by Primula Bond
Gustav puts his cup down. Wipes his mouth with the snowy napkin.
‘Actually if I hadn’t come out for a walk and found you on the bridge last night my intention was to surprise you this morning and grovel until you forgave me. But there’s another reason I came.’
I bite my tongue. Feel the blood rushing to my head as I pull my knees up to my chin. All my acting skills fly out of the window to join the pigeons down in Piazza San Marco.
‘You couldn’t live without me for another minute?’
‘Something like that. Chérie, anything could have happened to you at that ball. All that strong liquor, illegal substances, tight corsets. I know I had no right to worry, but I did. I do! I always will. I know I said I want to set you free, within limits, but how can I when the minute you’re out of my sight I can’t bear the thought of it either? I know those Weinmeyers have taken you under their wing, but they’re still not to be trusted when they get into one of their orgies.’ He half sighs, half chuckles. I wind lacy fronds of prosciutto around the melon. ‘Masks, swords, fire-eaters, it’s like one big production of Phantom of the Opera.’
‘It was just a party, Gustav. Not some kind of cannibalistic ritual.’ I shrug, curl my tongue around the sweet melon and salty ham. ‘So you came flying over here to rescue me from some nonexistent danger?’
Gustav puts his cup neatly down on the plate and goes to stand by the window. His hand reaches up and strokes the heavy velvet curtain.
‘I came over here to apologise and tell you I love you. But the danger wasn’t entirely nonexistent, was it? You were in a state when you got back here, and so was Crystal, because she disobeyed my orders and lost track of you.’
I work my way carefully through the melon. If I don’t tell him what happened, Pierre will.
‘That was my fault for leaving the ball without telling anyone. Gustav, let’s just be happy that you came. Venice doesn’t feel right without you.’
He opens the window. Cold sea air blasts into the room, knocking over the little glass vase of tiny rosebuds on the breakfast tray.
‘I’m a fool, I know. I should have trusted you to look after yourself. You’re my feisty mare, after all. But I can’t help it, Serena. You’re my treasured possession. The more I watch you grow and blossom, the more I want to be near you, taking care of you.’
‘You sent Crystal to do that instead.’ I push my plate away. ‘And I’m grateful, Gustav. You don’t have to worry about me, but it was lovely to find her here. Where is she, by the way?’
‘I sent her back to London. Rather abruptly, I’m afraid.’
‘Crystal’s my friend, Gustav. Not my bodyguard.’ I close my eyes, grope about in the fruit bowl and find a peach. I lift it to my lips and bite into it. ‘And I’m sure the Weinmeyers wouldn’t have let anything bad happen.’
I let the peach juice swirl over my tongue. That’s if they’d known where I was. I’d put myself into that danger by running off in search of the man in green.
Gustav nods. ‘They wouldn’t let anything harm their latest protégée. They adore you, Serena, and no wonder! Already they’ve sent out invitations to a party to view your boudoir portraits of them in their house. No doubt the ballroom montage will be another glittering Weinmeyer exhibition, too, when that’s edited.’
Gustav scoops my ball gown off the floor with his toe and lifts it to sniff the sweat and perfume on the fabric. His black hair is drying now, falling into his eyes as he squints against the light. He doesn’t notice that the robe is falling open, baring his muscled stomach and the dark shadow between his thighs. I spit out the peach stone with a clatter onto my little plate.
‘So? You said there was another reason you came here?’
Gustav hooks the gown on a hanger over the door of the wardrobe. Stroking the green silk with his long, strong fingers. ‘A little promenade, I think, and then I want to show you something.’
We have a few more hours before our night flight out of Venice. We mustn’t waste it. I walk slowly through the city. For the first time in days I have something of the old spring in my step. That’s having Gustav within reach, of course, but I’m also basking in the genuine delight of the Weinmeyers just now, when we went through the stills and film of their Carnevale ball.
I smile as I remember the scene that greeted me at Palazzo Weinmeyer. Most of the party detritus had been cleared away, but I still spotted a couple of masks hanging from an oil painting and some cut-out scarlet knickers adorning the head of a marble statue before the exhausted and hungover pair greeted me in their little salon.
‘You left the ball without saying goodbye. Not always safe to do that. Anything could have happened to you on a night like Carnevale,’ chided Mrs Weinmeyer, resting a cool cloth against her head. ‘But you’d fulfilled your brief, so we’ll let you off. I daresay that stranger in the emerald green had something to do with your flitting away like Cinderella?’
My face flooded with red as I packed away my camera. ‘I needed to get back. I was tired, that’s all.’
‘You and Prince Charming had a lot of catching up to do, I’m sure.’ Mrs Weinmeyer winked at her husband. ‘That was our doing, you know. We persuaded Gustav to come hotfoot from New York and claim you at the ball. We had no idea he’d be clever enough to find the very costume to match yours, though! Even we didn’t know what you were going to be wearing that night, did we?’
‘Mrs Weinmeyer, Mr Weinmeyer, I have to tell you something in total confidence.’ My hands stop fiddling with my camera case. I look up, and they are listening intently. ‘The man in green wasn’t Gustav. How I wish it had been! He just vanished into the crowd, I didn’t see him again, but I think Gustav would be happier not hearing about him, especially as he’s so furious he didn’t get here in time to come to the ball!’ I laughed shakily to hide the guilt and the pleading note in my voice as they tried to pay attention like a pair of tired birds, their heads on one side and resting against their armchairs.
Mr Weinmeyer lifted a silver bell and tinkled it to summon the butler to let me out. ‘What happens at the Weinmeyer ball, Serena–’
I laughed quietly. ‘And that’s why I have to get going now. Gustav’s waiting for me down near the Giudecca Canal and he’s whisking me back home first thing tomorrow morning. As you say, we have lots of catching up to do! See you back in the Big Apple!’
‘You certainly will, sugar,’ crooned Mrs Weinmeyer. ‘You owe us a little private fun.’
As I ran down the wide marble staircase I caught sight of a buckled shoe discarded in the corner of a balcony.
Now I walk on through the white afternoon to meet my lover. The few sightseers who pass me are bedraggled after last night’s excesses. The city is still quiet, restored for a day or two to its inhabitants and their secret lives behind the chipped arched windows and freshly planted red geraniums.
One pair of buckled shoes nearly destroyed me. Pierre wore them to lend him the extra height that made him look more like Gustav. And now I can feel the sway of the gondola again, the pressing of my body into those cushions with Pierre’s weight on me, his hands and lips, every part of him trying to take me away from Gustav. Nausea swirls in my stomach as I see again the fly of his breeches opening to show me what he had in store, the deep kick of excitement and readiness in my response.
No wonder I can’t shake off the fear that eyes are watching me. Pierre could be anywhere. When I see him again he will be unmasked, with such a story, and I wonder if I will ever be free of the fear that he will tell it.
I walk south down the side of the gallery and across Campo Sant’Agnese, empty today save for a clutch of pigeons and a waiter emerging from a small corner trattoria and optimistically putting out metal chairs and tables even though this wind is Arctic. A bent old lady wearing a black coat, with a black mantilla draped over her sparse white hair, edges her way round the piazza with her back pressed against the walls, eyes darting from side to side as if she is poised any minute to surrender to a hai
l of gunfire, like a very old Bonnie who has lost her Clyde.
I take out my camera, my automatic reaction whenever my imagination starts to work overtime. In my viewfinder she shrinks into a batty old woman who wants to feed the birds, tuppence a bag. But like all of us she has a history. She could once have been a great beauty, had a great voice, was a famous dressmaker or explorer or pastry cook, had been a maestro’s mistress, enjoyed great passion. And now she’ll be forever old and frozen inside my box of tricks.
I scan the square, into the windows, up to the roofs. Pierre is like a sniper, taking aim. I lower my camera and keep walking. Last night’s encounter, even though it didn’t come to fruition, is a ticking time-bomb if I don’t find a way to defuse it. All I can hope is that Pierre won’t say anything because if he tells my boyfriend he tried to fuck me in a gondola he will lose his brother all over again, with me as collateral damage.
But if he does decide to tell Gustav some hideous story, I have no option but to tell the truth. That I thought he was Gustav. That it was a case of mistaken identity. But until then there’s the horrible feeling that I am Pierre’s hostage. I become more absorbed, foraging material for my ‘Windows and Doors’ show as I pass a scattering of closed shops and bars, and then I’m on the wide southern pavement of the Fondamenta Zattere. Every evening last summer this was where the colourful passeggiata of artists and residents took place, away from the central areas, watched over by the melancholy Isola della Giudecca. Now I’m almost knocked backwards by the wind slicing up the Giudecca Canal in the wake of an obscenely enormous white cruise ship that is taller than most of the buildings. It looks crude and false, superimposed, as if the city is a green screen and the gigantic cruiser is the harbinger of a disaster movie. The engines throb like a sore thumb, their underwater vibrations trying to prise up the old stones beneath my feet.
Venice has cobwebbed around me like a network of arteries and veins. I can’t envisage this city collapsing into the waves, like the special effects in the closing scenes of James Bond’s Casino Royale.
The only other person out here is a shabby bearded painter in a drooping trilby and an overcoat. He is huddled over his easel, a stack of blank canvases beside him. His paintbrush is poised like a dart as he ignores the stout backside of the retreating cruise liner and instead stares eastwards towards Chiesa San Giorgio Maggiore and the lagoon. On the paper clipped to his board are the first few strokes of a dreamy watercolour, so understated that all I can see is a tangerine haze, so he must have been here since sunrise. Sunsets here are coral. Spires and people are ghostly smudges on the page, designed to play tricks on the eye until interrupted by the curved black prow of a gondola entering the picture from the edge.
I wonder if he realises that a blob of terracotta watercolour paint in the top corner has elongated into a tear drop and is now a rusty stream piercing the delicate outlines of his work.
I continue until I’m able to take a surreptitious picture of the artist as he bends to look at his paper. He notices the spillage and absently traces the stream of paint with his finger.
I see Gustav before he sees me. Through the big open doors of a squero, a small shipyard on the Rio di San Trovaso, where the carcases of broken gondolas and the embryos of new ones hang from the rafters, he is squatting on the floor amongst curled shavings, listening intently to a grizzled geezer as he planes dark wood. Gustav is stroking the rib of a half-formed gondola with the tip of his finger, and I stand on the other side of the canal watching him, a shiver of desire going through me as I look at his big warm hands. When he’s not punishing me he strokes me just like that.
Right now the boat looks like the bleached skeleton of a long fish. I come up behind the two men and scuffle my feet in the sawdust. Gustav half-turns and waggles his fingers over his shoulder but I’m not to interrupt. I squat close to him, dying to ferret my nose into his black hair just where it falls on to his red scarf. It would be rude to start licking his neck in front of this old gondola-maker, but I want to breathe him in.
‘Did you know, there are seven different kinds of wood going into this gondola? Two hundred and eighty pieces in the hull alone,’ Gustav remarks after a moment. The old man nods at me, a gold tooth glinting, then gets back to work.
I raise my camera and start to shoot.
‘He uses oak for the flanks, fir for the bottom of the hull because apparently it’s light. The stern is made from cherry, and the bow is mahogany. He has to make it asymmetrical. The left side has a greater curve to balance the lateral action of the oar. It’s a work of art. He’ll take out all the nails and do it again if it’s a millimetre out of line.’
Gustav stands up and bids farewell to the gondola-maker in fluent Italian.
‘Is that what you wanted to show me today?’
‘No, but it’s fascinating nevertheless. Maybe we should plant all those trees in the garden we are going to have one day, Serena. In England. Italy. Wherever. Wood for these beautiful boats. It’s just a shame they’re so overpriced now, once the gondoliers reel in the tourists.’ Gustav seems deep in thought as he puts his arm round me. ‘Like streetwalkers tarted up for business.’
We walk back along the Zattere and push open the door of a warm lino-floored pizzeria noisy with the clatter of pans and cutlery. The rustic walls are adorned with misty paintings of the city.
We spend a long afternoon drinking beer and eating pizzas the size of wagon wheels slathered in melted mozzarella and sprinkled with bright green basil before leaving reluctantly and making our way slowly back over the slim Accademia Bridge. We stop in the middle, taking in the curve of the Grand Canal.
‘La Serenissima. Venice the serene and beautiful. They named this town after you, Serena.’
I smile and lean against him. ‘You know this bridge was intended to be temporary when it was built? They were supposed to be finding a suitable permanent design but they seem to have forgotten, and this spindly wooden one is still here.’
We watch the parade of finished gondolas slide under our feet, all painted and varnished and lacquered and gliding nimbly amongst the businesslike vaporetti. A trio of heavy peate lumbers down the centre of the channel with several grand pianos lashed to their hulls.
‘A bit like the London Eye. That was only supposed to be for the millenium, wasn’t it?’
‘And how different this watery thoroughfare is from the Thames.’
I close my eyes and see the giant wheel turning on the South Bank, how it caught my eye every time I looked out of the window of the Levi gallery during my first-ever exhibition in London. I remember the quiet circuit Gustav and I made on it that day just before Christmas when he asked me to go to New York with him. How thrilled I was.
And yet at this moment the last place I want to be is New York.
The couples below us who have paid a king’s ransom for the privilege of being propelled in a gondola look faintly ridiculous as they rub mottled violet hands and try to arrange their legs elegantly on their cushions, exclaiming and taking pictures while the bored gondolier whistles soundlessly above them.
‘I’ve got something here to perk up those shrivelled-looking honeymooners. Don’t they know there are other ways to enjoy a gondola?’
Gustav chuckles quietly and pulls the silver chain out of his pocket. It has been rolled up so that it looks like a tennis ball made of metallic wool, something a kitten would toy with. It’s tied all round so that it won’t unravel.
‘Gustav? What are you doing?’
He waits for the gondola to slide under the bridge and then tosses the ball straight down into the gondola, making the couple jump and wonder.
Gustav kisses my hair. ‘It’ll take them a while to work out what it is for. But I hope they enjoy it. We don’t need it any more. You’re free.’
‘You came to Venice to set me free?’ I rub my wrist, where the silver bracelet still glistens. This explains his serious expression. He came to tell me that it’s over. ‘I don’t want to be free. I
want to be glued to you forever!’
‘And you are. You will be. But we don’t need the silver chain to bind us. However long a leash I attach to you, you will always stretch it further. It’s a symbol that has run its course, because I trust, I know, that you’ll always come back to me, even when you run away as far as Venice. So I think we need something new to symbolise what we have.’
We stare from the bridge down the Grand Canal flanked by Gothic palazzi towards San Marco, my hotel, and the wide expanse of light from the lagoon beyond. The coral sunset is beginning to stain the sky. Beneath us a boat churns up green foam. Gustav presses his hand on the rail to make me stay put, and dashes down the bridge the way we came. He darts into a little bar beneath the Hotel Galleria and comes out again with two tall glasses of prosecco.
I take a sip from my glass. It’s delicious and light, but the bubbles aren’t inside me yet.
‘You know the strangest thing, Gustav? I’ve done a lot of walking while I’ve been here. I went looking for the convent where I photographed those nuns last summer, but I couldn’t find it. It was as if it had never existed. But then the other morning I passed the Ospedale della Pietà, not far from the hotel actually. Historically it was the church where the fallen women of the city left their babies, nearly always girls, to be brought up. And Vivaldi trained many of them to sing like angels in his choirs.’
My eyes spring with hot tears as I look over in that direction.
‘We can always come back here again, Serena. How about a tour of Italy next year? We can find a lovely villa, in Tuscany maybe, that will only be ours.’
I don’t really register what he’s saying. I lean my head on his shoulder. ‘The foundlings were given the surname Trovato, did you know that? It means ‘found’. Maybe I could do that. Discard my own false history once and for all. Make myself a new one. I could change my name to Trovato. What do you think, Gustav?’
Gustav doesn’t respond. I’m not sure he’s heard me. The wind whistles past us. The buildings of Venice crowd round us as the light fades.