Sophie's Secret

by Anne Weale

  Evidently the other gondolier had understood his passenger’s last remark. In the Venetian dialect, he said to Paolo, ‘They all complain about prices. They have no values, these people. To ride through Venice in a gondola is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. When my sons are men it may no longer be possible. These stupid people should be grateful they can afford to come here. Do they think we want millions of them invading our unique city?’ He looked at Sophie, his expression softening. ‘She’s pretty. You always get the pretty ones. I get the fat, ugly ones.’

  ‘Would you rather work on an assembly line in a factory in Mestre?’ Paolo asked him as the other gondola was disappearing from view.

  ‘The prices here are rather steep,’ Sophie remarked.

  ‘We have to cover the months when we don’t make any money. It’s a vicious circle,’ said Paolo. ‘Without the tourists the city would fall into ruins, but now there are too many of them. In the old days they stayed longer and enjoyed themselves more. At this season it’s not so bad, but in the summer…a madhouse!’

  But the square where he stopped the gondola was an oasis of peace, with only a few local people enjoying the last of the sunlight at the tables outside a caffè.

  When he had ordered their drinks, he said, ‘Why did you have to work today? I thought you weren’t starting till tomorrow?’

  ‘My boss changed his mind. Paolo, you shouldn’t have come to the palazzo. I don’t have fixed working hours like other people. A PA’s hours are elastic.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me your boss was a young man. I haven’t seen him before. I thought he was much older. Didn’t you want him to know you have a boyfriend?’ he said shrewdly.

  ‘You’re a friend, not a boyfriend,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Have you grown so grand since you left us that a gondolier isn’t good enough for you any more?’

  ‘Your job has nothing to do with it. We were close as children, but now we’re two grown-up people who don’t really know each other. I’ve changed and I’m sure you have. Life is more complicated now than it was all those years ago.’

  ‘For you, perhaps. Not for me. What are you looking for, Kit?’

  ‘I’m Sophie now,’ she reminded him. ‘At the moment I’m not looking for anything. Having just landed an exceptional job, I have to concentrate on doing it well. Marc Washington is a very demanding employer. If I don’t come up to scratch, he’ll replace me.’

  Their drinks came: a beer for him, spritz al bitter for her. It tasted subtly different from the one in Paris. Perhaps it was like some wines which, in wine buffs’ jargon, ‘didn’t travel’. Maybe Campari never tasted the same outside Italy, and never quite as perfect as in the roseate twilight at the close of a day in Venice.

  ‘Tonight we won’t eat at Tia Angelita’s place,’ said Paolo. ‘I want to have you to myself. I want to find out how you’ve changed…if you’ve really changed.’

  Presently he rowed her through the twists and turns of the smaller waterways back to the Grand Canal, to a restaurant where the canal-side tables were full of wellheeled tourists. He had reserved a table by one of the windows in an upstairs room. Here the patrons were mainly Venetians eating their antipasti, mostly dishes of seafood. Sophie recognised moleche, the crabs caught in spring and autumn when they changed their shells.

  Having eaten well at lunchtime, she wasn’t very hungry and could only manage a bowl of fish soup and a salad. Paolo ate four courses and finished with cheese. Although he was trim and muscular at the moment, she thought that if he didn’t take care he would run to fat later.

  At the end of their meal, while they were drinking coffee—his accompanied by a glass of grappa—Sophie glanced out of the window and saw a launch flying a blue pennant cruising slowly along the canal in the direction of the Rialto Bridge.

  Seated in the stern, wearing a dinner jacket, was Marc. Beside him, in a fur jacket with a rug over her legs, was his young cousin Chiara.

  Something in Sophie’s expression made Paolo turn his head to see what she was looking at. ‘That’s your boss, isn’t it? Who’s the chick with him?’

  ‘A cousin…Chiara Banti. I met her today. She said she was going to a party but I didn’t know he was going with her.’

  ‘Jealous?’ said Paolo, taking his eyes off the launch passing below them long enough to flash a grin at her.

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Sophie tried to speak lightly, not to betray how much his quip annoyed her. ‘There’s nothing I’d enjoy less than going to a fashionable party where I wouldn’t know anyone.’

  ‘If you were with him it wouldn’t matter. He knows everyone. When you have his money and his background, everyone wants to know you. If there was any justice in life, he’d have a face like an ape,’ said Paolo. ‘She’s a good-looker too, but too young for my taste. They still giggle a lot at that age and they want to dance all night. I’m past that.’ He stopped watching the launch and turned to her. ‘Quiet, candlelit dinners with someone intelligent are what I prefer these days.’

  Next morning, very early, Sophie went for a brisk walk along the Riva. In New York she and Merle had attended exercise classes, but here she thought she might buy some trainers and take up running.

  She wondered where Marc did his running when he was in Venice. She didn’t expect to meet him. It was more likely he ran along the Zattere, the waterfront on the south side of the élite Dorsoduro district, not far from his palazzo. But if he and Chiara had been partying half the night he might postpone today’s run until later.

  Paolo’s chaffing remark about jealousy still rankled slightly. Paolo himself was a complication in her life. It wasn’t true, as he had suggested last night, that the company of a gondolier and his family wasn’t good enough for her now. It was merely that she didn’t want Marc to think she had been bowled over by Paolo, like the susceptible tourists who every year lost their hearts to Italian and Spanish waiters, Greek boatmen, Swiss and Austrian ski-instructors and all the other good-looking young men who worked in the tourist industry and notched up innumerable conquests which meant nothing to them.

  Yesterday, if Paolo hadn’t turned up and Marc had walked her back to the Riva, she would have explained the situation to him. But it was quite a long story and needed to be told in the right circumstances, not when he had more important matters on his mind.

  On the way back from her walk she stopped in the Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, a filled-in canal which was now the city’s widest street but far enough from the Piazza to have a village atmosphere and for the prices in the bars and alimentari to be much cheaper. Sophie bought two brown rolls for breakfast and a bag of apples for her room. She ate the rolls as they were, sitting on a stone bench with the kind of view which had inspired Canaletto to paint his stupendous vistas of eighteenth-century Venice.

  All the happiness she had once known in this city was beginning to seep through her veins like the rising sap in a tree. Love was no longer here: the shared laughter, the physical comfort of a strong shoulder to lean on and the warm hugs and bristly kisses. But Michael’s spirit was here. She felt his presence everywhere, and heard in her mind his deep voice calling her Kitten, Sweetie and other endearments.

  She arrived at the palazzo at a quarter to nine, reaching the top floor to find Marc already there.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, from the threshold of his office.

  ‘Good morning.’ He rose from behind the wide desk. ‘A lot has come through overnight.’ He indicated the tray behind the fax machine. ‘I’ve dealt with some of it already. We’ll go through the rest together and I’ll tell you what needs to be done.’

  ‘I’ll just fetch my notebook.’

  In her office, Sophie hung her blazer on the hanger in the cupboard.

  Freshly shaven, his dark hair still damp from the shower, Marc looked alert and well-rested. Perhaps he didn’t need much sleep. It was a peculiarity of many top-level achievers that they could maintain their physical and mental energy on half the sleep required by the
average person.

  ‘Did you enjoy your evening?’ she asked, when she rejoined him. ‘I saw you and Signorina Banti going past in the launch while I was having supper.’

  ‘Chiara enjoyed herself. I was there as her chaperon. Large parties are not my personal choice for a night out. I prefer a quiet dinner à deux. Where did you eat?’

  When she told him, he raised an eyebrow. ‘Alone?’

  She wished now she hadn’t mentioned seeing him. ‘No.’

  ‘That restaurant’s expensive,’ said Marc. ‘Your gondolier must be seriously enamoured. Are you seeing him again tonight?’

  ‘No, I’m not…and it isn’t—’

  But Sophie’s decision to explain her relationship with Paolo was frustrated by the telephone.

  ‘Excuse me.’ He reached for the receiver. ‘Pronto, sono Washington.’ A moment later he was speaking Japanese and signing to her that the call would take some time.

  Later she accompanied him to a meeting with his architect and representatives of the city’s planning authority.

  They walked to the architect’s office where he was going to show them a scale model of Capolavoro’s existing and proposed buildings.

  On the way there many people said good morning to Marc, but not always, Sophie noticed, the kind of people who might be expected to know him. Two or three of his acquaintances were noticeably down-at-heel. Even more surprising was what happened as they mounted the wooden steps of the Accademia Bridge, where a man was crouched, begging.

  There were not many beggars in Venice. So far Sophie had seen only two, and on each occasion had responded with a small donation. But most people, especially tourists, ignored them and she wouldn’t have been surprised if Marc had done the same. Instead, they both put their hands in their pockets and gave the man some money.

  At the top of the bridge Marc stopped, putting his palms on the edge of the sun-warmed balustrade and looking down the broad waterway with the same slightly smiling expression she had seen when they’d been approaching the city from the airport.

  Standing beside him, watching a gondola going in the direction of the Rialto and a delivery barge chugging in the opposite way, she said, ‘Do you always give to beggars…even when they’re probably dipsos?’

  Marc turned his head to look at her. ‘If they’ve hit the rock-bottom point of asking strangers for money, the least I can do is give them the price of a drink. It’s an ineffective way of addressing the problem of these people who can’t cope with life, but it’s better than pretending not to notice them. I thought you would be a soft touch.’

  ‘Did you? Why?’

  A light gust of breeze off the water caught and ruffled her hair, blowing a lock of it across her cheek. Before she could deal with it he reached out and did it for her, smoothing the errant strands behind her ear. The intimate, almost tender gesture astonished her.

  He began to walk on. ‘You strike me as someone who would always be on the side of the underdog,’ he said. Then, slanting a mocking glance at her, he added, ‘But perhaps not always equally sympathetic to the problems of the top dogs. Except in your professional capacity.’

  After the meeting, Marc and the architect went off to have lunch together while she returned to the palazzo to transcribe her record of what had been said.

  Although she had contributed little to the men’s conversation, but had sat quietly by, taking verbatim notes while they talked, from the outset Marc had made it clear that when he was away she would be left in full charge of the island’s conversion.

  Whether she really had his confidence to the extent he had indicated she herself wasn’t sure. But he had left the others in no doubt of it. The architect had pressed her to join them for lunch but she had thought it best to excuse herself.

  A printout was on his desk when Marc returned. It had not been the kind of long, vinous lunch that made businessmen who indulged in them perform at reduced efficiency for the rest of the working day. He was back by two-fifteen, with some speedwriting notes of his own for her to type.

  The late afternoon brought a stream of faxes and telexes from Canada and North America, where the working day was just beginning.

  It was after six when Marc’s PC played the opening bars of what Sophie recognised as a violin concerto by Vivaldi as a reminder.

  ‘I must go,’ he said.

  He had shown her his engagement diaries, the desk diary duplicated on his computer. She knew that tonight he was going to a reception at the German Embassy, an attractive building, painted yellow, on the north side of the wooden bridge between the smart part of town and the Accademia, where many of the city’s greatest art treasures were housed.

  As he was leaving the room Marc said, ‘Tomorrow we’re going to Torcello. I suggest you wear a cotton frock. We’ll be lunching at the Locanda Cipriani and it can be very warm in the garden there at midday.’

  ‘Why are we going to Torcello?’ She had planned to visit the island on her first free day. She didn’t want anyone with her the first time she went back.

  ‘The grandmother of one of my college friends arrived in Venice this morning. I’m under an obligation to show her some of the sights and Torcello isn’t too taxing for someone in her eighties. You can help me entertain her.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your cousin be a better choice?’

  ‘Chiara has been to Torcello too many times to find it an interesting excursion…unless it’s with a new boyfriend. She’s not interested in anyone in Mrs Henderson’s age group. I don’t suppose you are either, but you’ll make a better job of pretending to enjoy being with her. See you tomorrow.’

  When he crossed the large room the way his hair flicked into half-curls just above his shirt-collar and the jut of his cheekbone rang a faint bell in her mind, like a muted and hard-to-hear version of the musical reminder that Marc had had installed on his PC.

  Then, as he disappeared, the clouded memory cleared. She knew where they had met before. How could she have forgotten? Except that the brain had a way of blotting out days and events too painful to recall.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  IN ORDER to have some time on the island before the famous restaurant opened its doors to those who could afford to lunch there, they collected Mrs Henry Henderson from her hotel at eleven o’clock.

  Marc left Sophie in the launch while he went inside the hotel. On his advice she was wearing a summer frock, but it was a conservative style with not too much bare flesh on view. The parts that were bare she had covered with a high-protection sun lotion, knowing that travelling by water increased the danger of burning. She hadn’t left off her tights in case Mrs Henderson had old-fashioned, old-money ideas, and didn’t approve of bare legs in elegant restaurants.

  Although she had lived nearby for a long stretch of her life, Sophie had never entered the Locanda Cipriani, but Torcello received many famous visitors, both to see its church and to lunch at the locanda. Before Sophie’s time, the Queen of England had been there and, after her time there, Prince Charles. The list of celebrities was long, including the American writer Ernest Hemingway, who had taken a room at the locanda to shoot duck and write a novel.

  But the life Sophie had lived there with Michael had had no connection with all the comings and goings of the world’s VIPs. Although, out of curiosity, she had planned to eat lunch at the locanda when she returned to the island, she hadn’t expected to travel on a private launch, and would have preferred to be going by ferry.

  When Marc reappeared with his guest, Sophie blinked. Could this slender and upright woman in a white voile shirt and white cotton trousers, with a broad-brimmed dark green straw hat in her hand, be an eighty-year-old?

  Stepping lightly into the launch, with a gracious ‘Buon giorno…molto grazie’ for the boatman who gave her his hand, she said to Sophie, ‘Isn’t this a perfect morning? I’m Martha Henderson.’

  Sophie had risen and was standing braced to keep her balance and to steady the American if, as Marc came abroad, the launch lurc
hed under his weight.

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Henderson?’

  ‘Please call me Martha. I don’t like to be formal,’ she said, with a smile.

  What a breathtaking beauty she must have been in her youth, thought Sophie. As indeed she still was, but not with the artificially preserved looks of many of her American contemporaries. There were no detectable signs that Martha had kept age at bay with surgery and long hours spent with beauticians. Her hair was white, her make-up minimal, her jewellery proclaiming her style rather than her wealth. It was her supple waist, her visible joie de vivre and her delicious light scent which made her seem ageless: a woman who had lived a long time but was still finding life an adventure.

  That Marc was having similar thoughts was shown by the look he exchanged with Sophie while Mrs Henderson was settling herself and lifting her face to the sun with closed eyes and a wordless murmur of pleasure.

  ‘I came here on my first honeymoon in 1936,’ she told Sophie as they moved off. ‘Marc tells me you arrived a few days ago. Aren’t you overwhelmed by all this beauty? Don’t you envy people who spend their lives here?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Sophie said truthfully.

  ‘When I was here with James, my first husband, I wanted to stay. I wanted to re-plan our future. But for him that was impossible. He was a lawyer, like his father and grandfather. He had his life all mapped out and I couldn’t ask him to change it. Then the war came and changed many lives, including ours.’

  They were passing the Palazzo Non Finito, the unfinished building which would have been the largest palace on the canal had it been completed. Now its single white marble storey bore a sign: ‘Peggy Guggenheim Collection’.

  ‘I met her once,’ Martha said. ‘I envied her living in Venice for thirty years. She had one of the last privately owned gondolas, you know. But I didn’t envy her private life. She must often have been very lonely. Did your grandfather know her well, Marc?’

  He was sitting on the other side of her, at right angles to the two women sharing the comfortably cushioned stern seat. The breeze was ruffling his hair.