Christmas in Venice. Lucy Gordon

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      ‘How can I go back now?’ she’d said, indicating her pregnancy. ‘When Francesco sees me like this it will revive things that are best forgotten.’

      ‘Don’t worry,’ Tomaso had reassured her. ‘Francesco is courting someone else.’

      She’d suppressed the little inner shock, the voice that cried out, ‘So soon?’ After all, she had left him. He was a warm-hearted man who wouldn’t stay alone for long. She had no right to complain.

      She insisted that Francesco must be warned before she arrived, and Tomaso telephoned his son and gabbled something in the Venetian dialect which Sonia had never been able to follow. When the call was over he’d announced, ‘No problem. Francesco says the baby is yours. He won’t interfere.’

      ‘That’s fine,’ she’d said, trying to sound pleased.

      Well, it was fine. It was exactly what she wanted. If he wasn’t interested in his own baby that suited her perfectly. And if she was being unreasonable, so what? She was eight months pregnant and entitled to be unreasonable.

      Because she was so close to her time they couldn’t fly, and had embarked on the twenty-four-hour train journey. That was how she’d made her first trip, because she’d booked at the last minute and couldn’t get a flight. So she’d approached Venice by train over the lagoon and seen it rising from the sea in glory.

      Tomaso glanced at her as she sat, refusing to go to the window. ‘After all this time, don’t you want to see Venice welcoming you back?’

      ‘Oh, Poppa, that’s just a pretty fantasy,’ Sonia protested, smiling to take the sting out of the words. ‘Venice deals in pretty fantasies, and I made the mistake of taking them seriously.’

      ‘And now you make the mistake of blaming the city for being beautiful,’ he replied.

      ‘So beautiful that I fell in love with it, and thought that was the same as being in love with a man.’

      He was silent, but regarded her sadly.

      ‘All right, I’ll take a look,’ she said to please him.

      But the sight that met her wasn’t what she had expected. Where was the magic, the gradual appearance of gilded cupolas touched by the sun? How could she have forgotten that this was late December? A dank mist lay on the sea, shrouding the little city so that there was no sign of it. When at last it crept into view—reluctantly, it seemed to Sonia—it had a glum, heavy-hearted appearance that reflected her own feelings.

      At the station she tried to carry her own bags but Tomaso flew into a temper until she let him take them. He commandeered one of the taxi boats, and gave the driver the name of her hotel. The Cornucopia.

      Of course, he didn’t know that this was where she’d stayed that first time. No matter. She would enter the Cornucopia again and banish her ghosts.

      She’d had to brace herself for the sight of the Grand Canal on leaving the station. The railway station had a broad flight of steps leading down to the water and, on the far side, the magnificent Church of San Simeone. It had made her catch her breath when she first saw it three years ago, and again when she had arrived there in a gondola to be married, a few short weeks later. Now she tried not to look, but to concentrate as Tomaso handed her carefully down into one of the taxi boats in this city where the streets were water.

      The chugging of the motor boat made her a little queasy, so she didn’t have to look at the palaces and hotels gliding past. But she was aware of them anyway, she knew them so well, and every tiny rio as each little side canal was called: Rio della Pergola, Rio della due Torri, Rio di Noale, taking her closer to the Cornucopia, until at last it came in sight.

      The Cornucopia had once been the palace of a great Venetian nobleman, and the company that had turned it into an hotel had restored its glory. Beneath the mediaeval magnificence was a good deal of modern comfort, but discreet, so that the atmosphere might be undisturbed.

      She was booked into a comfortable suite on the second floor.

      ‘You look tired,’ Tomaso told her. ‘You need a rest after that journey. I’ll leave you now, and call back in a few hours to take you to see Giovanna.’

      He kissed her cheek and departed. It was a relief to be alone, to wash the journey off, and ease her heavy body onto the bed.

      At least she wasn’t in the same room as before. Then the city had been full for the Venice Glass Fair, with not a room to be had. Sonia, booking at the last minute, had been forced to accept a place nobody else wanted, at the top of the building.

      It had been little more than an attic, she recalled, but she’d had her own bathroom, and she’d hurried into the shower to wash off the journey. When she’d finished she’d taken a whirl around the tiny room, thrilled by her first foreign trip for her employers, and her first visit to Venice. At this height there were only the birds to see her, and she finished by tossing aside her towel and standing, arms ecstatically upstretched in a shaft of sunlight from the window.

      The door opened and a young man came in.

      She was totally naked, her position emphasising her perfect body, long legs, tiny waist and full breasts. And he was barely six feet away with a grandstand view.

      For what seemed like forever they stared at each other, neither able to move.

      Then he blushed. Even now it could make her smile to think that he had been the one to blush.

      ‘Scusi, signorina, scusi, scusi…’ He backed out hastily and shut the door.

      She stared at the panels, but all she saw was his face, mobile, vivid, fascinating, blotting out everything else in the world. Only then did she remember to be indignant.

      ‘Oi!’ she yelled, snatching up her towel and dashing for the door. In the corridor outside she found a pile of large boxes, two hefty workmen and the young man. ‘What’s the idea of barging into my room like that?’

      ‘But it’s my room,’ the young man protested. ‘At least, it was supposed to be—nobody told me you were here. If they had—’ his eyes flickered over her and he seemed to be having difficulty breathing ‘—if they had, I—I would have been here twice as fast—’

      Her lips twitched. Mad as she was, she wasn’t immune to the flattery in those last words, or something in his look that went deeper than flattery.

      The towel, inadequate at the best of times, was slipping badly. The two workmen watched her until the young man snapped something out and they vanished hurriedly.

      ‘Let me put something on,’ she said, retreating into her room, and grabbing a robe. The young man followed as if in a trance. She would have gone into the bathroom but she’d backed herself onto the wrong side of the bed.

      ‘I don’t look,’ he said, understanding.

      He turned away and covered his eyes in a theatrical fashion that made her laugh despite her agitation.

      ‘No peeking,’ he promised over his shoulder. ‘I am a gentleman.’

      ‘You shouldn’t have followed me in here. That’s not the СКАЧАТЬ