*
‘Tonight,’ the Contessa announces, after supper, ‘I thought we would play charades. I will divide you into teams, and give you each your challenge. You will be playing famous characters from the real or imagined past – and we must all guess who they are. The way I play it is that the teams must confer, and whichever team presents the winning answer is spared. The others must drink a glass of anis.’
She is already setting out the tiny crystal cups, pouring measures of the syrupy liquid into them. There is no time for dissent before she has paired them all off. Earl Morgan and Gaspari, Truss and Giulietta, Aubrey Boyd and Roberto – who tries to protest, to no avail. And then, with a strange kind of inevitability: Stella and Hal. She passes him a slip of paper.
He reads it, and then shows it to Stella, so that only she can see.
Lancelot and Guinevere. When he glances up toward the others, he catches Truss watching him. He feels pinioned by the man’s gaze. Truss smiles, revealing that row of white teeth, and Hal smiles back, but it is a physical effort: the muscles in his face are taut as rubber bands.
Earl Morgan and Gaspari are first. Interestingly, Hal thinks, all the subtlety of the performance is Gaspari’s. Morgan’s performance is strained melodrama, and without the benefit of his rich voice it all feels rather thin. Hal finds himself wondering how many takes it requires to portray him at his scene-stealing best. When Morgan plunges an imaginary blade into Gaspari’s back, and Gaspari turns with a look of agonized betrayal, Aubrey leaps from his seat. ‘Julius Caesar,’ he shouts, in delight. ‘Caesar and Brutus.’
The little glasses are passed round to the losers. While the others grimace Hal savours his, enjoying the warming liquorice taste.
Aubrey Boyd is Titania, smoothing imaginary gossamer skirts over his lap for his lover to lay his head in, and Roberto – clumsy, scowling – is unintentionally hilarious as Bottom. Then Truss and Giulietta make an interesting pairing as Samson and Delilah. As on screen, Giulietta is magnetic: by turns seductive, devious, righteous. It is as though the character has been poured into her, filling the empty spaces. Truss merely suffers the performance, as though he is indulging the game of small children, but there is something between them, a tension, that makes it interesting.
Their turn will be next. Hal turns to tell Stella how he thinks they should do it, but she has risen from her seat. ‘I’m sorry to break up the game,’ she says, ‘but I’m very tired. Please—’ as the Contessa makes to stand too, ‘don’t worry about me. I’m going to go to bed.’
Her
I am anything but tired, as I make my way below deck to the cabin. I feel that I have come very close to danger. As soon as our names were called together, I had to extricate myself. Perhaps it is irrational, but I felt that had we had done it, acted out our parts, everything would have been visible. That night in Rome. The thing that is between us now, that made itself known in the garden this evening – though neither of us would acknowledge it. But I saw his face when I turned back to him.
I have taught myself better than this. People are lazy. They see, usually, only the thing that you choose to show them. And I have learned that the more they think you say, the less you can get away with revealing. This has suited me well – I have become adept.
Yet with him it is different. It isn’t just that I think he sees through this performance – which I am beginning to suspect he does. It is that I find myself wanting to tell him more. I haven’t spoken of my father in more than ten years. I haven’t even alluded to that former life. Yet this evening, when the two of us were alone, with the quiet of the garden all around, it was all I could do to remain silent. I wanted to keep talking.
That night, Hal has a strange dream. He wakes disorientated and aroused. Gradually, fragments of it come back to him. It was her, Stella. That night in Rome. His sleeping self remembers, no matter how hard he has worked to forget it.
He sits on the side of the bed. At least it makes a change from the other dream. But he needs to get a hold of himself. A married woman. It could have no future. He had his chance for that sort of happiness with Suze, and he ruined it. And there could be no happiness in this. But then perhaps this is why he is drawn to her, because he knows there is no future in it. Later, he will remember these attempts at rationalizing the irrational, and he will smile at them. But later still than that, they will hold no humour for him.