Deep and Silent Waters (7 page)

Oh, stop it! she told herself. Stop thinking about him. Down that road lay true madness; total unreality. She wrenched herself away from the image of Christ and hurried on behind an American tour group, listening in to their guide’s comments. It made everything she saw more interesting to know exactly what she was looking at, and the Italian-American guide spoke fluently, an expert, obviously, on everything Venetian. Laura became so interested that she paid the necessary sum to view the greatest treasure of San Marco, the Pala d’Oro, a heavily jewelled tenth-century altarpiece.

Half an hour later, Melanie found her still in the basilica so absorbed that she was half dazed with beauty. Grabbing her arm, Melanie hissed, ‘What
are
you doing? I caught sight of you back there but they wouldn’t let me join you unless I paid the entrance fee for this part of the cathedral, and I could see that if I yelled to you they’d throw me out. The guy on duty had that look on his face, a sort of just-you-try-it-buster expression, so you owe me, Laura. I’ll put that fee on your next bill, and you’d better not query it!’

‘Sorry, Mel, but you should have waited until I came out.’

‘I have been, for ages, sitting in the square drinking a
frullato di arancia
.’ She paused, watching Laura, who sighed.

‘Okay, I’ll buy it – what’s that?’

Melanie grinned. ‘Delicious, I can tell you! A mixture of chilled milk and orange juice. You must try it – I’ve never tasted anything like it! Come on! Haven’t you seen enough of this gloomy old place?’

‘You could stay in here for days and not see enough.’

‘Not me, I couldn’t. I’m not a great one for churches.’ But Melanie stared incredulously at the magnificent Pala d’Oro. ‘Is that real gold, do you think?’

‘Absolutely, it’s made up of two hundred and fifty panels of gold foil and precious stones.’

‘You’re kidding! Are they real? Do you think those are emeralds or just green glass?’

‘Emeralds, and the red ones are real rubies.’

Melanie frowned suspiciously. ‘How do you know that? I thought you didn’t believe in reading guidebooks.’

‘I listened in on a tour group.’

‘I might have known you’d cheated.’ Melanie held up one hand and considered her plump fingers, on which several rings gleamed. ‘Imagine one of those big rubies in a ring! A heavy gold setting, of course – it would look ridiculous in anything else.’

Laura giggled. ‘Come on. We’d better go before you try and grab one!’

As they walked out Laura looked at the large wicker basket her friend was carrying. ‘What have you bought?’

‘Some ravishing red Venetian glass, made at Murano. Do you know, they were making glass in the thirteenth century?’

‘I hope they packed it well. You don’t want it getting broken
en route
. I wouldn’t fancy its chances bumping along the conveyor belts at Heathrow.’

‘I’ll carry it myself.’ Melanie looked at her watch. ‘Look, I don’t want to hang around St Mark’s Square all afternoon. I’m going to explore more shops.’

‘What else do you want to get?’

‘Some
prosciutto
, some squid-flavoured pasta – and you can get little bottles of pear and lime liqueur here that are supposed to be terrific.’

‘You could buy all of that in Harrods,’ Laura said.

Melanie gave her a furious look, her lower lip stuck out like a petulant baby’s. ‘It wouldn’t be the same. And it would cost more. Imported food always does. Anyway, I like to buy stuff in the country of origin, it makes it special. When you eat it you can remember your holiday.’

As they emerged from the basilica Laura blinked in the fierce light of the sun. The enormous square was still crowded with tourists although it was now late afternoon. She put her dark glasses back on just in case there was a reporter or cameraman around. The sun poured down relentlessly, making her head ache after the cool shadows of the basilica.

‘Coming with me?’ asked Melanie. ‘Shouldn’t you buy presents for your parents, Angela and Hamish and the brats?’

‘I can do that tomorrow morning, early, when it isn’t so hot. Right now, I’m dying to sit down. I’ll find somewhere nice and quiet in the shade. You can meet me again at that café under the arcade – it’s bound to be cool. We don’t want to sit outside in the sun, even if the tables do have umbrellas. And I think it’s more atmospheric. I love those cloudy old mirrors on the walls.’ Laura gazed across the square into Florian’s, her eyes dreamy. ‘You can’t see yourself in them, but they seem to reflect other faces from long ago, strange shapes that keep changing, eyes that watch you. D’you know what I mean?’

‘No, you’re just crazy,’ Melanie said with the impatience of the practical for dreamers. ‘Now, don’t get lost! Remember, anyone will show you the way back here, okay? And keep your eye on your watch. Five o’clock, okay? If you don’t show I’m going back to the hotel without you.’

They parted and Laura tried to get a table at Florian’s, but none was free. She wandered off into a quiet, shady square nearby, bought some postcards, then sat down at a street café under an awning, ordered iced tea and settled down to write to her family. She would go back to St Mark’s at five o’clock.

Sebastian had come over to the city, too, but he had taken a
vaporetto
, which moved more slowly and stopped frequently, giving him a chance to reorientate himself in the city he found instantly familiar, even though nearly thirty years had passed since he had last seen it. Of course, he had been reminded of it over the years, on film and in books. The image of Venice was universal, a dream all men dreamt.

When he set out he had had no plans. As he stopped at the hotel desk to hand in the key of his suite, Valerie Hyde came up behind him. ‘Going out? Want any company?’

He turned sharply to look at her. ‘Oh, hi. Actually, I meant to leave you a message. Will you do some research for me? My mother died here and I’ve always meant to check up on the details. Can you go through the back files of the local paper for me?’ He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘I’ve written her name and the date on here. If you can get them, I’d like photocopies of any news items covering the story, or the inquest.’

Valerie glanced at the handwritten note. ‘What am I looking for?’

‘Just the facts. She drowned. I want to know how or why and if anyone else was involved.’

She looked up and stared at him with narrowed eyes. ‘It isn’t always wise to dig up the past.’

‘Just do it, Val,’ he said curtly. ‘See you later.’

On impulse he disembarked from the
vaporetto
in the Castello district, on the paved quayside called the Riva degli Schiavoni, at the landing-stage for the church of San Zaccaria Pièta. He did not want to get involved with the hordes of tourists that filled the further end of the Riva degli Schiavoni where it met St Mark’s Square.

He had played with the idea of visiting Ca’ d’Angeli that afternoon, but once he got off the boat his courage failed. He was afraid of what he would find, dreading that a child’s memory would prove false, that the great golden palace of his dreams would be just another crumbling old house without any of the heartstopping beauty he remembered.

The Castello district was a less visited area of the city, although there were always tourists drifting about on the quayside, and stalls selling souvenirs and maps. As a child Sebastian had known this part of the city well. He walked now in a sort of trance, hardly knowing what he was doing, but along a route he had followed before, in another life, moving slowly through a narrow arch, along a shadowy alley, into a square in front of a great Renaissance church.

The weather was typical of the sweltering heat of an Italian August, the hot air so still that it moved not a leaf on the trees he walked beneath. Trees were rare in Venice, but this district had a park-like feel to it. The smell of the canals made his nose wrinkle in distaste. In Venice you were never far from water. The Grand Canal lay behind him and at one point he caught a glimpse of a small side canal; aquamarine sunlit water between crumbling, fading red-brick walls in which there were small, barred windows high up, with strings of washing hung out from one side of the canal to the other.

‘Rio del Vino,’ he said aloud, amazed to find the name coming up out of the past, and with it a memory of his mother telling him that name every time they came here.

‘Why is it called the wine river, Mamma?’

‘Because this is where wine was brought up from the docks, Sebastian.’ She had had a beautiful voice, sweet as honey, low and soft, intensely female.

He had looked across at the red-brick walls thoughtfully. ‘Or maybe because the reflection of the walls sometimes makes the canal look like red wine?’

Mamma had laughed, throwing back her head, her long white throat throbbing with amusement. ‘What ideas you come up with! Well, it’s in your blood. I wonder if you’re going to be an artist.’

‘Yes, that’s what I want to be. Would you like me to be an artist, Mamma?’

‘I want you to be whatever you want to be.’

He had forgotten that conversation until now. Memory stung, like grasping nettles growing along some dusty, forgotten byway. He flinched and entered the church of San Zaccaria, leaving behind the heat and the dust of the square for the cool, deep shade within.

When his eyes were accustomed to the shadowy light he wandered around, absorbing it all slowly, until at last he stopped in the north aisle, in front of Giovanni Bellini’s
Madonna and Child with Saints
, the exquisite altarpiece that radiated serenity, a soothing balm to a fevered spirit.

Sebastian felt the painting’s calm invade his soul. He almost believed he could hear the music of the angel playing a viol while St Catherine, St Lucy, St Peter, and St Jerome stood around as he did, intent on the music.

Listening to that soundless music, his mind was absorbed in memories of his mother. She had brought him here on a fine spring day soon after his fifth birthday. He was already used to visiting churches and art galleries. Venice had so many of both and his mother loved pictures. She herself had painted, and knew everything there was to know about Venetian artists.

‘It’s by Bellini,’ she had said. ‘We’ve seen some of his paintings before – do you remember? No? Well, memorise his name, Sebastian. Giovanni Bellini. He was a great artist, you will see his work everywhere, and he came from a family of artists. One day you must learn to tell one from another. Giovanni is the great Bellini, of course.’

Sebastian remembered looking at the altarpiece, then up at her beautiful face, a fugitive gleam of sunlight in the gloomy interior turning her hair into a halo of gold and red, like the haloes of saints in missals and old paintings. The first time he saw Laura, on the cover of a magazine, he had felt a jolt of shock because, for a second, he had thought she was his mother: the shape of the face was so similar, the forehead, nose and jawline, and her hair was exactly the same colour as his mother’s, that shade of red-gold which Titian loved to paint, the gleam of sunlight seen through a candle-flame, the colour of a halo in a Renaissance painting.

Thirty years had passed since the spring day when he and his mother had visited this church, but in front of the Bellini now he could remember every second of the time they had spent there together. He could even remember the weather, the peculiar brightness of the sun through the new leaves on the trees in the square, the light on the canal, the sound of birds flying back and forth, nest-building under the eaves of houses. At five years old, he couldn’t remember last year’s spring: to him this was the first spring he had ever noticed, a pattern for all springs to follow.

When she had died, just over a year later, it had been a snowy February.

Why was memory so fitful and selective? He had never been able to remember who else had been on the boat; he could see only his mother. But she could not have been alone on the boat that day.

She had vanished into the blizzard, and a few minutes later he had heard a confused noise somewhere out there, on the Grand Canal. He had never been able to remember just what he had heard, only that it had frightened him. A violent jab of pain made him shut his eyes and put a hand to his forehead. Migraine. It must be the heat, and the disturbance of coming back here, after all these years.

Turning away from the altar, he walked out into the sleepy little square, turned left and began slowly making his way towards St Mark’s. A few minutes later he stopped dead. There was Laura, sitting in a street café with a glass in her hand. A shock of joy hit him. She was so lovely. That gilded hair, that face, its serene, smooth beauty, a Madonna’s face, pure and innocent – and below it a sensuous body that denied everything in the face, as Clea’s had. As his mother’s body had? Were all women the same?

You could never believe what you thought you saw. The eye is easily tricked, any film-maker would tell you that. Looking through the camera lense you could deliberately confuse the real with the illusory.

He stood, watching Laura, in the heavy, hot, somnolent Venetian afternoon. Flies droned past, footsteps echoed on the pavement, there was a dank odour from the canal. The smell of death.

All these years he had not wanted to return to Venice because he had known that death would haunt it for him. He had always had this uneasy feeling whenever he thought of the city: a brooding premonition as if doom awaited him there.

At times he had believed that he, too, would die here, that it was death that waited for him. How strange that he should find Laura again here, in this place. Even stranger that she looked as if she belonged here, had always been here, in this square, shade flickering over her face, her red-gold hair moving softly as she wrote postcards, bending over the table.

Sebastian began to walk towards her, his eyes fixed on her, but when he was a few feet from her table a hand grabbed his arm.

‘
Signore
! Signor Ferrese!
Scusi, – mi displace
…’ a rough, hoarse voice husked in his ear. Sebastian glanced round in surprise.

An old man, wearing the oil-stained navy blue jersey and ancient trousers of someone used to working on boats, stared back at him, smiling with a mouth half full of blackened teeth. Nearly bald, his skin wrinkled and weather-worn, the old man’s face had that slyness and secrecy which usually suggests a lack of any sense of right or wrong.