‘You look done in, Pip,’ says Clare. ‘Why not turn in? I shan’t be far behind you.’ She guesses he will like the time alone, to read and explore his room, and she sees she’s right in his relieved expression.
‘Perhaps you’re right, Clare,’ he says. ‘If you’ll excuse me, Mr Cardetta? Father?’
‘By all means, Philip.’ Leandro nods, gives a benevolent smile. ‘Rest well. Tomorrow, we will talk motor cars, you and I – I have something to show you that I think you’ll like.’
Marcie leads Clare away, passing from room to room, flicking the light switches on as she goes, leaving them for the servants to switch off behind them. The leather soles of her sandals make almost no sound as she walks; her narrow figure is sinuous beneath her clothes. They pass through a library and some stern, masculine rooms that have huge desks and severe-looking chairs, through a cavernous sitting room more lavishly done, and then another, and then a dining room with a table in the middle that could comfortably seat twenty-four diners, and a ceiling festooned with painted plasterwork. The floors are of polished stone or colourful, intricate tiles; the windows all have heavy shutters, and their voluminous curtains are held back by twisted silk ropes. It is all grand, with a kind of solid splendour, but Clare finds it oppressive, stagnant, as though it froze in time fifty years earlier. She begins to imagine the air creaking as they push through it. The place smells of stone and parched wood, and the prickle of dusty damasks.
Marcie turns to face Clare as they reach the foot of a marble stair.
‘Well, what do you think?’ she says. Her accent runs the words together: whaddyathink?
‘I think it’s very lovely,’ says Clare, after a fractional pause. Marcie smiles delightedly.
‘Oh, you Brits are always so damned polite! How could anyone not love you? It’s a museum, I know it is; a gentleman’s club from eighty years ago. Deny it – I dare you!’
‘Well… some of the decorations are perhaps a little dated.’
‘Ain’t that the truth. I’m working on him, honey, I’m working on him. My Leandro isn’t all the way used to the idea of a woman’s touch yet, but I’ll get him there, you’ll see.’
‘Now is the perfect time, surely? If Boyd’s here to redesign the façade, why not update the interior at the same time?’
‘That’s my exact argument, Clare. My exact argument. Can I say something rather personal?’ The question comes so suddenly that Clare blinks. In the half shadow of the staircase it’s hard to read Marcie’s expression. She’s smiling, but then, she’s always smiling.
‘Of course,’ says Clare. She hopes the question is not about Boyd. What has he said?
‘Well, it just seems to me that you can’t even be thirty yet. I can’t figure that you’re that charming boy’s real mother?’ Clare’s heart thuds in relief. She exhales slowly.
‘I’ll be thirty at my next birthday, and you’re right. Pip’s mother was Boyd’s first wife, Emma. She was an American – a New Yorker, like you. She died when he was four years old.’
‘Oh that poor child. And poor Emma, knowing she had to leave her tiny boy behind! But lucky him to have such a thoroughly lovely and unwicked stepmother.’
‘We’re very close. I was only nineteen when I married Boyd…’ Clare trails off, unsure what she intended to say. Marcie’s eyes are alight, her curiosity plain, and Clare wonders how long she has been alone in this house, and how lonely she has been. ‘Well. I suppose I’ve been more like a big sister to him than a mother. He remembers Emma, of course.’
‘How did she die?’
Clare hesitates before answering. Soon after she met Boyd she asked her parents the same question, since they had mutual friends and a closer acquaintance with him then. She was told Emma had died in childbirth, while they were living in New York; that Boyd’s grief had been all-consuming, and she should avoid all mention of it. She’d accepted this unquestioningly, until a few months after her wedding when she’d come to know Pip a little better, and discovered that he had memories of his mother. Then her curiosity had been uncontrollable. It would have been too cruel to ask Pip, still a small boy, the true cause of her death so in the end, on an evening when Boyd was calm and happy, Clare gathered her courage and asked him. And he’d looked at her with such profound shock it was as though she hadn’t even been supposed to know Emma’s name, or that she had existed, let alone shown any interest in her. His pained expression had chilled her; it made her regret her words at once. She tried to take his hands and apologise but he disengaged her, stood and went to the door as if he would leave without answering. But then he paused, not looking at her.
‘It was a… a sudden fever. An infection. Sudden and catastrophic.’ He swallowed; his cheeks were pale and drawn. ‘I do not wish to speak of it. Please don’t mention it again.’ And that night in bed he hadn’t touched her, not even with the sleeping length of his limbs, and Clare had cursed her own insensitivity, and vowed to do as he bid.
Shaking off the memory of that night of lonely self-recrimination, Clare uses Boyd’s exact words to answer Marcie.
‘It… was a sudden fever. Boyd has never been able to talk about it to me; not properly. It’s too painful for him.’
‘Poor man, I’ll bet it is. Men are so less well equipped to deal with things like that, don’t you think? They have to be strong, and they’re not allowed to cry, or seek comfort in friends, so they just bottle it all up and let it fester. My Leandro has things he won’t talk about – scars he won’t show me. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m an actress, but I just think let it out, you know? Let it out. Look at it in the light of day, and maybe it won’t seem so bad. But he won’t, of course. That man is a damned fortress when he wants to be.’ She runs out of breath, takes a gasp as if to go on, but doesn’t. She smiles instead. ‘Well, I suppose it’s up to us to just be there if they ever do want to talk about it.’
‘Yes. But I don’t think Boyd ever will. Not about Emma. He… he loved her very, very much, I think. Sometimes I think he’s afraid to tell me about her, because he doesn’t want me to be jealous.’
‘And are you? I would be – I am most definitely the jealous type. I had it easy, since Leandro’s first and second wives created such a stink when he divorced them that he can’t stand either one of them now. They both hate me, of course; and they have three sons between them who are none too keen either. Nothing much I can do about that. But the ghost of a beloved first wife – ugh! Who could compete?’
They turn and start up the stairs together, shoulder to shoulder, one slow step at a time, and Clare doesn’t answer straight away. She thinks of the time she found Boyd in his dressing room, holding a pair of ladies’ silk gloves that were not hers and running his thumbs over the fabric with a slow, hard intensity. He didn’t notice her standing there, and in that moment Clare saw an expression of such acute anguish on his face that she hardly recognised him. The gloves trembled in his hands, and when he spotted her he dropped them as if they’d burnt him and his face filled up with blood in such a rush that a vein bulged out at each temple. As if she’d caught him in bed with another woman; but in fact that came later. She said It’s all right; but he didn’t manage to reply.
‘I’ve made a point of never to try to compete. Love isn’t a finite resource, after all. He can love me as well as still loving her,’ she says now, in a low voice.
‘What a wise and wonderful thing to say! You’re far more of a grown-up than I am, Clare,’ says Marcie. Clare says nothing, not sure that Marcie means this as a compliment. ‘And you married him at nineteen? Goodness, you were just a girl!’