CHAPTER 18
Nicholas
Venice One month later
Nicholas had finished his meetings and was left with three hours to kill before he must leave for the airport. But, of course, you didn’t kill time in Venice, whatever the season, unless you were a cultural blank.
He negotiated the walkway – some wooden planking erected across Piazza San Marco because of the flooding.
It was surprising, he thought grimly, that the whole city didn’t suffer a similar fate.
Progress was slow since everyone was trying to leave the square in single file.
It often rained in Venice in October. He should have brought his wellies.
The water gurgled below the planking. Nicholas wasn’t sure quite how the city achieved it, but Venice remained impossibly romantic even when the rain had been hammering down and the canals had overflowed onto streets and piazzas.
It wasn’t raining now, though. The afternoon sun was so warm that a faint mist was rising from the watery pavements and a pink-golden glow was lighting the stone of the crumbling buildings around him.
Nicholas was glad to be here, even though his visits were always fleeting.
Isobel and Giuseppe would be pleased – business was good; the jewellery was selling well.
And before too long he’d be in El Cotillo.
He felt a judder of anticipation. Mixed feelings, though; he still wasn’t quite sure whether or not he was a fool to go back there.
He reached to help an elderly lady up onto the walkway.
She had braved the puddles in order to get a different perspective on the gloriously gilded facade of the famous cathedral with its decorative spires and painted frescoes and would now have sodden shoes and stockings for the rest of the day, poor dear.
‘Thanks, love,’ she said, and grinned. British. He should have guessed.
Today, Nicholas had expected to have a late lunch with Fabio, one of his contacts in Venice, and had prepared himself accordingly with an early breakfast of a cappuccino and a small pastry cornetto followed by a further fierce espresso during the morning.
But Fabio had been called away to deal with some domestic crisis, leaving Nicholas alone in La Serenissima with time on his hands.
He’d had lunch already and now he was free – to wander, to do some sightseeing, whatever he chose.
Thankfully, he reached an area that was drier and jumped off the planking.
At least his black Italian brogues seemed to have survived the experience.
He straightened the jacket of his suit, which was well cut, Italian, naturally, and had been chosen by Rachel who had an eye for such things.
In Italy Nicholas wore Italian designer suits, in Cornwall he wore jeans.
Sometimes he thought he was so fluid that he’d become two different people – branded by the clothes he wore, the places he lived in.
He glanced up. The sky was misty blue, with a few feathery clouds and that autumnal light that came when the sun was low.
He found himself thinking about Christmas.
Isobel and Giuseppe had invited him to stay, but there was too much of Rachel in Rome, and besides, they were her family, not his, and family was what Christmas was all about.
Celie had already said she’d be with Tom, her boyfriend, visiting his parents in Brighton.
It would then be Nicholas’s first Christmas without the family since they had become his family.
Before that, he’d had his father, and before that .
. . There’d never really been a time that he’d been alone.
Back in Cape Cornwall, men like his father didn’t take a long Christmas break – they couldn’t afford to. His father had never spent Christmas with Nicholas, Rachel and Celie. And only now, with him dead and buried, did Nicholas wonder if he had ever wanted to. Shame on him. He sighed.
‘What does your father do?’ Rachel had asked him a long time ago, soon after they first met in St Ives.
Nicholas was aware that this was a significant question. He already knew that Rachel’s father was ‘in banking’. His family background was very different.
‘Fish,’ he said.
‘What?’ She looked at him more closely, as if to see if he was joking.
‘He’s a fisherman. Down the coast, at Cape Cornwall.
’ No one had ever heard of Priest’s Cove, though it was as old as the surrounding hills.
Cape Cornwall was the original Land’s End, where ocean met ocean and a tall chimney stood like a parody of the old tin mining engine houses on top of the grassy headland.
Nicholas looked back towards the waterlogged square fronted by the imposing basilica and all the famous facades, the canopied coffee bars and porticoes, the regiments of grey and white stone.
He admired the shabby grandeur and easy elegance of Venice.
But it was all show, wasn’t it? It played to the people like a theatre.
He walked on. That was what happened, he supposed, when tourism took over and the original city-dwellers slunk backstage and into the wings.
They still had their busy streets and canals, their food markets, their sense of community.
But that authenticity was kept hidden in the name of survival.
And he could sense it, exactly as he had sensed it in Rachel – that quality Venice held of not wanting to be completely known.
Six months after they’d met, Nicholas had taken Rachel to meet his father.
Not that he expected her to have anything in common with Robert Tresillion.
His father’s life was the little stone cottage in which Nicholas had been born, the pub down the lane where he met up with his cronies in the evening to play cribbage.
And the sea – mostly the sea. But since his intentions were serious, Nicholas needed Rachel to understand who he was.
And this was who he was – at least, who he had been, once upon a time.
He had often wondered what his father had made of her.
But he’d never asked him, afraid perhaps that his father would be too honest. She’d sat on the edge of his father’s tatty old sofa as if something dangerous inside might drag her down into the rusty springs.
And she sipped so cautiously at the strong brown tea – his dad didn’t do Earl Grey.
She spoke to his father politely but slowly, as if he was in his dotage, instead of fifty-seven years old and still out fishing most days, all seasons, all weathers.
Nicholas had cringed and caught the look in his father’s true-blue eyes, but told himself it didn’t matter. His father didn’t need to understand. Rachel was part of his new life; she didn’t need to be part of the old. He loved her, he wanted her, he meant to have her.
After tea, he and Rachel had walked down the narrow winding lane towards the beach, Rachel in her high heels exclaiming every now and then about how steep and stony it was.
As they reached the steps that led down to Priest’s Cove, she turned to look back, pushing the dark hair out of her eyes.
His father’s cottage was next to the end of the row of fishermen’s dwellings nestling halfway up the green hill; small and compact, with white stone walls, tiny square windows and woodwork needing a lick of paint.
She raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s hard to believe, Nick,’ she said.
He knew what she was saying. He had come from a humble background, yes.
But his parents had encouraged him to work hard at school and later, after his mother’s death when he was only twelve years old, his father had urged him to consider university.
He’d never held him back. Nicholas had no complaints.
Only that his mother had given birth to him late in life and had died too young.
He was quiet for a moment, remembering the softness of her eyes, the curve of her lips as she gave him that special smile. My son . . .
‘He’s a good man,’ he told Rachel.
‘Oh, yes, yes, I can see.’
Now, he doubted that she had seen very much at all. Which made him even more of a fool. Because even now he’d rather she was still living with him, still making love with him, still pretending. At least, some days that was what he wished.
He slowed his pace. He came to Venice three or four times a year, but he’d never had so much time to spare. He had never let himself get lost in this city but had never quite found it either, just as he’d never found Rachel.
The other pedestrians were dawdling, gazing into vibrant and seductive Venetian shop windows, pausing to peruse tempting menus in café doorways. Nicholas wasn’t sure that he wanted to get lost this afternoon. But he wanted something.
Something . . . He found himself outside the Venice tourist information office and opened the door. Curiosity really. Looking for inspiration.
Inside, it was chilly, white and minimal. He smiled at the woman behind the desk and she shot him an impersonal smile back.
‘Just browsing,’ he told her, in Italian, before she could ask. She would speak English, of course; everyone did. But . . .
He scanned the postcards in the tourist office. There was the usual stuff: Venice at night, black and white Venice, sepia Venice. He moved on to the brochures, not knowing what he was looking for, waiting for something to catch his eye.
Back at Cape Cornwall, they had walked – he and Rachel – down the slipway at Priest’s Cove, past the lobster pots and nets left to dry out in the sun.
The Cape jutted out into the sea, its grassy flanks cloaked in wild pink daisies.
On a clear day you could look across Whitesand Bay to Sennen Cove and Land’s End.
Sometimes you could see dolphins, seals or even basking sharks.
‘But you’re so different.’ Rachel had put her hands on his shoulders and laughed. The wind was blowing her hair into her eyes again, but this time she didn’t seem to mind. She smelt of jasmine.