‘Darling … wonderful to see you.’
‘Ciao, come stai? Si, tante grazie …’
‘Cherie, ça va? Et ta famille? Bien, oui, moi aussi!’
Laura felt like a newcomer to the Tower of Babel, and a very underdressed newcomer at that. She was wearing no jewellery and her little black dress was far from eye-catching. She was totally out of place, she shouldn’t have come.
All her buried anxiety rose up inside her and she wished she was back in her childhood home, the old farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall with a long, rolling view in front and behind it, the green hillsides of northern England, backboned in rock, scattered with thorn trees that sang in the wind. Whenever she was unhappy or frightened that landscape comforted her. It had outlasted the Roman Empire, the British Empire, seen suns rise and set for thousands of years, it dwarfed all her fears and griefs and put them into perspective.
Melanie came bustling back. ‘The porter’s taking our bags up to our rooms. Ready?’
Laura pressed the button for the lift. ‘Which floor are we on?’
Melanie didn’t answer. She was staring across the foyer. Her scarlet mouth hung open. ‘Oh, my God, no!’
Idly Laura followed her stare until she saw the face that had caught Melanie’s attention. The hair on the back of her neck prickled; her skin turned icy with shock. Sebastian. Walking towards them, in his usual working gear of well-washed but shabby jeans, a white shirt under an olive green sweater, army-style, with patches on shoulders and elbows. Some in that glittering crowd turned to stare at him, stepping back to let him pass.
‘Where the hell is that lift?’ muttered Melanie. She put her thumb on the button and kept it there. ‘Come on, damn you, come on.’
He looked so much older. Laura couldn’t believe how much he had changed. When they first met he had been only thirty-one, his skin a smooth golden olive, his black hair thick and sleek, his features so hard and clear they might have been chiselled from stone, high cheekbones and temples, an aquiline nose, and above it those bright, dark eyes.
He looked forty now, but could only be thirty-five. Deep lines had been etched into his brow, around his eyes and mouth; his facial bones showed through his skin, giving him the austere, spare look of a monk.
There were silvery hairs among the black at his temples, his mouth was tighter, reined in, tension in the set of it and in the angle of jaw and throat. Everyone who ever worked with him would agree that Sebastian Ferrese was an arrogant, brilliant, dangerous son-of-a-bitch, and it showed now in that face, as if the rock of his nature, which had once been masked by the beauty of his youth, had risen up into view with the passage of time.
On the other side of the room Laura noted a little cluster of people whose faces she knew – Sebastian’s favourite camera man, Sidney McKenna, a quiet, introverted man with a bald head and the blank, sea-gazing eyes of a sailor, Valerie Hyde, and several others from the crew with whom she had worked on her first film. Sebastian surrounded himself with people he respected and trusted. They would all have been with him in South America. Maybe some of them had been nominated for awards, too.
‘Come on,’ Melanie urged, tugging at her arm. ‘The lift’s here.’
Laura turned blindly, but as she did so Sebastian grabbed her other arm with long, tense fingers that bit into her and would not be easily dislodged.
‘We’re in a hurry.’ Melanie would not let go; she was determined to pull Laura into the lift.
Sebastian wouldn’t let go either. ‘Laura, I have to talk to you.’
She quivered at the sound of his voice – deep, faintly hoarse. How familiar, how oddly American, when she had begun to expect him to sound Italian here in Venice – but, then, he had lived in the States for so long.
Somewhere a flash-bulb exploded, then Laura felt the heat of television arc-lamps on her cheek and realised that a TV crew had spotted them and swung their camera round to start filming.
Melanie saw them, too, and ground her teeth audibly. ‘That’s all we need!’ she muttered. ‘Look, will you let go of her and bugger off, Sebastian? Haven’t you done enough harm? If her name gets linked with yours again, it could ruin her. At this stage of her career the wrong gossip could be fatal.’
Sebastian’s eyes flashed at her, black with rage, but he let go, Melanie tugged, and Laura almost fell into the lift. The doors closed and a second later they were gone.
As the lift rushed upward Laura leant against the wall, trembling. She had seen him. He had touched her. Nothing had changed.
Melanie watched her worriedly. ‘That was bloody bad luck. Don’t worry, I’ll be around while we’re here. Just don’t let anyone into your room until you’ve checked through the spy-hole, don’t answer the phone, and don’t go anywhere without me, okay?’
Laura didn’t answer. Her face was white, her green eyes jagged with fear, shards of broken glass.
‘Did you see the way people were staring at him?’ asked Melanie. ‘And those who didn’t look made it just as obvious. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. They all think he did it, Laura. He’s got away with murder and the whole world knows it.’
The lift stopped, they got out and walked down to where the porter had unlocked their adjoining rooms and was waiting with their luggage.
‘I never thought I’d say this … but any other time or place I’d have been thrilled to have TV people interested in you, but not if it means you getting mixed up with that bastard again.’ Melanie sighed. ‘Oh, well, there are so many big names here, it probably won’t make it on to the screen.’ She paused. ‘You believe he killed her, don’t you? You wouldn’t be so scared of him if you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t say I was scared of him.’
‘You didn’t need to. You looked terrified.’
Because I was, but not because I think he’s a killer. I was terrified because I wanted him so badly, thought Laura, and walked into the room at whose open door the porter stood.
He asked, ‘Please, your case, which?’
‘That one,’ Melanie told him, pointing. He carried it to a stand at the end of Laura’s bed, talking all the time in his broken English, telling them how to switch on the television, operate the air-conditioning, where to find the minibar.
Melanie stood at the door, her face clouded. ‘Are you going to be okay? Do you want me to stay?’
‘No, I’m fine.’ Laura managed to hold her voice steady.
‘Are you sure?’
Laura gave her a brief look. ‘Yes.’
Reluctantly Melanie moved away. She called back, ‘Have a shower, rest on your bed for half an hour, then we’ll have a trip over to the city and do some window-shopping and sightseeing, okay?’
Laura tipped the porter, who bowed and murmured, ‘Grazie tante, grazie,’ before leaving to show Melanie into her room next door.
Alone at last, Laura walked slowly to the window to gaze out at the sunlit view. Heat made the horizon dance, dazzling her eyes, making her head ache.
Her mouth was dry, her body burning; passion and fear darkened the sea and sky for her, blotted out the sun.
If she had known he would be here she would never have come to Venice.
When she had met Sebastian, Laura was working in London as a model and living in a flat in Islington, a large, northern suburb of the city. Her parents still lived in the old grey farmhouse just below Hadrian’s Wall, which she missed intolerably in the cold, grey, dirty streets of the city. Her mother and father had not approved of her becoming a model: they had wanted her to go to college or get married, like her sister, Angela, who had trained as a nurse before she married Hamish, a doctor working in general practice in Carlisle. Somehow Angela managed to fit having children and running a home into a busy life as one of the nurses in the health centre Hamish worked for, and that was the sort of useful, satisfying life John and Lucy Erskine had wanted for Laura. A life much like their own.
She might well have ended up as they hoped, except that during Laura’
s last year at school she had met a man … As Bogart says in Casablanca, ‘How many stories start with that?’
I met a man when I was young … Immediately you have forebodings, don’t you? You imagine seduction, rape, the ruin of a life. But you would be wrong. Laura had met Bernie Piper on the Roman wall one bright spring day. She was there with a group from school, doing a sponsored walk to raise money for new computers for the science lab. Bernie lived in London, a busy, successful fashion photographer, but he was on holiday that week, exploring the architecture on the wall, since Roman history was one of his many interests.
Laura and her classmates walked past him in a brisk crocodile following the up-hill down-dale path while Bernie stood above the path, watching. He began to follow the girls, staring at Laura.
‘Dirty old man,’ her best friend, Ellen, said, loudly enough for him to hear, and the other girls giggled.
Laura turned salmon pink, as his eyes wandered from the top of her head, where her long red-gold hair was pinned in a neat bun, down over her distinctly skinny body to the legs that she privately thought looked like the roots of a plant, long and thin and pallid after the winter.
She was five foot nine, taller than anyone else in her class. Her height put boys off: who wants to go out with a giantess? Laura knew she was ugly and clumsy; she would have given her eye-teeth to be a demure five foot three, with a sexy, curvy figure.
The teacher shepherding them turned to give Bernie a cold, reproving look, and he pretended to be taking pictures of the view, his expensive camera raised, while the girls continued their walk for another half-hour before stopping to eat the packed lunch each had brought.
Breathless and overheated, Laura undid the top buttons on her shirt and tucked the hem into her bra to let the air get to her bare midriff. She was lying back, eating a cheese and tomato sandwich, when her friends nudged her. ‘Hey, look – it’s him again! He followed us. Well, followed you, anyway.’
Looking up, Laura blinked as Bernie took a rapid succession of pictures of her.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ The gym teacher Mrs Heinz, who was their chaperone that day, marched up to him, bristling. Short and muscled with crew-cut hair and a ginger moustache when she forgot to wax it, she was full of energy and often aggressive and overbearing. ‘Stop that at once and go away, or I’ll call the police!’
Bernie shrugged and went, but a week later he drove up to Laura’s home with a pile of glossy photos.
When she saw them she was silent. Was that really her, that beautiful girl with pale breasts partially visible at the open neck of her shirt, lying back against a bed of long grass, her eyes half closed, languid and sultry?
Her face went bright red. She was so hot she could scarcely breathe, and she felt embarrassed, with her parents staring at the pictures then at her. What were they thinking?
Then she had wondered how he had made her look like that. And how he had got her name and address. That gave her a sense of Bernie’s ominiscience, which never quite left her even when she knew him well and had discovered that he had asked one of the other girls which school they had come from. When he had processed the pictures he had gone there, had waited until some girls came out, shown then the photos and found out who Laura was that way. Simple when you know how.
It had taken her parents quite a while to get over their first view of those pictures. When Bernie had talked about a modelling career for Laura, her mother’s reaction had been immediate. ‘She’s far too young. And even if she wasn’t I wouldn’t want her to get involved in that sort of life. She’s going to college.’
Bernie ignored her and said to Mr Erskine, ‘The camera loves her – I knew it would, the minute I set eyes on her. It’s the bone structure. She could have a brilliant career as a model, earn a fortune.’
Laura’s father was a shrewd, down-to-earth man who had had to work hard from dawn till dusk to earn his daily bread. ‘What sort of money are we talking about?’ he asked.
Bernie grinned, knowing that the fish had taken his bait. ‘The sky’s the limit, if she gets taken up by all the magazines and advertisers. She could be making a hundred thousand a year, or it could go up to a million.’
‘A million?’ Laura’s father had been impressed, his eyes brightening. Then, catching his wife’s angry, disapproving eye, he added, ‘But she’s still at school, you know, and we couldn’t let her leave until she’s taken her exams.’
Mrs Erskine interrupted angrily, ‘She isn’t going to be a model, now or later. She should never have posed for those disgusting pictures in the first place!’
‘She’s a natural, she didn’t need to pose. I just took pictures of her as she was and look at the result! Stunning, isn’t she? A beautiful girl. She takes after you, I can see that.’
He had wasted his flattery. ‘She’s too young and I won’t have her going off to London!’ Mrs Erskine snapped.
Bernie turned back to her husband. ‘If you’re worried I’ll find someone to chaperone her. I’m a happily married man, Mr Erskine. I see beautiful girls all day long. I don’t have to chase after them, they chase after me. I swear to you, your daughter will be as safe with me as if she was my own kid. I think it would be a crying shame if she didn’t get her chance. She has terrific potential – I’m convinced she could get to the top and make a fortune.’
Laura had never had any self-confidence about her looks so she had never even daydreamed about being a model. She couldn’t believe the startling metamorphosis Bernie had wrought in her, changing the gangling schoolgirl she knew from her mirror into a languid-eyed siren, but nothing would have stopped her grabbing Bernie’s offer with both hands.
‘I want to do it,’ she said, an obstinate expression settling over her eyes and mouth. ‘I don’t want to go to college, I want to be a model, if he says I can.’
She had to finish her exams first, however, because neither of her parents would hear of her leaving before the end of that school year. Her mother hoped she might change her mind, and continued throughout those months to point out she was not a swan but an ugly duckling, clumsy, graceless, awkward.
‘You’ll never be pretty, so don’t let that man pull the wool over your eyes. I don’t know what his game is, but I don’t trust him. Don’t be a fool, Laura. Go to college, get a good education and a good job afterwards.’
But Laura was counting the days. She couldn’t wait to leave for London and get away from her mother’s drip, drip, drip of criticism.
When she began modelling, success came almost immediately and, with it, temptations of the kind her parents had feared, but Laura was always too tired to stay out late after working all day on her feet, and the clubs only began to swing at around ten or eleven at night. She wasn’t attracted by smoky nightclubs, drugs or drink. She had one or two brief relationships with men, but they didn’t mean much to her. She had fun with them, enjoyed their company, but never fell in love. Then, when she was twenty-one, she was chosen to be the ‘face’ of a famous perfume house for a year.
‘You’ll have to turn down any other offers during the run of the contract. We can’t have your face appearing anywhere else,’ she was told. ‘That’s why you’ll be paid such big fees. You can’t earn anything from anyone else. From now on you’re ours exclusively.’
She didn’t hesitate – the money involved was far too big and the coverage was saturating. Everywhere she went Laura saw her own face, huge and terrifying, barely recognisable at that size, staring down from billboards. She saw it on the backs of glossy magazines, alive and shimmering on television screens – you couldn’t miss it unless you lived on a desert island. It made it impossible for her to go out alone.
She couldn’t walk through the streets, take a peaceful stroll in one of the beautiful London parks, visit Harrods or Selfridges. She was driven everywhere, and suddenly acquired minders: big, muscled men with faces like scrubbed turnips who could toss people aside as if they were matchsticks.
The casual, light
-hearted relationships she had had with young men, more friends than lovers, ended – the strain of being followed everywhere by the paparazzi made them irritable, and none of them wished to see themselves photographed with her and speculated about in the tabloid gossip columns.
‘It’s like being under siege! I’m sick of it!’ she complained to Bernie.
‘Go back home for a while, visit your family. It’s time for some rest and recuperation,’ he advised, and that was what she did. It felt strange, at first, to be back there, treated as a child again, with her parents, in the wild, green, lonely places of her childhood after the four years she had spent in London, but she gradually felt her pulse slow to the quiet beat of days that were always the same.
Since the moment when she had first met Bernie, Laura had believed in fate. You could call it chance, good luck, or pure coincidence, but whatever it was Laura believed some agency operated in her life that made the wheels of opportunity turn and directed her along the right path. During those days in the old farmhouse she felt as it she was drifting, waiting for a tide to turn and carry her onward. She didn’t know what she wanted to do next, she simply felt that a future was waiting for her, to which she would shortly be directed. Meanwhile she read new novels, watched TV, helped her mother feed the animals and cook, went walking across the hills to gaze in breathless pleasure at the landscape, the heather moorland and green valleys, the bony hills, the clouds tearing overhead.
Sometimes she visited her sister in Carlisle, played with her little nephew and nieces, baby-sat while Hamish and Angela had an evening out. One day she took her parents with her. They had lunch with Angela and the children, and in the evening went to the local cinema to see Back Streets, a film about gangsters in Chicago, full of vice and drugs and murder. Mr and Mrs Erskine hated the film, wanted to leave half-way through, but although it was so violent it was witty and melancholy, full of insight, and Laura was deeply impressed by it.
‘Who made it, anyway?’ demanded her father, as they drove home afterwards, along dark, mostly empty roads through remote villages.
Deep and Silent Waters Page 3