by Anne Weale
‘Did you enjoy the flight?’
She opened her eyes to find Marc seating himself beside her, crossing his long legs and raising his arms to rest them on the back of the seat in the same relaxed posture as the pilots.
‘Very much, thank you. We had some wonderful views of the Alps, didn’t we?’
He nodded. ‘I like flying over mountains on a sunny day. But the snow on the Dolomites gives a razor edge to the wind when it blows from that direction.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ she said.
‘You had some cold weather last time?’
It was her turn to nod, hoping he wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t enquire into the duration of her visit. When the time was right she would explain about ‘last time’, but this wasn’t the appropriate moment.
As Venice came into view Marc said, ‘There she is…La Serenissima.’
His caressing tone and the smile at the corners of his mouth struck Sophie as being like of a man who had just seen, in the distance, the woman he loved coming towards him. She wondered if any woman had ever made him look like that, or if his deepest feelings were reserved for what the poet Byron had called a ‘fairy city of the heart’.
The walled island, where Venetians were buried, and the city’s northern waterfronts were as familiar to her as the streets of West Side New York. She felt her throat tightening again and was thankful she was wearing sunglasses.
Approaching the canal which would take them through the city to the wider and busier waterfront on the south side, the boatman reduced speed. As they cruised slowly past old buildings, the paint on the flaking stucco faded to the hues which made Venice a Mecca for artists, Sophie felt something close to ecstasy. She was back…and suddenly it felt as if she had never been away.
Marc said, ‘Your hotel is near the Danieli, but smaller and cosier. A family-run place like the restaurant last night. I thought for the first week or two you would be more comfortable there. Later, if you wish, we can find you an apartment.’
Until he spoke she had assumed she would be housed in the palazzo, perhaps in the old servants’ quarters. For presumably Venetian palazzi, like the stately homes of England, were run differently now from the days when for many people domestic service had been the only option. But perhaps, for a man of Marc’s means, finding household staff was as easy as recruiting office staff, and his forebears’ palace still had its full quota of minions.
On the jetty where they put in, a youth with a baggage trolley was waiting to take her suitcase from the boatman. Sophie said goodbye to the others and then turned to find that Marc was already on the jetty, waiting to take her hand as she stepped from the swaying launch to the weathered planks of the landing stage.
She had felt the strength in his fingers when they’d shaken hands the day before yesterday, and today his grip was even firmer. The wash of a vaporetto arriving at a nearby stop made the launch tilt more forcefully just as she was leaving it.
The water had always been boisterous along this part of the Riva, where there was a lot of traffic coming, going and passing. From lack of recent practice Sophie misjudged the manoeuvre. She sprang up with enough vigour to have made her lose her balance on landing if Marc hadn’t hooked a steadying arm round her waist.
For an instant she leaned against him before pulling upright. ‘I’m sorry…how clumsy. Thank you.’
‘Any time.’
The amused look he slanted down at her gave a nuance to his reply which threw her into confusion. She walked quickly along the jetty in the wake of the youth with the trolley.
The hotel to which he led them had a pavement caffè outside it. In the shade of an awning, tourists were writing postcards and drinking coffee and beer.
The lobby was very different from the one in Paris. At present it was piled with the luggage of departing guests, some of whom were standing about waiting to pay their bills. However, when the proprietor saw Marc, he left the desk to shake hands and be introduced.
‘Your room is ready for you, signorina,’ he said, in good English. ‘Forgive me for not showing it to you but, as you can see, you have come at a busy time. The boy will take you up and I will talk to you later.’
She looked up at Marc. ‘When do you want me to start work? This afternoon?’
‘I’ve been away for some time. I must attend to family matters and you need time to settle in. Spend tomorrow finding your feet and start work the next day,’ he said. ‘We’ll begin by going to Capolavoro. Be on the same jetty at nine.’
Sophie watched him stride from the lobby, the brightness outdoors giving a sheen to his thick dark hair as he stepped into the sunlight and, a few moments later, was gone.
As she followed the baggage porter upstairs she was aware of disappointment that she wouldn’t see him again till the day after tomorrow. An absurd reaction when there was nothing she wanted more than to rediscover Venice. A day and a half to explore was a bounty she hadn’t expected.
CHAPTER FIVE
TOWARDS the end of the afternoon Sophie was returning to the albergo when she caught sight of a man she had known when he was a small boy, with untidy black curls and a mischievous grin.
Now most of his hair was hidden by the red-ribboned straw hat of a gondolier. This was not unexpected. Paolo’s father and grandfather had been gondoliers and it was traditional for the skills required to steer the elegant boats around the labyrinth of canals to be handed down from father to son.
What did surprise her was that the skinny boy had grown into a strongly built man, and a handsome one too.
When she first saw him, he was trying to persuade an elderly couple to take a ride in his gondola. After they had shaken their heads and walked on Paolo turned to see if any more prospective customers were among the people coming towards the small hump-backed bridge where he was stationed.
When he spotted Sophie, his first glance was that of a man assessing a woman rather than a gondolier looking for a likely customer. He took in her small waist and her long legs—this afternoon she was wearing dark blue jeans with a checked shirt—and his smile reappeared.
‘For you, signorina, I make a special price,’ he said to her, in English.
However, although he had guessed correctly that she was English-speaking, he obviously had no idea that he was speaking to his first teacher of that language.
‘How special?’ Sophie asked.
‘Very cheap. Only half the official price, because I enjoy showing my city to pretty ladies…especially when they have eyes like the sea in summer,’ he added, with a wicked look from his own black eyes.
‘You’re a poet as well as a gondolier,’ she said, smiling, wondering how he would have described her eyes had they been brown or grey. Later, when she had told him who she was, she would ask him.
‘I am also a singer,’ he told her. ‘I have a very good voice. If you come with me, I will sing to you.’
The heads of passers-by turned as he suddenly burst into song, his strong baritone resounding in the narrow street bisected by the canal flowing under the bridge. Translated from the Italian, the words meant, ‘Lovely lady, don’t break my heart by spurning my devotion.’ It sounded like a line from an opera, although Sophie didn’t recognise the tune. Or perhaps he had made it up.
‘When I sing, everyone listens,’ Paolo told her. ‘Not like the “serenades” on the Grand Canal.’ He put his forefingers in his ears and contorted his face into a grimace of revulsion.
Earlier that afternoon, Sophie had returned to a secluded spot on the Grand Canal, a pleasant corner of the city which non-Venetians found only by accident. There she had perched on a sunny doorstep to watch the water traffic.
Presently three gondolas had come past in line abreast, each packed with as many tourists as they would hold as well as an accordionist and an elderly tenor, their voices long past their best. The music hadn’t been quite as ear-splitting as Paolo’s mime suggested, but she had to admit it hadn’t compared with his short burst of song.
&
nbsp; She said, ‘I should be embarrassed by the attention you’d attract.’
‘Even if I don’t sing people will look at us—especially at you. When did you arrive in Venice? Where are you staying?’
‘I arrived this morning. I’m staying on the Riva degli Schiavoni.’ This wasn’t telling him much. There were many hotels on the Riva, catering to every budget level.
‘You are not with a group. And if you were here with a lover he would be with you. I think you are here with your parents, who are resting after the journey. If you live in the north of England, a long way from an airport, you had to leave home very early, perhaps before it was daylight.’
‘You know a lot about tourists, but you haven’t got it right this time. I’m on my own,’ said Sophie, wondering if he was married now and chatting up female tourists was merely his stock-in-trade.
Paolo had been leaning against the parapet of the bridge. Now he stood up, ‘It’s time I took a break. I’ll walk you back to the Riva and tell you about some nice places you won’t find by yourself.’
‘What about your gondola?’ she asked, glancing down at the graceful black craft moored alongside the bridge. It was in immaculate order, the sofa upholstered in dark red velvet with matching fringed cushions on the two armchairs facing the stern.
‘Nobody is going to steal it. It is not like a speedboat, which any fool can drive if he can start the motor. To steer a gondola is an art. It takes years of practice. Come—I’ll show you a short-cut. If you go by the Piazza you will have to push through the crowd on the Ponte della Paglia. Every tourist who comes to Venice wants to photograph the Bridge of Sighs from what you would call the Bridge of Straw. One day it will break under the weight of so many people. At this time of day that bridge is impossible.’
‘So I noticed on my way out.’ Sophie didn’t reveal that she already knew the short-cut he was proposing and had once known Venice as intimately as he did. For a moment she was enjoying the masquerade and looking forward to seeing his astonished stare when she revealed herself. She was also looking forward to asking him about Marc. Paolo would be sure to know something about her employer. The activities of the palazzo owners had always been food for gossip in the city.
She wondered how Marc would react if he could see her now, being escorted by a handsome gondolier. It was unlikely they would run into him. If he was out and about this afternoon, it would be in the smart part of Venice, where the banks and the fashionable shops were congregated.
The street they were following was too narrow for more than one person to pass someone coming the other way. Paolo had to walk close behind her until it opened out into one of the many squares called campi.
‘If not from the north, where are you from?’ he asked. ‘London?’
‘I’ve worked in London. I like it, but it’s choked with traffic. It’s pleasanter here, with no cars.’
‘All the tourists say that. Listen, if you’re alone, why don’t you have dinner with me? It’s not nice for a girl to have to go to a restaurant on her own in a strange city.’
‘That’s an old-fashioned idea. Modern women don’t mind going about on their own and I’m told Venice is very safe.’
‘Yes, but it’s more enjoyable to have someone to talk to while you eat your dinner, don’t you think?’
‘Don’t you have a wife to talk to you?’
‘I’m not married. I’m still looking.’
Having crossed the campo diagonally, they entered an even narrower street which for several yards was roofed like a tunnel by the building spanning it.
‘My name is Paolo Sarto. What’s yours?’ he asked.
She told him without much fear that it would give the game away. Before, he had known her as Kit, a shortened form of a pet name.
‘Sophie is nice. It suits you. It sounds gentle and sweet.’
‘How come you speak such good English?’
‘I speak all the tourists’ languages, even some Japanese. It’s necessary. I have to tell them about the buildings we pass, about the history of Venice.’
He did not explain his exceptional fluency in her language. Perhaps he had forgotten those early lessons. They were a long time ago.
Outside her hotel, he said he would come for her at a quarter to seven. Sophie didn’t demur. She wasn’t sure that she would have done even if he had been unknown to her.
She wouldn’t have allowed herself to be picked up by a stranger in New York, London or even Bordeaux. But Venice was different. As a group, gondoliers were no less predatory than other men. If they sensed that female tourists were easy conquests, probably some of them made the most of their opportunities. But their ranks were unlikely to include anyone violent. She would have felt safe having dinner with one of them even if she hadn’t already met his parents, grandparents and numerous aunts and cousins.
Paolo was wearing ordinary clothes when he came for her. Without the straw hat his hair showed thick and curly, but better cut now than when his elder sister, then an apprentice hairdresser, had been his barber.
Sophie had changed her jeans for a short black pleated skirt, opaque black tights and a pale grey cable-patterned sweater with some mohair in it. Although it was hot during the day, after dark the temperature dropped.
‘We are going to my aunt’s place,’ Paolo told her. ‘Tourists tell me the food in Venice isn’t as good as they find in the rest of Italy, but at Tia Angelita’s restaurant you will eat like a princess.’
Sophie remembered his aunt and was certain Tia Angelita would quickly recognise her. Years ago, she had often remarked on the colour of Sophie’s eyes.
‘You don’t remember me, do you, Paolo?’ she said as they emerged from an alley into the campo dominated by the majestic church of San Zaccaria.
‘Remember you?’ He looked disconcerted. ‘When were you here before? I thought it was your first time.’
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t think you would ever forget me,’ she added, with an exaggerated sigh.
His look of alarm amused her. She could almost hear his brain whirring as he scanned all the girls in his memory for some recollection of her. As he searched wildly for a way to extricate himself from his embarrassing situation she let him squirm for a minute before ending his discomfiture.
‘You never used my real name. You used to know me as Kit…short for Kitten. Don’t you remember the Englishman who drew caricatures of the tourists? We had a pitch on the Riva. There’s a bead stall there now.’
Paolo’s forehead wrinkled. ‘I remember the old English artist and the girl who looked like a boy…But you can’t be her…can you?’ He gave her a long searching look. ‘Mamma mia! How you’ve changed. Who could believe you would grow up to be so beautiful?’
Suddenly seizing hold of her, he gave her the kind of hearty kisses exchanged by close family members after long separations.
Sophie didn’t mind being hugged. She liked it. But when Paolo went on to give her a kiss on the lips she pulled back in laughing protest at his quickness to turn the tables and take playful revenge for the trick she had played on him.
‘You’ll shock the old ladies…kissing in public,’ she said as two smartly dressed elderly women, arm in arm on their evening stroll, came towards them.
‘They aren’t shocked. They are wishing they were young again,’ Paolo said irrepressibly.
And indeed the two stately signoras taking their passeggiata, a ritual of Venetian life whenever the weather encouraged a leisurely promenade, were looking faintly amused by the young Italian’s spontaneous display of affection.
‘I still can’t believe how beautifully you have grown up,’ Paolo said in his own language, when, several hours later, they passed through the same square after a filling meal at his aunt’s restaurant and Sophie’s reunion with that branch of his family.
His father, Sophie had been sorry to hear, had died two years earlier. His mother was living with a married daughter at Mestre, the industrial town on the shore of the mainland
to which many Venetians had moved for jobs in the industries there and for more modern housing.
‘You’ve improved too,’ said Sophie. ‘But why aren’t you married like the others?’
‘There’s plenty of time. For a man there is never any hurry. Why aren’t you married?’
‘I’ve been too busy with my career. I’m not here on holiday, Paolo. I shall be working. Have you heard of a man called Marc Washington? His mother was Venetian.’
‘Everyone’s heard of him. He’s one of the richest men in Venice. His father was an American millionaire who fell in love with the daughter of the old Marchese Cassiano. They were all compulsive gamblers, that family. The Palazzo Cassiano was falling to bits due to lack of money to repair it. Then the daughter bewitched this rich Yank and they had one of the grandest weddings this city has ever seen. Mamma’s described it to us a thousand times. But a year later she was dead—the bride, I mean. Died in childbirth…And a few years after that her husband drank himself to death.’
‘How dreadful.’
It explained why Marc’s only family references were to his grandfather, thought Sophie. He hadn’t known his parents. She could empathise with that. She hadn’t known hers either. But what she did know was that during her parents’ few years together they had been deeply happy. The transcript of the tape-recorded log of their last voyage was proof that they had been enjoying life until shortly before the storm which had capsized their boat a few hundred miles from the finish of an ocean race they had been expected to win.
‘Why are you interested in Washington?’ Paolo asked.
‘He’s my boss. I’m his personal assistant in Venice, starting the day after tomorrow. He has PAs all over the world—wherever the business empire he inherited operates. I was recruited in New York and met him for the first time the day before yesterday. We flew here together.’