Never Such Innocence, page 31
‘Goodbye, Mrs Gillingham.’ They shook hands and Julia made her way out of the hospital.
Having walked right across the city it seemed silly to turn straight back again and so she decided to look at the little Scuola of the Dalmatians that David had talked about on one of their sightseeing expeditions soon after she had arrived in Venice. One of the Carpaccios there was his favourite Venetian painting, he had told her, and she had never seen it. Julia pulled the little guide book from her handbag and plotted the simplest route.
Losing herself several times in the unfamiliar alleyways that seemed much older and darker than their counterparts on the other side of Venice, Julia walked slowly towards her destination. About halfway there, she felt suddenly faint and rather sick, and she sat down to rest for a while on the stone steps of a tiny bridge, leaning her head against the rough brickwork of its walls.
Five minutes later she was recovered enough to wipe the clammy sweat from her face with a handkerchief and look around her. She was surrounded by shabby houses. Black and green algae marked the walls for about two foot above the dark-green water of the canal, and above that damaged mushroom-coloured plaster flaked and cracked off the old peachy bricks. There was one house where someone had put pots of plants just outside a window on the first floor and their new leaves were the only fresh-looking thing in the whole scene. Everything else seemed on the point of decay: the grilles across the lower windows were rusty and bent out of shape; the main door had once been painted green, but only traces of colour remained and the lowest planks were beginning to rot; even the poles where boats tied up looked as though they were in danger of collapse.
Stuffing her damp handkerchief back in her handbag, Julia started to get up, but when she heard the sound of a window opening, she waited, not particularly wanting to advertise her pallid face and dishevelled hair to any strange-Venetians. She heard a light, sweet, familiar voice singing in Italian and twisted her neck to look at its owner.
There, looking as pretty as always and far better dressed, was Raffaella, casually watering the plants on the tumbledown balcony. Julia sat back against the brickwork of the bridge, relieved that the girl was all right after all, but puzzled and affronted that she should have just disappeared without a word. After all, Julia had been to considerable trouble for her. Raffaella dumped her watering can on the floor and turned, murmuring a scolding. A moment later she stood up again with her son in her arms.
In that moment Julia hated Raffaella: for her plucked eyebrows and her fine blonde hair; for her pretty voice and little hands, her slender figure and above all for her dark-haired, blue-eyed baby. There was no real evidence that he was David’s child, but Julia was becoming more and more convinced that he might be, and she was shaken by a storm of jealousy that appalled her. Rage and shame and resentment and thwarted love churned around in her, making her feel sick again.
When she heard the window shutting again, she got up and began to retrace her steps to the hospital. All desire to see David’s favourite painting had left her and she thought that Anthony might have reappeared.
She met him about five minutes later, coming towards her down a dark, narrow little street across which a mangy cat was slinking. He stopped a few feet away from her, obviously astonished to see her in such an unappealing area of Venice.
‘Were you looking for me?’ he asked, almost defensively.
‘Yes. I came to the hospital earlier to find you and thought I’d try again,’ said Julia.
‘But why? Are you ill?’
‘No,’ said Julia. ‘Shall we get out of this dingy alley?’
‘All right,’ said Anthony, wheeling around to walk beside her. They retreated to a small square into which a faint, fugitive sunlight managed to reach and perched on a broken wall. ‘Well?’
‘I’ve realised that I have to go home,’ she said after taking a moment to collect herself. ‘I can’t work here any more and there’s nothing for me to do. I can’t help you in the hospital. I can’t spend any more time sightseeing. Hanging about just makes me depressed. And there’s work waiting for me in London.’
‘I think that’s quite a good idea, Julia,’ said Anthony quietly. ‘You’ve not exactly been happy here, have you?’
‘Not exactly,’ she repeated with her familiar lopsided smile. ‘I don’t think either of us has. Will you mind if I go home sooner than you?’
He looked a little surprised at that and she remembered that he had never actually made any reference to going home at all.
‘No, of course not, my dear,’ he said very kindly. ‘Your work and your health are very important to me. I’ll miss you, of course. When do you want to go?’
‘There’s a seat available on a flight in three days’time,’ she said. ‘I thought I might take that. Anthony, what are your plans? Long term, I mean?’
‘To train up my Italian successor,’ he said at once. ‘It ought not to be too long now. He’s straining at the leash already and in a year or so we foreigners are going to be merely in the way over here.’
A whole year, thought Julia. Well, it would give her a chance to get back some kind of sense into her life before she tried yet again to mend her marriage.
‘Now, can you find your own way back or would you like an escort?’ Anthony asked.
‘You’re probably too busy for that,’ she said, anxious as always to be accommodating, even as she battled with the curdled emotions that were making her feel so ill.
‘Well, I am on my way to a patient.’
‘I’ll be perfectly all right,’ said Julia. ‘Shall I see you at dinner?’
‘If possible,’ said Anthony, helping her up off the wall and brushing down her dusty behind for her.
Julia set off back to the Venice in which she felt more comfortable, struggling with herself and wondering whether she would ever feel whole and content again. Contentment she had once had and then it had seemed so little; now it seemed like a prize to be valued.
So buried was she in her own thoughts that it was some time before she became aware of the sound of footsteps behind her. They reminded her of her first few days in Venice, when she had been certain that she was being followed and had turned out to be wrong. She told herself to brace up.
What little sun there had been disappeared behind thick dark clouds and Julia walked on, trying to ignore the footsteps and the oppressing sensation of being followed. Looking back at one sharp turn in the narrow alleyway, she thought that she caught a glimpse of a thin, dark figure backing away from her, but she could not be sure.
She turned up her coat collar with one hand and stuffed the other deep into her coat pocket, gripping her keys. Just as she reached St Mark’s Square, she felt the first heavy drops of rain.
With no mackintosh or umbrella, she did not much like the idea of getting drenched and stood for a few minutes in the portico of the basilica, hoping for some sign that the rain might stop. As she watched, peering out at the lowering sky every few minutes, the rain seemed to be getting heavier, and so she decided to get home as fast as she could.
Dirty water overflowed her shoes before she was more than halfway across and rain dripped off the brim of her felt hat and trickled down her neck. Even her thick overcoat could not cope with the storm and within minutes she could feel the wetness seeping through to her back.
A quick, harsh flash of lightning was followed almost instantly by a sharp, vicious-sounding crack of thunder, which ripped through the air. Julia was so startled that she did not look where she was going and fell awkwardly on the wet pavement as she caught her shoe on an uneven flagstone. Absurdly shaken, she picked herself up and set off again, not noticing that she was heading for the wrong exit from the square.
It was not until she was faced with a row of long-prowed black gondolas swinging on their ropes in a kind of pool at the angle of two canals that she realised her mistake and turned to go back. Hearing the footsteps again, she decided to let their owner get past her so that she could recross the square alone and walked quietly into a side street to wait. She pressed herself back into a shuttered doorway, trying to keep dry. Thunder crashed and boomed once more.
She heard footsteps echoing somewhere close to her. For a moment she thought that they were ahead of her and then behind and to the right of where she stood, pressed into the damp doorway. The sound seemed to be distorted both by the rain and by the hardness and narrowness of the little streets. Before Julia could work out where the sound of the steps was coming from, they stopped. There was no sound at all then except the rhythmic splashing of the rain on stone, punctuated by longer, sloppier sounds of drains and gutters inadequate to carry the immense quantity of water that was coursing through them.
Pulling herself together, Julia walked back out of her side street, recrossed St Mark’s Square and walked out of her usual exit and down the wide street that led ultimately to the Campo San Maurizio. There was no one else about. Even the starveling cats had disappeared out of the rain. She tried to laugh at herself for her absurd fears.
By the time she crossed the little canal of Santa Maria Zobenigo, she had worked herself back into rationality. She could hear no footsteps at all, there was no one in the street behind her and no one ahead of her; she was almost in sight of the Campo San Maurizio. Speeding up, shaking the rainwater out of her eyes for about the twentieth time, she headed for the last canal before the square.
Just as she reached the bridge she heard footsteps behind her again, turned and saw a thin, dark figure stepping round the last corner of the street. Julia walked firmly forwards, determined to ignore the man behind her, reached her home and fumbled for her key. Before she could push it into the lock, the man caught up with her and astonishingly gripped her arm.
‘Dove Raffaella?’ he demanded hoarsely.
Really frightened at last, Julia said loudly in English:
‘I don’t understand you. Let me go.’
The man tightened his fingers on her forearm until they actually hurt.
‘Dove Raffaella?’ he demanded and then added what was obviously some gross insult, which Julia did not understand.
Julia turned her key and pushed open the door, trying to wrench her arm out of his grip without success. Before either of them could say any more a voice yelled in Italian:
‘Paolo, let her go!’
Both of them turned to see David running from the corner of the square, shouting at the man. He dropped Julia’s arm at once and poured out a stream of furious Italian, pointing at Julia and gesticulating wildly. David said something sharply and turned to Julia:
‘Are you all right? Has he hurt you?’
Julia shook her head, trying to control her breathing.
‘Then go on in, my dear,’ he said. ‘I’ll deal with this. You should never have been involved in it. I am most dreadfully sorry.’
Julia went inside, hardly able to bear what her mind was telling her, that she now had all the evidence she needed of a connection between David and Raffaella.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sitting strapped into the aeroplane seat, Julia stared out of the little porthole at her last sight of Venice. For once the city was bathed in sunlight that glittered off the tiny waves on the lagoon as brightly as off the glass and gilding of the palaces. It looked unreal and very lovely, the sort of place in which to be ecstatically happy, not cold and tired or ill and discouraged.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about Raffaella?’ she had asked David when they were alone together just before she left for the airport with Anthony.
‘How could I,’ he asked in turn, ‘without hurting you? I never wanted you to be hurt, Julia – and if you had to be, I so much wanted it not to be through me. I suppose it was cowardly, but it seemed very important.’
‘Didn’t you think that it might hurt more if I merely stumbled on the truth?’ she asked, trying to control the hurt and the bitter anger that were tearing at her entrails.
‘There are no excuses,’ he said sadly, ‘except that all I did was with the best intentions, and that’s not much of one. Julia, please believe that I care more for you than –’
‘Not now, David,’ she said, sounding merely irritable in her attempts to prevent the tears her pride would not allow her to shed in front of him. ‘I really can’t take any more just now.’
‘Very well,’ he said, standing in front of her with his head bowed. ‘Whatever you say. I promised that I wouldn’t importune you.’ Then he raised it and she thought saw again the hardness she had recognised on the train from Florence. ‘But if ever you change your mind, if ever you need anything, or … please will you tell me?’
Remembering how his eyes had looked when he had told her he loved her and the feeling of his hands on her face, Julia took a handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose vigorously. She felt such a fool. Anthony had warned her about David and yet she had allowed her unlikely passion for him to overtake everything else.
She was honest enough to admit that a recognition of her folly was not what was making her so unhappy. Despite what she now knew about David, she had not managed to stop loving him. None of her carefully nurtured detachment or philosophy could ease the pain of knowing that she had probably seen him for the last time. Pride might forbid her to show it to anyone else, but that did not make it hurt less.
Anthony had understood that she was unhappy and she hoped that he did not know why. He had been angelically kind to her when he took her to the little airport to see her off, and had said:
‘Take care of yourself, Julia. I know you’ll feel better when you’re working again, and I expect when I come to London you’ll be your old self.’ Then he had told her of the arrangements he had made for his lawyers to pay her an increased housekeeping allowance to tide her over until her practice picked up again. That piece of kindness set the seal on her humiliation, but she felt too tired to tell him that she had plenty of money of her own.
Trying to banish the humiliation from her mind as she sat in the uncomfortable aeroplane seat, she thought about her other two Venetian farewells. Giovanna had been acerbic as she complimented Julia on her good sense in returning to ‘innocent England’and yet again Julia wondered how much Giovanna had really wanted the Allies to win the war.
Annunziata had been quite different as they said goodbye and she was the only person Julia was unequivocally sad to lose. When they had embraced and Julia had thanked her for all her care during the pneumonia, she had given Annunziata an envelope containing a hundred American dollars, saying:
‘It is not a tip, Annunziata, but a present to help you when your son comes home. You will need it then.’
Julia was afraid that Annunziata’s pride would not let her accept the money and was grateful when she did. She also pulled a creased letter from a pocket under her apron and handed it to Julia to read. With some difficulty Julia deciphered the unfamiliar handwriting and roughly translated the letter as she read it:
Dear Mama,
Hansl is dead, killed by the Russkies. I came here to the West and tried to get a job with the Amis but they won’t have me. I am living in the cellar of a bombed house alone. You cannot imagine what it was like here when the Allies bombed us night after night or even last winter when it was meant to be all over but it was so cold and there was no food. I am afraid of another winter, Mama, may I come home?
Marcella.
Julia gave the letter back to Annunziata, saying:
‘And so she is safe. Thank God.’
‘Yes,’ said Annunziata with a smile that cut right through Julia’s own sadness. ‘And so we can start again. Lucia is dead, but the other two are living. It begins.’
‘I am so glad,’ Julia said. ‘Will you write to me sometimes, Annunziata? I shall miss you.’
Thinking of Annunziata and how much she had done for them all helped Julia to bear the long uncomfortable flight. But by the time the aeroplane was circling over the airport at Northolt she had a crunching headache to add to her depression. When the aeroplane landed she waited in her seat until the other passengers had disembarked and then put on her hat, gathered together her bag, gloves and newspaper and went out into the cool, damp air of the London suburbs.
Standing for a moment at the top of the steps and breathing in the mixed smells of rainy tarmac and petrol that filled her nostrils, Julia felt the first faint sense of hope renewed. London and her work between them might help her to refashion some kind of interior scaffolding that could hold her disintegrating self together.
Outwardly calm, determined and powerful, showing nothing of what she felt, Julia walked across the sticky, slippery tarmac and entered the low, flat building that housed the customs and passport-control men. There was the usual hubbub of anxious and excited travellers, but even from the doorway she could pick out the languid American drawl of Comfort and looked quickly away from the uniformed official who was examining her passport to search for her sister-in-law.
There, standing beside a short, stocky man dressed in grey-flannel trousers and a paint-stained sweater, was Comfort Gillingham. She looked as beautiful as ever and quite at ease, despite the dishevelment of the man at her side and the smear of raw umber paint that disfigured her right cheekbone. Julia felt herself smiling in relief. For some reason the familiarity of Comfort seemed to reinforce her own determination to submerge herself in the old life.
As soon as her passport had been returned to her, Julia went to collect her two modest bags from the customs official and walked as fast as she could to where Comfort was standing. She was so absorbed in her conversation with the untidy man who stood beside her that she did not seem to hear Julia’s approach.
‘Comfort,’ she said when she was no more than five feet away. Her sister-in-law swung round and flung open her arms. Julia dumped both bags on the ground and allowed herself to be kissed.
