LILLIAN AND THE ITALIANS.8

Even in the shade of the pine tree it was becoming insufferably hot with the sun now directly overhead. There was not the faintest whisper of a breeze. Lillian rose and headed back towards the landing stage.

Bitterness overwhelmed her as she walked through the park. All she had to show for thirty years of marriage, fifty years of living, was a daughter and grandchildren from whom she was separated by more than mere distance, and a son who hadn’t trusted her with the truth about his life and who was in any case too busy with his own sordid pursuits to make time for her.

She felt not so much bereaved as bereft.

On the vaporetto, oblivious once more to the splendours of the Grand Canal, she decided she would eat her lunch at the hotel, have a siesta and then go to the railway station and enquire about tomorrow’s trains. She would go back to Calais, to Hastings, to her life of golf and bridge, jumble sales and the Sadlers. There was no point in going on with this pursuit of Andrew.

Her son was indeed - as she’d admitted to Bob Sadler -a ‘rolling stone’, rolling wherever impulse or his depraved appetites took him, rolling (his grandmother would have been certain of this) down the road to Hell.

Lillian could not bring herself to wish her son ‘bon voyage’ along this road he’d chosen to take, but she forced herself to accept that there was - and perhaps had never been - anything that she could do to divert him from it.

* * *

The telephone woke her from an afternoon nap that had turned into four hours of deep sleep: the enervating heat and yesterday’s disturbing revelations were clearly taking a toll.

It was Carlo, calling from Ravenna. He’d had to return there today; the last client was pressing for the work to be finished.

‘I’ve just spoken to Fausto again, the Prince’s other son,' he announced. ‘We’ve almost found his brother and Andrew.’

‘What do you mean: “almost”?’

‘They’ve been on an island called Giglio since Tuesday, off the coast of Tuscany. They were seen in a restaurant with a French girl last night and the night before, but today they seem to have gone off somewhere. The yacht’s still there, but they’re not.’

‘Then where on earth are they?’

‘Fausto’s contact says the French girl’s yacht left this morning and hasn’t come back yet. It’s a bigger boat than Prince Massimo’s, with a captain and crew. Andrew and Fabrizio must have gone with them. There are some interesting places to see around there: Montecristo, for instance, which inspired the book by Dumas. Or they might have gone to the mainland. I’m sure they’ll turn up, maybe even this evening. Fausto’s on his way there to meet them.’

Despite a lifetime spent beside the sea Lillian had always felt nervous about boats. Her head swam at the prospect of some calamity taking Andrew from her.

‘The other news,’ Carlo continued, ‘is that Fausto has been in touch with his father in Las Vegas and the Prince has instructed him to invite you to their villa in Amalfi. Fausto’s going to bring his brother and Andrew there once he catches up with them. I’ve got the train times for tomorrow. You’ll have to change in Rome, and one of the Prince’s men will meet you in Naples.’

‘Actually,’ Lillian blurted, ‘I thought I’d go back to England tomorrow.’

‘Oh, but you can’t give up now - when you’ve nearly caught up with him. Besides, I’ve got no way of contacting Fausto until he calls me again from Giglio or from Amalfi. Andrew will know you’re here. He’ll be expecting you.’

‘Naples now,’ Lillian said with no enthusiasm.

‘Yes, you’re certainly seeing Italy!’ Carlo chuckled. ‘Fausto tells me his brother and Andrew were at the Amalfi house last weekend. They’re working their way northwards. Fabrizio has to go back to school in Siena next month.’

‘And will Andrew come back here then, do you suppose?’

‘Maybe. But not for long. I think he’s had enough of Venice. He’s completely lost interest in interior design, and he even stopped seeing his posh friends in the city when he moved to Sottomarina at the beginning of the year. But - he didn’t find what he was looking for there either.’

‘What is he looking for?’

‘I’m honestly not sure. I doubt if he knows himself. Lately he’s been very unsettled, wanting change all the time: new places, new faces. Fabrizio’s a charming boy, quite captivating in his way, but really he’s no more than what the Americans call the “flavour of the month”. It’ll be a toss-up as to who gets bored first, Andrew or Fabrizio.’

Lillian asked the question that had festered in her mind in the park:

‘Is there a reason for this, for him being – like this?’ She heard the snap of his cigarette lighter before he answered.

‘There are all sorts of theories about homosexuality. A lot of boys give it a try during their teens or later. Some seem to grow out of it, some grow into it.’

‘I see,’ said Lillian, though she didn’t. ‘So where do you think Andrew will go when this – Prince’s son goes back to university?’

‘I wish I knew. I doubt if Andrew even knows himself. He might go back to Hastings with you!’

She smiled sadly. ‘It’s sweet of you to say so, but I’m afraid Hastings doesn’t have anything to offer a person of Andrew’s – tastes.’

He caught her momentary hesitation. ‘Mrs Rutherford, I’m not sure that I’ve done the right thing in telling you all this about him.’

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m glad you’ve told me. It makes a lot of things clearer, things I’ve never been able to understand. Perhaps, in a way, I have always known, but I simply didn’t have the experience to put a name to it.’ She paused. ‘I can’t think why he didn’t tell me himself, years ago. It makes such a mockery of our relationship, him keeping something this important from me.’

‘He would have liked to tell you, he said so to me, but he wasn’t sure how you would cope with knowing and he was even more afraid of his father’s reaction.’

‘Oh well –’ she laughed grimly - `I wouldn’t have dared tell George! But I’m sure I could have accepted it, given a bit of time. I’m sure I will accept it now – in time. He’s my son, I’ll always love him whatever he does - whatever he is.’

Embarrassed by this unaccustomed articulation of her deepest feelings, she fell silent.

Carlo exhaled audibly. ‘Adriana sends you her best wishes and safe journey, et cetera,’ he said. ‘Have you got a pen and paper to hand? I’ll give you the train times.’

Lillian sighed silently. Andrew had disappeared off the face off the earth, and her quest was turning into an odyssey, acquiring a momentum of its own, sweeping her along with it. But it was her own fault, for coming here and setting it in motion.

* * *
Sleepless in the stifling night air, she got out of bed and opened the window. She didn’t look at her watch, but it must be close to midnight. She’d bought mosquito-repellent cream at a pharmacy and now she rubbed it into her hands and face before getting back under the single sheet.

She still couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the heat or the mosquitoes or even the intermittent nocturnal voices and chugging engines from the Grand Canal. It was Andrew. Far from looking forward to the reunion in Amalfi, she was almost dreading it. It would not be her son she was meeting, only a stranger who looked like her son.

* * *

ISLAND OF GIGLIO

The lighthouse beam flared briefly at the window of the darkened room in which Fausto Monfalcone sat drumming his fingers on a cluttered desk top. After a breakneck drive from Siena to the coast and the 55-minute crossing to Giglio during which he paced the deck of the ferry, he'd spent the afternoon cross-examining fishermen and other port users who had reported sightings of Fabrizio and Andrew on or off the island. Now, after midnight, he sat impatiently in the small office which the harbourmaster had put at his disposal. Through a thin partition wall came the voice of the ship-to-shore operator, paid to stay on after the end of his shift, calling ports and marinas in Corsica, Sardinia and along the French and Italian mainland in an attempt to find the missing yacht.

Fausto had communicated to his father in Las Vegas, though not to Carlo Marini in Ravenna, the fact that much of what he'd learned was disturbing. The owner of a yacht which had been berthed next to the French boat on Thursday, kept awake by his neighbours' orgiastic sexual activity, had overheard Fabrizio and his English companion splashing about in some moonlight bathing with the French girl. The proprietress of a shop that hired out snorkelling equipment had opened her bedroom window after midnight to call her cat in and heard young male and female voices shouting on board one of the yachts.

Of the two fishing-boats that had seen the French yacht at sea, the second had made the more alarming report. Through binoculars one crew member had observed the yacht rendezvous with a fast motorboat out beyond Montecristo; the French girl and her mother had descended a ladder onto the smaller boat, leaving a man and a boy who matched the description of Andrew and Fabrizio on deck with the crew, which was augmented by two men from the second boat before both vessels set off at different speeds on a heading that suggested Corsica as their destination.

Fausto prayed that his brother had not been taken to Corsica. Anything involving Corsica spelled trouble. In Italy and its islands the Monfalcone name caused doors to open; in Corsica it would cause them to shut.

‘Signore, signore –’

The radio operator burst into the darkened room without knocking. He was more than twice Fausto's age but like the harbourmaster and the restaurant manager who was the Monfalcone contact on the island he addressed the son of Prince Massimo as ‘sir’. Fausto pressed the switch on a desk lamp and blinked in the sudden glare.

‘A boat is coming - fishermen - Sardinians - they have caught two bodies in their nets - a man and a boy –’

The difficulty of understanding the radio operator's dialect, the dialect of this little archipelago, was compounded by his agitation. No one liked to be the bearer of bad tidings, especially to the son of Massimo Monfalcone.

‘Where are they?’

‘Half an hour out, signore.’

Fausto picked up his sweater and went outside, the other man following. They walked onto the nearest jetty. Pools of lamplight illuminated stanchions, coils of rope, torn nets, empty lobster pots, a pile of old car tyres. There were lighthouses at the head of both jetties, but only one whose lamp revolved. The black night sea hissed through the narrow opening and slapped against the harbour walls. A light breeze rattled the ropes on the masts of the pleasure craft moored in the small harbour, of which the Monfalcone cabin cruiser was now the largest.

The radio operator, trembling from more than the night chill on his tee-shirted torso, proposed going to wake the harbourmaster and the local police sergeant, but Fausto vetoed this with a gesture. He didn't want a crowd when the fishing boat came in. He would see what he had to see and then he would do what had to be done.

Like any of these functionaries who jumped at the mere mention of the name of Massimo Monfalcone, Fausto was in awe of his father. He knew the power of his father's rage and also the extent of his father's grief. At eighteen Fausto had already earned his father's admiration and respect, but he was aware that his younger brother, because of his extraordinary resemblance to their mother, had the bigger share of their father's love. He dreaded the phone call he would have to make after he saw what was on the fishing boat.

It was nearer an hour, a long hour, before the chug of a distant engine preceded the first glimpse, in the sweep of the lighthouse beam, of the fishing boat riding on flashes of phosphorescence in the gentle swell. As it surged through the harbour mouth Fausto stood like a soldier at attention, hands at his sides, a short stocky figure in jeans and a cable-knit sweater, his face set, his expression unreadable.

The radio operator ran to catch a line thrown by one of the fishermen as the boat ap-proached the jetty. There were two more men on deck and a fourth in the small wheelhouse. Masses of live fish, mostly sardines and anchovies, threshed in an assortment of vats and trays on the deck. Near the wheelhouse two shapes lay under a tarpaulin.

One of the crewmen offered Fausto a hand, but he ignored it and jumped nimbly onto the deck, striding directly to the tarpaulin which he quickly pulled back.

They lay on their backs, arms at their sides, the older man's right hand accidentally over-lying the boy's left. Having been only a few hours in the water, the two bodies were not bloated, although they did possess that ghostly pallor that comes from prolonged immersion. The older man had either been beaten or dragged across some rocks: his face was lacerated. The boy might almost have been merely asleep; there was seaweed in his hair but his face was unmarked, save only for the neat round hole, twin to the older man's, in the exact centre of his forehead.

But the boy was not Fabrizio. He was a year or two older than Fabrizio and as swarthy as a gypsy. And the older man, although the right age and colouring, was not Andrew.

‘I kn-kn-know these men, signore,’ said the radio operator, impelled despite his terror to follow the son of Massimo Monfalcone onto this ship with its grisly deck cargo and stammering from a mixture of cold and the release of pent-up tension: ‘the boy was a deckhand on the yacht of the Frenchwoman, and the other man was her captain.’

Fausto pulled a wad of money from his jeans pocket. He instructed the radio operator to give it to the fishermen and then go and rouse the police sergeant. As he walked back to the harbourmaster's office Fausto looked at his watch and calculated the time in Las Vegas. The news he would have to transmit to his father was not as bad as he had feared, but it was bad nonetheless.

‘Quei porci maledetti di Corsi,’ he allowed himself the satisfaction of a muttered imprecation: accursed Corsican swine.

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