Deep and Silent Waters (40 page)

‘I wish I was.’ His lashes drooped, and he looked through them wickedly at her.

‘You’re a flirt,’ she told him, and he grinned.

‘You look so sad all the time. I’m trying to cheer you up. Should you be sitting so near the fire? Would you like me to move your chair back a little?’

‘It’s fine. If it’s too far back I catch the draught from the window or the door. Sebastian and I experimented to find the perfect spot.’

He dropped his pad and pencil and lay back on the rug, his hands laced at the nape of his neck, gazing up at her. ‘Ah, yes, Sebastian. Always Sebastian.’

‘He is my director.’

‘And your lover.’

She didn’t answer.

‘Every time I see you, you’re more beautiful,’ Niccolo said softly.

She frowned. ‘Don’t. Please.’

‘You don’t like compliments?’

‘Not much. After all, I’m not responsible for the way I look. I just grew like this. When I was in my teens everyone told me I was ugly, clumsy, awkward, my arms and legs too long, my body too thin. Then suddenly men started telling me I was beautiful – but I hadn’t changed. I looked in the mirror and saw the same girl. I got very confused. And one day I’ll be old and men won’t rush up to tell me how beautiful I am, they’ll look away, thinking, What an ugly old hag, and how will I feel then?’

‘No. Never. When you’re ninety you’ll still be lovely. It’s your cheekbones and the way your eyes are set in your head. Your bone structure is ravishing. I may draw your skeleton, leave out all the flesh.’

She burst out laughing. ‘How gruesome! You have the strangest mind.’

‘And you have the most beautiful body.’ He sat up, knelt to take her hand, stretched out the fingers on his palm. ‘Even your hands are a work of art.’

‘Thank you, but I was not the artist.’

‘No, that was God, the greatest artist of us all.’

‘You believe in God?’

He looked up at her, dark eyes clear. ‘Of course. Don’t you?’

‘I used to, but I’m no longer sure.’ She remembered Valerie, broken on the stone terrace in front of Ca’ d’Angeli with the golden archangels staring solemnly down at her.

Niccolo kissed her fingers one by one. ‘Don’t cry.’

She only realised she was crying when he said it. Pulling her hands away she found a paper handkerchief and dried her eyes, blew her nose.

He watched her, concerned. ‘I’m sorry, the last thing I meant to do was upset you. The police talked to me about the woman who killed herself the other day. Is it true that it was her who stabbed you?’

She nodded.

‘So she was not your friend.’

Laura laughed feverishly. ‘That’s a charming way of putting it. She hated me.’

‘She was crazy, obviously.’

‘She was very sick.’

‘Then you must not be sad. She couldn’t have been happy. Maybe now she’s dead she’s happier.’

She gave him a dry glance. ‘Somehow I don’t find that very comforting.’

They were both silent, then he said, ‘When the inquest is over, you will go home to England?’

‘Yes, as soon as I’ve finished filming a couple of scenes for Sebastian. I haven’t done any work since I got here and it’s essential that I shoot the scenes I was scheduled for.’

‘Please, come back to Ca’ d’Angeli in the summer. I wouldn’t want you to have only bad memories of my house, and I’d like to show you more of Venice.’

‘That’s very kind, but—’

‘Also I still want you to pose for me as the female David. I’ve made a number of sketches from the photos I took and I’m eager to start work – but I need you, I can’t work exclusively from photos. I need to touch, you see, to feel the dimensions of what I’m working on.’ He flexed his hands, the strong, tanned fingers eloquent, knelt up and framed her face, holding and touching, caressing all at once.

The hair on the back of Laura’s neck bristled. Someone was watching. She felt it, as she had felt it once before. She looked up instantly, and saw the glassy, gleaming eye in the ceiling staring back at her.

A scream broke out of her and a second later the human eye was gone, replaced by the flat, painted one.

‘
Dio
!’ Niccolo was so startled he lapsed into Italian, talking fast, looking anxiously at her.

She didn’t understand a word. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Why did you scream like that? I wouldn’t hurt you – I’d never hurt you.’

The door was flung open. Laura looked across the room as Sebastian rushed in. She was both relieved and alarmed to see him.

‘What’s going on in here?’ It wasn’t a question so much as a threat. ‘What did he do to you?’ He moved fast towards them and Niccolo stood up, squaring his shoulders as if ready for a fight.

‘I didn’t do anything to her!’

‘He didn’t,’ Laura said. ‘I saw it again – the eye.’ She pointed. ‘Up there.’

Sebastian’s hard mouth indented; his eyes spat jealousy. ‘I wonder what you were feeling guilty about this time.’

‘I wasn’t feeling guilty about anything! I tell you, I saw it.’

‘Oh, come off it! You didn’t see anything up there. You just imagined it!’

Niccolo was looking up at the painted ceiling. ‘No,’ he said slowly, seriously. ‘No, I don’t think she did. Laura, was it Juno’s eye?’

Sebastian and Laura stared at him.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘And you saw a living eye watching you?’

‘Yes.’ Laura drew a sharp breath. ‘I didn’t imagine it, did I?’

Niccolo turned on his heel, and walked out of the room without answering. Sebastian followed him. Laura hesitated for a minute, but she wasn’t staying there alone. She went after them, shivering a little as she turned into the marble-walled hall. The two men were on the stairs going up to the second floor and vanished round a bend in the staircase.

The film crew, still busy in the hallway, had stopped to watch curiously: an electrician with black cable wound round his hand, Sidney polishing a lens of one of his cameras, looking older since Valerie’s death as if the shock had aged him, Carmen sitting cross-legged on a rug with a pile of shooting scripts in front of her, going through them and scribbling timings in the margins.

Laura wished she was just one of them, lost in the daily minutiae of their lives, doing her job, worrying about nothing except getting her work right.

She waved to them and Sidney called, ‘How are you?’

‘Okay,’ she said, but his eyes told her she didn’t look it. She walked slowly to the stairs and followed the men up to the second floor, leaning heavily on the banisters.

By the time she reached the top they were out of sight but she heard voices and followed the sound along a corridor into a large bedchamber, hung with red velvet at the window and on the four-poster bed. The walls were painted dark red, too. The black shadows from the flames in the hearth licked up to the ceiling and made the atmosphere heavy with brooding. The Contessa, wearing her usual black dress, sat at an embroidery frame, sewing with the calm, measured movements of custom.

She put down her needle and the skein of silk she was pulling through the cream fabric. ‘What are you doing, Niccolo?’ she asked sharply.

He had flapped back the carpet on the floor and was kneeling down. Taking no notice of his mother, he told Sebastian, who stood beside him, ‘This is the mechanism. It’s very old, probably from the Renaissance – who knows who ordered it to be installed? It was the sort of thing that fascinated them in the sixteenth century. I found this one years ago, when I was about four and crawling about in here while the maid cleaned the silver brushes on my mother’s dressing table.’

‘She had no business bringing you in here! You shouldn’t have been left with a maid at all.’

‘Well, I was, that day. She didn’t notice what I was doing. I played with it for a while then pushed the rug back over it. It was some time before I realised exactly what I’d found. At the time it never occurred to me that my mother might know it was there. This house is full of secrets. There’s a staircase that leads up from the boat-house to the bedroom Laura is using. That was how my father’s visitors got up to his room without being seen.’

The Contessa rose to her full height, her face cold and forbidding. ‘Please leave my room, all of you. Niccolo, you forget your manners. You know I dislike my privacy being invaded.’

‘Why were you prying into Laura’s privacy, then?’ demanded Sebastian.

She didn’t look at him. ‘I was doing nothing of the kind.’

‘Oh, yes, Mamma,’ Niccolo said. ‘You were up here, peering down through this spyhole. Don’t bother to deny it.’

‘Why were you spying?’ insisted Sebastian.

‘I was not. I heard raised voices – it sounded like fighting. I was worried about my son, that’s all.’

Sebastian’s mouth twisted cynically. ‘Is that why you were watching Laura and me making love the afternoon she first arrived here?’

A spot of dark red flared up in her cheeks. ‘How dare you!’

Niccolo asked, ‘Did you watch my father through that spyhole?’

She shot him a furious look. ‘I am not discussing your father in front of them!’

‘But he wasn’t just
my
father, was he, Mamma? He was Sebastian’s father, too.’

Laura had suspected this, but it was still as big a shock as a volcano erupting. Sebastian was white-faced, rigid, like Lot’s wife frozen into a block of salt.

Laura put a hand to her mouth to stop herself from crying out and betraying her presence.

‘Gina and my father were lovers, weren’t they? And Sebastian is their child.’ Niccolo turned to look at Sebastian, his face grave. ‘I guessed long ago but I was sure when he came back and I saw him face to face. He and I are so alike. It was like looking into a mirror.’

‘No! You’re nothing like him! Nothing!’

Her son gazed at her with an expression of mixed pity, impatience and regret. ‘I’m sorry, Mamma, but it’s time to stop pretending, stop lying. You aren’t going to convince me. I have a mind of my own, I can do my own thinking. It’s all so long ago. What does it matter, anyway?’

‘The past always matters! The present springs from it,’ Sebastian said, and Niccolo looked at him quickly, his face mirroring his half-brother’s, thoughtful, interested. Watching them, Laura saw again how alike they were, not merely in body but in the creative mind of the artist, inventive, curious, speculative, capable of red-hot passion and cold theory.

‘Yes, of course.’ Looking back at his mother he said, ‘Gina had her baby just before you had me, didn’t she?’

Her face worked violently. ‘Yes, you know she did. I had such a bad time when you were born that I was ill afterwards, I had no milk, but she had milk enough for two. Those great breasts of hers were fountains of it. They took you away from me. I woke up and you were gone, and however much I cried and begged they wouldn’t give you back. They only let me see you once a day! I was your mother, but they kept you from me.’

‘That scene in Canfield’s book, where the wife’s baby is taken from her and given to her husband’s mistress? Is that where he got the idea for that? But how did he know? Who told him about it? He knew my father. Those descriptions of tapestries, rooms, paintings always seemed very familiar to me. Was the palazzo in the book based on Ca’ d’Angeli?’

‘Of course,’ Sebastian said, slowly. ‘And the love affair, the betrayal of the wife, the plot against her. That was you, wasn’t it, Contessa?’

She didn’t answer, her eyes black holes in space, empty and desolate.

‘So that’s why you hated the book so much!’ Niccolo was looking at her as if he had never seen his mother before. ‘Was it all true, the way Canfield wrote it? Did Papa and Gina conspire to get you married to Papa? All he had were the house and the works of art. He didn’t want to sell any of them – but although he loved them passionately he loved Gina, too, and she had no money, either.’

‘How on earth
did
Canfield know all that?’ asked Sebastian.

‘They were at school together, Gina and my mother and my aunt Olivia,’ said Niccolo. ‘She’s dead now, years ago, but the three of them were close friends when they were children. After the war my mother went to the same finishing school as my aunt, in Switzerland – the family photograph album is full of photos of them skiing together. That’s how my father and Gina knew you were going to inherit the Serrati fortune, Mamma. That’s what happened, isn’t it? They got Aunt Olivia to invite you to Ca’ d’Angeli, and Papa and your brother Carlo made some sort of deal.’

She laughed bitterly. ‘You make it sound so sensible, Niccolo. You left out Canfield. Oh, yes, he was in the conspiracy. He was obsessed with Machiavelli, you know. He wrote a book about him just after the war. Canfield enjoyed plotting, making things happen, playing with people’s lives as if they were puppets. I only saw later what a part he played in my own life. It wasn’t just spite or a love of conspiracy – he adored Gina, he was in love with her too. Maybe they’d been lovers.’

Sebastian shouted, ‘That’s a lie!’

‘How would you know?’ the Contessa threw at him. ‘She was my husband’s whore. She could have slept with half Venice for all you know! Throughout those years Canfield haunted this house. He had dinner here several nights a week.’

‘None of the books about him mention Ca’ d’Angeli.’

She shrugged. ‘How could they? I didn’t talk to any of the reporters and academics who tried to get in touch with me, so they left us out. I think one or two said he had briefly been a tutor to an Italian family but, again, by the time they wrote about that none of my family were alive, except me. There was nobody to tell them anything.’

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me?’ Niccolo demanded. ‘You knew how much I admired his work. I’d have been fascinated to discover he used to come here.’

‘I didn’t want to talk about him. I loathed the man. All my life I hated him, from when I was very small. And later, after I married your father, I hated him even more. They would all sit talking and drinking in the salon, after dinner …’

‘Talking about what?’ asked Niccolo. ‘Can you remember?’

‘Art, books, God knows, I never listened. I was usually told to go to bed, as if I was a child. Domenico would tell me I looked tired, didn’t Canfield agree? And Canfield would say I needed my beauty sleep – one of his little jokes, a double meaning he seemed to think I wouldn’t pick up, as if I couldn’t read the mockery in his face, the way he looked me up and down. He thought I was ugly, even as a child. I didn’t argue, my pride wouldn’t let me – but Antonio used to wait on them, and afterwards he would tell me everything they said.’