And then without quite realising how, Odette found herself sitting on the floor, looking up at the table. Attentive voices were murmuring in her ear. The headwaiter and a dour, middle-aged woman whose role in the hotel was unclear to Odette were looming over her. ‘Is it the wine?’ a voice said. ‘I think the lady is ill,’ said another. Odette felt very hot. She wanted to be sick, but she knew that she must not do that … here … in front of the boy. My God, the boy. She had fallen off her chair right in front of that beautiful boy. Hands helped her up, guided her from the dining room. She looked towards the table with the family. It was empty.
‘I shall call the doctor,’ said the middle-aged woman.
‘No, no, I’m fine,’ replied Odette. She thought she was just tired and stressed from the journey … from the journey. She smiled at the thought that she had fainted from exposure to the sheer beauty of the boy. Wasn’t there a syndrome? A Radio 4 memory drifted in and out. Stendhal syndrome. Fainting from too much beauty. Wasn’t it the corsets? But Stendhal was a man, wasn’t he?
And then Odette was alone, lying on the bed. The boy’s disembodied face hovered before her, his eyes still surveying some distant horizon, but her head echoed with other sounds: the clinking and crashing from the kitchen, which was below her window; the random shouts and guttural noises from the streets; the voice of Matt, with his empty ‘wow’ and transparent excuses. The sounds would have haunted her all night, but she managed to silence them by focussing on the face of the boy, and his image stayed with her as she drifted into sleep.
It remained with her when she awoke late the next morning. She still felt very peculiar and wobbled as she made her way to the bathroom. She’d missed breakfast, but still wasn’t hungry anyway. And she feared meeting the boy. As well as the embarrassment of falling off her chair, Odette was irrationally convinced that the boy would know that she was … that she was, well, what exactly? Besotted, she supposed. God, what a mess.
For her first expedition, Odette decided on the Academia, which her guidebook told her held the world’s greatest collection of Venetian art. It had the more immediate virtues of being both indoors, useful given the continuing drizzle, and less than thirty feet from her hotel, which was about her maximum tottering range at the moment.
Odette had never really had time for art. She would occasionally permit herself to be persuaded into an exhibition by one or other of her cultural friends, but she always found herself bored within half an hour, and plagued by stiffness and aches in odd parts of her body. The Academia didn’t bode well. There was an initial half-hour wait to get in, amid the jostling tourists. By the time she entered the first room she was already soaked to the skin and feeling more light-headed than ever. And then came the procession of skinny saints and stout Madonnas. The artists all seemed to have the same, or very nearly the same, name. Odette found herself entirely unmoved by the displays of devotion, however exquisitely rendered. The toothy yammering of the Japanese, the barking of the Germans, and the uncomprehending murmuring of the English all added to the misery.
‘Why am I here?’ she asked herself, not for the first time.
‘Yes, well, it’s magnificent, isn’t it?’ came a sort of reply. It was, of course, Buttock Face. ‘Fancy meeting you again,’ he continued. ‘Enjoying yourself? Look rather peaky to me.’
‘Yes, sorry, feel a bit … funny.’ Odette couldn’t muster the energy to be rude, and besides, it wasn’t her way. But why was it always the dullest people, or the weirdest, that we cannot shake off, and never the … beautiful ones?
‘You know, if you’re not feeling well, you can always come back to our hotel for a lie-down.’
Something hideous between a leer and a pout settled on the man’s face as he said this. He clearly had some frightful ménage in mind with Odette and the beret lady. She had a sudden vision of whips and thongs and strange harnesses. She knew that if she ever went back to the frightful chamber with them she would never escape alive, and bits of her body would turn up in bin liners, scattered around the city.
‘No, no, thank you,’ she said, primly. ‘Really, I’m fine.’ She hurried away into another of the endless rooms. This one seemed to be principally made up of St Sebastians being prettily shot through with arrows. He never winced, not even when a particularly sore-looking one hit him in the shin, or the elbow. As she stared at one frankly erotic Sebastian, his Calvin Klein loincloth barely saving his modesty, she became aware of a dim reflection of a face in the glossy oil-paint, precisely covering Sebastian’s pelvis. Thinking that a connoisseur was interested in the painting she moved away and to the side. But it wasn’t a bespectacled professor, or an earnest student.
It was the boy.
Odette didn’t know if he had been watching her or looking at the martyrdom of the saint. Her lips parted with an embarrassing little ‘pap’ noise. She wanted to say something, to make some profound or witty remark about the painting, or Venice, or anything. But instead she staggered back into an unruly party of Italian schoolchildren who had just spilled into the room. They were laughing and joking, ignoring their harried teacher, and Odette felt lost and helpless in the flow. She allowed herself to be carried among them away from the boy, away from the Sebastians.
Outside in the fresh, but damp, air, Odette decided that a drink was called for and Harry’s Bar seemed the only place to be. She found it without too much difficulty and, as it was the middle of the day, she even managed to get a seat. Naturally, she ordered a Bellini. Naturally, she was shocked by the price, and the tiny size of the thing, but her qualms were banished by the sharp sweet tang of it, and a couple more followed, brought by the crisply dressed and efficiently polite waiters. Venice soon became a little less wearisome. But Odette still felt strange, and it wasn’t just the Bellinis. What on earth could she do about the beautiful boy? She wanted him so badly but she couldn’t just go and seduce him, could she? It just wasn’t the sort of thing that she did. No, no. Odette Bach was the kind of sensible girl who coolly went about her business, efficiently accumulating capital. Efficiently dumped. Oh God.
That evening, Odette stayed in her room. The Bellinis wore off, leaving her more depressed than ever. She read again through the guidebooks: so much splendour, so much beauty. She felt further away from it than if she had stayed in London. She ordered a sandwich from room service, but still felt too sick to eat. She lay awake again that night, listening again to the kitchen sounds, and her own shallow breathing.
Sunday: her last full day in Venice. She was determined to make the most of it. The woman on reception suggested the Rialto. Odette took the vaporetto. The day was brighter, and Venice looked more itself. There really was nothing like it anywhere: the sheer weirdness of buildings lapped by water. Before she came Odette had vaguely thought that there would be some kind of beachy bit in between the canals and the palazzos. But no: it was just there – water and then palace. She wanted to explain this remarkable insight to someone, but she half realised the urge was part of her illness.
Her guidebook had a useful pull-out section naming the major buildings along the Grand Canal, and she ticked off the Palazzo Grassi, the Ca’ Foscari, the Pisani-Moretta, and later the Contarini Dei Cavalli, the Grimani, the Ca’ Farsetti and the Ca’ Loredan. Although she knew she was supposed to be impressed, and did perceive something of the ancient grandeur, she couldn’t help but feel that they screamed out for a lick of paint, or just a good tidy-up.
Stepping from the vaporetto at the stop just after the bridge, Odette instantly hated the Rialto, which seemed the essence of all that was wrong with Venice. Tourists swarmed amidst the boil-in-the-bag tourist tat, stalls and shops selling the sort of things it was impossible to imagine anyone ever wanting to buy: hideous glass trinkets like fragments of solidified migraine, nylon lace stamped with unidentifiable Venetian scenes; plastic gondolas, complete with string-pull singing gondoliers.
Odette staggered down a side street to escape the inferno, and found herself in a different
type of hell. Everywhere there was blood and heads and flayed skin, and the stench of fish. Odette had finally found a corner of ‘real’ Venice, complete with leering traders, their stubble dense as Velcro, and toothless, black-clad widows, haggling over the price of eels. The air was thick with the strange Venetian accent, well beyond the reach of her phrasebook Italian. Odette thought hard about being charmed, but it was all too real, all too smelly and loud, and she found herself churning again with nausea and revulsion. Hot, despite the still falling drizzle, she leant against the window of a shop facing the market. The glass felt cool against her cheek. And then her eyes focussed on what was behind the glass. Rolls of earth-dark meat; strange cuts she did not recognise; long, curling sausages in the same dark umber, speckled with white fat. And a picture of a gaily prancing horse.
And more. Once again there was a reflection in the surface; the same slender form, the same impression of serenity, lightness, gravity, beauty.
‘Yurluk lie yoor go ña pyook.’
The boy had spoken to her in his language, exotic and yet familiar.
‘I beg your … I’m sorry, I don’t understand your language.’
‘I said, you look like you’re going to puke.’
Ah! Not Estonian. The accent was vaguely Northern; Odette thought of Leeds.
‘You’re in our hotel, aren’t you?’ the boy continued. ‘I saw you the other night when you fell off your chair. Are you sick?’
Odette started to laugh. One of the rewards of honesty and straightforwardness was her inability to take herself too seriously. She was very aware that she had been silly, and unlike many people who would have been embarrassed at the thought, and repressed it, the knowledge gave her no little pleasure.
‘Not really. But I haven’t had anything to eat for a couple of days, and I feel a bit woozy.’
‘There’s a place near here. Mum takes us there sometimes. It’s good and cheap. Do you want to go for some lunch?’
The cocky little so-and-so, thought Odette, but her nausea had floated away and she felt famished. And even if the boy had lost his mystery, he was still undeniably very pretty.
‘Yeah, why not. But aren’t you with your family?’
‘Oh, they’ve all gone off to do some sight seeing, now Dad’s here. We came a week ahead of him, and he’s catching up. He had a funny tummy on the first evening. Something dodgy on the plane.’
The whole family now appeared less romantic. Estonian aristocrats! They were clearly Yorkshire haute bourgeois. Odette mentally moved them from Leeds to Harrogate.
The lunch was fun. The boy, whose name was Peter Todd, was lively and funny. He was halfway through his A Level course, and told jokes about the teachers and other kids in a charmingly egocentric way. He seemed to be used to being the centre of attention, everyone’s darling boy. And, Odette realised, he was flirting with her, reaching over, at one point, to wipe away a little smear of tomato sauce from the corner of her mouth, and, more than once, brushing against her foot under the table.
He finally asked her what she was doing in Venice on her own. She gave him a censored account, trying hard not to sound too sad or desperate. But it still sounded quite sad and desperate. Peter seemed genuinely moved by the story.
‘The miserable fucker. And you’re so …’
‘So what?’ smiled Odette.
‘Gorgeous.’ He blushed, prettily.
It was then that Odette realised that she was going to sleep with the beautiful boy. She was aware that she was behaving irresponsibly. This boy was more than ten years younger than she was. But wasn’t it true that everyone between fifteen and forty was now more or less the same age? Liked the same music and wore the same kind of clothes? It was one of the common themes among her friends, thirtysomethings determinedly clinging to their youth.
She wasn’t sure who proposed it, but she found after lunch that they were walking back to the hotel. Peter knew the route well, and told stories (almost certainly made up) about the sights along the way. Here a man was castrated by the irate husband of his lover; in that Palazzo a brother and sister were suffocated in swan down after being caught in bed together. The city was no longer a chore, but a game, and its beauty emerged fresher from the dappling of light amidst the darkness.
He took her hand. She was surprised to find that his was not delicate and light-boned, but broad, and rough and strong. She felt for the first time a rippling of old-fashioned animal lust, so much more energising and thrilling than the curious, disembodied desire she had felt before.
At the door to the hotel, he whispered, ‘You can come to my room. I have some vodka. It’s number forty, right at the top. It’s the only single room in the hotel. I said I wasn’t going to share this time. But we better not go in together.’
Odette found herself impressed, turned on, and not a little shocked by his coolness and apparent experience in these matters. She rather enjoyed the feeling of being in another’s control, of not having to act or think.
She went first to her own room, where she applied some lipstick (the only make-up she ever used). She had brought some silly sexy underwear for Matt, mainly as a jokey contrast to her customary utilitarianism in lingerie. But now she slipped on the little knickers with a growing feeling of excitement. Before leaving she popped a packet of condoms into her pocket.
She knocked on his door. The room was tiny, and the sharp fall of the ceiling meant that you could only stand up in the middle. Peter silently approached her and kissed her very gently on the lips, pushing in his tongue, sweet and sharp. Odette noted for the first time with surprise that he was taller than she was. He guided her to the narrow bed. As they sat upon the edge he slipped his hand under her cashmere sweater, and popped the clasp on her bra.
‘Very professional,’ she said, laughing.
‘I used to practise on my sister’s – fastened to a chair, of course.’
‘Have you got anything?’ she said.
‘No, but I can … I can do a thing.’
‘It’s all right, you’d better use one of these.’
She was down by now to her knickers, and he was naked but for his Calvin Kleins. His body was completely unmuscled, in the way of teenage boys, but lithe and sinewy. Only his big hands suggested the man he would become. And the … well, here it was. Odette was determined to be totally passive – the last thing she needed was a conscience troubling her about seducing children. This way she knew that it was all of his doing. And he seemed to enjoy the challenge of her passivity, straining to tease and stimulate her into a response.
And then there came a knocking at the door, and a voice shouting: ‘Peter? You in there? No point pretending, I know you are. Reception said you got your key. Can’t believe it. Most beautiful city in the world and all you can do is lie skulking in bed, playing with yourself. Get out of there right now. I want you in our room in five minutes flat to plan the rest of the day.’
Although the door was locked, both cringed playfully beneath the sheets, trying not to laugh.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Peter, detumescing. ‘I hate him. But look, we’ve got time …’
‘No,’ said Odette. ‘It’s a lucky escape, really. I shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t be doing … this.’
‘Go on.’
‘No,’ smiling.
‘Please.’
‘No,’ laughing.
They were sitting up now. The intensity of the moment had gone, but there was no awkwardness.
‘You’ve done this sort of thing lots of times, haven’t you?’ she said.
‘Yeah well, when you look like me, you get … offers all the time.’ It was said plainly, without vanity. He was just stating the facts. ‘You haven’t, have you?’
‘No. Was I really so bad at it?’
‘You were lovely. I mean really sexy. I could tell you were holding yourself back, that something really amazing was about to happen when the dam broke. I wish I could have been there when it happens.’
‘Well, y
ou nearly were. You’re some boy.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come out to dinner with us tonight? My mum and dad aren’t that bad, and they’re always picking up interesting strangers.’
Odette thought about her options. What else could she do, alone, on her last night in Venice? There was something about the mother and the elder sister, and even the two brats that drew Odette. They all had that same loveliness which makes you just a little bit happier when it’s near. And could the father really be such an ogre?
‘Why not,’ she said.
Peter called her room to tell her where they were to meet. It was one of the grandest restaurants in Venice, famously expensive.
‘It’ll be Dad’s treat. He’s excited about meeting you. I made you sound all tragic and interesting. I hope you don’t mind.’
Odette could live with tragic and interesting.
The restaurant seemed to be modelled on the dining car on the Orient Express. It was excessively opulent, and ever so slightly tacky, but that was the way of money in Venice. The family, minus the father, were already there when Odette arrived.
‘You must be Odette,’ said the mother, her voice placing her reasonably loftily on the Harrogate social ladder. ‘Peter’s been telling us all about you. You’ve made quite a conquest there, my dear.’ It was impossible to tell if there was any irony in the words. ‘My husband is still feeling a little unwell. He’ll be back in a moment.’
There followed some pleasant chit-chat. The two little ones stopped fighting so they could stare at the new arrival, and the teenage girl, whose name was Lotte, was very sweet.
‘Ah Quentin,’ said the mother to a shadow looming behind Odette, ‘you’re back. Meet Ms Bach, who’s been showing Peter the beauties of Venice.’
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