The Continuity Girl (28 page)

She looked at Barnaby with his sandbox hair and his moth-eaten sweater (undoubtedly his father’s) and she thought that maybe
life with him would not be all that bad. And then for the squillionth time since she’d arrived in London, Meredith wished
there was a book of rules on what to do depending on how you felt and where you were. She wished she could look up “Correct
response to proposal from sweet but bumbling alcoholic falconers” on an index and follow the directions there.

As it was, she was on her own.

There were no seats on the train at Pisa, so Meredith sat on her suitcase in the aisle. Shortly after the train began jerking
toward Florence, a man in a fitted blue uniform approached and said something disapproving in Italian. He pointed to the vestibule
between the cars. She over-pronounced an apology and began to move, pulling her suitcase through the aisle behind her. It
ricocheted off the seats on either side in a series of humiliating thuds. The other passengers yanked away their arms and
legs as she passed, making their resentment apparent. There was no air-conditioning on the train, and people seemed to be
allowed to smoke wherever they liked. Meredith could feel pinpricks of sweat beneath her sweater. She wondered if she smelled
bad.

The folding jump seats were taken, so she pulled her suitcase to the center of the space and sat down on top of it. Several
men were standing around, all of them smoking or talking into cell phones or both. They looked at her through mirrored lenses.
She could feel their eyes examining each breast and buttock with the critical judgment of a greengrocer. Meredith scrunched
her knees to her chest and prayed silently that her moisturizer wouldn’t explode inside her bag and stain all her clothes.
She hardly had anything to wear as it was.

In a way, the invitation couldn’t have come at a better time. There had been no question of her
not
going. Passing up the
chance to attend a dinner at Osmond Crouch’s villa was unthinkable. “Like a nun bailing on an audience with the Pope,” her
mother had said when she expressed her ambivalence about the prospect of traveling to Italy for a dinner party. The mysterious
thing was why he had asked her in the first place. The invitation, Irma said, had been delivered by a uniformed man in a chauffeur-driven
car. It came in an oversize envelope made of thick creamy paper that smelled as crisp and metallic as money and was sealed
with a blob of red wax and stamped with the image of two stags, their antlers interlocked.
Miss Meredith Moore,
it read on
the outside in bold, blue fountain pen. Inside was printed a date, time and address and nothing more.
THE 21ST OF JUNE AT 19:00 HRS. VOGRIE, FIESOLE
. And then in the same fountain pen at the bottom, the words,
Meredith, Do come.
Followed by an illegible squiggle—the signature
of a person who spent a lot of time signing things. If it hadn’t been for her mother’s interpreting powers, Meredith wouldn’t
have had a clue what the invitation was for.

She had to fold the invitation twice to fit it in her handbag.

Meredith was nervous, but Mish said she had a professional obligation to attend. Not that Meredith was actually a professional
anything anymore. As a freelancer she’d long ago grown used to never knowing where her next paycheck might come from. “Who
knows?” she used to laugh. “I may never work again!” But the thought of unemployment was no longer a dark joke. After walking
off one set and being fired from another, she might well never work again. She cursed herself for ever having tempted fate
out loud. Meredith had once read a statistic that after two months of unemployment a person’s chances of reentering the workforce
within the next two years dropped dramatically, something like 60 percent. It stuck in her head in the same way all those
terrifying fertility statistics about your ovaries drying up after the age of thirty-five did. She imagined herself in half
a decade—living alone in a basement rental unit in a dilapidated government-subsidized high-rise on the outskirts of some
anonymous midsize city. She would have broken down from the loneliness and adopted a cat. Probably two or three. They would
have grown very fat and sad sitting around her apartment all day watching her watch the DVD box set of Audrey Hepburn films.
She would have grown fat by then too. Fat, alone, infertile and unemployed.
God.

The train halted, pitching her face-forward into the crotch of the man standing in front of her. Meredith righted herself
and rubbed her face hard, wishing she was dead. But the man did not seem embarrassed in the slightest. Nor did he offer to
help her up or even pause in the point he was explaining into his cell phone. He looked down at his trousers and smoothed
away the crease beside his zipper made by Meredith’s nose.

The men here looked different to her. They were extra-smooth, as if their skin had been blended into a sweet paste before
being applied to their bodies. Their eyes were thick-lashed like women’s and even indoors they hid under sunglasses. She wondered
what it would be like to have an Italian baby. She would definitely name it something swishy like Libero or Prudenzia. They
would live together in a crumbly old farmhouse in an olive grove. Meredith tried to imagine her life with her Italian baby.
Making pesto for lunch with a mortar and pestle. Doing her laundry by hand in the local stream and hanging it to dry outdoors.
The fantasy went on until Meredith realized she had no idea what an olive tree looked like or if they even grew in this part
of Italy. And the reality of doing laundry in a stream was probably a lot less lovely than the oil painting in her mind.

The train moved reluctantly toward Florence, jerking to a stop in every village along the way and pausing for several inexplicable
siestas in between. The machinery felt sluggish, but inside it Meredith was wide awake. She had slept on the flight from London
to Pisa and the nap had left her hyper-alert. Early summer fields swooshed by in an unending pan. Erratic borders were staked
with cypress trees. A farmer stood outside a stone shed holding a rope tied to a cow. As the train passed he lifted his arm
to touch his hat—he was gone before Meredith could see whether or not it came off in his hand.

The station in Florence was crammed with people pushing in different directions. It smelled like popcorn and damp cement.

She walked outside and stood in line for a taxi. The sun was blazing and the grass on the front lawn was bleached brown in
spite of it being only the end of June. June twenty-first, to be exact. Meredith remembered the date because the dinner party
she was going to was an annual event, held each year on the same date in honor of the summer solstice. Her mother had told
her this.

Meredith wondered, not for the first time, how it was that Irma seemed to know so much about Osmond Crouch. She had wanted
to ask but did not, out of a long-held habit of not asking her mother for more information than was absolutely necessary.
Irma’s history was a remote island Meredith had no inclination to visit. The wild travels and arcane accomplishments, her
various affairs and endless vague connections to people filled Meredith with a numbing sort of anticuriosity. She didn’t know
and didn’t ask. When her mother offered up something, Meredith ingested the information with a salt mine of skepticism.

A dusty Volkswagen pulled up in front of the line. The driver, a compact man in pressed denim and a fisherman’s vest, jumped
out and hoisted her bag into the trunk without a word and then opened the back door and waved her in with a flicking motion
of his hand. Meredith looked for a seat belt in the upholstery cracks but couldn’t find one. Instead of attempting an exchange
in her nonexistent Italian she pulled the invitation out of her handbag and handed it to the driver, pointing to the location.
Vogrie, Fiesole.
The man nodded and turned back to look at her more closely this time. Meredith noticed he was very young.

“Sì, sì, signorina,”
he said.
“Una bella villa.”
He winked.
“Andiamo!”

Less than an hour later, having been shown to her room by a rather menacing old butler in uniform, Meredith lay stiffly on
a single bed attempting to sleep. It was hopeless. She opened her eyes and looked about, reflecting for a moment on the many
different rooms she had slept in during the past couple of months. These were the sort of quarters that would have thrilled
her as a girl. A turret. Like the one Rapunzel got locked up in. The walls were made of yellow stones that looked about a
thousand years old, and there were tiny rectangular windows facing north, south, east and west, out of which you could see
all the surrounding countryside, the village of Fiesole and all the way to the Duomo in the city center.

Despite the heat outside, the room was cool and damp. The floor was made of flagstones, and there was nothing on the walls.
On her bedside table was a candle in a simple holder for carrying, so that she could see her way down to the bathroom in the
night. The room was dim, unwired and without plumbing, and the only decoration in sight was a small, cheap-looking brass vase
with three wilted sunflowers. Even castles, Meredith realized, did not always live up to their glamorous reputation.

She slid into something close to sleep. After some minutes or hours (she could not be sure which) there was a knock on the
door. A flat, accented female voice informed her that cocktails would be served in the library at seven. The messenger did
not wait for confirmation but immediately retreated down the stairs with a series of shuffling footsteps. Meredith checked
her wrist and realized she had forgotten her watch at her mother’s flat. She hated to be without a watch and had worn one
day and night from the time she was a small child.

There was nothing to do, she supposed, but get up and dress for dinner. She wondered how large the party would be and whether
all the guests would be staying overnight or returning to wherever it was they lived. She had no idea what to expect.

She took a pink cotton washcloth out of her terry-cloth bath bag and cleaned her face and armpits. She brushed her teeth and
hair and applied fresh deodorant and moisturizer and a bit of mascara. Meredith did not usually wear much makeup, but she
had noticed on the train that Italian women seemed much more (as her mother might say) “put together” than their British or
North American counterparts. With this in mind she took the time to flat-iron her hair, and even applied a smidge of lipstick.
After nearly fifteen minutes of frozen deliberation she pulled on a black sleeveless sheath dress and a pair of matching flats.

She climbed down the turret stairs slowly, running her fingers along the stone, feeling its natural coolness rising to meet
her skin. It was terribly dark. When she got to the bottom, she stood stock-still, holding the wall, waiting for her eyes
to adjust. She heard footsteps, and the next moment she felt something warm on her throat. A hand. She jumped back against
the wall with a squawk.

“Terribly sorry!” said an English voice. “Completely inexcusable. It’s just my candle...It...It...” the voice stuttered a
bit and then trailed off. A sizzle of sulfur was followed by an orangey glow. Within it was a man’s face—bespectacled, indeterminately
middle-aged, with a bald head as perfectly round and luminous as a cultured pearl. He squinted at Meredith and pushed his
wire frames up his nose with his middle finger.

Meredith extended her hand. The man stared at it as though she were offering him something to eat he wasn’t quite sure of.
Then he handed her the candle. “Thank you for inviting me,” she said.

He moved in for a handshake and then quickly reconsidered and slapped himself hard on the top of the skull.

“Good God, no.” He lowered his voice to a staticky hiss. “Bless you. What a little flatterer you are. I’m positively buttered.
But no. You’re wrong. I’m not
him.
We won’t see
him
until later on. After the first round of cocktails, anyway. He likes to
make
entrances,
you know.”

“Who?” Meredith was not going to risk making another assumption. “Well,
obviously,
” he said, snorting and rubbing his nose
with both hands in a way that reminded Meredith of a large gerbil. “The dishonourable Master Crouch. Tony Wickenhouse Shaftesbury.”
He pumped Meredith’s hand. “All-purpose hack. You’ve probably seen my byline. It’s an eyeful. So you can just call me Tony
Two Names if you like. I’m afraid everybody does. Who can blame them really? Mmm?”

“Meredith Moore.”

He snorted once more and the candle went out. Once again the corridor was black as a mine shaft.

“Oh bugger.” He finally took Meredith’s hand, the one without the candle in it. “Come along. I’ll take you to the library
and then you can tell me your whole story. I’m certain you have one or you wouldn’t be here.”

The library was a cavern with sky-high ceilings and leather-bound volumes stacked all the way up the walls. A wooden ladder
on casters rolled along a track attached to the top of the shelves. In the center of the space hung a wrought-iron fixture
in the shape of a triple-masted tall ship in full sail. It swung gently from side to side, blazing with candles. Somewhere
in the room a sad man gasped a ballad through tar-clogged lungs—Tom Waits? Meredith glanced around but could not detect a
piece of stereo equipment anywhere.

Tony Two Names smiled, raised his hand and waved at two other male guests standing by the fire at the other end of the room.
The hearth was so large the mantel seemed to be resting on their heads.

“Tell me then, Meredith, how is it that you know our host?”

“I don’t really.”

“Ooh.” Tony adjusted his glasses by wrinkling his nose and opening his eyes wide in disingenuous alarm. “Isn’t that curious.
So what are
you
famous for?”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to pretend to be shy with me. I mean, what is it you’ve done?”