by Unknown
He’d spent every summer here as a boy, even before his parents’ divorce, and it amazed him that, even though he hadn’t driven a boat here in more than two decades, the old routes and back-doubles came to him easily. His passenger didn’t say much. She spent most of the journey to the Lagoon Palace looking up at the tall buildings, her mouth slightly open, eyes wide. It was only when they moored the boat a short distance from the hotel’s private jetty, where only the dedicated shuttles from the bus and train stations were allowed to dock, that Ruby began to talk again.
‘So, what are the finer points of your agreement with your mother? You can’t have spent that long arguing about it without going into details.’
He sighed as he led her up a narrow cobbled calle between buildings and out onto a wider one that led to the foot entrance of the hotel. He’d known he wouldn’t be able to win his mother over to his plan from the moment he’d stepped out onto the balcony with her. He had, however, managed to broker a deal that meant his stay here would be on his terms.
‘I have conceded to spend a couple of hours each morning with Sofia while my mother is at work and to attend a family dinner each evening.’ He couldn’t help the slight tone of disgust in his voice at the word ‘family’.
She kept up pace, slightly behind him. ‘And what did she concede?’
‘That I should have the rest of the time to work on my design and do my business.’
‘Will that do?’
He stared straight ahead and looked grim. ‘It will have to.’ As they entered the hotel through the street entrance he sighed. ‘What’s the alternative? At least this way I’m only tied up for seven days, instead of two weeks or more in a totally unsuitable apartment. Aside from the fact you’d be trying to stop Sofia breaking her neck every moment of the day, I’ve only got one bedroom.’
Ruby swallowed and her face grew just a little closer to the shade of her dress. ‘No, I can see that would be a...’ she swallowed again ‘...problem.’
‘I don’t know why she does these things. For some reason my mother isn’t happy unless she’s creating havoc in everyone else’s lives as well as her own.’ He shook his head.
They’d arrived at the suite now, and the next quarter of an hour was spent packing up their belongings. And then they checked out and headed back to the boat. Max carried his bag, his laptop case and his document tube, and she took care of her own rucksack and Sofia’s bag.
He decided to take a less direct, but maybe more scenic, route back. If she’d liked the little crumbling buildings of the back canals, she’d love some of the palazzos on the Grand Canal. He pointed a few of them out to her, telling her a few of the famous stories connected with them, many of which he guessed had been embellished over time with a healthy drop of the Venetian love for drama and spectacle. She chatted back, asking him questions and laughing at the more ridiculous tales, so it kind of took him by surprise when she suddenly said, ‘I don’t think she’s done this to cause trouble, you know. I think she just wants to spend time with you and, yes, she’s gone about it a back to front kind of way, but she’s not asking anything terrible, is she?’
He didn’t say anything. Just stared straight ahead. Suddenly he didn’t feel like playing tour guide any more.
He should have remembered this one was different, that she wasn’t like his employees at the firm, that she liked to say things she shouldn’t and be inquisitive. None of them had ever dared to comment on his personal life. But then he’d never given any of them a personal tour of Venice, either.
He thought about what she’d said and let out a low growl of a laugh.
‘What?’ she asked, never one to miss an opportunity to stick her nose in.
‘Now, maybe, my mother seems like that,’ he said gruffly, ‘but she’s a hypocrite.’
Despite the bustle and noise of the city—the purr of outboard motors, the noise of the seagulls and pigeons and the ever steady hum of a million tourists’ exclamations—the air around them went very still. He’d shocked her into silence, had he? Well, good.
‘She deserted my father and left him broken-hearted. He never got over it. So don’t talk to me about family loyalty.’
He turned to look over his shoulder, wanting some grim satisfaction in seeing her squirm, but instead he found her looking at him, her eyes large and warm. He looked away again.
‘How old were you when she left?’ she asked softly, almost whispering.
He forgot to ask how she’d guessed, too caught up in a sideswipe of memories that left him gripping the steering wheel so hard it burnt his fingers. ‘Fourteen,’ he answered hoarsely. ‘She said she didn’t want to disrupt my education, so she took Gia and left me in London.’
There was a hint of uncertainty in her voice this time. ‘That was thoughtful, wasn’t it?’
He made that same almost animalistic sound that could pass as a laugh again. ‘It was an excuse. I’m too like my father, you see. Or I was. He died five months ago.’
There was a shuffling noise behind him. He couldn’t resist a quick glance. Now he’d got what he’d wanted. Her cheeks were flushed red and she was looking down at her flat little black ballet pumps.
‘Don’t get sucked in,’ he warned her. ‘She’s not what she seems. Nothing is what it seems in this city.’
* * *
Nothing is what it seems in this city.
Ruby heard the words inside her head as she stood outside the library door.
It was pure Venice, wasn’t it? To have a proper room designated as a library in your palazzo, not just a flat-pack bookcase stuffed under the eaves in your poky little attic flat. Max had decided to use it as his office while he was here, and he was inside now. She could hear him tapping away on his laptop keyboard, along with the odd rustle of paper.
Not even you, Max Martin, she thought, as she knocked softly on the door. Or should that be Massimo?
All she got in response was a grunt. She took it as an invitation.
Max didn’t look up straight away when she pushed the door open and slid inside to stand with her back pressed against the wall, hands tucked behind her. The library was small compared to some of the other rooms in the apartment, but it shared the same high ceilings and leaded windows. Two of the four walls were filled with bookshelves, and Max sat at a desk placed up against the dark green silky wallpaper of one of the other walls.
It had been a whole twenty-four hours since she’d seen him doing exactly the same thing in the hotel suite, but somehow she felt as if she were looking at a completely different man.
She’d thought him a robot, a machine, but she’d seen the bleakness in his eyes when he’d talked about his family that morning. There was a lot more inside there than met the eye. Maybe even a man with true Italian blood coursing through his veins, a man capable of revenge and passion and utter, utter devotion. The fact that the wounds of his childhood still cut deep, that he could neither forgive nor forget, showed he was capable of more than this grey, concrete existence. But like some of the crumbling buildings of this city, all that emotion was all carefully hidden behind a perfectly built façade.
He pressed the enter key with a sense of finality and turned to face her.
‘I’ve just put Sofia to bed, and I wondered if you’d like to go and say goodnight? She’s asking for you.’
His chair scraped and he moved to get up. Ruby pushed away from the wall and clasped her hands in front of her. She cleared her throat. ‘I have something to say before you go.’
He stopped moving and looked at her.
She inhaled and let it out again. ‘I’d like to apologise for what I said earlier. I didn’t mean to butt in.’
She’d expected his face to remain expressionless, but she saw a subtle shift in his features, a softening. ‘Thank you.’
He made to go forward and h
er mouth started off again before she could ask herself if it was a good idea or not. ‘I know what it’s like, you know. My relationship with my father has always been difficult. But I pretend I don’t care, that it doesn’t get to me. That it shouldn’t matter after all these years...but it does.’
She was rambling, she knew she was. But she couldn’t seem to shut up.
‘So I just wanted to say that I won’t comment on your family any more and that I’ll try and be a little bit more professional in the future.’
He’d been right. She should keep her nose out. Not in the least because this silent, dedicated man was starting to tug at her heartstrings, but also because she was just the nanny, and getting sucked in definitely wasn’t part of her job description.
He nodded and glanced towards the door. ‘I’d better go and see Sofia before she falls asleep.’ And then he walked down the wide corridor without looking back.
Ruby sagged back against the library wall and looked up. She hadn’t noticed before, but painted cherubs were dancing on the ceiling, blowing flutes and twanging harps. For some reason, she got the feeling they were mocking her.
* * *
If there was one room Max hated more than any other in his mother’s house, it was the dining room. Most people were left speechless when they walked inside for the first time, at least for a few moments, then the exclaiming would begin.
Apparently, his great-grandfather had had a fondness for whimsy, and had commissioned an artist to paint the whole room so it resembled a ruined castle in a shady forest glade. Creepers and vines twined round the doorway and round the fireplace. Low down there were painted stone blocks, making the tumbledown walls, and above, tree trunks and leaves, giving glimpses of rolling fields beyond. It even carried on up onto the ceiling, where larks peered down and a pale sun shone directly above the dining table. It was all just one big lie.
The table only filled a fraction of the vast space, even though it seated twelve. Max sat down at one of the three places laid at one end and scowled as his mother sat at the head and Ruby sat opposite him. He hadn’t liked being manoeuvred into this whole arrangement and he wasn’t going to pretend he liked it any more than he was going to pretend they were sitting in a real forest glade enjoying the dappled sunshine. He was just going to eat and get out of here. The plans he’d left on the desk only a few minutes ago were already calling to him.
‘My family were successful merchants here in Venice for five hundred years,’ his mother told Ruby as they tucked into their main course. ‘But now I live more simply and rent the other parts of the house out.’
Max saw Ruby’s eyes widen at the word ‘simply’. As always, his mother had no grip on reality, and no awareness of how other people carried on their lives. He tuned the conversation out. His mother was busy regaling Ruby with stories from the annals of their family history, both triumphant and tragic. He’d heard them a thousand times, anyway, and with each telling the details drifted further and further from the truth.
Then his mother ran out of steam and turned her attention to their guest. Well, not guest...employee. But it was hard to think of Ruby that way as she listened to his mother with rapt attention, eyes bright, laughter ready.
‘So, tell me, Ruby, why did you decide to become a nanny?’
Ruby shot a look in his direction before answering. ‘Your son offered me a job and I took it.’
Fina absorbed that information for a moment. ‘You didn’t want to be a nanny before that?’
Ruby shook her head.
‘Then what were you?’
Max sat up a little straighter. He hadn’t thought to ask her that during their ‘interview’. Maybe he should have. And maybe Ruby was annoyingly right about details being important on occasion.
Ruby smiled back at his mother. ‘Oh, I’ve been lots of things since I left university.’
He leaned forward and put his fork down. ‘What course did you take?’
‘Media Studies.’
Max frowned. ‘But you don’t want to work in that field, despite having the qualification?’
She pulled a face. ‘I didn’t graduate. It was my father’s idea to go.’ She shook her head. ‘But it really wasn’t me.’
His mother shot her a sympathetic look. ‘Not everyone works out the right path first time.’
Max snorted. If these dinners had been his mother’s plan to soften him up, it was backfiring on her. Every other word she uttered just reminded him of how she’d selfishly betrayed the whole family. She might not have been a Martin by birth, but she’d married into the institution, and if there was one rule the family lived by it was this: loyalty above all else.
If his mother had heard the snort, she ignored it. ‘You must have had some interesting jobs,’ she said to Ruby, smiling.
Ruby smiled back. ‘Oh, I have, and it’s been great. I’ve made jewellery and I worked in a vineyard.’
‘In France?’ Fina asked.
Ruby shook her head. ‘No, in Australia. I did that the year after I left university. And then I just sort of travelled and worked my way back home again. I tended bar in Singapore, worked on a kibbutz in Israel. I did a stint in a PR firm, I joined an avant-garde performance company—that was too wacky, even for me—and I’ve also busked to earn a crust.’
His mother’s eyebrows were practically in her hairline. ‘You play an instrument?’ she asked, taking the only salvageable thing from that list.
Ruby gave her a hopeful smile. ‘I can manage a harmonica and a bit of tap dancing.’
Lord, help them all! And this was who he’d thought was exactly what he needed? No wonder his sensible plan was falling to pieces.
‘And will you stay being a nanny after this? Or is it on to the next thing?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I know this sounds stupid, but I see the way my father loves his work, and I want to find something that makes me feel like that.’
His mother leaned forward. ‘What does your father do?’
Ruby froze, as if she realised she’d said something she shouldn’t. She looked up at them. ‘Oh, he makes nature programmes.’
‘What? Like Patrick Lange?’ his mother exclaimed, clapping her hands. ‘I loved his series on lemurs! It was fascinating.’
‘Something like that,’ Ruby mumbled.
Now it was Max’s turn to freeze. Lange?
‘Your father’s Patrick Lange?’ he asked, hardly able to keep the surprise from his voice. The man seemed such a steady kind of guy. Max could hardly believe he had a daughter like Ruby.
She nodded and returned to eating her pasta.
‘How marvellous,’ his mother gushed and then the smile disappeared from her face. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about your mother, Ruby. It was such a tragedy. She was such a wonderful woman.’
Ruby kept her head down and nodded.
Max racked his brains. There had been a news story... Oh, maybe fifteen years ago? That was it. Martha and Patrick Lange had always presented their nature documentaries together until she’d contracted some tropical disease in a remote location while filming. She’d reassured everyone she was fine, that it was just a touch of flu, and had carried on, reluctant to abandon the trip. By the time they’d realised what it was, and that she’d needed urgent treatment, it had been too late. She’d died in an African hospital a week later.
Max watched Ruby push her pasta around her plate. He knew what it was like to lose a parent, and it had been bad enough in his early thirties. Ruby could have only been...what? Nine or ten?
‘Anyway,’ Ruby suddenly said, lifting her head and smiling brightly. ‘I’d like to find my perfect fit. My niche.’
His mother, who had finished her meal, put her knife and fork on her plate and nodded. ‘There’s no sense in doing something if your heart isn’t in i
t.’
There she went again. He’d just about forgotten about being angry with her for a moment, distracted by Ruby’s sad story, but she had to dig herself another hole, didn’t she? It just proved she would never change.
His mother must have noticed the expression on his face, because she stopped smiling at Ruby and sent him a pleading look. He carried on eating his pasta. She tried to smile, even though her eyes glistened in the light from the chandelier.
‘Well, maybe being a nanny will be your niche. You’re a natural with Sofia.’
‘Thank you, Fina.’ Ruby smiled, properly this time, and the gloom of her previous expression was chased away. How did she do that? How did she just let it all float away like that, find the joy in life again?
‘Massimo wanted to be an architect since he’d got his first set of building blocks,’ his mother said. Her face was clear of the hurt he’d seen a few moments ago, but he could hear the strain in her voice. ‘He always wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps.’ She turned to him. ‘He would have been so proud to know you’d secured the commission for the Institute of Fine—’
Max’s chair shot back as he stood to his feet. ‘Don’t you dare presume to speak for my father,’ he said through clenched teeth. His insides were on fire, yet his skin felt as cold as ice. ‘In fact, I’d rather you didn’t mention him at all in my presence.’
And then he turned and strode from the room.
CHAPTER SIX
MAX STARED AT SOFIA, who was currently sitting on one of his mother’s sofas, staring at him expectantly. Gone was the sunshine of the previous day, replaced by a low, drizzly fog. It would probably clear up by the afternoon, but that didn’t help him now.