On a graceful bay on Lake Garda stands a honey-coloured hotel. Against a backdrop of pines, creamy crenulations line its corner towers, and a light breeze from off the water sends the fragrance of sage and lavender drifting across the lawns. Statesmen have painted it, novelists swooned over it. Events of historical importance have taken place here. Now, twice a day, fit young men rake the gravel, and trim the box shrubs to maintain their elegant shapes. Waiters appear mid-afternoon to hand out sorbets to guests lying round the slate-lined pool. Beyond the topiary and banks of herbs soar the bruised blue rocks of the Alps.
Tom and Rosemary drive from Milan in a hire car. Very few guests travel under their own steam. Instead, cars wait at airports to ferry guests behind tinted windows. Other guests use the helipad. Those in the know arrive after a quick dash across the lake in the hotel's 1920s replica motorboat, its walnut panelling glinting in the sun. The directions Tom's secretary took down over the phone have proved inadequate. Several minutes have been wasted accessing a mobile network, and calling the hotel for guidance.
When they arrive, it is dusk. Citronella candles flicker from every flat surface. As Tom and Rosemary are taken by golf-buggy to their room at the furthest end of the property, their first full view of the bay is eclipsed by a terrace. On this vine-covered platform--this stage, this set--sit couples dining, their backs to the newcomers.
Rosemary has forgotten on purpose to pack condoms. A conscious act of rebellion. Her rival in this instance is Tom's Blackberry, to which Tom is surgically attached. He is also on record as saying that he's too old for children. By which he means more children, since Aurelia won custody of Harriet and James. And he'll never have sex without protection: as a doctor of the new school, he forbids Rosemary to pump her body full of the Pill's artificial hormones. Not that she much minds the lack of sex. The relationship affords her plenty of other benefits. Like this trip to Italy, for instance. A 'thank you' for her patience, while Tom tends to his patients. The trade-off feels appropriate. When Rosemary was a child, she amused relatives by expressing a desire to grow up to be a very expensive toy.
The next morning, Rosemary sets off for breakfast alone. Normally she stares at the ground when she walks. But the glare from the white gravel hurts her eyes, and she's casting around the lawn for something else to look at when she notices the man. He sits on the grass in the shade of a tree, in the lotus position with his eyes closed. In his left hand he fingers a loop of beads. Conscious that her wedge sandals scrunch on the gravel she stands still. The cotton of her kaftan clings to the damp heat of her body.
From under her hat, she takes him in. His hair is silver, and hangs in easy layers at his neck. Too long for his middle age, perhaps, but Rosemary is reminded of statues of Greek gods and is surprised to feel her heart quickening. His nose is round and soft, his lips even more so. One hand caresses the beads, kneading them tenderly like nipples. The other rests in his sweat-pant lap. Diamonds of sunlight settle upon him through the leaves. And all about her, the slap of the lake against the jetty or the birdsong from the trees, the very daylight, all seem to disappear into a vortex, so that this man in the shadow of the tree shines all the more radiantly as the source of all that happens in the world.
On the terrace, Rosemary selects a chair facing the lake, with her back to the rest of the terrace, the lawns, the man. Dainty dishes of berries arrive, and some cuts of cheese. She tries to focus on the water, the way it sparkles in the sun, but her mind keeps returning to the man behind her, to his self-containment. His presence at the villa makes her spine sting.
Restlessly, she goes to a central table and spies English papers amongst the foreign ones. They're from the day before. Not even this much opulence can deliver the news more quickly. She takes a copy anyway, just as a woman arrives. She is in her forties, and wears a blue beach-hat. She is shown to a table on the terrace, and picks up a Herald Tribune on the way.
Rosemary is on the birth announcements by the time Tom finally appears. Despite the heat his sleeves are rolled down. He places his Blackberry on the table and seizes the pot of cold coffee. How quickly, she thinks, he has got out of the habit of greeting me. Having taken a sip, he beckons her to lean towards him.
"Don't look round, but we've a celebrity in our midst. I said don't look round," he adds, tersely.
Taking her newspaper, Rosemary moves to the central table to replace it on the pile. As she turns full circle, she glances briefly around the terrace. Breakfast ceased a full ten minutes ago, so it's virtually empty, except for one other table occupied by the lady in the blue hat, and a man with grey hair. The man is ordering an egg-white omelette. His American voice is downy and full of promise. Rosemary is grateful for the need to complete the circuit and return to Tom, because it almost hurts her to look at the man. But the woman in the floppy blue hat who pretends to be reading the Herald Tribune feels that moment's hesitation and knows of old what it means.
After instructing staff to manoeuvre their sun-loungers, and then arranging magazines and medical journals to confer title, Tom and Rosemary return to their room to clean teeth and apply sun-cream. By the time they return to the pool, another couple has set up camp close to their pitch. The woman has flipped up the brim of her blue hat, but has not changed into any swimwear. She reads Scott Fitzgerald with a pen in her hand, and jots down notes in the margins. The man with silver hair sits hunched over some papers. They have, in fact, commandeered four loungers, and have spread their possessions out accordingly. She sits in the shade of an enormous canvas umbrella, the edge of which just reaches the man's shoulder. To Rosemary's eyes, his skin simply soaks up the sun.
"Probably reading a film script," says Tom out of the side of his mouth.
Rosemary shrugs.
"You still don't recognise him?" Tom smirks, lying back on his sun-bed and closing his eyes. "Ah Rosie. It does me good to be reminded how young you are."
Rosemary flops onto her bare stomach. Suddenly she wishes for once that she was older, more worldly, less insulated. If she'd had to make her own life, instead of attaching herself to someone with his already mapped out, then maybe she'd know who this man is. She resolves when back in London to buy a novel. For now, she opens a magazine and studies the couple from behind her sunglasses. They do not speak to each other, and Rosemary, who generally sees the world as it relates to herself, suddenly has a vision of her life with Tom in twenty years time, him retired and her the age of the woman in the blue hat, and the pair of them having even less to say to each other than they do now.
Half an hour later, Tom slaps her bum and announces he's going for a swim.
It's now mid-day. Other guests have come to the pool, but none has chosen loungers near the couple. Rosemary senses a force field keeping people out. Her whole body aches to wriggle under the radar.
"Mommy!"
A small child trips across the lawn. He bounces onto the woman's sunbed, knocking the blue hat slightly askew. A younger woman, probably Rosemary's age, ambles up and recounts the latest adventures, which to Rosemary's ears sound exceptionally dull. The child demands to go swimming and mother gives her permission, although her tone suggests that it's the nanny who'll be getting wet. Rosemary glances behind her at Tom chiselling lengths.
But once in the water, the child loudly insists on Mommy's presence in the pool. Or even Daddy's. At this, Rosemary stops reading. It has not occurred to her that this man, this platinum Buddha, will have dependents. Rosemary is the kind of girl for whom wives do not count. The words on the page swim before her eyes, and she remembers the first time she realised that her own Daddy and Mummy slept in the same bed.
"I'll come, if you can be quiet!" says the man, his voice a post-coital drawl.
At this, Rosemary looks up from her magazine to find the man looking not at his child but at her. He grins slowly, with his eyes as well as his mouth. The woman is tucking her hair up into the crown of her hat. Then she drops her skirt to reveal a modest one-piece. No cellulite, Rosemary notes. After the woman passes between them en route to the pool, Rosemary dares to look back at him. He's still watching her. Something in her recognises, identifies with, his need to be the centre of attention. And she makes a silent promise to him.
As they dress for dinner, Tom asks Rosemary whether she's finally identified the celebrity.
"No," she says, checking her silhouette in the mirror.
Such indifference is feigned. She's thought of borrowing Tom's laptop and Google-ing, but she can't without a name. Tom's drip-feed of information during the afternoon has annoyed her. The man's films are apparently legendary, and she's been aroused to learn that his forté is the romantic lead. His look has spawned fashion collections. Tom's professional judgement is that the man is pathologically charismatic. Even I've worked that one out, she thinks--as Tom zips up her Matthew Williamson--and I've had no proper schooling since I was fourteen.
She feels the man's power, is attracted to it, as she had been once to Tom. Using her experiences with Tom as a template, she wants to receive deliciously wicked texts from the man. To set her phone to vibrate and to lie with it under the bedclothes. Last time round, that all had to stop when a nurse discovered the phone in Rosemary's bed. Mobiles were stupidly banned from the entire hospital in case they triggered cross-addictions in patients on the detox programme. She was forbidden weekend leave for a month as a result. Thank God no-one thought to change her Consultant.
Above all, and this occurred to Rosemary during the hot afternoon, she wants a child with this new man. She, who has shown no maternal feelings in her life, who has never brooked any rivalry, wants to present him with a baby like a child home from school with a drawing, showing off her accomplishments. Her need for him, her need to separate him from his wife, electrifies her. She feels she could climb the Alps. She brushes her column of chestnut hair and then flips it over her shoulder. He will see her tonight at dinner and claim her.
During dinner, Tom is called away. A waiter delivers an urgent fax to the table (Rosemary recognised the crest of the new clinic at its head), and now Tom must deal with the emergency. Normally, Rosemary feels a twinge of jealousy. Tonight, it fails to register on her consciousness. She attacks her langoustines with gusto.
Suddenly, she senses someone standing beside her, clearing his throat. Her hands are drenched in fish juice, which she finds momentarily mortifying. She looks up to find a tall older man with a sun-lined face hovering at her table. His Panama, which he raises slightly, reminds her of her father.
"Forgive me. I saw you at the pool today and I wanted to warn you not to overdo it on your first day. The Italian sun is stronger than you think. This is your first day, isn't it?"
This man, she hears, is also American. Talking to him makes her feel she's making a useful connection. "Yes. We arrived last night. Have you been here long?"
"Couple-a-days."
"I don't think anywhere could be more perfect."
"Nothing is ever perfect, my dear," the man smiles. "Mussolini stayed here during the war. More of a prisoner, actually. Lots of dark secrets, if you know where to look."
"And how do you know where to look?" She's paying attention properly now. "How do you know about Mussolini, I mean?"
"I'm in publishing," he says, holding out his hand. "Gabe Hirsch, of Hirsch Hooper. I knew the guy who once owned this place. He was in publishing, too."
She's struck by how typically free this American is with his personal information, and how this contrasts with her lover. She likes Gabe immediately, but as Tom would say, so what's new? Rosemary likes older men. A differential diagnosis in her file ten years ago (Tom would sneak them to her sometimes) mentioned an unresolved Oedipal complex. She wishes all American men could be relied upon to be so expansive. "And you published something by Mussolini?"
"No, I'm a literary agent. Fiction, mainly, but my real passion's biographies. We got the Pope's one, as well as Mussolini's. Trying to pitch one on Obama. Not much interest lately. How long ya here for?"
She tells him and they banter back and forth. Which is why she fails to see the arrival on the terrace of a woman, a child, a nanny, and a man. The first she notices is when Gabe half-turns to someone, the last of the four, who has just touched him lightly on the arm. Rosemary can feel herself prickle.
The scene is set for an introduction. "I'm sorry, how rude. I don't know your name," says Gabe with no embarrassment.
"Rosemary," she says. And the man with silver hair gazes down on her with a look that suggests that her reply has now answered a question that has puzzled him all his life.
"And you know this man, of course," says Gabe, with all the pleasure in his voice of knowing he has the prerogative of telling the groom he may now kiss the bride.
"Yes, I know you," she says, looking up into his mellow face. "You're the man who meditates under the tree."
He's under the tree again the following morning. And the next. Meanwhile, Rosemary has the time, the solitude, the obsession, to make detailed mental notes of his routine. He meditates alone. Just as breakfast is finishing, he joins his wife on the terrace for an omelette, and carrot juice. For the rest of the morning, he studies pages of A4 beside the pool. Sometimes he tries out a few lines on his wife. She'll either nod, or not, and they resume their independent activity. Lunchtime, and the child and nanny arrive; for pizza, out of deference for junior appetites, under the umbrella. An older man in a Panama normally strolls over for a chat at this point, and they discuss mutual friends using first names only. In the afternoon, it's yoga or he swims in the empty pool. In the evening, he plays the hotel's piano in the salon, while the other guests enjoy aperitifs down by the lake.
One lunchtime, Rosemary hears the hotel motorboat revving up beside the jetty. She observes the hotel manager speak to the foursome, whereupon they go fishing. Around the pool, guests get up, stretch, swim, laugh and joke with each other, and generally walk around without feeling the need to hold their stomachs in.
As soon as Tom begins his afternoon lengths an older man in a Panama appears and lowers himself onto the end of Rosemary's lounger as if he knows her. She sees a look of disquiet cross his face when she asks him his name. She concentrates. Something stirs in her mind about the hat. Of course! It's Gabe. And soon they are walking the lawn, deep in conversation. And Rosemary is crying. Gabe reached out and wipes the tears dripping from under her large sunglasses.
"I love him. You know him. Can't you tell him how I feel?"
"You think you're the first?" says Gabe, softly. "Look, I barely know the guy. We published a book by a friend of his, you know the sort of thing. I know him as well as you do."
"But I don't know him at all!" she wails. "And you spoke to him like he was your friend. He touched your arm."
Gabe laughs. "You make him sound like an alien. He's only human. Believe me!"
When the motorboat returns, Rosemary watches the foursome saunter up to the villa. Staff carrying their coolboxes and rods and lifejackets. She sees that he holds his wife's hand, appears happy to do so. And in the mutable, crepuscular light, Rosemary shifts away from herself and assesses the woman's appeal, her lithe, almost boyish beauty and--in her reading and her preference for daffy hats--her beguiling self-possession.
The next morning, Rosemary pads silently across the lawn, her sandals in one hand. When she reaches the tree, she leans in and kisses him on his mouth.
Tom is already on his way to the airport. For a few days only, but he hasn't been specific. A medical crisis has proved too life threatening to ignore. She could tell by the way he tip-toed round the room before dawn that he believed her to be still asleep.
The kiss hasn't taken the man by surprise. Instead, she feels him respond with something like approval, but at the same time wistfulness, as if something is sliding out of reach before he has had a chance to enjoy it. But now he has stopped kissing her, if indeed he ever was responding in kind, and Rosemary is left with the taste of toothpaste stinging her lips.
"Teach me to meditate," she breathes, glancing down at his beads.
"I rather think you want me to sleep with you."
His comment stuns her into silence. Not even Tom, with his clinical insight and degrees in neurology, was ever this perceptive, this quickly. She sees that he smiles as he says this, and she's flattered he has remembered her name. But all the same, she has a flash of being a child and arriving at a party in a velvet dress to find all the popular girls wearing jeans.
"You're laughing at me."
His laughter lines are deep when he smiles. "No, I'm--"
"Because, you don't know how much I--"
He puts his fingers to her lips. "No, you don't love me. You only think you do from what you've seen of me at the movies."
Rosemary blinks. "But that's just it. I've no idea who you are. I know you've been in films. You had a whore in one, and played a hooker of sorts yourself in another." She can see he's puzzled by her language, as if she's quoting someone else. "And in another you were a soldier, or a gentleman, I can't remember which. The point is, I don't remember seeing you. Ever. But, then I've--." She is tearing at the beading on her kaftan. "I've been--."
Now she's hyperventilating. He strokes her forearms. She leans into him, whimpering, and goes limp, as though she's giving herself over for treatment, or parenting, or a strange cocktail of the two. She registers that in one hand he is still holding his string of beads. They remind her of cranberries and she reaches out to touch one.
"Are you going to fuck me now?" she says in a childish voice, moving her finger from the bead to his wrist bone.
She feels his whole body stiffen. She pulls away to look at him and sees a damp patch at his chest where her tears have seeped through the cotton.
He rakes his hand through his hair. "No, Rosemary. No."
"Why not?" Her bottom lip protrudes.
And suddenly she can see it all in his face, the actor who can convey pages of script in an expression. Because I'm married to a woman I love deeply. Because I have a child. Because everything about this is wrong. These sentiments swirl around his features. She senses his anger, sees it mutate into guilt, and then compassion. He has reached out to her hair and is tucking a strand behind her right ear. "Rosemary. Why did you think I would?"
She is now properly apart from him, kneeling with her legs out to one side. "Daddy says it's alright to, when I'm sad or unwell."
For the first time she sees perspiration on his forehead.
"But that was before I entered the clinic. First I was sad. Then I got unwell."
"And are you unwell now?"
"Tom says it's a special form of Aphasia. I can't recognise the faces of older men. After I've seen them, I blank them out. Tom says it's self-protection. And you changed that."
At this, she curls up on the grass like a fawn and closes her eyes.
The actor gazes down at the girl on the grass. He has the sharp sense that this scene has been played out before. He wishes that his wife were here. She'd know what to do. And he wants to share with her his overwhelming sadness. For himself, and for the girl: vulnerable, and ignorant of her own fragility.
He notices he's been idly stroking Rosemary's hair as she rests. Oh, the irony. He'd assumed she was typically English. Reserved. Respectful. So when she said you're the man who meditates, he'd thought he'd found someone prepared to cut through the celebrity. Like his wife, who had years ago seen the lonely man inside and taken him under her capable wing. And now it turns out that Rosemary is ill, that her ignorance is a symptom of her condition. And her condition is a symptom of what? He doesn't want to dwell on what might have happened to damage her. Across the lake he sees a luminous line of sunlight breaking up on the surface of the water. And suddenly the broken pieces of the world seem impossible to mend.
He hears footsteps on the gravel. He tries to sniff his tears away. A faint breeze off the lake washes the scent of lavender around him. Beside him stands a woman, her blue hat in her hand.
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Lucy Beresford is a psychotherapist and broadcaster. Somethng I'm Not was her debut novel, and her second is currently being submitted to publishers. She is the Agony Aunt for the women's magazine Psychologies, and reviews fiction for the Sunday Telegraph and New Statesman. A Tender Meditation is her first published short fiction.
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