Chapter Twenty-Two 25 July 2011
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I gripped the door handle of the Fiat as Louis veered into a sharp turn on the strada provinciale out of Portofino. An alarmingly wide lorry honked as it approached. I squeezed my eyes shut until it whooshed past.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“Sorry.” Louis laughed. “These roads are insane.”
We hit a straight stretch of coastline and I started to relax again. We had the windows rolled down so we could taste the salt air. Cheerful blue beach umbrellas fluttered in the breeze. Bougainvillea heaved itself over walls. Girls on Vespas wove through traffic effortlessly.
“I wish we were staying in Portofino,” Louis said. He was wearing a crisp white shirt that made the caramel tan he’d picked up in the few days we’d been here seem even deeper. “Bit more going on than in Rapallo.”
“I don’t know if security would allow it,” I said.
“Didn’t you hear?” he asked, looking at me over his Ray-Bans.
“They had big problems with the villa we’re in.
A private mooring always freaks them out because anyone can hire a boat and float right up to us.
Papa almost called the whole thing off, but Mum agreed to hire that guy to stand on the dock. ”
I hadn’t heard. All I knew was that the Rapallo villa was on loan from one of Mum’s post-divorce friends—a jewellery designer perhaps?
A film director? Hiring a place in Portofino for ￡15,000 a week wasn’t an option.
The private security guard to top up our royal protection detail was already going to blow out the budget for the trip, and money was becoming a sensitive issue.
The divorce settlement had come through, but for a woman like Isla Kilchurn, ￡18 million was not a lifetime’s supply.
Round-the-clock private security had swiftly robbed her of her nest egg, so that she was relying on monthly child support payments to get by.
They were due to stop the day we turned eighteen, which was only five months away.
The easiest way to make money would be to shop her story to a New York publishing house.
But she was bound by Stewart’s NDA in perpetuity, which meant that one day she would have to choose.
She could find an American investment banker, or a Scottish earl, or a tech billionaire ten years her junior.
Or she could become a brand ambassador for luxury watches and mass-produced coffee pods.
Both prospects seemed to terrify her. And so that summer, we stayed with rich friends, we accepted free meals at buzzy restaurants, and we paid ￡5,000 for a man to stand guard on our little stone ledge overlooking the marina.
“Don’t tell her you don’t like the villa,” I said to Louis. “She really wants us to like it.”
“I won’t,” he said. Then he sniggered. “Is it not the craziest place you’ve ever seen, though?”
I smiled. “Yeah.”
The villa had been built by an Italian contessa in the seventies and left to rot and crumble when her marriage broke down.
It was considered a monstrosity by the locals in Rapallo, but Mum’s friend (a celebrity chef?
an art dealer?) had bought it in the nineties and restored it to its strange and decadent former glory.
There wasn’t a single straight line in the place.
Everything was arched and curved. At the centre of the house was a sunken living room—a “conversation pit,” Mum called it—filled with velvet cushions and ashtrays.
Instead of hanging artworks, the owner had simply placed paintings on the floor and leaned them against the walls.
Every piece was a graphic nude. I thought it was delightful—far more interesting than the usual places to which we were invited.
And anyway, who cared what the interior looked like when it hung so precariously over the sea?
The villa seemed to open right onto the glittering Rapallo marina.
Down some steep steps, you could reach the boat dock and a stone shore.
“Oh, you’re home!” Mum called when we walked through the front door. She was wearing a pair of Louis’s boardshorts and an old vest knotted at her waist, and she still looked great. “How was Portofino?”
“Yeah, fine,” Louis said, stretching. She wrapped an arm around his head and kissed his sideburn while he grimaced. They both moved through the world with the ease of the long-limbed and beautiful.
“Now, please be honest, dearest,” she said to him. “You didn’t have a drink in town, did you?”
“We didn’t drink, Mum—we got gelato.”
“You know I don’t care. Have all the Aperol spritzes you want. But if a photographer catches you and he sees, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Mum lived in fear of a change to the custody arrangement, even though we were just months from our eighteenth birthday.
“I might get a swim in before dinner,” I said, padding down the hall towards my bedroom. “Can we really have spritzes with dinner?”
“Yes, alright,” she called.
I took my book and towel down to the water.
The paparazzi knew we were travelling around Italy, but they were yet to track us down to Rapallo, so I lay on the hot rock in my bikini, the Ligurian Sea washing up my pale, exposed thighs.
There’s a feeling you get when you’re being watched.
I don’t know if I was more attuned to it because being observed was my entire purpose, but I opened my eyes and saw a man leaning against the railing on the boat dock.
He was wearing aviators and smoking a cigarette.
He nodded his head and smiled, and I waved back uncertainly.
I hadn’t seen the Italian security guard yet, but I supposed that was him.
The protection officers who joined us from England were far more discreet, and I felt this man’s eyes as I tried to go back to my sunbaking.
Eventually, I rolled onto my stomach to hide my body and pretended to read.
But the more natural I attempted to be, the more I felt the prickling discomfort of his gaze.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the puff of smoke leave his lips as he stood sentry on the dock.
How strange to be repulsed by a man’s scrutiny, and yet still perform for it.
If I walked back to the villa immediately, it would be obvious I was trying to avoid him, and even though this man worked for my mother and I didn’t know him at all, I was deeply concerned about hurting his feelings.
Instead, I closed my book, got up and leapt off the rocks into the tepid sea.
Still, he watched. After a few moments bobbing around in the water, I climbed out, wrapped myself in my towel and headed for the rocky steps.
“Goodbye, carina,” he called after me.
I gave him another small wave, emitted a choked squeak meant to be a farewell and hurried up the steps.
“That security guy’s a bit creepy,” I said at dinner. We were eating on the deck, watching the sun sink in the sorbet sky. None of us knew how to cook, so Louis had gone into town for pizza.
“Who, Davide?” Mum asked, pronouncing it the correct Italian way, with three distinct syllables. Like me, she was mostly picking at the toppings and leaving behind the cheese and dough. “He’s lovely. He calls me ‘Bellezza.’”
Louis scowled. “Where’d you find this guy?”
Mum shrugged. “He was recommended by a friend. My options are limited, you know. The number of photographers chasing me has probably doubled in the last year and I’m out there completely alone.”
“You could always go out a bit less,” Louis muttered.
A wave slapped the rocks and a salty mist landed on our bare skin. I sipped my Aperol spritz in silence. Mum was staring at Louis.
“Could I?” she asked coldly.
“I’m not saying… you know, I’m just… if you go on people’s yachts and into nightclubs, it’s part of the territory.”
“And what places would you deem acceptable?” she asked. “Given that I was cut out of my own life with absolutely no protection, and all my old friends and relatives stopped speaking to me?”
Louis and I stared at our plates.
“Sorry, Mum,” he said. “I just worry about you sometimes, that’s all.”
“Yes, well, you can hold your father responsible for that,” she sniffed. “He wasn’t always quite so cruel, but the closer he gets to the crown, the more vicious he becomes.”
We started eating again and I hoped that was the end of it.
“You’re not exactly making it easy for him either,” Louis said softly.
There was a clattering of cutlery and the scrape of a chair. The table shuddered and the drinks slopped out of their glasses as Mum stood up and stalked back into the villa. We sat in silence as the horizon glowed and then blazed behind us.
“Sorry, Lexi,” he murmured.
The year before, Mum had travelled to Haiti to raise money for earthquake victims. Separated from us over Christmas, she had spent a week at a rape crisis centre in the Democratic Republic of Congo instead.
A month before we went to Italy, she had been on the Turkish–Syrian border to draw attention to the growing refugee crisis.
But she also went to movie premieres and fashion shows, and so all I heard from the people around me was how she was bringing the monarchy into disrepute.
Eventually Louis and I gave up on the evening and parted ways.
He was on the top floor of the villa facing the gardens, while I was on the bottom floor overlooking the sea.
I have no idea what time it was when Mum woke me up.
Later, I would piece together every moment of what happened next, and it’s likely I hadn’t been asleep for long.
I felt her warm hands on my cheeks and when I opened my eyes, she was already dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans.
“What is it?” I whispered.
She smiled at me. “Let’s go on a raft, for real this time.”
I looked out the window. The ocean was like mercury under a sliver of moon. “Now?”