“If only I’d taken notes I could have told you exactly how many times.”
“Sorry. So I think he desperately craved an audience.”
“Doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Oh, I don’t mean to make him sound completely self-absorbed and egotistical. He is, a bit, but not only, and not all the time. I think one of the things he likes about me is that I take the piss. He’ll be telling some story about himself—he’s always the villain of the piece, and it’s usually about how his blindness or selfishness destroyed someone’s life or led to some great disaster—and all I have to do is raise an eyebrow, or perhaps start humming that awful song “Tragedy,” by the Bee Gees, and he’ll furrow his brow for a second as if he’s going to start raging, and then he crumples and goes all soft and starts to laugh.”
“Gosh, Alice, I’ve never heard you talk like this about a man before. When will you see him again?”
“He’s having a sort of party in a couple of weeks. Just a few people staying for the weekend. He called it ‘a shooting party without any shooting.’ “
“Exciting.”
“Nerve-racking, more like. I haven’t got a Barbour jacket or anything. I probably won’t go. It just isn’t me.”
Well, thought Odette, it certainly wasn’t the Alice of a few weeks ago. Odette was delighted about the Lynden development. It was exactly what Alice needed. Far better than her own idea of tracking down the Dead Boy’s family for some cathartic confrontation. How mad was that? What had she been thinking?
“What about that nice-sounding boy in your office? The one who went to the park with you ages ago—I thought he still had some kind of crush?”
“Andrew? It’s sad, but I never really noticed him until we went together to see Edward, that first time. We sit together at work, and he just became sort of invisible to me. Especially after . . . when . . . you know, that time.”
“Yes. It’s okay. Go on.”
“Well, on the first trip down—he gave me a lift—we talked and—well, he stopped being invisible. He’s funny and nice and sort of hapless, but in an almost-kind-of-sexy way. I think he’s a bit jealous about the Edward thing. Not that there is a thing yet, really.”
“Alice!”
“Sorry. Anyway, there was an incident at work the other day. I think he may only have been joking, you know, playing up a bit, but it all misfired. There were people around, some of the higher-ups, and Andrew came out looking very bad. I hope there aren’t any consequences.”
“You still haven’t really told me if Andrew has anything to be properly jealous of. You’ve got as far as staying up late drinking Edward’s whisky and swapping stories with the fire blazing and the Cave of Ice all a-sparkle.”
“That’s all to tell, honestly. About two—well, maybe three—in the morning, I started to yawn, and he said, ‘My God, I forget my manners. You must be very tired.’ And I said I was quite, yes. And he showed me to my room.”
“What was it like, amazing?”
“As you’d expect, amazing. It was one of the comfortable ones, rather than the bleak and modern ones. It must have belonged to a woman. There were feminine touches: cushions and things. A four-poster bed, which was a bit of a shock. But it still looked like something out of an interior-decoration magazine: I don’t mean Elle Deco, I mean one of the really flash ones, Metropolitan Home, say.”
“And he just left you at the door?”
“I know it doesn’t sound plausible, but he did. Gave me a gentle little kiss on the forehead. I assumed that was a prelude to some kind of lunge, but it wasn’t. He just said, ‘Breakfast at eight,’ and that was it.”
“Oh, how anticlimactic!”
“No, not at all. I don’t know what I’d have done if he’d tried to come in. It’s been so long. I’ve forgotten how! And don’t say it’s like riding a bicycle. For me it was always more like riding a unicycle.”
Both Odette and Alice succeeded in finding this wildly amusing. They did have the excuse of being well into their second bottle of New Zealand sauvignon.
When they had recovered themselves, Alice said, “Okay, you’ve had long enough, and I’ve been analyzed half to death. Tell me all about Venice and Matthew.”
“Fine, but just let me catch the eye of that nice young man. I think this needs another bottle.”
CHAPTER TEN
Odette in Venice
“I’VE BOOKED A WEEKEND,” she’d said, over the lunchtime sandwiches, which they’d started eating together down by the river.
“Oh!” said Matt, in a tone as difficult to pin down as his accent. “That should be . . . you know. Where did you say?”
“Venice.”
With characteristic thoroughness she had researched and cross-referenced, using every single guidebook in print. She’d found what sounded like the perfect little hotel: nothing too extravagant, but universally recommended for its charm and comfort, and convenient for the Accademia. She had even thought carefully about the duration. They would go on Friday afternoon, and return by the first flight on Monday. She knew they could get into the office by ten o’clock, and arriving together would signal to everyone that they were an acknowledged couple.
“Wow, Venice.” That wow should have alerted Odette to the possibility of danger. As the mouth was wowing, the eyes were doing something altogether different, which, had it taken aural form, might well have sounded like nnnghh.
“Have you ever been before?” she asked, gushing a little.
“No. But I’ve—” He was also going to say that he’d always wanted to go, but it would have sounded limp to repeat what she had just said, and besides it wasn’t true.
“You can come, can’t you? I know it’s short notice, but what the hell, we’re only young—”
“No, yes, of course I can come.”
ODETTE WAS AT the airport an hour before check-in time. Twelve-thirty came and went. And then one. She telephoned his flat. The answering machine cut in, so Odette tried his mobile.
“Matt, where the hell are you? You’re going to miss the flight.”
“Oh, God, Odette. Look, I can’t make it. I was about to call. I’ve had to come into the office. It’s what I’m here for. Stuff’s happening. Look, sorry.”
Odette hung up.
The fucker.
She was in shock. How could he just not turn up? What would she say to her mother, who’d told her to be careful, thrilling with excitement at the thought that she might not? Everyone in the office would know. They’d want to see the pictures.
In a moment Odette had decided that the only thing was to go. She deliberately stopped thinking, throwing her ever-active mind into the almost unvisited neutral gear. Somehow she found herself in a cramped seat, staring at an over-made-up stewardess semaphoring what to do if you get attacked by a shark after ditching in the sea. Strangely, she was in the middle of a three-seat row, sandwiched between a buttock-faced man and a woman in a crocheted beret, eating nuts. Something about the man and woman made Odette think they were together, and a little shudder of paranoia ran through her. How had she come to be between them? What were they planning? The airline was one of the budget ones that don’t allocate individual seats, and Odette wanted to say that she had paid for two seats and so should have a space next to her, but that would have involved explanations and excuses, and she didn’t have the will.
With the surge of takeoff, the horror of it all returned to swamp her. Had she done something wrong? Was it because she was too plain, or too dull? Had he been laughing at her behind her back with the rest of the office? She squeezed her eyes tight shut to close out the thoughts, but a voice came through.
“Are you okay, my dear?”
Odette opened her eyes and found that the buttock-faced man was leaning across her, his paunch pressing into her thigh.
“Yes, fine. Why?”
“Sorry. It’s just that you made a noise. A sort of a squeak. You’re far safer than you would be in a car.”
; Odette imagined herself jabbing a finger into the man’s doughy cheek, where it would, she was sure, leave a long-lasting indentation. She shuddered. The bereted accomplice crunched her nuts.
Odette ordered two little bottles of gin with tonic from the over-made-up attendant. The buttock-faced man passed them to her with his fat fingers and winked. Odette had a particular dislike of winking, which she always thought of as the sex-offender’s version of the Masonic handshake.
Somehow she got through the flight. She was determined to make the most of the trip, extracting some cultural capital from the emotional waste, and so read carefully through the Venice guidebooks she had brought, underlining the must-dos and asterisking the should-dos. She hunted down the best (sensibly priced) restaurants, and worked out itineraries for both days, weaving complicated but utterly rational paths between the eternal beauties of the city. And she saw with pleasure that her true self, the sensible, rational core, was still there—dented, perhaps, by the fiasco, but resolute and immutable. Some minor love problem could not bend her heroically straight lines, nor upset the comforting rigor of her thought.
Odette had originally planned to take one of the famously wonderful water taxis from the airport to the city. That was when the wonder and the romance, as well as the absurd cost, were to be shared by two. But on her own, Odette decided on the more prosaic waterbus. At least, she thought, it would provide an appropriately aquatic beginning to the holiday, so she followed the crowd through the various circles of airport hell, trying and frequently failing to avoid the buttock-faced man and the beret, and emerged into a wet dusk. A fine rain was falling, seeping its way under her collar and ruining her hair.
The waterbus was a misery. She tottered over a narrow plank, leered at by unhelpful helpers, who made no attempt to carry her bag. The seats were set so low that it was impossible to see anything other than the dark gray of the sky through the rain-smeared windows. So much for her dreams of arriving like Cleopatra on her barge. After an hour and a half of blind chugging she was disgorged at San Marco. The buttock-faced man appeared at her shoulder.
“Know where you’re going?”
She had only a vague idea. “Yes, of course.”
“Don’t need any help then?”
“No, I’m fine.”
She wanted to weep but looked around instead to get her bearings. On one side water, and then an island with a big church; on the other side people, buildings, scaffolding, pigeons. There was no joyous little explosion inside her head at the beauty of it all, just a registering that Venice had arrived and the knowledge, like an all-body toothache, that a trudge to the hotel was upon her. She consulted the maps in the guidebooks. They were all either too small or too large in scale, fine if she wanted to count the bricks in the Doge’s palace or find Venice from outer space, but next to useless for getting to the Accademia and her longed-for hotel room.
How much fun it would all have seemed, what an adventure, she thought, if only there had been Matt. For the first time she started to hate him. She decided to tell people in the office about his weak bladder. That helped lift her spirits as she headed in what she hoped was the right direction. Soon she was lost in the narrow streets, convinced that she was crossing the same bridge over the same murky canal over and over. And that surely was Prada again—or were there two? Finally she did the thing she hated most: asked an American. He smilingly waved her in the right direction, and five minutes later she and her suitcase crawled over the wooden, curiously Oriental, Accademia bridge. From there she quickly found her way around the side of the gallery and along the street to her hotel.
“There are two?” asked a not especially charming woman in reception.
“No, just one,” replied Odette, blushing. She remembered the shame of her first night in a hotel with the lecturer, convinced that the old lady in the bed-and-breakfast knew and disapproved of their illicit coupling. She smiled grimly at the neat reversal: Now she was ashamed of the absence of carnality.
Her room was small and neat. She quite liked it until she lay on the bed; it was as hard as a butcher’s slab. Even the pillows seemed to be made of solid rolls of felt. She curled into the fetal position and tried to cry, vaguely aware that it was supposed to make you feel better. It was six-thirty.
At eight she decided to get something to eat. The hotel restaurant was mentioned as reasonable in the guidebooks, so she thought she’d try it, although she wasn’t hungry and was, in fact, beginning to feel clammy and nauseated. Odette was used to eating out alone and would normally have been content to sit and read as she ate, but the dining room was low and oppressive. She found herself blushing whenever she spoke to the overly attentive waiters, and said too many thank-yous and grazies. The wine waiter pressed a whole bottle of red wine on her, which she found herself gulping joylessly, like mineral water. She ordered pasta vongole, but when it came the clams had a strange aftertaste, and she couldn’t eat more than a couple of mouthfuls.
She tried to amuse herself by observing the other diners. They were all, of course, tourists. Mainly middle-aged. Three gray couples (not, blessedly, the buttock-and-beret team), a smattering of late-onset Teutonic lesbians, a man dressed unseasonably in combat shorts whom she assumed to be Nordic, and in the far corner a family, making too much noise. The mother was attractive, perhaps forty-five years old. Four children: two squirming brats responsible for most of the racket and an older pair, a girl of fourteen or so and a boy who might have been sixteen. The girl spoke quietly with her mother in a language Odette did not recognize. For some reason she decided it was Estonian, although it could just as easily have been Turkish or Hungarian.
It was not, however, the girl who captured Odette’s attention. It was the boy. The boy, who remained in silent profile, was the most perfectly beautiful object Odette had ever seen. Odette had never thought it possible for a man to be beautiful. Not that she was immune to physical attractiveness: It was just that the physical qualities she admired in men—boldness, competence, energy—seemed to occupy a different mental space from the world of beauty. She dimly remembered attending philosophy lectures in her first year at the LSE, where the meltingly feminine beautiful was contrasted with the masculine overpowering sublime.
But now here was a boy, almost a man, who, without having any particularly female characteristics, could only be described as beautiful. His hair was long and seemed to be trying to form itself into ringlets. His eyes were pale gray, saved from any suggestion of emptiness by a slight furrowing of the brow. His face was long with high cheekbones, and the nose was elegantly flared. Odette reeled. She experienced a raging, torrential flood of desire, suffused with a strangely pure affection: She wanted to hurl herself upon the boy, feel his bones crunch into hers, gnash her teeth against his. And yet she also wanted to take his fingers in hers and talk about those things she had shoved to the margins of her life: art, and the beauty of the world, and literature, and philosophy.
And then, without quite realizing how, Odette found herself sitting on the floor, looking up at the table. Attentive voices were murmuring in her ear. The headwaiter and a dour middle-aged woman whose role in the hotel was unclear to Odette were looming over her. “It is the wine,” a voice said. “I think the lady is ill,” said another. Odette felt very hot. She wanted to be sick, but she knew she must not do that—here—in front of the boy. My God, the boy! She had fallen off her chair right in front of that beautiful boy. Hands helped her up, guided her from the dining room. She looked toward the table with the family. It was empty.
“I shall call the doctor,” said the middle-aged woman.
“No, no, I’m fine,” replied Odette. She thought she was just tired and stressed from the journey . . . from the journey? She smiled at the thought that she had fainted from exposure to the sheer beauty of the boy. Wasn’t there a syndrome? A Radio 4 memory drifted in and out. Stendhal syndrome. Fainting from too much beauty. Wasn’t it the corsets? But Stendhal was a man, wasn’t he?
And
then Odette was alone, lying on the bed. The boy’s disembodied face hovered before her, his eyes still surveying some distant horizon, but her head echoed with other sounds: the clinking and crashing from the kitchen, which was below her window; the random shouts and guttural noises from the streets; the voice of Matt, with his empty wow and transparent excuses. The sounds would have haunted her all night, but she managed to silence them by focusing on the face of the boy, and his image stayed with her as she drifted into sleep.
It remained with her when she awoke late the next morning. She still felt very peculiar and wobbled as she made her way to the bathroom. She’d missed breakfast but wasn’t hungry anyway. And she feared meeting the boy. As well as the embarrassment of falling off her chair, Odette was irrationally convinced that the boy would know that she was . . . that she was—well, what exactly? Besotted, she supposed. God what a mess.
For her first expedition, Odette decided on the Accademia, which her guidebook told her held the world’s greatest collection of Venetian art. It had the more immediate virtues of being both indoors, useful given the continuing drizzle, and less than thirty feet from her hotel, which was about her maximum tottering range at the moment.
Odette had never really had time for art. She would occasionally permit herself to be persuaded into an exhibition by one or another of her cultural friends, but she always found herself bored within half an hour and plagued by stiffness and aches in odd parts of her body. The Accademia didn’t bode well. There was an initial half-hour wait to get in, amid the jostling tourists. By the time she entered the first room she was already soaked to the skin and feeling more light-headed than ever. And then came the procession of skinny saints and stout madonnas. The artists all seemed to have the same, or very nearly the same, name. Odette found herself entirely unmoved by the displays of devotion, however exquisitely rendered. The toothy yammering of the Japanese and the barking of the Germans and the uncomprehending murmuring of the English all added to the misery.
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