by David Hewson
‘Had she been hurt? Physically?’
‘No one mentioned such a thing to me.’
It had to be asked. Date rape had become only too common in the Nineties.
‘Had she been . . . molested?’
‘No! How do I know? Please . . .’ This conversation was painful, for both of them, not that her mother seemed much aware of that fact. ‘Sofia was living here on her own. She had no money. No future. No idea where she was going. I took her home for two months until she felt better. After that she went to Paris. She seemed to think she’d recovered.’
‘Home?’ Teresa Lupo tried hard to staunch the anger and disbelief. ‘I must have come back around then. Are you telling me she was there?’
A guilty look, a frown.
‘She didn’t want you to know. She went out when I said you were coming. No one wanted to disturb you. There were still exams. We knew what that might mean.’
‘Thank you!’
Chiara Bianchi’s eyes roamed around the dilapidated living room, cast an exasperated glance at the mess on the floor and the furniture, the childlike painting on the easel, the half-finished costume on the dummy by the door.
‘Sofia did the right thing. She suggested it, before I could. I had to take her back. She was alone. Just as she was when she came back here last year.’
‘Except now we don’t know where she is,’ Teresa said firmly.
‘I imagine it’s the role of police officers to state the obvious.’
‘I’m not a police officer and you’re missing my point. Everything seems to indicate Sofia hasn’t been in this apartment for six days. If something dreadful had happened someone surely would have noticed. I’ve called the police, the hospitals. Only this morning. From the train. You heard me. No one has any record of her.’
Her mother’s eyes went to the window and the grey lagoon beyond.
‘Venice,’ she hissed. ‘Anyone could die in this place and never be noticed. The water . . .’
This was going to take days. Weeks perhaps. The idea that her mother might be around, in this despairing, mournful mood, was unimaginable. There was work to be done.
‘I don’t believe for one moment she’s dead,’ Teresa Lupo declared, and found that the words heartened her already. ‘If this case came to me as a professional I would find no evidence to support such an idea. Certainly not some unexplained incident from sixteen years ago . . .’
‘She tried to kill herself! In this very city! I asked her not to come back. I begged her. It was useless.’
‘You said yourself, you don’t know what happened. I’m not a child and I’m not a fool. Until I see some proof to the contrary I will continue to believe that Sofia is alive and out there . . .’ Her own gaze went to the glass and the icy blue sky beyond. ‘Somewhere.’
Chiara was shaking her head and this made her daughter’s decision, already half-confirmed in her head, even more certain.
‘I’ll find her,’ Teresa said. ‘I promise.’
‘Ever the optimist,’ Chiara murmured, reaching for her little suitcase. ‘There are two bedrooms? Or one and we must share?’
‘There are two bedrooms but you needn’t unpack.’
Her mother’s face creased in puzzlement.
‘I think you should go back to Frascati,’ Teresa said. ‘You’re more use to me there.’
‘I beg your—!’
‘No. I won’t hear any arguments. I may need to deal with the Questura back in Rome. They won’t be happy I’m here. You can smooth things for me. Explain to them. Be my contact.’ This was a lie, and she suspected they both understood it. ‘There are people in Venice I know. Officials who may help. You can’t be a part of that. It’s impossible.’
Chiara listened, nodded, then said, ‘You don’t want me here, do you?’
‘If I thought it would achieve anything . . .’
She got up, crossed the room, knelt in front of her mother, took her cold, wrinkled hands. In all the years, the long and difficult decades, there had been few moments like this.
‘I promise,’ Teresa said, ‘I’ll get to the bottom of it. But I can’t be answerable to you. I have to do things my way.’
‘Is there any other?’
‘No,’ Teresa said simply.
She put her arms around the woman who sat there stiff and miserable inside the ancient fox-fur coat.
‘Do you have anything else to tell me?’ she whispered into her mother’s ear.
Two dry lips briefly brushed against her cheek and mouthed a single word, ‘Nothing.’
Then this brief intimacy was over. The two parted, stood up. The handle of the little suitcase was in her mother’s hand. Teresa was surprised she had given in so easily. This was clearly that rare kind of battle, one she was happy to lose.
‘You know what I know,’ Chiara said. ‘The doctors told me they assumed she tried to kill herself. Sofia claimed she had no memory of this and seemed too embarrassed to discuss what might have happened. When she was well enough to leave she came home with me to Rome. After that she went to Paris. Then London.’ A pause. ‘The circus . . . the carnival resumed.’
Fifteen minutes later they stood on the wooden jetty near the Ponte agli Incurabili, waiting for the water taxi Teresa Lupo had insisted on calling.
Her mother turned as she was about to step onto the gleaming launch with its white hull and polished walnut decking.
‘There was a man,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I’m sure of that. I asked Sofia at the time if there was anyone in Venice I should talk to. About her being in hospital. She said no one. Said it in that way I recognized. It was a lie. You’d never have seen that. You knew her differently.’
Chiara gazed at the grand form of Redentore across the Giudecca canal. The day was dying in a glorious smear of colours: cerise and blue, copper and gold, their reflections drowning in the dappled surface of the lagoon.
‘There was always a man, wasn’t there?’ Teresa asked as the boatman guided her mother into the vessel.
‘Something happened here,’ Chiara told her. ‘Something special. Something bad.’
‘In Venice?’ the boatman interjected. ‘Bad? No, signora. This is the quietest, most peaceful city on earth.’
He tapped the side of his long nose and glanced at them both.
‘Want to know a secret? Most of us are dead already. This is a city of ghosts.’
‘You won’t have need of a tip then,’ Chiara said and clambered onto the red leather seats in the rear.
The archaic laptop contained no new information. The papers proved to be either bills, advertising flyers or notes Sofia appeared to use as background for her work as a freelance guide. After an hour of sifting through the material scattered around the place like confetti Teresa accepted that the ramshackle apartment had nothing to tell her that she didn’t know already. Sofia had been gone for almost a week and seemed to have left unexpectedly. On the days before she disappeared it looked as if she was keen to meet someone she dubbed Il Gobbo, the hunchback. That was it.
She bundled the mess from the living room into five black rubbish bags then stored them in the spare bedroom in case they were needed again. After that she cleared out the smelly remains of some cheese, milk, yoghurt and prosciutto crudo from the refrigerator, put on her jacket and woolly hat and walked down to deposit the rubbish in a bin by the bridge.
It was almost eight o’clock and bitterly cold, the air sharp with the salt bite of the ocean. The lights of the island of Giudecca opposite glittered on the canal alongside the dark, sparkling shapes of vessels moving across the lagoon. Large and small they came: fast, sleek public vaporetti, slow ferries heading for the Lido, private craft still delivering goods even at this hour. Venice seemed more alive on the water than on the land sometimes.
As she stood there, reluctantly transfixed by the beauty of the view, a small, luxurious-looking cruiser edged past. A good dozen or so carnival figures were gathered in the brightly lit stern deter
mined to be visible, buoyed by loud music, chinking glasses, gossiping and laughing. She took in the masks and the gaudy costumes, some bright gleaming silk like Sofia’s unfinished gown upstairs, some, the men’s mainly, in velvet the colour of the night sky. She’d worn a mask here once during a student weekend. They all had different names, different styles. The bauta, with its jutting jawline. The pale, eerie larva, named, she seemed to recall, after the Latin word for ghost. There was someone in the popular Plague Doctor costume she’d seen earlier, the one with the long ivory nose and round, dark spectacles for eyes. Five or six beautiful young women stood together in a group. They looked as if they’d walked out of a painting by Tiepolo, with radiant, artificial hair and half-masks that let them drink and eat and smile coyly at the men.
Another world, Teresa thought, one she would never quite comprehend. Her career had taken her to strange places at times. That student weekend apart, there were none where she had felt a need for the frisson of a hidden identity, the quick, frantic stab for the affections of someone who might, or might not, be a complete stranger.
Sofia, though . . .
Her mother’s story continued to puzzle her. How well did she really know her aunt? Was the face Sofia had shown her over the years manufactured to fit the needs of a troubled and awkward young woman in awe of someone older? One more mask, like those of the figures on the passing cruiser? And if so, what lay beneath? Depression and doubt? Then some unknown, unexplained moment of despair in which she sought to take her own life?
All things are possible. Her work in Rome and beyond had taught her that. But likely? She still doubted it.
The carnival figures on the pleasure craft floated past towards the Punta della Dogana and St Mark’s Basin, their vessel starting to cut a sharp silhouette against the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore and its towering campanile across the water.
Teresa Lupo became aware that she was ravenous. Carefully, wrapping herself more tightly in her plain and practical winter jacket, she picked her way in the flat-soled shoes her mother hated along the ice and compressed snow of the Zattere waterfront, crossing three low, pretty bridges until she was back near the vaporetto stop. Some residual memory told her the carnival occurred elsewhere, principally around San Marco, a fifteen-minute walk away across the bridge by the Accademia, and around the Rialto, a similar distance in the opposite direction. The festivities had not reached this area of Dorsoduro. A single restaurant was open, deserted apart from a silent couple: a surly middle-aged man in a grey suit and someone who might be his daughter or mistress, an elegant blonde with Asiatic features, foreign perhaps. Teresa took a table at the opposite end of the room by the window and ordered a quattro formaggi pizza and a small carafe of the local red Refosco from the Colli Orientali in Friuli. Both were excellent and, with the view and some idle chatter from a polite and interesting waiter, welcome.
As she sat there watching the lights on the canal her conviction that Sofia Bianchi was alive continued to grow. Perhaps it was the wine or the pleasant atmosphere. There was, she knew, no reason for this belief, and reason was, in Rome, her watchword, the guiding light of her professional life. Nevertheless she felt as she sat there, picking at the remains of the pizza, that her aunt was somewhere in the Veneto region; if not in Venice itself, perhaps in the Dolomiti mountains she loved so much for the wild bleak peaks and the skiing. There was a reason for her absence and the mysterious message she had sent. What mystery lay behind her disappearance lurked here somewhere, in this city, waiting to be found. That was one benefit of an island. It was hard for anything to escape completely. Hard to escape it oneself, too.
Ever since she first visited Venice as a child Teresa had felt that a part of the place stayed with her always, a stain on the memory, a perpetual scar, ready to be brought back to a life by a random event or experience: a glimpse of the reflection of an ancient palazzo flickering in the dappled dark waters of a canal, the endless, overwhelming sky, the smell of the water, the steady rhythm of the vaporetti, even the taste of the food, cold sharp fish, sarde en saor and creamy baccalà, local dishes she’d loved from the moment she first tasted them.
One never quite left behind these aspects of the city. There were traces of Sofia here somewhere too. If her aunt did not simply re-emerge from the night, smiling innocently as if nothing had happened – this had occurred before – these signs had to be found.
She finished her meal and returned to the apartment, checked the other rooms more thoroughly, found nothing.
Then she went into the bedroom and looked more closely at the object she’d seen earlier, when her mother was still around, and quite deliberately failed to mention.
The photograph was almost thirty years old, in a frame by the bed. A picture that must have followed Sofia around the world, through two marriages, innumerable failed affairs, from America back to Europe and then the years she had spent in Asia. The colours were a little faded now and Teresa could not place the exact date, only the location. She was ten or so, with Sofia and her mother standing in the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome, next to the famous Bocca della Verità, a bearded god’s head carved in marble, jaws open. The ‘Mouth of Truth’.
As a child the budding scientist in her had soon discovered this was some kind of Imperial-era drain cover, rejecting the popular notion that the stone creature would bite off the hand of anyone who inserted his or her fingers into his mouth and spoke a lie. But it was a fetching legend, and one that brought a stream of visitors to the little church near the Tiber.
Sofia had her wrist in the Bocca della Verità at that moment and was smiling at the camera, her hair long and beautiful, her face innocent, a little puzzled perhaps. Chiara was gazing at her severely with the concerned intent of an elder sister. Teresa merely stood there, a lost and surly child, expressionless, plain and moody, hating, as always, the sight of the camera.
She vaguely remembered seeing this photograph years before but had never really looked at it closely. A kind of inverse vanity was the reason. She didn’t hate her own forgettable if pleasant looks, her sturdy body, the way she slouched. She just didn’t want to be reminded of her physical ordinariness. Why? She knew she was just one more face in the crowd.
Now she did peer closely at the picture and she saw something in the face of her mother, some half-resented sense of care, the kind a parent would show to a wayward child. It was directed at Sofia, not at her.
Teresa reached over for her bag, took out her phone and called Frascati. It was now past ten o’clock. Chiara had just arrived. There was a brief and polite conversation about the journey and the lack of any further information in Venice. Then she asked, ‘Were some of Sofia’s stories untrue? Please, tell me.’
Chiara Bianchi sighed and her daughter wondered how many times she’d heard that careworn sound.
‘What stories?’
‘The ones that weren’t obvious. The ones where you had to take her on trust.’
‘I never knew what to believe,’ Chiara said eventually. ‘The marriages, yes. I met both those men. Everything else. The life in London. In Paris. Asia. The dreams . . .’
‘She went to those places?’
‘She went to some of them,’ her mother replied. ‘Asia . . . I don’t know. When she was supposed to be there someone told me she’d seen her working in some ski resort outside Turin. A cabin girl. Cleaning, cooking, fetching. I don’t know what to believe. I never did after a while.’
Teresa closed her eyes and fought for some self-control.
‘You could have asked.’
‘And punctured what little confidence and self-respect she had?’
‘Has. People who are about to commit suicide don’t send their niece their keys and a note saying they might have some small problem on their mind. Not in my experience.’
There was some hesitation on the line then Chiara said, not unkindly, ‘Difficult as you may find this to believe, there are still matters outside your experience. Y
ou have a very strict and defined view of humanity. I imagine your job demands that. Your character too. Don’t imagine it encompasses everything.’
This strange, stark criticism astonished her.
‘I’ve no idea what that means.’
‘I’m sure you don’t. I did my best with Sofia, believe me. She was my sister. I still remember holding her in my arms when she was a baby, feeling so proud. Looking forward to all the time we’d spend together. But it never happened. We were sisters, never friends, not really.’
‘Mother . . .’
‘Listen to me, please. We don’t possess other people. We can only offer our help and then, when it’s rejected or ignored, offer it again a little later.’ Her mother’s voice was beginning to crack. ‘I never stopped trying, believe me. You were right that I should leave. It’s time to try your kind of talent. Mine, such as it may be, always seemed squandered somehow. My fault, not hers.’
‘I’m sure you did everything you could.’
‘If it was a waste what was the point?’
‘The point is you tried. You’re a good sister and a good mother and I love you very much,’ Teresa said, aware that she could never have uttered those words face to face, aware too that her eyes were beginning to cloud over with tears.
Nothing that had occurred between them these last thirty or more years came close to this moment and they both knew it. There was only space after that for a brief and clumsy goodbye.
A few minutes later, as she was beginning to accept that there was nothing left to do but change the old, crumpled sheets on Sofia’s bed and try to sleep, the doorbell went, followed by several rapid knocks and a voice calling loudly, ‘Sofia! Sofia!’
A young woman stood there, pretty, with long dark hair and a very pale, almost bloodless face. She wore the most extraordinary costume: a grey hooped floor-length skirt, a white lace cotton apron and neckpiece and a bright scarlet jacket trimmed with crumpled velour. A red-and-white lace bonnet sat above her forehead, tied beneath her chin. In her right hand was a large manila envelope, in her left an expensive-looking bouquet of roses.
