A Little Bit on the Side (32 page)

Seducing the waiter with a smile and tucking a note into his top pocket as he took their order, she made her cappuccino and water last an hour or more, and was content to sit and give herself up to people-watching, with perhaps an occasional glance around her at the more celebrated attractions of the Campo.

Bemused and a little puzzled at the way Josie was choosing to spend the morning of her first day in Venice, Jack nevertheless had so far been happy to play the devoted escort, admiring her looks and dress, the easy elegance with which she moved and sat, and not unpleased with the covert glances she attracted from other men nearby. But with lunchtime approaching he felt that she might now like to play the part of the conventional tourist, and suggested that they take the lift to the top of the campanile.

‘You mean squeeze in with all of them, do you Jack?’ she said with a look of distaste, nodding towards the crowd pressing around the door at the base of the tower.

‘That’s how it’s going to be at most of the major sights I’m afraid Josie. That’s the way it is most of the year in Venice, unless you chose to come in the depth of winter.’

‘Well if that’s the case I don’t think I’ll bother: at least not at the moment. Perhaps they’ll be less crowded some other time. And now I’d like to have a little browse around the shops under the arcades, and then you can take me to Harry’s Bar for a drink and a snack.’

Seated in Harry’s bar Josie ordered a Bellini and a club sandwich. This must be bloody Mandy, thought Jack - ‘and of course you simply have to go to Harry’s and have a Bellini.’ He sipped a beer, and looked around him. He’d glanced in at the door on his earlier visit and hadn’t been impressed. He was even less so now. Soulless, totally without character, rip-off prices, and not particularly clean (the table was sticky and the waiter’s jacket stained) he wondered how it managed to retain its reputation. Time for a little discussion with Josie about the rest of the week he thought. If she found the tourist crowds at the main sites daunting, he said, perhaps she would enjoy some of the city’s other, but less popular attractions.

More than fifteen years had elapsed since his earlier visit with Kate, but he remembered it as though it were yesterday. Up early and out into the half-light for Venice at sunrise, with Piazza San Marco hushed and deserted, and dawn breaking behind the domes of the basilica. Strolling the empty streets to linger in the strengthening sunlight on the Rialto bridge. Then an early coffee and croissant amid the bustle of trading at the fish market before an hour or so on vaporetti busy with Venetians, not tourists. And after breakfast, as the crowds began to arrive, they would lose themselves in the outer reaches of the sestieri, where a maze of narrow, winding alleys had led them via silent stretches of waterway, secluded campos and little-visited churches to lunch at a canal-side bacaro where the fried sardines came crisp from the kitchen and the wine cool from a barrel behind the bar.

Jack hadn’t mentioned that earlier visit with Kate, but he restrained his enthusiastic recital of the city’s minor delights when he saw Josie smiling slightly as she listened to him, and realised that she must understand very well the reason for his intimate knowledge of the byways of Venice.

She didn’t exactly reject his proposals out of hand, but somehow none of them quite fitted into her idea of a week in Venice. She wasn’t in the least a morning person, she said, and would be a poor companion for Jack on a dawn vigil, lovely as it sounded. At his mention of the fish market she said nothing, but wrinkled up her nose dismissively. Those little churches and quiet campos sounded charming, she thought, but she’d read that there were over four hundred bridges in Venice, and with one around every corner would be too utterly exhausted to enjoy those distant attractions long before she got to them.

The unfortunate truth was that quite apart from Mandy’s misreporting, Josie’s dream of Venice was born out of vague and romantic teenage memories of Katie Hepburn in
Summertime,
where the city, quite untouched by tourist hordes, shimmered and glowed under the loving direction of David Lean. The reality, unfortunately, didn’t live up to her expectations.

‘It’s a wonderful film set,’ she said. ‘But I have to confess that it isn’t quite what I expected. It’s smelly. It’s too hot, and it’s far too crowded. I’d no idea it would be overrun with day trippers like this. It might as well be Blackpool.

But we mustn’t spoil it for each other Jack. I know there’s a lot here that you’d like to see again and introduce me to, but if I’m honest old masters, crowded palaces and dusty museums really aren’t my cup of tea.’

‘And if I were honest I’d have to say that Harry’s bar isn’t exactly mine.’

‘I realise that Jack. It is rather nasty isn’t it, and I’ve got a proposal…. Now you mustn’t be offended, but I think we should go our separate ways during the day and then meet up later in the afternoon. We could have afternoon tea at Florian’s or somewhere on the waterfront, and then saunter back together to freshen up for the evening: a gondola ride perhaps, and then a leisurely dinner together.’

Far from being offended, Jack was more receptive to Josie’s proposals than might perhaps have pleased her had she known. He’d already been envisaging a pretty barren week ahead if he was confined to acting as Josie’s escort.

‘And you’ll be quite alright by yourself?’

‘Of course I will. I’m a big girl now. Then, if you really want to, you can slip away for your Venice sunrise without disturbing me, and I’ll make a nice leisurely start to the day. But now, if you really want to, and while we’re together, you can give me a conducted tour of the Piazza, and show me Venice from the top of the campanile.’

Although Jack had no enthusiasm for a solitary dawn vigil, he was nevertheless up and away the following morning while Josie was still lingering in the shower, and in avoiding those places where the tourists clustered most thickly, found himself treading the paths of that earlier visit. But even Venice changes, and after bemoaning the closure of their little canal-side bacaro he struck off in search of some new but minor delights; never difficult to find in Venice.

Josie, as he learned in the course of the week, utterly determined to indulge herself to the full despite her initial disappointment, had started each day in much the same leisurely way as her first, but rang the changes for her morning coffee between Florian’s, Gran Caffe Quadri and the Danieli Terrazza. Beautiful, immaculately dressed and solitary, she inevitably attracted attention, but politely declined all advances save one, that of a middle-aged Italian who assured her that he sought nothing but the pleasure of her company while he showed her the splendours of his city from the water: he had a launch at his disposal. He was as good as his word, she said, and after a late lunch together, returned her to the door of the hotel having conducted himself throughout with perfect propriety.

She bought jewellery from Missiaglia beneath the Procuratie Vecchie, and lace from Burano, travelling by private launch. Guided by the hotel porter to La Fenice, she was disappointed to find no opera in production at that time, but procured for herself (part charm, part financial consideration she said) a tour of the theatre including back-stage, and came away with a poster of the latest production.

In fact, as Jack later reported in a letter to Jimmy, Josie achieved the seemingly impossible by staying a week in Venice without stepping inside a palace, museum or gallery, or viewing any form of artistic expression other than the facades of the ‘film set.’ Just once, having fallen in with a family of American Hemingway devotees, she joined with them in the cost of a private launch to Torcello for lunch at Cipriani’s, and subsequently, almost incidentally, went with them into her one and only church, the basilica of Santa Maria As-sunta. God knows what it all cost her, he wrote, but I can assure you Jim, we did not go Dutch on that little bout of extravagance.

On the flight home he gazed bemusedly at Josie sleeping quietly alongside him, and managing to do so with grace, even in an aircraft seat. Shaped to perfection, exquisitely decorated and enticingly tactile, she was almost a form of artistic expression herself, he thought, but she was, alas, a hollow, empty vessel. Their week together had been enough to confirm what he had for some time suspected: Josie was a bit of a film set herself, all surface, no substance.

Apart from such drama as Brandy had introduced her to she knew next to nothing about literature at large. Most of his quotes passed her by unnoticed; that had seldom been the case with Kate. Her passion for opera seemed to be no more than a purely visceral response to the thrill of a tenor in full flow. Of music beyond the opera she was almost entirely ignorant. She hadn’t a political bone in her body, or an original thought in her head. Despite the many pleasures Josie offered, Jack was beginning to suspect that for him, as well as for her, the novelty might be wearing off.

On the Monday following their return Jack bent himself once again to the demands of the office, but after almost nine years of specialist investigation work he would have had to admit that grateful as he was for the transfer to Barlow, he found the routine of district life tedious. He’d made sure that the concluding stages of the investigation into the affairs of Bayley, Bayley and Bedgood were conducted by someone other than himself, and left his casually acquired knowledge of the evasion activities of Jackson’s Agricultural tucked securely under his hat marked private. If they came under scrutiny for any other reason, well that would be a different matter.

He did his best with the increasingly inadequate resources, and was generally successful in avoiding any unwanted Head Office attention, but by and large he found his work dull and unrewarding until he met again with Mrs Davenport. Of Noddy Davenport, her husband, Jack had seen a little and heard much during his years on the hill, where Noddy had become a legend for self-improvement and success, and was accordingly commended, or envied and denigrated in equal measure.

Born on the hill in the winter of 1930 with flat feet that would earn him a Grade Four exemption from Military Service, and the taunts of his childhood companions for his clumsiness, Noddy took refuge by withdrawing from the world. The upshot was that at school his innate intelligence and remarkable ability with figures went unnoticed. Escaping his rustic education at the age of fourteen, he was accepted into the Civil Service as a trainee clerical assistant, and assigned to Barlow Tax Office. There, as junior lowest of the low, he made the tea, shuffled files, and occasionally received some basic instruction.

In Barlow, however, Noddy was neither impressed with what he saw, nor with the pay and promotion prospects. But for three years he looked, learned and applied himself with such success to evening classes that his application for a vacancy at Batesons, a large Wolverton accountancy practice, was accepted, and brought with it the prospect of professional training. He said goodbye to the hill, moved to Wolverton, and apart from occasional return visits to his parents, nothing more was seen of him.

A little more than six year later M W Davenport ACCA surprised the village by returning with his professional qualifications, the first in the community to achieve such heights. Even more surprising was his newly acquired, but passionate love affair with the glory that was Greece, inculcated in him by one of the Bate-son seniors, a Balliol classics man, who saw more in Noddy than was seen by the common eye, and took him under his wing.

Hanging his handsomely framed certificate on the wall of the office he opened in Mordiford Wells, a small market town at the foot of the hill, Noddy buckled down to making his way in the world, commuting each day from the Barton house which he occupied with his mother, now widowed.

Noddy had left for Wolverton a diffident, shaggy-looking country boy encumbered with flat feet and a broad local accent. He returned, still with his flat feet, but now confident, trim and well-dressed, with his accent suppressed for all except the men from the hill who came to him for their accounts, and to whom he could talk in a way and in terms that they understood.

To Noddy, invariably belatedly as far as the taxman was concerned, the boys who had mocked him at school now came as young men with their cardboard boxes packed with farmyard-soiled scraps of paper, a few books and an assorted collection of invoices. From these, on two quality sheets of A3 and by that magic alchemy that only accountants can work, Noddy and his one very attractive lady assistant, produced one neat and tidy Balance Sheet and an accompanying Profit and Loss Account, all rounded off with a fine-sounding certificate to the effect that the accounts now produced were in accordance with the books and records of the business and the explanations and information supplied by his client.

The accounts that Noddy submitted to the Inspector on behalf of his clients were, of course, absolutely kosher, and indeed prepared strictly in accordance with the transactions appearing in the books and records, but without any embarrassing enquiries or probing into any that might be outside them. When, however, he had no alternative but to seek some further information from his clients, he accepted all but the most outrageous explanations with a few grave nods of the head, and so acquired his nickname with the locals.

Amongst his clients, and in the few local tax offices to which he worked, Noddy soon became well known both for a prompt and businesslike approach to his work, and for the distinctive nature of his stationery all of which was headed with the legend:

‘And each shall give an account of himself to God’

Romans 14:12

Neither his clients, nor the taxmen could ever quite satisfy themselves whether, in addition to his qualifications, Noddy had acquired religion during his time in Wolverton, or simply a very dry sense of humour. Cynics watching his progress in the world were, however, of the view that he had rightly identified the Church (orthodox C of E of course) as one of the establishment clubs to which it might be useful to attach himself to further his advancement socially, and in his business career.