by Clare Curzon
He had laughed at her puzzlement. But of course the trees were below the marble floors. They were the timber piles that supported the proud campaniles: underwater forests petrifying over the centuries, but still sinking, because all these islands were a continuation of the miles of offshore swamp. And the sea, that had brought Venice its ancient glory, would finally suck all its magnificence away.
Even her ghost wouldn’t linger here. She had no time for nostalgia. Go for it, she always told herself: she had things to do, a life to live.
Franco pointed. ‘Over there, to the left, that dark mass is the Isle of Dogs. All strays from the islands are taken there. You can hear them barking at mealtimes. And ahead is the island of the Armenian Brothers. If you wish to visit their chapel they will row across and fetch you. And those distant lights, strung out …’
‘Are venezia, from San Marco down to Arsenale, with the island of San Giorgio in front.’
‘Ah, you know our tiny world already. This isn’t your first visit.’
She was aware of having cut him off and was sorry. ‘One can never know enough about such a magical place,’ she granted.
‘So what would you care to do tomorrow?’
She took her time answering while they stepped back indoors. There was no question what she would prefer to do: go home. Find out what Charles was actually up to. And have that word with Eddie which she’d not found time for at old Carlton’s.
‘Tennis?’ she suggested. There wasn’t a court in the garden, so it would mean going outside, testing how closely she was guarded. Maybe she could buy some postcards, send a message to say where she’d ended up.
She was conscious of Stefano and Giulia exchanging glances, then the woman’s barely perceptible nod.
Stefano turned his brilliant smile on her. ‘So that’s what we will do, before it gets too hot.’
‘Yes,’ Giulia agreed. ‘The forecast is for 38 degrees Celsius tomorrow. Breakfast will start at seven. Stefano shall book a court for 8.30.’
So this morning’s programme had already been mapped out for her. She showered, practised speaking her new name in front of the mirror, slid into a short, yellow sundress and went downstairs. She followed voices to the large, airy kitchen. There a dumpy, fat woman looked up from filling a cafetière, her dark face one shining smile.
‘Signorina, I Rosalba. I cook,’ she announced proudly. She pointed to the other, who appeared to be Chinese. ‘He, Ping Pong.’
The little man bowed. ‘Not true name, but it amuse people. Rosalba, that is all the English she know. She learn it for you.’
‘I’m honoured,’ Jess said, ‘Thank you. I’m Laura.’
She took a place at the scrubbed, square table. ‘Where are the others?’
‘The signora take coffee in her room. The young men go sailing. Perhaps we get fish for lunch,’ the man said.
Rosalba might have little English, but she was more than able in Italian. While Jess helped herself to fruit and rolls her voice went on relentlessly, passionately, with an extravagant sweeping of arms and rolling of eyes as she related some dramatic story quite incomprehensible to the girl.
‘What was all that about?’ Jess asked in a brief lull while the cook went to answer a bell’s summons.
Ping Pong shrugged. ‘Her son. He have this woman she do not like. Families, aiiigh!’
Before Jess had finished her coffee Stefano and Franco were back, smelling of the sea, with salt crusted on hands and eyebrows. Franco flung a hessian bag at the Chinese who peered in and declared, ‘Not enough. Tomorrow you do better.’
‘Two minutes,’ Stefano promised, ‘and we shall be ready for you, Laura.’
‘He lies,’ Franco said, following him to the door. ‘He will spend at least twenty minutes on just spraying his perfume.’ Joshing each other, they went flying upstairs.
The tennis courts were on the Adriatic side of the narrow island, protected by a surround of shrubbery and palm trees. They played singles, Jess the first set against Franco, losing to him four-six. She did better against his cousin who slammed the ball fiercely from the baseline but had less finesse. At six-all he declared they should leave it so, well matched.
‘Now you must play each other,’ Jess said, ‘while I watch.’ She let them battle on for a game or two, then quietly made for the gate of the little park. Before she could make her escape Franco was there beside her.
‘Have we bored you?’ Stefano called from the net. He had started to wind it down.
‘Not at all. Please carry on. I just thought I’d have a look at some shops, perhaps get some postcards to send home.’
She’d said too much. ‘We’ll come too,’ Franco insisted. ‘Here, borrow my sun glasses. The light is too much for your English eyes,’
They let her choose the view cards, even reminded her what euro stamps were now required, but she knew she was under arrest, the wrap-around shades protecting her from public gaze much as the police at home covered their suspect with a blanket. It was beginning to get to her that Giulia’s warning had been serious.
They would never let her post those cards. She knew that, and she couldn’t see any way she could smuggle them out. When she checked her things after breakfast she’d found that the return half of her flight ticket had been removed from its envelope, although so far the money was intact. In the villa there was always someone on duty. In the garden there were the Dobermans.
All the same, she wrote three cards during siesta time: to Claudia and Carlton, doing the thanks thing; a vague greeting to Kate; a longer one to Eddie, quoting the temperature here and warning him not to eat the cake she’d left in his freezer until she was back to share it with him.
She signed them all with the letter J, still hoping it might pass muster with her guards. But if she imagined she’d be allowed further freedom she was put right when they all met up at four o’clock for iced tea.
‘My beautician is to come later,’ Giulia said, stroking back her blue-black hair. ‘You may wish to make use of her. With such a lovely fair complexion, Laura, have you never thought of becoming a blonde? It would suit you so well. Don’t you think so, boys? A new Marilyn Monroe.’
They agreed instantly, Franco perhaps with less enthusiasm. Anyway it was clear that they’d been put up to it. Not a suggestion, but a command.
‘No way!’ Jess protested. ‘Bleach is out of the question.’ Giulia wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh, but I think it would be best. More tea, signorina?’
Jess started to get up from her chair but was strangely lethargic. The heat and the tennis were taking their toll. She slid back. Giulia leant forward. Her face came so close, peering in, that her two eyes became one, like a shiny, black beetle.
Jess awoke on a sofa an hour and a half later, bottle-blonde, with an urchin cut gelled into spikes.
She was outraged, trembling with inexpressible fury. Giulia remained calm, totally in charge: Franco silent but unable to meet her eyes. Stefano kept his distance, shrugging his angular shoulders. In the kitchen Rosalba and Ping Pong carefully pretended they noticed no difference.
Alone at last in her room she examined herself in the mirror. A pert bimbo stared defiantly back. Every surface of her face had taken on a different, upward slant. When did she ever have a retroussé nose?
Her whole persona seemed changed, and surely with it her mental tectonics had realigned. She knew this character she now stared at, had passed her in the streets of London, been crushed against her in the Underground, shared a cloakroom mirror with her in restaurants, watching her slam on more black eyeliner. She’d be shallow, mouthy, confident, voicing secondhand judgments, her slang – like the spiky hairstyle – just that bit passé. If this one couldn’t fix a bloke to take her out of Italy on his pillion then she’d march out as a backpacker. You could lose her ten times over in the swarm of tourists boggling at the Bridge of Sighs.
Good. So that was the way she’d leave. Her mind was made up. She had suffered the final humiliation at Giulia’s hands.
Her present passport was useless. This trollop was no Laura. What ‘celebrity’ name would her mother have saddled her with? Patsy? Charleen?
Giulia had said nothing about updating the passport to her new appearance. The reason wasn’t hard to imagine: she had no intention of letting Jess use it again. Return to England was off the agenda. All this hoopla about instructions from Charles was beginning to wear thin. His original intention had been to protect her, or at least distance her from his present situation. Jess suspected Giulia of adorning it with her own fancies, or even of running a separate agenda in parallel. Behind that perfectly turned-out hostessing she sensed a hint of malicious invention, because under it lay instinctive hostility.
So I’ll run my own game, Jess decided. However long Charles had originally intended her to be kept away, if she turned up despite all the humiliating frustrations, he’d have to admit she had initiative.
She returned downstairs for dinner preserving the expected mood of high dudgeon, making the cousins work hard to bring her round to a better mood. Tomorrow, Stefano said, they would take her across the lagoon and she could do the tourist round, go wherever she fancied – Doge’s Palace, churches, museums, the Peggy Guggenheim Modern Art gallery. Next day Murano for the glass factories, Burano for linens. It seemed there was no limit to where she could safely go, now that she was disguised.
Even while she allowed herself to appear won round she fumed against them inside. How crass to insult her further with promises of childish treats. The ultimate indignity had been to have all choice removed: to be put under and operated on like a sick cat at the vet’s. And be turned out a common bottle blonde.
She shrugged at their plans, keeping up a barrier of sulkiness. That was all for tomorrow. Tonight there was to be sea bass and chargrilled peppers followed by a pineapple torta with toffee sauce. Then Scrabble or backgammon while Stefano sang, serenading them with his guitar.
Jess endured the pantomime stiff-faced, inside coldly vowing revenge. They mustn’t guess her new appearance could be turned to advantage. And there was one added point in its favour: when eventually Kate got to see it, all the air would go out of her sails. Speechless, she might forget to ask the most embarrassing questions.
Seated at Eddie’s bedside, Kate was startled as one of the nurses came in quietly behind her. ‘Tea, Mrs Dellar?’
She hadn’t been dozing; simply trapped in mental miasma, and it was good to be rescued from it. She took the proffered cup with a weary smile and cradled it in her lap.
She sat well back, allowing the nurses freedom of access. Although Eddie remained totally immobile there was so much to be done for him: constant checking of heart and blood pressure; drips to be overseen and kept flowing, then replaced; urine bags emptied; notes to be made up for the surgeon’s round.
Only the sighing clunk of the ventilator assured her that he was, at least mechanically, functioning. She fixed her eyes again on his still face, the dark sweep of eyelashes lying along his unlined cheek. The five o’clock shadow that proclaimed him a mature man seemed a mockery. This was a distorted replay of how she’d watched over him soon after his birth, Eddie the later twin to be born.
Jess, ever impetuous, had thrust herself into the world, lustily crying. Eddie had taken his time, lying awkwardly. There had been anxiety that with delay his breathing would be affected. Yet he had made it to the outside.
For several weeks he’d seemed frailer, slower, with a more tenuous hold on life than his more robust sister. Even when Kate had both babies home he was the one she most often stole in at night to check on.
But with the years all that had changed. He’d gathered strength, put on weight, grown into a sturdy, thoughtful little boy. At puberty he’d shot up, overtaken his sister in height, proved himself in athletics as well as with academic work. A sensible, sensitive, kindly personality, well able to take care of himself.
And now, suddenly, it had gone full circle, so that he was helpless again, and she must watch, powerless to do anything for him. Her hurt was overwhelming, physical.
She believed that for two days she had been his only visitor. Surely there was someone else who could take a turn sitting here, talking, in the hope that a familiar voice could reach through to his unconscious mind and stimulate it into action. She wondered if perhaps it worked away inside despite his outer stillness. What kind of dreams would he be having? There was no way to read that from his passive face.
She would give anything to have Jess here alongside, chattering and teasing in the way that never failed to get him going. Others would be useless at that.
Last evening she had sat alone in her cottage and watched dusk soften the outlines of her garden until all colour was sucked away and only the white lilac remained dimly visible, floating on the dark. It had seemed like life draining away. When she spoke by phone with Night Sister she’d learnt Eddie’s condition was still unchanged. But stable. That new word had brought a small measure of comfort.
Later the young woman detective had called in with the wonderful news about Jess. That the charred body was someone else.
Or it had seemed wonderful until she realized it was still a violent death. Some unknown mother had lost a child in her place. It seemed shameful to feel such enormous relief.
And still nobody knew where Jess had gone off to without leaving word. It was appallingly rude, especially to Claudia and Carlton. If they hadn’t had their minds full of their own losses they might have been more censorious. Undoubtedly, now that she’d phoned them about the body in the burnt-out house, they would be attributing Jess’s omission to bad upbringing.
More black points against me, Kate thought wearily. I can’t do anything right for them. Some people have to cope with a dysfunctional family. The Dellars are something else: individually hyper-functional, with each of them going all out to do his or her own thing, and the devil take any other consideration.
She ran through the events since Friday afternoon. With Dr Marion Paige she had felt some empathy because she too was an outsider: not a Dellar. But then, none of the family could be totally Dellar. At least half of their genes were from elsewhere, from people like Matthew’s dead wife Joanna or herself; from dear Michael’s mother too. She’d brought a new strain into the family, diluted the Dellar self-sufficiency. It was she who accounted for Michael having been so different, lovable and loving; appreciating a world of people outside himself.
But hadn’t Carlton’s and Matthew’s mother been an outsider too? Maybe some of what disturbs me about the others was down to her, Kate thought; that first wife of Grandfather Frederick. We don’t know enough about the past, about those who were dead before we lived. That is one way in which I really believe in ghosts – the inescapable genes that they leave to haunt us.
And then Claudia: also an outsider. How had it come about that she was the most Dellar of all? – almost setting the pattern: the poison in the pool. (Kate didn’t know where those words came from. They sounded like a poetic quote.)
It was hard to think of Claudia as ever not having been a Dellar. She was so much the prototype. She considered no one’s feelings when she spoke or acted; took no prisoners. Kate could not believe she loved her elderly husband. She was simply the dragon guarding his gate. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, like rocks and barnacles, but Kate wasn’t sure who was which.
Carlton lived isolated in his imaginings, surviving physically under her shadow. For Claudia, Carlton was her raison d’être, providing material security and nourishment. Little wonder then that when, amazingly, this disparate couple had produced a child she should turn out so strangely detached as Miranda.
Back to Marion Paige, no longer the new enigma. Kate believed they’d much in common. Both watched people, observed things about them, saw their strengths and weaknesses. But overnight her feelings about the woman had shifted. The difference between us, Kate realized, is that I try not to work on what I see. Particularly I’ve tried with my children. Marion, she was su
re, picked up on others’ foibles and made use of them. Her compulsion was to manipulate.
Which made her wonder quite why Marion intended to marry Robert, whom she obviously found transparent. The look she’d given him across the garden hadn’t actually been doting. With new, sharper insight Kate knew then: in secret Marion despised him. Her expression at that moment had been one of slightly disguised contempt. And Robert – once-bitten in marriage, surely twice a harder nut to crack – was nevertheless in thrall to Marion, who would twist him to fit her requirements.
Kate shuddered. Oh God, she thought wretchedly; must I dislike them all? What’s wrong with me? Perhaps, just now, I’m paranoid. Put it down to shock. Otherwise why should I feel revulsion for the one person who’d at first appeared to be kind?
Is there no one I like?
Old Carlton: yes, she was quite fond of him, but warily. He could diminish one too easily. The more so if you let drop the protection of banter. Appearing so mild, so woolly-minded, he was the keenest of the lot; the most capable of withering the spirit with a word. She knew her own attitude was one of subservience: the underdog, nervously self-protective.
And Matthew was a sadist despite his courtly veneer: the legal raptor. Madeleine had little time for anything but horses. Her husband and his son Jake didn’t really count.
What other Dellars were there? Only Miranda, the panicky hermit crab, poor girl.
10
On Tuesday morning Miranda Dellar was following her mother downstairs with a suitcase in one hand and the tartan rug over the other arm. She counted the eighteen steps to this lower flight, then twenty-seven repetitions of the fleur-de-lys pattern on the bottom line of the wallpaper as far as the hotel’s outer door.
There had been five hundred and eighty-two square tiles in her bathroom upstairs. She felt safer if she knew.
Her lips moved as she passed over the flagstones out to the cab. Claudia was standing beside it and gave her a hard stare. Miranda closed her mouth tightly, and accidentally her eyes, so that she blundered into the open door of the waiting taxi. Her mother’s breath escaped in a controlled whoosh.
