Chapter Four
The rest of that first session belonged almost entirely to Leo.
He was asked to detail his crime set-ups and settings.
He talked hilariously about his infamous, occasional late-night roaming around the streets of London, hunting for characters, stories and situations.
He was relaxed, charming, gregarious and his audience lapped up every word.
The other authors sat back, mostly. Anthony Beau answered one question about the role of his hilarious narrator, Ignatius Mulch; Frances was asked about her South London settings and the rich St Lucian history weaved throughout her books.
Olivia answered two questions. One about where she liked to write (at her desk, at the window overlooking her garden in Marylebone – yes, she had ‘really gone up in the world’, as her father, Charlie, once liked to say), the other on who was her favourite romantic heroine from literature (Cathy from Wuthering Heights).
The rest of the time, her scattering brain tapped at her about the restaurant scene in chapter twenty-five of The Curator on Church Street.
Yes, it was in an Italian restaurant. In London, though, not Italy.
Yes, the food had been as described. Yes, her two characters, Kath and Justice, had talked openly about parts of their pasts but not everything, and had looked into each other’s eyes.
Yes, it had been based on a real-life meal she had shared with Leo Greene.
Her cohort was now waxing coyly about his next work, kicking back in his chair again, like it was a deckchair on a beach.
‘An idea in progress always sounds a bit lame when spoken out loud,’ he told a glamorous, mid-life Italian woman with a huge coiffed hairstyle and hooded eyes winged with black eyeliner.
She’d come with an equally glamorous friend.
‘Telling anyone even a part of it makes me want to shoot it dead before it’s even begun. Or myself!’ he quipped wryly.
‘So, no hints?’ asked the woman. She had taken her coat off while he was replying to her, revealing a wine-red dress with a keyhole neckline.
‘None whatsoever,’ he replied with his trademark grin, and the woman flashed one back at him.
‘Thank you very much, Leo Greene,’ said Valentina decisively. She tapped twice on the lectern with her fingertips. ‘And now we will have our interval with coffee and bussolai – Venetian butter biscuits – on the balcony.’
‘Do put your coats back on,’ Felicity urged, ‘or you really will get cold – we don’t want anyone suing us, ha ha – and make your way out.’
The same Palazzo staff members creaked open an arched grill to the balcony, immediately letting a blast of Grand Canal air into the room: brine, woodsmoke and the dank sluice of fog.
The patrons heaved on coats and hats and scarves and wandered out to take near-single-file places on the narrow balcony, like cut-outs in a paper theatre. Olivia hung back to fall in with Frances and they shuffled along to the left; Leo was far right, talking to Anthony.
‘Beautiful venue.’
Frances was wearing a camel coat with a wide faux-fur collar and peeling on a pair of dove-grey sheepskin gloves.
‘Beautiful city,’ Olivia agreed.
Their vista was the green-black canal. The city’s January coat of low, lazing fog.
A lit brazier on the other side of the water a round thistle of orange burr-blaze from a small balcony.
Winter gulls alighting on a copper roof.
An arm raised in greeting from a vessel stitched to the water by an angled pole.
And above the jumbled, majestic skyline, the shifting clouds, skulking through on their way to other cities.
Yes, Olivia liked Venice in the winter very much.
She liked the drained colours, the flashes of heat, the pause from the summer crowds.
There was a rolling clatter from behind them, and Olivia turned to see the two elderly ladies, carthorse-ing a trolley laden with a coffee urn, cups and saucers and an oval platter of pale gold biscuits.
They parked the trolley in front of the open grill and made a two-woman chain to pass out steaming cups of coffee and plates of ‘s’-shaped, crumbly biscuits.
Olivia received her coffee gratefully and her heart momentarily swelled at the scene in which she found herself: the grey plume of the morning, the literary minds, the readers.
That somehow, she had made it here, all the way from a humble ground-floor flat in Pimlico with Charlie Sackville, to being an English author in Venice, standing on an ornate balcony overlooking the Grand Canal.
If only Leo Greene wasn’t standing at the other end.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t have a chance to chat before the session started,’ said Frances. She nudged her fur collar higher around her neck. ‘You spoke wonderfully, by the way, and you look so well.’
‘Thank you. So do you.’
Olivia had always admired Frances Holland, the fun and gossipy writer from Streatham in South London. She was also a little jealous of her sparse, incisive prose and pithy dialogue.
Frances stirred her coffee. She looked at Olivia through its steam. ‘Fancy you and Leo Greene writing the same scene in your books!’
‘Yes, fancy,’ Olivia said airily. She glanced to the end of the balcony. Leo was sipping his coffee and staring out across the canal. Anthony was in deep, neck-forward conversation with Sophia Loren-lite and her friend, as they stood in a row. ‘Although, have we really?’
‘So, you’ve never had a meal like that with Leo?’
‘No, no. Of course not. Like he said, it’s just a coincidence. I’ve barely ever met the man.’
Frances nodded. ‘Are you going to read his book?’ she asked, setting her cup back into its saucer. A vessel on the canal clonked into another. There was a shout, an Italian hand gesture.
‘Probably not. I don’t like crime.’ Always denial, when it came to Leo Greene, she thought. Always never quite telling the truth, or blurting out too much of it. It was what had brought them down. It was what had ground their story to its end.
‘I might do,’ said Frances. ‘I’ve never read any of his. I sort of felt that a man that good-looking couldn’t be any good.’
‘Like it was his only talent? The bestseller charts might disagree with you!’
Frances laughed warmly. ‘Yeah, I know. He’s good-looking and brilliant. I hate people like that!’
They both looked from the brazier, that bright burr from the opposite balcony, to steal a glance at Leo Greene, collar up, game on. He caught them at it and gave them a bashful wave. Olivia frowned and turned back to Frances.
‘Sometimes there’s more to people than meets the eye,’ she murmured, almost to herself. ‘We write about characters like that often enough in our books.’
‘We certainly do.’ Frances had a warm but curious smile on her face. ‘Onions. Layers. They’re our bread and butter. So,’ she continued chattily, moving on, to Olivia’s relief, ‘are you at the London Book Fair this year? Did you notice that Alistair Thomas, senior editor at Banks she pitched him a tiny, self-conscious smile.
‘Actually, my therapist has got me making gratitude lists,’ he added.
‘I have to write down all the things I am grateful for in life.’
The woman’s eyebrows raised. ‘What kind of things?’ she asked.
Therapist? Leo was seeing a therapist? A rush of surprise and guilt pinned Olivia to her seat.
Leo grinned. ‘Day to day stuff that makes me happy, like sunshine and cherry blossom. Freshly mown grass. The taste of sea bass in lemon butter. But also, bigger things out there in the world that I’m grateful for.’
Olivia stared at him.
‘And is that easy or difficult?’ asked the woman. ‘Finding things to be grateful for?’
‘It’s easy,’ said Leo good-humouredly. ‘I’m grateful for a lot, just ask my accountant.’
The audience laughed.
‘Is there anything you want that you haven’t yet got?’ the woman pressed.
‘A couple of things,’ Leo answered. ‘A yacht, a Lamborghini . . . Some other things, maybe.’
He smiled coyly. The woman returned his smile like she was in love with him. She dropped back into her chair, her friend immediately offering her a boiled sweet from a rustling bag.
‘And one last question from the floor, please.’ Felicity looked at her watch, a little agitated.
A hand was raised. A querulous British voice: ‘Yes, over here!’ The owner of the hand was an elderly gentleman with a scholarly cotton wool ball of grey hair above each ear.
‘Have you ever been on a writers’ retreat?
’ he asked. ‘And how useful do you find them? This question to Olivia Sackville, please.’
Olivia’s heart took pause in her chest, and she quickly considered why he was asking.
Was he a writer? Someone with a property in the Euganean hills, outside Venice, thinking of hosting a retreat for visiting authors?
‘Yes,’ she answered carefully. ‘Just the once. Here in Italy, actually. In Tuscany.’
‘Ah, Tuscany.’ The old man looked pleased. His eyes twinkled in his face. ‘I grew up near Volterra.’
‘Oh, lovely.’ Olivia remembered everything about Tuscany. She remembered its summer days and its evening glow and its outright trickery, fooling you into thinking you might be in love.
‘Do you think they are useful for writers?’ he continued. ‘Get a lot of writing done?’
‘Yes, I did, at first.’ She avoided Leo’s eye. ‘Yes, it was very useful, indeed. All that space, the beautiful setting . . .’
‘And did you travel around the area? Get to know Italy?’
‘Yes, a little.’ She definitely didn’t look at Leo.
‘And will you look around Venice while you are here? Go to Murano? To the Lido?’ This man was chatty, she thought.
‘I’m definitely going to the Lido,’ Olivia volunteered. ‘My godmother has a house on the island.’
‘She does? Well, how wonderful!’ The old man beamed. The puffs above his ears moved upwards. ‘I expect she’ll be so happy to see you there!’
‘Well, she’s actually in a hospice in Castello at the moment. But I’ll be going to the house to do some packing up.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ The man looked downcast, and Olivia felt she had said too much.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ said Leo, turning to her with suddenly soft hazel eyes.
‘Thank you. Both of you. And thank you for the question.’ She smiled at the man. ‘Really. That was a good question about a writers’ retreat . . .’ She looked down to her notes, gave them a quick shuffle, stacked them neatly again on the table.
There was a moment’s silence, then, ‘Well!’ announced Valentina, clapping her hands. ‘That concludes the morning! Thanks so much to our authors and all the attendees here at Palazzo Tesoro. I think we would all agree that it’s been a really fabulous session!’
Olivia looked up. There was a small wave of applause.
‘Thank you all for coming!’ echoed Felicity politely. ‘Please mind the stairs on your way out.’
Hands reached for bags, fastened coats and wedged on hats. Feet echoed on the marble floor to the open gilded doors, and through to the lobby.
Felicity and Valentina approached the authors’ table, followed by Meryn and Tanya, Leo’s publicist, who came up to Leo and bent down to give him a kiss on the cheek.
‘Well done, Leo,’ she said in her clipped tones. Tanya was the daughter of some marquis or other. ‘You were great.’
‘Thanks, Tanya!’
Leo stood up, packing his notebook into his satchel. The others stood, too, Olivia smoothing down her skirt and reaching for her tote bag.
‘We will go into the palazzo garden now for more refreshments,’ said Felicity.
‘This way, please,’ said Valentina, holding out her hand to one of the closed walnut doors.
‘I thought that was it,’ Olivia whispered to Meryn. ‘I thought we were going back to the hotel.’
‘I guess we’re required to mingle,’ said Meryn with a shrug. ‘Sorry.’
‘Damn,’ Olivia whispered, and she stole another glance at dazzling, heart-breaking Leo Greene. Damn it.