Victoria Fox - The Silent Fountain

‘I told her nothing.’

Vivien exhales. Adalina lays down a supper tray, soup and crackers, a bunch of grapes the colour of bruises, but she has no appetite.

‘Are you all right, signora?’

‘I saw her from the window,’ Vivien says, daring to meet Adalina’s eye, wanting to know if the maid has seen it too. But Adalina gives nothing away.

‘Do you think she looks like…?’ Vivien swallows. She cannot say the name. ‘I saw her and I thought what a remarkable resemblance she has to—’

‘She’s dark. That is where it ends,’ says Adalina.

‘But her height, her build, everything – it’s everything.’

‘Not at all.’ Adalina protests, unwilling to give her charge any scope for indulgence. Vivien notices this, and seizes it as proof of her agreement.

‘You can’t deny it.’

‘I can. Up close she is entirely different.’

‘It was like seeing her again.’ The ‘her’ is spat like venom. It’s been years – years – but the poison remains. She cannot get her mouth around it, the taste bitter, too horrible, too immediate, all that hate multiplying inside her with nowhere to go.

‘Then you must meet the girl,’ says Adalina. ‘I will arrange it.’

‘I cannot have her living here if you are wrong.’ Vivien is trembling, her voice skittish, her heart leaden. Get control of yourself , she thinks, aware the resemblance the girl has is impossible, a trick of her mind, but the uncanny is all around, in the windows, in the water, in shadows and reflections, and she would not put it past the house to test her in this way. Vivien has heard the noises late at night, the creak of a floorboard, the slam of a door, the howl of the wind so like a woman’s scream…

‘You must eat,’ says Adalina. The pills come out, the tray set down.

Without warning, Vivien takes her hand. Adalina is surprised.

‘It isn’t her, is it?’ she asks in a strange, disembodied voice.

‘Of course not, signora.’

‘That would be impossible.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘She wouldn’t come back for me, would she?’

Adalina is frightened now.

‘Never,’ she rasps.

‘She wouldn’t dare.’

‘No, she wouldn’t dare.’

Vivien releases her grasp. Adalina fills a water glass, as if nothing has happened. Sometimes, the maid stays to help with supper. Tonight, she leaves.

Vivien, Los Angeles, 1976

In years to come, Vivien Lockhart would look back on the night that her world began: on the point at which her journey was set. Four years since she had run from home, four years of surviving on luck and a dime – until the stars joined up their fatal alignment and the wide, brave future gathered her to its beating chest.

In a velvet-swathed dressing room at Boudoir Lalique, Vivien perfected a final swipe of mascara before sitting back to appraise her reflection. Wide blue eyes lined with dashing kohl; full, crimson lips; and her sleek blonde hair tied beneath a majestic scarlet turban, studded with rubies. Each time the vision was surprising – this person was a girl and a woman, herself and a stranger. Jewels glimmered at her forehead, and the neck of her opulent Biba robe, reminiscent of the one Farrah Fawcett wore to that premiere on Broadway at the weekend, made her appear like the head of a powerful sphinx. At Boudoir Lalique, she was no longer Vivien. She was Cleopatra.

‘You’re up, hon,’ said one of the girls, wafting into the dressing room in a mist of knockoff Chanel. ‘There’s a new guy out there tonight – he’s smokin’.’

Vivien stood, swallowed a knot of fear that she would be assigned this fresh patron. It made no difference if he was handsome or not: she was still at his mercy.

‘Thanks,’ she answered, watching as the girl grabbed her bag and hooked up with the others at the door, giggling and shrugging their coats on. Vivien had this idea of friendship among women, a caramel-hued roller-skate ride through buttered popcorn and candyfloss and hairspray, and they had asked her before to join them, tried to include her, but she always said no. She was scared of them, their breezy confidence and happy conversation, their cola bubblegum and easy swear words, so far removed from the dark, punitive annals of her own past. She’d love to have a friendship like that but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to dismantle the fortress she’d built, knowing its every limit and parameter, instructing herself to stay inside.

Vivien took a breath and stepped through the swathe of fabric on to the dance floor. The heat hit her instantly: of bodies, of liquor, of thick, glowing cigars… of wealth. All eyes were on her as she moved across the room, as lithe as a panther.

The Lalique wasn’t any old discotheque. Whereas others in town were as light as Cinzano, this was as syrupy and dark as the throat-searing brandy it served in diamond-cut tumblers behind the bar. Lavish, smoky, sexy, and strictly private, it oozed decadence. Men clustered in leather booths, some lone wolves, some prowling in packs. Vivien could smell the dollar bills that came through the doors, and wished each night that the cash would whisk her away, an ocean of it on which to cast her sailboat, taking her to the life she’d always longed for. Until then, she would close her heart and soul to the men who took her backstage, just as she had closed her heart and soul to her father. What choice did she have? She was never going back.

‘Hey, baby…’

‘Lookin’ good, honey…’

‘You wanna come sit with me for a while?’

Murmurs of approval and invitation followed her through the sultry space. Chin up, smile on, Vivien poured cognac and champagne and absinthe, prepared perfect squares of glass with their neat lines of cocaine, and sat with her company for the night, a group of Japanese businessmen. Quickly she ascertained the one in charge, the one who would have paid, and made sure to compliment him on his suit, his tie, his expensive cologne. The drunker the group became, the more freely their hands roamed. Vivien remembered the first time a client had touched her leg: the feel of his thumbs, pressing, pressing, first on her knee and then on her thigh, higher and higher still, hot and dry. She had frozen, but the club kept turning, the drinks kept flowing, and this was how it was.

‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ the chief asked now, his eyes red-rimmed. Vivien judged he had twenty minutes before he passed out.

When she had arrived at the Lalique two years ago, wide-eyed and hopeful, she had taken the job of hostess, welcoming parties, pouring drinks, looking pretty, draped against the glass-topped bar smoking one of her impossibly long silver-tipped cigarettes while David Bowie’s ‘Fame’ twanged its bass – at least that was how Mickey, the owner, had sold it. For a while she had enjoyed being Cleopatra, her alter ego, relishing the chance to run from the child she’d been in Claremont, spritzing perfumes, donning costumes, collecting her tips in a plush satin pouch at the end of the night. But then her job description changed. It started with the odd grope, the occasional leer, and then it was no longer enough to laugh at their jokes or let them squeeze her hand. ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ said Mickey, which was less advice than instruction. Each time one of her clients led her into the back, she drove out her dread and did her duty. She blocked out the rest.

‘Sure,’ Vivien told him. ‘Another drink first?’

‘You’re gonna lead me astray…’ he slurred.

She was about to respond when a figure caught her eye. A man was standing in her peripheral, alone and all the more brazen for that solitude.

His appearance threw her. Conversation dried on her lips – but luckily her companion was too trashed to notice. The stranger was handsome, fair, tall, but it was the way he was looking at her that stole her breath. There’s a new guy out there tonight – he’s smokin’. This man radiated power. He radiated money.