Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘He’s around,’ Pansy said airily. Appraisingly they looked at each other, then Pansy’s silvery-gold head turned away.

  ‘Pansy,’ Chloe said softly, ‘thank you for being here. You, and Helen too.’

  Very slowly the clouds began to lift. Small, everyday activities began to seem significant again, and then one morning Chloe found herself looking forward to the brightness of summer. The Oxford spring was warm, and the borders in the College gardens were splashed with colour.

  The surprising, painful longing for the baby that would never be faded to the point where it stopped obliterating everything else. The scar would stay with Chloe, but the immediate hurt was over.

  One evening Chloe cooked a thank-you supper for Helen and Pansy. It was the last evening of full term. From tomorrow most people would disperse for the vacation, and the crowds on the city pavements would be wandering tourists.

  The three women sat in the dusk, looking out at the light fading over the spires and domes.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ Pansy said. She had bitten the top off an orange and was sucking it dry with childish enjoyment. ‘Come to Venice for the Vac.’

  Chloe and Helen stared at her in surprise. ‘I must have told you about Masefield’s palazzo? No? Well, naturally, he has a palazzo on the Grand Canal. I’ve got to join him and Kim there for a few days.’ She made a face as if the prospect was the gloomiest imaginable. ‘Do come. It’s just what you need, Chloe. Change of scene and all that. And a break for you before Schools, Helen. We can eat lots, and sightsee if you insist, and you can both go shopping with Kim instead of me.’

  ‘We-ell,’ Chloe said, tempted in spite of herself.

  Helen felt a stab of envy. She could think of nowhere in the world she longed to see more than Venice, but the idea was impossible. Then, with a jolt of excitement that brought the colour rushing to her face, she remembered the remainder of her travel bursary. The money would buy her a standby ticket to Venice and back, with perhaps even a little left over. That’s what the money is for, she told herself. And she would see Venice.

  ‘Helen?’

  ‘Will they have room for all of us?’ She tried to sound cool, suppressing the longing that leapt inside her in case Pansy’s invitation should be withdrawn as casually as it had been issued.

  ‘Room?’ Pansy giggled. ‘I expect they’ll find you a corner somewhere. Wait till you see the place. That’s settled, then.’

  Chloe nodded slowly. The last time she had been to Venice was with Leo, who was working. He had proclaimed himself too busy to join her in exploring the city, and they had spent his free hours in bed, or in dark restaurants and claustrophobic bars. Now, the thought of seeing it all in the company of Pansy and Helen was inviting.

  Somehow, in the horrible days since the clinic, they had become the best friends she had ever had.

  The room was almost dark now, but she could still make out Helen’s face vivid with excitement, and Pansy’s pleased satisfaction.

  Chloe lifted her drink.

  ‘To Venice,’ she said.

  ‘To Venice,’ they echoed her.

  Easter

  Ten

  ‘I’ll miss you.’

  Darcy was standing with his back firmly turned to the queue at the passport desk. He put his hands on Helen’s shoulders and drew her towards him.

  ‘If you must go, come back as soon as you can,’ he whispered with his mouth close to her hair. Helen breathed in the familiar scent, wool and leather and the open air, and then grinned up at him.

  ‘It’s only ten days,’ she said lightly. ‘But I’ll miss you too.’

  It’s true, she thought. Somehow, without either of us knowing quite how, we’ve drawn very close. Watching the broad, undistinguished face and rueful smile, she recognised that Darcy was part of her life now.

  He bent to kiss her, brushing the corner of her mouth with his own. It wasn’t Darcy’s way to be more demonstrative in a public place. He lifted one of the black curls and wound it reflectively round his finger.

  ‘I love you,’ Darcy said.

  ‘This is the last call for Alitalia flight 349. Last call for Alitalia flight 349.’

  The intrusive announcement brought back the crowded terminal, the disappearing queue.

  ‘I know.’ Helen’s voice was barely audible. She looked down at Darcy’s capable, calloused hands gripping her own, then up into his eyes. ‘I know.’

  He didn’t kiss her again. Instead he gently propelled her forward and into the line of travellers at the barrier. Pansy and Chloe, from their discreet distance, grinned at each other and came to join her. When Helen looked back from the far side of the barrier, Darcy waved once and then turned away.

  There was such tenderness in his face that she almost ran back to his side, but Chloe and Pansy were behind her and between them they swept her along the featureless tunnels to the boarding gate.

  Helen’s love affair with Venice began almost at the moment that the jet dipped and swung round to make its final approach. Beneath her was shimmering pearl-grey water, and wide flat plains shrouded in vaporous pearly mist so exactly the same colour that it was impossible to tell where earth met water and sky.

  The airport was identical to all other airports, but for Helen it was magical because the signs all read Venezia.

  Waiting to meet them with Masefield’s Mercedes was the Italian version of Hobbs. But the Italian had quick black eyes under his peaked cap, and he smiled at the three of them with open admiration. His way of handing each of them into the car was a beguiling mixture of formality and flirtatiousness. Pansy flung herself back against the cushions with a sigh of pleasure.

  ‘Oh, it’s good to be here. If only it was going to be just the three of us.’

  Helen was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the low, misty horizon, waiting. The drive from the airport was only a few miles. Then without warning, they were on the great bridge that spanned the lagoon. Helen drew her breath in so sharply that the others glanced at her rapt face and smiled. The oil refineries and chimneys of Mestre smudged the skyline with dirty smoke, there were sprawling developments of ugly new buildings on either side, but ahead of them, shimmering, drowning in the light between water and sky, was Venice.

  They were across the lagoon and plunging into a tangle of cars. The chauffeur wrenched the wheel, jammed his finger on the horn and swore in a muted torrent of Italian.

  ‘This is Tronchetto,’ Pansy said. Magically, a space opened up for them. ‘The car stays here.’

  A string of olive-brown boys appeared and, with the suitcases borne in procession in front of them, they emerged from the oily caverns of the garages. Helen blinked in the pure lemon-yellow light. She was standing on a stone-flagged quay but there was water all around her. It splintered with reflected sunlight and with the criss-crossing of boats of all kinds. At the quayside, bobbing on the wavelets, was a trim little white motorboat.

  Masefield’s driver pulled off his peaked hat and threw it into the boat. He ran his hands through his hair and laughed at them so that all his white teeth showed.

  ‘Much better, yes?’ he chuckled in English as they climbed into the rocking boat. The engine coughed and then with a high-pitched roar, they swung in a wide arc and a shower of spray away from the quayside.

  ‘This is the Grand Canal,’ Pansy murmured beside Helen. ‘Wrong end.’

  Helen was stunned, painfully aware that her five senses were inadequate to take it all in. They were speeding between the chugging vaporetti now, and in and out of the black high-prowed gondolas. On either side glowed the marble palaces of the Grand Canal. They were as beautiful in reality as in pictures, fine façades with tall windows and bracketed balconies hanging over the curves of the Canal. But she saw now that the real Venice was quite different from the one she had imagined. In her head, she had pictured it as a series of exquisite images, posed, formal, and deserted. But this city was so vibrantly crowded with life that it took her breath away. There were people
everywhere, hurrying as in any city, but here they were smiling as they went. There were gaudy shop signs alongside the finest palazzo and heaped stalls of fruit and vegetables, and there were festoons of washing draped from the ancient balconies. And everywhere there was yellow light shining off the rippling water.

  Ahead of them a graceful arch spanned the pageant of the Canal.

  ‘I know,’ Helen smiled at Pansy and Chloe on either side of her. ‘The Rialto Bridge.’

  Past the Rialto to the motorboat swung right and into the dense shadows of a narrow rio. The cool dimness made the water opaque olive-green. At once Helen was enclosed by the smell that was forever to mean Venice for her. It was damp moss, cold stone and the mysterious deep whiff of the green water. The outboard slowed, the throb of it thrown to and fro and amplified by the high walls at either side. They slid under a colonnade of arches and stopped at a stone quay where the water slapped and sucked at the piers beneath. The Venetian smell was so intense that Helen felt she could almost reach out and touch it.

  She looked up to see an ancient metal sign that read Palazzo Croce.

  ‘Home,’ Pansy said. ‘Sort of.’

  From the private quay she ran up hollowed stone steps within the palazzo towards another arch where brighter light showed in the dimness. The arch gave on to the inner court of the palazzo. Behind her Helen stopped short, letting the arch frame the scene for her.

  The walls were lined with creamy marble and a frieze, faded figures in russet and bronze and grey-green, ran round all four sides. There were sightless calm marble heads carved over the windows and the floor of the court was paved in great marble slabs with an intricate mosaic border. The spring afternoon outside was only pleasantly warm, but Helen could imagine how cool and silent this place would be in the blaze of an Italian summer.

  In the middle of the peace and beauty of the court, Masefield and Kim were utterly incongruous. They might have been a tableau mistakenly uprooted from the poolside of some expensive modern hotel. Kim was lying on a flowery, padded lounger, surrounded by glossy magazines. There was a viscous drink full of chunks of fruit at her side, and she was intent on varnishing her toenails. Beside her Masefield was sitting on a matching upright chair at a white wrought-iron table spread with papers. He was talking rapidly into a dictaphone, and there was a cordless telephone at his left hand.

  As soon as he saw Pansy he jumped up and enveloped her in a bear-like hug, then held her face in his blunt hands to kiss it. There was no mistaking his pride and pleasure in his daughter.

  ‘Baby,’ he said. ‘Baby, I love you. Just seeing you makes the whole stinking world look brighter.’ He kissed her again and then looked round. ‘And where are your pals? Here. Well, introduce them to your old Dad.’

  Masefield Warren’s handshake was very firm, and his eyes behind the welcoming mask of smile were narrow and shrewd. His glance flicked over Helen and lingered a moment longer on Chloe. She stared coolly back at him. He was impressive, she thought, in a faintly brutal way, and noted the physical power in the bull-like shoulders and neck as well as the lines of domineering authority in his face.

  ‘We’re honoured,’ he was saying bluntly. ‘We don’t get to see a lot of Pansy’s friends these days. This is Kim, my wife.’

  ‘You’re always somewhere else, Daddy darling,’ Pansy said mildly.

  Kim’s welcome to Pansy was distinctly less warm than her father’s. She turned up her cheek to be kissed and lifted a fingertip at once to smooth away the damage. ‘Darling,’ she said in a faint voice. ‘Always jeans. I know you’re a student, but haven’t you got anything else? If you haven’t, you must come out with me this afternoon and I’ll organise you. You can’t dress like that here. We’ve got the Riccadellos coming for dinner.’

  ‘Kim,’ Pansy said gleefully, ‘I’ve invited Chloe specially for you. She likes shopping almost as much as you do. You can go together while Helen looks at pictures and gloomy old churches. And me …’ Pansy stretched and pirouetted on the marble, ‘… I’m going to eat wonderful food, which will be a happy change from Oxford, and watch the boys in the gondolas. Now, is there any tea?’

  ‘Show your friends upstairs first,’ Masefield said sharply.

  Pansy started and went pink, then nodded gracefully and shepherded them away. Helen thought as she followed her friend that between her authoritative father and her near-contemporary stepmother, Pansy was still treated as a wayward child. She could guess how irksome that must be for her.

  The Palazzo Croce guest rooms were on the top floor. Helen almost ran to the windows of hers and opened them outwards on to the balcony. The Grand Canal lay below her, and to one side she could just see the domes of St Mark’s Basilica and the top of the slim campanile in the piazza. Enchanted, she leaned over the balcony to drink in more of the glittering city. In her eyrie the loudest noise was the call of the swifts as they soared against the blue-green sky and then plummeted over the warm rooftops.

  ‘Don’t fall in,’ Pansy warned behind her and Helen turned back.

  ‘It makes the view from Follies look distinctly dim,’ she laughed. ‘Pansy – thank you for inviting us here. It means a lot.’

  ‘I can see that from your face,’ she said softly. ‘It’s good to have you here. I just wish it was … different. You know what I mean.’

  Helen did. It was strange that both Oliver and Pansy, the two most privileged people she had ever met, should be so unhappy with it in their different ways.

  Pansy was lying on her back on Helen’s bed, staring up at the white barrel-vault of the ceiling. Ripples of reflected light chased endlessly over it.

  ‘These rooms used to be the kitchens,’ she said. ‘Being right up here they’ve escaped most of Kim’s Ideal Home improvements. The proper guest suites are on the floor below.’

  The room was simply enough furnished, with spare furniture in dark wood and cool terrazzo tiles. Thin voile curtains fluttered at the windows.

  ‘I thought you’d like to be up here because of the view.’

  ‘I love it,’ Helen said.

  Pansy looked at her, a half-smile showing although her eyes were shadowed.

  ‘You’re lucky, Helen, you know. You enjoy things so much. Don’t lose the knack.’

  Before Helen could answer Pansy swung her legs off the bed and stood up. ‘Well. Better go and clean my fingernails and put on a ribboned frock so Kim will permit me at the tea-table. See you downstairs.’

  Helen itched with impatience to walk out into the limpid light and begin her Venetian exploration, but went politely downstairs instead and joined her hosts for tea.

  Almost as soon as it was over, Kim was issuing instructions for dinner. Important business contacts of Masefield’s were expected. They were to dress, and meet for drinks in what Kim called the lounge. Helen tried to imagine what sort of room a lounge could be in this graceful marble palace, and then had to bite back the laughter when she saw Pansy’s eloquently arched eyebrows.

  Reluctantly she went upstairs to change her clothes again. Outside the light was softening from lemon to gold and Helen was afraid that she would never be able to escape into it. Turning her back on the panorama she peered into her suitcase, and began to understand Kim’s shopping obsession. If guests at the Palazzo Croce were expected to change clothes for every meal, Helen thought, she would have to start shopping for herself.

  The lounge turned out to be the long first-floor room that fronted the Canal. It was windowed from floor to ceiling, but the heavy carved shutters were pulled almost to so that the room was shadowed. Helen glanced around in fascination while Masefield poured her a drink from the elaborate trolley in one corner. He had looked faintly surprised when she refused whisky. The proportions of the room were perfect, but they were blurred by the fussiness of the furnishings. There were heavily swagged and tasselled curtains at the windows, superfluous to the intricate shutters. A great many spindly occasional tables lurked between the overstuffed sofas, and there was a predominance
of cushions and small objects in coloured glass. The worn, beautiful mosaic floor was covered with expensive bright modern rugs. Evidently Kim disliked it, but didn’t quite have the courage to hide it entirely.

  On the end wall her portrait, flashily done in oils and prominently featuring the diamond on her engagement finger, was lit with a special strip light. The whole effect reminded Helen irresistibly of Naples.

  The important guests had not yet arrived. Pansy, wearing a silk dress that was slightly too old for her, was sitting meekly next to Masefield and talking to him about Oxford. Across the room Chloe looked her most polished. There was a heavy gold chain around her neck and gold bracelets against her black sleeve. She looked amused and more animated than she had done for weeks. From time to time Masefield’s eyes settled on her. Kim had attention to spare for no-one. She was darting to and fro moving cushions and rattling the drinks trolley. Her blonde hair was piled up on top of her head and her strapless white dress managed to suggest both the naivety of a Greek tunic and the price tag of a top couturier.

  ‘Well, are you all set to see Venice?’ Masefield asked Helen loudly.

  ‘Yes. I can’t wait.’

  ‘Helen likes paintings,’ Pansy put in.

  Masefield beamed at his daughter. ‘Good, good. With your studies going so well you should be able to tell Helen all about those -inis and -ettos that everyone makes so much of.’ His voice breathed the respect of the self-made man for the idea of ‘studies’. Helen, well aware that she knew ten times more about Renaissance art than her friend and that Pansy had not attended a single lecture of her art history course, looked away from Pansy’s angelic smile and murmured, ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

  ‘I adore Canaletto,’ Kim said. ‘Don’t I, Mase?’

  The guests turned out to be two thickset jowly men and their overweight, bejewelled wives. Only one of the men spoke English, and even the most trivial remark had to be translated for Kim, who knew no Italian. The conversation was mostly about money, or about people who had money and what they did with it.