Chapter Twenty-Seven
I wasn’t stopping for anyone. I walked briskly across the entrance hall, nodded to the smiling porter and slipped through the spinning entrance door. Once outside, I broke into a jog and headed down the narrowest street I could see, pounding along the slick cobbles.
Olly’s words pounded in my head like the throb of a headache.
Sniping.
Disappointing.
Nothing to say.
They stung. I’d always considered myself to be tough as old leather professionally, but this was beyond the professional.
This was personal. And even worse, he was right.
My enthusiasm for work had been fading but I thought I’d kept that hidden.
Kept the show on the road. How come he’d seen through that?
I came out of the alley into the middle of St Mark’s Square, suddenly feeling a sharp coldness seeping into my boots. I looked down. Water was seeping up through the paving stones at a rate of knots.
Acqua alta. High water.
A cold wind whipped across the square. I’d left my coat behind; I felt the chill pierce through my clothes.
I stood there, numbly, watching the water rise.
A small group of women in yellow gum boots were laughing and kicking questionable water at each other.
But I wasn’t laughing. I felt an unfamiliar, frightening feeling: a bone-deep exhaustion.
When a spray of water flew over me, soaking me, I ignored their apologies and turned away.
I was sinking. Just like Venice. Emotions stacking on top of each other, pushing me down.
As I stared at the water, and it rose to ankle depth, my phone chimed. Dad’s chime. I pulled it out and looked at it.
DAD: Love, maybe we should pay for Alex’s stuff in advance, so there aren’t any mix-ups. Also, I checked the Journal – there’s a message from his ‘work coach’– is this the reassessment thing?
I closed my eyes, trying to hold my emotion in.
Remembered Dad saying it’s your mum’s birthday, as though I wouldn’t remember.
Remembered Jack looking at me as though he could see every single fault in me. Saying ‘great facade, Brinks, but not much behind it, is there?’
Sniping. Disappointing. Nothing to say. And this was the career I’d spent my life energy on.
As I stared at my phone, I saw the number of emails in my inbox ticking up by the moment.
Knew that in ten years’ time, I would still be sitting on the floor of my shitty flat, cutting out pictures of gardens I could never have. Wondering what the fuck had happened to my life.
The feeling started in my torso, as though it was rising up from the depths of me.
I heard myself sob; felt warm tears running down my face as I shoved the phone back in my jeans pocket.
I knew, instinctively, these were old tears.
Tears I’d held back from shedding; griefs I hadn’t wanted to face.
I thought of Chiara’s warning voice, at the other end of the phone, in the rain; I thought of Pebble, and how her disappearance had drilled down into an unsettling knowledge – the realisation that my cat had become one of the only sources of joy in my life.
The feeling as friends left London, or began new lives; my decision to keep the world out of my life, of my home, dating men like Jack Dillane, who didn’t have a scrap of tenderness in him.
I had cultivated hardness in myself. But it wasn’t really me.
Even now, I had to protect myself: I didn’t want the women dancing in the water to see me crying, so I put my hands over my face.
When would all of this stop? A tiny voice in my head started suggesting outlandish things.
Maybe I could just stay here, maybe I could just disappear.
Disappear into Venice. Start a new life. That was possible, right?
I could just pretend I had died. Perfectly rational, totally straightforward.
Of course it wasn’t. I was never going to escape my life.
When I felt two hands grab my shoulders from behind and turn me, I put up my hands in fight or flight.
The tiny thought at the back of my mind was: what a weird way to start a mugging.
When I caught sight of Olly’s face, his expression full of concern, I pushed at him, but he pulled me towards him with such strength I didn’t even try to resist, splashing against him, and dealing him a half-hearted thump on the shoulder which, of course, the man mountain didn’t even feel. Our bodies met with a jolt.
‘What the hell were you doing, running out here like this in the middle of a flood?’ he said hoarsely. ‘Something could have happened to you.’ I saw him take in the expression on my face, my dissolving make-up. He took hold of my shoulders. ‘What’s wrong?’
I was shaking my head, the tears falling, trying like a sensible woman not to dissolve entirely at the look of desperate concern on his face. I needed space. I needed not to feel like this. I wanted to feel nothing.
‘Why are you crying?’ he said, holding me close. Somehow the full deliciousness of his touch made me want to weep even more. ‘Please, speak to me.’
I tried to say something smart in response but couldn’t get the words out. Instead, I shook my head, gave up the fight and buried my face in his chest. He held me as I sobbed, one arm around my waist, the other hand curled around my neck.
I finally emerged from the sanctuary of his hug, gulping in breaths. ‘There’s stuff going on,’ I said. ‘My dad.’
He nodded, trying to read my gaze. ‘We’ll sort it,’ he said. ‘But you’re shivering. We need to get you somewhere dry.’
A wavering Venetian bell sounded the hour.
This place was so ridiculously picturesque.
Yet again my life was falling apart in Venice.
I remembered Jack chiding me after our disastrous minibreak: at least the shit went down somewhere pretty.
The man knew how to reduce everything to its cynical essentials, to make everything beautiful sound seedy. I started crying again.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He dropped his face to the side of mine, inhaled. ‘I was being a dick. I just’– he took a breath – ‘I feel like you’re disappearing in front of me.’
I felt the words in the depths of me.
I didn’t want to tell him that part of the reason I’d felt so lost since Pebble’s disappearing act was because I was haunted by our what-might-have-been.
That kiss. That I’d been turned from what I considered to be a perfectly self-sufficient, relatively unemotional person into someone who was feeling things too much.
‘I thought you liked the sniping,’ I said, as he took my face in his hands and gazed at me.
Something gave way in his face. ‘Are you kidding? I fucking love the sniping,’ he said.
‘I thought we were friends.’
He gave a hollow laugh. ‘Fat chance, with the crush I’ve got on you. I’m glad you can’t see half the things that go through my head,’ he said. ‘By the way, that dress, this morning. Were you actually trying to kill me?’
I felt jittery with the joy rising in me. ‘Not trying,’ I said, managing a teary smile, ‘but if you were an incidental casualty…’
I was silenced by him kissing me.
He kissed me as though he was trying to wake me from a nightmare. He kissed me as though he had found the secret of eternal life on my lips. Basically, he kissed me like we were in a fairytale, rather than two harassed colleagues trying to keep our bosses’ shows on the road.
The women in gumboots cheered. We broke apart. ‘You should give out those kisses as rewards,’ I said, trying not to hyperventilate. ‘People could buy an experience voucher or something.’ God, I was talking gibberish, trying to gather myself.
‘There’s a problem with that,’ he said. I looked up at him. ‘I only want to kiss you. It’s all I’ve been able to think about.’
I felt something give way inside me, some kind of barrier being breached by a wave of feeling. But I couldn’t. No, I thought. No. Not. More. Feelings. But something else was saying an even bigger Yes.
‘Lizzy,’ he said. ‘This water is bloody freezing.’
I looked down. ‘Oh no! Your new shoes.’
He gave a rueful smile and shrugged. ‘I guess I’ll never have to make the effort to live up to them. Not sure they’re really me anyway. Please, can we go on the passarelle.’
‘If you put it like that,’ I said, and gave a practically girly scream as he picked me up in his ridiculously strong arms and started to wade through the water to find one of the raised walkways.
‘Bellisimo,’ one of the women called, her face shining with the brightest of smiles.