I was released into the afternoon. The Contessa was waiting for me. She looked, suddenly, every one of her years; older. With all the energy gone from her face, her features had a wrung-out look. When she saw me she came to me, and took my arm in hers. Before I could even ask if there was any news, she shook her head.
As soon as I saw the line of the sea I broke into a run. With the Contessa’s shouts in my ears and the exclamations of the crowd that straggled the shoreline, I ran down to the sand, past the beach umbrellas, shrugging off clothes. I swam straight out in a strong crawl, as though I had a specific destination in mind. At that moment, I felt that I could swim forever, for as long as it took. It was only when I reached the deeper water that I knew my own impotence, a tiny being surrounded by the vast unknowableness of the sea. I shouted her name and the breeze swallowed it almost instantly. I dived beneath the surface and saw only stinging clouds of greenish blue.
I am not stupid. I understood the futility of it. I was hours too late.
Afterward, the Contessa shepherded me into one of the cafés that thronged the Croisette, with the stares of the waiters and other customers upon us. She made me sit down, with all the care of someone looking after the frail or elderly. The irony of this was not lost on me.
‘Hal,’ she said, taking my hand, ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Truss,’ I said. ‘Where is he? Have they questioned him? It’s him, for God’s sake.’
‘Hal,’ the Contessa said, gently, ‘he has many people who can vouch for him from that night.’
‘Whom he paid, no doubt. The police too – I’m certain of it.’
She touched my shoulder. ‘They think that it was a terrible accident.’
She called the waiter over, had him pour us cups of coffee. She watched over me as I drank mine, attentive as a nursemaid. In the harbour, they were still searching. A flotilla of rescue boats trawled back and forth – a far cry from the pleasure boats of the day before. The crowd still watched, even as a fine rain began to fall, silent and solemn as mourners at a funeral.
‘He drowned her.’
She looked at me sharply. ‘Hal, you can’t say such things. They don’t think—’
‘In the journal,’ I fished it from my pocket. ‘He drowned her, Luna, the girl in the water.’
She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘The film is a lie.’
‘Hal, you aren’t making any sense.’
‘Look,’ I opened it, turned to the final pages, showed it to her.
She read, her brow furrowed. ‘It doesn’t say anything.’ She passed it back to me. I read what was written there.
I need to remove her from evil influences here. I do not blame her – she is green and impressionable, and was perhaps not quite ready for Society. I am taking her away for several weeks. We will sail down the coast, back to the house in Portofino.
It finished there. ‘But—’
‘It is understood that there was a great storm,’ the Contessa says, ‘recorded only a little while after this entry. There is, too, a letter from another in the family, dated from a similar time, speaking of “our poor drowned cousin”. The compass was found on the seabed, not far from San Fruttuoso. So yes, it is likely that he perished, that they both perished – but not that he drowned her. We choose to reinterpret the ending, to make it about a new life, rather than the end of one. A hope that all of us deserve.’
‘I don’t understand.’ I began to leaf through the remaining blank pages, certain that there would be something more there. But I could find not a word – not even a mark.
‘Hal,’ she said then, ‘I do not think you should speak of this to anyone.’ Then, when I didn’t answer, she said, ‘I feel some responsibility for all that has happened.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
‘It is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw you both, at my party in Rome. I had met her before, and saw that she was miserable. Like someone wearing a brightly painted porcelain mask. And I met you and you seemed, well, equally lost.’
I remembered Aubrey’s talk of her little projects. ‘And you tried – what – to bring us together?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing so crude as that. I couldn’t be certain of what I had seen between you. But I thought … perhaps I might have the capacity to bring happiness, of the sort I have had.’
‘It nearly worked,’ I said.
She had suffered some sort of terrible accident. This was the conclusion that they arrived at. And the blood? It wasn’t as much as they had made out, actually. It might be entirely unrelated. Or perhaps she had tried to make like the lady diver and hit her head. There was much made of the fact that she could be reckless, impulsive: that she had gone swimming off the beach at San Fruttuoso and nearly drowned.