Truth to Tell

by Mavis Cheek

  I was in luck. La Calcina had a room with a view. For a split second I thought Brando was going to suggest the cheaper option, of a single room without a view, and in my earlier incarnation I wouldn’t have noticed, or commented. But I was probably giving off vibes – don’t mess with me, not in the mood – because he paid the advance like a pussycat. In this city of secrets and winks and nods and waiters who blow kisses to each other to attract attention, he could hardly contain his excitement. It certainly beat cruising in Kensington Gardens.

  ‘Happy?’ he asked, oddly anxiously still.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said. And he left.

  The proprietaria who signed me in was quite uninterested in me as a person but committed to me as a guest, which was exactly right. I wonder if there is another breed of people who are quite so good at judging the selling of services and goods. A Venetian will assess what you need before you know it yourself and without the side issue of morality. The buying and selling of commodities, any commodities, is above morals. I was once told by Toni’s Bob – I winced to remember his existence – that the Japanese had this same skill with people as purchasers, but I couldn’t judge. Both cultures use masks – maybe that’s the link. In any case, I did not want to think about either of them. Not now. Toni and I must wait. I was here in Venice and I meant to enjoy it. The owner accompanied me up to my room. She showed me how to work the shower, how to open the shutters without damaging my nails, how to unplug one item in order to plug in another. Then she left me, and as she closed the door I felt both sad and excited at being so alone. Two days of being my own mistress entirely. It seemed that some things could compensate, just a little, for the bad stuff.

  The simple room had long windows overlooking – sideways on – the Zattere and the Giudecca, and it was on the third floor so not too noisy or smelling of pizza – in fact, it was perfect. If I lay on the small white bed and turned my head, I could look out across the water to the line of little cafes and shops on the opposite shore. I lay there, twitching my toes, and wondering, suddenly miserable, why I had to be here alone. But there was also that faint and niggling sense of freedom. A very odd combination of responses for one who, until now, had been such a thoroughly married woman. The misery began to give way, just a little, to excitement.

  The place certainly suited my mood. Every so often the canals and waterways of Venice are drained. For a time you can see the slimy foundations of the beautiful buildings and the sludge and foul detritus that sits at the bottom of those snaking pathways of water. Venice shows you her dark side, her secret filth, and then – when the cleansing and the dredging is complete – the snakes are refilled and the light shines down on them and you try to forget, for she does not want you to remember, the truth about her hidden nastiness. Perhaps it was the melancholy this thought caused, or the balmy breeze of the April afternoon, that sent me to sleep.

  To be woken about two hours later by the telephone and Brando asking how I was getting on – he sounded waspish – irritable – and I guessed that whoever he’d had his eye on had not obliged.

  ‘Very, very well,’ I lied. And then I remembered. ‘Actually,’ I said, waiting for the storm to strike, ‘I’ve been asleep.’

  There was a swallowing sound, a hiccough that might or might not have been Brando about to strike, and then he replied with calm evenness, ‘Good. So you’ll be nice and ready to do a bit of research now. Have a bit of a wander. You can get a rover ticket.’

  No water taxis for me, then. ‘Yes – plenty to get on with.’

  ‘Good. And you can join me for dinner.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I teased.

  ‘Sure about what?’

  ‘Having dinner with me and not –’

  ‘See you at seven, here,’ he said, crisply. ‘Or – no – wait – let’s meet for a drink at Florian’s. Outside. It’s warm enough. Six thirty.’

  ‘Ah yes, home of the kissing waiters.’

  ‘Something like that.’ He sounded even more waspish. ‘Florian’s,’ he said, and put down the phone.

  I took out my books and some old maps and a few other bits and pieces and laid them carefully on the table by the window. It looked extremely efficient. I then sat down and began to mark up places to visit, things to see, over the next couple of days. But really my mind was not on the task. Not at all. I loved being here. Just being here. And I longed to telephone Robert, really longed to; the view from the room made his absence all the more acute. Never mind the freedom, I could only think that we had been so happy here. But of course I didn’t phone. What could I say if I did speak to him? ‘I’m sorry’? But I wasn’t. How much easier it was to tell a lie than an inconvenient truth. I began to have a tickle of sympathy for politicians after all. In the course of this procedure I’d managed to arrive this side of divorce from my perfectly acceptable husband, I had upset my daughter, alienated my mother (true this was not hard) and probably lost one of my closest women friends. Great. I could see myself ending up in a world in which my only ally was Brando.

  I finished unpacking, showered and out came the white linen. Venetians notice everything you wear and can make you feel very inadequate – especially at a place like Florian’s. They may take the money of the baseball-behatted crowd during the day, but in the evening it is back to good sense in matters of style, as if the entire population dresses for dinner. Of course, this is also fantasy, but that’s the Venetian way – to give you fantasy at a price.

  The early-evening air was warm. I would be about half an hour early for our meeting but I quite liked the idea of sitting alone and watching the world go by in the piazza. When Robert and I came here and visited Florian’s, I watched a couple of interesting, elegant-looking single women – how much older they seemed to me then, the same age as me now – and thought how intriguing and sophisticated they looked – in an unselfconscious way – as if it meant nothing to them to be alone at their separate tables sipping their drinks in this most fashionable of places. This evening I thought I might do the same. Just sit and look about me and pretend to be fascinating – with a notebook and pen to hand in case some jotting of thoughts took my fancy. I was too late to go and see those lions’ mouths this evening, anyway, and the archive would be closed. Tomorrow would do for both. There is nothing like wandering around a place like Venice if you have an object in mind – even if you never fulfil it. Those old lions had been in place for five or six hundred years – another day wouldn’t worry them.

  Even if they weren’t used nowadays I could imagine it being cathartic to pop a vengeful note into the lips of the lion, despite its never being read. And they looked so decorative, so harmless. Some had the prettiest of lions’ faces, with sweetly curling manes and not a tooth to be seen. Seductive and meretricious. Some were more honestly wrought with grimaces of rage or with sinister, curling mouths – but all with that same small but tempting opening of the lips, secret and perfect for a denunciation or two. Now, apart from the Doge’s Palace, the rare ones that remained around the city were in various states of decay. Still, we only needed to look at one or two close by. I doubted if Brando would step further than he had to. The two remaining in the Doge’s Palace would suit him, the best being in the Bussola Chamber where the face is still complete and sinister and you can easily imagine the moment when an ambitious politician or an angry spouse – a thought rather too near to home for comfort – dashed off a damning note with his quill and slipped it into that secret slit. Maybe they regretted it once done – but too late – like the Royal Mail, once inside the box it was the property of the state. Even in the benign sun of an April evening, I shivered. How many poor souls went to their tortured deaths through the heat of the moment and a rash deed? There is no reposeful balance in Venice, or very little. Mostly it stirs you up, the place, with its dynamic of movement and illusion. You can hardly call the baroque soothing. Perhaps it wasn’t the best place to be when I was so stirred up already. Or perhaps it was. I hardly knew any more.

 
At least there was a table free in the piazza, and in the sun. Florian’s band was playing Viennese waltzes – which was a relief from the tinkled up Beatles’ numbers they were playing last time Robert and I were here. It made me smile, now, to remember how high-handed we were then. How we looked down our snooty, youthful noses at such wanton misuse of proper culture. Now I wouldn’t have minded at all if they had burst into ‘Yesterday’ or ‘Michelle’ – I’d probably hum along. But this evening it was definitely Vienna. All in all I might have been sitting there in Napoleon’s time, so fitting was the music, so correct were the cafe-goers. This is the time of evening in St Mark’s when the tourist boats and the coaches parked by the station leave and the place becomes civilised and proper again. Now it was all elegance and serenity.

  A waiter blew a kiss at another waiter and one was immediately by my side. I ordered Campari and soda – a very silly drink but pretty – and sat there idly looking and waiting – feeling slightly sad, slightly excited. Venice is never truly gay, she is too watchful, too much the merchant who has lost too much, not regained enough, has too many regrets to be careless enough for genuine jollity. The mood of her suited me. Truth was a hard thing to achieve.

  Brando would be totally unsympathetic. He was not bothered if I spoke truth or told him lies. He trusted me to choose which for the good of whatever I wanted to do at the time. Brando was sometimes entirely untruthful just for the fun of it. But when asked, he never flinched from being honest. How odd it was that he – most frivolous and shrugaway of all my connections – should be the one with whom truth sat so confidently. It would never occur to him to worry about being hurtful. He would tell me that my breath smelled of garlic as quickly as he would tell me that what I had written made no sense. Oh the irony. When you don’t care a fig for the world and what they think, only then can you be as truthful as you wish.

  The drink arrived, I sipped it, and then I really was in Italy. The brightness of the red, the deep flavour of the bitterness, the hint of bubbles is a perfection found only if taken in Italian sun. Anywhere else and it is very unpleasant. You can soldier on with it back home but eventually you’ll abandon the attempt for a sensible gin and tonic. And as I was thinking about this and smiling to myself and remembering those cool- and collected-looking women whom I admired as they once sat here just as I sat now, something that I had not, for one moment, expected to happen, occurred. A man came up, bowed slightly, and asked if he might join me. A tall, lean man with distinguished dark grey hair, elegant rimless spectacles, and a slightly suntanned face. Not handsome but stylish and confident. He was – at a guess – in his early sixties and wore his black linen jacket open with a pale blue linen shirt beneath. As the white is for the women, this is the quintessential uniform of the casually dressed Italian male.

  He carried an English Times folded under his arm, and while he was not Marcello Mastroianni, nor was I Anita Ekberg. And anyway, this was Venice, not Rome. I noticed, as he smiled, that he had very good teeth. I was also aware, as I was about to tell the smiling lie that my husband would be along any moment, I couldn’t. Not without rendering the whole exercise that had brought me here null and void. How useful lies are. How naked we are without them. I just stared up helplessly wondering what to do. He smiled again and gestured at the other, empty, chair.

  ‘I’m not disturbing you?’ He nodded at my notebook which was unopened on the table, the pen still clipped into place. ‘It will be such a pleasure to speak in English. You don’t mind?’

  And he slipped comfortably into the vacant seat opposite me, put his paper down on the table, and smiled.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t mind at all.’ Which was, God help me, the truth.

  Ten

  Neezled: a little drunk or intoxicated.

  Walter Skear’s North of England Words, 1873

  ‘YOU ARE ENGLISH as I hoped,’ he said with satisfaction as he leaned back in his chair and looked straight into my eyes, most disconcertingly. I hoped it was only his spectacles that appeared to wink. ‘I knew you were English.’

  ‘How?’

  He shrugged. ‘There is something about you – an individual sense of style – a lack of arrogance – a politesse in the way you eye the waiters …’ He shrugged again, most elegantly, as if apologising. ‘You had to be English. I enjoy the company of English people.’

  I looked about me. An individual sense of style? So much for the assumption that I blended effortlessly into the Venetian evening. I probably did look a bit pink compared to all those smooth, olive skins. And the lack of arrogance was just the passivity of the insecure Englishwoman abroad, the politesse of me and the waiters only a form of fear. It could probably all be summed up by saying that I looked every bit a Marks & Spencer’s woman, and they, the rest, looked like Emporio Armani. But I did not rise. I merely smiled with my very English teeth and took another sip of my drink. At least a Campari was acceptable. Wasn’t it? When I looked at the Armani signore, they all appeared to be drinking black coffee from tiny cups and what men there were appeared to be drinking either prosecco or whisky. Nobody, but nobody, had a bright red glass of something on their table.

  ‘Is this your first time in Venice, signora?’

  That old line.

  ‘Oh no – I’ve been here a couple of times before – with my husband.’

  Smooth as the waters of the canal, he replied, ‘But your husband is not here with you now?’

  This is when I would normally have lied and said that he was at the hotel, or flying out later, or having a haircut, but now all I could do was concede. Alarming certainly, but also amusing. Well, at least it was something. I was English, as he had so pointedly made clear, and married, and we married Englishwomen are not inclined to be put on the spot by flirtations. Indeed, we Englishwomen tend to be running scared of seductive encounters of the flirtatious kind, especially if we have been married for a long time. But, I had been asked a question and if truth were the order of the day there was nothing else for it.

  ‘No,’ I said, as inscrutably as I could manage, ‘he is not here.’

  ‘Then I,’ he said, turning to attract a waiter, ‘must do his duties for him.’

  I imagine my eyes gave away the thought process which was whether or not the double meaning was intended or otherwise. I think they may have sparkled. I very much hoped not.

  ‘Due Campari soda,’ he said, and then turned to me again with his sunny, inscrutable smile. ‘This very fine weather.’

  The correct approach for the English. I immediately fell into the conversational mode and agreed that it was.

  ‘And is it also good in England at the moment?’

  I agreed, again, that it was, yes, very sunny there, too.

  Of the two of us, he was the more used to appearing to be friendly and bland.

  ‘Now, why are you here alone?’

  I picked up my glass, the better to savour the moment before replying, and found that it was empty. How on earth did that happen? I replaced it on the table and was very well aware that he was looking at me, and very politely.

  ‘Another one comes,’ he said, a tad too pointedly.

  I decided to look him in the eyes but stopped somewhere near his nostrils – I couldn’t. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t. So I ended up looking over at the colonnades on the far side of the square as if for the first time.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘Alone.’

  And then the waiter brought the drinks and I looked up at the waiter with gratitude while the waiter looked down his nose at me as if I were something brought in on a misplaced shoe. My companion did not speak so I looked at him, finally, and the eyes were questioning, quite pleasantly, and waiting, quite unconcernedly, for me to say more. So I did. Truthfully. ‘I’m here with a friend. A man,’ I said. ‘He’ll be here very soon. You must stay and meet him.’ I thought this last was pretty clever, really, and expected him to make his excuses and leave. But he only leaned further towards me, raised one eyebrow, said,
‘Oh, a man?’ and touched his glass to mine. ‘Thank you. That would be very nice. I always enjoy meeting the English. He is English, I take it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Praying that Brando would not be wearing one of his more outlandish Versace jackets. There is something entirely recognisable in a fuchsia jacket with gold buttons, something that says this man is not, really, a woman’s man. Brando might be any one of a number of ways when he arrived: he might be polite and civil in a fairly distant way; he might be outrageously flirtatious (though I thought my companion a tad too old and far too self-assured for him); he might play it straight, be very friendly and very interested and ask him to dinner with us; or he might be coolly polite and immediately take me off to the restaurant without a backward glance. But which tonight? The first or the last would be best from my point of view. When, however, did Brando ever do what was required of him?

  We finished our drinks. My companion introduced himself as a Venetian born and bred – an archivist by profession and something to do with local politics. He also had curatorial duties at the museum – he pointed to the far end of the piazza. I said how interesting and that I was from London and that my name was Nina and he had pronounced it a charming name and said that he had a daughter whom he nicknamed Nana. He then said how much he liked London and which bit did I live in? And at the same time ordered another Campari which I said I did not want and which I decided to ignore when it was brought.

  ‘You know London well?’ I asked. Vienna had gone and the band was now playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – I tried not to think of Robert – and I found I was tapping my fingers on the side of the new glass. He noticed.