Hal considers the elderly couple. How well suited they are to one another, both hewn into interesting shapes by life. They live lives almost independent from one another, evidently. And yet Hal sees the Contessa’s fingers interlace with his, her gaze caress the raw-boned face. And the old man stoops from his great height to kiss the crown of her head.
The room he is shown to is dark and cool, echoing in the same important way as the church in Portovenere. The warmth of the day outside quickly fades from memory – the floor has a particular chill to it that Hal decides must be peculiar to ancient stone; the cold of centuries. At first glance, everything in the room looks as though it might have remained there since the era of the castle’s inception: from the faded pastoral scenes frescoed upon the walls to the four-poster bed with its threadbare but beautiful damask coverlet. Gradually, though, other elements reveal themselves: pieces that speak of exotic travels. Three wooden African masks hung on one wall, a Moorish patterned rug on the floor, the curved scimitar sword in its embellished scabbard.
Aubrey Boyd is in the room beside Hal’s, Giulietta on the other side. Stella, Earl Morgan and Gaspari are in rooms on the next floor.
Now he can hear voices upstairs. He pushes his door open to make them out more clearly.
‘This room,’ Giulietta is saying, in her most imperious tone, ‘is far bigger than mine. I would prefer to sleep here.’
The Contessa, of course, proves a worthy match. ‘But I am afraid it is not your room,’ she says, pleasantly, ‘it is the one I have given to Mrs Truss.’
Now Stella speaks. ‘It’s all right,’ she says, wearily. ‘I don’t mind swapping.’
The Contessa tries to dissuade her.
‘No,’ Stella says, firmly. ‘I don’t need a large room.’
Hal closes the door. Fame, he thinks, has a great deal to answer for. It rewards behaviour that should otherwise be stamped out long before adulthood. He will find some way of making sure that some trace of this infiltrates his piece.
Supper is served in the courtyard outside the castle, which sits above a sheer drop down to where the sea froths against the rocks beneath. Behind them the wall of the castle is almost completely obscured by an ancient growth of wisteria with blossoms from which tiny purple petals, dislodged by the breeze, take to the air and land all around. Several cats of every imaginable size and colour have appeared and they circle the guests curiously, the bolder among them threading their way between table legs and ankles. Nina watches them warily, letting off the occasional warning bark, but the animals are unperturbed by her presence.
‘We used a cat for one scene in the film,’ Gaspari says.
‘I remember it,’ Hal says, ‘the one that leads the man through the streets to the shrine.’
‘Yes. That’s it.’ Gaspari nods, pleased. ‘We trialled several different animals before we found the one that would do what we wanted, and only then because we bribed it with little pieces of chicken tied out of sight. It would refuse to do anything – anything – unless there was chicken involved. And people think that the film world is a glamorous place. Auditioning cats – imagine!’
The Conte sits on Hal’s other side. Hal is pleased by the novelty of having someone to talk to who hasn’t also been on the Pygmalion. And the Conte makes an excellent dinner companion. For all his bizarreness of appearance – he arrives at dinner in a purple Chinese silk tunic and matching trousers – and his great age, he is lucid as the grappa that is handed around after the meal. He regales Hal with his tales of the Syrian desert, where he and the Contessa once spent a whole six months living with a Bedou tribe. He tells Hal of the storms of sand, in which the fine particles in part assumed the characteristics of water. A sea that seethed and stormed, enveloping all.
‘You have to keep moving – so that you do not become like un sarcofago. It happens in seconds, otherwise. I almost lost my wife like that. She was trying to take a photograph of it … imagine.’
He describes to Hal the Bedou tribes’ strong sense of honour and hospitality, and of their customs: the poetry they would recite in the evening, their great piousness.
‘There is a purity to a desert existence, to living according to its laws. But there is also a strength of mind and body required for that life. I was too weak.’ He gestures, ‘I missed the sea, I missed the green. But sometimes, now, the Contessa and I find we miss the desert, too. It is something that gets into the blood, a most rare and powerful drug. Who knows, maybe one day, we will return there, my wife and I. Our bodies are weaker but our minds, perhaps, have acquired the necessary resilience.’
When they have finished eating he takes Hal to the tent they have brought back with them and erected at one end of the courtyard. It is a long, low shape, a thick coarse cloth made from woven goat hair. Hal climbs inside the dark space and smells woodsmoke and incense and something else, too – something indefinable. A residue, perhaps, of the intense heat of the desert sun which has by some magic permeated into the fabric itself.