Overture in Venice

by Hester Rowan

  But the visitor had sensibly failed to show up. Of course the small man was worried: no client, no commission, and clearly he needed the money. And so, in desperation, he was trying to recruit me.

  Well, he’d picked the wrong person. I’d already zipped through more than half of my small quantity of travellers’ cheques, and anyway I had absolutely no intention of going anywhere with him. So I sat tight, but because he looked so wretchedly anxious I tried to put him down kindly.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s no use,’ I said. ‘I leave tomorrow, you see. Yes, I’m sure it’s a very nice place, but I simply don’t have the time to go there, wherever it is.’

  The tone of my voice must have given him some kind of reassurance. He pulled out his handkerchief to dab his face again, and as he thrust it away I saw that he had replaced his anxious look with one of relief. Quickly, confidingly, he moved the two empty coffee cups to new positions on the table, as though demonstrating the relationship between two places. He tapped one cup and spoke a phrase, tapped the other cup and spoke another; and to make him happy, I repeated the words after him.

  ‘Yes, I see. You’ve made it perfectly clear. I’m sure I’ll be able to find it, next time I’m in Venice.’

  He sat back and smiled his metal smile and I felt a moment’s guilt because I had misled him into thinking that I understood. But the smile extended no further than his mouth; the eyes were still wary, as though having done his best he did not really believe that he had won.

  He drew a deep sighing breath. ‘Grazie mille, Signorina,’ he said. Then suddenly, he was gone. One minute he was sitting there, sweating with relief at having said his piece, and the next he had catapulted himself away from the table and was running and pushing his way through the crowds towards one of the narrow lanes that led out of the square.

  I was still staring after him in surprise when I saw the tall man with dark glasses moving in the same direction. Not hurrying, but wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as though he had had to leave his wine in a hurry; and because he was so much taller, moving fast enough to catch the small man if he wanted to.

  And then I lost sight of both of them, because someone came to occupy the vacant seat at my table. He eased his bulk into the chair, folded his arms across the top of his stomach and twitched his moustache high enough to give me the benefit of an ingratiating gold-tipped smile.

  ‘Scusi, Signorina,’ he said confidently.

  Chapter Two

  One small nervous Italian I didn’t mind; a fat brash one was too much. As soon as he started to speak I tried to choke him off.

  I may not be much of a linguist, but there is one word that I know in more languages than I can speak. ‘No,’ I said firmly chipping each word out of ice. ‘No,’ non, nein, nee, nei. Niet’, I added for good measure.

  He blinked, startled by my verbal assault, but instead of being put off as would-be pickers-up invariably were he simply hitched his chair a little further forward and tried again. There was garlic on his breath too, but the smell was sickeningly compounded with aftershave. The lines on his face were greasy creases of prosperity in the blue-jowelled flab.

  He was repulsive, but there was something else too. His piggy eyes were cold, malevolent. He was far from being an out-sized nonentity and as I looked at him I felt the nape of my neck begin to prickle; I knew now what I had seen in the eyes of the small man who had been sitting in the same chair.

  I seemed to see him again, the thin hungry face, the nervously twisting hands. I saw the line of sweat on his upper lip and the twitching muscle under the skin at the side of his mouth, and I knew that what I had seen was fear.

  I shut my eyes and held my breath as though that would ward off the infection, but it was no use. Fear touched the back of my neck and fell, however lightly, on my shoulder. The fat man’s voice suddenly stopped.

  The touch on my shoulder intensified, was real. I whirled round, near to panic, expecting to face the tall man in dark glasses, and saw instead a complete stranger who said loudly, preposterously: ‘Amanda! Sorry I kept you. Have you been waiting long?’

  Before I could begin to think of a reply he had put his hands on my shoulders and bent his head as though to kiss my cheek. His voice dropped to a warm, reassuring murmur. ‘Tell me to push off if you’d rather, of course, but I don’t much care for the look of your new companion.’

  He released me. I tried to answer him and was mortified to find that my mouth was so dry that all I could manage was a clumsy croak.

  ‘Come back to my table,’ he suggested. Without waiting for my agreement he scooped up my library of guidebooks, nodded coolly to the fat man – ‘Excuse me, won’t you?’ – tucked his other hand under my arm and escorted me away from the front row.

  I was too dazed to protest my independence and, frankly, too much relieved to raise any objections. He sat me down at his table and looked at me with concern.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes – yes, thank you,’ I said, forcing a smile. ‘Just a bit startled, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to make you jump like that, but I couldn’t sit by and watch you being plagued by a succession of predatory Italians. My name’s Williams. Owen Williams.’

  I brushed the last wisps of fright out of my mind, collected myself and gave him my attention.

  ‘Owen Williams? Just as well you told me – I’m afraid I was about to insult your national pride by saying how glad I was to hear an English voice!’

  He laughed with perfect good humour. ‘I doubt if any self-respecting Welshman would want to own me. My family’s lived in Shropshire for the past fifty years, we don’t speak a word of Welsh and we sing like a choir of rooks. Besides, do I look like a Celt?’

  He was in his late twenties: well over six feet tall, with appropriately broad shoulders, thick fair hair, blue eyes, an open friendly face that was at present patchworked on the nose and forehead with peeling sunburn.

  ‘Hardly,’ I agreed. ‘Oh, I’m Clare Lambert. And I’m very grateful to you for rescuing me.’

  He looked immodestly pleased with what he had done. ‘A pleasure – it was the opportunity I’d been hoping for. I’ve been sitting here for the past half-hour, absorbed by your family drama. The lovelorn girl was your sister, I imagine?’

  ‘My cousin Jennifer.’

  ‘Ah. There’s a distinct family resemblance. Well, I’d hoped that when Jennifer and her boyfriend finally wandered off hand in hand towards the sunset, you would look sad and deserted. That would have been my cue to introduce myself. Instead, you were obviously glad to see them go and perfectly capable of looking after yourself – and I admired you all the more for it. When you polished off that second cup of coffee I nearly stood up and cheered!’

  It was disconcerting to know how closely I had been observed. ‘Is there no privacy in this city?’ I complained.

  ‘Not if you sit outside Florian’s, there isn’t. Incidentally, would you like some more coffee? The cups are ridiculously small, and yours must have been cold by the time you drank it. Or something stronger?’

  I settled for hot coffee. ‘If I’d known you were watching I’d have signalled for help with that first Italian,’ I admitted.

  Owen looked put out. ‘Hang it, I wish I’d known. I was ready to come rushing over, but you seemed to be talking to him so calmly that I didn’t like to interrupt.’

  ‘Well, goodness knows what we were talking about! I don’t understand Italian, and he didn’t speak English.’

  ‘Really? It looked from here as though you were having a normal conversation.’

  ‘I’d say it was more of an international misunderstanding. It was ridiculous …’

  I hesitated. My sudden fear had been so absurd, so unnecessary that I was half-ashamed to tell him about it. In the end I compromised.

  ‘It might have been amusing – except that he was afraid. I didn’t realize it at the time, I thought he was just a tout who was losing comm
ission, but he really was frightened.’

  ‘Of the two big men?’

  ‘Yes. There was something … very unpleasant about the fat one.’

  ‘I thought he looked a nasty brute,’ said Owen warmly. ‘That’s why I butted in, whether you needed me or not.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  We looked at each other and smiled. I was glad, too. Owen Williams was pleasantly uncomplicated, as companionable and solidly reassuring as an over-lifesize teddy bear. He was exactly what my mother, who despairs over what she calls my ‘difficult‘ friends, would describe with hopeful approval as ‘a thoroughly nice young man.’ I’ve usually found her nice men monumentally boring, but after the moment of fright I’d experienced I found Owen’s guileless company particularly welcome. Even his peeling sunburn seemed endearing.

  He touched his nose ruefully, conscious of my appraisal. ‘Sorry about the state of the decorations. To be honest, I hardly dared to speak to you until the fat man intruded – I didn’t think you’d take kindly to a would-be escort with a face like an animated jig-saw puzzle. I drove across from Ostend with the roof of the car open, and the result’s impossible to hide.’

  ‘You’ve just arrived in Venice?’ I asked.

  ‘This morning. And maddeningly – just as we’ve met – I have to leave again early tomorrow. I’m partly on holiday, but my firm has given me the job of taking some plans for approval to one of our best clients. He’s spending the summer at his villa in the Dolomites, if you please. I’ll have to stay up there for a day or two to discuss the plans for renovating his London house, but I’ll come back as soon as I can – if you’ll still be here?’

  I shook my head, not without regret. ‘Sorry, but I’m leaving tomorrow too.’

  He looked almost comically disappointed. ‘Wouldn’t it happen this way! And this evening –’

  ‘This evening,’ I recalled, ‘you’re meeting Amanda.’

  ‘Amanda?’ He frowned, then threw back his head with a great laugh. ‘Good lord, no, that was just the first name that came into my head. I haven’t seen her for months. No, but I am here to meet a friend, more’s the pity. And I must meet him because he knows quite a few people in Venice and I’m relying on him to find me a bed for the night. The city’s packed out, it seems.’

  I finished my coffee and looked about me. The last of the colour had drained from the sky but the lights in the square had come up, making St Mark’s appear like a magnificent stage back-cloth for an Oriental pleasure-dome. The square was alive with people, some of them singing to the cheerfully incongruous sounds of a Viennese waltz played by a café orchestra, but I could see no sign anywhere of the two big men. I put the unpleasant incident out of my mind.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to meet your friend,’ I said, collecting my belongings. I smiled at him, thinking that there was a lot to be said for thoroughly nice young men. ‘Thank you for the coffee – and thank you again for your help.’

  Owen scrambled to his feet, nearly knocking over the table in his haste to take the guidebooks from my hands. ‘Clare!’ he protested. ‘You don’t imagine that I’m going to let you walk away without me, do you?’ And then he sobered. ‘Unless of course you’re meeting someone else –?’

  I laughed. ‘Only Jennifer, eventually, and I doubt if she’s giving me much thought at the moment.’

  ‘Well then! Do please stay until I make contact with Guy, and then I’ll take you back to your hotel. He should be – ah, that’s him.’

  Owen raised an arm and signalled vigorously somewhere several feet above my head. On the edge of the crowd a man responded with considerably more restraint, and began to make his way among the tables towards us.

  I watched his approach with some misgiving. I’d gone off Italians, and at this distance there seemed little doubt about his nationality. He was slightly shorter than Owen, slimmer and very dark, and he wore a light grey suit of an unmistakably foreign cut; wore it, too, with an un-English elegance.

  ‘You said his name was Guy?’ I queried, thinking how inappropriate it sounded.

  ‘The English version of it, yes. He’s half Italian, born in Venice, I believe, but he’s lived most of his life in England. We work for different firms – I’m a surveyor, he’s an architect – but our offices are in the same London building and we often see each other, professionally and socially. But when he comes to Italy, he gets very conscious of his Italian origin. That accounts for the suit; I’m sure he wouldn’t take at all kindly to being mistaken for a tourist … This is Guido Lombardi; Guy, I’d like you to meet Clare Lambert.’

  At close quarters, the Italian look was less marked: his skin had only a hint of Mediterranean olive and the eyes, like the suit, were a cool grey. His greeting was conventionally English but slightly abstracted, as though he had weightier things on his mind. He disputed with Owen half-heartedly – and unnecessarily, since I declined – over which of them should buy me a drink, and then made an effort at polite conversation.

  ‘Have you and Owen known each other long?’

  Owen had taken the opportunity of his friend’s arrival to hitch his chair considerably closer to mine. ‘Long enough,’ he said with a cryptic smile, but I declined to be rushed.

  ‘About half an hour,’ I reminded him. I turned to Guy: ‘I was sitting here alone and Owen kindly rescued me from some over-friendly Italians.’

  The explanation had a cool reception. Guy’s dark eyebrows rose a censorious half-inch and his voice was tinged with frost. ‘I see.’

  Well, after all, he was half-Italian himself; I might have put it rather more tactfully. ‘Unfortunately I don’t understand or speak a word of Italian,’ I explained. ‘It’s difficult trying to hold a conversation when you haven’t a common language.’

  ‘It must be.’ This time the chill was unmistakable. ‘If you can’t speak the language I’m surprised you should choose to travel to Italy at all.’

  I hadn’t taken to him when I first met him and he wasn’t making it any easier for me to like him now. I doubted that I was the first tourist in Venice to speak anything less than fluent Italian, and what’s more I wasn’t prepared to believe it a crime.

  And then I remembered Owen’s amused comment that his friend wouldn’t take kindly to being mistaken for a tourist. Understandable: I imagine that any native of, say, Stratford-on-Avon is strongly tempted to assert his own local identity. But I suspected Guy Lombardi to be the kind of man who dislikes tourists on principle, who makes a distinction between tourism for the masses and travel for the individualist.

  It’s a valid distinction, but not one that I greatly admire. Travel, in that sense, pre-supposes leisure and money that most of us simply don’t have.

  Guy Lombardi, I decided, was a snob.

  Owen was giving an order to the waiter in what sounded like competent Italian. His friend had turned away from me and was looking about among the crowds. I was so irritated by him that I almost let my indignation get the better of me.

  As a matter of fact, I wanted to tell him firmly, it hadn’t been my idea to come to Italy at all. I’ve never been attracted by Southern Europe. When you live, as I do, near Durham, abroad doesn’t mean the hot aromatic south: it’s the clear salty air of Bergen, the pine-scented Norwegian ski slopes, the deep green stillness of the fiords, the frivolity of the Tivoli Gardens, the gabled canalside houses of Amsterdam. We were in Italy only because Jennifer’s mother had seized the first available cancellation the travel agent had offered her.

  But why should I bother to defend myself? I liked Owen, but not enough for it to matter whether his friend liked me. I caught Guy’s eye and gave him what I hoped was an ingenuous smile.

  ‘Oh, travelling’s not a bit difficult,’ I said sweetly. ‘I’m on a package tour, you see – we don’t have to come into contact with the locals at all.’

  His face turned two shades darker. He opened his mouth, thought better of it and closed it again. Owen intervened quickly.
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  ‘Venice seems full to overflowing, Guy. I haven’t been able to find a room for tonight – can you help?’

  Guy turned to him with evident relief. ‘Yes, of course. There’s a spare bed in the apartment I’ve borrowed. Sorry, I’m not really concentrating, I’m afraid. I suggested meeting here because I had a message that a girl I haven’t seen for a couple of years urgently wanted to meet me. Goodness knows why, but it’s supposed to be desperately important that I should be here to talk to her this evening. She’s late though. She was going to be waiting when I arrived.’

  Owen grinned at his friend. ‘Beautiful?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Guy absently, looking round with a frown.

  Well of course. Not that he was excessively handsome himself, but I could imagine that a man like Guy Lombardi would expect nothing less than perfection from any girlfriend. Owen winked at me in amused agreement with my unspoken thought, and I decided that there was no reason for me to stay there any longer.

  ‘I must get back to my hotel to pack. I’m on a two-centre tour, you see,’ I explained to Guy with unkind, innocent enthusiasm. ‘It really is tremendous value for money. We’ve been in Venice for a whole week so we’ve seen absolutely everything, and now we’re going on to do the Lakes. By the time I get home I shall really feel that I know Italy.’

  He flinched, but got politely to his feet.

  ‘I’m seeing Clare back to her hotel, of course,’ said Owen, suppressing a grin. ‘Shall you be here when I get back?’

  ‘Here or in Harry’s Bar. Ah, there’s Anna at last. See you later, Owen. Good-bye – er – Clare.’

  Guy gave me a nod, turned and walked quickly towards a dark girl who had arrived at Florian’s almost at a run. Owen took my arm and steered me among the tables and out into the open piazza. His touch was gentle and protective and I felt slightly ashamed of my behaviour.