Sophie's Secret

by Anne Weale

  ‘Yes, but he disliked her collection of modern art so they were never close friends.’

  ‘I don’t like most of it either, but I do like the Marini statue of the horseman we’ll see through the water-gates. When you come out of the house and walk round and see his erection, it’s such a shock the first time. Was that the artist’s motive, do you suppose? To shock people? I wonder if the story is true that one day, when a group of nuns were coming to visit unexpectedly, Peggy unscrewed the penis and threw it in the canal?’ She turned to Sophie. ‘Have you seen it?’

  Marc answered for her. ‘She hasn’t had time to visit any galleries yet. And Sophie has too much aplomb to be shocked by anything,’ he added blandly.

  He must know that wasn’t true, Sophie thought, clenching her teeth. He had rocked her aplomb several times.

  Martha looked closely at her. ‘You do look a very calm person. What’s your secret? Yoga and meditation?’

  Considering how tense she was feeling about going back to Torcello, Sophie was amazed that she gave Mrs Henderson an impression of serenity, especially as she felt sure there had been nothing tongue-in-cheek about the American’s comment.

  ‘Walking and reading are my main relaxations,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Oh, mine too.’ In a spontaneous gesture, Martha stretched out her hand to give Sophie’s wrist a friendly squeeze. ‘I haven’t “measured out my life with coffee spoons”. It’s been a long country walk marked by a trail of books.’ After a pause, she added, ‘I might have that on my tombstone. What do you think, Marc?’

  ‘I like it.’ He was smiling at Martha with a look that caused curious sensations in the region of Sophie’s heart. ‘But if tombstones can have postscripts I think I would add, “A very short time in her company made you feel you had found a friend.”’

  Mrs Henderson looked delighted. As well she might, Sophie thought.

  ‘What a charming thing to say. I feel the same.’ This time it was his arm she squeezed. She was obviously a very tactile person. ‘But I’ve heard a lot of good things about you from Hal.’ She turned to Sophie. ‘I had four children with my first husband and two more when I married again, after the war. Now I have a whole tribe of grandchildren. Hal is the eldest grandson. He’s the same age as Marc—thirty-six. When he was eighteen, he had a terrible accident on his motorbike. It left him a paraplegic. He’s married now, with two children, but at first it was very difficult for an active young man like him to adapt to life in a wheelchair. Marc helped him make that adjustment.’

  ‘He exaggerates my contribution,’ said Marc. ‘It was Hal’s own determination which got him through his time in hospital and the first years at Yale.’

  ‘He says it was you who did that—cheering him up when he was low, spending your free time with him instead of having a ball with the others.’

  ‘I liked him better than the others. Why did I never meet you before?’ Marc asked.

  Sophie liked the deft way he turned the conversation away from himself.

  ‘My second husband was ill while Hal was at Yale. We were living in France and I wasn’t around much then. That’s a lovely hotel. That’s where I stayed the second time I came here.’ She gestured at the Danieli, a luxurious near-neighbour of Sophie’s more modest base.

  Further along the Riva, they turned down the canal which led to the Arsenale. As they glided through the lion-guarded water-gate into what had once been the largest shipyard in the world, Sophie remembered coming this way with Michael on the vaporetto, the only way for members of the public to see inside the walls of the Arsenale. He had wanted to paint the vast caverns of the covered docks but hadn’t been able to get permission.

  Marc had turned to look at something to starboard, and was showing the same quarter-profile which, yesterday afternoon, had unlocked her memory of their first encounter. If he was thirty-six now, when she’d been eleven he would have been twenty-two.

  At the time he had seemed very adult, but he might still have been a student, visiting Venice on vacation. If he hadn’t been there and known what to do, Michael would have died. She hadn’t known what to do.

  ‘The first time I came to Torcello was by gondola,’ said Martha as they approached the island. The bell-tower of its ancient cathedral had been in view for some time. ‘In those days you could hire a gondola, with two gondoliers to row it, for a whole day for very little. I remember we brought a picnic. It was almost dark by the time we got back to Venice. It was one of the best days of my life.’

  ‘Aren’t you nervous about coming back?’ Sophie asked.

  Martha gave a gentle shake of the head. ‘Whatever it’s like now it can’t spoil that wonderful memory. They sang to us on the way back. They didn’t have very good voices but even so it was lovely. There was a full moon rising and Venice looked like Camelot or Atlantis—one of those legendary places you expect to vanish as you approach it.’

  ‘Does your gondolier sing, Sophie?’ Marc enquired.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said untruthfully.

  Perhaps Martha heard a nuance that alerted her curiosity. With an interested look, she said, ‘Who is your gondolier?’

  ‘He’s someone Marc thinks picked me up,’ Sophie told her pleasantly. ‘But he happens to have an aunt who runs a very good restaurant and a large friendly family who are only too happy to let me listen in to their conversations in the Venetian dialect. Being able to speak it will be a help in dealing with local people, especially working people.’

  ‘She omits to mention that her gondolier is too handsome for his own good and has the reputation of seducing every susceptible tourist who comes within a hundred yards of him.’

  Marc was smiling as he said it, but something in his eyes reminded her of the expression on a cat’s face when, with claws temporarily sheathed, it dabbed a soft paw against a terrified mouse or captured fledgling.

  Controlling her indignation, she said, ‘Do you have grounds for that statement?’

  ‘One of Domenico’s cousins is a gondolier. They all know each other. There are only about four hundred of them left.’ He turned to Martha. ‘Apparently Sophie’s guy is well-known for targeting the cream of the foreign girls…with close to a hundred per cent success rate, so I’m told.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t targeting me,’ Sophie retorted, losing some of her cool. And then, already strung up and resenting being needled, she repeated what, long ago, she had heard a Venetian girl from one of the poorer quarters say to a man who had been annoying her.

  The words were no sooner spoken than she was horrified, and thankful that Mrs Henderson, even if she had some Italian, was unlikely to have understood the coarseness of her terse instruction to mind his own business and push off.

  For a moment Marc’s face was blank, and she had a sinking feeling he was going to dismiss her there and then. It was an enormous relief when he began to laugh.

  ‘Is that what he’s taught you to say if anyone else makes a pass at you? It would certainly have an effect. But ask yourself this: would you say the English equivalent if someone in New York or London was making a nuisance of himself? I doubt it.’ He glanced at Martha. ‘Don’t ask me to translate Sophie’s pithy mouthful. Those words aren’t in your vocabulary.’

  ‘They might not be in my personal vocabulary, but I expect I’ve heard them spoken or read them in books,’ Martha said drily. ‘I don’t think I’m behind the times. I try not to be. But one thing I do dislike about contemporary manners is the way both sexes swear in front of each other.’ She turned to Sophie. ‘I’m sure you don’t, my dear…except to give Marc an example of the Venetian you’ve learnt,’ she added, with a mischievous look.

  The launch was slowing down to pass the jetty where the ferry passengers disembarked. It was near the mouth of a small canal and the footpath leading to the centre of the island.

  Her attention distracted by the cut and thrust with Marc, it was only now that Sophie looked at the jetty. She had so often stood there with Michael, wait
ing for the boat to Venice where he, with the sleeve of his missing right arm neatly folded and pinned to the side of his shirt, had earned their living drawing portraits of tourists with his left hand.

  Martha gave an exclamation. ‘The path has been paved with bricks. It was a dirt path last time.’

  To Sophie, the other woman’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. She was looking past the jetty, to the spot where Venezia had once been moored.

  Michael had given his boat the Italian name for Venice long before he’d come to Torcello. He had loved the city all his life, but before losing his arm had been busy working in London, where he had been one of the great fashion artists of his day.

  Behind the protective screen of her sunglasses, Sophie closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them the launch had entered the canal. The painful sight of Venezia’s empty mooring had passed out of view.

  The path alongside the canal had been paved with bricks laid in a herring-bone pattern.

  ‘That’s much prettier than concrete or asphalt,’ said Martha.

  The pattern reminded Sophie of the paths in the walled kitchen garden of her English boarding-school—a great country house once owned by an aristocratic family which had died out.

  Shortly before his death, Michael had inherited some money—enough to send her to boarding-school and to cover her education until she was eighteen and could start supporting herself. At first she had been very unhappy away from him, but every week a letter illustrated with funny sketches had arrived to cheer her up until, gradually, she had grown to like her new environment and to throw herself into doing well and making him proud of her.

  The launch glided under a bridge without any parapets. A young couple who looked as if they might be honeymooners were sitting on it. Sophie wondered if they would be a poignant reminder to Martha’s of her first visit here. But everything must remind her of that longlost happiness. It sounded as if her first husband had been killed in the war that Michael had also fought in.

  ‘Did you come here as a child, Marc?’ the older woman asked.

  He nodded. ‘My grandfather liked to lunch here whenever he was in Venice. He knew Guiseppe Cipriani, the founder of Harry’s Bar and the Cipriani Hotel, and Guiseppe knew everyone from Winston Churchill to Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren. I should think the locanda here has welcomed more celebrated people than any other inn of its size in the world.’

  Several elderly women had set up stalls selling lace and hand-embroidered linens on the path between the rustic inn and the eleventh-century church built as a shrine to a forgotten saint. The cathedral behind it was even older, its interior adorned with wonderful mosaics. Michael had often sat there, gazing at the tall black-robed Madonna, with Sophie sitting quietly beside him, trying to imagine Torcello as it had been long ago: the most important island in the lagoon, with more than ten thousand inhabitants and many churches and convents.

  Today the ancient cathedral was full of visitors, and she couldn’t recapture the sense of awe and mystery she had felt in this place as a child. Perhaps Martha also found the presence of other people an intrusion on her memories. They did not stay long.

  A deferential young man welcomed them to the locanda and ushered them into a garden from which the roofs of the two churches were visible above the surrounding trees.

  ‘Would the ladies prefer a table in the shade?’ he asked Marc.

  Marc looked inquiringly at them.

  ‘I like the sun, but I have a shady hat,’ said Martha. ‘Is the sun too strong for you, Sophie? You’re very fairskinned.’

  ‘I love the sun too. I shan’t burn. I have lashings of sun cream on.’

  ‘How sensible of you,’ said Martha as they were shown to one of the tables in full sunlight. ‘But I guess good sense is an essential qualification for your job. I often wonder how I’d have got on in the business world, but my parents were comfortably off and when I was twenty James swept into my life, so I’ve never had to earn my living.’

  ‘You raised six useful members of the next generation,’ said Marc, watching her put on her green hat.

  Sophie listened with half an ear to their easy flow of conversation. She was looking about her, taking in the details of a place which had once seemed as inaccessible to her as a fairy-tale palace to a woodcutter’s granddaughter. Not that Michael had been the modern equivalent of a woodcutter, but they had been almost as poor as the peasants in the tales he had read to her when she’d been little.

  The tables had blue cloths, a paler blue than the vivid sky overhead, and the part of the garden she was facing was planted with pomegranate bushes, their bright red fruit peeping out of the foliage. Soon all the tables were taken, and the waiters, their shoes crunching on the gravel underfoot, bustled back and forth with menus, bottles of wine in buckets of ice and baskets of shellshaped rolls.

  When Marc and the two women had made their decisions about what to eat and were sipping chilled white wine, Martha said thoughtfully, ‘I wonder what happened on this island to change it from the way it was in the tenth century to the way it is now? Was it struck by the plague?’

  ‘The current theory,’ said Marc, ‘is that the action of two rivers caused the waters surrounding the island to become a malarial swamp. Most people don’t realise how shallow the lagoon is…less than two feet in most places.’

  He began to talk about the conflict between the needs of the region’s human inhabitants and its wildlife, and it was clear he was a knowledgeable student of the problems involved.

  Much of what he told Martha about the plant and bird life Sophie already knew, and as she listened her thoughts drifted back to the day they had met for the first time…

  ‘I’m feeling a bit below par. I think I’ll take the day off,’ Michael announced after breakfast.

  ‘Yes, why don’t you?’ Sophie agreed, trying not to show her concern.

  For some time past she had suspected that her grandfather wasn’t well. His energy had diminished. He was often tired. Sometimes he was short of breath. But when she’d suggested a check-up he’d dismissed the idea and claimed to be perfectly well and just beginning to feel his age.

  He had married late, and when Sophie had come into his care, at the age of three, was already in his sixties. For most of his life he had been one of the world’s top fashion artists, ranking with Eric, Bouché and Gruau, discovered by Vogue while he was still at art school and remaining a frequent contributor to their pages and those of other glossy magazines for several decades.

  Three factors had contributed to his becoming a street artist in Venice. In the sixties drawings had lost favour with fashion editors, and then an accident had resulted in the loss of his arm. In the seventies his son and daughter-in-law had died in an Atlantic storm. He had been living in Venice at the time, with his boat in a nearby marina, and for the next few years he and his grandchild had moved from hotel to hotel, each one cheaper than the last. Eventually they had taken to living on the boat, their funds still steadily dwindling.

  In competition with many local artists trying to eke a living selling picturesque views to the tourists, he augmented his income by drawing exaggerated portraits with his left hand.

  Three times a week, throughout the steadily expanding tourist season, he spent all day on the Riva, taking Sophie with him. She did not go to school but was given lessons by Michael. By living abroad they escaped any intervention from what he called ‘interfering busybodies’, whether official or otherwise.

  Michael spent the morning quietly, but soon after lunch could not hide his breathlessness. He admitted to having unpleasant sensations in his chest and went to lie down. Presently she heard him groan and went into his cabin to find him, grey-faced and sweating, with a pain shooting up his arm.

  ‘I think I’m having a heart attack.’ He began to shiver.

  Sophie tucked a blanket round him and fetched the pillow from her cabin. ‘I’ll go and get help. Don’t move. Don’t exert yourself.’


  Panic-stricken, but trying to keep calm, she hurried on deck and sprang ashore, scanning the channel in both directions in the hope of seeing a fast boat which could transport Michael to hospital. But there was nothing to be seen but the wide expanses of reed beds and skyreflecting water.

  The only option was to run like a hare to the locanda and ask them to telephone for a water ambulance. Or, with luck, there might still be a motoscafo there—one of the expensive water taxis which brought tourists who could afford them to visit the island.

  She was only a short way along the path leading to the locanda when she saw a motorboat coming towards her. Waving both arms, Sophie shouted, ‘Aiuto! Aiuto!’

  After her first rush of relief, she realised the boat wasn’t a taxi but a private craft, with a group of good-looking young Italians on board. For a minute she feared they might ignore her and sweep past, not wanting to be bothered with someone in trouble. Even if they did stop, she wasn’t hopeful that they would know how to deal with the contingency. They looked the sort Michael had once called jeunesse dorée, meaning literally ‘gilded youth’. His tone had implied that such people were generally spoilt and selfish pleasure-seekers.

  Only one of them noticed her: the young man at the wheel. He cut the throttle and brought the boat alongside. ‘What’s the matter, kid?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘IT’S an emergency. My grandfather’s having a heart attack. Please help me.’

  The young man turned to the others, his sharp, ‘Be quiet, you lot!’ stopping their laughter and chatter as abruptly as he had cut the purr of the motor. ‘Where is the old boy?’ he asked her.

  ‘In our boat…round the corner—on the far side of the ferry-stop.’

  ‘Make room and give her a hand,’ the young man said to another sitting behind him. ‘She can perch on your lap for a minute.’