by Rosie Thomas
The lengthy dinner, impeccably served, was heavy with creamy sauces. When at last it was over the men withdrew sharply with Masefield. All three faces were suddenly alive, wolfish with enthusiasm for the deals to be made. The six women were left to languish in the lounge. Conversation would have died away entirely without Chloe’s light, effortless chatter in her almost fluent Italian. Helen thought it was the most stultifying evening she had ever spent and new sympathy for Pansy sprang up inside her. More and more frequently her eyes turned to the velvet dark beyond the cracks in the shutters. Enviously she heard laughter from the boats and the quays, and the singing of the gondoliers.
Pansy followed her eyes. At once she said, ‘Kim darling, as it’s Helen’s first night here, don’t you think Chloe and I should take her out somewhere, even if it’s just to Quadri’s for a coffee? I’m sure Signora Riccadello and Signora Tronzino won’t mind.’
Kim plainly longed to veto the idea, but she was trapped into politeness.
‘What does Helen want to do?’
‘I’d love to go in a gondola.’
Kim looked puzzled. ‘In a gondola? Where to? Guido can take you anywhere you want to go in the motorboat.’
‘Not to anywhere. Just to look.’
Plainly Kim thought just looking the most eccentric occupation in the world.
Formal goodnights were said all round and then Pansy hustled her friends out of the room. Glancing back Helen saw Kim mustering a bright smile for the Italian matrons, but the sides of her cheeks were pinched in as if she was swallowing a yawn. So evenings like this were Kim’s job, for which she was paid with days in Masefield’s European palaces and her Armani and Krizia dresses.
Helen wondered if Masefield’s first three wives had found the job not to their liking.
The three girls ran down the stairs as if they were escaping from detention.
‘Who were those men?’ Chloe asked. ‘Didn’t they look like mobsters?’
‘Chloe!’ Helen was shocked, but Pansy only laughed.
‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised. Masefield knows all kinds of very odd characters.’
They crossed the cool silence of the inner court and came down the stone steps to the private quay. Again the slap and suck of the green water filled the air. From the shadows a white shirt materialised, and the white smile of Guido the chauffeur above it. Pansy explained what they wanted and he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled. At once a dark shape came dipping and bobbing towards them. Once under the arches the gondolier thrust his oar in to steady the boat while they climbed aboard. When he saw the three of them he answered Guido’s call with another, rising whistle. Guido gave rapid, curt instructions and the gondolier shrugged. Then there was the whisper of notes changing hands.
Helen sat squeezed in the middle, with the warmth of Chloe’s and Pansy’s arms against her own. In front of her the lantern swinging from the beaked prow sent wavering splashes of gold over the water. There was a lurch, and then they shot out under the arches of Palazzo Croce and into the Venetian night. The Canal was a forest of gondolas sliding under the Rialto Bridge, faster boats cutting through the water and swaying lights of every imaginable colour. Behind her Helen could hear their gondolier humming, and sometimes calling out to another as he passed. She closed her eyes to listen to the water and snatches of music drifting over it and told herself Venice. I’m in Venice.
On either side of her Chloe and Pansy were silent, busy with their own thoughts.
The route took the three of them through narrow, dark cuts where the yellow squares of windows were high up in the walls and where ancient lights flared against the stonework, under high-humped bridges and past little paved alleys that allowed glimpses into busy trattorie. Helen lay back against the cushions and thought of the precious days ahead that would give her the chance to wander over these bridges and in and out of the dim, inviting churches.
At length they came into a wide expanse of water where the lights of another island winked at them from the distance. The gondola skimmed forward and then swung to the left where a tangle of others swayed against their tall wooden mooring poles.
Helen looked up and saw that they were alongside San Marco. They scrambled out on to the wooden duckboards and then on to the firmness of the quay.
‘Quadri’s?’ Pansy asked.
‘Quadri’s,’ Chloe agreed.
Firmly linking Helen’s arms in theirs they guided her through the piazzetta and into St Mark’s Square. The great open-air drawing room was alive with people, music from the cafés and the swarming, fluttering pigeons.
Helen stopped dead. The Basilica dominated everything, floodlit, and crowned with its squat Byzantine domes.
‘Look,’ she breathed. ‘Just look.’
Pansy and Chloe smiled indulgently and steered her on.
‘Tomorrow,’ they promised.
The open-air tables had just been put out for the season in front of the cafés, but they were not yet packed with tourists. The Venetians were still in possession of their city and they sat idly over coffee cups and talk. At Quadri’s there was a violinist walking between the tables playing a sad little melody that hung in the warm, scented air.
Helen sank into her chair and stared about her, stunned.
The others were laughing at her and she was suddenly swept by a wave of love for them both, and happiness that they were there to share this magical evening with her.
Pansy had ordered ice-creams and they came in fluted glasses, five different flavours.
Helen waved her spoon. ‘I feel,’ she said, ‘as if all my birthdays have come at once. What more could anyone ask? Friends, and Venice, and ice-creams like this.’
‘Many happy returns,’ they answered.
In spite of her fears, Helen was allowed plenty of time to learn the moods of her new love. Sometimes with Chloe, more usually alone, she went out in the blue-grey morning fight and let herself drift along the narrow streets, pausing every so often to hang over one of the high bridges and stare into the water. She had begun methodically, with guide-books and lists of sights to see, but gradually she abandoned herself to unplanned wandering. Her rewards were the discovery of an exquisite altarpiece in a dusty, deserted church, or a sudden perfect vista of a narrow street with a single fruit stall and a child playing unconcernedly beside it. She saw the Tintorettos and the Tiepolos and all the great architectural masterpieces, but it was her own private finds that gave her the most pleasure. Sometimes she was out for the whole day, stopping to buy fruit from one of the stalls in the erberia and to drink coffee in shabby cafés among strangers.
She came to know the look of the city in every hour from dawn to dark, and as she learned about it she went further afield, riding the vaporetti to Murano and Torcello, and the ferryboats out to the Lido where she wandered among the fashionable rich and enjoyed the contrast with the variegated crowds of the real Venice.
Helen found that the thoughtless idling among so much haphazard beauty affected her strangely. She was overtaken by a dreamy sensuality stronger than anything she had felt since her early days with Oliver. Darcy was often in her mind. His quiet company would be perfect for Venice and she imagined his fair head bobbing among the sleek, dark Italian ones all round her. She remembered his words at the airport and his mouth touching hers, and thought, I do want to go back to him. Then the reality of Venice engrossed her again and Darcy sank back into her subconscious.
In their own ways, too, Chloe and Pansy enjoyed their holiday. Kim immediately adopted Chloe as an ally. They were almost the same age and it gave the visitors much secret amusement to see Kim calling on their few extra years of life experience and appealing to Chloe for help in controlling her stepdaughter. Chloe understood at once that Kim was bored to death, and was lacking the resources within herself to provide distraction. Pansy would do no more than poke sly fun at her, but Chloe went good-humouredly on shopping expeditions, or plundering trips as Pansy called them. They came back and modelled t
heir designer bargains with enthusiasm for the others. Two or three times Kim, generous with Masefield’s fortune, came back with ‘little somethings’ for Helen, and Helen had no choice but to accept them. The frivolous, expensive things looked funny in her cupboard alongside the worn skirts and shirts.
Chloe felt genuinely sorry for Kim and her luxurious dull life, and she felt pleasure in her own contrasting existence seeping back with every passing day. The very timeless tranquillity of Venice eased her unhappiness too by making it seem pitifully small.
They saw little of Masefield. He seemed to prefer the company of his papers and telephone to that of his wife, and even his daughter, even though he was always protesting that Pansy had so little time for him that he hardly knew her. Pansy herself spent most of her days reading on her balcony, a strange, eclectic selection of books that made Helen look at her with new eyes. One day it was Under the Volcano, another it was Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.
‘Are you enjoying it?’ Helen asked.
‘Rather dry,’ was all Pansy would say. ‘Didn’t he have a curious private life, or something? Have I got the right bloke?’
Helen suspected that behind her careful smokescreen there was a Pansy that nobody knew at all.
One evening towards the end of their stay Masefield and Kim, resplendent in full evening dress, went out for an important dinner with important people. Masefield insisted that the three girls go out to eat too, at a restaurant of his choice. They heard him booking the table himself, and giving instructions that the bill was to be sent direct to him.
‘You’ll love it,’ he told them firmly. ‘Food like you get at Al Pescaor doesn’t come your way all that often.’
Relieved of their usual slightly awkward evening duties with the Warrens, they spent longer than usual in dressing up, and then went out laughing in the feeling of a special occasion.
Al Pescaor was special indeed. It was small, intimate, and redolent with wonderful smells. The food when it came was reverently laid on a snowy white cloth. It was exquisite, melting seafood. They ate until they could manage no more and grew giggly on bottles of golden wine. Then they sat replete over coffee and smooth brandy. Their richly contrasting colourings drew admiring glances, but they were happy in their own company and saw none of them.
Pansy sat back with a sigh of contentment. ‘It seems a long way off, doesn’t it, damp old Oxford, and Follies with Rose shuffling around, and Gerry leering around corners?’
‘Another world,’ Chloe agreed. ‘But in two days, we’ll be back in it.’
There was a sudden, small silence.
For more than a week no-one had mentioned Stephen, but now it was as if he was sitting at the table with them.
‘It’s been wonderful having you both here,’ Pansy said abruptly. ‘I get very low, on my own with Masefield and Kim. It’s fine to come back and make ho-ho jokes about it, but it’s miserable just the same. But with you it’s been quite different. I haven’t … missed anybody, or wanted to see anyone else.’
‘Neither have I,’ Chloe said quietly.
Pansy leaned forward to touch her wrist with one fingertip. ‘I’d feel happier still if I thought that was the truth,’ she whispered.
‘It is the truth,’ Chloe answered. ‘I loved him, but I’ve stopped now. It isn’t as though he hasn’t got plenty of faults.’
‘I’ll say,’ Pansy was grinning. ‘The way that whatever happens, he’s got a quote to supply to make it even more significant.’
‘And the way that he puts on his lecture voice, even in bed, and addresses you like a seminar room.’
They were both giggling, while Helen stared in amazement. The taboo topic had at a stroke become a source of shared laughter.
Pansy dabbed at her eyes. ‘Poor Stephen. How mean of us.’
‘Stephen will survive. Poor Beatrice, rather,’ Chloe said with a touch of seriousness.
‘Yes. I didn’t ask him to leave his wife, you know. I didn’t ask him for anything.’
‘That was the difference between us,’ Chloe said calmly.
‘Perhaps. But he came, for whatever reason, and there we were. It scared me to death, and still does. I tried to talk to you about it once, Helen, do you remember?’
Helen reddened a little under Pansy’s clear blue gaze.
‘And I wasn’t very much help, was I? You thought I was taking some kind of moral standpoint, but it was only because of Oliver, and Chloe.’
Oliver. Without anyone voicing it, they knew that they couldn’t talk about Oliver here in this mellow room with the water rippling peacefully outside.
‘You’re a very loyal friend,’ Chloe said, squeezing Helen’s hand.
‘So you are,’ Pansy added. ‘And you’re the only one of us who’s got any sense. Darcy’s the nicest man I know, and he adores you.’
He adores you. The words rang in Helen’s ears and Venice fell away. She saw Darcy standing in the meadows at Mere, smiling at her.
‘Didn’t you know?’ she heard Chloe asking.
Helen collected herself with an effort. ‘Oh yes. I knew.’ She looked quickly from one to the other and determinedly changed the subject. ‘Why are we sitting here talking boyfriends like three schoolgirls? Isn’t there anything else?’ They were all laughing again.
‘There’s us. And The Stones of Venice, for a start.’
‘Do you think we should have some more brandy before Pansy gives us her critical interpretation?’
‘I’m sure we should have some more brandy.’
Much later, when they reached the Palazzo Croce again, they found Masefield and Kim waiting for them in the lounge. There were creases of genuine concern in Masefield’s heavy face, and he was holding out a silver tray with a little square envelope on it.
‘This has just been delivered. For you, Helen.’
It was unmistakably an international telegram.
The glow of pleasure from her evening was torn away from Helen by a cold shock of fear. Oh God, a voice said in her head, not Mummy too. Please, not Mummy too. Her hands shook as she snatched the envelope from the pretty tray and clumsily fought to rip it open.
‘Not bad news I hope,’ Kim said.
For a moment, as Helen stared at them, the words failed to register. She frowned, her lips framing the short message. Then relief so profound flooded through her that she found herself laughing weakly. The telegram fluttered from her fingers and drifted away.
‘What is it, Helen, for God’s sake?’
‘It’s nothing. No, I don’t mean that. It’s Darcy.’
Pansy picked up the telegram again and put it into her hands.
‘Come on,’ she said briskly.
Helen looked down at the words again, then read them out aloud as slowly as if they were in a difficult foreign language.
‘It says “Helen will you marry me Darcy”.’
There was a confused babble of exclamations. Helen found that she was still laughing half-hysterically. ‘It’s so like him,’ she explained to no-one in particular. ‘Not to say it direct. Or even to telephone. It’s so like him, to do it like this.’
Kim stared around, puzzled.
‘Will someone tell me who Darcy is?’
‘Kim,’ Pansy said, ‘he’s Oliver Mortimore’s elder brother.’
Kim’s jaw dropped. ‘The elder brother?’
‘The one and only. We have the possible future Countess of Montcalm in our midst.’ She turned the telegram over. ‘Reply paid. He means business, Helen.’
It was Chloe who gently took her hands. ‘Shall we all leave you alone for a bit?’
Helen started. ‘No. Don’t go away, please. What do I have to do to answer? He’ll be waiting.’
Masefield’s hand was on his cordless telephone. ‘You want to call?’
Helen shook her head. ‘No, I just want to answer this.’ She held the crumpled telegram out to him.
‘What do you want to say?’
She looked from his heavy-lidded eye
s to Kim’s impressed stare. Beside Kim Pansy and Chloe were watching her affectionately. And behind them the shutters stood open on the scented night. She thought of the way that Venice had possessed her, mind and body, and the way that its languor had made everything seem sweet and simple.
In painful contrast, her memories of the past months were all struggles and sadness. She had fallen helplessly in love with Oliver, and his loss had cost her a great deal. Even her slow recovery had been shadowed by Oliver’s growing unhappiness. Now she was left with tenderness for him, and with protectiveness and anxiety still shot through with some of the old love. Even here, far away in Venice with Darcy’s telegram in her fingers, she could see Oliver’s face and hear his bitter laughter.
Yet it was Darcy who had changed things for her. He had salved her loneliness with his soothing company, and he had taken away much of her sadness. Darcy wasn’t Oliver. He was himself, and she suddenly knew how important that was. Helen will you marry me Darcy.
She remembered her day of goodbyes to Oxford, and how her tutor had asked her what she really wanted. Her answer, ‘I’d like to marry and have children’, had shocked them both. The thought of it with Oliver was painfully inappropriate. But with Darcy, it was different. He was clear, and faithful, and she knew that he loved her.
Then at Stephen Spurring’s house, she had envied Beatrice in the warm clutter of her family kitchen. That could be her own life now, and for her husband she would have Darcy whose goodness was unmistakable.
She could go home to Darcy and the low grey house against the hillside, and the warmth of his love. And to the invincible security of his great name, however little that had to do with the man himself. She would be secure with Darcy, and she could be free to be happy. Nor would it be just for herself. Her mother and Graham would never have to worry again. She was certain that Darcy would see to that.
Pansy and Chloe and the Warrens were still looking at her, smiling uncertainly. Outside the low music of the Venetian night went on. Life had seemed sweet and simple here. Her heart leapt as she realised that that simplicity could stay with her now.