by Primula Bond
‘The camera never lies, Serena,’ she shoots back at me. ‘You of all people should know that, no matter how clever you are with an image or how many tricks you pull. I’m not a photographer. I just aimed my phone at you and took the pictures, right while it was going on. You weren’t trying to talk to Pierre about me, or get him to come back to me. You were kissing him! How tacky does it get?’
‘Polly, come back! Why are you doing this? I’m your family, for God’s sake! Your cousin!’
She pushes the button on the lift outside, her oversized coat wrapped like a great batwing around her frail body.
‘You were a foundling, remember? You’re not my real cousin!’ She shouts as the lift doors open. ‘You are nothing to me!’
The words punch all the air out of me. I crumple down onto the floor, where she was sitting just now, but she is gone. Those are the very words I heard over and over again when I was a child. I thought they could never hurt me again.
I manage to heave myself onto the sofa, pull the kimono round me. My nakedness feels shameful. But it might just melt him. I’m shivering, even though it’s warm in here. Gustav steps towards me, and I look up eagerly, but he’s looking at me, just like Polly did, as if he’s never seen me before, or worse, as if what he sees he detests.
I grab his hands, but they are dead in mine. Think, Serena, think.
‘Margot is in Pierre’s head, making mischief. That’s all this is. But I don’t give a damn about his twisted motives. He did give me a rather close kiss, but I pushed him off! I was trying to help Polly and I thought it would help you, too.’
‘You said yourself, we can’t trace every bad thing that happens back to Margot.’
‘And we can’t let one grainy, misinterpreted photograph destroy everything either.’
Gustav lifts my wrist and I think he is going to sit beside me, and put his arm around me. But instead he unclips the silver chain, winds it quickly round his knuckles and goes to pick up his coat which is still lying across the sofa.
‘I should have known he’d got to you when I saw that magnificent photograph of Pierre, standing on the stage like the king of the world. Something has been wrong with you ever since I got back this evening and it takes your poor troubled cousin, who you were supposed to be helping, to show me the light. How could you, Serena? With my brother, of all people!’
I curl up in a ball, my head in my hands. ‘It’s just a picture, Gustav. They’re all just pictures. It’s my job, remember?’
I hear him shake out the red scarf. I look up. His head is bent as he starts to wind it round his neck. His aquiline nose, his profile so fine. So hard and unreachable.
‘A job which you have started doing just a little too well. I wonder if it’s affecting your judgement. The all-seeing, all-knowing eye behind the lens.’ He draws the knot tight around his neck and moves towards the door, picking up his coat and dragging it behind him.
‘I’m just capturing people, and moments. But if it upsets you, I’ll stop!’ I kneel up again. ‘I’ll cancel the commissions, all those portraits and family groups and Club Crèmes and threesomes and voyeurs’ delights, and I’ll concentrate on my personal project. “Windows and Doors” I was going to call it, remember? I’ve had it planned ever since the London exhibition opened. I’ll do anything to stop one picture jeopardising what you and Pierre have.’
‘Stop avoiding the subject, Serena! Ironic that this all stems from the one picture you didn’t take yourself!’ He opens the door as if it weighs a ton. Everything is happening in slow motion, yet much much too quickly. ‘Pierre and I have all the time in the world to sort out our differences. We are brothers, so there’s always hope. What’s jeopardised here is you and me.’
Turn around, Gustav. Stop talking crap. Turn around and make this all go away.
All I can see of him is the back of his head. His strong shoulders. His shirt, one tail sticking out of his dark-blue jeans. He pulls on the coat slowly, as if it’s hurting him. Pushes his black hair out of the collar. His lovely hands, resting for a moment on his ears as if to blot everything out.
‘I don’t know what to think any more. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
‘Nothing to say? How about coming out with it and saying sorry, Serena, for all my grand words I don’t really trust you? That I didn’t mean a word of it when I said I wanted to set you free? That’s what you should be saying. Not turning your back on me just because my demented cousin thought she saw me kissing your brother! Don’t you see how ridiculous that notion is? Haven’t I told you enough times how much I love you and want to make you proud of me?’
Gustav’s hands hang lifelessly in the air as if they’ve somehow betrayed him, too. ‘Can you hear yourself? You sound just like him. This is hurting me, it’s just like our own vile version of that stand-up row in the gallery in London. Accusation and counter-accusation, and all shrouded in uncertainty. I can’t take it, Serena. I won’t take it.’
I stand and start to walk away from him towards the bedroom. Then I stop and wheel round again, burning with fury.
‘This is nothing like that showdown with Pierre! That was you and him rehearsing years of resentment and misunderstanding fuelled by an evil bitch whose main aim in life is to harm everyone in it. I stood beside you in that gallery and told Pierre that every word spewing out of his mouth was wrong and twisted, and it wasn’t hard for me to do that, because I love you, and I’ll do anything to show the world what a fantastic man you are.’
‘A man who never learns who he can trust.’ His face remains expressionless as granite. His black eyes slide away from me as he shakes his head. I take a step towards him, across the echoing poured-concrete floor of our home.
‘But you can trust me! We’ve moved way beyond all that!’ I wave my hand at the door where Polly has just rushed out like a bat out of hell. ‘This is me, Gustav. You, me and a pathetic photograph of a bungled conversation and a clumsy goodbye in a bar, taken by a girl who’s been rejected and is beside herself with jealousy. You knew I was meeting your brother for a drink. You encouraged it! And yet you still believe I went behind your back and kissed him?’
When he still doesn’t reply something shuts down, goes numb and cold inside me. The same feeling I had as a child when nobody, ever, would listen. The world is suddenly bleached of colour. The maelstrom of the past few weeks has halted like a broken clock. If Gustav is telling me that one apparent error of judgement, one drink with one man, has cost me everything, that he can shut me out that easily, then whatever I say won’t sway him.
I leave the door open for Gustav to come into the bedroom and take it all back. I have nothing to apologise for. I spent the first half of my life wishing those closest to me would love me, and the second half knowing they never would. I’m not going to stand here and beg him to trust me when I’ve done everything I can to show I’m solid.
Meanwhile it feels wrong being half-naked. I pull on some clean clothes. I can’t stand this hostile atmosphere a minute longer. We need distance. How far, how long, I have no idea. Maybe a day. Maybe forever. I start throwing some other clothes into a bag.
I glance out of the window, over the skyline that I will always associate with our brief life together. But it all looks fake now. Precarious, like a painted backdrop. How did I ever think this magnificent palace could be my home?
I have to get out of here. It’s one thing observing Gustav’s fight with his brother. It’s quite another having him turn his anger onto me. If he’d listened to anything I’ve said about my childhood he’d know that I’m not a coward, but I won’t stand and be attacked either.
Individual thoughts rise to the surface like cream curdling. All I’ve done in the last three months is dance to his tune. All I’ve done since Christmas is try to help bring him closer to Pierre. As for Polly – I can’t even think about her.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror. My hair is still damp. My face is scrubbed and unmade-up from the bath. The only things adorni
ng me are the silver bracelet and the golden locket. I yank at them, try to break both the chains, but of course they are unbreakable. Only the best, strongest metals for Gustav Levi.
Then I hear the heavy clunk of the front door, and silence. He really has gone out and left me.
I fasten my bag with the theatrical zip that always heralds a dramatic exit in the movies, my heart hammering with despair and fury, and as if in response my iPad, still plugged into the charger but buried under the rumpled duvet, makes the swooshing, clicking sound that announces that it is coming to life.
The screen is so bright it shines right through the Egyptian cotton sheet. I pick it up. It’s an email. And the sender’s name is Margot.
I should delete it. Whatever hateful nonsense this is, I should delete it. But instead I open the message and a face fills the screen. It’s the woman from the theatre, painted to look like a swan, eyes decorated with the white lace mask, holding a bouquet of edelweiss. She pushes her nose into the flowers, gazes up through heavy, oriental lids. In the background there is some kind of church music. A wedding march. The arrival of the Queen of Sheba.
‘Hello, Serena. I would have sent this direct to Gustav but then, well, you really shouldn’t leave your devices lying around backstage. It was too tempting to make a little mischief. I know this will get to him as soon as you’ve opened it, anyway. You share everything, no? So this is for you, Gustav darling,’ says the woman in a deep, smoker’s voice. ‘Remember these pretty bridal flowers? Remember this wedding music? Remember me?’
I can’t tear my eyes away. The woman is pulling the mask off with one hand, glancing down, picking up a big wad of cotton wool, and wiping it across her eyes. She smudges the black birdlike maquillage into a horrible mess over her cheeks and forehead, then she takes another pad and carefully wipes first one eye, then the other, keeps wiping until all the make-up is gone.
The face is still dead white, the lips bright cerise pink, but the black oriental eyes are the same, staring at me just as they did from those sketches Gustav made in Lugano. The mouth keeps moving, but I can’t hear the words because the organ music fills the air. I back away into the living room, still clutching it.
‘I’ve had enough! Take him!’ I scream like a madwoman at the gloating screen. ‘You’re welcome to him. You’ve won! You’re welcome to the lot of them!’
I drop the iPad from my scorched fingers, grab my bags, and run from the apartment – leaving it, still talking, the screen refusing to fade, on Gustav’s favourite sofa.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I’m standing in front of a giant furnace, blazing out heat like a scene from Dante’s Inferno, complete with doomed souls. In the glowing embers I see a burning old building in Paris and a young man carrying his baby brother from the flames.
The people around me shuffle their feet on the concrete floor that sparkles with shards of glass, and I force myself back to the present. Even though this is a pleasure trip I still raise my camera. Even though my hands are shaking with fatigue I wait to capture the performance that is about to begin. The gaping maw of the fire’s grate is for my ‘Windows and Doors’ exhibition. The light and shade is perfect for a moody, typically Venetian composition.
Even in here the sea breeze reaches us, cutting viciously off the iron-grey lagoon separating this little island from the domes and spires of the watery city that rises like a herbaceous border on the horizon.
I lean against the wall and watch as a young guy saunters out from a back room, unbuttoning a loose white shirt. There’s no fanfare except a muttered commentary from the tour guide in charge of the tourist group beside me. I try to listen in, but she’s speaking in a language I don’t recognise and in any case I’m distracted by the long hard stare I’m getting from the guy as he strips to the waist.
The flirtatious glance is all part of the show, a trick to improve sales, and it must have the desired effect. The other tourists all clap enthusiastically as the shirt comes off. The guy picks up a long metal pipe and plunges it without further ado into the bubbling furnace. The back of his head, spine and legs are painted with darkness, the outline of his face, chest and arms thrown into relief by the roaring light.
The muscles in his shoulders and arms flex as the glass blower grasps the pipe. His ribs jab through his skin. All that intense heat must knock the breath out of you.
‘I’ll have him washed and brought to my room,’ one of the other tourists mutters.
My stomach tightens. The cold air has brought tears to my eyes. Not just the cold air. I feel so alone here. And stupid. I am missing Gustav as badly as if someone has chopped off one of my limbs.
I’m standing in the one place I’ve dreamed about revisiting, but what’s obsessing me is the mess I’ve left behind me. Gustav slamming the door of the flat without another word. Me left alone to zip up my bags, enraged by his distrust and scared shitless by that iPad message. A very quiet voice inside me, constantly being squashed down by all the other arguments, wonders if I was too hasty running off like that. But if I’d stayed, would he have come back? Was that one of his midnight flits, as Pierre called them? Would he have listened even if I’d wanted to talk?
I can’t hold on to this kind of anger for long. All I know now is that the oceans I’ve put between us may have calmed me down a little, but they have solved nothing, just made me realise that the one man I want by my side isn’t here.
A wedge of muscle thickens down each side of his back as the young man manipulates his iron pipe, dipping it into the furnace again. I know from my researches into glassmaking that the furnace is called the glory hole. When I read that, lying in the First Class cabin the Weinmeyers had booked for me, my first instinct was to text something obscene to Polly, because I could hear her reaction: He can poke my glory hole any time!
But Polly and I are not on speaking terms. In fact, I don’t even know where she is. My darling cousin has taken leave of her senses. She’s decided that I’ve stolen her boyfriend and trashed her life, and Gustav thinks the same thing.
The glass blower scoops out a sort of jelly and dances across the cold workshop to a slab of marble where he rolls and flips it, constantly lifting and twisting and swinging his pipe. Then he lowers his mouth and his cheeks pull in as he starts to suck. There’s a muted collective gasp around me.
For the millionth time I wrestle with the temptation to make that call. Swallow my pride and sort this out. I need to know how Gustav has reacted to that iPad video. Why the hell did I leave it there? If Margot and Pierre filmed that together, then they are even more evil than I thought. They are finding their way back to Gustav.
The glass blower rotates and twists his pipe as his cheeks blow life into the red-hot globule gathered at the end and coax it into shape. As the embryonic glass elongates at the end of that pipe it swells and grows, unmistakably resembling a hard-on.
A frantic, hopeless desire grips me. My body, my heart, arguing with my head. I can’t switch this off. Gustav is on the other side of the world, but who am I kidding? It felt right to jump on the first flight out here. Remember, Gustav was very quick to believe that I had let his brother kiss me. But that could have been part of Pierre’s plan. And I was starting to warm to Pierre. Part of the plan, too. He was working some of that sinister magic on me.
But Gustav has hurt me by believing Polly’s stupid photograph rather than me. That injustice will keep me in Venice, and away from him. Let him get on with his life without me by his side, and deal with his poisonous brother on his own.
The glass blower sketches another pas de deux with his instrument, coaxing the elegant line of metal as he breathes air down the tube, and look how the globular mass responds, fading from garish tangerine to a rosy hue and forming into a lovely oval.
If this was the last moment of my life I would discard everything else. I would want Gustav’s hands running over me, coaxing my body into amazing shapes. No words. Just a mind-blowing reunion.
The ballet slows as the
glass blower, still swinging his pipe to keep the momentum, rolls the dark-pink mass onto another slab and then suddenly, with his free hand, pinches the neck of the glass, which has stretched into a column, and decapitates it. Then it’s over. The shapeless, molten mass has turned into a unique ruby-red glass vase.
And everything will be all right, because I have work to do, and a life to get on with.
There is a deep hush inside the workshop. Everyone here seems reluctant to break the spell. But then the tourists start whispering, and gradually my scattered thoughts rearrange themselves into a pattern, like the multicoloured particles in a mosaic.
I approach the workbench. I study the vase closely, adjust the lighting over it, take some pictures of it with both my camera and my phone.
‘Please gift-wrap this and ship it to this address in Manhattan. The smaller one can be delivered direct to the Palazzo Weinmeyer. From me. Serena Folkes.’
I hear the cool authority in my voice and this time I catch a look of genuine admiration in the guy’s face. He looks me up and down, the expensive clothes, the quick slick of lipstick, the contrasting wild russet hair. He nods obsequiously and retreats to the back office to fetch the shipping documents.
I straighten my duck-egg-blue and white spotted silk scarf as I wait. I close my eyes, crumple the ends of the scarf up to my nose to sniff the slight remaining traces of Gustav’s tang from when he last wound it round my neck.
I walk slowly round the workshop. I finger the delicate glass ornaments, vases, bottles and bowls. I recognise the bulbous red goblets sitting on the equally delicate shelving. The Weinmeyers filled one of these with wine in their house on the Upper East Side and tried to seduce me. Spotlights are cleverly angled to make the glass objects glow, red, orange, green, blue. Seahorses, budding flowers, plain dishes, fragile glasses, all set out here for the discerning buyer.
The man emerges from the back office attired now in shirt and jacket, a pair of cool glasses on his nose. He hands me some forms and a pen. The guide ushers the tourists out of the workshop like a bunch of school kids.