Chapter Thirty-Two Venice Thursday 11 January 2018
Chapter Thirty-Two
Venice
The water taxi to the Guggenheim was slow, its engine a spluttering spit that threatened to peter out at any second.
Another taxi, passing it at speed, hosted a fresh bride and groom.
The smiling bride held on to her veil in the wind and spray.
Her diminutive groom saluted merrily to other canal-goers from the feather and fluff of her bell skirt as their vessel coursed through the water like a palette knife through royal icing.
A little cold for a wedding dress, thought Olivia, in their slow boat to the Grand Canal, but perhaps wedding days were like wool winter coats and kept a person warm.
The driver of the happy couple’s boat beeped his horn, and several other boats around it responded, including their own, in carnival spirit.
‘How lovely.’ Frances sighed. She was seated next to Anthony, with Tanya the other side. On the opposite seat were Olivia, Leo and Meryn. ‘I wonder where they’re going? I mean, where are the other guests?’
‘Perhaps they eloped,’ suggested Tanya. ‘Perhaps they wanted it to be just the two of them.’
‘That’s what Hamish and I did,’ Anthony recollected, with a smile. ‘A Highland fling for two – whiskey and tartan. A dream. Neither of you have been married, have you?’ he asked Olivia and Leo.
‘Nope,’ said Leo.
Olivia shook her head.
‘Not even close?’
They looked at each other.
‘No,’ they said in unison.
‘Shame,’ said Anthony, and he turned to Frances to immediately regale her with more tales of his idyllic wedding day.
Olivia swivelled in her seat. The grand white frontage of the Guggenheim was in their sights, its wide and low vista a pristine pause in the courtly faded line of taller Venetian buildings.
She and Leo took in its central entryway – with four arched windows spanning either side and its grand steps, the green hedged flat-top of its roof.
Leo had knocked for Olivia at midday. She had opened the door to him holding an almond croissant on a tea plate in one hand, and a large china mug of coffee in the other.
‘I didn’t see you at breakfast,’ he’d said, ‘so I stole this for you from the kitchens.’
She had overslept, not intentionally, waking at nine thirty, but had avoided breakfast deliberately, and Leo.
After she had helped him up from his bookish crash mat at the back porch of the Libreria Acqua Alta yesterday, Tanya had returned, as had Anthony and Frances, clutching bulging paper bags from a nearby bakery, and the four authors had travelled back to the hotel together.
She and Leo hadn’t spoken on their own again.
Olivia had declined requests of a group dinner.
She had gone to her room, switched the television on, ordered room service, drank two miniature bottles of vodka mixed with Coke from the mini bar, and slumped into bed to toss and turn all night.
They shouldn’t have laughed like that. They shouldn’t have talked like that. Clumsy idiot, peacocks . . . Him telling her he wasn’t going to make any kind of wrong moves. She needed time, and she needed space; things she’d had for a long time without him.
‘Thank you,’ she’d said, taking his breakfast offerings. ‘I overslept. But I’ll be at the meeting point in time this afternoon.’
She had smiled politely. Closed the door quietly on his bemused face.
Marvelled that, for Leo, each encounter between them here in Venice could simply evaporate like the ankle-deep waters of St Mark’s Square after the acqua alta, while for her, they remained absorbed, a seeping papier-maché-sodden part of her, weighing her down.
‘Did your godmother have a farewell party on the roof of the Guggenheim, too?’ he asked her now.
‘She did.’
Olivia stared up at the grassy terrace on the roof, getting nearer and nearer.
Her godmother had sent her one last postcard, not long after she’d first become ill: a photo of the Guggenheim on the front, and some sentences on the back about a perfectly warm night with young interns drinking champagne in plastic cups, dancing to Roxy Music and twirling around and around the departing Gillian like fairies.
Olivia wished she had been there for that bittersweet farewell.
She wished she could have seen Gillian’s face, clapping as the others danced, inside the piped hedge border of the Guggenheim’s picturesque flat roof.
‘Almost there!’ Meryn stood up. The water taxi putted up to the jetty at the white steps of the Guggenheim and wriggled into place. Its passengers disembarked.
Beth was waiting outside with the Italian book bloggers, her anorak zipped up to her neck.
Felicity and Valentina were heads-down over a lectern set up at one end of the main gallery, in front of which wood-and-metal classroom chairs were set in rows.
The mayor of Venice, Armondo Alessandro, was expected.
‘The public won’t be in here for another twenty minutes,’ Felicity said, looking up at the authors. ‘You can have a mooch around if you like. Familiarise yourselves.’
Olivia was full of awe and sadness on entering the airy exhibition space and its sense of calm and serenity, that her godmother had walked these cool marble floors, carrying papers or art books; directing the interns, instructing them in the hushed gallery rooms housing Pollocks and Picassos, on how to put the covers on the exhibits at night; talking to the curator about upcoming exhibits – sculptures, jewellery collections – in her forthright way.
‘Excuse me.’
A young woman was behind her, long dark hair in a middle parting and wearing an olive-green shift dress and flat silver sandals.
‘Are you Olivia Sackville?’ she said. ‘I’m Claire Martell.
I used to be an intern here. I’m now assistant curator.
I know your godmother, Gillian.’ The young woman had a French accent. Soft blue eyes.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Olivia exclaimed. ‘I believe my godmother was happy here.’
‘She was very kind to me,’ said Claire. ‘She used to bring in little treats, sugared almonds and lemon drops. She used to tell me things about life in London, and of her famous author god-daughter.’
‘Really?’ Olivia was so surprised.
‘Of course. Actually, we have some possessions here of hers. Some papers. They were discovered at the back of a drawer a couple of weeks ago when we replaced the desk, and, as we knew you were booked to come, thought perhaps you could give them to her? Let me show you.’
Claire led Olivia from the gallery to a small, pristine office which smelled of lavender and linen, furniture polish and art books old and new. It had simple white walls, the green of an occasional potted plant. A Hermès scarf swooned over the back of a cream upholstered chair.
‘Here you are,’ said Claire, pulling a scroll of papers, secured with an elastic band, from the top drawer of a filing cabinet.
Olivia turned the roll in her palm. ‘Thank you. What kind of papers are they?’
‘I’m not sure. Old receipts, typed notes . . . I’ll leave you with them, for a moment? I must make sure everything’s ready for the mayor.’
Olivia nodded, and Claire left. Olivia prised the elastic band off the scroll and unrolled the papers, fanning them on the desk in the office.
Two were what looked like invoices, both for dresses, as Olivia knew the word ‘vestito’ was Italian for ‘dress’.
There was an old ticket for the Venetian opera, tea-stained in one corner.
A flyer in English for a special show at the Guggenheim – an exhibition of Picasso in 2015.
And a clipping from a Venice newspaper about the 2012 carnival, when a late acqua alta had disrupted events but not spirits, and Andrea Bocelli had come to the city to sing.
There were also two A4 posters, both featuring events at the Guggenheim – an evening with the curator, and a Salvador Dali retrospective.
And a third thin piece of A4, clinging to the bottom of one of the posters, a typed piece of writing Olivia happened to recognise.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, peeling it free. She read it twice.
I saw a father and baby today at a library.
The baby was sitting on her father’s lap, in the children’s corner, a muslin square caught in her fist and her father’s attention equally captured.
Love and tenderness, and constant kisses on the cheek and the forehead and the top of the head abounded.
A look of pure love, no conditions, no boundaries – between a father and a daughter.
A relationship that would only grow as the seasons turned and the years marched by . . .
It was what Olivia had written during the workshop at the library in Islington, about the father and baby. The piece of writing she had once posted to her godmother, but Gillian had never acknowledged. Yet she had kept it with her possessions and her keepsakes. How strange.
Olivia carefully gathered the papers, rolled and secured them with the elastic band again, placed them in her tote bag and left the office. Back in the gallery, Beth was hovering, seemingly waiting for her. Her pink pinafore dress was made of felt, huge green buttons at the shoulders.
‘I’m really looking forward to the readings,’ she said, approaching.
‘I would say, “Me too”,’ Olivia replied. ‘But they always terrify me.’
‘Oh, really? But you’re so good at them!’
‘It’s all fake confidence,’ Olivia admitted. She was still trying to process her godmother having kept that piece of writing. ‘I hate reading my own words out loud.’
‘Are you reading first or is Leo?’ Beth adjusted her glasses. They were standing in front of a polished bronze statue of a round-bellied bird.
‘I am. He’s last, I think. After Frances then Anthony.’
‘I hope he reads the bit about the bucket,’ said Beth, looking wistful.
‘Sounds gruesome . . .’
‘No, it’s just really clever. I actually read something about him and his family last night,’ she added.
‘Oh, like what?’
‘Well, I know his father is Isaac Feu . . .’
‘Stepfather.’