by David Hewson
“We can deny what’s happened, Laura. We can’t erase it.”
“Really?” she replied. “So you think Piero and I should remind each other constantly of a night when he found a naked and half-dead teenage girl and saved her life? And whenever I see a frail old man, I should think of Scacchi when he lay there in his chair, and this crazy stream of words coming from him about the fiddle and Massiter and you, with Paul dead and you asleep in my bed at that moment?”
He tried to speak, but there were no words, though his head felt as if it might burst.
“I hate your hair like this,” she said. “It’s too short, too spiky. How can a woman run her hands through that? The moustache must come off too. In some ways you have extraordinarily bad taste.”
“Thank you,” he said, smiling.
“Where did this idea arise, Daniel?”
He recalled that as precisely as the moment he first understood Massiter’s true motive for seeking the Guarneri. It was in his prison cell, late one night, when he was unable to push the memory of her from his head. “I thought about the day I went on Hugo’s boat. I sat there, with Massiter and Amy. As we left the quayside, I looked back, into that little park. You were wearing jeans and a red T-shirt. And sunglasses, as you usually did outside. You couldn’t stop looking at the boat. At the time I thought it was me...”
“Men!” she objected. “Everything revolves around themselves.”
“Quite. But it was Massiter, naturally. You wished to see him from afar, to convince yourself his presence remained as malevolent as you remembered.”
“I wished to walk onto that boat and tear his eyes out. I didn’t like having him near you. But I was afraid. I am afraid.”
“You were going to see your ‘mother,’ or so I believed.”
“Ah,” she said, giving nothing away.
“In prison, when I was bored, I would imagine your life, Laura. I would try to dream what you were doing at any particular time. And what you had done that summer when I wasn’t with you. Those visits to Mestre, for example.”
“I confess,” she said swiftly. “I had a lover. He was a lorry driver with horny hands and bad breath. It was merely a sexual infatuation.”
“Rubbish!” he exclaimed. “I imagined it precisely. You wouldn’t play in Ca’ Scacchi, for fear of troubling the old man. So there was some small musical gathering in Mestre. A string quarter, perhaps. You borrowed a cheap violin. You played beneath your capabilities. But you played, and that was what mattered.”
Her green eyes narrowed. “I’m not fond of your talent for imagining, Daniel Forster. It’s unnatural.”
“I apologise.”
“You still apologise too much as well! And there was a lover. Once. I’m not some blushing virgin.”
Daniel touched her cheek, then gently, nervously ran his fingers through her hair. “You have a lover now,” he said.
“Oh, Daniel.” Abruptly she turned away, but not before he saw the sudden change in her demeanour.
“Please play for me, Laura. I’ve waited a very long time to hear you.”
She reached forward, kissed him briefly on the forehead, ruffled her hand through his short, cropped hair as a reproach, and left the room. Ten minutes later, a period of time which seemed to last forever, she reappeared. The white housecoat was gone. She wore a red cotton shirt and cream trousers. A silver necklace glittered at her throat. Her long hair was now on her shoulders, just as it was in the photograph in the newspapers. In her hand was the fat brown Guarneri he had once touched, a lifetime ago, in a warehouse in the Arsenale.
He was lost for words looking at her. It was as if she were some new, changed person. As if Susanna Gianni had slipped out from beneath Laura’s skin.
“I don’t always wear a uniform,” she said in return. “I’m not a nun. Stop doing that fish thing with your mouth, Daniel. It’s unattractive.”
“I’m—”
“No! Just sit, please, and listen.”
Laura stood by the piano, straight-backed, with a determined poise. There was no music. She lifted the fiddle to her neck, tucked it beneath her chin, then brought the bow down on the strings. She chose the most difficult section: the virtuoso finale. Daniel closed his eyes and listened to her play, let the full, bold sound of the Guarneri rise to occupy every last inch of his consciousness.
Amy had performed this magnificently, but she was, next to Laura, a child. Now the piece had an added intensity, a wild, mature beauty it had never before possessed. This was how the work was meant to be played. She had mastered every last cadence and harmony until there was nothing left to change. It was perfection, of an ethereal, almost supernatural kind.
When she finished, Laura raised an amused eyebrow at his silence. “Why do you look so surprised? I can practise here, Daniel. I don’t have to run and hide in Mestre every time I feel like taking out the bow. How do you think I spend these long months of solitude the masters of the house allow me?”
He stood up and, with her permission, took the Guarneri. The instrument was curious: a workmanlike piece of extraordinary size. Yet the sound it made... Daniel gave it back to her. He recalled that day on the Arsenale and some sudden flash of colour in his head. Rizzo feared the fiddle. In a way, he did too.
“Did I perform well?” she asked.
“You were magnificent.”
“Thank you! Do you really think that an Englishman wrote such a lovely piece of music? I read your book.”
Daniel bristled. “All the evidence points to such a conclusion. Why shouldn’t an Englishman have written it?”
Laura laughed. “Don’t be so touchy. It just sounds... wrong. I’ve a fancy it was written by a woman.”
“You mean for a woman?”
“No. By. I feel that when I play. You’re the historian. Tell me it’s nonsense.”
“It would certainly be... unusual, let us say.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes I dream too much. Do you?”
“Only of you,” he replied. “I should like to hear you play in Ca’ Scacchi, Laura.”
Her face fell. “I can’t. Think. You must know why.”
“For the life of me I don’t. I have a house we both adore, one that feels empty without you. As does my entire existence. From the moment on Piero’s boat, I think I knew as much, but I was too stupid to realise it.”
Her face fell onto his neck. He felt her arms move around his waist, then the warmth of her tears touched his skin. Laura’s voice whispered in his ear.
“Scacchi once told me we were all born hurtling towards Heaven, Daniel. I denied it for both our sakes, but since we met, I have always felt I was born hurtling towards you. I don’t know why. It terrifies me that I understand so little about these feelings.”
“Then we’re the same—”
“No,” she insisted. “It cannot be. You don’t appreciate that man for what he truly is. A devil. Nothing less. He lives. He waits. He’ll come for us one day. He’ll devour us because he believes we have given him the right.”
“Massiter’s gone,” he said firmly. “No one knows where.”
“He sees us, Daniel. You in particular. With your riches and your book and your fame. Haven’t you considered that? You’ve profited from Massiter more than anyone.”
Daniel’s train of thought, so carefully organised beforehand, stumbled. “For what reason would he return? Revenge?”
“No! Don’t you understand anything? To possess us, Daniel. To own every last part of us. Even our souls.”
Beyond the window, above the distant horizon of the Adriatic, the sky was perfect, cloudless.
“You could have killed him.” There was a note of accusation in her voice. “I read it. Why did you choose otherwise?”
It was a question he asked himself from time to time, and one it never took long to answer. “Because if I had, I would have become like him. Joined his hell. And I would have lost you forever, and deserved to.”
She was unmoved.
“That devil will seek us out, Daniel. It’s in his nature.”
“And what if he does? He has no power unless we give it to him. If we possess each other more fully than Hugo Massiter could begin to comprehend, what’s left for him to own? What space will our lives allow him to occupy?”
Laura took her hands away and refused to meet his gaze. “Still, he will come,” she said softly. “One day.”
“Perhaps,” he admitted. “But if I leave here without you, I don’t care in any case.”
A light fired at the back of her eyes. “And is that the kind of blackmail you hope will win me, Daniel Forster? Walking in here with your scrawny moustache and your spiky hair?”
“I’d rather hoped as much,” he said lamely.
“Pah!”
She turned and was gone, out into another room—the kitchen, he imagined. He went to the window and admired the view. A formation of wild ducks crossed the sky in a squawking vee, heading northwards for Sant’ Erasmo and, if they were unlucky, the jaws of a certain black dog he knew. There were worse places than Alberoni. It was, at least, the lagoon.
He heard her cough. Laura stood holding two glasses of bloodred liquid. He smiled and held out his hand.
“Wait,” she ordered.
In the corner of the room a small ornamental clock struck six. When it had ended, she handed him his glass.
“Spritz!” Laura said, smiling. “Timing is important, Daniel Forster. I like my days divided in an orderly fashion. Not running backwards and forwards as they fancy. You should know this about me.”
“Spritz!” he replied, raising his glass. “I had guessed that, to be honest.”
“Good. Is there something I should know about you?”
“Only that I’ll never cease to love you, whatever may happen. And I’ll never leave you, because that would be like leaving myself.”
She cocked her head to one side, thinking.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I was remembering the last time you kissed me. You smelled of eel.”
Daniel was surprised. It was one memory which had eluded him. “No. That was the first time I kissed you. The last was some hours later.”
He fell silent. She was staring at the room as if about to take her leave of it. She seemed serene at last. At this moment he could almost convince himself that every last painful act of the recent past was justified by their reunion.
She turned and wrapped her arms around him. She was shivering in the dying heat of the evening. Their bodies locked together, like two pieces from the same puzzle.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“Of what?”
“Of us. Of how I feel when we are together. Of what lies ahead.”
He gazed beyond the glass at the low, flat marshland and the empty grey horizon. As he watched, a solitary figure walked slowly across the pebble beach, in the distance beyond the dunes, then passed behind a hummock of marram grass and was gone. There would always be shapes in the shadows. She saw them too.
They held each other tightly.
The doorbell sounded and she trembled in his arms.
Daniel strode to the front of the house. A boy of no more than nine stood there selling apples and pears fresh from the orchard. Daniel gave him some notes and took a few apples. The child disappeared down the drive, half running. When Daniel turned, she was standing in the hall holding a small kitchen knife. He walked up to her, took the blade out of her hands, and said, “Come with me, Laura. Please.”
“Of course,” she said nervously, and quickly removed the silver chain, then began to tie up her hair and fumble in her bag for the sunglasses. He waited, wondering if she would seek out the white housecoat too.
“No,” he said, taking her hands. Overawed by her beauty, he gently pulled forward her auburn hair until it sat over her shoulders again.
Daniel walked over the threshold of the villa, breathed the late-summer air, and led her outside. Arm in arm, slowly, not speaking, they walked to the small modern promenade, past the restaurants, past the little hotels, then sat by the water’s edge.
The lagoon mirrored the gold of the sky. It was a perfect evening. The last of the season’s swallows darted above their heads. Families played on the narrow strip of beach. Couples walked hand in hand along the concrete path. In the distance stood the outline of the city, shimmering in the haze on the horizon.
Laura’s head fell on his shoulder. He felt the moist warmth of her lips on his skin.
“Who are we?” she asked.
“The blessed,” Daniel said, and knew at that moment that nothing, not even Hugo Massiter, would part them again.
65
Chance encounter
From the journal of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, April 1743
AT LAST THEY DO ME JUSTICE. I TRAVEL NOW FOR A post of some rank, as Secretary to the French Ambassador in that den of sin, Venice. I cannot fault the work; only the location. I have not written much of the place in my other journals, though I spent a little time there a decade or so ago. There are sights aplenty and a smattering of artists too. Yet, though possessed of a memory which scarce lets slip a face or incident from years back, I must confess I recall nothing of moment during my interlude in La Serenissima. Nothing, that is, save the stink of the canals, which even an idiot is unlikely to forget.
Sometimes the oddities of fortune have a way of making up for these omissions. I travel to Venice from Geneva, where I saw my few remaining relatives. The call of business prevented my taking a direct route and instead demanded I visit the surly burghers of Zurich for three tedious days. Then I took the coach to Chur for the mountain pass to Milan, by Lugano and Como, a crossing so ancient I must be following in the footsteps of Caesar and his battalions with every mile.
This is a long and tiresome journey, and so, of necessity, I must break it into as many constituent parts as I find convenient, or sit day and night on the hard seat of some cold, drab carriage, listening to the coughs and wheezes of my fellow man. Chur is as pleasant a place as any to pause for breath. This is a curious spot, set in a deep valley carved by the Rhine. The natives, part of the canton we call Grisons and they Graubünden, claim descent from the Etruscans and speak a strange tongue known as Romansh. There is a handful of fetching buildings, some fine hotels and restaurants, and an ancient Kathedrale with one of those Gothic altars designed to make you dizzy if you stare at it too long.
With some money in my pocket for once and an urge for a decent meal and a soft bed, I took a room at the Drei Könige, a comfortable establishment not far from the carriage stop. There I dined marvellously on good Swiss boar, potatoes, red cabbage, and ale before retiring to the salon at the rear, attracted by the unexpected sound of a small ensemble. I pulled up a chair, joined the six or so other travellers in the room, and found myself lost in thought. The music was expertly played, though somewhat predictable in content— insipid dance tunes, the kind of fare one must expect from entertainers in an hotel. What caught my attention most, though, was the players: a woman of striking appearance, perhaps in her mid-thirties, with wayward dark hair and a scarlet dress, who worked at a large, sonorous fiddle as if she were born with the thing strapped to her arm; a furtive-looking man a little younger than his wife, playing the harpsichord with rather less skill than his partner; and a dark-haired, if overly serious, child—nine, no more—bowing away on a smaller fiddle alongside his mother, and very well too.
I recognised this couple instantly. Our meeting had been brief—in Venice, of all places—and at least one of them I believed dead, and after some villainous deeds at that. To see this pair, with their o fspring, stand in front of me, flesh and blood, was a curious and chilling experience, and one made all the more so by the way in which, after a while, both adults returned my inquisitive gaze. They performed another fifteen minutes more, then, after the merest round of applause, turned their backs on me and began to pack away their instruments. Emboldened by this rudeness, I decided to play them at their own ga
me, and duly strode across to the tiny stage in order to strike up a conversation with these “strangers.”
The man regarded my outstretched hand as if it were leprous. “I congratulate your little band, sir,” I said with a smile. “I never expected to hear such musicianship in the provinces. Surely you must head for civilisation to reap the acclaim you deserve!”
The fellow gave me a filthy look, one that made my heart skip a beat. The exact circumstances of our acquaintance were still a blur to me at this point. The woman, I recall, was a musician. Yet I knew there were black rumours about his character later, though I had assumed him a gentleman when we first met, if a somewhat pompous one. It would be foolish to discount these tales of his disposition simply because half the intelligence about his fate proved misconstrued.
“Music is music, sir, wherever it is played,” he replied in a monotonous country brogue. “One does not need the city’s imprimatur to prove its value.”
“True, but what worth is a diamond set beneath the ground, dear fellow? Nothing. It is only when the miner brings it to the surface, the jeweller carves it, the lady wears it... then it becomes the most precious thing in all the world!”
His eyes, if I am not mistaken, glazed over at this metaphor. A strange symptom of fear, no doubt, for all three of us knew this was a charade.
The lady packed away that gigantic instrument, as ugly to behold as it was delightful to hear, and said with what passed for a smile, “We are mere country folk, sir. Content to earn a living and a bed for the night by our playing and our lessons, nothing more. The city would surely drown us in its tumult and expose our talents as the humble e forts which, in truth, they represent.”
She did herself a disservice and knew it. “Not so!” I insisted. “I listened most carefully, and you, madame, play like an angel. And originally, too, for I have not heard those tunes before and there’s many a hotel band I’ve been forced to listen to on my travels.”
She beamed at that. Quite rightly, for it was sincerely meant. She had acquired, I must record, a distinct limp; it spoiled somewhat her otherwise comely appearance. “Thank you, sir. It is a hobby of mine to write a little now and then.”
