Chapter Seventeen Venice Wednesday 10 January 2018
Chapter Seventeen
Venice
‘Morning!’ he called to her quite cheerfully, as Olivia approached.
She noted the slosh of water against the planks and the balustrades of the jetty.
The teasing of the canal dank between the barbershop mooring poles.
The fact that she and Leo were both dressed warmly – Leo in a great khaki padded coat and a furry trapper hat; Olivia in jeans and knee-high boots, her fluffy ‘teddy’ jacket, plus her tote bag over her shoulder stuffed with packing tape, bubble wrap and a large brass pair of scissors.
‘Hello.’ She hooked her bag further up her shoulder. ‘What’re you doing here?’
She hadn’t expected to see Leo until the book signing at the Libreria Acqua Alta this afternoon. She had eaten alone in her room last night, a room service snack of antipasti and salad, before TV and bed. She’d spent several hours trying not to think about him.
‘I know you said you didn’t need any help, but I thought I’d come along.’ Leo looked unrepentant. Far too cheerful. Far too handsome.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well, I did mean that. I really don’t need you. It’s just a few boxes.’
‘I can come anyway, though? For moral support? Please don’t send me away.’ He pulled down the ears of the trapper. ‘This hat is expecting an outing.’
‘It’s hardly an “outing” just to pack up a few boxes,’ she replied. ‘And that’s a ridiculous hat,’ she added.
He stroked one ear theatrically, like it was a pet, a silly look on his face.
She couldn’t help but smile. ‘Alright. The hat can come,’ Olivia conceded, misgivings building as soon as she’d uttered those words. Why was he here? ‘But only because there’s a bench you can help me move.’
‘Great,’ said Leo. ‘I can move a bench.’
They waited for the water taxi, which pulled up to the jetty with a gentle thud and a sluice of the Adriatic.
Leo helped Olivia on board, and she baulked at his touch, although they were both wearing gloves; the leather on velvet a static charge.
He settled opposite her, leaning back against the unglamorous plastic windbreaker.
‘We should make the twenty past ferry,’ she said.
She focused on the scenery. The morning. The majesty of the buildings they putted past. The slap of water at rickety jetties. The yells of tradesmen heaving boxes of produce off rocking vessels into the waiting arms of restaurant staff on narrow decks. The brisk call of the seabirds.
They spoke about breakfast, what time they’d had it and what they’d had.
The decor of the bedrooms. The man on reception who attempted to tell jokes in English.
They spoke of anything and nothing, without curiosity, and she was glad.
She was scared to even look at him. Wary of what he might say, and what her heart might reply.
The ferry to the Lido was slower than the water taxi.
Olivia ran out of nothing to say, and Leo got up to ‘have a look’ at the front of the ferry, and to get talking to a couple from the north of England.
Olivia could see the three of them laughing at the rail, that he was asking them lots of questions, that the woman found Leo handsome.
‘Nice people,’ Leo remarked as they disembarked at the main pier of the Lido, just before nine o’clock, that long slip of an island shaped like an aardvark’s snout which curled gently in the water parallel to Venice’s main island. Leo talked to anyone; Olivia remembered that.
They walked along the wide, quiet streets to Gillian’s house.
Past the little bakery with the green awning, and the tiny dry-cleaners’ where Olivia remembered a nonna sitting outside on a little chair in the summer, barking good-naturedly at people.
The overhanging willow from a neat front garden that tickled at arms and shoulders like a child’s fingers when you walked beneath it. She had walked this street once before.
‘Are you OK?’ Leo asked her.
‘Perfectly.’
‘Are you cold?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘You’re hardly talking.’
‘I’m OK.’
When she had last walked along this street, the pavements were busy and the velvet band above the skyline had been a bright blue, not a steel-wool grey.
When the sun danced on the surface of the canals and crept down the alleyways, illuminating eager faces.
Now, there was a man walking beside her in puffa coat and silly hat, his breath distilling into the air. Mystifying, irresistible Leo Greene.
‘This is it,’ she said, stopping on the pavement.
The house was the colour of washed spearmint.
It sat back from the street behind a fretted ironwork fence and a gate heralded by two stone pillars, one with a letter box trapped inside.
It had a huge, drooping monkey puzzle tree in the front garden.
A striped awning proud over the front steps.
A pretty stained-glass door, and cobalt-blue shutters at narrow arched windows that housed faded window boxes.
‘Wow!’ Leo exclaimed, followed by an appreciative whistle.
‘Yes,’ she responded.
‘Have you been here a lot?’
‘Just the once. But I didn’t go in.’
Leo looked at her in puzzlement. She had a copy of the key in her bag, tied to a piece of pale blue velvet ribbon. The key struggled in the lock. The door swung open.
‘Goodness!’ Olivia cried.
She had tried to imagine this empty house on the Lido, free of Gillian’s furniture and possessions, now sold at auction houses via a Venetian clearance company, but she was chilled by how bare and unwelcoming everything looked.
The hall smelled musty. There was no console table, no squishy sofa, or plants, or paintings; no patter of excited dog paws, no swoosh of Gillian’s very English slippers on the cool Venetian marble.
All the things Olivia had envisaged inside.
Olivia had imagined Gillian often in her house in Venice, pottering around in the front garden, over-fussing her dogs.
Touring about on the vaporetti with one of the smaller ‘babies’ in her arms, his snout curious over the water.
Squeezing into one of those tiny, stand-up bars to have a shot of espresso with all the old boys who went there for breakfast. Wandering the alleyways of Venice with her famous carpet bag over her shoulder, certain she wouldn’t get lost, but smiling to herself when she found another set of uneven steps heading straight down to the Grand Canal.
Gillian had curated a whole new life for herself.
An ornate and sweetly aesthetic one, full of art and beauty.
Gillian, clever as clockwork and paid handsomely for that in her field, had created a world beyond what most people could dream of.
The house was cold. Leo’s footsteps echoed behind hers up the empty hall with its faint, ghostly trace of coffee and lavender.
‘What do you need to do first?’ he asked her.
‘Check for any remaining boxes or possessions,’ she replied. ‘There shouldn’t be much to do. But I have to be at the hospice by twelve. Your phone’s ringing,’ she added.
‘Is it?’
Leo pulled his phone from his coat pocket, frowned at its screen, saying, ‘I thought that was later,’ and clicked it off. ‘Why is your godmother in the hospice?’ he asked, peering into rooms off the hall. A sitting room. A dining room. ‘What happened?’
‘Complications following pancreatic surgery, just under a year ago,’ Olivia said.
There were boxes in the dining room, so they wandered in.
‘A chronic infection. No hope.’ She sighed.
‘It’s been difficult to accept, especially as she’s only in her late sixties.
And she could have come home, have nursing care here, but Gillian prefers to pay to be in the hospice, apparently. ’
‘Apparently?’
Olivia sighed. ‘I haven’t seen Gillian for quite a while,’ she confessed.
‘All we’ve had is some postal correspondence here and there.
Then her solicitor got in touch, said I had been named next of kin – she has no family, no children – and would I be willing to oversee the final closing up of the house.
I had the festival booked here, so I thought, yes, I could do that, and I’d like to visit her, too. ’
‘I see,’ Leo said. They went to stand by the boxes in the corner of the room.
‘And she must want you to visit, if she made you next of kin.’ Olivia didn’t reply.
‘You said you came here once, but you didn’t come in.
Was that in 2015, when we were in Tuscany?
You were due to come here after Santa Luce. ’
At the mention of Santa Luce, Olivia’s body became still. How could he mention it so casually, the site of their final stand-off? Their disintegration?
‘Yes. She couldn’t see me in the end,’ she replied. ‘It was complicated. Anyway, let’s take a look at some of this stuff.’
The dining room was completely bare but for this one corner: three large cardboard boxes in a stack, two unassembled flat-pack boxes leaning against the wall, and a neat pile of items including a packet of Lavazza coffee and the detached tassel from a tapestry cushion.
There was a handful of books piled up, too: a heavy hardback on botanical plants; Gillian’s old, treasured, leather-bound compendium of Jane Austen novels that Olivia remembered from the house in Pimlico; an old Harvard prospectus; and two smart coffee table books on the Guggenheim Collection – the Venice art museum.
Olivia bent to pick up the top book and started flicking through it. The wan sun through the window created a square on the floor.
‘Nice books,’ Leo observed.