Deep and Silent Waters

‘I didn’t do anything to her!’

‘He didn’t,’ Laura said. ‘I saw it again – the eye.’ She pointed. ‘Up there.’

Sebastian’s hard mouth indented; his eyes spat jealousy. ‘I wonder what you were feeling guilty about this time.’

‘I wasn’t feeling guilty about anything! I tell you, I saw it.’

‘Oh, come off it! You didn’t see anything up there. You just imagined it!’

Niccolo was looking up at the painted ceiling. ‘No,’ he said slowly, seriously. ‘No, I

don’t think she did. Laura, was it Juno’s eye?’

Sebastian and Laura stared at him.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘And you saw a living eye watching you?’

‘Yes.’ Laura drew a sharp breath. ‘I didn’t imagine it, did I?’

Niccolo turned on his heel, and walked out of the room without answering. Sebastian followed him. Laura hesitated for a minute, but she wasn’t staying there alone. She went after them, shivering a little as she turned into the marble-walled hall. The two men were on the stairs going up to the second floor and vanished round a bend in the staircase.

The film crew, still busy in the hallway, had stopped to watch curiously: an electrician with black cable wound round his hand, Sidney polishing a lens of one of his cameras, looking older since Valerie’s death as if the shock had aged him, Carmen sitting cross-legged on a rug with a pile of shooting scripts in front of her, going through them and scribbling timings in the margins.

Laura wished she was just one of them, lost in the daily minutiae of their lives, doing her job, worrying about nothing except getting her work right.

She waved to them and Sidney called, ‘How are you?’

‘Okay,’ she said, but his eyes told her she didn’t look it. She walked slowly to the stairs and followed the men up to the second floor, leaning heavily on the banisters.

By the time she reached the top they were out of sight but she heard voices and followed the sound along a corridor into a large bedchamber, hung with red velvet at the window and on the four-poster bed. The walls were painted dark red, too. The black shadows from the flames in the hearth licked up to the ceiling and made the atmosphere heavy with brooding. The Contessa, wearing her usual black dress, sat at an embroidery frame, sewing with the calm, measured movements of custom.

She put down her needle and the skein of silk she was pulling through the cream fabric. ‘What are you doing, Niccolo?’ she asked sharply.

He had flapped back the carpet on the floor and was kneeling down. Taking no notice of his mother, he told Sebastian, who stood beside him, ‘This is the mechanism. It’s very old, probably from the Renaissance – who knows who ordered it to be installed? It was the sort of thing that fascinated them in the sixteenth century. I found this one years ago, when I was about four and crawling about in here while the maid cleaned the silver brushes on my mother’s dressing table.’

‘She had no business bringing you in here! You shouldn’t have been left with a maid at all.’

‘Well, I was, that day. She didn’t notice what I was doing. I played with it for a while then pushed the rug back over it. It was some time before I realised exactly what I’d found. At the time it never occurred to me that my mother might know it was there. This house is full of secrets. There’s a staircase that leads up from the boat-house to the bedroom Laura is using. That was how my father’s visitors got up to his room without being seen.’

The Contessa rose to her full height, her face cold and forbidding. ‘Please leave my room, all of you. Niccolo, you forget your manners. You know I dislike my privacy being invaded.’

‘Why were you prying into Laura’s privacy, then?’ demanded Sebastian.

She didn’t look at him. ‘I was doing nothing of the kind.’

‘Oh, yes, Mamma,’ Niccolo said. ‘You were up here, peering down through this spyhole. Don’t bother to deny it.’

‘Why were you spying?’ insisted Sebastian.

‘I was not. I heard raised voices – it sounded like fighting. I was worried about my son, that’s all.’

Sebastian’s mouth twisted cynically. ‘Is that why you were watching Laura and me making love the afternoon she first arrived here?’

A spot of dark red flared up in her cheeks. ‘How dare you!’

Niccolo asked, ‘Did you watch my father through that spyhole?’