by Anne Weale
First she had a shower and then, knowing it was served until ten, she ordered a continental breakfast. That done, she dialled Pierce’s number.
The call was answered by Hooper. ‘Mr Sutherland’s residence.’
She was too strung up to stand on ceremony. She said, ‘This is Holly. May I speak to Pierce, please?’
‘He isn’t here, Miss Nicholson. He’s in the park, on his roller-blades.’
‘His roller-blades?’ she echoed, astonished.
‘Mr Sutherland has been roller-blading since the sport started in this country. He’s extremely expert. He says it concentrates the mind. Did you just want to speak to him, or has some kind of hitch arisen? If so, perhaps I can help?’
‘There’s no hitch. But I do need to talk to him. Does he have a cellphone on him? Can you make contact?’
‘Unfortunately not. He prefers to be undisturbed. But I’ll ask him to call you the moment he returns.’
‘Thank you. Before he went out...did he seem his usual self, Mr Hooper?’
‘I would say so, yes.’ After a slight pause, he added, ‘Are you feeling nervous this morning?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I’m wishing my father were here to calm me down.’
‘Perhaps, if you wouldn’t think it impertinent, I can offer some reassurance.’
‘Please do, if you can.’
‘A long time ago I was married myself,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately we had no children and my wife died young... in her forties. But until then we were very happy...and I’m sure you and Mr Sutherland are equally well suited. It’s very natural to feel nervous in the last hours before your wedding. In a few days’ time, when you’re together in Venice, you’ll look back and smile at this morning’s feeling of stage fright. Naturally, Mr Sutherland doesn’t discuss personal matters with me, but I know him well enough to be sure that he’s been a much happier man since he met you, Miss Nicholson. If that also holds true for you, as I’m sure it does, can there be any doubt that much happiness lies ahead of you?’
‘Thank you, Mr Hooper...thank you.’ She was too moved to say more.
It was half an hour later, and she had finished her breakfast, when the telephone rang.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Pierce. You wanted to speak to me.’
‘Only to say good moming...and that it seems a long time till half past eleven.’
‘You’re going to be there, then?’
‘Yes, I’m going to be there.’
‘Good. I was hoping you would be. How did you sleep?’
‘Not very well. And you?’
‘Hardly at all. But tonight, with you in my arms, I’ll sleep a lot better. Until half past eleven...’
Holly left for the register office escorted by Pierce’s friend, whom she had met before. He made all the right remarks about her outfit—a simple cream dress and a cap of Christmas roses with clusters of golden stamens among white silk petals. From then on the day, after starting slowly, suddenly switched to fast forward.
The short wedding ceremony, the lunch with the witnesses, the drive to the airport, the unaccustomed luxury of the first-class lounge, the short flight to Italy, the final lap of the journey in a fast launch from the airport across the lagoon all seemed to follow in rapid, dream-like succession. None of it felt like real life, except that, when she looked at her left hand, there beside her lovely engagement ring was the plain gold ring symbolising her new identity as a married woman. All that remained was for Pierce to make her his wife in the fullest sense—an act which most bridegrooms performed a long time before the wedding but he, for reasons of his own, had chosen to delay.
Italian time being an hour ahead of London time, it was dark before they reached Venice, which was first seen as a shimmer of lights which seemed to rise from the sea like those of some magical city in a fairy tale.
The runways at Gatwick had been wet from a steady drizzle, but here it was a dry, clear evening and not too cold to stand outside the cabin and breathe in the salty air and watch the city take shape.
Pierce put his arm round her shoulders, drawing her close to him. It seemed to her that she could feel the warmth and vigour of his body even through their thick winter coats.
‘By this time tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I hope you’ll feel the same way I do about this extraordinary place. From the first time I saw it, I loved it. But perhaps if I lived here the magic would dissipate. It’s better to come and go and never to stay too long.’
The launch slackened speed to enter a canal just wide enough to allow two-way water traffic. Tall houses loomed on either side, the lights from their windows reflected in the water.
‘A lot of Venetian apartments, especially the ones on the upper floors of the old palazzi, have very low ceilings,’ said Pierce. ‘For somebody tall that’s not comfortable, so I bought a place with more headroom. I hope you’re going to like it.’
‘I’m sure I shall love it. Oh, Pierce!’ Her exclamation was caused by the launch gliding under a bridge and leaving the canal behind as it swung to the right and presented her with a view she had seen many times in paintings of Venice but which held her spellbound as she took in the busy waterfront and what she knew had to be the mouth of the Grand Canal itself.
They went in a different direction, passing a point of land and cruising along another waterfront on one side of a wider channel.
‘You can get your bearings tomorrow,’ said Pierce. ‘This evening the names don’t matter. You must be tired. It’s been an exhausting day for you.’
‘I can think of a lot of people who wouldn’t mind being exhausted in such nice ways,’ she said, smiling. ‘Who looks after your place for you?’
‘A maid comes in every morning when I’m here and twice a week when I’m not, to keep an eye on things. Apart from breakfast, I eat out. Tonight we’ll stay home and picnic, if that’s OK with you. My secretary called Lucia and gave her a list of stuff to leave in the kitchen for us.’
His place was part of a building which had its own watergate. The launch drew alongside the mossy step and the boatman made fast while Pierce helped her to step out, leaving the boatman’s assistant to deal with their luggage.
‘Alone at last,’ Pierce said, smiling, when the cases had been brought up, the bringer of them tipped and the outer door closed behind him. ‘Come on, I’ll show you round and then you can either unpack or lie in a hot bath while I make a cup of tea or fix you a drink. Whatever you want, you shall have, bella signora.’
The main room, where they were standing, was so full of interesting things that she couldn’t take them all in, but only formed an impression of treasure trove from his travels or perhaps found here in the city, like the eye-catching bust of a Moor with a black marble face and rose marble turban and tunic.
‘The bedroom is through here.’ He led her along a corridor, lined with books and lit, in the daytime, by a window of small leaded panes the size of saucers, to the most romantic bedroom Holly had ever seen or imagined.
Its side walls were lined with panels of antique mercury glass. Behind the bed was an enormous landscape, painted on unstretched linen, of islands in a blue sea. The bed itself had four posts, each about four feet tall and topped with a gilded swan spreading its wings.
‘What a wonderful bed! Is it Venetian?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but not an antique. I had it made for the flat. The wood is cherry and the swans were inspired by the finials on Gabriele d’Annunzio’s bed in the Casetta delle Rose. My swans are slightly more streamlined.’ He put his hand on the one nearest to him. ‘No one else has ever slept here apart from myself. I had the bed made as a marriage bed. Perhaps I had a premonition that it wouldn’t be long before I met you.’
It was a romantic thing to say, and he looked romantic as he said it, his hair ruffled by the breeze blowing across the lagoon, his tall frame now coatless, an open-necked shirt under a coral sweater making him look younger than the formal suit he had worn earlier in the day.
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She had an almost overpowering longing to fling herself into his arms and tell him she loved him. But she mastered it, saying only, ‘It’s a beautiful bed. I’m honoured to be the first woman to sleep in it.’
He beckoned her to him. ‘Do you realise we haven’t even kissed each other properly yet? That peck in the register office hardly counts.’
‘I know.’ His hand was still on the swan when she stepped close to him and put her arms round him.
She couldn’t say what she felt, but she could show it, and would, in every way possible. Now that she was his wife, she needn’t hold back from physical displays of love even if the words she wanted to speak would be an embarrassment to him until he started to feel the same way about her.
From now on she was determined not to think of if but when...
Looking up at him, she said, ‘You know that saying—Life isn’t a dress rehearsal? Well, this morning, when I was dressing, I felt that until today my life has been a dress rehearsal...and tonight is the opening night of a show which is going to run for the rest of my life.’
Pierce put his arms round her. ‘If you go on saying things like that to me and looking so lovely...’ His arms tightened, crushing her to him.
CHAPTER TEN
‘WHAT are you writing now?’ Pierce asked.
They were sitting in the sun in a caffè in one of the city’s many squares, the only foreigners there, because although people came to Venice for Christmas and New Year they did not come in their thousands as they did for the famous carnival and during the hot summer months.
At this time of year, Venice belonged to the Venetians and to the connoisseurs who knew the city intimately, not the hordes of tourists who stayed for a day or a few hours, often spending more time peering through their viewfinders than imprinting La Serenissima’s beauty on their minds’ eyes.
Holly had been writing a couple of postcards, but now was scribbling in a notebook, using a pencil and doing a lot of erasing with the rubber on the end of it.
‘I’m trying to write a poem,’ she said. ‘But please don’t ask to see it. I haven’t got it right. I may never get it right.’
‘Do you often write poetry?’
‘I don’t often have time...or the inspiration.’
‘What’s inspiring you now?’
‘I’ve called it “Venetian Days... Venetian Nights”.’ She gave him a saucy grin. ‘It’s a rather erotic poem.’
In matters relating to sex, she could talk to him freely now. Her last shred of shyness had evaporated. You couldn’t be shy with a man whose finely sculpted body you knew as well as your own. The only taboo, the only unmentionable word—at least in any personal context—was love.
‘In that case I’d better keep quiet and let you commune with your muse.’ Pierce returned his attention to the book, bought an hour earlier at the Libreria Internazionale, which he had been dipping into while they drank coffee.
But a smile lingered round his mouth for a moment or two before he became reabsorbed in the text. She knew she had pleased him with her tacit acknowledgement that Venetian nights in the swan bed had given her life a new dimension.
Occupying one of their table’s four chairs was yet another of the many large, stylish carriers they had taken back to the flat since their arrival.
On their first full day in Venice, they hadn’t got up until lunchtime. In the afternoon he had taken her to the Missoni shop, buying her a long knitted coat combining a dozen colours in a pattern so vivid yet so subtle that it glowed like a priceless rug and felt as warm as her tweed coat but as light and cosy as a sweater.
Every day since then he had insisted on buying her other lovely things. Perhaps because he couldn’t yet give her his heart, he seemed to feel a strong need to lavish her with all the material delights Venice had to offer.
But although everything he had bought her was of the finest quality and would last many years—she expected still to be wearing the Missoni coat when she was middleaged—it was the hours in his arms which had been his best, most memorable gift to her.
He had taken her gently, impatiently, fiercely, swiftly, leisurely—in all the ways a man could make love to a woman.
More than that, he had shown her how to make love to him, which she had known in theory but never put into practice. When she did, it astonished her to find how much pleasure it gave her. Perhaps that was partly because his body, when he was naked, was even more splendid than she had guessed it would be—lithe, lean and still lightly tanned from a September holiday walking in the Picos de Europa.
His clean, smooth skin was as delicious to taste as it was to touch with her fingers. Sometimes, when she was revelling in the freedom to caress him in ways which would have seemed unbelievable only a few weeks ago, he would suddenly give a low groan and his shoulders would come off the bed as he pushed her onto her back and did the same things to her, driving them both wild.
Remembering those moments made her long to repeat them. ‘Pierce...can we go home now?’ she asked.
‘Of course. Is anything the matter?’
‘Nothing that half an hour in bed won’t put right.’
He lifted a quizzical eyebrow, then signalled for the bill. When, arm in arm, with him carrying the shopping, they were walking back to the apartment, he said, ‘I’ve been propositioned before, but I’ve always suspected the motive.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’ve felt the suggestion was made to please me, rather than because the propositioner really wanted to go to bed with me. I’m beginning to believe that you do.’
‘Of course I do,’ she said fervently. ‘I think I’ve missed my vocation...that I was born to make love. But only with you, Signor Sutherland.’
‘But not only in Venice, I hope.’
Holly looked up at him. ‘It will always be special in Venice because this is where it began and the mirrors and the swans make it seem like a wonderful dream from which I’m afraid to wake up.’
‘You aren’t going to wake up. It will be the same wherever we are. If you want to have mirrors and swans at Talavera, it can be arranged.’
They had come to the entrance to a long covered alley, one of many such passageways in the city. This one was too narrow for them to walk comfortably abreast. Before going ahead of him, Holly stopped and said, ‘Perhaps we could have a different kind of swan bed for Talavera, made in the Regency style...you know, faux bamboo and painted swans. But the bed isn’t really important. It’s the person in it who matters. I’d be happy in any old bed as long as you were there with me.’
She knew that her heart was in her eyes as she said it and turned quickly away to hide a message which, if he read it, she hoped he would intercept as corporal rather than emotional.
It seemed that he did. A little way along the passage, she felt his hand on her shoulder, forcing her to a standstill. Turning her round, he pushed her against the wall and held her there with his body. Then he kissed her hard and hungrily on the mouth.
To two Venetian housewives, the sound of whose heels tapping on the flagstones brought the embrace to an end, they might have looked, seen in silhouette from the far end of the passage, like a pair of illicit lovers snatching a few moments’ privacy to give vent to frustrated passion.
As Pierce let her go, Holly realised that, but for the interruption, in a few more moments she would have reached the high pitch of ecstasy that belonged somewhere secluded, not in this public place.
Profoundly shaken, she forced her trembling legs to carry her forward, averting her face and keeping close to the wall as she passed the two women coming the other way, one behind the other.
When they emerged into sunlight, by the side of a narrow canal with a stepped bridge crossing it further along, she said, ‘You are a devil, Pierce. Do you know what you almost did to me?’
‘No more than I did to myself. You could drive a man insane.’ He seized her hand and began to walk very fast, his long stride forcing her to run to keep
up with him.
‘Stop...stop...you’ll give me a stitch,’ she protested, with a breathless laugh.
He did stop. A moment later, she was in his arms, being carried.
‘Pierce...you can’t. What will people think?’
‘Who cares what they think? If I want to carry you, I will.’ He lowered his voice to add softly, ‘I will do whatever I want with you, but it will take more than half an hour. It could take all afternoon.’
On their last evening in Venice, they dined at a restaurant which stayed open later than most in a city whose citizens kept early hours, especially in winter.
Afterwards they strolled home through almost deserted streets and over bridges reflected in motionless water. It was almost full moon, although not much moonlight penetrated the narrower streets and canals, where the buildings cast such black shadows that, even though Venice was a safe city at night, in places it had a sinister atmosphere for anyone imaginative.
Then they came out into the great open space of the Piazza San Marco and for once there was no one about. Even the pigeons had gone to their roosts on the ledges and friezes of the surrounding buildings.
‘Let’s have a last cup of chocolate at Florian’s,’ Pierce suggested.
‘They’ll have closed...hours ago,’ said Holly regretfully.
Of all the pleasures of Venice, she had particularly liked the city’s oldest caffè with its many little rooms inside and, outside, musicians playing on an awning-covered dais, their music sometimes mingling with that of the rival caffè the Quadri, on the opposite side of the square.
But at this hour, both would shut and, by the time they reopened, she and her husband would be on their way to the airport. The honeymoon would be over.
‘Do you know any old-fashioned dances?’ Pierce asked as they were crossing the Piazza. ‘The waltz and the tango, for instance?’
‘Strangely enough, I do. My father showed me how to waltz and I learnt a bit of the tango—not the very complicated steps—for a show we put on at college. Do you know any ballroom dances?’