Read Online Fault Line - Retail by Robert Goddard - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Goddard
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cloud of perfume and a shimmer of midnight blue. Gowned, stoled and multiply pearled, she had the full voice and stage bearing of the opera-singer she’d once been. She also had instantly infectious jollity, pinching Francis’s cheek, triple-kissing Vivien and clasping my hand while gazing at me with big, brown, spikily lashed eyes. Her hair was dark and glossy, drawn back to show off the fine bone structure of her face. She was no longer young, but she still had glamour as well as charm.
I wasn’t to be spared an account of myself, but I kept it as brief – and factual – as possible. Vivien and I had met through Oliver (true) and hadn’t known each other long (also true). Vivien intervened deftly to insist Luisa describe to me the setting of their villa on Capri.
But that proved difficult. ‘You have to see it to believe how heavenly it is,’ Luisa explained. ‘Have you ever been to Capri, Jonathan?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, but you will, now you and Vivien are friends. And then … you will understand.’
Capri with Vivien: a dream of everything that was delicious and unattainable. But it wasn’t unattainable. And I willed myself to believe it could actually happen.
Meanwhile, there were the hazards of fine dining to be braved. I was more of a stranger to four-star hotel restaurants than I wanted Vivien to realize, but dinner passed without my using the wrong cutlery or drinking too quickly. I managed to make some contributions to the conversation that weren’t completely stupid. And I even caught Vivien smiling at me on several occasions in a way that seemed, well, affectionate.
Francis said nothing directly about the travails of Wren & Co. and remained tight-lipped when Luisa referred to ‘Thursday’s meeting’. He was happier bemoaning the state of his homeland under a Labour government and took it in good part when Vivien said he sounded like a reactionary old colonel, pointing out that he really was an old colonel and was entitled to be reactionary. Altogether, he wasn’t anything like as crusty as he looked.
When I asked him why he’d settled in Italy, he explained he’d served there during the war with the Eighth Army (‘all the way from Sicily to Venice’) and had fallen in love with the country even while fighting in it. Returning to work at Wren & Co. after the war was ‘just one god-awful anticlimax’ and after a few years he ‘simply couldn’t stick it any longer’. It was easy to believe. As for Luisa, ‘meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me’. And that too was easy to believe. Unless you noticed, as I felt I did, the tightness of Luisa’s smile as she listened to him. Everything was superficially right about this adoring couple. Yet something was also subtly wrong.
The story of their first meeting, which it was clear Francis had told many times before, was a case in point. They’d found themselves sharing a carriage on a train from Rome to Naples one warm spring afternoon in 1949. This was a few weeks after Francis’s departure from St Austell. He was wandering down through Italy at a leisurely pace, hoping some opportunity with a salary attached would present itself before his money ran out. ‘It was just a few days after you were born, my dear,’ he said to Vivien. ‘I had a telegram from your grandfather in my pocket informing me of the happy event.’ His greatest asset, he explained, was his utter ignorance of opera. ‘I had no idea who Luisa was.’ And that, after many a tedious encounter with fans and fortune-hunters, was a huge relief to her. Before the end of the journey, she’d offered him free bed and board in her villa on Capri in return for his services as handyman-cum-chauffeur. ‘I suppose you could say nothing’s changed since.’
‘Nothing – and everything,’ Luisa contributed on cue, before Francis eased into an account of how the adoring effusions of the taxi driver in Naples who took them from the station to the Capri ferry
I wasn’t to be spared an account of myself, but I kept it as brief – and factual – as possible. Vivien and I had met through Oliver (true) and hadn’t known each other long (also true). Vivien intervened deftly to insist Luisa describe to me the setting of their villa on Capri.
But that proved difficult. ‘You have to see it to believe how heavenly it is,’ Luisa explained. ‘Have you ever been to Capri, Jonathan?’ I shook my head. ‘Ah, but you will, now you and Vivien are friends. And then … you will understand.’
Capri with Vivien: a dream of everything that was delicious and unattainable. But it wasn’t unattainable. And I willed myself to believe it could actually happen.
Meanwhile, there were the hazards of fine dining to be braved. I was more of a stranger to four-star hotel restaurants than I wanted Vivien to realize, but dinner passed without my using the wrong cutlery or drinking too quickly. I managed to make some contributions to the conversation that weren’t completely stupid. And I even caught Vivien smiling at me on several occasions in a way that seemed, well, affectionate.
Francis said nothing directly about the travails of Wren & Co. and remained tight-lipped when Luisa referred to ‘Thursday’s meeting’. He was happier bemoaning the state of his homeland under a Labour government and took it in good part when Vivien said he sounded like a reactionary old colonel, pointing out that he really was an old colonel and was entitled to be reactionary. Altogether, he wasn’t anything like as crusty as he looked.
When I asked him why he’d settled in Italy, he explained he’d served there during the war with the Eighth Army (‘all the way from Sicily to Venice’) and had fallen in love with the country even while fighting in it. Returning to work at Wren & Co. after the war was ‘just one god-awful anticlimax’ and after a few years he ‘simply couldn’t stick it any longer’. It was easy to believe. As for Luisa, ‘meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me’. And that too was easy to believe. Unless you noticed, as I felt I did, the tightness of Luisa’s smile as she listened to him. Everything was superficially right about this adoring couple. Yet something was also subtly wrong.
The story of their first meeting, which it was clear Francis had told many times before, was a case in point. They’d found themselves sharing a carriage on a train from Rome to Naples one warm spring afternoon in 1949. This was a few weeks after Francis’s departure from St Austell. He was wandering down through Italy at a leisurely pace, hoping some opportunity with a salary attached would present itself before his money ran out. ‘It was just a few days after you were born, my dear,’ he said to Vivien. ‘I had a telegram from your grandfather in my pocket informing me of the happy event.’ His greatest asset, he explained, was his utter ignorance of opera. ‘I had no idea who Luisa was.’ And that, after many a tedious encounter with fans and fortune-hunters, was a huge relief to her. Before the end of the journey, she’d offered him free bed and board in her villa on Capri in return for his services as handyman-cum-chauffeur. ‘I suppose you could say nothing’s changed since.’
‘Nothing – and everything,’ Luisa contributed on cue, before Francis eased into an account of how the adoring effusions of the taxi driver in Naples who took them from the station to the Capri ferry
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