it was because there was no family, only the paid surrogates and the distant figure of the man who had fathered her, who seemed to have no interest in her, only in the company. Patricia had been able to accept her situation, but for the child it was torment. Elizabeth felt unwanted and unloved, and did not know how to cope with her despair, and in the end she blamed herself for being unlovable. She tried desperately to win the affection of her father. When Elizabeth was old enough to go to school, she made things for him in class, childish drawings and watercolour paintings and lopsided ashtrays, and she would guard them fiercely, waiting for him to return from one of his trips, so that she could surprise him, please him, hear him say, It’s beautiful, Elizabeth. You’re very talented.
When he returned, Elizabeth would present her love offering, and her father would glance at it absently and nod, or shake his head. ‘You’ll never be an artist, will you?’
Sometimes Elizabeth would awaken in the middle of the night, and walk down the long winding staircase of the Beekman Place apartment and through the large cavernous hall that led to her father’s study. She would step into the empty room as if she were entering a shrine. This was his room, where he worked and signed important pieces of paper and ran the world. Elizabeth would walk over to his enormous leather-topped desk and slowly rub her hands across it. Then she would move behind the desk and sit in his leather chair. She felt closer to her father there. It was as though by being where he was, sitting where he sat, she could become a part of him. She would hold imaginary conversations with him, and he would listen, interested and caring as she poured out her problems. One night, as Elizabeth sat at his desk in the dark, the lights in the room suddenly came on. Her father was standing in the doorway. He looked at Elizabeth seated behind his desk, clad in a thin nightgown, and said, ‘What are you doing here alone in the dark?’ And he scooped her up in his arms and carried her upstairs, to her bed, and Elizabeth had lain awake all night, thinking about how her father had held her.
After that, she went downstairs every night and sat in his office waiting for him to come and get her, but it never happened again.
No one discussed Elizabeth’s mother with her, but there was a beautiful full-length portrait of Patricia Roffe hanging in the reception hall, and Elizabeth would stare at it by the hour. Then she would turn to her mirror. Ugly. They had put braces on her teeth, and she looked like a gargoyle. No wonder my father isn’t interested in me, Elizabeth thought.
Overnight she developed an insatiable appetite, and began to gain weight. For she had arrived at a wonderful truth: if she were fat and ugly, no one would expect her to look like her mother.
When Elizabeth was twelve years old, she attended an exclusive private school on the East Side of Manhattan, in the upper seventies. She would arrive in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, walk into her class and sit there, withdrawn and silent, ignoring everyone around her. She never volunteered to answer a question. And when she was called upon, she never seemed to know the answer. Her teachers soon got into the habit of ignoring her. They discussed Elizabeth among themselves and unanimously agreed that she was the most spoiled child they had ever seen. In a confidential year-end report to the headmistress, Elizabeth’s teacher wrote:
We have been able to make no progress with Elizabeth Roffe. She is aloof from her classmates and refuses to participate in any of the group activities, but it is difficult to tell if this is because she makes no effort, or because she is unable to handle the assignments. She is arrogant and egotistical. Were it not for the fact that her father is a major benefactor of this school, I would strongly recommend expelling her.
The report was light-years from the reality. The simple truth was that Elizabeth Roffe had no protective shield, no armour against the terrible loneliness that engulfed her. She was filled with such a deep sense of her own unworthiness that she was afraid to make friends, for fear they would discover that she was worthless, unlovable. She was not arrogant, she was almost pathologically shy. She felt that she did not belong in the same world that her father inhabited. She did not belong anywhere. She loathed being driven to school in the Rolls-Royce, because she knew she did not deserve it. In her classes she knew the answers to the questions the teachers asked, but she did not dare to speak out, to call attention to herself. She loved to read, and she would lie awake late at night in her bed, devouring books.
She day-dreamed, and oh! what lovely fantasies. She was in Paris with her father, and they were driving through the Bois in a horse-drawn carriage, and he took her to his office, an enormous room something like Saint Patrick’s cathedral, and people kept walking in with papers for him to sign, and he would wave them away and say, ‘Can’t you see I’m busy now? I’m talking to my daughter, Elizabeth.’
She and her father were skiing in Switzerland, moving down a steep slope side by side, with an icy wind whipping past them, and he suddenly fell and cried out with pain, because his leg was broken, and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Papa! I’ll take care of you.’ And she skied down to the hospital and said, ‘Quickly, my father’s hurt,’ and a dozen men in white jackets brought him there in a shiny ambulance and she was at his bedside, feeding him (it was probably his arm that was broken, then, not his leg), and her mother walked into the room, alive somehow, and her father said, ‘I can’t see you now, Patricia. Elizabeth and I are talking.’
Or they would be in their beautiful villa in Sardinia, and the servants would be away, and Elizabeth would cook dinner for her father. He would eat two helpings of everything and say, ‘You’re a much better cook than your mother was, Elizabeth.’
The scenes with her father always ended in the same way. The doorbell would ring and a tall man, who towered over her father, would come in and beg Elizabeth to marry him, and her father would plead with her, ‘Please, Elizabeth, don’t leave me. I need you.’
And she would agree to stay.
Of all the homes in which Elizabeth grew up, the villa in Sardinia was her favourite. It was by no means the largest, but it was the most colourful, the friendliest. Sardinia itself delighted Elizabeth. It was a dramatic, rock-bound island, some 160 miles south-west of the Italian coast, a stunning panorama of mountains, sea and green farmland. Its enormous volcanic cliffs had been thrown up thousands of years ago from the primal sea, and the shoreline swept in a vast crescent as far as the eye could follow, the Tyrrhenian Sea framing the island in a blue border.
For Elizabeth the island had its own special odours, the smell of sea breezes and forests, the white and yellow macchia, the fabled flower that Napoleon had loved. There were the corbeccola bushes that grew six feet high and had a red fruit that tasted like strawberries, and the guarcias, the giant stone oaks whose bark was exported to the mainland to be used for making corks for wine bottles.
She loved to listen to the singing rocks, the mysterious giant boulders with holes through them. When the winds blew through the holes, the rocks emitted an eerie keening sound, like a dirge of lost souls.
And the winds blew. Elizabeth grew to know them all. The mistral and the ponente, the tramontana and the grecate and the levanter. Soft winds and fierce winds. And then there was the dreaded sirocco, the warm wind that blew in from the Sahara.
The Roffe villa was on the Costa Smeralda, above Porto Cervo, set high atop a cliff overlooking the sea, secluded by juniper trees and the wild-growing Sardinian olive trees with their bitter fruit. There was a breathtaking view of the harbour far below, and around it, sprinkled over the green hills, a jumble of stucco and stone houses thrown together in a crazy hodgepodge of colours resembling a child’s crayon drawing.
The villa was stone, with huge juniper beams inside. It was built on several levels, with large, comfortable rooms, each with its own fireplace and balcony. The living-room and dining-room had picture windows that gave a panoramic view of the island. A free-form staircase led to four bedrooms upstairs. The furniture
