Overture in Venice Read online

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  Contents

  Hester Rowan

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Hester Rowan

  Overture in Venice

  Hester Rowan

  Hester Rowan was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

  She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Hester Rowan also wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.

  Chapter One

  It was late June, but the sky was as grey as the pigeons that pecked their way among the puddles in St Mark’s Square. The colours of the city were soaked and dulled, the air tasted of dank stone.

  I shivered. The rain had stopped but a chill evening wind had driven all except the most resolute tourists back to their hotels, and my own resolution was weakening by the minute. Venice, says one of the guidebooks, is sinking into the lagoon at the alarming rate of six millimetres a year; at that moment I could not only believe it, I swear that I could actually feel the worn marble pavement of the great square sliding slowly under my feet into the grey water of the Adriatic.

  But then I remembered that I was supposed to cheer Jennifer up, not to sink into companionable gloom, and I turned to give her a big false encouraging smile. As usual she was wandering listlessly behind me, too deeply immersed in her own unhappiness to recognize that we were in Venice at all, let alone to care about its precarious stability.

  Jennifer is my cousin. She is twenty-one, nearly beautiful and usually an amusing companion, with a lively curiosity about people and places. I am very fond of her, but at that moment I would have liked nothing better than to give her a good hard shake and then abandon her to her misery while I caught the next plane back to England. But as I was there at her mother’s expense for the sole purpose of keeping her company, I looked round instead for a diversion and found it in the rows of tables, half of them empty, outside Florian’s.

  ‘I know – as it’s our last evening here, let’s have coffee to warm ourselves up. My treat.’

  She gave me a misty, desolate look. ‘If you like.’

  A little more enthusiasm would have been welcome. Like all conscientious tourists in Venice we had already spent an evening at Florian’s, and she knew as well as I did that the coffee there is shatteringly expensive. But anything was better, after a long day of determined sightseeing, than trailing back to our shared hotel room where I would have to pretend not to hear her crying herself to sleep again.

  It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. I could understand her state, having been there once myself; but at least I had made it a point of pride never to indulge in tears in front of anyone else. The fact that Jennifer seems able to cry without ruining her appearance is no excuse, though I admit that I’d dearly like to know how she manages it.

  We sat at a table in the front row and I used one of my half-dozen basic Italian phrases, mugged up in a hurry in the week before we came, to order the coffee. Jennifer sat silent, a thousand miles from home; a single tear overflowed from her dark blue eyes, hung quivering for a moment on her lashes and then slid down her cheek, leaving no trace. I sighed, but silently.

  Goodness knows I’d tried everything during that first dreary week of our holiday: quiet sympathy, gentle encouragement, brisk distraction. I had several times been on the brink of pointing out that it wasn’t the end of the world, that there would be someone else. Being three years older, I knew this from experience; I also knew that it would be unforgivable to say so, and I kept my heartless advice to myself.

  The coffee arrived in the usual wickedly small cups. Jennifer managed a damp smile. ‘I’m sorry to spoil your holiday, Clare.’

  ‘Of course you’re not spoiling it,’ I lied patiently. ‘I never thought I’d have the opportunity to come to Italy, and I’m making the most of your mother’s generosity. Do try not to cry any more, though, love – Venice is damp enough without your help.’

  She blinked, trying to deny her tears. ‘It was just that I thought I saw him. Right over there, on the other side of the square. I was quite sure – but then I knew it couldn’t be him.’

  No need to ask who she was talking about. No point, either, in reminding her that at their last meeting she had apparently told him that she never wanted to see him again. There’s no logic in love.

  ‘Sugar?’ I offered, trying to bring her back to reality. I was just lifting my cup to my lips when her fingers caught at my arm. I complained, unwilling to lose a drop of the liquid gold, but her grip was so urgent that I put down the cup and looked at her.

  Jennifer’s eyes were shining but not, for a wonder, with tears. A man with conspicuously red hair was striding rapidly towards us, looking as though this time he intended to stand no nonsense. Jennifer offered him none. She ran to him and they clung together, oblivious of the number of spectators.

  I heard a stir of interest among the customers at the tables behind me. My cousin is tall and slim with long ash-blonde hair, and the audience was appreciative as the couple embraced with passion against the magnificent back-cloth of St Mark’s. I heard a murmured ‘Bravo!’ and one or two admiring ‘Bellissimas’.

  Richard eventually came up for air, looking considerably less stern and authoritative, and managed to focus his eyes on me. ‘Hallo, Clare.’

  ‘Welcome to Venice,’ I said with feeling. ‘What kept you?’

  He got his breath back and grinned. ‘Ah, that was policy. I wanted to make absolutely sure that Jennifer would think that I’d taken her at her word and gone for good. Let her suffer for once, I thought!’

  She raised her face from his shoulder. ‘Pig,’ she said fondly.

  ‘There you are, you see,’ he said. ‘She loved me all the time.’

  The sun had decided to make an evening appearance and all Venice expanded in its warmth. Crowds began to fill the square, a band played, the façade of St Mark’s glowed with colour. On the enamelled clock tower the great bronze figures struck their bell with enthusiasm and the pigeons soared and wheeled, no longer grey but iridescent.

  I smiled at them. ‘Of course she did. Well – in other circumstances I’d ask you to stay for coffee, Richard, but I imagine you’ve plans for the evening
?’

  ‘In other circumstances I’d be delighted to join you, Clare. But yes – there is this matter of getting engaged to Jennifer all over again … in a gondola, I thought.’

  ‘Unoriginal, but very romantic,’ I approved.

  Jennifer was pink with happiness. ‘Oh yes … but, darling, I must tell you that Clare has been absolutely marvellous. I’ve been such a drag all this week, I know I have, and she hasn’t once told me that I’d “get over” you, or find someone else, or anything stupidly impossible like that. I couldn’t have been with a nicer person.’

  Richard looked at me with grateful approval and I had the grace to feel ashamed of some of the unkind things I’d thought about his fiancée.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re together again,’ I said quickly. ‘I shall insist on being chief bridesmaid, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ he agreed. ‘And godmother to our first, I hope. Only now, perhaps you’ll forgive us for deserting you for the rest of the evening – after we’ve walked you back to the hotel.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ I protested, ‘there’s no need for that. Go on, the pair of you.’

  He assumed a premature air of cousinly responsibility. ‘But I can’t leave you here on your own.’

  I laughed. ‘Why not? Look, it’s very nice of you, Richard, but I’ve been abroad alone, you know – I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. This is my last evening in Venice, and I want to make the most of it.’

  Richard hesitated, and Jennifer detached her eyes from his face long enough to give me an affectionate glance. ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, darling, Clare likes being independent. She deserves a few hours to herself, after putting up with my miseries all week.’

  ‘Well, then –’ He abandoned his sense of responsibility with evident relief. ‘Enjoy yourself, Clare.’

  ‘I will. And may your gondola never overturn … Go on, or you’ll miss the sunset.’

  They went, hand in hand, and I finished my interrupted coffee. As an afterthought I drank Jennifer’s too. It was lukewarm, but my natural Northern thriftiness hated to see it go to waste.

  Their going left me with a buoyant sense of freedom. For the rest of the evening Venice would be mine to enjoy without the nagging knowledge that Jennifer was moping at my elbow.

  As she knew, I enjoy being independent. I love meeting and talking to people, and it’s easiest to do this when you travel alone. Easier, too, to capture the flavour of a place, to absorb the sights and sounds and smells of abroad without the familiar distractions of a friend’s company.

  Now that I had Venice to myself, there were places that I longed to re-visit. In my efforts to distract Jennifer I had insisted that we spend all our time sightseeing; my unrelenting programme had given us aching feet, acute architectural indigestion and a surfeit of Tintorettos, but even so we’d seen only a few of the varied riches of the watery city.

  But it was already after eight o’clock. Too late now to make the journey across the lagoon to the reedy canals and gardens of the rustic taverna I had liked so much on the island of Torcello. And too late to try to weave my way across the city to a tiny square we had found, quite by accident, where the church was decorated with inlaid marbles in soft, delicate colours, and where pink oleanders growing beside an elegant stone bridge hung over to catch their own reflection in the still green water of a side canal.

  I could of course try going back inside St Mark’s. Jennifer had hated it, refusing to stay for more than a few minutes because of the gloom and the great haunting mosaic eyes of the Saints, and I had been left with a confused glimpse of a kind of vast robbers’ cavern where gold and jewels and coloured marbles glittered in the dim light. Hardly an appropriate impression, I thought; as a conscientious tourist, I ought to go back and try again.

  But I was reluctant to move. This, after all – the great piazza edged by colonnades that led the eye to the astonishing sunburst of columns and domes and pinnacles that made up the exterior of St Mark’s – was Venice. The best way to enjoy the city for what remained of the evening would be simply to sit here, as visitors to Venice have always done, and use my eyes.

  The square had filled with strollers. People of every nationality, guidebooks in hand and cameras at the ready, gaped and marvelled with me. Hawkers proffered souvenirs and postcards, corn-sellers made urgent attempts to persuade the tourists to encourage the overfed pigeons to make nuisances of themselves. Local families, dressed in their best, took their evening promenades with the frank intention of enjoying the spectacle of the tourists’ enjoyment of Venice.

  As I sat watching it all, I noticed a disturbance among the unhurried crowds. A small thin man was burrowing his way anxiously towards the tables where I sat, half-running, his eyes searching among Florian’s customers for someone he was evidently unable to find.

  He checked, irresolute, near my table. He looked at his watch, looked again among the customers, glanced behind him.

  Two men were shouldering the strollers aside as they made purposefully for Florian’s. Bigger men, one tall with dark glasses, one fat and heavily moustached. The sight of them seemed to help the small man to make up his mind; with a last hopeless look for the person he wanted he stepped up to my table, drew out a chair, gave a perfunctory bow, said ‘Signorina – scusi?’ and quickly sat down.

  The big men halted. They conferred briefly, grabbed a nearby table with no ceremony and snapped their fingers for a waiter, while the Japanese tourists who had been about to sit there and ease the weight of their cameras from their necks retreated in polite bewilderment.

  My table companion made no attempt to give an order and I doubted if he would want a waiter to approach. He gave an impression of being dressed up for the occasion, but his cheap blue suit was shiny with wear and the handkerchief that he took out to mop his face was predominantly off-white. He tucked it quickly out of sight, gave me a placatory smile that revealed the dull shine of metal-capped teeth, and looked again at his watch.

  Well, it was no concern of mine if a far-from-well-heeled Italian chose to arrange to meet someone at an expensive place like Florian’s. Now that most of the tables had filled up, I could hardly expect to keep mine to myself. I could of course get up and leave, but I was reluctant to offer the man such a direct snub; besides, I had no intention of letting myself be driven away from my front seat in the most splendid square in Europe, so I stayed and concentrated on the architecture.

  But concentration was difficult. The man was nervous, fidgeting and glancing round and checking his watch and cracking his knuckles. I had just decided that I really couldn’t bear to sit there any longer when he leaned confidentially across the table towards me and began to speak.

  I’ve travelled alone often enough to discover an effective technique for freezing off unwelcome advances, but there was no need for me to practise it now. Obviously the man had something more important on his mind than the hope of picking up a solitary foreign girl. Besides, the most unprepossessing people can sometimes be the most interesting, and I’ve had fascinating conversations with strangers in public places in cities as far apart as Bergen, Birmingham and Breda. I wouldn’t have minded talking to him – on condition that he stopped cracking his knuckles – if only we’d had a common language. As it was, I was reduced to looking in one of my guidebooks to find the phrase for ‘I don’t speak Italian’.

  He nodded in glum understanding and tried an apologetic smile, but couldn’t make it fit. The lines of middle age in his face were deep with deprivation and his eyes held a look of something – trouble, unhappiness, alarm – that made me feel almost as uneasy as he seemed. He looked over his shoulder at the two big men who sat looking in our direction and absently disposing of a carafe of wine, and then turned back to speak to me with renewed urgency.

  I felt sorry for him, but the communication problem was too great for me to be of any help. I shook my head firmly. ‘I don’t speak Italian,’ I repeated, this time in English. ‘I’m
sorry, but there it is. I can’t help you. Anyway, why come to me? You’re in your own country, you’ve got millions of people to talk to. Try some of the other customers. Try a waiter. Try the police, if it’s that desperate. Do you understand? Another Italian.’

  Absurdly, I found myself speaking to him very slowly and clearly. Like most people, I have an innate conviction that my own language is so simple that any foreigner can understand it if he puts his mind to it. The fact that I know perfectly well that this is nonsense doesn’t seem able to stop me from mouthing and gesturing when I’m pushed to try to communicate.

  Unfortunately, the Italian appeared to share my delusion. Whether or not he had understood a word of what I said, my willingness to talk seemed to give him encouragement. He began speaking to me again, slowly and with frequent repetitions. He emphasized one word several times, softly so that no one else could possibly overhear; then one or two phrases.

  They meant nothing to me, of course. How could they? And when he leaned towards me I caught such a formidable whiff of garlic that I couldn’t avoid turning my head away to miss as much of it as possible.

  It was too late for me to get up and go. Now that he had started to unburden himself he would, I felt sure, only follow me to try to finish what he had to say. My only hope of being left in peace was to pretend to hear him out and hope that he would then go of his own accord.

  He broke off his speech and glanced covertly at the two big men, and suddenly I thought that I understood. Of course. I’d seen men like him often enough, at airports and railway stations and coach terminals – and here in Venice too, trying to sell pigeon corn and guidebooks to visitors. He was obviously some kind of small-time tout, scratching a living on the fringes of the tourist industry.

  He had hurried to Florian’s in search of someone; probably, I guessed, some wealthy visitor with a smattering of Italian who had been unwise enough to express an interest in whatever establishment he was touting for. And presumably it promised to be an important deal – important enough to attract the two men, big-time touts, who were following him to try to bag the unsuspecting tourist for themselves.