The Girl Behind the Mask (11 page)

It’s fascinating. Even though Luciana was writing in the eighteenth century, her diary entries sometimes read as though they were written by a 21st-century teenager. She has all the same concerns. The same conceits.

Donato quickly wrote back.

Your interpretations of Luciana make me laugh. As soon as I am able to find the time, I will have to read this secret diary myself. In the meantime, of course you must avail yourself of the library whenever you need to. I am very proud and happy to be supporting such a worthy academic cause. So long as you promise to keep me up to speed with our Luciana’s adventures.

I agreed that I would.

Donato’s next email arrived.

And one other thing. Perhaps you could tell me some more about yourself. Is there anything of the teenage Sarah Thomson in the diaries of Luciana Giordano?

I blushed with pleasure at his personal question and wrote back at once.

Oh, of course. I remember only too clearly what it was like to be that difficult age, feeling every inch a grown woman but still being treated like a child. My parents were probably not unduly strict for the time, but to me, as a teenager, they seemed positively Victorian. They sent me to an all girls’ school, possibly hoping that without the distraction of male classmates, I would achieve my academic best with ease. But even if there were no boys in the classroom, they were a constant obsession. My friends and I spent hours discussing the exotic creatures at our brother school on the other side of town. All our free time was devoted to catching sight of one. Perhaps if we had been allowed to learn side by side, those young men would have had less mystique and we would have got a great deal more work done.

So, yes, I do see something of myself in Luciana. Not just in her obsession with love but in her need for excitement. At least I knew that as a reward for all those lonely years of study, I would be off to university, where I could spend as much time with the boys as I pleased. How frustrating it must have been to know that the world beyond her father’s house might never be hers to roam? From her father’s house to her husband’s house without time to make a few mistakes in between? No time to explore. No time to fall hopelessly in love with the wrong person. I firmly believe that heartache is terribly important. How can we be kind lovers ourselves, if we don’t know what it feels like to be hurt?

Where did that piece of cod philosophy come from? I asked myself when I reread the email before sending it. I almost cut the offending sentence out, but instead I took a deep breath and pressed send.

Chapter 16

If being hurt makes kinder lovers, then I would be a world-class girlfriend next time round, because Steven Jones had made carpaccio of my heart.

I first met Steven when I was a final-year undergraduate. He had recently gained his doctorate and was teaching the odd tutorial to earn his keep in the history department. Though it wasn’t love at first sight – Steven wasn’t exactly your classic Prince Charming in his rumpled shirts and ancient faded jeans – he was so clever and funny that I quickly began to fall for him. I found I wanted to be in his company all the time, so I signed up for every tutorial group and seminar he offered. My essays improved immeasurably as I tried my best to impress him. As Luciana’s diary was proving, every eager student should develop a crush on their teacher if they want to get ahead.

I was over the moon to discover that the feelings I had for my tutor were mutual. After a boozy Christmas dinner with Steven and my fellow students, he walked me back to the house I shared with my best friend and kissed me on the doorstep. He told me he had feelings for me that went beyond simply wanting my body. He told me he thought we might be soulmates. That, however, was as far as we went for a while.

He was so careful and courtly, taking his time, telling me it was important that we approached any potential sexual relationship as adults rather than as teacher and pupil. He reminded me he was ten years older. People would naturally think he was taking advantage. But he also said he had never been involved with a student before. What I should have reminded myself of at the time was that he was in his very first year as a teacher and I was his very first student.

Finally, we could not keep our hands off each other any longer. I went for a private tutorial. We started kissing in his office and ended the day in his bed. I was wild with desire for him. At twenty-one, I had never before experienced such mind-blowing passion. I had certainly never before had an orgasm. If I wasn’t already lost to love for Steven when he kissed me, then the morning after we first made love, I would have given my life for him. Our sex life was a revelation. For at least four years, we made love every time we spent the night together. Then we moved into the same flat. But it was still good, if slightly less frantic, when we were under the same roof full time.

Over the seven years we were together, the dynamic between us changed. Though Steven had insisted we enter our relationship as equals, of course at first I had looked up to him, older and more experienced as he was. As I grew more confident of my own intellectual abilities, however, I was less in awe of his.

I remember vividly the first time I dared to argue with his opinion in front of other people. We’d been together for five years by this time. I was studying for a PhD and questioned one of his pet theories in a room full of undergraduates. He handled it with humour in the moment but later our disagreement spilled out of the seminar room and into our private life. When the seminar ended, he told me he was going for a drink with some friends. I sensed that I wasn’t invited. He did not come home at all that night, though the following day he was contrite and we made love as passionately as ever. More passionately, in fact. When he kissed me it was as though he would rather have bitten me. Showing a dominant streak I had not noticed in him before, he dragged me around the bed, pulling my legs apart and roughly lifting them over his shoulders so that he could penetrate me more deeply. He penetrated me so deeply it almost crossed the line between pleasure and tear-jerking pain. On one level I definitely enjoyed it. I loved giving myself up to him. I loved the feeling of abandonment that came with submitting to whatever he wanted right then. But the coldness in his expression as he came that day was strange to me. It wasn’t an expression I recognised, though I would come to see it far more frequently than I wanted to.

After that night when I didn’t know where he’d gone to, I was more careful when it came to disagreeing with Steven in public. Officially, he had apologised for escalating an intellectual argument into a personal row and a night spent apart, but something had changed for ever. Indeed, while our sex life became more interesting as a result of the new tensions, our dealings with each other outside the bedroom were increasingly cautious.

When I mentioned to Steven that I was interested in making a study of Luciana Giordano, he told me I was wasting my time. No one would be interested in funding such a work. When I proved him wrong, getting funding from not one but two different foundations, he refused to be impressed and was grudging with his congratulations. A little later he went so far as to tell me that academic bodies were ‘throwing money’ at women’s studies in order to comply with government quotas. I never would have believed he would belittle me like that.

And yet I continued to love him. I continued to try to make him feel that he was the centre of the universe. He was certainly the centre of mine. I talked up his research at every possible opportunity. Meanwhile, the angrily rekindled flame of our sex life guttered and dwindled. On more than one occasion, Steven came home late and slept on the sofa, telling me he hadn’t wanted to wake me up by getting into our shared bed. I began to think back with nostalgia on the days when he would have woken me up whatever time he came home and insisted on trying to make love to me to boot. Proper love. Tender and caring. Now I tried to reignite our passion in every way I could dream of. I failed.

Of course what I should have realised is that eventually another Sarah would come along: younger, wide-eyed and ready to be impressed by anything. Steven chose easy adoration over the hard work of love.

Seven weeks after the end of our relationship, I still felt tears spring to my eyes on a daily basis. I was determined, however, not to be beaten by our break-up. This sabbatical in Venice was a chance for me to shine. It was important that I didn’t waste my opportunity. The pain of heartbreak might eventually make me a kinder lover. In the meantime, the best way I could think of to show Steven that he hadn’t beaten me was to produce a thesis worthy of long-lost Luciana.

Chapter 17

Before I knew it I had been in Venice for a fortnight and I was starting to feel quite at home. I could make my way from the apartment to the university without getting lost. I flirted with the guy who owned the vegetable boat. I was even on sniffing terms with the fussy dog in the bar on the Campo Santa Margherita, the one who would only eat beef. My colleagues Nick and Bea were fast becoming good friends. Nick, especially, made sure I need never feel lonely. He invited me to join him for dinner almost every evening. He was wonderful company, full of anecdotes and tall tales.

Meanwhile, my correspondence with Marco Donato was becoming more and more informal. Alongside our continued discussion of Luciana’s antics, Marco, as I now addressed him, and I exchanged more information about our own lives. I told him more about school and my home town and my summer job at the private hospital. He told me about his childhood in the city, about summers spent on the lagoon, winters half-drowned by the
acqua alta
. He told me about his flamboyant paternal grandfather and his grandmother, a loving, simple woman who was somewhat overwhelmed by the trappings of her husband’s extraordinary success. Still, Marco’s ‘simple’ grandmother seemed impossibly glamorous to me. I told him about my own grandmother, who had pronounced my mother a ‘harlot’ because she dyed her hair.

Then she wouldn’t have liked my mother at all,

Marco confided.

Marco also told me about the moment he left Venice for high school in the United States and how the other students had mocked him for his name and his exotic accent, until he broke the school bully’s nose. He joked about it:

I inherited my skill as a boxer from my maternal grandmother. She was great at bedtime stories too.

I told him:

My grandmother was a wonderful storyteller, too. Those nights when Gran was looking after me were the only ones when I actually looked forward to bedtime. She had a big old book of fairytales. My favourite was ‘Beauty and the
Beast’. I think that story might actually have been what inspired me to torture that poor guy in the hospital with my schoolgirl Italian. I loved the central theme of it. The notion that we can all be transformed by love.

Marco wrote back,

It’s a very nice notion. And I think the fact that you believed it says a great deal about the goodness of your soul. You are Beauty.

‘And you are taking the mickey,’ I responded. But though I had yet to lay eyes on him, Marco Donato was fast becoming my best friend in Venice. Surely I had to meet him soon?

Despite my professed approval of the moral behind Beauty’s story – that looks don’t really matter – I set off for the library each day with a sense of immense anticipation, dressed as carefully as someone going to a job interview. Or, more accurately, on a date. My colleagues back in London would not have recognised the smartly dressed woman setting out from Ca’ Scimietta to the Palazzo Donato. I certainly didn’t bother to put on a full face of make-up to go in to the university back home. Mind you, some of my fellow academics in England looked as though they rarely washed.

On my third weekend in Venice, I spent more money than I could afford on skirts and dresses from a boutique recommended by Bea. She was only too happy to help me Italianise myself, insisting I dump the thick comforting jumpers that had been as much my signature look as that Danish detective’s and wear two thinner layers instead.

‘Italian style. Just as warm and much, much sexier,’ she told me. She was right. Without my baggy jumper, I had a waist again. ‘You’ve got an incredible figure!’

I hugged Bea’s compliment closely. I hadn’t felt as if anything about me was incredible for quite a while. My baggy jumper had become something akin to armour. What had changed? I suppose it was the possibility of Marco’s attention that made me want to come out of hibernation again.

I was once your classic bluestocking, telling myself what was on the inside mattered most, but that had definitely changed. I wanted to be ready to impress Marco when I finally saw him, as I was certain must happen soon now that we were writing to each other so often. How could we not meet? We were exchanging up to twenty emails a day! And when we did, I wanted him at least not to look straight through me. Every morning, as I dressed, I remembered the photographs I had seen online. Marco, handsome and stylish and always surrounded by beautiful women: the kind of women who had nothing to do but prepare for the next party. I had neither the time nor the money for the sort of grooming those Côte d’Azur party girls could indulge in, but I didn’t want to be the archetypal hopeless academic either. Just because I wanted to be taken seriously didn’t mean I couldn’t flick on a bit of mascara from time to time.