Chapter Seventeen Venice Wednesday 10 January 2018 #2
‘Yes, Gillian always had lovely books.’ They were her own route out, Olivia remembered.
Gillian had been a voracious reader from about five, she had once told her, slipping extra books from the reading corner at school into her bag.
Reading under her covers at night with a torch.
Taking books to her father’s allotment or on outings with her ma to the local ‘medium’ sessions, where she’d read while her ma drank weak tea and listened to a woman tell her audience that the dead were standing over their shoulders.
‘How are you feeling about the reading at the Guggenheim tomorrow?’ asked Leo. He had picked up the book on botanical plants and was perusing the back cover.
‘Reluctant,’ she replied. ‘I don’t like reading from my own books. I’m always frightened of discovering a mistake, or something I could have said better. I get nervous, too. You enjoy it,’ she stated. He was too close, she thought. And she hated that she liked that.
‘I do,’ Leo admitted. ‘I guess I like the sound of my own voice.’ He flashed her a boyish grin.
‘Typical of the privileged classes,’ she responded.
‘Of which you are now part,’ he retorted.
‘True.’ They’d never got far when they’d moved on to class differences. ‘But I have always enjoyed hearing you read.’
This was also true. Leo read his own words beautifully, having no such qualms about breathing new life into them.
He really got into character as well, applying the right cadence and inflection to his cast’s voices.
Once upon a time he had read a chapter or two of her own work aloud. But that was when they were friends.
‘She worked there,’ Olivia said, ‘at the Guggenheim. Gillian.’ She paused at a photograph of an old Picasso in the book, and smoothed her hand over it.
‘Oh?’ Leo sat down on the floor. He made a good fist of crossing his legs, then took off his hat and placed it beside him. ‘You never told me that.’
‘Yes, she worked in the office there for quite a few years. I only knew about it from the postcards she sent me. She said she became a kind of mother figure to the interns there – the young girls who did the tours and took the covers off the exhibits in the morning, that sort of thing – American girls, English girls, French girls . . . She told me she used to organise a party for them on the last Friday of every month on the roof terrace, to say goodbye to those leaving and hello to those arriving. I guess she worked there until she got ill. But I think she loved the Guggenheim. And I loved that she wrote to me, telling me that.’
Olivia ran her finger down the spine of the book, then replaced it on the stack.
She walked to the other window and peered out at a side passage, at peony bushes – big, blousy and blustery in the spring, no doubt; now dormant with their leaves furled.
Gillian had intermittently sent her postcards from Venice.
The first, when she’d newly arrived, a photo of the Grand Canal, writing on the back, I have moved to Venice.
Hope you are well, and describing a little about how she had got the job at the Guggenheim, and that she now had three dogs she called her ‘babies’.
Gillian had never asked her to visit; Olivia had only asked that herself.
‘She actually knew the Guggenheims, you know?’ Olivia continued.
‘Well, she met one of the grandchildren at Harvard – she was there in her third year at Sheffield University – so I think that’s how she might have got the job.
Or it helped. And she can speak Italian.
She has great style, too.’ She smiled. ‘I think Peggy would have approved.’
‘Peggy Guggenheim,’ Leo commented from behind her. ‘What a woman! Peggy liked a list, too.’
‘How do you mean?’ Olivia turned from the window. ‘What do you know about Peggy Guggenheim?’
‘Apparently, she had a shopping list of artworks for her collections when she first got started.’
‘A kindred spirit, then . . .’
‘You got me into them. The lists. Don’t you remember?’
‘Of course I do.’
They smiled at each other as weakly as the morning sun creating the square on the floor.
‘So, you’ll have mixed feelings when you step into the Guggenheim tomorrow.’ Leo, cross-legged in his jeans and big coat, looked at her thoughtfully.
‘Yeah, I will. I think, just like this house, traces of my godmother will be there.’
‘You’ll be with friends, though,’ he said.
‘We’ll be there to support you when you do the reading.
And if you can feel your godmother there, then all the better.
Her traces might even shore you up.’ He was rising to his feet.
‘What about the two boxes?’ he asked, retrieving his hat. ‘Do you need to check what’s in them?’
‘I suppose I should.’ She stepped over and used her scissors to knife through the brown packing tape on the first. ‘Just old paperwork,’ she said, rifling through its contents.
‘The same for this one.’ Her thoughts were not on the job in hand, they were on Leo.
His kindness, so often what she needed. The way he calmed her, made her look at things a better way.
But he had ceased to be her friend a long time ago.
‘May I explore?’
‘Of course.’
Even stripped bare of all Gillian’s touches, the kitchen was wonderful.
It had pale cream units, a milky marble floor and arched windows that overlooked the garden.
Leo glanced around him admiringly. Olivia noticed a tea towel accidentally left on a hook, a print of the Mona Lisa.
She plucked it up and tucked it into her coat pocket, where it trailed like a fox’s tail.
‘I barely saw Gillian at all after my father’s funeral,’ Olivia admitted.
They were both at the windows. The garden’s bare trees, the crouch of winter hedges and the smooth path flecked with old leaves made it look like a forgotten winter painting.
‘She hardly came over, there was always some excuse. She was busy, she had plans. And then she moved to Venice. You remember when I was going to come here, after La Clementina?’ She had said the word and it hadn’t killed her.
‘Well, she had friends over, I heard them in the background when I phoned her that time.’ Did he remember?
The morning in Bologna? ‘And when I got here, I could hear them in the back garden. Music, laughter, lots of Italian accents, and I felt I didn’t deserve to come in.
I had invited myself, she never really wanted me here.
She never really wanted to see me at all.
’ Olivia walked to the island and ran her hands over its surface.
‘So I didn’t go in. I turned away. I walked back to the ferry.
I didn’t explain to her and she never contacted me to find out.
So, I’m really nervous about going to the hospice today.
Maybe she wants me as next of kin to tie up the house and everything, but I don’t think she wants to see me. ’
She had felt tears coming into her eyes and she didn’t want him to notice. Leo said, from behind her, his voice gentle, ‘Next of kin. She wants to see you.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who wouldn’t want to see you, Olivia?’
Olivia turned from the island, and Leo turned from the window.
Why was his voice so gentle? The look in his eyes so soft?
She felt suddenly that this moment might collapse in on itself, and she would end up in his arms by the window, but that was only a dream, surely, and the time for dreaming was past.
So she said, ‘I think she still resents me for not being there when my father died. I think that must be it. Why she’s been so distant with me all this time.
I know people’s lives move on, and we didn’t have Dad to connect us any more, but I thought we would be connected, forever.
’ She shrugged. ‘It hasn’t worked out like that. ’
‘I’m sorry, if that’s the case,’ Leo said. And now there was something unspoken between them, she thought. They, too, might once have imagined they would be connected forever. And they, too, had failed to work out.
‘I’ve lost a lot of people in my life,’ she said. Did he know he was one of them? Her loss of him and how painful it was? Did he see it each time her eyes were reflected in his? The air stilled between them, then he spoke again, like a hand cupping through it.
‘Then go find one of them,’ he said. ‘Go to the hospice. Talk. Make it right. You’ll be able to do that, Olivia.’
He took a step towards her and she was terrified he was going to hug her, one of his special Leo Hugs, that always served to both make everything alright and to spark in her that terrible longing for him, and she didn’t want to long for what she couldn’t have, so she said, ‘Thank you. Yes, I can try. Do you want to tour the garden?’
He let his hands fall to his sides. ‘Yes. If you’d like to.’
‘Oh, the bench! Can you help me bring it out?’
The bench was in a small back hall: pale oak with carved legs. Olivia was to leave it in the garden for the neighbours, who she’d been told had expressed an interest. They would collect it when they returned from an extended Christmas break in Naples.
Leo took most of its weight and she held the other end, and they moved it out of the double doors at the back of the house and into the garden, where they set it down under a spindly pine tree.
In the summer, they may have sat on it for a while, and they might have talked a little more; they may have even been brave enough to venture, tentatively, into talking about ‘Us’, and Italy, and La Clementina, but it was winter, and the air was still, and the ground was cold with hibernating bushes and empty planters.
So, instead, they walked around the garden a little and Leo admired what it once must have been, and she knew, if she reached out to touch his hand, then she might not feel cold any more, but she didn’t dare.
Back inside, they packed the books and the curtain tassel and the coffee into one of the flat-pack boxes, which Leo had assembled, and Olivia wrote a label in her navy-blue marker pen and placed the box for the removal company.
Then she locked up the house with the little key on the slip of velvet ribbon and they walked back to the jetty to wait for the ferry.
‘I’d like to come with you,’ Leo said as they walked. ‘To the hospice, to visit Gillian. Will you let me?’ Olivia turned to look at him. His hands were in his pockets. His face open. ‘Let me support you?’
They walked a few steps further. The sun slipped out from behind a cloud and presented itself again, a pale cascade over the tops of buildings. Olivia thrust her cold hands into her own pockets. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. She really wasn’t sure about anything. ‘Can I think about it?’