s arrival six months earlier, had left. The one thing the three young American women had had in common was their apparent dislike of more or less everything Italian, and their longing to be back in the land of the free. Beth had seemed to grow smaller the longer she stayed, terrified as she was of everything: the isolation, the climate, the food, the adders and wild boar, and Mauro’s temper.
‘Well,’ he’d finished abruptly, the mention of interns perhaps a source of disappointment to him. ‘As I say. We’ll see how things go.’
‘Yes,’ she’d said, and in that moment she’d been sure that she hadn’t got the job.
Mauro had given her a lift back to the station, then a short hop on a dusty
regionale
to Arezzo, and her stepfather had collected her. By the time she’d got home, Luca had already called to offer her the position, and Cate had found herself wondering why.
That hot summer evening seemed a long time ago now, as she stood once again outside Luca’s office, waiting like a child to see the headmaster.
‘Caterina,’ he said. ‘Cate, thank you.’ He pulled out a chair for her. He sat, elbows on his desk, and put his close-cropped head in his hands.
‘Caterina. Listen. I need your help, now.’ He spoke quietly, but she knew this would not be a request, not really. It would be an instruction.
‘My help?’
He held her gaze. ‘There are – there is so much to do in the aftermath of – an event like this, I am sure you understand.’ He passed a hand anxiously over his head again, and his face was pale. ‘There is – everything. An accident and – ’ he mimed an explosion with his big hands. ‘Suddenly everything is unknown.’ He tried to smile. ‘In the short term, there are people I need to contact.’
‘Of course.’ Did she have family? Did she have parents? It was hard to imagine.
‘And then there is – there are the guests. They must be protected – they must be reassured.’
‘Yes,’ said Cate.
‘And without an intern – ’
Cate nodded, careful not to show what she was feeling. Exasperation with Beth for leaving, although perhaps it was just as well. She’d tried to turn to Loni Meadows as a mother figure, and was met with short shrift; even Cate had seen that Loni didn’t want to be anyone’s mother, with her bright vivacity, her tense, birdlike frame always poised for flight and her high-breasted figure, too youthful for her age. Which was? Fifty some; Cate would have guessed fifty-three. With a small shock she realized all over again that the woman was dead.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a nightmare for you, I can see that.’
‘Yes,’ said Luca, his voice firming. ‘Well, the thing is, I’d like to offer you a kind of promotion – provisional, of course, a step up, on a trial basis. You can go on helping Ginevra a bit too, but I’d like you to – um, shift your focus, upstairs. While we wait for another intern,’ he stopped, his faced clouded, ‘and of course the appointment of a new Director, well. I’m going to need all the help I can get.’
Cate gazed at him, trying not to show her very mixed feelings: doubly an outsider in the kitchen, with this promotion. ‘Wow,’ was all she could risk saying. Then, realizing it wasn’t enough, ‘You’re very kind.’ And took a deep breath. ‘I’d be honoured.’