Reaching the flat once more, Elena followed Irma up the stairs, making sure her own footsteps were silent. Irma’s progress was slow and, for the briefest of moments, Elena felt sorry for her, but she soon roused herself by remembering how mean she had been to Rosanna.
Standing a few feet behind her, Elena watched as Irma retrieved her key from her bag. Like in the Danieli, it was all about timing. The key was in the lock and the handle was being turned. The door was open. NOW!
‘Irma!’ Elena called softly from behind her shoulder before walking lightly down the hallway a little.
‘Who’s there?’ Irma asked, craning her head back a little but not letting go of the door handle. There wasn’t enough space for Elena to get through.
‘Irma!’ Elena called again.
Irma’s tiny eyes narrowed until they’d almost completely disappeared. ‘Who is it? Is that you, Dora?’ she asked, walking towards the stairs and peering down.
Elena took her chance and ran lightly into the apartment. She was in! Almost
immediately, she was struck by the neatness of everything. There wasn’t a cushion that was out of the place, the curtains were drawn just so and a large collection of silver photo frames shone brightly on a sideboard. Elena took a step closer to look at them and noticed that they were all of Corrado. These must have been the photo frames from Rosanna’s nightmare, Elena thought, and she had a sudden urge to throw them all out of the window into the nearby canal.
The flat door slammed and Irma Taccani came in muttering under her breath. Elena watched as she walked through to the kitchen and started to put her shopping away, wondering, exactly, what she was going to do with her. She amused herself, for the time being, with unstraightening the curtains and squashing the cushions into unpleasant shapes but that wouldn’t amount to a satisfying revenge even though it was funny to see Irma’s puzzled expression as she walked back through to the living room.
The answer came when Irma took a duster to a picture on the wall. It was one of the few pictures in the flat that wasn’t of Corrado. It was of the Virgin Mary. That was it, Elena smiled.
‘Irma Taccani!’ Elena suddenly bellowed, surprising herself by the strength of her own voice.
Irma dropped her duster and span around to face the empty space that Elena was occupying.
‘Who is it?’ Irma asked, obviously terrified. It was, Elena thought, probably the first time in her life that this woman had been terrified.
‘Who do you think I am?’ Elena boomed.
‘Mary, mother of God!’ Irma squealed, looking at the picture she’d been dusting.
‘That’s right,’ Elena said, trying very hard not to scream with laughter.
Irma crossed herself and sank to her knees. ‘How have I displeased you?’ she asked, eyes closed as if in prayer.
Elena paused for a moment, marvelling at how easy it had been to have this dragon of a woman sink to her knees before her.
‘I’ve been watching you lately and I am not pleased with what I see.’
Irma’s eyes sprang open as if in shock. ‘What have I done? Tell me what I have done and I will make amends.’
‘You’re damned right you will!’ Elena boomed, and then wondered if the Virgin Mary would really use the word damned, but it was too late and Irma hadn’t seemed to notice. ‘You are a mean and crabby old woman, Irma Taccani,’ Elena continued, not worrying too much about the vocabulary she now attributed to the Virgin Mary. ‘And you’ve been mean and crabby to those around you.’
‘Crabby?’
‘Why do you sound surprised by that word?’
Irma shook her head as if in confusion. ‘The market - the crab!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘N-nothing,’ she stammered. ‘But I don’t understand what you mean! My darling Corrado! He means more to me than life itself. I cannot think what I’ve done to hurt him.’
‘I am not talking about Corrado, you silly woman,’ Elena continued, getting into her stride as the godly messenger.
‘Then who? I hardly see anyone else.’
‘No,’ Elena said, ‘you don’t have many friends, do you, Irma Taccani?’
Irma shook her head. ‘My boy! He’s all I need.’
‘But he is an adult now. He will soon make a family for himself.’
Irma nodded, and silence ruled for a moment. ‘I think I see now,’ she said at last.
‘What is it you see?’
‘I think I might have been unpleasant to his girlfriend.’
‘Think? THINK?’ Elena shouted.
‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’ Irma babbled wildly.
‘You were most unpleasant to her. Most unpleasant!’
‘But she-’
‘What? What did she do to you? There is no excuse for the way you behaved. None at all.’
Irma shook her head. ‘Forgive me! Tell me what I should do.’
Elena thought for a moment, dragging her mind back to the days of confession. ‘Five Our Fathers and Eighty-eight Hail Marys,’ she said, her voice serious.
‘Eighty-eight?’
‘You have a problem with that, Irma Taccani?’
‘Oh, no! But why eighty-eight?’
‘You dare to question me?’
‘No! Oh, no!’
‘Then I will leave you to begin,’ Elena said, making sure Irma’s eyes were closed in prayer before she quietly let herself out. Before she left, she turned around to see a shaking Irma Taccani clinging on to her rosary and saying the first of eighty-eight Hail Marys.
Chapter 28
Elena and Rosanna weren’t the only ones to have had a disturbed night’s sleep. Mark had tossed and turned and, after realising that he wasn’t going to find any sanctuary in sleep, had got up at seven o’clock and left his hotel. He’d walked three miles before breakfast which surprised him because he wasn’t used to walking further than to his local supermarket.
Venice was the best city to get lost in, he decided. He wasn’t quite sure where he went on his early morning exploration although he had recognised San Marco. It was ghostly quiet when he walked through it and it was easy to imagine it was like that all the time. He wandered in and out of the arches of the Doge’s Palace, feeling as if he was inside some gargantuan wedding cake, and then spent a few, quiet moments looking out across the bright water of the lagoon. He’d never seen so much water in his life. Being a city boy, water had been something to drink or bathe in - never something simply to look at.
Walking, he’d found, was very therapeutic. With each step he took, he felt a little less anxious and a little less stressed. He let his feet take charge and had found himself at the Rialto where he grabbed something to eat. By now, the city had been awake for some time and the vaporetti were packed with people off to work. Mark wondered what it would be like to get a boat to work. Looking at the queues and the people squashed together, he surmised that it was really no different from catching the bus or the Tube. The novelty of water-based transport would soon wear off, he thought cynically, crossing over the Rialto Bridge and turning right.
He soon found out why there were so many people around as he came across a market. Wandering around the stalls, he bought a couple of large red apples before heading to look around the fish market. The smell of salt-water tickled his nose and made his stomach rumble even though he’d just eaten. He’d never shopped at a proper market before; he was a supermarket kind of guy and his trips involved nothing more time-consuming than grabbing a basket and dashing madly, grabbing as many microwavable goods as he could.
So it was quite pleasant to have the time to just wander around, smelling the smells and seeing the sights, and it culminated in him seeing the most extraordinary thing.
He’d just passed a stall on which was a very impressive display of fish when a crab seemed to have flown into an unsuspecting shopper’s basket. Mark’s eyes had almost been out on springs; it was the strangest thing he’d ever seen and, for a minute, he wondered if he was stil
l half-asleep. Had the crab still been alive? He hadn’t thought so, and he couldn’t help grinning as he watched the old woman’s response. She gave a load of abuse to the stall-holder whom she clearly blamed for the incident but Mark had seen that he’d had nothing to do with it; the crab had simple flown into the woman’s basket. There was no other explanation for it. Maybe it was a species of crab peculiar to the Veneto region?
Mark looked around for someone to share the joke with but there was nobody. All he could think about was how much Elena would have laughed if she’d seen it and he knew that it wasn’t half as funny seeing it alone as it would have been if they’d experienced it together. It wasn’t that he felt half a person without her - he didn’t buy in to all that rubbish - it was just that life wasn’t as much fun without someone who was on your side, someone you could say, Hey! You’re never going to believe what happened to me today! Or to assure you that you were right and that it was the world that had lost its marbles - not you. Everybody needed that other person to sound-off to and, for Mark, only Elena would ever do.
He’d been bitterly disappointed when she hadn’t turned up at the apartment, and there wasn’t any consolation in the fact that Rosanna had been equally annoyed. She’d paced up and down, periodically cursing in Italian and flinging crockery around in the kitchen. He’d sat for an unbearably long time, having no idea what to say to Rosanna or what to do if Elena didn’t turn up. He kept giving her the benefit of the doubt. She’ll be here in another ten minutes’, he’d think. If she’s not here by then, I’m going. But, as soon as the ten minutes had elapsed, he’d wait another ten minutes.
Finally, he’d lost patience and, with an apologetic and apoplectic Rosanna following him down the steps to the front door, he’d left.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she’d called after him. ‘I’ll give her a piece of my mind when she gets back.’
Mark had given a brief smile and headed down the dark calle on his own. At the time, there’d been a part of him that had never wanted to see Elena again. What was he meant to think when she’d not shown up? Didn’t it prove that she no longer cared about him?
Leaving the market, he felt angry, confused and very alone.
*
Rosanna picked up the note and read it. She pursed her lips, feeling deprived of picking a fight with Elena. She’d woken up in a bad mood after her nightmare of turning into a fat Italian mama surrounded by squawking kids, and the only vent for her emotions was her sister and, as she wasn’t there, Rosanna felt at a loss.
She fed cat-child before pushing it outside with an angry toe. Just where had Elena gone to so early in the morning? Rosanna could only hope that it was to sort things out with either Reuben or Mark - if not both. But then, Elena didn’t know where Mark was staying, did she?
‘She must be with Reuben,’ Rosanna said aloud, stopping in front of a mirror. She gazed at her reflection. Her eyes looked wild from her disturbed sleep, even though she’d slept in late. At least she didn’t have any bookings that day. But there was one thing she couldn’t avoid. She had a date with Corrado. Before she’d escaped from tea with his mother, Corrado had made her promise to meet him at a restaurant on the Lido where they could talk properly. Corrado had never used the phrase “talk properly” before and it set all sorts of alarm bells ringing in Rosanna’s mind.
‘It’s the house in Umbria!’ she whispered. ‘The house and the kids. And Irma!’
She span around from the mirror, her eyes as wide as a cartoon character’s. She knew what was coming - it was her nightmare vision of the future. She had to put a stop to it before things got out of hand; she had to tell Corrado that it was over.
Chapter 29
After the strange Elena-mirage, Prof had spent the whole morning trying out his patchy Italian on unsuspecting shopkeepers and café owners, proffering a small photo of Elena which he kept in his wallet. He was met with nothing more than shrugs and shaking heads. It wasn’t as easy as he’d thought it would be. He’d naively thought Venice would be rather like a friendly village where everybody would know each other, but it was no different from any other city.
To make himself feel slightly better, he visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection where he marvelled at the modern art even though he hadn’t been able to understand a single brushstroke, and squinted at some rather phallic blue glass which he knew Elena would have had him blushing and laughing at had she been with him. It all left him feeling rather hungry so he found a very nice restaurant overlooking a pretty square.
Choosing a table outside because the weather was really very mild and the sunshine was most pleasant on a tweed jacket, he ordered himself lunch with a glass of house white. A chap could very easily get used to this, he thought, stretching his legs out under the table. He looked out at the houses across the quiet square: they were painted in shades of fondant pink and mellow red which had the most pleasing effect on the eye. He smiled, turning back to take a sip of the wine that had arrived.
It was then that he noticed a young woman sitting at a table opposite his. He hadn’t seen her when he’d first sat down and he couldn’t understand why. She had a mass of auburn curls which caught the spring light and danced in the breeze as if they were a part of it. Her skin was pale and she had a smattering of freckles over her nose as if a child had flicked a paintbrush at her. Prof couldn’t help but smile. He’d always been rather susceptible to a pretty face and this one was Pre-Raphaelite pretty. He watched her for a moment and tried to see what she was doing. She’d finished her lunch and was writing in a lined pad with a bright silver pen.
As if he’d called out her name, the woman looked up and caught him staring at her. Prof immediately felt himself blushing and felt ashamed that he’d intruded into her private space but the woman returned his smile, quite unselfconsciously.
‘You’re English, aren’t you?’ she asked him suddenly.
He nodded, surprised by her boldness. Anyway, how could she tell he was English? Had his Italian accent been that bad when he’d ordered his meal or was there something unmistakably English in his tweed jacket and bow tie?
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You?’
‘Of course!’ she replied in an accent as sharp as cut glass. ‘Although my name isn’t terribly English - Anastasia Dupres.’
Prof smiled at her very confident but seemingly natural way of introducing herself.
‘I’m Sigmund,’ he said shyly.
‘Pardon?’ she said, leaning forward in her seat. ‘I’m afraid we won’t be able to hold a satisfactory conversation if you sit all the way over there.’
‘Oh!’ Prof said, looking confused.
‘I meant, would you like to join me?’
Prof felt another blush spreading over his face but found himself nodding and standing up, walking towards her table and sitting down.
‘Now, darling,’ she said, as if she’d known him for aeons, ‘what did you say your name was?’
‘Sigmund.’
‘Sigmund?’
Prof nodded, waiting for the laughter which inevitably followed whenever he introduced himself. ‘Yes. Sigmund Mortimer,’ he said, extending a hand to shake hers.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone called Sigmund before,’ she said with a gorgeous, open smile whilst shaking his hand firmly. It was the best reaction he’d ever had to his name. ‘You’re the first,’ she added flirtatiously.
Prof wasn’t sure how to respond to that and became even more flustered when the waiter came out and scowled at him. ‘Oh, I’ve moved,’ he explained unnecessarily.
‘It’s so nice to have somebody to talk to,’ she said. ‘Travelling alone can be so dreadfully dull.’
Prof nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And I do an awful lot of that with my job,’ she added.
Prof noticed how she effortlessly fed him conversation starters. It was a rather enjoyable experience and he allowed himself the pleasure of going with the flow.
‘Don’t you want to know wh
at I do?’ she said.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ Prof said, realising that he’d missed his cue because he’d been watching the way the sunlight shone through her hair, turning it a wondrous ruby red. ‘Of course! What do you do?’
Anastasia laughed. ‘I’m a travel writer. I’m doing an article for Vive! at the moment.’
‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘I know it’s not the best of papers to write for but they pay well and the exposure will do me good,’ she said, uncrossing and crossing her legs to the side of the table, giving Prof a quick glimpse of her shapely legs.
Prof picked up his glass of wine and took a generous mouthful, feeling very hot all of a sudden.
‘Do you read Vive!?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Hardy and Dickens mostly.’
‘Really!’ She laughed again, a wonderfully light laugh which reminded him of champagne bubbles. ‘You know, when you first came and sat down, I had a feeling you were a teacher.’
Prof smiled. ‘Was it that obvious?’
‘Yes but in a good way. I bet you’re a wonderful teacher,’ she said. ‘You look kind, approachable-’
‘Lenient!’ Prof interrupted.
‘Are you?’
‘Well, I do have one or two students who can run rings around me,’ he said, thinking of Elena and her ever-extending deadlines.
‘I bet you do,’ Anastasia said, her eyebrows rising naughtily. ‘I wasn’t so lucky at my old school. We had nothing but nasty nuns. I never had anyone as nice as you.’
‘Well,’ Prof said, not quite knowing how to respond.
There was a moment’s silence when he was very aware that her eyes were glued to him. It had been a long time since he’d felt so completely at the centre of somebody’s attention. He’d never quite had that feeling with Elena. She always seemed as though she was only partially with him - as if part of her was somewhere else. It was like the emotional equivalent of looking over somebody’s shoulder at a party in the hope of finding a more interesting person to talk to.
‘So,’ she said, ‘what is Sigmund doing in Venice?’
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