Chapter Twenty-Seven Venice Wednesday 10 January 2018
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Venice
Libreria Acqua Alta (‘bookstore of high water’) was nestled at the base of a building on Campiello Testori and under the canopy of a spreading tree.
Heralding its entrance were postcard stands, art books and posters and a table with a hand-drawn, water-washed poster taped at its end, declaring, Welcome to the most beautiful bookshop in the world!
Inside was a charming, chaotic tumble of books, cats and people: books stacked in gondolas; books in empty bathtubs, boats and barrels; new books and second-hand books scuffed at the edges or spineless; books piled high on shelves and tables; books bowed and squished and wedged together in concave towers.
Narrow gondolas like quills were tethered high on the walls; there were cats everywhere: sitting on book stacks, winding nonchalant tails around them, lapping water out of bowls.
And people: people looking at books, people buying books, people stroking cats, and people waiting for Leo Greene and Olivia Sackville.
‘Oh, there you are!’ Tanya was standing behind a gondola and a cat, in a cream cashmere sweater and a long silky skirt, her hair swept up into a fancy chignon. ‘I was beginning to get worried about both of you. Fab hat, Leo!’
Leo grinned at her. Olivia smiled cautiously. ‘We’ve just been for lunch,’ she said.
‘Oh, nice.’
Olivia was already regretting it, spending so much time with Leo today.
The house, the hospice, the lunch. What had it achieved?
Nothing except an uneasy alliance, she realised, and an acceptance they may never talk about the circumstances that had brought them to this point: civil non-friends, fellow book festival attendees with history, one-time lovers who could never quite make it to falling in love .
. . And then there was the walk here. What he had said to her.
‘Should be a good turnout,’ said Tanya, bending to stroke the cat, who stared up at her and then shot off. ‘I hope your wrists are limbered up for all the signing.’
Olivia looked for somewhere to hang her coat. Meryn appeared with a clipboard.
‘We’ll be ready to rock in about ten minutes,’ she said.
‘The authors will be sitting over there.’ She pointed to a table wedged at the back of the bookstore, four chairs behind it.
‘So, if you want to wander around for a bit . . . There’s quite a few here for it already.
’ A couple of women had clearly recognised Leo.
They were nudging each other and beaming in his direction.
A young man waved shyly at Olivia. ‘Oh, and here’s Frances and Anthony! ’
Anthony met Leo with great enthusiasm, immediately pulling him aside to divulge some choice piece of nonsense. Frances admired Olivia’s coat.
The bookstore was filling up; plenty of people wandering in through the entrance. Tanya gathered all of their jackets, and Leo’s ridiculous hat, and stowed them in the base of a wall-mounted gondola.
‘Did you bring your special pen?’ Leo asked Olivia.
She tapped her bag at her side, tried to appear sunny and not completely in her own head. ‘Yes. Pen for box labelling, pen for signing . . .’
‘Do you have another I can borrow? I’ve forgotten to bring one.’
‘Sure.’ They were playing at being buoyant. Olivia felt anything but. As she handed him a smart navy-blue ballpen, Valentina appeared in a pistachio tweed suit, her voice high and bright like a fork pinging a champagne flute.
‘Good morning!’ she cried. ‘If the writers would like to take their seats!’
Felicity popped up behind her. ‘The seats over there,’ she echoed, pointing. ‘Make your way, please.’
Olivia and Frances walked to the table at the back of the room, Anthony and Leo following, and, somehow, she and Leo ended up sitting next to each other again, in the two middle places, thighs wedged together on primary-school-like chairs.
‘Cosy,’ Leo remarked with a small sigh.
‘Hmm,’ Olivia replied. She didn’t want to get cosy with him, to be this close.
She needed some distance from him. He had said something else to her, as they’d walked to the bookshop from lunch.
They had been ducking down an alleyway Leo was sure was part of the maze that would lead them here, but it hadn’t.
It had brought them to a dead end, an abrupt canal in shadow, a flaking wall rising behind it – a building that seemed to be almost creaking in its dilapidation.
‘We need to go back,’ Leo had said. And then he’d placed his hand on her arm. ‘I do think we need to go back, Liv.’
‘Save it for your therapist, Leo,’ she’d replied flippantly, but he wasn’t flippant. He was serious.
‘I don’t think anyone else knows me like you do.’
He was looking into her eyes, and she was worried he could see into her soul. It was almost as if he was going to kiss her.
‘Isn’t that the problem?’ she replied, almost in a whisper.
And, after an endless moment in that dank, shadowed space, he let go of her arm and released her soul.
Mumbled something about really needing to get there on time, and after that he’d only talked of books and bookshops as they’d re-navigated the alleyways of Venice and peered up at any part of the skyline that might give them a clue where they were going.
It turned out that everyone currently in Libreria Acqua Alta wanted a book signed.
They formed four orderly lines, pretty even in length.
Leo’s queue was mostly female, Olivia’s was all female apart from a man in a cagoule, Anthony’s was middle-aged people who all looked rather like him, and Frances’s was a complete mixture – young and old, and everyone in between.
Leo was busy getting his pen ready, rolling up the sleeves of his jumper.
He loves this, Olivia thought, the occasional theatre of being an author after being cooped up in a study for months.
He liked the showmanship, the talking about it all.
He always had. She enjoyed it to a point.
She felt her best self was in her work and that her words, carefully chosen when she wrote, were not always the right ones when interacting with people in real life.
Often, afterwards, she wished she had selected better.
They each had a pile of their books in front of them.
Leo’s, with that menacing city-at-night cover.
Hers, coral and pink and classic font. Anthony’s quirky and cartoonish, a man in tweed in a flat cap with a pheasant pitched over his shoulder.
Frances’s, green and orange and abstract, 1970s swirls and stylised bubble writing.
Olivia felt something soft at her leg. She reached down to pet a little black cat that had stolen under the table, tickle it behind the ears.
For the first time, she noticed there was music playing in the bookstore – Peggy Lee, ‘Emotions’.
Gillian had liked Peggy Lee. Once upon a time, Olivia imagined Gillian had brought all her old albums with her to the house on the Lido; that Gillian would lie on a big sofa and listen to her favourite songs, or get up on a rug and dance, solo, to northern soul.
And it was true that Olivia was certainly feeling a lot of different emotions here in Venice.
Her first book signee was the young man who had waved at her – a shy Venetian called Nicolas, in his early twenties, who wanted her to put three kisses. Then an English woman in a padded gilet and huge silk scarf. Beth was third in line.
‘You didn’t have to queue up,’ Olivia chided her gently. ‘I would have signed a book for you, anytime.’
‘I know.’ Beth placed her copy of The Curator on Church Street on the table.
‘What would you like me to sign?’ Olivia asked her.
‘Always believe in love, Olivia Sackville.’
Olivia smiled. ‘Sounds like a command.’ A rather difficult one, she felt, but she signed the book and handed it back to Beth.
The signing went on for another thirty minutes. There was a lot of convivial chat, as there always was, people hanging around, wanting a little more.
Anthony rose from the table first.
‘I need to stretch my legs.’
Frances got up, too, ‘for a vape’, and disappeared out of the fire exit, which was basically a door that led straight out on to the canal.
Leo announced he had to make a call and headed for the front entrance.
Olivia felt the absence of his thigh next to hers.
She stayed in her seat, neatly stacking up the remainder of her books and re-packing her bag until they all returned.
Leo held out his hand for her and, as she stood up, she took it.
She knew about electricity between two people: she had re-fashioned it hundreds of times in her books, between a hero and a heroine, trying to avoid cliché, trying to make it sound fresh, original, but there it was again, as familiar as an old coat on Guy Fawkes Night and as jolting as fifty volts.
She didn’t want to feel this way. She couldn’t. All evidence was to the contrary. She let go of Leo’s hand.
‘Where are we going?’ Leo asked Tanya, briefly looking down at his empty hand, and up at Olivia, then turning to collect the three books he hadn’t needed to sign.
‘Just through there,’ said Meryn. She gestured over to another door with her clipboard. ‘The back porch. Tanya has arranged some refreshments.’
Olivia self-consciously put her hand in the pocket of her dress. They went to the gondola to fetch their coats and head outside.
‘Oh, this is cute!’ Olivia exclaimed.
‘Isn’t it?’