The Invitation

by Lucy Foley

What is it like being called “Italy’s finest export”?’ She shrugs. ‘It makes me sound like a tomato.’

I sometimes think that if only she’d been born ugly, or even just a little less beautiful, she might have had a chance to be happy.’

There is something shameful in it, this need to survive. It is beyond thought. Papa, Tino are gone – I have nothing left. Yet this will to live is as strong as an undertow, it sweeps me with it.

At one time, it was love that defined me: for Papa, for Tino. Now it is hunger.

The more cordial the man is, the less he likes him. He mistrusts his manner entirely.

‘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!’

Still she has not allowed him into her bed. But he can be patient. It is only a matter of time. She is kind to him, after all.

it is not only in the imagination then, this thing that is happening between them. It is visible to a stranger.

His desire in Rome was uncomplicated, little more than instinct. It was the simple excitement of the unknown. This is something altogether more complex. For this reason, he steps away.

‘Whether we blame ourselves because in a way it makes things easier to understand if they have a reason, a fault, behind them.’

‘There are days when I assume it is over for me. Love, real happiness … I decide that these things belong to youth. I decide that it is the way of someone like me: to be alone, to be melancholy. And then I spend a few days with them, these people who found one another a little later in life, and I begin to have hope.’

He is humiliated: she has made him look needy. He wants to tell her that it has cost him to get to this point, how he worked to convince himself, too – how he is certain of it, now. But there is no use in it: he has put his case, and she has rejected it.

‘Things happen. And they happen whether or not we’re there to influence them. And we can either let them eat away at us, and destroy us. Or we can go on living. Sometimes that is braver.’

Only a man like Truss, I thought, would have had his cocktail cabinet shipped overseas to a Muslim city to accompany him in his dying days.

He had been a bully and something approaching a criminal, but perhaps not a monster. In my mind, I had made him into one. It had been easier to imagine him thus.