Chapter Nine
As they headed back to the water taxi pier at St Mark’s Square, there was pale sunshine and a lull in the crowds.
Perhaps, feeling the chill, the tourists had all wandered into bars and cafés for caffè and cioccolata.
Perhaps they were all inside Doge’s Palace or the Basilica, consulting their guidebooks.
Perhaps they were peering out at Olivia and her merry band, from various Gothic arched windows, as they walked through the lovely grey and blush of Plaza San Marco.
They were all a little drunk, the four writers and Meryn and Tanya and Beth.
More and more bellinis had come to the table, then martinis, then a few negronis.
They had deliberated about gelato, they had ordered coffees and petits fours, they had taken that photo – leaning forwards, bringing their heads together as the waiter took it with Tanya’s phone.
And they had talked on and on of books and the classics they had adored and been inspired by.
Olivia spoke of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.
Leo spoke of Oscar Wilde and Jack London.
It had been dangerous, drinking bellinis with Leo Greene, sharing passions and delights, but she had survived it, Harry’s Bar, with Leo sitting opposite her.
Now there were just four more days to go.
Four days to be with Leo Greene and not do the catastrophic thing of nearly falling in love with him again, or risk getting anywhere close, because even the slide, the pitch, the prelude to the fall, was always laced with jagged glass.
‘Look!’ she cried. ‘Another of the book bloggers from this morning has posted about the panel – a very interesting tweet! Nice to see Leo Greene and Olivia Sackville on this morning’s book panel #AnEnglishWriterinVenice, denying that apparently they have written the same scene in each of their books. Intriguing!! Ciao!’
‘What’s this?’ Leo had obviously heard his name. He dropped back and asked Beth to read the tweet again.
‘Oh, dear,’ Olivia murmured. ‘People are getting rather carried away.’
‘People are really interested,’ Leo echoed with a frown.
‘Sorry!’ said Beth. ‘I expect Meryn will love this!’ She stepped forward to tap Meryn on the shoulder, holding up her phone like a trophy.
‘I guess we’re being “lumped together” all over the internet,’ Olivia said after a few moments, as she and Leo walked in tandem.
‘“Lumped together”?’
‘You said in the session you didn’t want to be lumped with “poor Olivia”. Oh!’ She nearly tripped on an ancient paving slab; he grabbed her arm and steadied her, keeping her upright.
‘You OK?’ His eyes, on hers, were suddenly intense. His hand on her arm, in leather gloves, was warm through the wool of her coat, reminding her of another time, in London, when his hand had been on her arm in a similar manner, but not in similar circumstances.
‘Yes,’ she said weakly. ‘Thanks.’ It was the first time he had touched her in three years.
The first time he had steadied her, made her feel better somehow in his own Leo way.
And time seemed to stop, just for a moment.
He was here again, and so was she. They were together in Venice.
She could almost take pleasure in it, if she let herself.
She could almost fall under the spell of this moment.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re neither “poor” nor someone I wouldn’t want to be lumped in with. I was just showing off. I’m trying to stop doing that.’
She was surprised. And I used to be poor, she thought. I used to wear church project hand-me-downs and shower using a plastic tube attached to the bath taps. Bread and butter with every meal. ‘Then you don’t mind being here? Or me being here?’
She wanted to know. Did he have a carousel of regret in his own mind, going around and around? Had he thought about their last night together like she had, over and over? Did the things that had happened, and that were said, still matter to him?
‘I knew you were going to be here,’ he replied steadily. ‘So, no, I don’t mind.’
‘But I didn’t,’ she risked saying. ‘I didn’t know about you.’
His eyes were a rich hazel in the afternoon gloom. Hers could not stop looking at him. His face. The puzzle of him. The ways they had hurt each other. But moments always passed, and life took over.
‘We didn’t finish talking about the stuff in the middle.’ Beth dropped back to them again. Leo let go of Olivia’s arm. ‘In Harry’s Bar, when we were discussing the arc of a love story.’
‘The stuff in the middle . . .’ Leo thrust his hands in his coat pockets. Looked at Beth brightly. Looked curious.
‘Yes, after the Meet Cute.’ Olivia wondered if, like Meryn, Beth never switched off.
If she had a little battery inside her causing her to look for meaning in everything, to be excited by it.
‘The back and forth, the fun and games. Not the early days, or the coming back together – finally – but what’s in between.
Meeting again and again, being on and off, obstacles, misunderstandings, secrets .
. .’ She looked delighted. ‘The stuff in the middle.’
Olivia didn’t like this; the things being put out there into the atmosphere of Venice in January, to be sifted through, disturbing her objectives – her focus, her forbearance – with the fog of memory.
All these moments with Leo in Venice, all this talking, this walking, were taking her straight back to moments with him in London and beyond, captive, and the past was a dangerous place that threatened the future. Everyone knew that.
She glanced across at Leo, but his hands were still in his pockets and he looked deep in thought. He executed a slow turn, scattering the curious birds of St Mark’s Square, while she lamented every moment they had ever spent together.
They should only have had a beginning: the pub in Kensington, the encounter at the airport.
Fate should have left it there, turned the pages, closed the book, abandoned it at a very short story and let them return to their lives, but there was a postscript.
And another. How easy it was to go back there, she thought.
To the past. And further back. To her father’s house. And a date that never was.