Children of the Master

by Andrew Marr

  That was more like it. Davie looked up and asked, ‘Out where?’

  ‘Venice.’

  The Education of David Petrie

  The good politician is international. I’ve had all my best ideas in airports.

  The Master

  Davie met Ella at the British Airways lounge in Terminal Five. He was carrying a bulging plastic bag full of books. From the outside, Ella looked much as normal – poised, sipping a bloody Mary, a little bored. But everyone has a limit, and Ella had reached hers. Petrie, never the most observant of men, noticed nothing. He gestured proudly at his bag of books, and began to pull them out one by one: John Julius Norwich, Jan Morris, Francesco da Mosto, Thomas Mann …

  ‘Oh, bloody great,’ said Ella. ‘Not only a sodding conference on town planning, but you’re going to have your nose in a sodding book the whole time.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Venice,’ replied Davie modestly, ‘so I thought I’d better learn a little about it first. Someone told me to educate myself. It was either these, or more office bumf.’

  Unnervingly, Ella made no attempt to keep her voice down. ‘Well, I’ve been to Venice loads, and it smells of shit, and the food is shit, and all the hotels have bedrooms the size of iPads.’

  ‘So I guess you’re here purely for the pleasure of my famously exciting company?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Your Royal Highness the Autodidact. Let’s drop the pretence, shall we? I’m here because the Master told me to be here – to come along and hold your hand and wipe your bottom.’

  ‘Really? He told you to come?’

  ‘I said let’s drop it, OK? You know and I know, and I know that you know, that I work for the Master, and for nobody else. For some reason I don’t understand, he still seems to think you might have what it takes for greatness. You are among the chosen, his children, one of the last ones standing. But the more I see of you, David Petrie, the more I disagree. You’re a drone. A speck. You’re at the back of the chorus. That’s what I’ve told him. See? I love it when you flinch. Oh, you think sad eyes will work? Labrador eyes. Little hurt face. Aaah … Well, think again, lover. I’ve only ever tolerated you because the Master wants your loyalty. Step out of line, and there are pictures of us together that will blow your world apart. Did I do that? Did you do that? They’re really quite disgusting. I can hardly believe them myself. Mary and the little kiddies will never speak to you again.’

  Davie felt as if she’d just reached into his chest and squeezed. He felt very cold. Then he felt very hot. He wanted to shout. He wanted to cry. But he was a grown-up, and he spoke evenly. ‘So all this time it was just a game to you? You’ve never felt …?’

  ‘Nothing. I’ve never felt anything. Not for you. Not for anyone else, come to that, except for the Master. For God’s sake, don’t look at me like that. We can carry on fucking, if you like. Although you might consider flossing, and a mouthwash …’

  Davie looked around the lounge, which was beginning to empty. Something was going on inside him: a rumble. He wasn’t going to collapse after all. ‘We’re going to miss the flight. You can borrow a book if you like.’

  Less than two hours later, the Serene Republic, like a child’s drawing of a fat fish, was visible, glittering on the lagoon, as the jet banked for landing. Davie and Ella had sat in silence throughout the flight, he reading his books, she leafing through magazines. After picking up their cases, he began to lead the way towards a sign reading ‘Water Bus’.

  ‘No,’ said Ella. ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it properly. We need a water taxi, our own boat. They’ve given us a hotel on the Grand Canal, at least, so we can make it go straight in and turn left. It’s the only way to arrive.’

  Murdoch White had once told Davie that the secret of professional success was to be ‘multi-track’ – to be able to think of several different things, passionately and intensively, at the same time. During the flight, Davie had been both studying the history of Venice and nursing a boiling sense of rage and injustice directed towards Ella. Now, more than ever, she seemed a stranger. He wasn’t going to miss this trip for the world, but she was dead to him. Davie was a handsome man, with a strong jaw and a muscular, well-made face. In repose it had a certain jutting brutality. But from his earliest years he had had actorly qualities too; now he smiled at Ella, his eyes almost disappearing in a crinkle of lines.

  ‘Let’s not fight. Let’s not spoil this. I don’t know what you’re really up to, but since were on the same side, I’m going to ignore your little lecture at Heathrow. Bad time of the month, perhaps.’

  ‘Whatever you want. I’m not going to say it again; nobody should need to be warned twice. But, just so we’re clear, it isn’t a bad time of the month.’

  ‘Well if it isn’t now, it soon will be. Ella, sweet-pea, be my guide.’

  What did he mean by that? Ella turned on her heel and led the way into the bright sunlight. Five minutes’ walk ahead of them, the water rocked and glittered. After negotiating briefly in Italian with the pilot of one of the water taxis, Ella demanded €120 from Davie.

  Standing in the open at the back of the boat, bouncing when it hit the bow waves of others returning to the airport, they passed tiny, derelict islands before, through the haze, the cupolas and spires of Venice itself appeared. Soft blues and tiny golden streaks against a violet sky.The Serene Republic herself. Davie felt all his hurt start to blow away in the salty breeze. He stiffened a little as the boat appeared to be heading straight for a line of buildings. Would they crash?

  Ella laughed and put a hand on his arm. ‘It’s all right. Just wait.’

  And indeed, the pilot headed straight into the concealed opening of a tiny canal, whose orange-painted and leprous buildings were festooned with drying underwear. Arched stone bridges and narrow alleys apparently leading nowhere were crammed with tourists. Twice, their boat had to slow down and pull to one side to make way for barges carrying concrete mixers and plastic-wrapped furniture, as well as sweaty, beefy workmen. Just like the lads at home, Davie thought.

  ‘Now. Close your eyes,’ said Ella, as if she had entirely forgotten their conversation in the airport. She placed her smooth, nervy fingers over his face.

  ‘And … open!’

  Davie was initially blinded by the scorching light, and disorientated by the crowded movement of boats and blue shadows. And then he fell in love. He fell out of love with Ella and in love with Venice. Giant, peach-coloured or pink palaces were all around him. On either side of the canal there were balconies, elaborately hooped windows, marble columns and bucking gondolas. Each building seemed more fantastical and exuberant than the last. A stained white fairytale bridge rose up before them. They passed underneath it, and turned another corner; to Davie the Grand Canal seemed infinitely more impressive than the Grand Canyon could possibly be. A nimble wooden bridge came into view, but their water taxi turned right before it, and came to a halt alongside an elegant little palace studded with medieval statues.

  ‘Damn,’ said Ella. ‘The best was yet to come. Never mind. This is us – the Palazzo Stern.’

  Inside, there were more statues, and ancient-looking stone columns and old mosaics. Davie couldn’t make out whether it was a real palace, or some kind of large private house owned by a mad collector. They were shown to a modestly sized room whose windows looked directly onto the canal. Still reeling from all he’d seen, Davie pulled out a wodge of glossy paper he’d been given at the department the night before. It contained a couple of passes, and pages of details about the conference. His heart sank a little. ‘I suppose we’d better go and register. We’re not here to have fun – which is lucky, considering.’

  ‘Don’t be sulky. We need to get ourselves to the other end of Castello, where the pavilion is. I guess it will be the “Biennale” stop.’

  ‘Bloody hell, you know your stuff. Who are you, Ella? You always dodge the question whenever I ask. Trustafarian?’

  ‘Something like that. We’ll t
ake a vaporetto. It’s just like catching the bus. Line 2, I think.’

  And so they passed by the Salute, and St Mark’s Square, with the Doge’s Palace looking like a strawberry confection sculpted out of cream and drunken dreams, and the two giant columns. On one, Davie recognised the Lion of Venice. On the other, an armoured thug appeared to have just defeated an enormous croissant.

  ‘A dragon,’ laughed Ella. ‘St George.’

  The conference was heralded by a huge plastic banner on a low-slung building among some trees further down the island. ‘Urbanity 22’, it read. There were metal barriers and clusters of police carrying machine guns standing around. In a gusty wind, men dressed in smart dark suits struggled to hold umbrellas over the heads of crouching, chic women. Tourists were pointing at famous faces. There were ministers and other representatives from many countries taking part, including what Ella called ‘my Americans’. After they’d registered, she disappeared off to meet them. Davie was due to attend a round-table seminar on the City of London, and to speak briefly at dinner – but neither was until the following day. On the spur of the moment, he decided to chuck the conference, leave Ella behind, and head off on his own.

  ‘I’m not bloody missing this,’ he thought to himself. If Ella was worried, so much the better.

  For the next four or five hours, Davie wandered through the maze of tiny alleys and canalside dead-ends, marvelling at the liquid beauty of the place even as he struggled to make sense of his map, and signs which appeared to point to the same destination in opposite directions. Periodically he stopped to rest his aching feet, order a coffee and read a bit more about the city. He might have been a late starter, but he was a fast and attentive reader, and bit by bit his views of Venice began to change. Ella would forever see the city through the memories of love affairs and extravagant purchases; Davie saw an entirely different place. Behind its façades and glittering stonework, this was a city of corrupt merchants, slave traders and bankers. Venice had been famous for her torturers and dungeons, her greed and her assassins, before she was famous for the nobility of her architecture. The very foundations of the place, driven into the mud of the lagoon, were smeared with blood. After the ages of cruelty and the ghetto, Venice had been a city of adultery and disease. Her real inhabitants were the giant rats scuttling along deserted alleys.

  Even as the scales dropped from his eyes, the builder in Davie was fascinated by the technical solutions to the problems of building a city on over a hundred islands in a lagoon – the deep wooden piles, with the stonework and brickwork placed on top; the soundly paved embankments around which the water moved so easily. An education. So that was why he was here. Clever Khan. So much beauty, and such devotion to a God of love: the churches, the paintings – and all of it based on the rape of rival cities, and murderous local politics. Men with daggers driven through their eyes. Bodies dumped in canals. Cheating merchants, terrifying prisons, torture, corrupt bankers. They had been efficient bastards here, all right. And then he would set off again, in another direction, vaguely aiming at something else one of the guidebooks had assured him was not to be missed, but missing it anyway, for how could you hit anything first time off in this bewildering maze?

  His mind returned to Ella’s venomous tirade at Heathrow. So she despised him. So she was only obeying orders. The Master, it seemed, hadn’t quite given up on him after all; but now, thanks to that betraying little bitch, there were incriminating pictures. To keep him in his place. Or, as Bunty would have put it, ‘to have him by the short and hairies’.

  In the dark, cramped little alleys, it seemed to Davie that the world was pressing in on him from all directions. Ella’s curved mouth, which he had once found erotic, now seemed merely part of another Venetian mask, hanging with empty eyes and painted cheeks. He had absolutely no idea who she was. She must think him a pathetic fool. But Leslie Khan was quite right. If he wanted to be a player on the stage – not this stage, not Venice, but a big stage nevertheless – then it was time to act. Davie began to turn down the corners of pages in his guidebooks, and make little notes to himself. Perhaps a kind of madness was taking him over. Detached, almost amused, he watched the dark Venetian shadows as they swarmed and flickered.

  Because of the power of the Bad Sex Awards, what happened between Davie and Ella that night must remain private. The following morning, to Ella’s surprise and annoyance, Davie failed to turn up at the conference. He arrived after lunch for the round-table, at which he performed in a lacklustre fashion, and then disappeared again.

  ‘You know I’m not your biggest fan,’ Ella told him at the dinner that evening, ‘but even I’m surprised that you’re so lazy. Just bunking off – that’s not like you.’

  ‘I wasn’t bunking off. I’ve been working.’

  He didn’t say any more about his perambulations, but concentrated on his meal – plates of tiny, deep-fried crabs and other gritty seafood. ‘Yuck,’ said Ella. ‘I told you the food here was foul.’ Davie, however, enjoyed it all – the sardines smothered in onion, and cuttlefish cooked in its own ink, rich and black and oily. Peasant food – the Venetian versions of stovies, cockles and black pudding, however handsomely they dressed it up.

  After the dinner he spoke perfectly well, but Ella thought his mind was elsewhere. He talked to her about paintings. Had she seen the Carpaccios in the Dalmatian church? He’d never realised before that Renaissance painters could be witty, even downright funny – those monks running away from the lion like a flock of scattering birds … Ella closed her ears, but she was impressed despite herself. Perhaps the man was learning after all.

  On the third day, their last in Venice, Davie surprised her again.

  ‘I want to take a boat trip. Torcello. And then Burano, perhaps?’

  ‘I don’t get it, Petrie. Torcello’s got a famous old basilica and a couple of expensive restaurants but nothing else. And so far as I remember, Burano’s just a luridly painted fishing village.’

  ‘Indulge me, Ella, this one last time. I think I can learn something over there. Prove something to myself.’

  And so, missing the final plenary session of the conference, the two of them walked through the snaking alleyways of Castello to the Fondamente Nova opposite the Isle of the Dead, with its castle-like walls and black fingers of cypress. From there, they took the Number 12 boat. Davie was carrying a rucksack Ella hadn’t noticed before. As they were clambering off the boat, she tried to lift it.

  ‘Christ, that’s heavy. What have you got in there?’

  ‘Oh, books and stuff.’

  ‘You are completely mad. What books?’

  ‘Death in Venice.’

  ‘Well, that’s short at least.’

  On Torcello, they trudged in the heat to the basilica, paid their five euros, and stood, awestruck, before the huge mosaic of the Last Judgement. Davie found himself talking about his own Catholic upbringing, and how scared he’d been of the fires of hell. Pointing out the skulls with the worms writhing through them, and the damned in the flames – Muslims, scarlet women, dirty old men – he said, ‘It still makes me shiver.’

  Ella surprised him by putting her hand in his, and squeezing it. He looked at her; she smiled very slightly.

  ‘You’re a funny one,’ she said.

  ‘You bet I am.’ He wanted no intimacy.

  They crossed back the short distance to the fishing island of Burano. Walking past the canals lined with houses painted lime green, bright orange, shocking pink and cherry red, they finally came to a scrubby beach on which a few small, decrepit fishing boats were tethered. The lagoon was a blur of grey light, the sky an oppressive glare.

  ‘You see, I’ve got an idea from all of this,’ said Davie, showing her one of his books. ‘Do me a favour, and go and take some pictures of the houses. The brightest you can find. Just half a dozen. I know you’re good at pictures.’

  After she had gone, he wandered among the boats, kicking them until he found a grubby, unloved-looking little craft w
hich he could move unaided.

  It was noon, very hot, and there was nobody around. Davie found a discarded white plastic chair and set it up on the shingle, where it sank slightly among the scrunching stones. He was sitting there when Ella returned, dangling her camera. He got up, and gestured at the chair.

  ‘I’ve got a wee surprise for you, Ella. Just take the weight off your legs, and look ahead of you. See that line of trees and buildings way in the distance? That’s the Lido. That’s where the wicked Lord Byron galloped his horses, and where Thomas Mann wrote Death in Venice. Half an hour on the oars and we could be there. Amazing, eh?’

  Those bloody books, Ella thought to herself. It was as if he’d gorged on them too quickly, and was vomiting them out again. Real politicians didn’t read books. The Master struggled to get through a Dick Francis.

  As he was talking, Davie was quietly unzipping his rucksack. He pulled out a roll of duct tape he’d found in a small general store not far from St Mark’s Square. With a throwaway knife, he cut a few inches off it. He still had a workman’s strength. Then, moving at lightning speed, he grabbed Ella under the chin, hauled her backwards and taped her mouth shut. That felt good. Ella, taken completely by surprise, didn’t have time to say a word. Tumbling backwards out of the chair, she fell heavily on the beach. Davie was on top of her almost immediately, his knee sharp and heavy in the small of her back. Calmly, deliberately, he hit her heavily across the side of the head, then taped her hands and feet together.

  ‘Sorry, Ella. Bit of a surprise? It shouldn’t be.’

  Soon, she was grunting and twisting furiously. There was blood on the stones. Unhurriedly, Davie reached back into his bag and pulled out a length of plastic rope, which he used to bind her arms and legs more tightly. He looked around. Not a soul. Good. Those pitiless saints of Venice must be looking down on him. Heaving Ella onto his shoulder, he stumbled towards the small boat and threw her into it. Then he went back, still not rushing, for his rucksack, threw that in as well, and pushed the boat down to the lagoon. The warm, salty green seawater reached up beyond his knees before the boat was afloat, but Davie barely paused. A minute later, he was rowing gently away from the island. Nobody shouted. Nobody seemed to have seen him. Fortune favours the bold. Ella lay looking at him in complete astonishment, a thin trickle of blood running from her ear.